-scorched wildernesses should
have lagged behind even their savage brethren of the coasts in respect
of material and social progress; and in fact there are many indications
that they have done so, in other words, that the aborigines of the more
fertile districts near the sea have made a greater advance towards
civilisation than the tribes of the desert interior. This is the view of
men who have studied the Australian savages most deeply at first hand,
and, so far as I can judge of the matter without any such first-hand
acquaintance, I entirely agree with their opinion. I have given my
reasons elsewhere and shall not repeat them here. All that I wish to
impress on you now is that in aboriginal Australia a movement of social
and intellectual progress, slow but perceptible, appears to have been
setting from the coast inwards, and that, so far as such things can be
referred to physical causes, this particular movement in Australia would
seem to have been initiated by the sea acting through an abundant
rainfall and a consequent abundant supply of food.[109]

[Sidenote: Backward state of the Central Australian aborigines. They
have no idea of a moral supreme being.]

Accordingly, in attempting to give you some account of the belief in
immortality and the worship of the dead among the various races of
mankind, I propose to begin with the natives of Central Australia,
first, because the Australian aborigines are the most primitive savages
about whom we have full and accurate information, and, second, because
among these primitive savages the inhabitants of the central deserts are
on the whole the most primitive. Like their brethren in the rest of the
continent they were in their native condition absolutely ignorant of
metals and of agriculture; they had no domestic animals except the dog,
and they subsisted wholly by the products of the chase and the natural
fruits, roots, and seeds, which the ground yielded without cultivation
of any sort. In regard to their intellectual outlook upon the world,
they were deeply imbued, as I shewed in a former lecture, with a belief
in magic, but it can hardly be said that they possessed any religion in
the strict sense of the word, by which I mean a propitiation of real or
imaginary powers regarded as personal beings superior to man: certainly
the Australian aborigines appear to have believed in no beings who
deserve to be called gods. On this subject Messrs. Spencer and Gillen,
our best auth