ABSTRACT
I F an aboriginal Tasmanian family, miraculously survivi~lg in the mountain forests and with no previous experience of Europeans, could be induced to watch a cinema film of our everyday life they would doubtless regard it as an amazing, incomprehensible, and rather terrifying sight. We lived in a land' very similar in its scenery and climate to their own island; but every morning, so far as they might understand, we left a cliff face by a small hole, entered hard and shiny houses which moved over the ground, went into another great cliff-house, and climbed inside to a small chamber into which light came from another hole covered by a slab of rock through which you could be seen. All day and all the week, it seemed, we took no steps whatever to obtain food except to ask for it in other large structures which were apparently full of nothing else. In the evenings, if it were summer, we played with other people, hitting a ball into marked squares across a net, or moved with peculiar gait round and round, each male ernbracing a female in a crowd of similarly embraced couples, while noises emerged from a square drum-like object which nobody manipulated to make it play. Yet the magical purpose of this ritual remained quite obscure. Our magical beliefs might be detected in visits to a man who tapped us all over and finally gave us a small white square which, when taken to another magician, was exchanged for a transparent box of magic fluid. All this time we gathered no fruits, had no personal stores of food, hunted no animals. From similar views of the countryside the Tasmanians would slowly understand that some of our fellows did produce food, but that their efforts were so amazingly prolific that the great mass of the people could live packed together in large settlements, occupying themselves all day long making all sorts of unnatural objects move, clang and clatter, despite an obvious freedom to sit about in some quiet spot to tell and hear stories, sing songs or gamble. If the scenes were various enough the natives would discover storytellers, gamblers and community singers, but for a long time many of our activities would seem incredible and meaningless.
