A very detailed and intimate description of the life, personal and tribal, of the Central Australian Aboriginals; their characteristics, beliefs and superstitions; their tools and weapons; together with a discussion of the results of their contacts with the whites, their present condition and their probable future. Dr Chewings writes with the authority of personal knowledge gained by long, patient and acute observation in his travels in Central Australia from 1881 into the 1930s. A major work with photographs from the Spencer and Gillen expeditions.
Australia as a land of the picturesque and the unexpected has come on to the literary map. Ernestine Hill's The Great Australian Loneliness, ... Michael Terry's Sun and Sand, Dr. Charles Chewing's authoritative book on the aborigines, Back in the Stone Age, and Ion Idriess's Over the Range, ... have all brought before the reading public the native beauty of Australia, her endeavours and achievements. - Adelaide Advertiser, 1937