This large axe is from the rainforest in the Tully region of Far North Queensland, from the traditional country of the Gulngay people.  The axe is made from a metavolcanic stone, and likely dates to the last 5000 years.  The largest stone axes in Australia were made by people living in the Queensland rainforests.

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The large axe in this model was probably made from a flat river cobble.  The cobble was shaped by non-invasive percussion flaking, and the flake scars were mostly removed by grinding.  Pits from pecking are visible on one surface of the axe.  Large axes like this are found on archaeological sites throughout the rainforest region around Tully, Innisfail, and Cairns.  Historical examples were hafted with a wrap-around lawyer cane handle, but the explorer Eric Mjöberg observed in 1913 that the handles were not sufficiently strong to lift such heavy stone axes.  Rather, they were found and put into these handles for ceremonial purposes and as symbolic ‘reminders of a disappearing past’.

See the annotations for technological details about this stone tool.

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The earliest-known edge-ground stone axes in the world are found in archaeological sites in Australia, and are over 40,000 years old.  They were made continuously from the earliest occupation of the continent through to the recent past, and are still made in New Guinea today. Stone axes were made in vast numbers during the Middle and Late Holocene period, from about 10,000 years ago, and Aboriginal people developed extensive trade networks for axes made of particularly prized stones.  The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner, writing in 1933 about ceremonial trade on the Daly River of the Northern Territory, said that ‘there can be nothing more useless in the native economy than a pile of [stone axes] with nowhere to send them.’  Axes were also symbolically and ritually important, with story sites for axe quarries and mythological figures wielding stone axes as weapons.  For instance, Namarrkon, an Ancestral Being in Arnhem Land in Northern Australia, uses stone axes affixed to his head, elbows, and knees to create the intense lightning in storms that signal the arrival of the monsoon.  Axes were integrated within the cultural system in the historic period, and axe manufacture and use was embedded in various social roles.  Stone axes in the recent past were usually mounted onto thin wood handles and affixed with plant resin or native bees wax.