1 This paper was presented to the 16th Conference of the Association for the History of Religions, Rome, September 1990. It is really a summary statement of some 20 years' scholarly research into Australian Aboriginal society which has raised as many questions as it has answered. 1 would like to thank Guy Lanoue, Donald Wiebe and Peter Richardson for their comments and suggested clarifications, as well as Tony Swain for his thoughts on the Walbiri.
2 For discussion of this point see Noel Butlin, Our Original Aggression (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1983), and W. E. H. Stanner, White Man GotNo Dreaming (Canberra: Australian National University, 1979).
3 See Tony Swain's documentation of this tendency in his Interpreting Aboliginal Religion: An Historical Account (Adelaide: Australian Association for the Study of Religion, 1985).
4 This has been documented by Graeme Pretty in his report, The Excavations at Roonka Flat (Adelaide: South Australian Museum, 1976).
5 A statistical demonstration of the nature and extent of the Aborigines' transcendence of material determination is found in my "Kinship is Cosmology," Mankind, 19, 3 (1990): 215-26.
6 Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1964 [1896]).
7 David H. Turner, Return to Eden: A Journey Through the Promised Landscape of Amagalyuagba (New York: Peter Lang, 1989).
8 This experience is not unlike the one recounted by Jacques Maquet on viewing Mondrian's painting Broadway Boogie Woogie (in The Aesthetic Experience: An Anthropologist Looks at the Visual Arts [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989], p. 80). It is to be understood more as an aesthetic than a religious experience.
9 Over time, patterns of reciprocal renunciation have developed such that Form may channel content as trade goods and resources along two (Kariera-type), four (Aranda type, including the Warnungamagalyuagba), or even one (Western Desert) lines of Land/People linked by the activities of the same or linked creative beings. Form may also channel content as marriage partners between the same two People/Lands every generation (Kariera), every second generation (Aranda) or outward in an expanding direction (Yaralde).
10 Julie Waddy has demonstrated this for the Warnungamagalyuagba and their neighbours in her study Classification of Plants and Animals from the Groote Eylandt Point of View (Darwin: Northern Australian Research Unit, 1988).
11 David H. Turner, "Transcending War: Reflections on Australian Aboriginal Culture," Anthropology Today, 3, 2 (1987): 15.
12 Mervin Meggitt, The Desert People (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1962).
13 Ibid., p. 69.
14 Ibid., p. 42.
15 Mervin Meggitt, Gadjari Among the Walbiri Aborigines of Central Australia, Oceania Monographs, 14 (Sydney, 1967).
16 Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971 [1915]).
17 This is the third of a trilogy for the series Toronto Studies in Religion edited by Donald Wiebe which began with my/Aboriginal reading of the book of Genesis (Life Before Genesis), was followed by a phenomenological account of the Aboriginal way of life (Return to Eden) and will end with my/Aboriginal reading of Christian Scriptures (Afterlife Before Genesis).
18 Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958).
19 David H. Turner, "The Incarnation of Nambirrirrma, in Tony Swain and Deborah Rose, eds., Aboriginal Australians and Christian Missions (Adelaide: The Australian Association for the Study of Religion, 1988), p. 470-83.
20 For Plato Form is a substance existing in its own right independently of particular instances and of the substances on which these instances depend. Forms exist in a real but intangible, suprasensible, world. Aristotle saw Form as within the very nature of phenomena and not as a separable substance existing apart from particularities (see Renford Bamborough's "Introduction" to his The Philosophy of Aristotle [New York: Mentor]). To me Forms are perception in interaction with nature and cannot be known outside that interaction. Forms are perceivable, but Form as such is a not. It is rather a deduction, a projection from an a prior plural base. How Aristotle and Plato would address the issue of en- and in-Formation I am not yet sure.
