ABSTRACT
David Turner has described how he began his fieldwork on Groote Eylandt in the late 1960s by mapping the landscape, locating clan boundaries and recording kinship relations, then, finally, making a superficial study of the people's music. Despite the similar structure of social organization among tropical and semi-tropical hunter-gatherers on different continents, each cultural tradition has created its own representation of, and reflection on, the connectedness of hunter-gatherer society. In broad terms, there are four possible outcomes of the colonial enterprise. Colonial policy towards Aboriginal people has, as is well known, gone through three phases: extermination, assimilation, and multiculturalism and separate development. Several anthropologists have argued that the cults that are performed over much of the Top End of the Northern Territory this century were devised in response to colonization. In 1968, Gurinji stockmen on Wave Hill station in the Northern Territory went on strike and attempted to establish their own station on traditional Gurinji land.
