2 
INTRODUCTION 
achievement of Spencer and must ensure for him, for all 
time to come, a foremost place among the pioneers of 
anthropology. He had, indeed, an able and enthusiastic 
colleague in the person of his friend F. J. Gillen, who, as 
Protector of the Aborigines, had lived among the Arunta 
and had amassed a considerable body of information con¬ 
cerning them before Spencer visited the tribe for the first 
time in 1894; but it is probably doing no injustice to the 
memory of the genial Irishman to suppose that, like many 
men in similar contact with primitive peoples, he would have 
passed away without leaving any record of his priceless 
knowledge if it had not been for the inspiration and direction 
of Spencer. Henceforth the two men devoted all the leisure 
which their professional duties allowed them to deepening 
and widening their acquaintance with the aboriginal tribes 
spread over an immense area of Australia, from the dreary 
wilderness of Lake Eyre in the south to the shores of the 
Gulf of Carpentaria on the north. After Gillen’s death 
Spencer still further extended the range of his researches by 
studying the tribes of North-West Australia in the neighbour¬ 
hood of Port Darwin, including the interesting and little- 
known tribes of Bathurst and Melville Islands. But the 
tribe which he and Gillen knew best was the Arunta; it 
remained the central point of their studies and supplied in 
a sense the standard by which they judged the rest. The last 
work but one which Spencer published was a monograph on 
the Arunta, which embodied all the information given by him 
and Gillen jointly on this particular tribe in The Native Tribes 
of Central Australia , but enlarged by the addition of fresh and 
valuable materials which Spencer alone had collected from 
the surviving old men of the tribe in the course of investiga¬ 
tions which he undertook in the latter years of his life for 
the purpose of correcting or corroborating his former ac¬ 
counts on doubtful matters. The result of these, his latest 
