Two Representative Tribes of Queensland

It is with peculiar pleasure that I have responded to the author's invitation to supply a few preliminary remarks to this solid and well reasoned essay on Austro-Tasmanian origins. Apart from its general interest, the subject is one which has always had a special fascination for me, and I the more readily avail myself of this opportunity to say a few words on some of its more obscure problems inasmuch as I am substantially in accord with the views here advanced by Mr Mathew. We both hold that the Australians are a hybrid race, whose basal element is the Papuasian, but represented in recent times by the now extinct Tasmanians. We further hold that this primary element passed as full-blood Papuasians in extremely remote, possibly late Pliocene or early Pleistocene times, into Tasmania, while that island was still connected with the mainland, and the mainland, through New Guinea, with Malaysia. By the subsidence of the Austral land connections the Tasmanians were cut off from all contact with other races, and thus remained to the last full-blood Papuasians, somewhat modified by long isolation in a new and more temperate environment.

Meanwhile by the still persisting, northern land-connection, Australia was invaded by a people of unknown stock, possibly akin to the Dravidians of India, or to the Veddahs of Ceylon, or to the Toalas of Celebes, and these intruders gradually merged with the Papuasian aborigines in the hybrid race which we now call Australians.