Chapter Twelve

Trade Routes and Rituals

1 Trade between distant people is often seen as a mark of a more advanced economic life. If this insight is valid, many groups of aboriginals must have been far from backward because their raw materials and manufactures were traded to people hundreds of miles away. It is probable that every tribe in Australia traded with its neighbours, and a few commodities were involved in such a sequence of transactions that they crossed from the tropical coast almost to the Southern Ocean.

2 Pearl shell travelled further perhaps than any other Item. In Western Australia an explorer saw an aboriginal wearing, as a sporran, pearly oyster-shell which had travelled at least 500 miles from its point of origin. Some of the pearl shells were as wide as a bread-and-butter plate, and their silvery-white surface was engraved with a simple pattern. Many shells were neatly perforated at the top so that they could be worn as a pendant. They could be seen, suspended from the neck of aboriginals, near the Great Australian Bight, which was about one thousand miles overland from their home seabed. Similarly, Kimberley pearl-shells were found as far away as the Mallee scrub lying between Adelaide and the Victorian border. Baler shell from tropical beaches near Cape York were picked up far to the west of Alice Springs and as far away as Leonora (W.A.). Many hands must have fondled those ocean shells in the course of their long journey to the interior. Their journey consisted of many transactions between neighbouring groups, most of which did not even know of the existence of an ocean. If sea shells could travel so far into the interior, it is likely that spears or ochres from the interior were traded in the opposite direction, eventually reaching the hands of people who did not even know that the world held sweeping plains and deserts.

3 In eastern Australia the axe-stone also moved over a wide area. In a quarry on the smooth slopes of Mount William, about forty miles north of Melbourne, stone axes were intermittently mined and shaped by Billi-Billeri at the time when the first Europeans arrived with their sheep. The stone was volcanic, ranging in colour from black to lightish green, and perhaps was prized in its own hinterland even more than high grade axe-steel was to be prized there a century later. For generations, stone axes from that quarry cut wooden canoes for the rivers flowing south to the Murray, and the axes reached aboriginals as far away as Swan Hill, nearly 200 miles to the north.

4 A quarry which provided stone fit for stronger, sharper axes was likely to supply trade routes stretching in every direction. As many quarries were worked for generations, yielding thousands of tons of rock, they eventually scarred a considerable expanse of ground. At Metton Mowbray in southern Tasmania the chips and debris of a chert quarry covered about one acre. At Moore Creek, near Tamworth in New South Wales, an outcrop of greywacke running along the crest of a saddle-back ridge was mined prolifically; the axe-stone was quarried by aboriginals for a length of three hundred feet and to a maximum width of twelve feet. On countless still days the noise of the chipping, the patient chipping, must have carried across the slopes.

5 As the written records were thin in tracing the trade in stone axes from the Tamworth district; other ways of reconstructing the extent of the trade were needed. Petrological analysis was one promising technique. It has been applied as long ago as 1923 to reveal that the so-called bluestone used in building Stonehenge in southern England had been carried all the way from Pembrokshire in Wales. With this technique in mind an enterprising archaeologist, lsabel McBryde, examined a total of 517 edge-ground axes which had been found scattered over a large part of New South Wales. She mapped the places where each stone axe had originally been collected old aboriginal camping grounds, trade routes, or simply places where an aboriginal had lost or broken his axe or had bartered it away to a European pioneer. In the laboratory a thin sliver of stone was sawn from each available axe. Each specimen of stone was then ground down to a transparent thinness and examined under the microscope of the geologist, R.A. Binns. Once the minute characteristics of the stone had been identified, the search for its place of origin could be concentrated on those regions or even specific hills or valleys which were known to contain that type of stone. In those areas which had been mapped with intensity the exact quarry which produced some axes could even be located. Binns and McBryde were able to name one quarry which had originally produced the stone for sixty-five of the axes that were found in scattered parts of New South Wales.

6 This kind of archaeological jigsaw – the exact matching of axe and quarry – can be solved only when every likely source of stone has been discovered and described. In a sparsely-peopled territory the mapping is slow and the geological knowledge is not easily gathered. Nonetheless Binns and McBryde were able to gauge the extent of territory or market which was supplied with stone axes quarried from the long ridge of Moore Creek or from similar rock formations to the north of Tamworth. They found that axes had gone overland through a chain of tribal territories to Cobar, Bourke, Wilcannia, and other points on the plains as remote as 500 miles from the home quarries.The longest of these routes, transposed on to a map of western Europe, was almost equal to a walk overland from the English Channel to the Mediterranean.

Blainey, G. (1975). Triumph of the nomads: a history of ancient Australia. South Melbourne, Vic.: Macmillan, pp. 203-204

The issue of distance

The author focuses on this issue of distance because the fact of distance in trade is central to the claim made in Paragraph 1.

Why the example from Europe?

Perhaps the author provides an example from Europe because, at the time of writing in 1972, many Australians would have had a better sense of the distances travelled when they realised over how many countries and cultures such trade would have passed had it occurred in Europe. (In the early 1970s, Australians were largely of European origin and still Euro-centric.)