Rainforest Aboriginal people, c1890

Rainforest Aboriginal people, c1890. From their first encounters with Aboriginal people of the North Queensland rainforests, European observers remarked on their distinctive material culture, including long hardwood swords, painted softwood shields and woven-cane bicornual baskets. In 1940 anthropologists Norman Tindale and Joseph Birdsell pushed the idea of rainforest Aboriginal people’s distinctiveness much further, claiming that they were the remnant of an autochthonous Negrito race that elsewhere on the Australian mainland had been displaced by later waves of Aboriginal invaders. Following the long-established idea that rainforests were inferior places for human habitation, Tindale and Birdsell represented the North Queensland rainforests as ‘refuge areas’ in which the survival of the Negritos was due to their confinement to ‘the least desirable parts of primitive man’s environment’. Collection of the Cairns Historical Society, AIATSIS Negative 2111.02

Collection of the Cairns Historical Society, AIATSIS Negative 2111.02

Date captured: 
18 January 2013
Date created: 
18 January 2013