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Route Finding by Desert Aborigines in Australia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2009

David Lewis
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Extract

How do Aborigines find their way across the arid wastes of Central Australia? Certainly their feats of practical orientation and tracking are legendary. Are their methods in any way analogous to the non-instrumental arts still surviving in parts of the insular Pacific? (Lewis, 1972). In 1972 the professor of Pacific History at the Australian National University generously extended to Central Australia the accepted bounds of Oceania, to allow me to travel the Simpson Desert with Antikarinya tracker Wintinna Mick in an attempt to find answers to these questions. Subsequently, in 1973 and 1974, a grant from the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies and a Visiting Fellowship in Anthropology from the A.N.U. enabled me to extend the investigation into the Western Desert, under the tutelage of men most of whom had spent their youth as nomadic stone age hunters. What they taught me makes up the bulk of this paper and provides some sort of answers to our opening questions.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Navigation , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , January 1976 , pp. 21 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Navigation 1976

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References

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