Australia's Stonehenge: Inscriptions on prehistoric mystery monument 'hold clues to first human language'

Letters written by a late Australian journalist and recently obtained by amateur historians could hold the clues to Australia's mysterious version of Stonehenge. New South Wales resident Richard Patterson, who is a teacher at the Brunswick Valley Historical Society, found letters in 2013 penned by deceased journalist Frederic Slater who once served as the president of the Australian Archaeological and Education Research Society.

In the letters, Slater refers to rock formations. He wrote: "The mound is one of the oldest; I should say the oldest, forms of temples in the world and dates back to the Palaeolithic age with the advent of first man," adding that the site was "more important than Stonehenge". However, the prehistoric structure was destroyed in 1940 when a farmer who owned the land, 40km north of NSW town Mullumbimby, ordered it to be taken down.

Now, a father and son team, Steven and Evan Strong, has built upon Patterson's findings and Slater's research and state that the 181 once-standing stones are not even the most important things about the site. They believe that the large rocks may hold inscriptions of what could be evidence of the first human language.

The Strongs, who published their work on Forgotten Origin, are now in possession of 16 of Slater's letters that he wrote to colleagues in the late 1930s and early 1940s which theorise about the ancient location. Another of the letters reads: "The language which we speak today is not Anglo-Saxon, but just Aboriginal."

Local website, The Northern Star, says that during a Forgotten Origin lecture tour, the Strongs said: "His [Slater's] letters were lost and found. What we've now found is archaeology that backs up his theory that this was the first language ever (and) was recorded there. The language is a combination of hand signs, letters, sacred signs, and body parts ... Slater had compiled over 28,000 words in this language."

However, due to the destruction caused to the monument by the farmer, further research is now virtually impossible to conduct with it also being seemingly forgotten about after the site was demolished.

The Strongs continued: "They were going to set it up like Stonehenge ... it was published all over Australia in major papers, then the site was destroyed, and once it was destroyed the whole thing disappeared, and all of Australia's notes from 1930 onwards disappeared too. All we're trying to do is prove that all the work [Slater] did is correct."