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I Saw a Strange Land QUOTES

I Saw a Strange Land QUOTES

1 " The native needed vast space in his own domain, freedom, unlimited movement, and time to gather his own bush food and water so necessary to provide a diet that was instinctive to him, and as definite as the centuries. The country was far too poor to support large community groups, and thus most of the time they must hunt and collect bush foods in small groups or families. Every advance of the white settler interfered with known supplies of food and water. Gradually the bewildered remnants of once strong tribal units either moved into the nearest white settlements and lost their tribal beliefs in beggary, or turned to the Mission for help; but unhygienic congregation about the Mission soon eliminated natural greens and roots; and there was no immediate compensation.
It set up and appalling problem in humanity that has been understood by very few people. "

― , I Saw a Strange Land

2 " Thousands of years of wandering stripped the Central Australian aboriginal of independent ability toplan a future, and made him master only of the moment. His dwellings always have been temporary crude things of sticks and leaves and grass, built in a few hours and abandoned at the mystic call of far-away food, water, or tribal ceremony. He gorged himself today, starved tomorrow, and shared his temporary possessions. He believed in his descent from spirit and dream forms of totemic ancestors in an amazingly intricate and ceremonial network, which still baffles many of the world’s foremost anthropologists. A curiously talented race, with the minds of designing mathematicians yet little ability to count; whose great strength and past lay back in the ages of legend and ceremony; whose future was never their own concern, but the pawn of circumstance; a people who could not think ahead, but feverishly worshipped the traditions of the past. "

― , I Saw a Strange Land