MUCH MALIGNED

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 109, 11 May 1931, Page 9

MUCH MALIGNED

AUSTRALIAN NATIVES

ABORIGINAL MENTALITY

OBSERVER'S OPINION

United Tress Association—By. Electric Tele-1 graph—Copyright. . j (Heceived 11th May, 10 a.m.) SYDNEY, This Day. Dr. D. S. Davidson, tho anthropologist, after fifteen months' work among the Australian Aborigines in the Far North on behalf of the University of Pennsylvania and tho Social Research Council of New York, declares that the natives have been much maligned so far as intelligence is concerned. They had been described generally as among tho.lowest intellectual races in tho world, but nobody was able to prove such a description correct. They were a raco peculiarly placed, rendering recognised psychological standards useless for comparative purposes. Simultaneously with Dr. Davidson's observation comes a message from Darwin that native women are being sold pn Bathurst Island for bags of flour, sugar, or knives and tomahawks. The purchasers, however, are Catholic missionaries, whose object is to retrieve the girls from some of the chiefs, who have collected harems, including young children. The priests are endeavouring to break down r the custom. They find the chiefs ready to sell and the children glad to escape into the sanctuary of the mission, where they are taught useful household knowledge, and when they are grown up will be given the opportunity to mako a natural selection of husbands.

The experiment has not yet lasted long enough to show how this phase is going to work out.