Greater Sydney being one of the most intensely urbanized parts of the country has very few traces of it’s around 11 000 year human occupation on its surface anymore. But just beneath the surface there are incredible assemblages of the tool types and technologies that sustained hundreds of generations of men women and children. The recent discovery of over 22 000 artefacts made during work on the eastern suburbs tram line is an example of the way stone tool artefacts are automatically portrayed as negative in the Australian media and the way Indigenous history is so automatically problematic
They stand as a silent witness to the history of Aboriginal occupation of Australia, when touched by the excavator they almost act like metaphoric landmines; their uncovering has the power to halt multi-million dollar developments, they spark polarising debates about their importance among those who wish that they stay undisturbed and those who are simply not interested in what they might mean for modern people. Stone tools have stood as legal evidence in native title determinations, no wonder they also they have the power to act as a type of Kryptonite to property developers and local councils.
In Western Australia, recent discoveries at Fiona Stanley Hospital site and the Roe 8 highway extension caused the state government to review its assessment process for listing Aboriginal heritage sites on the state register. In 2010 stone tool artefacts found along the Jordan River levee at the Brighton road works site near Hobart were show to be between 28,000 and 40,000 years old. The Tasmanian's tools are evidence of an extraordinary journey of peoples in the pre-historic era to one of the most southerly regions of the planet and created a push for the plans for the bridge to be altered that should have been a much easier case to argue than it apparently was.
Possibly the issue is a lack of foresight and aboriginal participation in the decision making process as to where archaeological research should be conducted. It’s no coincidence that stone tool assemblages are only found during capital works projects, as this is one of the few industries in Australia that even commission or use archaeological assessment and heritage reports. There would be kilometres of unread reports written about discoveries of stone tools in Australia that has no real connection to the modern Aboriginal experience of country, the same way there are quite literally tonnes of stone tool artefacts sitting in storage in museums, government storage facilities’ and private collections. Even with modern technology we are only just beginning to be able to interpret the different types of tools and what they were used for, or where the material to make them is sourced from or even what they can teach us about cultural and ecological landscapes of the past.
The benefits of reconstructing and interpreting the ancient past present incredible opportunities for Aboriginal people to be involved in research, teaching, tourism, history and education industries, in Great Briton many examples of profitable industries around archaeology have existed for decades such as those seen on the Time Team television program, which developed an entire membership based organisation catering to both the layperson and the specialist. The past is not something that people are scared of the way it seems to be in Australia if the sensationalist reporting of their existence in the media is anything to go by.
This site at Randwick shows evidence of trade routes into the hunter valley; other tool sites in greater Sydney have shown material that is sourced from as far south as Kiama. The movements of people, their language, their trade networks and kinship affiliations are not in the ancient past, they are important were wilfully evicted by the establishment of colonial Sydney that anything we can find that helps modern community members reconstruct the pre contact landscape should be a priority for many institutions.
Properly telling this story is also important for the non-Aboriginal community; to champion the resourcefulness and ingenuity of the first nation’s people who sustainably cultivated the land through cultural practice for millennia, nurturing the landscape that Australian agricultural industries have so successfully used to market Australian produce as world class.
Aboriginal community members of the eastern suburbs of Sydney, in the prime ministers electorate of Wentworth no less, have been largely left in the dark about the find, a recent social media post by Peter McKenzie sums up the mood of many in the community:
“Interesting… how long have the experts known about this find? They’ve already counted the individual stone materials even! How come we find out about it now….no mention of local Elders opinion except for some individual from ANOTHER Aboriginal country, (who is he?? doesn’t come from our country) what about the LALC (La Perouse), no mention of them (us), What about the NPWS?….Randwick City Council hasn’t notified our local Aboriginal advisory group, what the hell!. 22,000 separate artefacts have been counted and kept quiet about it? Us local Koories on whose land the find is located are not mushrooms, you know the story about mushrooms.”
Aboriginal Stone tools are ambassadors of the ingenuity and resilience of Australia’s first people; they can be found in the collections and store rooms of any world class museum. Stone tools are the most enduring evidence of the hundreds and in a few places thousands of generations of people who occupied the Australian mainland before colonization. Stone tool are erroneously associated with the deep past and therefore have no relevance to our modern technological focused world. This ignores the sophisticated craftsmanship in their production and the economic exchange of their distribution, in some cases across vast distances.
A quick search of eBay will return thousands of Aboriginal tools, completely divorced from their interpretive context, coupled with prolific accounts of many people having a few tools found on their property or collected by a relative being held in sheds and drawers across the country show the need to properly coordinate how these unique pieces of evidence of Australia’s deep past are catalogued, researched and ultimately better understand what these tools can mean for visualising the history of pre contact Australia and placing it in its true context as a fascinating branch of the human journey, tangible evidence of the distribution of modern humans around the world.
So why are stone tool artefacts in Australia such problematic entities? Australia seems to be scared of what these sites might mean, on the same day that news of the stone tool artefacts at Randwick were announced a story about the semantics of the word invasion in relation to a course at the University of New South Wales detonated across the media scape, even being reported internationally, burying any intelligent discussions about what the Randwick find could tell us about Sydney’s Aboriginal past under impenetrable layers of hyperbole and overly defensive Australian nationalism.
As assistant curator of Indigenous heritage at the University of Sydney’s Macleay Museum, I recently put together an exhibition comprising hundreds of stone tools sourced from the collections of the anthropology, archaeology and museum departments as well as a significant personal collection by archaeologist Fr. Eugene Stockton. The challenge of making stone tools interpretative to diverse audiences being to represent not only the archaeological classifications of the tools, but also to recognise the diversity and resourcefulness of tool kit of different Aboriginal language groups. I have had numerous visitors tell their own personal stories of encountering stone tools; I would confidently say that there is no shortage of interest in this aspect of Australian history among the general community, the only challenge being to find ways of presenting and interpreting these artefacts in innovative and culturally enriching ways that empower more intelligent discussions about bother settler and Indigenous histories.
As more sites like this one are properly excavated the potential to create employment in heritage and archaeology services for Aboriginal people becomes even more important. The opportunity to create and support Aboriginal led archaeology and to have Aboriginal people proactively asking questions and then testing their ideas in archaeological digs, would take our knowledge of the deeper history of place that Sydney and many other places around the country needs to move ideas about the inter relationships between land, history and science and our own place in the world.
The evidence of stone tool artefacts used for over tens of thousands of years of occupation across Australia cause us to contemplate not just the deep past but also the future of our own culture. Surely there must be better opportunities for Aboriginal stone tool artefacts to exist outside of the constraints of being a burden on development, or attracting dust in museums and archives. If the examples of Aboriginal stone tools can tell us anything it is that our own impact on the lands that we live on is always measurable, and our impact will always be judged by future generations of people, for better or worse.
