Chapter One We view personal possessions partly as a sign of our material success, but to Aborigines they were a burden. Somebody had to carry them. That their groups moved to new sites was an indication of their knowledge and skill. In moving camp and winning a living from a variety of botanical environments they faced reality rather than evaded it. In moving around they were not creatures of whim but of purpose; their wanderings were systematic. P 5
Ch 8: Dual & Battle
William Buckley Lloyd Warner - A Black Civilisation Josephine Flood
Although small in scale the proportion of people affected by raids/feuds was high, especially when the women and children where targeted as the did most of the food gathering. Conflict seems to have been widespread and devestating when it occurred.
Ch 9: The Days Hunt
Spending the days alone hunting geese nests, coming together at night with a few other men from the tribe, the silence of the swamps, the solitude, what was that like? What did they talk about? How did they not go mad?
Ch 10: women of the plains and mountains
Surprisingly little attention was paid to Palmer's essay. How the Aborigines made their living was of less interest than which deity they believed in, whom they married and how they structured their society.
The reliance on meat or plant-foods, and the relative role of women or men as the main food collectors, were crucial questions for the increasing regiment of scholars who studied Aboriginal ways of life.
Ch 11: Medicines and drugs,
liquids and cosmetics
The average Australian adult and ten-year-old child knew more about botany 1000 years ago than they know today. Knowledge of botany supplied them not only with much of their food but also with drugs and medicines and - in a drought - with water.
In Tasmania a cider eucalypt in season yielded a stimulating drink. Rather like a blue gum in appearance, the tree grew in the bracing climate of the central plateau, fourishing mostly where forest met open country.
Ch 20: white ghosts ride by
Dick Roughsey, one of the first Aborigines to write a book but his people, could recount his own father's recollections of the roning of Europeans to a small island in the Gulf of Carpentaria.