The Native Tribes of Central Australia

What It's About

Based on fieldwork carried out during the 1896 Engwura ceremonial gathering, this book documents the customs, social organisation, kinship systems, religious beliefs and material culture of the Arrernte people and neighbouring groups of central Australia. Spencer, a biologist by training, undertook the research jointly with Francis James Gillen, a local telegraph station master and magistrate whose long-standing relationships with the Arrernte gave the pair unusual access to ceremonies rarely witnessed by outsiders. The result was one of the earliest and most detailed European accounts of Aboriginal Australian life, covering initiation rites, totemic groupings, marriage rules and mythology.

Key Concepts

The book is best known for its detailed treatment of totemism and the classificatory kinship systems governing marriage and social obligation, and for introducing many English-speaking readers to the concept later known as "the Dreaming" — the Aboriginal understanding of ancestral, mythological time. It also records initiation ceremonies such as the Engwurra fire ceremony in close ethnographic detail.

About the Author

Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer (1860–1929) was a British-Australian biologist and anthropologist. Born in Lancashire and educated at Oxford, he was appointed the first Professor of Biology at the University of Melbourne in 1887, a post he held for over three decades. His fieldwork among Aboriginal communities in central and northern Australia, much of it conducted with Gillen, established him as one of the founding figures of Australian anthropology. He was knighted in 1916.