Stone tools combine an elegance and simplicity only achieved through complex, multidisciplinary understandings. Making efficient stone tools is the confluence of geological, chemical, biological and physical knowledge. To this day, no surgical tools have exceeded the efficiency of obsidian blades. The Palawa knew this and traded tools made of Darwin Glass all across the island. Freycinet observed a range of knives of various sizes in a village on the northern slopes of the mountain. Freycinet described the stone as “a kind of granite which is very hard and very fine”. Was it dolerite? Possibly. If it was, the Muwinina certainly had a great supply of that tool-making material close to hand. Quartzite creek pebbles would also have been a popular raw material for kitchen prep work— pounding and also grinding. On a one-day field trip for the Trust in 1995, a scatter of stone tools was found above the Springs, as well as another on the Goat Hills, and a third in Lenah Valley. One artefact was found in the summit area.

Sources

N.J.B. Plomley had Freycinet’s shipboard diary translated and published long tracts of it, together with his own explanatory observations, in The Baudin expedition and the Tasmanian Aborigines, 1802 by N.J.B. Plomley (Blubbered Press Hobart).