Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 15, 1904.djvu/501

 Reviews. 469

except in very dry seasons the natives have no difificulty about food-supply. About no miles from the coast of the Gulf of Car- pentaria the watershed is reached ; and from that point there is no lack of water. It thus appears that it is precisely in the most desolate region that the strange customs and beliefs which startled the scientific world five years ago are most fully developed.

This region has not always been so sterile and frequently im- passable as it is now. " In what were probably Pleistocene, even Late Pleistocene times, at all events Post-Tertiary, the climatic conditions of Central Australia were very different from those of the present day." The mountain ranges were loftier, the rainfall was much greater, the fauna much richer. The change to the conditions of to-day is due to the gradual desiccation of the inland basin of Lake Eyre. As the climate thus became more and more unfavourable any human population must have become more and more segregated, leading to the formation of the present tribes clustered at and around the localities where human life is still, though with difficulty, maintainable. The authors do not say whether there is evidence of the existence of a human population before the present climatic conditions prevailed. It is clear, how- ever, that the Intichiuma rites are such as are likely to have been developed in a barren country. The better supplied the country is with food and other means of livelihood, the less need would there be for magical ceremonies to produce them. Consequently we find that as we get further and further away from the Arunta country the Intichiuma ceremonies assume less and less import- ance, until their magical aspect practically disappears altogether on the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Now, either the ancestral Arunta carried them into the interior when they first peopled the country, or they have developed them there. The authors suppose, and it is a reasonable conjecture, that Central Australia was peopled from the north. But whatever was the condition of the climate in the interior, is there any reason to believe that further to the north on the Arunta track it was more arid and inhospitable ? If not, the ancestral Arunta would have had no use for the Intichiuma considered as magical rites, and would have been unlikely to develop them there. If, however, they had reached their present home carrying with them totemic ceremonies at a time when the climatic conditions were more favourable, it is quite probable that such totemic ceremonies