Charles Chewings

After engaging in sheep farming, Chewings travelled to the Finke River in Central Australia in 1881 with two camels and found them so useful that he imported more of them and started a carrying business.

Chewings was very interested by the discovery of marine fossils on Tempe Downs Station by his manager F. Thornton and in 1891 published "Geological notes on the Upper Finke Basin" in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of South Australia.

He listed the fossils and began a tentative interpretation of the region's succession of rock strata.

After the First World War, Chewings retired to Adelaide and contributed several more scientific papers relating to central Australia to the Transactions.

He worked on a dictionary of the Aranda language and towards the end of 1936 published a popular book on the Indigenous Australians titled Back in the Stone Age.