| dc.contributor.author | Ross, Margaret Clunies | eng |
| dc.date.issued | 1986-05 | eng |
| dc.description | In 1988 non-Aboriginal Australians will celebrate two hundred years' occupation of a country which had previously been home to an Aboriginal population of about 300,000 people. They probably spoke more than two hundred different languages and most individuals were multilingual (Dixon 1980). They had a rich culture, whose traditions were centrally concerned with the celebration of three basic types of religious ritual-rites of fertility, initiation, and death (Maddock 1982:105-57). In many parts of Australia, particularly in the south where white settlement was earliest and densest, Aboriginal traditional life has largely disappeared, although the memory of it has been passed down the generations. Nowadays all Aborigines, even in the most traditional parts of the north, such as Arnhem Land, are affected to a greater or lesser extent by the Australian version of Western culture, and must preserve their own traditions by a combination of holding strategies. Thus in 1988 many Aboriginal Australians will be inclined to mourn the Bicentenary with its reminder to them of all they have lost.--Page 231-232. | eng |
| dc.description | Margaret Clunies Ross, a member of the English department at the University of Sydney, has for some time had a special interest in the oral traditions of the Australian Aborigines. She has carried on fieldwork, particularly in North Arnhem Land, and has written numerous articles and monographs on this area. | eng |
| dc.format.extent | 41 pages | eng |
| dc.identifier.citation | Oral Tradition, 1/2 (1986): 231-71. | eng |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10355/64012 | |
| dc.language | English | eng |
| dc.rights | OpenAccess. | eng |
| dc.rights.license | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. | |
| dc.title | Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions | eng |
| dc.type | Article | eng |
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