Every other civilisations in the world invented or know to some kind of metal, how to find, melt and use it for various purpose, but Australian aboriginals were sitting on mines of iron ore or other metals but never has any knowledge of it. Its pretty much impossible to develop metal technologies if you are nomadic hunter-gatherer. The smelting of metals requires a pile – a simple blast furnace. Typically made of clay. These are not something you can carry around, or easily and quickly build if you move the tribe. And you need pottery skills, and the ability to make charcoal, which means access to lots of wood (most of Australia’s mines are in treeless deserts).
If you think of the regions that eventually developed high technology, that’s North Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe in that order. They had easy trade routes between them and were able to share their discoveries and build on each other’s knowledge, but aside from a few Asian merchants, the Aborigines were cut off from everyone else for tens of thousands of years (just as the Americas were largely cut off by the Bering Strait, and .sub-Saharan Africa by the desert).
North Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Europe all had horses, onagers, camels, water buffalo, oxen – and as far as I recall no ethnic group has *ever* developed advanced technology without having beasts of burden. Once Diprotodon was gone, there was no suitable animal in Australia.
all above is a justification from aboriginals supporting theories, not actual facts. final conclusion is they never knew there is a metal which is harder than stone tools they made nor they developed any till European arrived.
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