Along the Darling River, and in the west-central districts of New South Wales, the nether stones consist of large sandstone pebbles, in the two less convex surfaces of which perfectly circular and convex husking holes have been made in consequence of the daily use they are put to.
Haphazard rock fragments, usually of sandstone, with at least one broken surface, are extensively made use of for rasping and smoothing down the sides and edges of boomerangs, and of other wooden articles during the course of their construction.
Any suitable, flattish-oblong pebbles of hard quartzite, diorite, dolerite, and other igneous rock of homogeneous and finely crystalline texture, which have been symmetrically worn by the weather, are collected by the natives during their excursions and subsequently worked up into hatchet heads. This is done by obliquely chipping or grinding that of the smaller sides which is considered the more suitable, on one or both faces, until a straight or convex cutting edge results. The chipping is done with another fragment of hard rock, the grinding against an outcrop or slab of sufficiently hard stone which happens to be handy. The shape of the pebble is in most cases improved by chipping it before the cutting edge is ground, according to whether it is going to be ovate, triangular, or elongate-oblong when completed. Some patterns, such as those of Victoria, New South Wales, and the eastern-central region of South Australia (Strzelecki Creek), have a transverse groove cut right around the piece, at about two-thirds the whole length from the cutting edge, which is designed to hold the wooden haft when the implement is in use.
In many of the tribal districts igneous rocks do not occur naturally, but they are nevertheless obtained by barter from adjoining friendly tribes. The Dieri, Wongkanguru, Ngameni, and other Cooper Creek tribes obtain all their stone axe heads from New South Wales; the south-eastern tribes of South Australia used to receive their supplies from the hills tribes of what is now Victoria; and the Aluridja, Kuyanni, Arrabonna, and Kukata were regularly supplied from the MacDonnell Ranges and from Queensland through Arunndta agency. The fortunate tribes who owned outcrops of suitable stone carried on a regular trade with the surrounding districts and opened up quarries to meet the demand. The supplies were, however, not tribe-owned, but usually the property of a limited number of men who came to them by hereditary influence. Similar conditions are met with on the north coast; Sunday Island, consisting essentially of coarse-grained granitic rock, the natives have to import most of the material they use for making their stone implements from the mainland opposite; in consequence, they are loth to part with their weapons.
The stone axe head is fixed to a wooden handle after the following fashion. A long, flat piece of split wood or wiry bark is bent upon itself and tied together at its ends. The stone is thickly covered at its blunt end with hot porcupine grass resin and inserted into the loop of the haft, which is firmly pressed into the resin against the stone and tied together with human hair-string as near to the stone as possible. The free ends of the handle are then also tied together; after which the resin is worked with the fingers to fill up any gaps which may remain between the handle and the stone. The handle, and often the axe head as well, is decorated with punctate and banded ochre designs.
The size of the stone axes varies considerably; as two extremes, a large Arunndta specimen from the Finke River measures nearly eight and a half inches in length, by three in breadth, and weighs three and three-quarter pounds, whilst one from King Sound, in the north of Western Australia, measures three and a half inches by two and a half, and weighs only six ounces, the handle of the latter being only six and three-quarter inches long.
The flakes and splinters which fly from the pebble during the making of an axe head are not all discarded as useless by the native; among them he often finds one or two pieces which have a strong sharp edge with a butt opposite, suitable for holding between two or more fingers. Flakes of this type make useful scrapers with which he can work the surfaces of his wooden weapons and implements.
The same flaking and chipping process is purposely applied to rocks of a particularly hard and brittle nature, such as a fine-grained, porcelainized quartzite or chert, to obtain flakes for cutting, scraping, and holing purposes. Many of the best operating “knives,” with which initiation mutilations are performed, are derived in this simple way; as might be imagined, some of these implements are as sharp as a razor.
One frequently finds a fair-sized block of suitable stone among the paraphernalia of a native in camp, from which he chips pieces as he requires them. These blocks have been termed “cores” or “nuclei”; they are six inches or more cube in the beginning, but by the time a goodly number of flakes have been removed, the parent piece becomes much smaller and gradually assumes the shape of a truncated cone whose surface shows many faces from which flakes have been knocked off.