Tribes and Boundaries in Australia

Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1976. First Edition. Paperback. Very Good. Canberra, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1976. Quarto, xii, 250 pages with 29 figures, 18 maps and 6 plates plus a 865 x 600 mm folding map in an endpocket ('Aboriginal Language Distribution in the Northern Territory, as at December 1972'). Pictorial card covers tanned about the spine; endpocket torn at the foot; overall an excellent copy. The book contains, in rewritten form, eleven of the twelve papers presented at a symposium, 'Ecology, Spatial Organisation and Process in Aboriginal Australia' held at the ANU in October 1973. The contributors are Tindale, Flood, Peterson, Mulvaney, Birdsell, Yengoyan, Berndt, Maddock, Turner, Rose, Dixon and Milliken. 'The symposium was held to commemorate thirty-six years of collaboration between Norman Tindale and Joseph Birdsell ... Their work has stimulated research and stirred continuing controversy ... Central to the controversy, and to their work, has been the existence and nature of the Australian tribe ... In an important sense the controversy arises directly out of Tindale's original tribal map, published in 1940' (from the editor's introduction).