An Appreciation of Difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal Australia

Edited by Melinda Hinkson and Jeremy Beckett

First published in 2008 by Aboriginal Studies Press © Melinda Hinkson and Jeremy Beckett in the collection, 2008 © in individual chapters is held by the contributors, 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its education purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Aboriginal Studies Press is the publishing arm of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. GPO Box 553, Canberra, ACT 2601 Phone: (61 2) 6246 1183 Fax: (61 2) 6261 4288 Email: [email protected] Web: www.aiatsis.gov.au/aboriginal_studies_press National Library of Australia Cataloguing-In-Publication data: Author: Hinkson, Melinda. Title: An appreciation of difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal Australia ISBN: 9780855756604 (pbk.) ISBN 978 0 85575 685 7 (PDF ebook). Notes: Includes index. Subjects: Stanner, W. E. H. (William Edward Hanley), 1905-1981. Anthropologists — Australia — Biography. Aboriginal Australians — Social life and customs. Aboriginal Australians — Social conditions. Dewey Number: 301.092 Printed in Australia by BPA Print Group Pty Ltd Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are respectfully advised that this publication contains names and images of deceased persons, and culturally sensitive material. AIATSIS apologises for any distress this may cause. Cover images: (front) WEH Stanner in his room at University House, Australian National University, c. 1958; (back, L–R) Major WEH Stanner, 2/1st North Australia Observer Unit, c. 1942, AWM, PO4393.001; Stanner at a campfire, Fitzmaurice River, c. 1958; Stanner during fieldwork in the Daly River region, c. 1932.

Foreword

Bill Stanner’s extraordinary career took him from the bureaucracy to the academy. He had a distinguished career in the British colonial service, and briefly in the Australian department of external affairs. He reached the rank of lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army and commanded the North Australian Observer Unit during World War II. He was a foundation member of the Department of Anthropology at the Australian National University. Bill Stanner was also a central figure in the establishment of what would become the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, an organisation I am proud to currently chair, and was, in fact, the Institute’s first executive member. Stanner had been a tireless critic of the treatment of Aboriginal people since the 1930s, and of the policy of assimilation that dominated the state’s relationship with Indigenous Australia from the 1940s. A result of the 1967 referendum was the establishment of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs, a key body advising on new government policies in relation to Aboriginal people. The council rejected the policy of assimilation in favour of proper recognition of a unique Aboriginal identity, cultural expression, and land rights. Together with Nugget Coombs and Barrie Dexter as co-members, Stanner played a unique role in overseeing reform in Aboriginal Affairs. However, after three decades of bipartisan support for a broad policy platform of choice that the council promoted, the last 10 years has seen processes of attrition, combativeness and outright hostility in Indigenous affairs. During its last term in office, the Howard government was emboldened to implement its true intentions in Indigenous affairs, having secured an unexpected majority in both the House of Representatives and

iii

Foreword

the Senate. Each year from 2004 unveiled a further dismembering of key institutions of indigenous Australia. In 2004 the government disestablished the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission; 2005 saw a renewed attack on the iconic Northern Territory land rights legislation — the highwater mark in Australia in rights for Indigenous people. In that same year the then Minister for Indigenous Affairs Amanda Vanstone declared Aboriginal outstations to be ‘cultural museums’. In 2006 the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) was amended, leading to a further weakening of land councils, and the introduction of Section 19(a) head-leasing of townships as a mechanism to deliver to Aboriginal people their citizenship entitlements in return for the voluntary alienation of their land. In 2007, just months before being voted out of office, the Howard government made its most controversial act in Indigenous affairs with the declaration of the Northern Territory ‘national emergency’ intervention. Under the Northern Territory Emergency Response legislation the protections afforded under the Racial Discrimination Act (the RDA) to Aboriginal people captured by the new law were suspended and the government asserted that the steps taken under the new law were to be characterised as ‘special measures’ for the purposes of the RDA. For example, the permit system that provided traditional owners with the authority to control who entered their lands was abolished and the compulsory acquisition of all prescribed communities, for five years, was introduced. These and other land-related measures had nothing to do with the child sexual abuse reported by Anderson and Wild’s Little children are sacred report, which provided the government’s stated rationale for launching the intervention, and much to do with pre-conceived ideological positions. It soon became clear that the overarching philosophical intent in the intervention was mainstreaming. When visiting Hermannsburg in August 2007 prime minister Howard told residents that whilst respecting the ‘special place of indigenous people in the history and life of this country, their future can only be as part of the mainstream of the Australian community’ (Australian, 29 August 2007). A subtext of these debates has been about the supposed unviability of remote townships and the possibility of voluntary and involuntary shifting of Aboriginal people to ‘viable’ centres of economic activity. For the first time since land rights was enshrined in Commonwealth legislation, we have faced the spectre of Aboriginal people being forced to leave their land.This is a policy reminiscent of the centralisation prescriptions of the failed assimilation era. Stanner would have found this state-driven, top-down policy-making extraordinarily regressive and destined to fail. His work was exceptionally important in conveying something about the distinctive nature of Aboriginal people’s relationship to their country to a wider Australian audience. In 1968 Stanner delivered his Boyer Lectures, After the Dreaming, which are still well

iv

Foreword

recognised today, forty years on. In the lecture titled ‘Confrontation’ (Stanner 1969, p. 44) there is a particularly beautiful passage: No English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an Aboriginal group and its homeland. Our word ‘home’, warm and suggestive though it may be, does not match the Aboriginal word that means ‘camp’, ‘hearth’, ‘country’, ‘everlasting home’, ‘totem place’, ‘life source’, ‘spirit centre’ and much else. Our term ‘land’ is too spare and meagre. We can scarcely use it except without economic overtones unless we happen to be poets.

Stanner was spot on. When Aboriginal people talk about ‘country’ we mean something very different from the conventional European understandings. We might mean homeland or tribal or clan area. But we are not necessarily referring to a place in a merely geographical sense. Rather, the word ‘country’ is an abbreviation of all the values, places, resources, stories and cultural obligations associated with that area. Certainly, to talk of country is to talk of its resources: the uses to which these might be put, and their proper distribution. In this sense, to understand country is also to understand its crucial importance to the customary Indigenous economy and governance. However, the word best describes the entirety of a people’s ancestral inheritance. It is Place that gives meaning to creation beliefs. The stories of creation form the basis of Indigenous law and explain the origins of the natural world. To speak of country is to speak both of the economic uses to which it may be put and of a fundamentally spiritual relationship that links the past to the present, the dead to the living and the human and non-human worlds. Country is centrally about identity. Australia’s Indigenous peoples have fought hard to protect and preserve our countries and our identities since the first white settlements emerged on the NSW coast in the late 1780s. In the Northern Territory the persistent struggles of the Yolngu people of north-east Arnhem Land culminated in the Woodward inquiry whose findings and recommendations formed the basis of the first legislative regime of land rights based on freehold title in Australia. The Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act of 1976 was the first legislation in Australia to establish a land claim process by which traditional owners could claim various areas of land not through petition but as their right. Hence, the report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody said of Northern Territory land rights that: The result has been a fundamental shift in the position of Aboriginal people. Despite many ongoing problems, Aboriginal people now have an independent economic, political, and symbolic base for action. They have moved at least in part to a position of negotiation with the state. The importance of this is demonstrated in the growth of

˘

Foreword

strong and effective Aboriginal organisations, and the extent to which Aboriginal people now have to be taken seriously as a significant group within Northern Territory society.

However, the ‘reforms’ of the Howard government have steadily chipped away at these historic achievements, hard won over so many years by Aboriginal people and their supporters. Stanner predicted that a day would come when Aboriginal people might want to sell their land. The main message to be drawn from his writings on Aboriginal policy is that Aboriginal people should be allowed to make informed and realistic choices about their futures, not have decisions thrust upon them. The previous government sought to force changed land tenure arrangements upon traditional owners through the implementation of the 99-year leasing arrangements. I and others have pointed out that these changes were not required to enable the kinds of housing provision and economic development opportunities the government sought to encourage. Paradoxically, as we celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the referendum in 2007, Indigenous affairs reached a nadir. Where does one go from a nadir? There is some cause for optimism that the new Rudd government will take a more consultative approach. As I write there is much activity, much reviewing and also considerable uncertainty in the field of Aboriginal affairs. Since elected in November 2007 the Rudd government has announced it will endorse the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, it will establish a new Indigenous representative body, it has launched a review of the NT intervention, and a review of a key NT Aboriginal statutory authority the North Land Council. A case sits before the High Court challenging the Commonwealth’s compulsory acquisition of prescribed areas, possibly without just compensation. The outcomes of these various activities are far from assured: Will the review of the intervention recommend that NT emergency response laws pass the scrutiny of the RDA? Will the High Court find that the compulsory acquisition of Aboriginal land to provide public housing and services is unconstitutional? Will the government continue to support Aboriginal people who aspire to continue living on their customary estates or will it endorse the neo-liberal prescriptions of migration and mainstreaming? Clearly much has changed in the last half century, but there are obvious parallels between the assimilation policies of the mid-twentieth century and the neo-liberal prescriptions of the present. Both impose a future on Aboriginal people that seeks to speak on their behalf as to what best represents their future prospects. Both have neither mechanism nor room to hear from Aboriginal people as to what their aspirations might be, and how they might differ from those of mainstream Australia.This seems a risky

vi

Foreword

strategy for both remote-living Indigenous people and wider Australia alike. At the very time when climate change looms as the major threat to the very foundation of the neo-liberal paradigm, Aboriginal people are being asked to walk away from activities and ways of life that can contribute considerably to the maintenance of extremely biodiverse regions as well as carbon abatement. When Stanner was concerned with choice his focus was fixed firmly on Aboriginal benefit, although he did identify the cost to the nation of continued Indigenous disadvantage. But today the stakes are far higher than Stanner could possibly have imagined. By allowing remote-living Aboriginal people who wish to remain on and manage their country the choice to do so, we can see that their environmental management regimes might have local, national, and even global benefits.These benefits remain, as yet, unrecognised and unimagined by the nation. Surely, in this time of great uncertainty, this is the sort of choice we as a rich nation should be encouraging, for Aboriginal people as well as for all Australians? Mick Dodson August 2008

vii

Contents

Foreword Illustrations Acknowledgments Contributors ‘Going more than half way to meet them’: On the life and legacy of WEH Stannerâ•… Jeremy Beckett and Melinda Hinkson

iii xi xiii xv 1

part 1. diverse fields

1. ‘A chance to be of some use to my country’: Stanner during World War IIâ•… Geoffrey Gray

27

2. Stanner and Makerere: On the ‘insuperable’ challenges of practical anthropology in post-war East Africaâ•… Melinda Hinkson

44

3. WEH Stanner and the foundation of the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies, 1959–1964â•… John Mulvaney

58

4. Stanner: Reluctant bureaucratâ•… Barrie Dexter

76

part 2. in pursuit of transcendent value

5. Frontier encounter: Stanner’s Durmugamâ•… Jeremy Beckett

89

6. Journey to the source: In pursuit of Fitzmaurice rock art and the High Cultureâ•… Melinda Hinkson

102

7. Stanner’s veil: Transcendence and the limits of scientific inquiryâ•… Peter Sutton

115

8. ‘Religion’, ‘magic’, ‘sign’ and ‘symbol’ in Stanner’s approach to Aboriginal religionsâ•… Ian Keen

126

9. ‘Joyous maggots’: The symbolism of Yolngu mortuary rituals Howard Morphy

137

10. Indigenous songs as ‘operational structures of transactional life’: A study of song genres at Wadeyeâ•… Alberto Furlan

151

part 3 . land and people

11. Stanner and Aboriginal land use: Ecology, economic change, and enclosing the commonsâ•… Peter Sutton

169

12. ‘Too sociological’? Revisiting ‘Aboriginal territorial organization’â•… Nicolas Peterson

