The World of the First Australians

Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt's The World of the First Australians, published by Ure Smith in 1964, is a scholarly survey of Aboriginal Australian culture and religion by two of the most prominent Australian anthropologists of the twentieth century, both of whom conducted extensive fieldwork across many Aboriginal communities over long careers. Its strength is that direct, sustained fieldwork experience across a wide range of Aboriginal groups, and the book's standing as a longtime standard reference in Australian anthropology. Its limit is its age and its broad continental scope, generalising across many distinct Aboriginal nations and traditions under a single survey; more recent scholarship, including work led by Aboriginal scholars themselves, has refined and in places corrected specific claims, so a claim about one particular nation's practice should be checked against a source specific to that community.