their piccaninnies round their camp-fires,
and those legends used to make a Christmas booklet for the children of
their white supplanters.

I can only hope that the white children will be as ready to listen to
these stories as were, and indeed are, the little piccaninnies, and
thus the sale of this booklet be such as to enable me to add frocks and
tobacco when I give their Christmas dinner, as is my yearly custom, to
the remnant of the Noongahburrahs.

K. LANGLOH PARKER,
BANGATE, NARRAN RIVER, NEW SOUTH WALES,
June 24th, 1895.

INTRODUCTION

Australia makes an appeal to the fancy which is all its own. When
Cortes entered Mexico, in the most romantic moment of history, it was
as if men had found their way to a new planet, so strange, so long
hidden from Europe was all that they beheld. Still they found kings,
nobles, peasants, palaces, temples, a great organised society, fauna
and flora not so very different from what they had left behind in
Spain. In Australia all was novel, and, while seeming fresh, was
inestimably old. The vegetation differs from ours; the monotonous grey
gum-trees did not resemble our varied forests, but were antique,
melancholy, featureless, like their own continent of rare hills,
infrequent streams and interminable deserts, concealing nothing within
their wastes, yet promising a secret. The birds and beasts--kangaroo,
platypus, emu--are ancient types, rough grotesques of Nature, sketching
as a child draws. The natives were a race without a history, far more
antique than Egypt, nearer the beginnings than any other people. Their
weapons are the most primitive: those of the extinct Tasmanians were
actually palaeolithic. The soil holds no pottery, the cave walls no
pictures drawn by men more advanced; the sea hides no ruined palaces;
no cities are buried in the plains; there is not a trace of
inscriptions or of agriculture. The burying places contain relics of
men perhaps even lower than the existing tribes; nothing attests the
presence in any age of men more cultivated. Perhaps myriads of years
have gone by since the Delta, or the lands beside Euphrates and Tigris
were as blank of human modification as was the whole Australian
continent.

The manners and rites of the natives were far the most archaic of all
with which we are acquainted. Temples they had none: no images of gods,
no altars of sacrifice; scarce any memorials of the dead. Their worship
at best was offered in hymns to