orities on these tribes, observe as follows: "The Central
Australian natives--and this is true of the tribes extending from Lake
Eyre in the south to the far north and eastwards across to the Gulf of
Carpentaria--have no idea whatever of the existence of any supreme being
who is pleased if they follow a certain line of what we call moral
conduct and displeased if they do not do so. They have not the vaguest
idea of a personal individual other than an actual living member of the
tribe who approves or disapproves of their conduct, so far as anything
like what we call morality is concerned. Any such idea as that of a
future life of happiness or the reverse, as a reward for meritorious or
as a punishment for blameworthy conduct, is quite foreign to them.... We
know of no tribe in which there is a belief of any kind in a supreme
being who rewards or punishes the individual according to his moral
behaviour, using the word moral in the native sense."[110]

[Sidenote: Central Australian theory that the souls of the dead survive
and are afterwards reborn as infants.]

But if the aborigines of Central Australia have no religion properly so
called, they entertain beliefs and they observe practices out of which
under favourable circumstances a religion might have been developed, if
its evolution had not been arrested by the advent of Europeans. Among
these elements of natural religion one of the most important is the
theory which these savages hold as to the existence and nature of the
dead. That theory is a very remarkable one. With a single exception,
which I shall mention presently, they unanimously believe that death is
not the end of all things for the individual, but that the human
personality survives, apparently with little change, in the form of a
spirit, which may afterwards be reborn as a child into the world. In
fact they think that every living person without exception is the
reincarnation of a dead person who lived on earth a longer or shorter
time ago. This belief is held universally by the tribes which occupy an
immense area of Australia from the centre northwards to the Gulf of
Carpentaria.[111] The single exception to which I have referred is
furnished by the Gnanji, a fierce and wild-looking tribe who eat their
dead enemies and perhaps also their dead friends.[112] These savages
deny that women have spirits which live after death; when a woman dies,
that, they say, is the end of her. On the other hand, the spirit