INDIAN OCEAN IN THIRTEENTH CENTURY 21 



Australia manners and customs were essentially the same, 

 almost the worst manners and customs in the world, 

 except those of Tasmania. There is no trace, or at most 

 there is only a very faint trace, of any foreign element in 

 their midst, or of any foreign influence exercised upon them. 

 Australia was an all-black Australia. Immigrants from 

 other countries were not excluded by law, but they landed 

 at risk of their lives. " The coastal natives of the North," 

 writes Professor Spencer, " are strong and fierce, and 

 always on the look-out to kill intruders, and for a stranger 

 to venture into the bush would be certain death." 

 Australia resolutely played a lone hand in the world. 1 



And yet one cannot look at a modern map without Yet 

 feeling sure that Australia must have been visited in very 

 early times. It is not geographically a very isolated proachable. 

 land. It is tied to Asia by a string of islands, large, fertile, 

 populous, which lie so close together that they may possibly 

 have been represented to Ptolemy as one continuous land, 

 the great South-East extension of " Silk-land," which 

 formed the Eastern side of his land-locked Indian Ocean. 

 It seems, indeed, that at one time they were almost one 

 continuous land. "The chain of islands," writes Mr. Wallace, 

 "which extends from the Malay Peninsula towards Aus- 

 tralia, ending with Timor . . . represents a former con- 

 tinental extension, probably only broken by the channel 

 between Bali and Lombok (fifteen miles wide) and a 

 channel between Timor and Australia, twenty miles wide." 2 



1 Cf . Spencer's Native Tribes of North Australia: "There is only 

 very rarely indeed seen anything like a trace of Malay blood. ... It 

 is possible that, on very rare occasions, a Malay or Macassar man may 

 have succeeded in having intercourse with an aboriginal woman, but he 

 could do so only at the risk of his life. . . . The coastal natives are 

 strong and fierce and always on the look-out to kill intruders . . . for 

 a stranger to venture into the bush would be certain death. ... I have 

 once, but only once, seen a native who had clearly some Malay blocd 

 in her." Spencer says, however, that the drawings and decorations 

 of the Melville and Bathurst islanders are entirely distinct from any 

 on the mainland, and suggest contact in time past with a people whose 

 art was more akin to that of the islands to the North-East than to 

 anything in Australia (pp. 407-8). 



2 " The former channel has sufficed to stop the advance of the larger 

 animals from the Asiatic to the Austral region, and the latter channel 

 has similarly prevented Australian mammals from entering Timor." 



