Notes on the Aborigines of New South Wales is a compact but significant ethnographic account of Aboriginal life, emphasizing social organization, kinship, ceremonial practice, language, and customary law. Written in the concise observational prose typical of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropology, it combines field notes, comparative description, and classificatory detail. Its literary context is that of colonial scientific writing: valuable for the information it preserves, yet shaped by the assumptions and terminology of its period. R. H. Mathews was an Australian surveyor and self-trained anthropologist whose professional travels brought him into contact with Aboriginal communities across New South Wales and beyond. His technical habits as a surveyor—precision, mapping, classification—strongly influenced his ethnographic method. Unlike many armchair commentators of his day, Mathews gathered information through correspondence, interviews, and field observation, motivated by an awareness that colonial disruption was rapidly endangering Indigenous cultural knowledge. This work is recommended to readers interested in Australian anthropology, Indigenous history, and the documentary record of colonial-era scholarship. It should be read critically, with attention to its historical limitations, but also appreciatively, as a source preserving details of cultural systems too often ignored or misrepresented by contemporary observers.

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