185

13. Stanner, Milirrpum, and the Woodward Royal Commission Nancy Williams

198

14. Counting the cost: Stanner and the Port Keats/Wadeye populationâ•… John Taylor

217

part 4 . a public intellectual

15. WEH Stanner and the historiansâ•… Ann Curthoys

233

16. After the Dreaming: The Boyer lecturer as social critic Tim Rowse

251

17. From ‘After the Dreaming’ to ‘After land rights’: WEH Stanner’s legacy as Indigenous policy intellectual Jon Altman

271

Index

283

Illustrations

Bill Stanner during fieldwork in the Port Keats region, c. 1950s. Bill Stanner at the SAS ‘Long Vigil’ exercise, north Australia, 1977 Major William Edward Hanley Stanner, c. 1942 Stanner outside the British consulate, South Pacific, c. 1947–53 Some members of the National Conference on Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1961 Stanner at a meeting of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs and state ministers, Adelaide 1968 Durmugam, Daly River region, c. 1950s. Nym Bunduck, Providence Hill, c. 1954 Djanba dancing at Wadeye, c. 1950s Stanner’s wet season camp, Port Keats region, c. 1935 A yingapungapu ground sculpture,Yilpara, 2000 The maggot dancers,Yilpara, 2004 Wangga dancing, Port Keats, c. 1950s Bill Stanner and Peter Sutton, c. 1979 Mariwanda and Maringa men in dugout canoe, c. 1935 Aborigines who accompanied Stanner from Port Keats to Daly River, 1935 Men tilling gardens, Port Keats, c. 1950s Launch of the first issue of Aboriginal History, Canberra 1978 Stanner in his room at the Australian National University, c. 1958 Aborigines who accompanied Stanner from Port Keats to Daly River, 1935 xi

page 6 15 36 49 68 82 95 109 120 132 141 142 161 177 191 201 220 242 261 275

Illustrations figures

Figure 1.â•… Counts and estimates of the Aboriginal population of Port Keats Mission/Wadeye/Thamarrurr, 1947 to 2003. Figure 2.â•… Aboriginal population of Port Keats and the Thamarrurr region by age and sex, 1956 and 2003.

222 225

table

Table 1. â•… Murrinh-patha age divisions.

xii

226

Acknowledgments

November 2005 marked the centenary of Bill Stanner’s birth. To celebrate this occasion we organised a symposium WEH Stanner: Anthropologist and Public Intellectual, held over two days at the Australian National University, Canberra.We were drawn to do so on the basis of our different acquaintances with Stanner’s work: Stanner had been Jeremy’s PhD thesis supervisor at the ANU in the 1960s and sometime friend; Melinda never knew Stanner but came to know some of his unpublished materials while working as a research project officer at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in 2001, and subsequently as a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research between 2001 and 2003. The symposium was attended by more than 100 scholars, Stanner’s colleagues, family and friends, as well as descendants of Aboriginal men Stanner had worked with for more than four decades at Port Keats/Wadeye. Most of the chapters in this volume received their first public airing at that forum. The symposium was sponsored by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and the Australian National University through the National Centre for Indigenous Studies, the Centre for CrossCultural Research, the School of Archaeology and Anthropology, and University House. Presentations were also made at the symposium by Graeme Ward, Mark Crocombe, Basil Dodd, the late Lawrence Kolumboort, Marcia Langton, Max Charlesworth and David Nash. For various reasons these presentations have not been included here. In developing the volume we invited Tim Rowse to contribute an essay on the Boyer Lectures, and Melinda Hinkson’s chapter on Stanner’s 1958 expedition to the Fitzmaurice region was written to fill what we felt were two important gaps in the coverage of Stanner’s career. xiii

Acknowledgments

For their roles in the book’s production we thank the following: the contributors; Rhonda Black and the team at Aboriginal Studies Press; Mark MacLean and Frances Morphy; and two anonymous readers whose comments were helpful in the revision of the manuscript as a whole. We also thank ANU for its contribution of a publishing subsidy. For permission to produce images we thank ANU Archives, AIATSIS and the Australian War Memorial. For her enthusiastic support for the project overall we are particularly grateful to Mrs Patricia Stanner. The contributors to the volume are mainly academics, including anthropologists, prehistorians and historians who either worked with or knew Stanner in various capacities.The reader will note that they broadly represent a particular demographic. Consequently only three are women, and — apart from Mick Dodson who wrote the book’s foreword — none are Aboriginal, a fact that is regrettable but reflective of circumstances and the time that has passed since Stanner’s death in 1981. For younger generations of scholars Stanner is probably a remote and intriguing figure. We hope these essays that trace some of the key moments in his long and distinguished career and his contributions to Australian intellectual and public life will prove illuminating and occasionally provocative. The book’s title is taken from Stanner’s 1968 Boyer lectures, After the Dreaming. It is being published at a time when his notion of ‘a great Australian silence’ has perhaps been overcome by a great cacophony, one that Stanner would regard as often poorly culturally informed. Melinda Hinkson and Jeremy Beckett August 2008

xiv

Contributors

Jon Altman is Professor and Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University in Canberra. He has an academic background in economics and anthropology. He has undertaken research on Indigenous economic development and policy since 1977, mainly in north Australia. Since 1979 he has retained strong collaborative research relations with Indigenous organisations and their members in the Maningrida region, Arnhem Land, especially from the Kuninjku language community. Jeremy Beckett is an anthropologist with a particular interest in the place of Indigenous peoples in settler colonial society. He works among Aborigines in far-west New South Wales, and with Torres Strait Islanders in the Strait and in mainland Australia. Foremost among his many publications are Torres Strait Islanders: custom and colonialism (Cambridge University Press, 1987), and the edited collection Past and present: the construction of Aboriginality (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1994). As a graduate student, he had Bill Stanner as one of his supervisors. He is currently Emeritus Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Sydney University. Ann Curthoys is Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University and an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow. She has written about many aspects of Australian history, including Aboriginal–European relations; racially restrictive immigration policies; the Chinese in colonial Australia; journalism; television; and ‘second wave’ feminism. She also writes about historical theory and historical writing. Her books include Freedom Ride: a Freedom Rider remembers (Allen & Unwin, 2002), winner of the Stanner Prize, and, with John Docker, Is history fiction? (University of New South Wales Press, 2005). Her latest book, Rights and redemption: history, law, and Indigenous people, written with Ann Genovese and Alexander Reilly, will be published by UNSW Press in 2008.

xv

Contributors

Barrie Dexter, CBE, served from 1967 to 1976 with WEH Stanner and HC ‘Nugget’ Coombs as the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. During this time he established and served as director/secretary of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. Over the course of this career he has held many senior diplomatic posts, including positions in Lebanon, Cairo, Karachi, Washington DC. He served as high commissioner/ambassador in Ghana and Laos, Yugoslavia/ Romania/Bulgaria and Canada. On his retirement Barrie contributed to the re-establishment of CARE Australia, becoming vice president and Australian representative on the board of CARE International until 1995. Alberto Furlan graduated in Philosophy at Ca’Foscari University in Venice, Italy and completed postgraduate studies in anthropology at the University of Sydney. He lived and worked in Wadeye (2002–03) undertaking research on traditional and popular Aboriginal music. Other areas of research include Indigenous cosmology, performance, and continuity and change in Aboriginal society. He is currently employed as regional anthropologist by the Central Land Council in Tennant Creek, Northern Territory. Geoffrey Gray is a Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Studies, Canberra. His most recent book is A cautious silence: the politics of Australian anthropology (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007). Melinda Hinkson is a lecturer in social anthropology and visual culture in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Research School of Humanities, the Australian National University. She has undertaken research with Aboriginal people in central Australia, north Australia and metropolitan Sydney. Her recent publications include Coercive reconciliation: stabilise, normalise, exit Aboriginal Australia (co-edited with Jon Altman, Arena Publications, 2007). Ian Keen studied anthropology at University College London and at the Australian National University. He has carried out research on kinship, social organisation and religion in north-east Arnhem Land, and on Aboriginal relations to land in several locations including the Alligator River region and McLaren Creek in the Northern Territory, and Gippsland in Victoria. His publications include Knowledge and secrecy in an Aboriginal religion (Clarendon Press, 1994), and Aboriginal economy and society (Oxford University Press, 2004). He lectured in anthropology at the University of Queensland and the Australian National University, where he is currently a visiting fellow.

xvi

Contributors

Howard Morphy is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Research School of Humanities at the Australian National University. He has published widely in the anthropology of art, aesthetics, performance, museum anthropology, Aboriginal social organisation, the history of anthropology, visual anthropology and religion. His current focus is on the use of digital media in anthropological research and publication. His books include Ancestral connections: art and an Aboriginal system of knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Rethinking visual anthropology (Yale University Press, edited with Marcus Banks, 1997), Aboriginal art (Phaidon, 1998) and Becoming art: exploring cross-cultural categories (Berg 2007). John Mulvaney was the first university-trained pre-historian to make Australia his subject. From 1971 until his retirement in 1985 he was professor in pre-history in the Faculty of Arts at the ANU, and his Prehistory of Australia has been published in three editions. He served 18 years on the executive of the (then) Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, including a term as chairman, and also on the Committee of Inquiry on Museums in 1974–75 which preceded the establishment of the National Museum of Australia. Nicolas Peterson is Professor of Anthropology in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. His doctoral fieldwork focused on territorial organisation and ecology in Arnhem Land with self-supporting groups. Subsequently he has worked in central Australia on Warlpiri territorial organisation, ceremonial life and song cycles. As a result of his interest in territorial organisation he was appointed research officer to the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Land Rights in 1973–74, and as a consequence has had a long involvement in preparing land and native title claims, including the test case for native title in the sea with Jeannie Devitt. Tim Rowse is a Senior Research Fellow in the History Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Researching his book Obliged to be difficult (Cambridge University Press, 2000) brought him into close contact with Stanner as a policy intellectual. Tim researches and teaches Australian Indigenous history, and he comments on current developments in Indigenous policy. His most recent book is Divided nation? Indigenous affairs and the imagined public (Melbourne University Press 2007, co-authored with Murray Goot). € Peter Sutton is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at the University of Adelaide and the South Australian Museum. An anthropologist

xvii

Contributors

and linguist, he has worked with Aboriginal people since 1969. His books include Art and land: Aboriginal sculptures of the Lake region (with Philip Jones, South Australian Museum and Wakefield Press, 1986), Dreamings: the art of Aboriginal Australia (George Braziller Publishers in association with the Asia Society Galleries, New York, 1988), and Native title in Australia: an ethnographic perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2003). He is currently writing a book on Wik ceremonial sculptures of Cape York Peninsula. John Taylor is a Senior Fellow and Deputy Director at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University, and a member of the Australian Population Association. For the past 20 years his major research interests have focused on the measurement and policy implications of demographic and socioeconomic change among Australia’s Indigenous peoples. He has worked on these issues with people at Wadeye since 2003. Nancy Williams is currently Honorary Reader in Anthropology, School of Social Science, University of Queensland. Her research with Yolngu clans in north-eastern Arnhem Land since 1969 has focused on land and sea tenure and resource management. Her book, The Yolngu and their land: a system of land tenure and the fight for its recognition (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1986), is based on the Yolngu preparation for and participation in the Milirrpum case. Nancy is also author of Two laws: managing dispute in a contemporary Aboriginal community (Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1987).

xviii

‘Going more than half way to meet them’: On the life and legacy of WEH Stanner jeremy beckett and melinda hinkson

