rigines of Central
Australia, might develop through a phase of ancestor worship into a
pantheon of the ordinary type.

[Sidenote: Conspicuous features of the landscape associated with
ancestral spirits.]

Although none of the other totemic ancestors of the Central Australian
aborigines appears to have advanced so far on the road to religion as
the Wollunqua, yet they all contain in germ the elements out of which a
religion might have been developed. It is difficult for us civilised men
to conceive the extent to which the thoughts and lives of these savages
are dominated by the memories and traditions of the dead. Every
conspicuous feature in the landscape is not only associated with the
legendary doings of some ancestors but is commonly said to have arisen
as a direct result of their actions. The mountains, the plains, the
rivers, the seas, the islands of ancient Greece itself were not more
thickly haunted by the phantoms of a fairy mythology than are the barren
sun-scorched steppes and stony hills of the Australian wilderness; but
great indeed is the gulf which divides the beautiful creations of Greek
fancy from the crude imaginings of the Australian savage, whose
legendary tales are for the most part a mere tissue of trivial
absurdities unrelieved by a single touch of beauty or poetry.

[Sidenote: A journey through the Warramunga country.]

To illustrate at once the nature and the abundance of these legends I
will quote a passage in which Messrs. Spencer and Gillen describe a
journey they took in company with some Warramunga natives over part of
their country:--"For the first two days our way lay across miserable
plain country covered with poor scrub, with here and there low ranges
rising. Every prominent feature of any kind was associated with some
tradition of their past. A range some five miles away from Tennant Creek
arose to mark the path traversed by the great ancestor of the Pittongu
(bat) totem. Several miles further on a solitary upstanding column of
rock represented an opossum man who rested here, looked about the
country, and left spirit children behind him; a low range of remarkably
white quartzite hills indicated a large number of white ant eggs thrown
here in the _wingara_[146] by the Munga-munga women as they passed
across the country. A solitary flat-topped hill arose to mark the spot
where the Wongana (crow) ancestor paused for some time to pierce his
nose; and on the second night we camped by the