ABSTRACT
I left the women’s ritual and corroborees to the last, partly because I did not want their more spectacular and exotic character to overshadow and possibly obliterate the humdrum prosaic reality and importance of daily life; and partly because they have emerged out of the struggle to provide sufficient food, to face drought, fire, flood, and death, to prepare the individual for the responsibilities of adult status, to lessen pain, to protect from danger and to inspire with confidence and security. As far as possible I have tried to go to the roots of religion and to describe the conditions which have brought it into being, and which contribute to its persistence. Unless we relate these myths, dogmas, and rituals to the needs of the Aborigines, to their relationships with one another and their environment, we have missed their significance, and they become grotesque figments of the primitive mind: the meaningless and perhaps barbarous activities of primitive man. If we have grasped the underlying factors of daily life, the interests that constitute it, we are in a better position to realize how religion is a means of consolidating advantages already held, of reinforcing strength where control is less sure, of resolving conflicting claims. I have indicated the sanctions it provides for customs, laws, and those rites which either bear directly on the welfare of the community as a whole, or on the life-crises of the individual.
