Page:Two Representative Tribes of Queensland.djvu/127



tribes of Central and North-Central Australia, having been recently minutely described in all the uncanny, uncouth, and picturesque details of unsophisticated savage life, there is a liability to imagine that they represent the most primitive phase of Australian aboriginal culture. But in many respects they are more highly advanced than those tribes with which we have been long familiar, who occupy, or have occupied, the early settled districts. The territory of the central tribes is very extensive, and is easily accessible to influence from the north, the direction from which advances in Australia have always come. The distribution of circumcision is one evidence of greater accessibility to foreign influence and, besides, art, as exhibited in weapons, ornaments and Rh