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Aboriginal Teenager, Australia, 1996

"Conjuring an image as old as his ancestors, an Aboriginal teenager dons a mask of mud while swimming in a billabong, or water hole. For nearly 2,000 generations his people have inhabitied this wild and strangely beautiful spike of land at the top of down under. Steeped in the supernatural, it endures as a stronghold of native culture and one of Australia's last frontiers."

—From "The Uneasy Magic of Australia's Cape York Peninsula," June 1996, National Geographic magazine

Photograph by Sam Abell