GLASS – THE NOVEL MEDIUM

Lou Lane’s article “Glass – the Novel Medium” from Investigator, Volume 22, No. 4, December 1987, pp. 139–142. Members can also read that month’s issue online.

You can also listen to a reading of the article by clicking the following link:

An act of pilfering

While the sloop Rebecca was anchored off Indented Head in May, 1835, John Batman, accompanied by James Gumm, William Todd and Alexander Thompson, along with several Natives (originally from the colony of New South Wales) explored the countryside round the western arm of Port Phillip Bay.¹ Meanwhile, three of the local tribesmen swam out to the ship, clambered aboard and perpetrated one of the first, well-recorded acts of pilfering in the embryonic colony.

Using glass spokeshaves

William Buckley revealed to his biographer that, on that occasion, “the ship’s colours (the Union Jack), a quantity of rope and some sails” were commandeered along with “some glass bottles” which they broke to provide spokeshaves “to bark and sharpen their spears”. He also reported that he later met a party of tribespeople who told of meeting three white men and six stranger black men. The Aborigines were triumphantly bearing aloft two coloured, cotton handkerchiefs fastened to the tips of spears like pennons. Buckley also declared that, some time previous to the appearance of the Rebecca, having discovered a barrel washed up on the strand, he had removed the hoops and broken up the metal bands for the Wathaurung artificers “because they would find the iron useful”.²

It is realistic to suppose that Aborigines were accustomed to the occasional arrival of foreign flotsam from the whaling vessels which plied the coast soon after the English settlement at Sydney Cove in 1788. The explorer, George Bass, for instance, encountered two marooned men on an island in Bass Strait in 1797.

Trading relations

The indigenous people certainly would have heard of the white men and their marvellous possessions from the Bunerong of Mornington Peninsula with whom they had cautious, reciprocal trading relations, exchanging manufactured goods and/or raw materials, brides – and news – on occasions of ritualistic congregation. The Bunerong had witnessed the James Grant visit to Churchill Island, Westernport, in 1801; the occupation of Sullivan’s Bay, Port Phillip, in 1803; the establishment of a permanent sealing station at Westernport in 1821 and, finally, the erection of substantial buildings at Corinella, Westernport, in 1826 – an official settlement planned to forestall any attempt by the French to colonise this part of Terra Australis.

The value of glass

Glass suited the tribal toolmakers very well. Bottle-glass was curved by the very nature of its manufacture. The homogenous material, on being knapped, broke with shell-like curvature simulating the conchoidal fracture of first-class knapping-stone such as silcrete, chert or chalcedony which they had obtained over the millennia by quarrying or barter. They discovered it was easy to make tools from this new stuff identical in shape to those made of traditional material.

Evidence at Little River

Early pioneer travellers remarked that the verge of the carriageway from Melbourne to Geelong was littered with dead marines discarded there by wayfarers in drays, wagons and coaches. At least one adaptable Aborigine – who camped in a sheltered gully near the (now) township of Little River – took opportunistic advantage of this abundance of alien knapping-“stone” which fell, like manna, from heaven. One man’s rejectamenta became another man’s treasure-trove. He gathered many and many doom doom baramul (translating as things much the same shape as emus) for the workshop is paved with rainbow-coloured chips – amber, purple, bronze, green and crystal.³

An indubitable serrated blade of purple bottle-glass, an adze-flake of green; a keeled endscraper of brown/green, an amber-green microlithic piercer-burin as well as a flake-fabricator made on a section of a blue-green bottle-rim were all located within walking distance of the glass-confetti site. These five are the paragons of a collection of 150 worked glass implements collected on 24 sites within about 20 kilometres of Geelong: all within the tribal territory of the Wathaurung.

Kardinia Creek site

Nearer at hand, on the living-station at Kardinia Creek, just over the river from Sawpit Bend in Highton, there is ample evidence that toolmakers here also worked in glass. Among the blackened soil of the camping-mound that was raked down and spread out to level the house-blocks before the Harrison Estate was sold by auction in 1986, were more than two score pieces of hand-made glass in a variety of colours. Aboriginal artificers chose curved shards, often including rim-ridges, then modified the outline with spalls. They worked the edges in the time-hallowed manner by chipping or scaling to perfect the working-facets.

A long occupation

The type of stone implements recovered at Kardinia Creek indicate a very long occupation of the site. Many are of the small-tool tradition which was the mode extending from 5,000 to 1,500 B.P. according to the theorists. There were also those of the later phase – polished stone hatchet-blades and the flake-fabricators which are believed to have proliferated when the working of bone became fashionable.⁴

Any glass implement, of course, must have been made during the quarter century before the Aboriginal population was banished, in 1861, to an inhospitable reserve at Mt. Duneed.⁵

References

¹ James Bonwick, John Batman, 1867.

² John Morgan, The Life and Times of William Buckley, 1852.

³ R. Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, 1878.

⁴ F. D. McCarthy, Australian Aboriginal Stone Implements, 1967

⁵ Mulvaney and Golson, Aboriginal Man and Environment in Australia, 1971.

NOTE 1

The Kardinia Creek site has been under official investigation since 1982, though it should be noted that Harrison’s sand-paddock was a favourite collecting-place for the curio-hunter since before the turn of the century. A vigorous Scientific Association (similar to the present Field Naturalists) identified a living-site adjacent to the confluence of the Barwon and Kardinia Creek in the 1890s.

During 1982–83, nearly two hundred and eighty implements were recovered (including a few glass examples) among 1000 pieces of debitage and several kilograms of sintered stones from ancient fireplaces.

Since December, 1986, when the land was prepared for auction, a salvage-collection has recovered and recorded three hundred and eighty odd artifacts along with upwards of 1500 midden-chips and a corresponding number of fire-stones which were dispersed from the man-hill by earth-moving equipment.

NOTE 2

The criteria for the recognition of hand-made glass goods are as follows. The inside of the vessel shows diagnostic flow striations while the outside has a dimpled appearance imprinted when the molten material is blown into the mould. Where the two halves of the mould met, a pronounced ridge formed on the surface which often showed an uneven conformity in the vicinity of the joint. There are nearly always bubbles enclosed in the body of the glass. Hand-made bottles tend to have walls which thicken towards the base with very thick rims round the punts. The bottle-flange was welded onto the neck. This joint was, characteristically, a little askew.

With reference to the artifacts mentioned in paragraph 7 of the foregoing article:

1. PURPLE KNIFE showed mould-ridge and the raised letters “C O” on its outer, dimply surface. There were bubbles in the glass which, incidentally, was clear when blown and gradually turned purple with age.

2. GREEN ADZE-FLAKE – manufactured from the side of a square bottle. There were bubble inclusions as well as striations on the inner surface.

3. BROWN/GREEN ENDSCRAPER was made on a thick, curved shard including part of the bottom punt. There were dimples and bubbles.

4. AMBER/GREEN PIERCER-BURIN was dimpled and bubbled but a flat plaque of glass trimmed neatly into a hexagonal shape with a pronounced stiletto “nose”.

5. BLUE/GREEN FLAKE-FABRICATOR – made from a fraction of a bottle-punt, revealed a dimply outer surface with a base-rim.