Four Strategies for Effective Reading

Chapter Twelve: Trade routes and rituals

1. Trade between distant people is often seen as a mark of a more advanced economic life. If this insight is valid, many [Indigenous Australians] must have been far from backward because their raw materials and manufactures were traded to people hundreds of miles away. It is probable that every tribe in Australia traded with its neighbours, and a few commodities were involved in such a sequence of transactions that they crossed from the tropical coast almost to the Southern Ocean (Blainey, p. 203).

2. Pearl shell travelled further perhaps than any other Item . . .

3. In eastern Australia the axe-stone also moved over a wide area . . .

4. A quarry which provided stone fit for stronger, sharper axes was likely to supply trade routes stretching in every direction . . .

5. As the written records were thin in tracing the trade in stone axes from the Tamworth district; other ways of reconstructing the extent of the trade were needed. Petrological analysis was one promising technique.

6. This kind of archaeological jigsaw - the exact matching of axe and quarry - can be solved only when every likely source of stone has been discovered and described . . . … axes had gone overland through a chain of tribal territories to Cobar, Bourke, Wilcannia, and other points on the plains as remote as 500 miles from the home quarries . . .

Blainey, G. (1975). Triumph of the nomads: A history of ancient Australia. Macmillan.