through cemented gravel with three false bottoms, and about half-way down there was a hard band of cement.
By the courtesy of Mr. James Travis, the Acting Secretary for Mines and Water Supply, Mr. Stanley Hunter, one of the officers of the Geological Survey, examined the place referred to by Mr. Swinton and marked by him upon a parish plan of Maryborough.
Mr. Hunter reported to the effect that the tributary referred to by Mr. Swinton is one of the heads of the main Bet Bet lead, and as that lead is covered by Pleistocene basalt, the lower strata in the contributary lead in question may be of the same age. Yet this is merely an assumption, as no fossil evidence of any kind is to be found.
In 1865 the late Mr. C. S. Wilkinson,[1] together with Mr. Forde, found flint chips, a sharpened stone tomahawk, and several bone spikes or needles, together with bones of animals, in the sand-dunes near Cape Otway. In the same locality they also found a similar bone spike with numerous seal-bones and shells of apparently existing species in beach material of pebbles and humus, resting upon carbonaceous sandstone, and apparently intermediate between it and the overlying dunes.
In 1870, when visiting the Upper Dargo River in Gippsland, I was informed by some miners that in cutting a race for mining purposes they had turned up a stone tomahawk at about 2 feet below the surface. But as the race was cut out of the shingly alluvium at the side of the valley, the find does not necessarily imply any great antiquity.
Mr. Bennett, in his History of Australian Discovery[2] makes a statement that, in sinking wells and other excavations in the Hunter River Valley, flat rocks were found with marks such as are made by the aborigines in sharpening their stone tomahawks. These were at a depth of 30 feet or more below the present surface, and covered with a drift or alluvium.
