Stone Implements from Millstream Station, Western Australia

Extract

The Blacks nowadays are tame, but when Fortescue came up in about 1856 exploring, he had considerable bother with them, and even now in the Kimberley district, some 500 miles away, they are still in the Stone Age, and cannot be trusted. To-day at Millstream, stone implements are only used for circumcision and cutting out spears. The spears are made of hard wood and barbed both ways so that it is impossible to pull or push them out, and the blacks cut them out with a hot flake. The fire in which the flake is heated must not be lighted with a match but with a fire stick. By using a stone and not a knife they maintain that they do not get blood poisoning, and that the wound heals sooner. I showed one of my large black flakes to a native woman, and she said, “He good fella stone, he cut'em out spear, he borrow Ian.” Whether she meant a flake was called “borrow Ian,” or the kind of stone upon which the flake was made was “borrow Ian” I could not make out, but on showing her another, a yellow coloured scraper, she said, “He bad fella, he poison.”