pay particular attention to them, but the nature of the soil thrown 
out clearly showed that they had also been put to the same use. 
The constant traces of native occupation thus afforded by these 
Rock-shelters, seems to indicate that the population, from an 
aboriginal standpoint, was a fairly numerous one, due* doubtless, 
to the facilities afforded by the proximity of the lagoon for 
procuring fish, which we know formed a very large portion of 
the food of these blacks. 
I think we may accept a general statement to the effect that 
the Aborigines of the Port Jackson coastal districts were Shelter 
dwellers to a greater or less extent, and for the matter of that, those 
of other districts where suitable conditions prevailed. Wherever 
escarpments of the Hawkesbury Sandstone are traced along the 
various inlets and arms of Port Jackson and the Hawkesbury 
River, these rocky recesses are met with, and the majority reveal 
traces of habitation in some form or another. 
Caves have from the remotest historical periods of the world’s 
history been the retreat of man, and this we see repeated in 
Australia, in a modified form it is true, within the historical 
period. Such habitations here, however, do not strictly conform 
to the term cave, but fall within the designation generally applied 
to them, that of “ Rock-shelters.” “Caverns,” says Mr. John 
Evans,* “are either long and sinuous, in places contracting into 
narrow passages, and then again expanding into halls more or 
less vast; while others are merely vaulted recesses in the face of 
a rock, or even long grooves running along the face of some 
almost perpendicular though inland cliff,” the two forms owing 
their existence to causes of a different nature. The stone 
dwellings here described rather fall within the second category. 
They usually occur in cliffs ami scarps, with horizontal bedding, but, 
the beds possessing varying degrees of hardness and permeability 
to water, the softer and lower strata wear away faster than the 
harder, leaving recesses of greater or less depth. 
The contents of these aboriginal Rock-shelters are in the main 
simply refuse heaps, thus resembling those of Prance and Belgium, 
“containing the bones, fractured and unfractured, of animals 
which have served for human food, mixed with which are the lost 
and waste tools, utensils and weapons, and even the cooking- 
hearths of the early cave-dwellers.”f 
Eliminating the utensils, a more truthful picture of the contents 
of our aboriginal Rock-shelters could not be drawn. There is, 
however, no evidence whatever of cave or cave-shelter tenancy by 
man alternating with that of either a living or extinct lower 
mammalian fauna, similar to that found in other quarters of the 
globe. 
* Ancient Stone Implements, &c., Gt. Brit., 1872, p. 128. 
flbid } p. 430. 
