Mount William stone axe quarry
The Mount William stone axe quarry is an Aboriginal archaeological site in Central Victoria, Australia. It is located 9 km northeast of Lancefield, off Powells Track, 10 km north of Romsey and 78 km from Melbourne. Known as Wil-im-ee Moor-ring, meaning 'axe place' in the Woiwurrung language, the greenstone quarry was an important source of raw material for the manufacture of greenstone ground-edge axes, which were traded over a wide area of south-east Australia.
The Mount William Aboriginal stone axe quarry comprises the remains of hundreds of mining pits and the mounds of waste rock where Aboriginal people obtained greenstone (diabase), and manufactured stone blanks for axe heads. Chipped and ground stone axes or hatchets were an essential part of Aboriginal toolkits in southeast Australia, with the Mount William greenstone being one of the most prized and extensively traded materials. The stone was quarried from the source outcrops, and roughly flaked into blanks, then taken away for finer flaking and grinding the edge. There are 268 mining pits, 18 of which are several metres deep, surrounded by at least 34 discrete flaking floors, with mounds of debris up to 20 metres in diameter and some featuring a central outcropping rock used as an anvil.
Mount William lies within one of six Cambrian greenstone belts in Victoria where several other greenstone quarries have also been found including Mount Camel, Howqua River, Cosgrove, Jallukar, Berrambool and Baronga on the Hopkins River; and Ceres and Dog Rocks near Geelong. However, none of the axes at Mount William have been ground and polished into finished hatchet heads. The nearest axe grinding grooves can be found at Mount Macedon, about 29 kilometres away, where analysis of stone fragments showed they were the same diabase stone the Mount William greenstone.♥
William Bradley appears to have been the first to describe the exchange of Mount William stone on 12 November 1838: Today two groups of blacks met at the encampment by the deep hole in the creek The stranger groups as I will call them had travelled from the south and they had carried with them a number [of] stone hatchets. Some of these hatchets were polished while others were still quite rough and I imagine still require further work. The group of blacks who are camped on the creek were eager to obtain these hatchets and in return for one polished axe they gave two of their opossum skin covers. For a hatchet still in a roughened state they gave in return a number of their light bamboo spears. This bartering as I shall call it went on for some time, but only amongst the menfolk.
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