A World That Was: The Yaralde of the Murray River and the Lakes, South Australia.

In his introduction to the volume Robert Tonkinson remarks that its publication is a "historic occasion." And indeed it is. I recall sitting in Ronald Berndt's seminars as a Ph.D. student at the University of Western Australia in the late 1960s listening with rapt attention as he discussed aspects of Yaralde culture, late of the Murray River Basin in South Australia where he had conducted fieldwork in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The population density of these people under traditional conditions was probably the highest in Australia, its marriage system one of the few where alliance ties in one generation were not renewed but pushed out in an expanding direction with each succeeding generation.

Then there was the tale of Ngurunderi, the aloof dweller in the sky who seems more akin to the Judeo-Christian God than to the more "grounded" aboriginal culture-heroes of other cultures - but for the fact that Ngurunderi traveled and connected Lands in the Creation Period, as did these other culture-heroes.

The Yaralde had no rites to increase natural species; they did not practice circumcision.

Here was a culture that perhaps provided a limiting condition to the basic framework within which life seems to have been lived in most of Aboriginal Australia. How many of the "differences" in question were indigenous, how many due to European contact? Was the transcendent character of Ngurunderi and the sky-world he and the spirits of the dead inhabited a result of refashioning spiritual beliefs under the influence of the Christian missionaries (there from 1859)? Were there increase rites and circumcision ceremonies in the pre-European past? What were European influences on the kinship and marriage system? Were the formalized leadership patterns and council or court system a response to European administrative requirements?

We all hoped that these questions would be answered when all of the material at the Berndts' disposal was pulled together and assessed. As students we discussed the problems with writing up field notes some thirty years after the fact (now some fifty years ago). Would changes in theoretical orientation alter the interpretation, indeed the perception, of the "facts" of the case? Weren't the same dangers built into the very way information on the Yaralde had been obtained - through the memories of the few informants there when the culture was viable? All these questions helped us formulate our own research agendas and made us acutely aware of the pitfalls of informant-oriented fieldwork.

So it was with eager anticipation that I agreed to review the book I had looked forward to for so many years. Now that I have read it, I can only say that the greatest praise I can offer is that none of my questions were answered. The book does not claim to be a definitive, accurate, account of traditional Yaralde culture. The problems of research into "memory culture" are acknowledged. The difficulty, even impossibility, of separating introduced elements from indigenous ones, is admitted.

And yet there does emerge an image of a vibrant aboriginal culture in this part of Australia, organized into clans based on territorial/ngatji (totemic) affiliation with well-demarcated boundaries but allowing for mutual access in the conventional Australian fashion. The person is here defined in terms of two spiritual aspects, the pangari or animator-spirit and the miwi or soul-substance, both associated with one's ngatji-species and prohibited as food, as elsewhere in Australia.

For those presently claiming continuity in aboriginal terms with the Yaralde in South Australia this book provides an invaluable link to their past and a unique record of aspects of their forebears' culture. For this reason alone the book's publication is indeed a historic event and a fitting memorial to the work of the Berndts among aboriginal people over the last haft century.

DAVID TURNER University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada