Author(s): Ion Idriess; Tom Thompson ((various roles))

Culture & History

This book may interest Australians in one of the wildest areas left in their continent - that north of the King Leopold Range. And it may reveal a little of a most interesting man - the stone-age man of thousands of years ago. If it should influence Australians to do something towards curing his ills and allowing him to retain his liberty, I shall be glad. - Ion Idriess

The latest from the pen of the adventurous Ion Idriess is the story of a man-hunting expedition with the North-West mounted police patrol. This took him twelve hundred miles through the Kimberleys, for long an impenetrable region where now a mere handful of white settlers breed cattle and sheep amid tribes of stone age aborigines... A curious point noted by this observant traveller was that though speaking an entirely different lingo, the blacks of the Kimberley were practising rites performed by aborigines 3,000 miles east. Mentally and physically these tribes, otherwise foreign to one another, were the same... He also established the existence of a secret sacred language by which the blacks pass on their innermost thoughts. "With this," he says, "they express their real beliefs, their feelings and mentality, their very selves, their 'sacred' life. And because of it the whites will never lift the veil that shades their mentality from ours." - Brisbane Telegraph, 1937