FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD 29 



■ — these Australians have none of the arts of the most 

 primitive among other races, excepting that they can 

 make fire and construct a canoe of the bark of trees. 

 They have not even the bow and arrow, but make use 

 of spears and the wonderful " boomerang " in hunting 

 and fighting. They daub themselves with a sort of 

 white paint, and decorate their bodies with great scars 

 made by cutting gashes in the flesh with sharp stones, 

 and they dress their heads and faces and ceremonial 

 wands with wool and feathers, which they fix by the 

 aid of an adhesive fluid always ready to hand — namely, 

 their own blood. I recently was present at a lecture 

 given to the Anthropological Institute in London by 

 Professor Baldwin Spencer, of Melbourne, with whom I 

 was closely associated when he was a student at Oxford 

 thirty years ago. He has devoted many years to the 

 study of the Australian natives, and ten years ago 

 published a most valuable work describing his experiences 

 amongst them, to which he has recently added a further 

 volume. He has lived with them in friendship and 

 intimacy in the remote wilderness of the Australian 

 bush, and has been admitted as a member of one of 

 their mysterious clans, of which the " totem," or supposed 

 spirit-ancestor, is " the witchety grub " — a kind of cater- 

 pillar. He has been freely admitted to their secret 

 ceremonies as well as to their more public " corro- 

 borees " or dances, and has been able (as no one else 

 has been), without annoyance or offence to them, to take 

 a great number of cinema-films of them in their various 

 dances or when cooking in camp or paddling and up- 

 setting their canoes,. and climbing back again from the 

 river. Many of these he exhibited to us, and we found 

 ourselves among moving crowds of these slim-legged, 

 beautifully-shaped wild men. The film presented some 

 of their strange elaborate dances, which soon will be 



