Some Wood and Stone Implements of the Bindibu Tribe of Central Western Australia

Abstract

In 1956–57 the remote and almost unexplored desert terrain that stretches for hundreds of miles north and west of Lake Mackay—a great salt morass that lies across the border between Northern Territory and Western Australia—was in the grip of a severe drought which had lasted for more than a year. This great tract of spinifex desert and red sand hills that extends westward to the Canning Desert was named the Great Sandy Desert by Colonel Warburton in 1873. During 1956 and again in the following year, reports had been coming in sporadically through Alice Springs of the existence of primitive nomadic aborigines far out in the sands beyond Lake Mackay. Some of these nomads were said to have come in to Mt. Doreen Station, which lies 225 miles to the west of Alice Springs on the fringe of the desert, but no accurate information was available. Having experienced tropical areas of high rainfall with their regular hunting and food-gathering cycle, I had always wanted to work in the arid interior of Australia, where the rainfall is not only extremely low but unpredictable. I had hoped to live and to hunt with a nomadic people of the desert and semi-desert, and to study the background ecology, the adaptation of these people to this arid terrain, and especially their hunting and food gathering, and so to understand the effect of these factors on the territorial grouping and on the social and ceremonial life of the aborigines as I had come to know it.

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