184 R. ETHERIDGE, T. W. E. DAVID, AND J. W. GRIMSHAW. 
mentioned localities. At atime when the dingo was contempor- 
aneous with such huge herbivores as the Diprotodon and the 
Nototherium, the climate of Australia must have been far more 
humid than at present, so that the Central Plains supported a 
dense growth of vegetation surrounding swamps which are known 
in the neighbourhood of Lake Eyre to have been infested with 
crocodiles. A great lapse of time is needed to account for this 
great change in the physical geography of Australia. We may 
conclude, therefore, that man, if contemporaneous with the earliest 
arrived dingoes, has probably a considerable geological antiquity 
in Australia, that he may have witnessed the volcanic eruptions 
in Victoria and South Australia, and that he may have crossed 
Bass Strait in his canoes at a time when that strait, now about 
one hundred miles wide, was in the condition of one or more narrow 
channels. It is, however, of coursé at present by no means certain 
that the dingo was introduced into Australia by man, and any 
conclusions based on such an assumption must therefore be looked 
upon as only provisional and tentative. 
That aboriginal man may have witnessed some of the latest 
volcanic eruptions in Victoria is rendered probable by the remarks 
of Mr. James Dawson, who makes the following statement':— 
“An intelligent Aboriginal distinctly remembers his grandfather 
speaking of fire coming out of Bo’ok ”—a hill near the town of 
Mortlake in Western Victoria—‘*when he was a young man. 
When some of the volcanic bombs found among the scoriz at the 
foot of Mount Leura were shown to an intelligent Colac native, 
he said they were like stones which their forefathers told them 
had been thrown out of the hill by the action of fire.” 
With the exception of the meagre direct evidence just described, 
the evidence obtained at Shea’s Creek, as far as we are aware, 18 
the best direct evidence hitherto obtained to show that the exist- 
ence of man in eastern Australia can probably claim something 
approaching to a geological antiquity, as is implied by the fact 
ee ae 
1 Australian Aborigines, 1881, p. 102. 
