 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.Chewings became a mining consultant in Coolgardie, Western Australia, in 1894, and later worked in Central Australia for almost 20 years.