Oceania

Oceania

Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, Australia



Oceania has exerted a singular fascination over the European mind. Travellers, painters, anthropologists, and psychologists have been drawn to the Pacific Ocean by an expectation that there they might find primitive cultures which illustrate how the early ancestors of all mankind lived and thought. Although this assumption has been attacked by modern scholars, it remains true that in the Australian Aborigines today we have men who are not far short of being ‘living fossils’. The age-old isolation of Australia, clearly evident in its archaic animals, such as flightless birds, egg-laying mammals, and marsupials, does find a parallel in the unique physical type of the aboriginal inhabitants. Of the Stone Age tribesmen of the central mountains of Papua, the world's second largest island, little is known at present, but it would appear that they may have maintained, too, a very primitive way...

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