The Ancient Kalkadoon Miners
The Kalkadoon people have been extracting hard black basalt rocks and making spearheads and axes from the hills of Kalkadoon country for thousands of years in Australia. One Kalkadoon mining quarry is estimated at being over 6,000 years old which makes the Kalkadoon miners the very first miners in Australia.
The spearheads and axes were not only used for themselves, the Kalkadoon people had extensive trade systems that went for hundreds of kilometers around Kalkadoon territory. They would tell neighboring tribes by way of a message stick of a market that would be held to barter and trade their prized axe and spearheads. The Kalkadoon people would trade for shields, red ochre, boomerangs and pituri. Pituri was a stimulant made from the dried leaves and twigs of the Duboisia Hopwoodi tree.
The hard black basalt weapons were easy to shape by the miners but very, very strong when chopping and Kalkadoon axes from Mount Isa have been found as far away as Southern and Western Australia. The Kalkadoon people had a production line factory system in place where each group of people specialized in a certain area of the operation. The miners would lever large basalt rocks out of the ground using long wooden poles, the rock was then broken into smaller pieces by another group. The rocks were then moved to another place where they were shaped into spear and axe heads before they went to the final group who were women who sharpened the weapons on grinding stones down by the river. The same job specialties apply to the miners of today with each miner specializing in their own field.