WEH Stanner is one of Australia’s best known and most highly regarded anthropologists. He died in 1981, but more than a quarter of a century after his death his writings and ideas on Aboriginal culture and affairs continue to be cited by observers from a range of perspectives, both within and outside the academy. It seems there is still much in his work that commands attention and stimulates thought. This abiding interest in Stanner’s work suggests that he had grasped something unresolved at the core of the encounter between Aborigines and those who came after, which even now remains at the heart of the debate over what it means to be Australian. This collection of essays reviews his intellectual legacy and a career that was variously significant: in the public domain there is his 1968 Boyer Lectures which alerted a wide audience to the situation of Australia’s Aborigines, and there is his work with HC ‘Nugget’ Coombs and Barrie Dexter on the Council for Aboriginal Affairs; among anthropologists, there is his writings on Aboriginal religion, social organisation, and his expert witness in the first legal case on Aboriginal land rights. But Stanner’s career is itself interesting because it reminds us of what it was like to have to make one’s way in an Australia that was very much smaller and academically less developed than it is now, and moreover to have one’s career plans interrupted by a world war. It is also interesting because Stanner was a particular kind of man, one whose qualities both contributed to — and perhaps also at times inhibited — his achievements. Recalling his early career, Bill Stanner explained to Jeremy Beckett that when he went to the University of Sydney in 1928 it was something that few Australians did, and he felt it incumbent upon him to make a significant contribution to the life of a country that still numbered less than seven million people. How he was to do so was not immediately clear to him; had he simply been driven by material ambition he might have gone for one of

˘

Jeremy Beckett and Melinda Hinkson

the professions, or persisted with the journalism by which he lived while he studied. He might have made a career in economics, the subject that first attracted him to the university. Instead he found anthropology, and in due course undertook field work with Aborigines in the Northern Territory. Yet, however intellectually satisfying writing for a small and relatively uninfluential discipline might have been, it virtually precluded any impact on public affairs, which he also wanted to make. Stanner’s subsequent career was in effect a tussle between these two kinds of commitments. At several moments, a career on the conservative side of politics seemed a possibility. Instead he became an academic anthropologist at the Australian National University (ANU). Late in his career, though, he was to exert an informed influence in the rethinking of official policy on Aborigines. He was the first — and till now the only — anthropologist ever to be invited to deliver the Australian Broadcasting Service’s annual Boyer Lectures. This gave him the opportunity to air his disquiet to an audience far wider than his university colleagues, and he made good use of it. After the Dreaming, delivered in a pleasant, rather cultivated voice, achieved a balance between plain words and eloquence that spoke to many. Writing for anthropologists, his style could be dense and difficult; writing for the general reader it flowed gracefully, illuminating each insight with a deft turn of phrase that was not quickly forgotten. Stanner’s Boyer Lectures were reprinted seven times, and are still cited 40 years after they were delivered. Within their pages lies the clearest expression of Stanner’s deep uneasiness about the past, present, and future place of Aborigines in Australian society. In tracing his working life through its stops and starts this concern is a key recurring theme, as is his passionate espousal of Aboriginal ‘High Culture’. In this introductory essay we have two aims. Firstly, we present a broadbrush account of Stanner’s career, situating it in the events and currents of the years in which he lived.1 The second part of this introduction briefly considers Stanner’s legacy in terms of contemporary debates on Aboriginal policy and anthropology, themes which are then explored in more detail and greater particularity in the essays that follow. a career of stops and starts

William Edward Hanley Stanner was born in Parramatta, Sydney, in 1905. His father died when he was three, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. In his mid teens, like most of his generation, he left school to help support his family. He presently found work as a journalist but was restless and began to feel the need for further education, making time to study for the matriculation exam that would qualify him for university entrance. Somehow juggling his journalistic duties with attendance at university lectures, Stanner began studying economics at the University of Sydney in 1928. However,

˘

On the life and legacy of WEH Stanner

his path was diverted to anthropology after hearing a dazzling lecture by the foundation professor, AR Radcliffe-Brown. Others have attested to the impact of ‘RB’ on undergraduates of the time: his elegance of mind and dress, his readiness to talk about just about anything, and seemingly ‘give life meaning’ (Ian Hogbin in Beckett 1989, p. 9). Forty years later, Stanner recalled the impression in the Encyclopedia of the social sciences: A tall man with a distinguished air and presence, strikingly handsome and in his prime, he often captivated people as much by his charm, wit, and cultivation as by the appeal of his ideas. He was a particularly brilliant teacher who was so much the master of his subject, and of the arts of the rostrum and seminar, that he could expound the most difficult topics without notes or any outward hint of preparation. His writings gave the same impression (Stanner 1968, p. 286).

In later years, Radcliffe-Brown’s students came to regard him more sceptically; Stanner, as this quotation suggests, retained a reverence for him, and in his writings often asked himself how ‘RB’ would have approached a problem, had it come his way. Radcliffe-Brown left Sydney before Stanner graduated at the end of 1931, but he stayed long enough to fire the young man with a desire to work in Aboriginal Australia. However, it was Raymond Firth, the temporary head of the anthropology department, and later AP Elkin, the next professor, who supervised his research in the Northern Territory. After lengthy consideration, and advice from the American linguist, Gerhardt Laves, who had travelled through the region and reported the presence of ‘unspotted savages’ (Barwick et al. 1985, p. 4), Stanner decided to make the Daly River the focus of his first field work. However, rather than the ‘uncontaminated natives’ he had been led to expect, Stanner was confronted with a social order in the process of profound transformation: colonial relations had restructured Aboriginal ways of life to an extent that those in the academy and government seemed unaware of. Stanner spent seven months in the Daly River region in 1932 and, after completing his Master of Arts thesis in April 1934, he headed north again, this time via western New South Wales and central Australia where he conducted surveys of Aboriginal groups for Elkin. He spent the wet season of 1934–35 in the Daly River region and accompanied the Catholic missionary Father Richard Docherty from Darwin to establish the new mission settlement at Port Keats. Stanner’s experience of the Territory in the 1930s established concerns that would preoccupy the last 25 years of his life. His direct observation of the plight of Aborigines on the urban fringes, particularly the Warumungu of Tennant Creek, both fired his imagination and disturbed his sense of social justice. His attention to this process gave him a heightened appreciation of

˘

Jeremy Beckett and Melinda Hinkson

anthropology’s need to theorise cultural transformation — the subject of his master’s thesis and the problem with which in one form or another he would continue to grapple throughout his life. And finally, having spent an extended period of time in an area where settlers were struggling in a tough environment to make a livelihood in the face of drought and global depression — graphically described in ‘Durmugam: a Nangiomeri’, the subject of Jeremy Beckett’s chapter — Stanner developed an appreciation of the complex challenges of development, and a critical base from which he would later approach developmental dilemmas in East Africa. Back in Sydney, Stanner knew that if he wanted to continue as an anthropologist he would have to get a doctorate and, since Australian universities at that time awarded nothing higher than a master’s degree, he would have to go England. Having completed his field work he arrived there in October 1936. While the prospect of working with RadcliffeBrown at Oxford was appealing, the need to secure paid employment lead Stanner, along with other young Australians — such as Ian Hogbin, CWM Hart, Ralph Piddington and Phyllis Kaberry — to the London School of Economics (LSE) and the formidable Bronislaw Malinowski. Since the early years of the twentieth century the LSE had been the most innovative centre for anthropology, though Radcliffe-Brown had just taken up the chair at Oxford. Malinowski’s seminars drew as many as 70 people, including colonial administrators and Indigenous intellectuals, notably Jomo Kenyatta, who would one day be the president of Kenya. The seminars were stimulating but also challenging for a person unprepared for such an arena, let alone Malinowski’s gratuitous sarcasm. While Stanner had a grudging respect for the man he had little liking for him, in contrast with his regard for the urbane Radcliffe-Brown. In later years he did not have much to say about the anthropology scene in London and his talk was more about the broader political ferment around the LSE and the dramatic events in Europe. As a student without private means it seems he had little time for socialising; while completing his doctorate in two years he supported himself financially through journalism and the research work that Raymond Firth put his way.2 The only lasting friendship he made at the LSE was with Firth, who played a key role in securing each of the three academic posts Stanner held after completing his PhD. Firth, as well as overseeing Stanner’s appointments in Africa, was an important connection for Stanner after the war, when almost all the anthropology jobs in Australasia seemed to be in his gift. While in London he also briefly worked for the Commonwealth Treasurer, RG Casey, and made the acquaintance of the Australian High Commissioner, Lord Bruce.3 He was invited by the Secretariat of the League of Nations to become a ‘temporary collaborator’ at the 1937 session — the purpose being to educate young people about the League.

˘

On the life and legacy of WEH Stanner

By the end of the 1930s Malinowski’s intellectual dominance of British anthropology was on the wane. Many of his students were beginning to reject his biologically based functionalism in favour of the structural functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown. Moreover, it was from research in Africa, rather than the Pacific, that the new ideas were emerging, notably from Evans-Pritchard, Fortes and Gluckman; even Malinowski had been looking at change in Africa. Meanwhile, prospects for research positions back in Australia were bleaker than ever. Thus in 1938 Stanner took up a post with an Oxfordbased team and began field work in Kenya, investigating colonial governance and economic development, in which he could draw on his early training in economics. This research was prematurely terminated by the outbreak of war. Although spending only seven months in the field he still drafted a book-length manuscript based on his research among the Kamba. He returned to this writing after the war, but it remained unpublished. Had war not broken out Stanner might perhaps have become an Africanist and followed a career in Britain. Instead he headed back to Australia and, although too old to enlist, looked for ways to contribute to the war effort. As Geoffrey Gray’s chapter explains, these took a variety of forms. He was appointed adviser to successive ministers for the Army, Spender and Forde. He worked on issues of national morale, reviving his journalistic skills and making radio broadcasts, as well as writing submissions to government. With Japan’s entry into the war northern Australia came under threat, and Stanner’s bushcraft and organisational skills were suddenly in demand. He was enlisted to establish the North Australia Observer Unit, the ‘Nackeroos’ as they became known, of which he was then put in charge with the rank of major. His zest for the experience seems to have been fired by the stories of the military grandfather after whom he had been named, and he loved to talk about his time with the Nackeroos in later years.4 But after a little more than a year he was redeployed to the Army’s Directorate of Research, which was a less happy experience. As Gray observes, Stanner was out of sympathy, politically and perhaps also personally, with his colleagues, and since their advice on colonial matters seemed to have the ear of the Labor government of the day, the more conservative Stanner found himself on the outer even after the war ended.5 Upon his demobilisation, Stanner worked for various agencies reporting on the reconstruction of the war-devastated Pacific colonies, and then in 1947 accepted an appointment as the foundation director of the East African Institute of Social Research. As Melinda Hinkson describes, Stanner was frustrated by various difficulties in this post, and with no time for his own research he resigned the position after a year. Months of searching followed before he finally gained a readership in the Research School of Pacific Studies at the newly established Australian National University.

˘

Jeremy Beckett and Melinda Hinkson

Stanner arrived in Canberra in 1950. Siegfried Nadel, who took up the chair about the same time, was a brilliant mind, if somewhat arrogant and overbearing. Concerned to broaden the base of anthropology as it was studied at Australian universities during this period, Nadel insisted that his be a department of anthropology and sociology, and initially wanted to include psychology as well. However, apart from one study in social psychology by Ronald Penny, and one in the sociology of migration by Jean Martin, the research scholars and fellows worked mainly in New Guinea and India. This regional focus reflected the original thinking about the appropriate scope of the department.6 Only Peter Worsley worked in Aboriginal Australia, and only then because he was refused permission to work in New Guinea. The New Guinea Highlands were particularly beckoning, with their recently contacted peoples still engaged in ceremonial exchange and periodic warfare. By comparison, Aboriginal Australia seemed to offer

Bill Stanner during fieldwork in the Port Keats region, c. 1950s. Photographer unknown, Stanner Collection, AIATSIS N861-3.

