The study of Australian Aboriginal religions has been the study of religions without a written record provided by their adherents. We depend on what outsiders to Aboriginal religion have thought worthwhile to commit to writing. Moreover the history of contact in Australia has been a sorry one in the main—Aborigines were dispossessed of land, regarded with contempt, and made socially and politically inferior. The amateur anthropologist A. W. Howitt could observe in 1880 that the frontier was often marked by a line of blood. Indeed, between the late eighteenth century, when European settlement began, and the 1920s, Aboriginal numbers fell so sharply that prophecies of race extinction were neither alarmist by some nor wishful thinking by others. After World War II, in keeping with a new policy of assimilating Aborigines to an ill-defined general Australian standard, there was a great...