Woman Anthropologist Leads a Lonely Life

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 175, 27 July 1938, Page 15

Woman Anthropologist Leads a Lonely Life

A young woman anthropologist, Miss Phyllis Eaberry, who has spent six months alone in the Australian bush,, is tho only white ever to havo seen the secreticorroborees of the bush women, and one of tho few permitted to witness the secret rites of the bush men. Born of English blood in the United States, she has been brought up in Australia. As an undergraduate of Sydney she longed to go to the distant places of the earth to see the unseen. She spent more than eighteen months in field work, living in a tent, and staying in turn with seven different tribes, each speaking a different language. 1 *Tt was always-believed ...that tho bush women had no religion at all,” she told an interviewer. “Men were supposed to represent the spiritual elements, women the profane in the rites. I can oxplode that myth. “The men’s corroborees are more elaborate than the women’s, but the women’s are much more secret. Thev have songs the men do not hear, and have spells the men do not know. “There are a lot of tabus, of course, and a certain amount of black magic, as well as love magic. If a man has been unfaithful the woman ho has betrayed will paint up a stone to represent him and bury it; If in tho course of time he falls ill, it is the magic. If he does not fall sick There has been some counter-magic at work! There is always a loophole. “The basis of the dances is totemistic. There is a whole body of mythology behind them. They have traditions of atimo when their ancestors were half human, half beast; and changed into wallabies and kangaroos.”