"The first of these were the Negrito people — short, dark-skinned, curly-haired and broad-nosed — who were forced to migrate…by the movement into those areas of people of a higher material culture….
"Later, another people arrived — the Murrayians, who were related to the Ainu in Japan and either destroyed the Negritos or drove them into the valleys behind Cairns and south into what is now Tasmania. Then in turn the Murrayians were challenged and displaced by the Carpentarians — a people probably related to the Vedda of Ceylon….
"This account is based on [the South Australian Ethnologist] N. Tindale and J. Birdsell’s Results of the Harvard-Adelaide Universities’ Anthropological Expedition 1938-39: [re] Tasmanian Tribes in North Queensland (in Records of the South Australian Museum),5 and H.A. Lindsay’s [article] The First Australians.6 Neither the Negritos nor the Murrayians, nor indeed the Carpentarians, made the advance from barbarism to civilization…. The failure of the aborigines to emerge from a state of barbarism deprived them of the material resources with which to resist an invader, and left them without the physical strength to protect their culture." Thus Manning Clark.