˘

On the life and legacy of WEH Stanner

meagre anthropological rewards. A few years later, Mervyn Meggitt’s verdict was that ‘none of the Australian field work with which I am acquainted (and I include my own) has produced data on which can be based what I would take to be a valid structural functionalist analysis of Aboriginal society’ (Sheils 1963, p. 216). Stanner had not been involved in Aboriginal Australia since the 1930s. During the first half of the 1950s he made two brief visits back to the Murrinh-patha in north Australia, but it was not immediately apparent that he would give Aboriginal anthropology his undivided attention. Indeed, given that his readership in the Research School of Pacific Studies was in ‘Comparative institutions’ it is not surprising that Stanner was strongly encouraged to continue working in the Pacific, including taking on the role as Australian representative on the South Pacific Commission, which brought together the various colonial administrations. His writings of this period were mainly concerned with questions of colonial policy and development in Africa and the Pacific; his main publication was South Seas in transition (1953) which drew on his post-war reconstruction work in Fiji, Samoa and New Guinea.7 This would be the only book-length study Stanner would publish, apart from his collection of essays White man got no Dreaming (1979a). Finally in a secure academic position, Stanner was able to experiment with a variety of topics, some theoretical, others ethnographic, some of which he published, others he set aside. It was only from around 1954 that he began to focus wholeheartedly on Aboriginal matters. By the 1950s, the anthropology of Aboriginal Australia was in a run-down state, with an air of antiquarianism about it that was no longer acceptable to a discipline that claimed to situate itself in the ‘ethnographic present’. Radcliffe-Brown’s students, Lloyd Warner, Kaberry, Piddington, Lauriston Sharp and Hart, were no longer in Australia. Of the four senior figures still in the country, Elkin was nearing retirement, Donald Thomson at Melbourne had no students and had little to do with other anthropologists, while TGH Strehlow at Adelaide was preoccupied with Arrernte and little else. Ursula McConnel had never had a university appointment and worked in isolation, though still writing; she was to die in 1957. The only anthropologists actively engaged in field work in Australia were Elkin’s students, Ronald and Catherine Berndt, Marie Reay and Mervyn Meggitt, and even they by the mid 1950s had chosen to do their doctoral work in the New Guinea Highlands.8 Formal in dress and manner — recalling his days with the military — and Anglicised in speech after his years in England, Stanner’s political conservatism did not endear him to colleagues whose sympathies seemed to be predominantly on the left. He was, however, close to Nadel, with whom he shared a commitment to the development of anthropological theory. In

˘

Jeremy Beckett and Melinda Hinkson

1955 Derek Freeman joined the department as a Research Fellow. He was to remain there for the rest of his career, as was Stanner, and while relations between them were initially cordial9 they became increasingly difficult, and at times hostile. At the beginning of 1956 Nadel died suddenly, and after Edmund Leach had been offered and declined his chair, Stanner and Freeman became the principal contenders, as well as alternate heads of school. The university delayed the decision over the chair for a year, and in June 1957 Stanner left for field work in Port Keats. Shortly after his departure the ANU offered the chair to John Barnes. Stanner felt he had been misled about the appointment,10 and although he returned briefly to Canberra in 1958 he spent considerable time over the next two years in the north. During this period he undertook what for a normally sedentary man in his fifties were two astonishingly strenuous expeditions into the Fitzmaurice River region of north Australia to locate and record the rock art of the area. The first of these journeys, as described by Melinda Hinkson, was both inspired by and fuelled his increasing fascination with Aboriginal religion (see also Jeremy Beckett’s chapter on Durmugam). Anthropology in the 1950s, particularly British anthropology, was uninterested in religion, except insofar as it could be reduced to social structure. Even Nadel was sceptical about the value of writing about religion. Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer religion was to change all this, but when it first appeared in 1956 it too was received with some scepticism. Stanner’s essays, which he began sketching in 1953, perplexed other anthropologists; they seemed not to be in dialogue with current anthropology, rather harking back to writers earlier in the century. However, the completion of the Oceania series and its publication On Aboriginal Religion (Stanner 1963), and as ‘Religion, totemism, and symbolism’ in 1965, did much to establish Stanner’s professional reputation, although it remained for later generations to appreciate the extent of his achievement (see Lukes 1975: 27, 28, 478, 479, 481; Keen 1986; Morphy 1988; Merlan 1989). Meanwhile, Aboriginal studies were beginning to revive. Nancy Munn had arrived at ANU in late 1955, followed by Jeremy Beckett, and a little later Les Hiatt and Diane Barwick, all of whom undertook research in Aboriginal Australia. Stanner contributed significantly to this revival in another way, convening in 1961 the conference that would result in the establishment of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (later the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS)). In this initiative he drew on his political connections, particularly with his old friend WC Wentworth.Yet, as John Mulvaney shows, the politics around the establishment of the institute were heated and Stanner’s own conception of a research centre did not win out. After its establishment, he declined the principal’s position and had relatively little involvement in its workings.

˘

On the life and legacy of WEH Stanner

Stanner was finally made professor, being appointed to the second chair of anthropology in the research school in 1964. After 1965 Stanner’s interests returned to policy matters. He had already declared his dissatisfaction with Hasluck’s assimilationism in an address to the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science in 1958, and his dismay at its practical impact can only have been intensified on return visits to Port Keats. Perhaps sensing a change in a public so long indifferent to these matters, particularly following the 1967 referendum, he took the opportunity of an invitation to deliver the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s Boyer Lectures in 1968. As Tim Rowse notes, he was the first Boyer lecturer to mention the Aboriginal question. Ann Curthoys considers the significance of Stanner’s Boyer Lectures in the broader context of an emerging Aboriginal politics and Aboriginal history writing. In 1967 prime minister Holt invited Stanner, along with ‘Nugget’ Coombs and Barrie Dexter, to form the Council for Aboriginal Affairs (CAA) and advise on national policy. Although with his friend Wentworth as minister the opportunities seemed promising, the Gorton and McMahon governments were less than amenable to the CAA’s proposals. Dexter’s chapter recalls nine difficult but ultimately productive years. Following the election of the Whitlam government and with the passage of land rights legislation for the Northern Territory in train, the CAA saw its work as having been done and voluntarily disbanded. Jon Altman considers Stanner’s legacy as a public policy intellectual in light of recent events in Aboriginal affairs. The demands of the council, combined with periodic duties as head of department at ANU until his retirement at the end of 1970, severely curtailed Stanner’s scholarly output. His time was taken up with reports and submissions to government, and with lectures to lay audiences. Yet another challenge intruded in 1970 when he, along with Ronald Berndt, was called upon to be an expert witness in Milirrpum and others versus Nabalco and the Commonwealth — otherwise known as the Gove Case — discussed here by Nancy Williams. This sent Stanner back to the anthropological basics of ‘local organization’, but required him to transpose them into concepts lawyers could understand — something that neither he nor anyone else had thought of up to this point. He continued to worry over it as the case failed, but in due course land rights and later native title became a real possibility in the Northern Territory. His occasional book reviews and brief notes throughout the 1970s indicate that Stanner was still reading and thinking. In his last years he returned to the question of Aboriginal culture, delivering lectures on religion at the University of Melbourne. Sadly, the Parkinson’s disease that afflicted his last years affected his previously pleasant delivery, to the point where his words

˘

Jeremy Beckett and Melinda Hinkson

could no longer be followed. Two years before he died he drafted chapters for a book on the Murrinh-patha, which he was unable to complete. It is appropriate that his last paper, published posthumously, was on Aboriginal humour, a neglected aspect of Aboriginal culture which had come to resonate with his own sense of fun (Stanner 1982).Those who were able to penetrate Bill Stanner’s dignified public persona found a delightful companion: witty, amusing, able to enjoy a joke against himself, but at the same time serious and sensitive. stanner’s legacy

To speak of a Stanner legacy is to highlight his two enduring commitments. As an anthropologist Stanner pursued a proper understanding of what he termed the Aboriginal ‘High Culture’. As a publicly engaged citizen he sought a more generous recognition of the Aboriginal presence in Australia. In searching for a concept that might allow us to consider the nature of Stanner’s legacy as both anthropologist and critic in some holistic sense, the notion of transcendence has some cogency. This provides an orientation to Stanner’s work from a number of perspectives. At its simplest we can observe the capacity of his most popular writings to transcend the constraints of the time in which they were written, and to speak to concerns that remain just as pressing today as they were more than four decades ago. In this respect, while Stanner was by no means the only Australian anthropologist of his generation, nor the most vocal, to contribute to public debate on the place of Aborigines in Australian society his work acquires new relevance in the present. The further applicability of aspects of Stanner’s work in the present is considered in Alberto Furlan’s adoption of Stanner’s notion of ‘operational structures of transactional life’ in the analysis of contemporary song genres at Wadeye, and in John Taylor’s deployment of Stanner’s census data to reflect upon contemporary policy challenges posed by population growth in the same community. As we discuss below, the idea of transcendence takes on a more complex flavour when applied to Stanner’s writings on Aboriginal religion, with Sutton suggesting we interpret Stanner’s work in terms of a pursuit of a notion of transcendent value. Yet in proposing transcendence as a concept with which to think about Stanner’s work we imply neither triumphalism nor a simplistic glorification of Stanner’s legacy. In evaluating Stanner’s contributions certain limitations are apparent. For example, Rowse contextualises Stanner’s Boyer Lectures in the wider intellectual tradition of that series and finds a certain hesitancy in Stanner’s approach to the problem of Aboriginal affairs. Stanner was a critic of past and present government policy who demonstrated ‘elegant dismay’ rather than ‘programmatic bluntness’. Similarly, Curthoys applies a

10

On the life and legacy of WEH Stanner

careful historian’s lens to the question of the extent to which these lectures might be credited with breaking the ‘great Australian silence’ that Stanner identified. Anthropologists Nicolas Peterson and Peter Sutton critically consider Stanner’s contribution to the anthropology of Aboriginal land tenure in light of recent political and theoretical developments. Given the events of the past quarter century in Aboriginal affairs, Stanner’s death in 1981 seems a long time ago. In what follows we briefly consider aspects of his work with the CAA in light of recent debates in Indigenous policy. stanner and the post-self-determination present

The period of the Howard coalition government (1996–2007) was characterised by a significant shift in the symbolic politics of Indigenous affairs. In April 2004, after protracted and intensifying conflict between Indigenous leaders and the federal government (see Sanders 2005), prime minister Howard announced the dismantling of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC): We believe very strongly that the experiment in separate representation, elected representation, for Indigenous people has been a failure.We will not replace ATSIC with an alternative body. We will appoint a group of distinguished Indigenous people to advise the Government on a purely advisory basis in relation to aboriginal [sic] affairs. Programmes will be mainstreamed (Howard 2004).

Established by the Labor federal government in 1989, ATSIC was the most recent and ambitious in a line of national Indigenous representative bodies through which Indigenous policy making in Australia was channelled from the early 1970s (see Coombs & Robinson 1996). These bodies, starting with the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (established in 1973), followed by the National Aboriginal Conference (1977–86), were intended as primary mediating structures between the federal government and Aboriginal communities. Developed under the broad policy umbrella of self-determination, each body was in turn charged with the task of representing Indigenous views in the policy-making arena. At some level their establishment might be seen as a response to growing demands by Indigenous people as well as the conclusion drawn by the CAA at the end of its life, that: …the way forward was to recognise and support the right of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to increasingly control their own affairs and to share freely in negotiations to determine the pattern of their relationship to ‘mainstream’ society (Coombs & Robinson 1996, p. 7).

