Featuring vivid accounts of many key players in the nineteenth-century development of Central Australia, this book argues for a multi-perspective theory of history. In offering descriptions of an important aboriginal culture–the Arrernte–it reveals the colonialist underbelly of all modern academic cultural studies. But it embraces this scenario as one of creative potential, outlining an interactivist epistemology for negotiating the classical alternatives of objectivism and subjectivism. Gill ponders two exemplary scholars (Mircea Eliade and Jonathan Smith) in his careful study of the emergent academic study of religion.