Difference

I spent much of 1981 in the eucalypt forests of the far south coast of new South Wales, Australia, looking for flaked stone artefacts. These forests cover a band of ridges which are the foothills of the great Dividing Range and which along this part of the coast reach eastward to within a few kilometres of the Pacific Ocean. The stone artefacts were almost all found along the top of ridgelines in surface concentrations that I took to represent 'moments' in the precolonial past when Aboriginal people had stopped to camp or perform activities associated with hunting and gathering forays they had made into this steeply dissected country from base camps on the coast or in big coastal valleys. On many of my own archaeological forays I was accompanied, or should I say led, by Uncle Ted Thomas (1909-2002), an Aboriginal man who was in his early seventies at the time but who had the vitality of a much younger man.