Ruark Lewis & Paul Carter
In AD 62, St Paul, making a journey from Cesarea to Rome became shipwrecked in Malta. He writes, "And the barbarous people shewed us no little kindness: for they kindled a fire, and receiving us everyone, because of the present rain and because of the cold" (Acts 28 New Testament King James Bible). Almost 2000 years later in 1919 Sigmund Freud wrote Totem and Taboo: resemblances between psychic lives of savages and neurotics. He drew on the research of the anthropologists Spencer and Gillen, working around Hermannsburg Mission (west of Alice Springs). This 'research' was carried out by observing ceremonial rituals and through informants giving accounts in pigeon English. Around the same period, the Dadaist Huge Ball, in a Café Voltaire performance, incorporated, among other languages, Aranda, one of the Aboriginal languages spoken in Hermannsburg. Hermannsburg Mission was directed at the time by a German Lutheran Pastor named Carl Strehlow. Versed in New Testament Greek, Latin, and dialects of the Lutheran and King James Bibles, Strehlow had undertaken to translate the same in Dieri and Aranda. In 1922, however, he became critically ill. A 'van' or raft was constructed so that he might be carried some 200 km overland in search of medical attention. Strehlow never arrived at his destination. He died at Horseshoe Bend before reaching the Alice Springs railroad.
In 1962, Maurice Merleau- Ponty wrote, Phenomenology of Perception. In this book he argues that perception is preconditioned—that the body, having a front and a back, sets up a kind of internal horizon in the subject. He calls this "pre-objective experience" and writes, "...the system of experience is not arrayed before me