AXE HEAD

At the beginning of European settlement in Australia, all tools and equipment used by convicts and free settlers alike were those bought out from England. These tools, particularly the English style axe, were of a design unsuited to Australian conditions. These axes had a long shank, narrow cutting blades and long handles, which over the centuries had been adapted to local English conditions, designed to cut alder, oak and pine. Remaining fundamentally unchanged, these axes proved inefficient, unwieldy and energy wasting, and far from proficient when used on Australia’s much tougher, native hardwoods.

By the 1870s there was a range of imported axes available in the Australian colonies, including the Collins, Plumb and Kelly from America, the Elwell, Braide and Gilpin from England and the Jarrahdale from Sweden. However, when a blacksmith’s forge was established on the grounds of the Convict Establishment, tools were presumably fabricated and repaired on site, and therefore could be adapted for local conditions. Despite this local manufacturing however, the raw materials would still have been imported, almost certainly from England.

An archaeological excavation under the Main Cell Block in 1993 uncovered 33 axe heads that had been buried under more than a metre of dirt. These axe heads are thought to have been manufactured by transported convicts on site at Fremantle Prison. They were of a type used to quarry and dress building blocks, from the soft local limestone. These axes where fabricated by joining along a central plane by forge welding two plates of puddled wrought iron, a central region being left unwelded to form a shaft hole. A section of crucible steel was then inset into the bit edge, also by forge welding (a process known as steeling). To complete this process a high level of blacksmithing skill was required, however, abnormalities which are present in these axe heads point to the inexperience of their convict manufacturers. For example, there is evidence of the difficulties of achieving weld bonding in regions adjacent to the shaft hole, and avoiding ‘burning’ in both wrought iron and steel during the steeling operation. High-carbon hypereutectoid steel was used in the inserts, but they were inserted in normalized conditions, that is they had not been quench hardened, as might have been expected to take full advantage of the steeling process.