Wil-im-ee Moor-ring Cultural Walk - Mt William Stone Axe Quarry

UPMCLG is privileged to host an exclusive two-hour cultural walking tour of Wil-im-ee Moor-ring — the Mount William stone axe quarry — led by the Education Unit of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation.

Wil-im-ee Moor-ring means "axe place" in Woiwurrung. For thousands of years greenstone was quarried here and worked into axe blanks that were traded across a vast area of south-east Australia. Hundreds of mining pits and dozens of flaking floors remain across the site. In the 1880s the Wurundjeri leader William Barak described to the ethnographer Alfred Howitt how access to the quarry was held and managed by named custodians, and how visiting groups sent a messenger ahead and camped nearby while they traded.

The site is owned and managed by the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation, and access is by their permission.