ABSTRACT
The disappearance of the Beaumont children thirty years ago in Adelaide is one of the great unsolved mysteries of Australia. In spite of reports from real or apparent witnesses, it is impossible to know what happened. Many of the early explorers of the continent, and later explorers of the past and the environment, have seen Aborigines as ‘noble savages’, at one with the environment, not altering or damaging it and therefore, in the ‘original affluent society’, having time to invest ‘into the realms of the ego, the mind and the soul’. The intellectual challenge while excavating is to absorb as much of this information as possible while it is being obtained and use it to develop ideas about the structure and history of the site. Archaeologists are therefore trying to conquer history in another sense, pushing further and further back into the past, and seeing the events of a lost time with increasing clarity.
