Something About Papuan

An Axe-Head

Something About Papuan Minerals

A VALUABLE gift made to me by Mr.

Jack Hides, before his return to Papua, was one of the two stone axes, of native workmanship, which he brought out of the valley of the Waga Furari, Central Papua, on his last famous expedition. The head is of beautifully shaped stone, bound to a balanced wooden handle with a kind of cane, wonderfully plaited. The axe is very similar to those I saw not long ago in Wau, which had been brought from the Purari-Mount Hagen district of New Guinea.

I showed the axe to our old friend, Mr.

A. J. Yogan, who has spent a lifetime studying rocks, and he at once became keenly interested in the peculiar olive green stone from which the axe-head has been laboriously shaped. This is what he wrote about it: A lump of phosphate rock was used for years as a door-stop in a Sydney office, before it was recognised, and showed the way to the enormously rich phosphate de posits of Nauru and Ocean Island. An itinerant hawker noticed that the pretty stone that a Boer farmer’s brat had played with for years was a brilliant, worth a king’s ransom, and the diamond industry was born. An intelligent boy began to think about the weight of a stone he had picked up to throw at a crow; and started the Westralian goldfields.

These things perhaps explain why Aus tralians take so little interest in the lovely Pacific Islands, lying right at their door.

They cannot see the enormous riches of the Islands.

To the geologist, or trained mining-man, this axe-head of grey-green stone is chiefly interesting because it exhibits that pecu liar form of Epidosite rock (as far as one can tell without a microscopic-section) which one associates in the mind with the four principal commercially-valuable forms of iron: Nickel, Cobalt, Haemitite, and Chrome, which to-day are pulling our neighbour New Caledonia out of the mire.

The Epidotes are of that “devil’s cauldron" that furnishes the world with all kinds of useful minerals —many of them, such as bronzite, not being known to the majority of mining men.

The place of origin of a native-axe is as difficult to locate as where my spectacles are, at times! Bought, exchanged, stolen, or part of the booty from a bloody raid?

But I happen to know that this particular stone is characteristic of that vast upheaval in Central New Guinea, known as the Bis marck Range; and I have seen similar rock in New Caledonia and in Fiji, where mining was a feature of the scenery. The colour is derived from Olivine crystals; and in the Dun Mountains in New Zealand it obtains as one of the recently-eruptive rocks, where it passes into Serpentine.

This has confused certain Museum geolo gists of New South Wales, who label it as “Green-stone.” so much associated in the popular mind with the heroic Ma-oris.

But the Maori axes were of quite another rock: Jade, or Nephrite (“To,” with a short “o,” in China, where the finest examples obtain), which is a silicate of lime and magnesia. Serpentine, so named because it is often spotted and marked, after the pre sumed manner of Eve’s “boy-friend,” is a hydrous-silicate of magnesium; and does not take so fine an edge. Jade, or green stone, is one of the Hornblendic rocks ( Amphibolites ) and is an altered form of ancient lavas. It should be the symbolism used by Australian mining-folk as in N.Z. it is the “ahua” of Honesty!

Serpentine is a product of pre-existing Olivine crystals; and often these may be noted under a lense, still in situ. It is a fairly sure sign of mining country; and was deposited from sea-water originally, in association with crystaline-schists, as Sterry Hunt and Geiki have shown. That weird, wild sea of heated water that fell as hot rain-deluges from the fiercely electric storm-clouds of the early days of our earth, seems to have mothered all our minerals, as it did the beginning of all life!

R.W.R.