Despite the austerity of their environment and their meagre possessions, these aboriginal people of central Australia produced as lavish a body of myth and ritual as can be found anywhere in the world.  It is a staggering cultural resource - but with the coming of the whitefella, everything changed.

Bibliography:

Gould, Richard, Yiwara, Foragers of the Australian Desert, Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY

Moorehead, Alan, Cooper’s Creek, The Opening of Australia, The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987

Sharp, Lauriston, Technological Innovation and Culture Change: An Australian Case, in Cultural and Social Anthropology, Peter B. Hammond, The MacMillan Company

Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, Dover Publications, NY