George Turner’s Natives of Australia and Other Pacific Lands

Record summary

George Turner’s Natives of Australia and Other Pacific Lands, published in 1889, compares religious traditions, myths, ritual customs, and social practices across several Pacific societies. The book is a useful discovery lead for tracking nineteenth-century discussions of sacred specialists, spirit beliefs, taboo, and indigenous cosmology across cultural boundaries. It also shows how missionaries constructed comparative categories that could resemble the period’s language of magic or occultism. Because the work compresses diverse societies into a broad survey, each specific claim requires verification against local sources and the cited mission records.