Surgery

ARNHEM LAND, in the vicinity of the Liverpool and Blyth rivers that flow into the Arafura Sea, is a region that most Australians appreciate in a very vague way. A recent book by L. R. Hiatt on the native people who live there' should help remedy this deficiency. It is not long since the Arnhemlanders of the Maningrida region harpooned dugong from dug-out canoes, knocked flying foxes from trees with long sticks and speared wallabies and bush turkeys. They received annual visits from the Indonesians from the sixteenth century onwards. Sailing down in their praus with the October monsoons and returning with the trade winds in March, the Indonesians employed the Australians at collecting and preserving trepang for the Chinese merchants of Macassar. They paid their Australian workers in rice, tobacco, alcohol, cloth and knives; Aboriginal mythology celebrates their coming as a kind of Golden Age.