364 MATHEWS — LANGUAGE OF SOME TRIBES l December 6, 



The Erlistoun Tribe. 



I have not been able to obtain the name of the tribe occupying the 

 country between Menzies and Lake Wells, including Erlistoun, 

 Laverton, Duketon and other places in the Mount Margaret gold 

 field. This tract may be approximately defined as being situated 

 between the 27th and 29th parallels of latitude, intercepted between 

 the 12 1 St and 125th meridians of longitude. I have provisionally 

 adopted the name of the Erlistoun tribe for the aborigines of this 

 region for purposes of reference. The center of the tract of country 

 indicated is approximately four hundred and fifty miles west of the 

 western boundary of South Australia, and about the same distance 

 northeast of Perth, the capital of Western Australia ; in other words, 

 about half way between Perth and the Petermann range on the 

 boundary between the two states mentioned. 



Any information, therefore, which we can collect and promulgate 

 respecting the language of a tribe so situated must be of the highest 

 value to the ethnologist, being a connecting link between the speech 

 of the natives of Perth and those occupying the region on both sides 

 of the boundary between Western Australia and the neighboring 

 state of South Australia. 



I have not yet succeeded in completing a grammar of the language 

 spoken by the natives of the Erlistoun district, but I have been for- 

 tunate enough to find a competent and reliable resident of that part 

 of the country, who has supplied me with a vocabulary of one hun- 

 dred and three words taken down by himself from the lips of old 

 blacks of both sexes, who were well known to him, and upon whom 

 he could depend. 



If we compare the vocabularies of the Erlistoun and the Loritya, 

 printed side by side at the end of this monograph, we discover that 

 thirty of the words are the same or practically the same, whilst eight 

 others are very similar. That is to say, more than a third of the 

 Erlistoun words are substantially the same as the corresponding 

 words in the Loritya. I may state that my correspondent was alto- 

 gether unacquainted with the Loritya dialect, and none of the natives 

 of that tribe were within hundreds of miles of his home at Duketon. 

 There was therefore no possibility of his inadvertently mixing the 

 words of both tribes. 