11

Jeremy Beckett and Melinda Hinkson

This is not the place to rehearse the political history of these representative bodies; suffice to say there has been sustained critique of the failure of all three to realise the goals they were set up to achieve. In retrospect each might be seen as a tangible manifestation of the highly ambiguous nature of self-determination as a policy approach within a liberal-democratic nation state.11 In some sense self-determination — at least at the level of its articulated goals — might be understood as the culmination of a process that Stanner worked tirelessly in support of, most prominently in collaboration with his fellow members of the CAA. In considering Stanner’s legacy in the present it thus seems important to ask why, when self-determination is being widely proclaimed as a failure, Stanner’s words continue to command attention? How have his writings managed to transcend the terms of these debates? In fact it would be misleading to see Stanner as having been an unqualified advocate for self-determination. Altman, in his chapter, explores Stanner’s approach to land rights, development and welfare, and considers the applicability of these ideas in the present. He observes that while Stanner may have supported the ‘mainstreaming’ of Indigenous expenditure to ensure funding equality, he would have been deeply critical of a policy platform that failed to recognise difference. Rowse observes that Stanner’s Boyer Lectures, while providing an insightful reflection on the history of Australia’s regard for its Indigenous population, were circumspect on the question of possible future directions and certainly provided ‘no manifesto for “self-determination”’. In his engagements with the Hasluckian vision of assimilation, the criticism that comes through is of an assimilation that was imposed on Aboriginal people against their will (see especially Stanner 1979b, 1969). His observations over four decades of failed development schemes in Africa, the Pacific and Aboriginal Australia convinced him time and again that any program of cultural redevelopment that was imposed rather than willingly entered into was doomed to fail.Yet, as a long-standing observer of the complex politics of Aboriginal Australia, Stanner was just as wary, if not sceptical, of the model of self-determination that was proffered by some as an autonomous, purely Aboriginal-driven project. Rowse has shown that Stanner and his colleagues on the CAA remained opposed to ‘the specialisation of bureaucratic responsibility for Indigenous affairs’ (Rowse 2000, p. 29). Nor did the CAA propose self-determination or anything similar as a new driving policy concept. Stanner was aware of the very real differences in historical experience and likely aspirations between Aborigines of remote and settled Australia, with notions of leadership and broad representative structures beyond the highly localised being antithetical to Aboriginal social processes in many parts of the country (ibid., p. 31). Pan-Aboriginalist politics emerging from the metropolitan centres of

12

On the life and legacy of WEH Stanner

south-eastern Australia were rejected by those in the remote north. Stanner regarded the process of assimilation, or at least integration, as an ultimate and unavoidable outcome (ibid., pp. 28, 93). Where he parted company with the assimilationists was on the question of choice and the possibility that Aborigines might enter into unity with wider Australia while retaining pluralist forms of identity within that union (ibid., pp. 27, 91). In their Report on visit to Yuendumu and Hooker Creek in 1974, for example, the CAA recommended that: …policy be directed to ensuring that Aborigines are not forced by economic and social pressures to accept a European style of life if they would prefer a simpler or more traditional style: i.e. that Aborigines be allowed and helped to adapt freely of their own requirements and circumstances such white Australian practices as they consider to be of value to them (Coombs & Stanner 1974, p. 3).

In their last policy statement before the election of the Whitlam government, the CAA argued it was crucial that there be ‘programs designed to develop and strengthen the capacity of Aboriginal people to manage their own affairs’ (quoted in Rowse 2000,p.107).While still refusing to adopt the concept of selfdetermination, the substance of what the CAA was lobbying for is clear.The election of the Whitlam government in 1972 galvanised the new policy platform into existence both in name and through a series of major legislative programs. Two and a half decades later, the election of the Howard government in 1996 brought to an end a broad bipartisan approach to Indigenous affairs under the banner of self-determination.12 Howard’s comments quoted above regarding the failure of this policy approach go partly to the widespread (although not entirely accurate) perception that few improvements were realised in statistical measures at the national level of Aboriginal wellbeing over that period (see Altman et al. 2005). On securing control of the Senate following the 2004 election Howard had the parliamentary mandate to abolish the ATSIC legislation. Ensuing debates have given rise to a number of competing perspectives on the question of ‘Where to now for Aboriginal affairs?’ Recent writings by Aboriginal commentator Noel Pearson (see especially Pearson 2000), as well as numerous reformist observers, have called for new kinds of partnerships between Indigenous communities and private enterprise, for Aboriginal people to take responsibility for their own affairs, for privatisation of land, and for forms of cultural redevelopment that might orient remoteliving Aboriginal individuals more effectively towards mainstream social participation. At the heart of this shift in the politics of Indigenous affairs lies a critique of prior forms of government support (Pearson’s ‘welfare poison’,

13

Jeremy Beckett and Melinda Hinkson

or ‘gammon economy’), and of non-market-based outstation living as unsustainable — with such places derided as ‘cultural museums’ by a former minister for Indigenous Affairs (Vanstone 2005). Criticism of anthropologists for perpetuating the ‘myths’ of selfdetermination, and the idea that Aboriginal cultural forms thrived in the wake of the implementation of land rights legislation and other aspects of self-determination policy, has never been far from the centre of these debates (see for example Pearson 1987; Sandall 2001; Sutton 2001). Yet while anthropology in general has come under attack, Stanner’s work seems exempt from such critical treatment. As long as five decades after some of his most noted essays were penned, Stanner’s work continues to be cited widely and favourably in support of a range of perspectives, as a brief glance at three examples makes clear. Ralph Folds’ (2001) account of the Western Desert Pintupi’s response to government policy draws heavily on Stanner’s work. Quotes from various of the essays published in White man got no Dreaming preface most chapters of Crossed purposes, and the book’s title is taken from Stanner’s 1958 essay ‘Continuity and change’ (Stanner 1979b, p. 43). Folds’ book is ultimately a story of why the Aboriginalisation of community governance is a misguided aim of policy making. He enlists Stanner’s observations about the radical disjuncture between Aboriginal and European ‘styles of life’ in support of this argument. In the opening sentence of his introduction to Whitewash: on Keith Windschuttle’s fabrication of Aboriginal history, Robert Manne (2003, p. 1) suggests that Stanner delivered ‘perhaps the most consequential lecture ever broadcast on the ABC’. Manne anchors his overview of the recent ‘history wars’ in a discussion of Stanner’s notion of the ‘great Australian silence’, illustrating the abiding cogency of that concept in the present. Likewise Noel Pearson sees Stanner as having articulated a set of timeless concerns. Pearson’s 1993 Boyer Lecture on the post-Mabo political landscape of Australia was framed in terms of issues Stanner raised a quarter of a century earlier: Today, more than ever, the series which Professor Stanner delivered for the ABC in 1968 makes compelling reading. His lectures articulate, illuminate and provide some guidance, with questions that will consume the people of this continent for as long as we need to consider them (Pearson 1994, p. 89).

Pearson clearly places Stanner outside the group of anthropologists he has more recently identified as a ‘B-grade industry’ responsible for the ‘roadtrain crash’ of native title.13 He enlists Stanner’s words in support of his campaign to encourage Aboriginal communities to actively undertake forms of cultural redevelopment:

14

On the life and legacy of WEH Stanner

Bill Stanner and participants of the SAS ‘Long Vigil’ exercise, north Australia, July 1977. Photographer unknown, ANUA 225/11 73/3.

The social situation of many Aborigines will change with rapidity over the next decade. Many will die wealthy, in possession of money or other assets for which their traditional law provides no disposal procedure. There will be conflicts of interest between Aborigines which may be insoluble unless their own doctrine of what I have termed rights, duties, liabilities and immunities can be developed. The ‘Aboriginal problem’ thus goes beyond the ‘retention of their traditional lifestyle’: there is a problem of development as well as one of preservation’ (Stanner quoted in Pearson 2003, pp. 7–8).

‘Greed and conflict’, argue Pearson, ‘will continue to plague our people as long as we fail to confront Professor Stanner’s prescient advice’ (ibid., p. 8). What is it in Stanner’s writings that has secured him exceptional status in the history of debate over Australia’s treatment of its original inhabitants? It may be paradoxical that his concentration on interpreting the limitations

15

Jeremy Beckett and Melinda Hinkson

of present policies rather than prescribing ways forward, his cautiousness, as well as a lack of resolution in his overall thesis regarding questions of cultural transformation leave considerable latitude for reading between the lines of Stanner’s powerful prose — Folds can enlist Stanner in support of his ‘crossed purposes’ thesis, at the same time as Pearson mobilises his words in an antithetical perspective, calling for Aboriginal people to embrace forms of cultural redevelopment and take responsibility for their own affairs. It may well be that what Rowse characterises as Stanner’s ‘dubiety’ provides part of the key to understanding this phenomenon. Yet as these three examples suggest, Stanner is widely regarded as having grasped something at the core of Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal relations which remains unresolved, a key tension at the heart of debates over what it means to be Australian. Perhaps it is this that gained him a place as the only anthropologist listed in the July 2006 issue of The Bulletin as one of its ‘100 most influential Australians’. A conjunction of his deep regard for Aboriginal social principles, his suggestion that the comprehension of many of these lay beyond our grasp, and his identification of our arrogance in assuming that Aborigines would want to become ‘like us’ add up to a compelling mix. Stanner was committed to drawing to public attention the intellectual depths of Aboriginal worldviews, but without sentimentality. He could be a cool observer of Aboriginal social life, particularly when it came to the vexed question of what the future might hold; he was an unusual blend of anti-assimilationist when this meant the terms of engagement with wider Australia would be thrust upon Aboriginal people, yet a considered realist in recognising the limited scope of choice before them. Beyond all of this lay an unusual gift for writing. Stanner is rightly regarded as one of the most evocative interpreters of Aboriginal life and cosmology because of his command, at moments poetic, of the English language. When writing for a general readership his prose was elegant, imaginative, compelling. His notion of ‘the great Australian silence’ and illumination of the Aboriginal Dreaming fired the imaginations of many. Students recall his propensity to proffer useful neologisms and secretaries lament that his revisions of their typed letters always contained more strange words than the first draft. Others were left to mull over such ideas that, for Aboriginal people, life ‘was a joyous thing with maggots at the centre’ (Stanner 1963, p. 37; see Morphy this volume). But Stanner struggled with his writing. Some of his academic works are convoluted, and his archive suggests he laboured hard over many of his texts, drafting, correcting and redrafting, with some well-worked pieces being set aside, never finding their way into print. He seems to have had the most trouble when he allowed his commitment to Radcliffe-Brown’s ideas to get in the way of making a plain case. Stanner had of course been trained as a journalist and this background, combined with the idea Malinowski instilled in his students that the anthropologist must

16

On the life and legacy of WEH Stanner

weave an engaging account out of collected data, are likely to have been important influences. But Stanner also wrote poems, and his love of poetry would have contributed to his careful choice of a word and his keenness to create a literary impact. When Stanner is at his best, as in After the Dreaming, he can be read for the pleasure of his prose. the ‘high culture’

Stanner’s writing on the Aboriginal ‘High Culture’ was the work of his maturity. €His first essay, ‘The Dreaming’ (Stanner 1956) is easy to read, but what followed was more considered and more penetrating.€The series of essays that became the monograph On Aboriginal religion (Stanner 1963) have these qualities, but they make heavy demands on the reader.€Stanner was developing his ideas as he went along, leaving some questions unresolved.€He hoped to revise and restructure the essays but, as was too often the case, never did. Nevertheless, Sutton, Morphy and Keen have found these essays worth revisiting in their chapters here. ‘Religion, totemism and symbolism’, published two years after the monograph, is probably the most accessible of Stanner’s writings on the High Culture, bringing together the main threads of his thinking in a survey of the field that remains a classic. Stanner’s approach to the High Culture has the same quality of transcendence that we have noted in his other work, though in a different way.€He refused to reduce Aboriginal religion to a mere category of social science, the ‘sociologism’ of which in their different ways both Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud were guilty (Stanner 1965, p. 211).€He perceived in much of the scientific writing on the subject, ‘A desire to free study from emotion became a fear of emotion, and a drying out of sensibility’ (ibid.).€Against such ‘drying out’ he offers his understanding of the ‘positive character’ (ibid., p. 213) of Aboriginal religion in terms that are, if not theological, then broadly humanistic, resonating with contemporary Western sensibility without reducing it to Western ideas. To cite just a few of his perceptions, he refers to the Aborigines’ ‘religious confidence’ and their ‘magnification of life’. ‘They seemed either to have stopped short of, or gone beyond, a true quarrel with the terms of life’. Of the ‘doctrine’ of the Dream Time, he writes, ‘two complementary emphases stood out…the fixation and instituting of things in an enduring form, and the simultaneous endowment of all things — including man, and his condition of life — with their good and/or bad properties’ (ibid., pp. 214–5). This last is the theme of Morphy’s chapter. Stanner was in dialogue with Christian missionaries and theologians while he was writing, and part of his project in this paper, as in other writings, seems to have been to persuade them and other Australians that Aboriginal religion must be recognised as a High Culture. In this one respect, the essay might be said to date; today after a generation of religious relativism Australians

