THE PROBLEM OF ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN AUSTRALIA 41 
importance to the discovery of the artefact since it might have 
fallen into a wombat hole or a natural hollow in the ground 
(Gregory, 1904) ; it seems unlikely, however, that wombats would 
burrow in consolidated gravel or that prospectors would sink a 
shaft where there was a natural hollow. 
In Dicker’s Mining Record, 1864, p. 120, a figure is given of 
a basalt axe-like implement with a hafting groove found in undis- 
turbed gravelly clay at 22 inches below the surface at Ballarat. 
It was 8 inches long, weighed 5 Ib., and was patinated. The imple- 
ment (fig. 6) is similar to a type commonly found on the surface 
in the Western District of Victoria. 
Voisey (1934) recorded kitchen middens of oyster and other 
shells along the base of low cliffs that mark an old coast line 
extending from Grassy Head to Collombatti, about 10 miles inland, 
in the Kempsey district, New South Wales. The old strandline 
tat t" 
\ 
: WN 
Y 
are 
ass 
SS 
<~ 
wy 
WE 
Wy 
Y} 
iA 
FIG. 6. 
The Ballarat Implement. 
(Reproduced from Dicker’s Mining Record, 1864.) 
is about 10 ft. above present high-tide level. McCarthy (1943), 
who described these middens and the contained implements, quotes 
Professor L. A. Cotton’s opinion that they were formed between 
5,000 and 11,000 years ago. Near the mouth of the Burdekin River, 
Queensland, is another locality where oyster-shell middens con- 
taining stone artefacts are associated with an old shoreline 4 miles 
inland and about 20 ft. above high-tide level (Jardine, 1928). Since 
primitive people do not carry large quantities of shellfish to camps 
several miles inland, the inference is that these middens were 
formed before the sea retreated to the present shoreline. W. Ander- 
son (1890 b) made a similar suggestion in regard to middens 30 ft. 
above sea level near Pambula and Noorooma, N.S.W. 
South of the Embley River on the western side of Cape York 
Peninsula and about three-quarters of a mile inland from the coast 
