LXXVIli PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 



land mass, probably in association with the alteration of severe 

 glacial and mild inter-glacial conditions during the Pleistocene 

 period. The first to reach Australia were the ulotrichous people, 

 of whom traces persist in Africa, Papua, Melanesia, and did, till 

 lately, in Tasmania. The ancestors of the present Australians 

 were possibly associated with a second dispersion, the members of 

 which reached America, Africa, Malaysia, and Australia, but not 

 Tasmania. 



These early races have been pushed out, as it were, into the 

 corners of the world; and, so far as Australia is concerned, it is 

 important to note that the people who arrived' here as the result of 

 the second migration have been isolated, and also protected from 

 further dispersions in a way quite different from those of Asia, 

 Africa, and America. Whilst the native tribes of the latter asso- 

 ciated with this migration retain, doubtless, many more or less 

 primitive customs and beliefs, they have been, of necessity, 

 influenced by later migrations that have not reached or affected 

 the Australian aboriginals, whose isolation by land has been 

 complete. 



It seems most likely that the original migrants entered Australia 

 at the north-east in Pliocene or very early Pleistocene times. ' 

 Whether they came from Asia or from America, as Sergi suggests, 

 whether they migrated southwards along the Eastern coast line, 

 which was then more extensive than it is now, it is impossible to 

 say idefinitely. They have left no traces of their movements or 

 occupation of the land behind them. The Talgai skull — the 

 earliest trace of man in Australia — has, according to Dr. Smith, 

 no special relation to the Tasmanian.(^) Finally their surviving 

 remnants found shelter and safety from the second immigration 

 in Tasmania until such time as, most unfortunately for them- 

 selves, they came in contact with the third —that of the white 

 man. ("^ 



Sir Wiriam Flower originally suggested a mixture of a frizzly- 

 haired Melanesian, the Homo tasmania^ivs of Sergi, with a dark- 

 coloured Caucasmn; Mathew, a mixture of the same with a 

 lighter coloured Dravidian; Sergi has more recently suggested a 

 Polynesian immigration fusing with the Tasmanian stock; and 

 more recently Berry again suggests that the Australians have 

 arisen as a cross between the Tasmanians and seme other sto'ck. 

 I would suggest that tiie points in common between what Sergi 

 calls the lophocephalic Tasmanian-Austra'ian skulls may be due 

 to a community of origin in the far past, before the immediate 

 ancestors of the present Australian had appeared; and it may be 



(') Dr. S. A. Smith. — The Foss.l Human Skull found at Talgai, Queensland. Phil 

 Trans. R.S., 1918. p. .383. 



(5) Since the above was written an article has appeared in Na'vre (Jan. 6, 1921), in 

 which Professor Keith says : " On a consideration of all his feitures we jijust place the Talgai 

 boy in the ancestral stock of the Tasmanian type of Australoids." 