17

Jeremy Beckett and Melinda Hinkson

seem all too ready to recognise Indigenous ‘spirituality’ but, in the process, it has too often been appropriated by New Age belief or reduced to a shallow trope of ‘indigenism’, both devoid of the kinds of qualities that Stanner identified and celebrated. ù The organisation of the essays that follow is designed primarily to chronicle important events in his career and signpost three main themes in Stanner’s intellectual work. Section one, ‘Diverse fields’ considers some discrete moments in Stanner’s career: his contribution to the war effort (Gray), his short tenure as director of the East African Institute of Social Research (Hinkson), his involvement in the establishment of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (Mulvaney) and the Council for Aboriginal Affairs (Dexter). Section two ‘In pursuit of transcendent value’, contains essays dealing variously with Stanner’s conceptualisation of Aboriginal social life and cosmology.The first two, by Beckett and Hinkson, sketch some of the broader social context in which Stanner was struggling to make anthropological sense of his ideas about Aboriginal lifeworlds and religion — Beckett via Stanner’s biographical portrait of Durmugam and Hinkson through his pursuit of rock art in the Fitzmaurice region of north Australia. These two essays provide something of a ‘real world’ backdrop for the focused analyses of Stanner’s challenging religious texts by Sutton and Keen. Morphy and Furlan mobilise aspects of Stanner’s theoretical conceptualisations in the analysis of contemporary phenomena — Morphy attends to Yolngu mortuary rituals, Furlan to contemporary genres of song at Wadeye. In Section three, ‘Land and people’, Sutton and Peterson critically evaluate Stanner’s contribution to the anthropology of Aboriginal land tenure. Nancy Williams revisits the Gove Case, the first legal case where anthropological knowledge in general — and Stanner in particular — were called upon to translate the concepts of Aboriginal land tenure into the terms of legal argument. John Taylor draws on Stanner’s data to build an historical account of dynamic population growth at Wadeye, and consider the associated challenges for present-day government. The final section, ‘A public intellectual’, evaluates Stanner’s contribution to public understanding and Aboriginal policy development.Ann Curthoys looks at Stanner’s influence on the writing of Australian history,Tim Rowse examines After the Dreaming within the wider tradition of the Boyer Lectures, and Jon Altman considers Stanner’s legacy as a public policy intellectual. conclusion

The picture of Stanner’s work that emerges from the preceding discussion is necessarily incomplete, shaped by the themes we have chosen to

18

On the life and legacy of WEH Stanner

address — a retrospective view of his working life as an Australian citizen and anthropologist, a brief re-reading of his interventions on policy in the present climate, and his concern with Aboriginal High Culture. The chapters that follow consider these themes in more detail and shine a light on other aspects of Stanner’s career and writings. Taken together they do not add up to a comprehensive picture, but provide substantial material with which to think about the varied contributions of Australia’s most influential anthropologist. As is always the case in biographical work, it is important to note that these essays reveal something of the interests and emphases of the writers — in some chapters the reader will encounter seemingly divergent portraits of Stanner. Read as a collection of essays, a multi-dimensional picture of Stanner’s outlook emerges, yet we have not attempted to force interpretations or analyses where unanswered questions remain. We have suggested that one cost of Stanner’s diverse commitments was that much of his work remained unpublished. Uncompleted projects across diverse fields have, as one observer has noted, left many fragments, some of them sizeable, but no oeuvre.14 This also makes it difficult to fully evaluate his real achievements. Stanner’s archive leaves the impression he intended to achieve much more, especially work of the kind that might influence public opinion: the ‘big book on Aborigines’ he referred to himself as writing over more than two decades was never completed. He was distressed in the last years of his life as Parkinson’s disease took hold and writing became increasingly difficult. Yet, as the contents of this volume indicate, the work Stanner did complete, as well as the unpublished papers he left for others to read, continue to inspire committed and creative thinking. As seems appropriate, we’ll let Stanner have the last word on this: My concern for many years has been to try, whenever possible, to use direct Aboriginal testimony to illuminate their problems with us, not ours with them. My idea was to try and change our perspective in the belief that we might then find credible motives for going more than half way to meet them. I have heard this called ‘the scholars’ fantasy’ but, in all the circumstances historical and contemporary, as I understand them, it seemed the best approach. It was, anyway, the thing I could do best because of the knowledge and experience I had gained from many years of friendly and rewarding association with Aborigines. It also let me express, through authentic material drawn from living people, a long-settled view that, in themselves, and as the bearers of unique and unrepeatable social forms and culture, they were and still are disvalued by our conventional European outlook; not just undervalued, but disvalued. And in a sense, it allowed me to try to repay a debt of obligation (Stanner 1979a, p. 340).

19

Jeremy Beckett and Melinda Hinkson

Acknowledgments With thanks to Patricia Stanner and TN Madan for permission to quote from private papers and personal correspondence. We are grateful to Jon Altman, Tim Rowse, Patricia Stanner, Peter Sutton and two anonymous readers for comments on an earlier version. References Unpublished sources ANU Archives are based at the Australian National University, Canberra. Firth papers are held in the London School of Economics and Political Science, London. MS 845 is part of the WEH Stanner collection, AIATSIS Library, Canberra. Published sources Altman, J, Biddle, N & Hunter, B 2005, ‘A historical perspective on Indigenous socioeconomic outcomes in Australia, 1971–2001’, Australian Economic History Review, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 273–95. Barwick, D, Beckett, J & Reay, M 1985, ‘Introduction’, in Barwick, D, Beckett, J & Reay, M (eds), Metaphors of interpretation: essays in honour of WEH Stanner, Australian National University Press, Canberra. Beckett, J 1989, Conversations with Ian Hogbin, Oceania Monograph no. 35, Oceania Publications, Sydney. Coombs, HC & Robinson, CJ 1996, ‘Remembering the roots: lessons for ATSIC’, in P Sullivan (ed.), Shooting the banker, North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University, Darwin, pp. 1–16. —— & Stanner, WEH 1974, Report on visit to Yuendumu and Hooker Creek, March 1974, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra. Evans-Pritchard, E 1956, Nuer religion, Oxford University Press. Folds, R 2001, Crossed purposes: the Pintupi and Australia’s Indigenous policy, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney. Hinkson, M 2005, ‘The intercultural challenge of WEH Stanner’s first fieldwork’, Oceania, vol. 75, no. 3, pp. 195–208. Howard, J 2004, ‘Transcript of press conference with Senator Amanda Vanstone’, Parliament House, Canberra, 15 April, URL accessed 3 March 2007 <www. pm.gov.au/news/interviews/Interview795.html>. Keen, I 1986 ‘Stanner on Aboriginal religion’, Canberra Anthropology, vol. 9, pp. 26– 50. Lukes, S 1975, Emile Durkheim, His life and work: a historical and critical study. Penguin Books, Middlesex. Manne, R (ed.) 2003, Whitewash: on Keith Windschuttle’s fabrication of Aboriginal history, Black Inc. Books, Melbourne. Merlan, F 1989, ‘“On Aboriginal Religion”: an appreciation’, in WEH Stanner, On Aboriginal religion (facsimile edition), Oceania Monograph no. 36, Oceania Publications, Sydney, pp. i–xviii. Morphy, H 1988 ‘The resurrection of the Hydra: twenty-five years of research on Aboriginal religion’, in RM Berndt & R Tonkinson (eds), Social anthropology and

20

On the life and legacy of WEH Stanner Aboriginal studies: a contemporary overview, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, pp. 239-66. Pearson, N 1987, ‘Anthropology and tradition: a contemporary Aboriginal viewpoint’, unpublished paper (presented by Mervyn Gibson) at the Australian & New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science Conference, Townsville, 1987. —— 1994, ‘Mabo: towards respecting equality and difference’, Voices from the land: 1993 Boyer Lectures, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Sydney, pp. 89–101. —— 2000, Our right to take responsibility, Noel Pearson & Associates, Cairns. —— 2003, ‘Where we’ve come from and where we’re at with the opportunity that is Koiki Mabo’s legacy to Australia’, unpublished Mabo Lecture, Native Title Representative Bodies Conference, Alice Springs, 3 June. Rowse, T 2000, Obliged to be difficult: Nugget Coombs’ legacy in Indigenous affairs, Cambridge University Press. Sandall, R 2001, The culture cult: designer tribalism and other essays, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado. Sanders, W 2005, ‘Never even adequate: reconciliation and Indigenous affairs’, in C Aulich & R Wettenhall (eds), Howard’s second and third governments: Australian Commonwealth administration 1998–2004, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, pp. 152–72. Sheils, H (ed.) 1963, Australian Aboriginal studies: a symposium of papers presented at the 1961 research conference, Oxford University Press. Stanner, WEH 1953, The South Seas in transition: a study of post-war rehabilitation and reconstruction in three British Pacific dependencies, Australasian Publishing Company, Sydney. —— 1956, ‘The Dreaming’, in Hungerford, T (ed.), Australian signpost, an anthology, FEW Cheshire, Melbourne. —— 1963, On Aboriginal religion, Oceania Monograph no. 11, Oceania Publications, Sydney. —— 1965,‘Religion, totemism and symbolism’, in RM Berndt & CH Berndt (eds.), Aboriginal man in Australia, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, pp. 207–37. —— 1968, ‘Radcliffe-Brown, AR’, in DL Sills (ed.), International encyclopedia of the social sciences, The Macmillan Company & The Free Press, New York, vol. 13, pp. 285–90. —— 1969, The 1968 Boyer Lectures: after the Dreaming, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Sydney. —— 1979a, White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938–1973, Australian National University Press, Canberra. —— 1979b (1958),‘Continuity and change among the Aborigines’, in White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938–1973, Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp. 41–66. —— 1982, ‘Aboriginal humour’, Aboriginal History, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 39–48. Sutton, P 2001, ‘The politics of suffering: Indigenous policy in Australia since the 1970s’, Anthropological Forum, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 125–72. Sullivan, P 1996 (ed.), Shooting the banker: essays on ATSIC and self-determination, Darwin: North Australia Observer Unit, Darwin and the Australian National University, Canberra.

21

Jeremy Beckett and Melinda Hinkson Vanstone, A 2005, ‘Beyond conspicuous compassion — Indigenous Australians deserve more than good intentions’, address to Australia and New Zealand School of Government, 7 December, Australian National University, Canberra.

Notes 1. For a more detailed account, we refer the reader to the introduction to the festschrift, Metaphors of interpretation (Barwick et al. 1985). Of the three editors of that volume, the late Diane Barwick was mainly responsible for the biographical account, cataloguing Stanner’s papers, published and unpublished, as they were deposited in the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies library, and providing a comprehensive bibliography of Stanner’s unpublished as well as published work at the end of the volume. 2. While in London Stanner also continued to financially support his widowed mother, remitting money to Australia whenever possible. Stanner’s widow recalls him telling her that he regretted these imperatives resulted in a poorer thesis and restricted time for reading. Phyllis Kaberry apparently told Stanner that his was regarded as the ‘most original mind’ in Malinowski’s seminar. He ruefully thought, in retrospect, this was because it was not as well furnished with wide background reading (Mrs P Stanner, pers. comm., April 2007). 3. In 1933 Stanner had worked on the personal staff of Bertram Stevens, the NSW Premier; this experience is likely to have laid the ground for his appointment as Casey’s assistant. 4. Late in life he recalled ‘Somehow the idea of being a good soldier to the Queen, which is the way Grandfather spoke of himself, remains for me the one accolade which I would never trade for another. Perhaps out of fashion now, but I think the chances are that it will seem important again’ (unpublished manuscript nd, c. 1970s, held by Mrs P Stanner). 5. Writing to Stanner to congratulate him on his appointment to the second chair of anthropology of the ANU, Elkin wrote ‘you have had an unnecessarily long wait — a delay not unconnected with machinations, which have had no relation with anthropology as an academic discipline’ (letter held by Mrs P Stanner, dated 10 June 1964). 6. Writing to Stanner regarding the scope of Stanner’s readership Firth observed, ‘One would naturally expect that in a School of Pacific Studies, attention would be directed primarily to problems of Pacific interest, and any sphere must be available for work within this. But, as I explained, one expects the Department of Anthropology to serve the whole university, and that means that regional limits cannot be assigned with any stringency. I would regard study of Australian problems as falling quite reasonably within the Reader’s scope, provided he does not restrict himself to them, but serves the Pacific too (Firth papers, 12 August 1949). 7. Although the writing of South Seas in transition was primarily completed in London prior to his move to Canberra. 8. During the 1950s at Sydney, Mervyn Meggitt was the only graduate student working in central Australia, but Ruth Fink, Malcom Calley and James Bell were studying people known at that time as ‘Mixed Bloods’ in New South Wales.

