And there are plenty of them around now ? Plenty in Museums ? I'd hazard a guess and suggest that there might be some now up around the tip of Cape York, influenced by current PNG cultivators, particularly women. At places like Seisia and in the Torres Strait islands. Is that what you meant ?

Save us some trouble, Nick, and describe one.

Joe

Sorry Nick, a harvesting tool, or a hoe, i.e. a. cultivating tool ? Which is it ?

Gregory described the harvester 1884.
Mitchell the hoe 1839.
pages numbers as stated.

Thanks, Nick, now all anybody has to do is produce one. Just one cultivating tool. Just one harvesting tool. I'd be fascinated to know what they looked like. How wide was the digging tool - three or four inches or so like a Maori spade ? A hoe- or a spade-like implement ? as the ground cultivated by digging as in pre-European Maori agriculture, or by hoeing as in much of African agriculture ? Harvesting tools with embedded flakes, like sickles ? So there were specialist blade-makers back in the village ? Specialist blade-makers - using flint or obsidian ?

My sister was working once at the Auckland Museum and showed me over one floor of it - an entire floor - composed of Aboriginal implements. Hundreds of thousands of artefacts. I can't recall seeing any cultivating tools or harvesting tools. But perhaps, as you would surely assert, there were some there.

And surely, a paddock nine miles long would need a hell of a lot of cultivating AND harvesting (i.e. gathering after cultivation), by perhaps thousands of people, co-ordinated and organised on well-known Aboriginal organisational principles. At least Mitchell talks about a nine-mile paddock. Nine miles of heaped-up 'ricks' of kangaroo grass hay. Perhaps ripped about and heaped up by a severe thunderstorm ? Or cultivated,, tended and deliberately harvested ?

You assert, you demonstrate, Nick. :)

Joe

Adelaide Library.
Title: Dar

Dear nicknamenick,

You wrote;

I wouldn't be wasting your time with Loudmouth. You could show him every hoe in the Australian museum and he would say they were for gathering rather than cultivating.