In dealing with the Australian aborigines, it is only too easy for the anthropologist to elaborate a fantasy based on theories and the foreign logics of other native races, and then proceed to build it up in his field work. The Australian follows the line of least resistance with the white man. He will always respond as desired to a leading question, eager to please, whether he understands it or not.

The fist lessons that I learned were never to intrude my own intelligence upon him, and to have patience, the patience that waits for hours and years for the links in the long chain to be pieced together. A casual soul, he knows no urgency. Yesterday and today and tomorrow are all the same to him. Naturalness in white company comes from long familiarity. Only when you are part of the landscape that he knows and loves will he accord you the compliment of living his normal life and taking no notice of you.

His unconscious confidences are by far the most valuable. Most of my data is the gradual compiling of many, many years. Quite often I have chanced upon the clue to problems long after I had given them up. Of unfinished legends begun at Broome and Beagle Bay in the north-west, I have written the finale at Ooldea in the centre. Some of the straying threads of my ethnological study are still in mid-air. I shall perhaps never find their source, nor know their conclusion. Only in God’s good time will you begin to understand the riddle of the native mind. It is the study, not of a year or two of field work, but of a whole lifetime.

Westward and eastward and northward in these northern areas I went, constantly travelling to and fro, and hither and thither by train, or buggy, or horse. I alighted whenever I saw a native and made friends with his little group. I lived their lives, not mine. Whenever I camped with them, they did not trouble about clothing of any kind, innocent and natural as children. Was I not their ancestral grandmother, spirit rather than woman?

Everywhere was evidence of the encroachment of the circumcised groups upon the uncircumcised. I found that the Bibbulmun area had once been far greater, and had gradually narrowed through the centuries, as the first hordes were driven to the coast. From Jurien Bay northward to Ballaballa, along a narrow strip of coastline, were certain isolated uncircumcised groups, each having its own initiation ceremonies, but always adhering to the fundamental totemic and marriage laws. These groups called themselves Ingada, and the Aggardee, or circumcised, tribes bordering them would make contact with the families, and then take the boys away to be circumcised. The Ingada kept their laws, but they gave their boys under compulsion. As civilization went on, their little spaces narrowed, and their marriage laws were no longer possible. I met the derelict members of about forty groups, and each had the same sad story to tell me. The tribes of Geraldton, within twenty years of the white man’s coming had been absorbed, for the second hordes had reached the coast all round them, under the protection of the white settlers.

The four-class marriages between Boorong and Banaka, Kaimera and Paljera, as here they were called, had been completely broken down in both the centre and the central west for centuries. The beginning of the breach was probably when certain young men, tired of waiting for their affianced wives to grow up, had seized their father’s sisters, who were their potential mothers-inlaw, and run away with them into the vast scarcely-occupied areas south and south-east of Nullagine, extending down to near the Nullarbor Plain. There they sat down beside a water-hole and either established a little group, or merged into the nomad tribes they met. The children followed the example of the fathers. Irregularity crept over until there was not one straight marriage among the thousands I encountered. Intercourse was not only promiscuous but incestuous. The old men would speak to me about these things as though I were a native.

Often I came upon a mixture of northern, eastern and south-western families gathered in one group and living amicably together, and, in one instance, a group of Bibbulmun in the centre of the Aggardee. I also found traces of types distinctly Dutch. When Pelsart marooned two white criminals on the mainland of Australia in 1627, these Dutchmen had probably been allowed to live with the natives, and it may, be that they and their progeny journeyed far along the river-highways, for I found these types as far out as the head-waters of the Gascoyne and the Murchison. There was no mistaking the flat heavy Dutch face, curly fair hair, and heavy stocky build.

Baby cannibalism was rife among these central-western peoples, as it is west of the border in Central Australia. In one group, east of the Murchison and Gascoyne Rivers, every woman who had had a baby had killed and eaten it, dividing it with her sisters, who, in turn, killed their children at birth and returned the gift of food, so that the group had not preserved a single living child for some years. When the frightful hunger for baby meat overcame the mother before or at the birth of the baby, it was killed and cooked regardless of sex. Division was made according to the ancestral food-laws. I cannot remember a case where the mother ate a child she had allowed, at the beginning, to live.

I obtained a photograph of this group unexpectedly. I was camped among the Meekatharra tribes, some distance from the township, devoting myself to the aged and the ailing, engaged mostly in compiling dialects and map-making, with the aid of the natives. (The map-making method was simple. I gathered the men of the different groups about me, and with a sheet of brown paper and a pencil, constructed an early history of their home waters and wanderings. I would start from a given point-Meekatharra, Peak Hill or Wiluna-plan out the district according to its natural features, mark off the waters, put down the tracks to and from fathers’ camps and grandfathers’ camps, denoting localities with their native names by means of elementary questions as to where they “sat down.” Distances were calculated from “how many sleeps?” allowing so many miles to a day’s journey. I have many of these maps in my possession, an intensive geography covering hundreds of square miles, and invaluable in marking the tribes and groups and countries and permanent and other waters of the west of West Australia before it was peopled by whites.)

One evening, an hour or so after dusk, I sensed something moving in the low scrub to northward. Without appearing to take any notice, I perceived a number of native men approaching quietly, all decorated, and carrying their spears and spear-throwers. I looked over to the Meekatharra camp, which had become strangely silent. The fires were banked and covered with sand, and there was no stir of life-sure sign of fear of the stranger. I went quietly on making my toast and tea.

The men came slowly closer, still hiding behind the trees. They stopped at some little distance. Without looking up, I called, “Come on, boggali! (grandchildren). Come to the fire You must be cold!” At last eight men came into the clearing, and very sheepishly approached, saying nothing.

“Sit down and have some food,” I invited them. “Where are your women?” They gave a short call, as one would call a dog. Several women came out of the bushes. My supper had, of course, to go by the board. Bringing out flour and water, I started them making dampers, and with a casual question or two learned that they had just come from far beyond Peak Hill to see me. Bush telegraph had sent the news of my arrival at Meekatharra, and they had walked over ninety miles, with little food on the way, to see kabbarli.

Next morning I took them over to the camp and made the introductions. There was armed neutrality for a while, every man with his spear in readiness, and indeed there were, after I had left them, a few thigh-spearings in revenge for the unlawful appropriation of a woman at one time or the other, but no serious trouble.

In this comparatively desolate country, the totems were entirely different from the brotherhood with nature and the food-totems of the Bibbulmun. Kangaroo, emu, and dingo-totems are common throughout Australia, and here, among them, I met men of the moolaiongoo, or wombat snake, and the goorara or prickly acacia. The goorara provided the best bamburu sticks and also the wood for the best come-back boomerangs.