22

On the life and legacy of WEH Stanner 9. In a letter responding to Nadel’s concern that he could not trust Freeman to act as head of department during his absence, Stanner replied ‘I don’t think, by the way, that you need have doubts about leaving Freeman alone here. He is not anxious to stir for a couple of years, he says, and the more I see of him the more I think you made a good appointment. Very steady, cautious in judgment, and a pleasant colleague. I am sure you could leave things in his hands for six months or more (letter held by Mrs P Stanner, dated 22 March 1955). 10. The vice-chancellor wrote to Stanner at Port Keats advising him that Barnes was being considered, and apologising for having taken this action during Stanner’s absence after having advised him that no appointment ‘would be made for some time.’ He concluded,‘I must emphasise that no decision has been reached and your own claims are position is not being overlooked.’ (Item 200, Stanner file, ANU Archives, dated 28 June 1957, strikethrough in original). 11. For example, on ATSIC see the contributions to Sullivan 1996 and the special issue of Dialogue, vol. 23, no. 2, 2004, ‘The abolition of ATSIC: silencing Indigenous voices’. ATSIC was responsible for expenditure of approximately 50 per cent of the Indigenous affairs budget and was subject to widespread criticism for failing to deliver significant change to its constituents in a period when critical community dysfunctionality increasingly became a subject of public concern. Across the scholarly and Indigenous communities there remain conflicting views on the legacy of ATSIC. 12. The Fraser government sought to differentiate its approach by using the term ‘self-management’ in place of ‘self-determination’. 13. ‘Native title’s day in the sun is over’ The Age 28 August 2002; see also Pearson 2003. 14. We thank an anonymous referee for this observation.

23

Part 1 Diverse Fields

1.

‘A chance to be of some use to my country’: Stanner during World War II geoffrey gray

When war was declared in September 1939 Stanner hurried back to Australia from Kenya. He was thirty-four years of age, had recently completed his PhD at the London School of Economics, and was eager to find a place for himself in Australia. He had been destined, until then, to find work with the British academy and the British colonial service.There were no positions for anthropologists in Australian universities. On his return in October 1939 he spent the first few months writing up his African research and undertook lecture tours for the University of Sydney Extension Board. Before the war he had worked as a journalist in both Sydney and London, and so he prepared scripts for broadcast on ‘political and military matters’ for the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). This in turn led to his employment with the Department of Information preparing propaganda scripts for the ABC (Barwick, Beckett & Reay 1985, p. 13), such as ‘War morale: a challenge to Australian youth’ (MS 3572, item 69).1 He was described in his security dossier as being of a ‘cultured and restrained manner’, and noting that his point of view ‘is never startling rather non-committal if anything’.The security service also noted that Stanner had political ambitions and, but for ‘lack of finance’, he would have contested the federal seat of Martin as a United Australia Party candidate (NAA C123 item 12630, 8 April 1942). He had a ‘gift for simplicity in describing problems of a complex nature’ (Pomeroy 1995, p. 200). He had worked for several prominent conservative politicians, including the New South Wales premier, Bertram Stevens, preparing data and ideas for the government on economic and social matters. In 1941 he was adviser to Percy Spender, Minister for the Army in the third Menzies Ministry, and continued in that position until there was a change of government in October 1941. He most likely remained an adviser to the incoming Minister for the Army, Frank Forde,

27

Geoffrey Gray

in part because Spender remained in the War Cabinet until February 1944 (Horner 1996, pp. 209–13). This chapter traces the various positions occupied by Stanner during World War II, and his endeavour to assist the Australian war effort — he saw himself as an Australian patriot, keen ‘to be of some use to my country’ (NAA A10651, ICR 23/28, 30 September 1948). For a brief period he commanded the North Australia Observer Unit (NAOU). The rest of the war, when he was a member of the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs (DORCA), was spent assisting in the formulation of post-war policy formulation for the Australian territories of Papua and New Guinea, as well as an enhanced role for Australia in the south-west Pacific. His time with the directorate, to which he was transferred in October 1943, was not happy. Stanner opposed what he considered the grandiose plans for a post-war Papua New Guinea that were hatched by the DORCA ‘boys’, as they called themselves. His disagreements with them were ideological and personal. At the same time he rarely missed an opportunity to further his prospects for a career either in the bureaucracy or the academy in Australia. the prime minister’s committee on national morale

At the end ofâ•› June 1942 Stanner was appointed to the Prime Minister’s Committee on National Morale chaired by Alfred A Conlon. By this time he was a commissioned officer, Major Stanner, commanding officer of the NAOU. Conlon prepared an interim report on the problem of civilian morale for submission to the prime minister, John Curtin (NAA A1608/1, AK 29/1/2, 4 April 1942). Stanner no doubt was provided with a copy in his capacity as adviser to the Minister for the Army, Frank Forde. Conlon, impressed with Stanner’s critique of the draft report (MS 3752, item 68, most likely written in April 1942) arranged his appointment. Conlon preferred to influence events from behind the scenes and is variously described as a ‘charismatic charlatan’ (Manne 1999, p. 21; cf. Kerr 1978, pp. 100–1), dismissed as largely unimportant (Ryan 1993) or seen as a visionary (Ryan 2004, pp. 28–61): there is no middle ground (Thomson 1964, pp. 91–164).The historian Peter McPhee described Conlon as a ‘young man with a brilliant mind and an extraordinary talent for making contacts’ (McPhee 1999, p. 59; also Jinks 1983, pp. 21–33; Rowse 2002, p. 154). At the beginning of the war Conlon, a mature-age medical student and the first student representative member of the University Senate, was heading the university’s manpower section. February 1942, when Conlon initially proposed the establishment of a Prime Minister’s Committee on National Morale, was a time of conscription, social disruption and rationing, and morale was an increasingly important issue. The country was in a state of alarm verging on panic; it was expected

28

1. Stanner during World War II

that the Japanese would invade the mainland at any moment. However, there is no evidence that an invasion was ever planned by the Japanese (Stanley 2002). The committee, formed in May 1942, consisted of Julius Stone, Professor of International Law at the University of Sydney, as Vice-Chairman; RM Crawford, Professor of History at Melbourne University; Justice ED Roper of the NSW Supreme Court; Sid Deamer, a journalist with the ABC Weekly; Keith Barry, Federal Programme Controller at the ABC; Roy Wright, Professor of Physiology in the University of Melbourne; University of Sydney anthropologist H Ian Hogbin; and Stanner (Thomson 1964, pp. 96–7; 100–1; Rowse 2002, pp. 96, 100). In December 1942 the committee co-opted HC ‘Nugget’ Coombs, JR Kerr and Brian Fitzpatrick (Thomson 1964: 127). In anyone’s assessment this was an exceptional group. Many in the committee saw themselves as liberal reform-minded progressives with a nationalist agenda and a bias for state intervention, confident of their ability to influence the course of events, if not during the war, then certainly in the post-war period. They were representative of the new academic and professional elite which emerged during the war and which was to play an influential part in public life during the decades that followed. The traditionalists in the bureaucracy, on the other hand, were distrustful of the committee and its members — especially Conlon — who were seen as intruders. Some ministers of the Curtin government, particularly Arthur Calwell, Minister for Information, distrusted intellectuals. They saw the committee as an ivory tower (Pomeroy 1995, p. 231). The committee held conferences and meetings to deal with such matters as a campaign to turn suburban gardens into vegetable plots to offset the loss of farm workers, a proposal to study the effect of occupational health matters on morale, and more substantial issues such as the need for a strong national body to influence the commonwealth on education policy (Pybus 1999, pp. 29–33; McPhee 1999, pp. 61–2). It also conducted research into civilian morale in a context of American military presence and widespread community suspicion that the Australian government regarded Australia north of Brisbane as expendable (Cottle 2002; cf. McPhee 1999, p. 62; Rowse 2002, pp. 97, 100). But its main task, it seems, was to ‘recommend a purging and drastic reorganisation’ of the Department of Information (Hall 1978, p. 40; Rowse 2002, p. 97). Coombs later recalled ‘that [the committee’s] deliberations did [not do] much to raise the national spirit’ (Coombs 1983, p. 197). Paul Hasluck, in the official war history Government and the people, 1942–1945, described the committee as a ‘curiously composed body’ and noted that ‘it is difficult to determine what standing it had’; he too believed it ‘had no effective influence’ (Hasluck 1970, p. 399). It is unlikely that the committee was abolished

29

Geoffrey Gray

until the end of the war, though it seems that it was sidelined earlier by Calwell (Pomeroy 1995, p. 231). It did, however, maintain a link with senior government and military officials and the prime minister, which could only promote the interests of Alf Conlon (Jinks 1983). Stanner continued his association with the committee while commanding the NAOU, while his radio broadcasts also addressed the broad issue of civilian morale. advice on indigenous loyalty

Anxiety about a Japanese invasion increased when the Deputy Director of Military Intelligence reported that the Northern Territory and ‘adjacent areas have been a hotbed of Japanese espionage and that Darwin has been the centre of collation and communication of information’. Further dramatising the moment he declared that it was ‘highly probable that enemy agents are being landed at present by parachutes from aircraft coming in over the Gulf of Carpentaria’ (NAA MP729/6, 29/401/618). The military turned to anthropologists for advice over two matters in particular: Indigenous loyalty (see Read 1947, pp. 95–116) and in what capacity Indigenous people might be used to support the war effort. Stanner, Donald Thomson, AP Elkin, FE Williams (the Papuan Government Anthropologist) and EWP Chinnery, Commonwealth Adviser on Native Affairs and director of the Northern Territory Aboriginal Affairs Branch, were all asked, at different times, for their views on these matters (various in NAA MP508/1, 240/701/217). The loyalty of Indigenous peoples, both on the mainland and in the island campaigns, was of paramount concern to the military, who required the support of local people. Robert Hall, in The Black diggers, observed that ‘the Services, particularly the Army which was responsible for internal security, suspected them [Aborigines] of favouring a Japanese victory’ (Hall 1989, pp. 145–7). A Queensland report entitled ‘Japanese activities among the aborigines’ stated that ‘aboriginals have openly stated that the Japs told them that the country belonged to the blacks, had been stolen from them by the whites and that “bye bye” they (the Japs) would give it back to them (the blacks)’.In fact,the author suggested (NAA MP729/6,29/401/626) that whoever supplied ‘food and tobacco’ would have the support of Aborigines! The problem of guarding northern Australia against Japanese invasion was raised at a joint meeting of the navy, army and air force, the United States army and the Flying Doctor Service.The meeting recommended that an observer unit (similar to that of the coast watchers in New Guinea) be formed to communicate all information from observer stations, and in particular aircraft sightings and naval and military movements.2 Initially, defence of the northern coastline was carried out by the anthropologist Donald Thomson, who had persuaded the Arnhem Landers, with whom he

