Mr Pascoe’s ‘Stone Hoes’ - But Wait There Are More
To support his ‘Aboriginal Agriculture’ theory, Mr Pascoe needs some ‘farm machinery’, and he has zeroed in on the stone tools known as ‘Bogan picks’, which he tells us are ‘Aboriginal ploughs’.
Maybe they are, or maybe they aren’t, no one really knows and Mr Pascoe has provided no evidence at all that his “Bogan picks” were agricultural implements.
Indeed we suspect that he has just found some curved, pointy stones which, in combination with an imaginary wooden handle, could be thought of as being used as wooden-handled ‘hoes’.
Well, thanks to the apparent acceptability of Mr Pascoe’s Revisionist History, we all can be ‘historians’ now, so us amateurs we have found our own Aboriginal Stone artefacts that Mr Pascoe may like to consider as potential Aboriginal ‘stone ploughs’.
Ceremonial Stones that Mr Pascoe may want to claim are ‘stone ploughs’?
-from PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY Vol. XLVIII JANUARY-APRIL, 1909 No. 191. BY R. H. MATHEWS. (Read January I, I909. - here
More Ceremonial Stones that Mr Pascoe may want to claim are ‘stone ploughs’? -from PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY Vol. XLVIII JANUARY-APRIL, 1909 No. 191. BY R. H. MATHEWS. (Read January I, I909. - here
Another group of stone implements called ‘wedges’, which are generally grooved and much heavier and more massive than stone axes, were believed to have been used for wood splitting. One of these ‘wedges’ below looks identical to what Mr Pascoe calls a Bogan pick or ‘stone plough’.
Our photograph below comes from a definitive book by S.R Mitchell, the Trustee of the National Museums of Victoria, called Stone-Age Craftsmen - Stone tools and Camping Places of the Australian Aborigines, published by Tait Book Co in 1949. There is no mention by Mr Mitchell of the Bogan pick being used as a ‘plough’ to ‘cultivate and till the soil by Aboriginal farmers’.
Bottom image is what Mr Pascoe calls a Bogan Pick or ‘stone plough’, whereas Mitchell describes it as a 'wood spitting wedge.
Another issue Mr Pascoe needs to address is that, if his Bogan picks are ‘stone ploughs’ used to tend the massive agricultural ‘crops’ over the vast Aboriginal Grain Belt of inland Australia, how come these artefacts are quite rare? Mr Pascoe claims the Aborigines were farming right up until the early 1800’s, when the nasty settlers destroyed all their crops, so there should have been thousands of discarded ‘stone ploughs’. Why were only a few of these Bogan pick stones ever found? Why were none ever found with their wooden handles intact?
The explorers and settlers certainly found many stone axes with their wooden handles intact (see below), many of which are now held in our museums. Indeed, the exchange of goods such as steel tomahawks, food and tobacco for stone tools and other artefacts was a brisk trade between the explorers and settlers, and the Aborigines during the 1800’s. But if Mr Pascoe is correct that the Aborigines ‘downed tools’ and stopped their ‘agricultural farming’ on the arrival of the British, why were none of these ‘agricultural farming tools’ such as hafted Bogan picks ever collected? Why were only hunter-gatherer tools and artefacts ever collected?
We would suggest the reason is because, there was no tilling and cultivating of the soil and crops with ‘stone ploughs’, given that the Aborigines were hunter gatherers, not farmers.
Examples of the goods exchanged between Aborigines and early settlers and explorers :
“In 1800 the Lady Nelson traversed Bass Strait, the first known European ship to do so. Two more explorations by this vessel found Lt Murray and his crew surfing the rip into Port Phillip Bay in February 1801. Boonwurrung men, leaving their women and children hidden, met five crewmen on the sands near Sorrento…The warriors were wary, but exchanged spears, an axe and a basket for shirts, mirrors and a steel axe.” - Prof Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians, 2005, p3 : (So no sign of any exchange of Bogan picks, hoes, bags of grain or other produce that one might expect to be offered by Mr Pascoe’s Aboriginal ‘farmers’.
