AUSTRALIAN QUATERNARY CLIMATES AND MIGRATION 53 



(1923) states that west of Mt. Buninyong, in the Yarrowee Creek 

 valley ' ' a small lake was formed against the basalt ... its surface 

 showing at about the 1,290 ft. contour at one period; whether it 

 was the original limit cannot be settled. Abundant chips such as 

 are found at the sites of aboriginal camping-places occur along 

 the former shore-line, and clearly mark points where the natives 

 congregated, but above or below this limit the chips are rare." 

 Mr. Baragwanath took the writer to the locality but it has, since 

 the former made his observations, been planted as a pine forest 

 and the evidence is not now obtainable. 



It is interesting to note that Howitt (1901) states that there 

 was an aboriginal tradition "that Mount Buninyong had at a 

 distant time thrown out fire." 



On the scanty evidence available, the Buninyong Bone possibly 

 belongs to the Tartangan of Hale and Tindale's industries (supra 

 p. 38). 



In 1855, A. C. Swinton and M. C. Shore sank a shaft near the 

 town of Maryborough, Victoria, in one of the heads of the 

 tributaries of the so-called Bet Bet Lead. A lead is the lowest 

 fluviatile deposit in an old river-valley usually covered by later 

 fluviatile deposits but often with lava. The Bet Bet Lead was 

 formerly thought to occupy a single trunk-valley having an outlet 

 to the north-west, but it has since been found to consist of two 

 valleys falling in opposite directions, one towards the Avoca 

 Lead, the other towards the Berry-Moolort-Loddon Lead System. 



Swinton and Shore's shaft was sunk for a depth of 5 feet to 

 "bottom," presumably Palaeozoic bedrock. At a depth of 4 feet 

 from the surface, Shore drove his pick into a basalt axehead 

 (Howitt, 1898). The shaft had passed through a hard band of 

 cemented gravel and also three "false bottoms." A false bottom 

 is a stream level above the lowest fluviatile deposit at which 

 former fluviatile deposition has occurred. The presence of three 

 of these in a depth of 5 feet below a surface deposit accumulating 

 at the present time, points to three very recent, short-lived cycles 

 of erosion. We are not told whether the axehead was in false 

 bottom material, but the shallow depth involved and the position 

 at which it was found, suggest this. 



It is not possible now to pin-point the shaft on a map, although 

 for our purpose, its position in relation to the local physiographi- 

 cal divide is important. If it was on the west of the town, the 

 fluviatile sediments belong to the westerly stream-system; if on 

 the east of it and in a tributary flowing northerly or easterly, 

 they are part of the eastern stream-system. Both these systems 



