THE DALY RIVER TRIBES: A REPORT OF FIELD WORK IN NORTH AUSTRALIA

(i) Introduction. I LiLr 1 bydney in April, 1932, under the auspices 01 the Australian * National Research Council, to spend twelve months in North Australia making a sociological survey of the remaining tribes of the Daly and Victoria rivers. Field exigencies compelled me to return, without visiting the Victoria river, after an absence of seven months. In this time, however, I was able to make a fairly intensive study of a number of Daly river tribes. At a later date I hope to return to this field, which is still full of interest and is not yet adequately studied. It promises, moreover, to yield to the sociologist material which may well be of crucial value. The literature of Australian anthropology contains no important sociological information on this area. The few references in the writings of R. H. Mathews and of Spencer and Gillen are too fragmentary to be of much account, and some are thoroughly misleading. A short paper by a Father McKillop,1 a missionary who lived on the Daly river for several years in the nineties of last century, contains some useful data and rich promise of more, but by indefiniteness and incompletion destroys much of its value. Thus, until my visit, the Daly river was virtually untouched by sociological research.2 The native cultures were reputed to be uncontaminated by contact with settlement, but early experience in the field proved this to be far from the truth, and showed, too, that much of these cultures has disappeared for ever. Most tribes on the Daly river have been experiencing an acute and corrosive culture contact for many years, some tribes at least