Australian Aboriginal Art

Abstract

THE Australian aborigine, like most of the world's primitive peoples, is increasingly affected by the influence known to anthropologists as 'culture-contact'. The spread of industrial civilization brings many problems of adjustment with it, whether in the form of the 'loss of nerve' which precedes final extinction, or of that dilemma of all distinguishable minorities-the choice (whether taken by themselves or by others for them) between retention of their own special values and way of life, to the enrichment of human culture, and the easier way of assimilation into the civilization and economy of the majority. The exhibition of aboriginal cave paintings arranged by the News and Information Bureau at Australia House, London, and opened by the High Commissioner on January 15, does great credit to the Commonwealth Government at a time when there has been some anxious questioning of the probable effects upon native life of the proposed establishment of a rocket -testing range to traverse the Central Aboriginal Reserve (see Nature, December 28, p. 939), though there is every reason to hope that adequate safeguards are to be provided.