The interpretation which, following in the footsteps of W.
Mannhardt, I have attempted to give of these ceremonies has been not
a little confirmed by the discovery, made since this book was first
written, that the natives of Central Australia regularly practise
magical ceremonies for the purpose of awakening the dormant energies
of nature at the approach of what may be called the Australian
spring. Nowhere apparently are the alternations of the seasons more
sudden and the contrasts between them more striking than in the
deserts of Central Australia, where at the end of a long period of
drought the sandy and stony wilderness, over which the silence and
desolation of death appear to brood, is suddenly, after a few days
of torrential rain, transformed into a landscape smiling with
verdure and peopled with teeming multitudes of insects and lizards,
of frogs and birds. The marvellous change which passes over the face
of nature at such times has been compared even by European observers
to the effect of magic; no wonder, then, that the savage should
regard it as such in very deed.
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