[6] After drought struck the region, the station eventually failed and the Parkers moved to Sydney in 1901, where Langloh was diagnosed with cancer, dying two years later.

[10] The Scottish writer and anthropologist Andrew Lang had provided prefaces to both works, and it was perhaps on his advice and encouragement that she eventually wrote the classic for which she is best known, The Euahlayi Tribe: A study of Aboriginal life in Australia,[11] which came out in 1905.

This, as generally her earlier books, were well received by the relevant scholarly community at the time: reviews commended her direct transmission of what elders had told her, unadorned by imaginative additions.

To be positive, you should never spend more than six months in their neighbourhood; in fact, if you want to keep your anthropological ideas quite firm, it is safer to let the blacks remain in inland Australia while you stay a few thousand miles away.

Otherwise, your preconceived notions are almost sure to totter to their foundations; and nothing is more annoying than to have elaborately built-up, delightfully logical theories, played ninepins with by an old greybeard of a black, who apparently objects to his beliefs being classified, docketed, and pigeon-holed, until he has had his say.

[13][14]She concludes by expressing her sympathy with Montaigne's criticism of European man's sense of being more enlightened than savages, when we ourselves boast of laws that putatively reflect nature rather than being themselves the outcome of custom.

[13] Her books nonetheless went out of print, and only in recent decades has her work been retrieved and examined, either critically as embodying the flaws of colonial ethnography, or as an early example of feminist approaches in anthropology.