30

1. Stanner during World War II

had worked in the mid 1930s, to put aside old enmities and join together to fight a common enemy (Hall 1989, pp. 85–98; Mulvaney 1992, pp. 1–57). Thomson patrolled an area that spanned almost the whole of the Arnhem Land coast and further east by land and on the ketch Aroetta.Thomson’s unit, the Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit (NTSRU) was seen as a holding unit until the Independent Companies, and the NAOU was trained to take over. In the early months of 1943 the NAOU expanded its role and the NTSRU was disbanded. north australia observer unit

In early 1942 Stanner, at the request of Major General Edmund Herring, made an appreciation of the requirements for an observer unit in northern Australia. He recommended a highly mobile unit, ‘horsed rather than wheeled’, capable of operating on their own initiative.The idea was inspired by Stanner’s period in East Africa in 1938–39, and especially the influence of Lieutenant Colonel Henderson, a district officer and ex-army officer. On learning of Stanner’s interest in soldiering and his ‘certainty that war was coming’, Henderson insisted that Stanner ‘“see” large-scale country in terms of time, space, physical movement and supply’. Stanner recalled that he and Henderson saw ‘an enormous amount of Africa together, from Kenya and Uganda to the Sudan’ (Walker & Walker 1986, pp. 6–7). On 11 May 1942 the establishment of the NAOU was officially announced, with its headquarters at Katherine in the Northern Territory, and Stanner was made commanding officer. The volunteers Stanner sought for ‘the Nackeroos’, as the unit was to become known, were expected to have first-class medical fitness, bush experience, horsemanship, ‘initiative, reserve, [and] intelligence’. A significant number who joined the unit lacked horsemanship and bush experience. Xavier Herbert, who joined the unit in May 1942, denounced the likely recruits as ‘a bunch of poofters whose only riding’s been one another in the Sydney Domain and Hyde Park’, though Herbert himself was not an accomplished horseman either (de Groen 1998, p. 132). Stanner was reluctant to involve ‘the blacks in the war’, however. He told the authors of a history of the unit that he ‘let each company commander employ a few as trackers, guides and horse handlers, but I did not intend to try to use them in large numbers’ (Walker & Walker 1986, p. 138); unfortunately, he did not provide an explanation. There were no enlisted Aboriginal soldiers, and those Aboriginal people ‘employed’ by the Nackeroos were used in a non-military capacity as guides and helpers. The unit employed only 59 Aborigines including the wives of some of the men (Hall 1989, p. 185). Stanner believed that in the event of a Japanese invasion Aboriginal people would stay in the areas best known to them and work with the NAOU sections and platoons (Walker & Walker 1986, p. 150).

31

Geoffrey Gray

As far as can be determined Stanner took no active role in informing his troops about Aboriginal people and their way of life, although the unit’s war establishment listed two anthropologists as personnel. No one was appointed (or recommended) for those positions (NAA MP742/1, 145/1/136). He did, however, enlist the support of the Northern Territory bushman William Edward (Bill) Harney. Harney had worked across northern Australia as a drover, trader, lugger captain and patrol officer with the Northern Territory Native Affairs Branch. Despite his lack of formal anthropological instruction Harney spent time with the Nackeroos between September and October 1942 (Walker & Walker 1986, p. 147). As the threat of invasion abated the unit’s operations were wound up in late 1944, and it was disbanded in April 1945. from the field to a desk

In October 1943 Stanner was transferred to the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs, located at Land Headquarters, Victoria Barracks, Melbourne. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel and made Assistant Director of Research (Territories Administration). This was an appointment which he did not seek. Who was responsible for suggesting Stanner is unknown, though it was most likely Conlon, director of DORCA, who had experience of Stanner as a member of the Committee on National Morale. At the time of Stanner’s appointment to DORCA there was increasing discussion at a senior government and military level of Australia’s role and responsibilities in a post-war south-west Pacific, especially Papua and New Guinea (Hasluck 1980). This was further underlined when DORCA proposed to Thomas Blamey, Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Army, that it should become the policy arm of the Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU) so that by the time a civilian administration took over it would be ‘in a state of development far ahead of any that had been contemplated previously’ (see Gray 2000, pp. 187–210). In April 1942 Conlon, commissioned as a major, succeeded in convincing the Adjutant General of â•›Land Headquarters, Major General Victor PH Stanke, of the need to have a Directorate of Research. Initially such a directorate, he argued, would assist in the development of a strategy that could be implemented in the event of an invasion and occupation of Australia by the Japanese. The lawyers JR Kerr and John Ryan were asked to report on alternative forms of military government for north Queensland in the event of invasion and the withdrawal of troops south of Brisbane. Of course it could do more and indeed it did more than concern itself with military government in the event of a Japanese invasion. The geographer John Andrews provided geographic material and maps for the army, for example. Conlon, despite the support of Stanke, had to fight tenaciously to gain a foothold for a directorate in the army. In early January 1943 Stanke

32

1. Stanner during World War II

was replaced by Major General CEM Lloyd who saw no value in such a directorate and threatened it with closure. Conlon managed to have the research section transferred, in February, to the Directorate of Military Intelligence and, in October, had convinced Thomas Blamey to bring the directorate under his direct command. There it became the Directorate of Research and Civil Affairs with its offices at Land Headquarters, Victoria Barracks, Melbourne (Kerr 1978, pp. 101–5; Reece 1993). Stanner was hostile to many in the directorate, not least Conlon, Kerr and Hogbin, his colleagues from the Committee on National Morale. He referred to them later as ‘the triumvirate’ (EP 197/4/2/573, 25 October 1948). From the start Stanner was an outsider and not part of the directorate culture and its style of doing business; this was due in part to his association with the conservative side of Australian political life as well as his values and his sense of himself, which will be commented on later. There was no love lost between Conlon and his ‘acerbic assistant’ (Pybus 1999, p. 49), and once Stanner was demobbed he never let an opportunity go without criticising the actions and decisions of ‘the boys’ as they called themselves. The dislike and distrust was mutual. Kerr — the other assistant director of DORCA, and in many ways Conlon’s right-hand man — described Stanner as having ‘an ego of terrific size which gets mixed up with the objective problem’ (KIP, 19 June 1945). Hence, Stanner’s appointment can be seen as a strategic move to delimit the possible criticism of DORCA’s plans for a post-war Papua and New Guinea as well as the various colonies in the south-west Pacific. Whatever its cause, it was a strained relationship from the start. a haven for intellectual talent

The war provided the opportunity for intellectual talent to play a role in running the country. The growth of services, ‘the necessary expansion of government, and the advent of a Labor Cabinet gave the younger generation chances which it would never have had in the stagnant society between the wars’. The Army Education Service, headquartered in Melbourne: …was one haven for intellectuals…In the Public Service, the Department of External Affairs was picking up bright young men…It was good to be alive in Melbourne. The various groups overlapped at parties and in pubs, and there was a spirit of optimism about Australia’s future. The new generation was confident that past mistakes would be avoided…The bright young men were nationalists (Hall 1978, pp. 43–5; 53).

It was into this intellectual and social milieu that members of the directorate found themselves. Stanner, who saw himself as a soldier and scholar, found himself alienated intellectually and politically.

33

Geoffrey Gray

DORCA recruited anthropologists to study the effects of the war on Indigenous peoples in New Guinea. Ian Hogbin (who obtained the assistance of KE Read), Camilla Wedgwood, Ralph Piddington and Stanner were involved in the directorate’s activities. DORCA and its future plans for a post-war Papua and New Guinea were known to Stanner. These plans included grand plans for the colonies in the south-west Pacific; that is, the establishment of a greater Melanesia under the control of Australia, and the training of colonial officials in a specialist school. He subsequently warned Elkin that the Sydney department and its training scheme for patrol officers in Papua and New Guinea was under threat: ‘…it will be an extraordinary array of personalities with their mingled gifts and weaknesses. If Conlon can mould them into an effective team, they may do good work, but the more I ponder on the long-term position of your department, the more I wonder at the final outcome’ (EP 197/4/2/573, 22 September 1944). Stanner had an interest in the maintenance and growth of the Sydney department as he hoped to be appointed professor on Elkin’s retirement, which Stanner anticipated would occur at the end of the 1940s (EP 197/4/2/573, 28 September 1944). (Elkin did not retire until 1955). ‘The boys’ were a threat to that ambition as they hoped to move the School of Civil Affairs (later the Australian School of Pacific Administration), which they had established in December 1944 as a training school for army officers working in the south-west Pacific, to the proposed national university in Canberra. Thus they took over all the training of officials for the colonial service and research, which had been the province of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. The matter of this attachment of the fledgling Institute of Colonial Studies to the proposed Australian National University was not properly settled until 1947. Stanner told Elkin, one year later, that it looked as if his: …prediction is coming true that the next focus of power to fall under the spell of this little gang will be the South Seas Commission. The next will be your chair, when you go; and when they have that, all the research into anthropology, sociology and colonial administration in the S.W.P. will be in the same hands — cocksure, ambitious, politically-minded, and quite unscrupulous (EP 197/4/2/573, 25 October 1948).

As further evidence of the directorate’s determination to move into anthropological research to assist in the formulation of policy it launched enquiries into post-war issues, including: …a study of the labour situation and its effect on village life [Hogbin], a study of native education [Wedgwood], which paid special attention

34

1. Stanner during World War II

to the problems created by the war but was not confined to them, a survey of agricultural potentialities of the Territories [JK Murray], and two anthropological studies of native communities with special emphasis on the effect upon them of the war [Read and Hogbin] (Mair 1948, p. 18).

Stanner was given tasks connected with the formulation of policy. His initial work for DORCA was to write a report on colonial policy. Conlon envisaged that Stanner would overview colonial issues involving the USA and Britain in terms of obligations and commitments, economic capacity, manpower requirements, and policy imperatives. Along with JR Kerr, Stanner attended the Field Officers conference held at Port Moresby in February 1944.While critical of some aspects of ANGAU he declared that service, mostly as labourers and carriers (stretcher-bearers) with ANGAU had: …definitely improved the native. His control has been firm, but just; his physique has improved from the excellent housing and rations he receives; he has learnt the value of discipline and his added responsibilities; he has a far more extensive appreciation of health and hygiene matters; he has been taught how to produce more and better food within his own village.

Stanner believed that this would ensure that ‘when the European returns, or decides to settle in New Guinea, he should be well-served with efficient and contented labour’. If this proved to be the case, then, ‘most of the credit should go to the personnel of ANGAU because of his efforts on behalf of the native during the war period’ (AWM 54/80/2/1, ‘ANGAU’). This resonates with a pre-war colonial trope that discipline (often physical) and consistency on the part of the white overseer was the most effective way of maintaining an orderly New Guinean labour force (Moore 1990, pp. 31–6). In South Seas in transition, written soon after the war (although it was not published until 1953), Stanner declared that pre-war labour legislation ‘would more than stand comparison with labour laws in any other country’ (Stanner 1953, p. 81). He noted that ‘working under indenture was agreeable to the natives and had become of some positive social and economic importance to them. An increasing volume of labour offered itself without direct compulsion’ (cf. Monsell-Davis 1990, pp. 186–8; Powell 2003, p. 196; 200–2; 223–8). During the inter-war period the League of Nations Mandates Commission, headed by Lord Hailey,3 had consistently criticised these very labour laws. The social scientist CD Rowley shows, contrary to Stanner, that statistical and other data ‘drives home the point of [the] unpopularity of working for the Europeans’ (Rowley 1965, p. 106). Stanner’s views were not based on anthropological research and evidence. Although Stanner had undertaken no field research on the conditions and

35

Geoffrey Gray

Studio portrait of VX89030 Major William Edward Hanley Stanner, 2/1st North Australia Observer Unit (NAOU), c. 1942. Photographer unknown, Australian War Memorial, PO4393.001.

treatment of New Guinean labour before or during the war, he ‘endorsed the army’s policy of placing war needs ahead of native interests’ (Powell 2003, p. 196). Stanner’s views were not supported by Hogbin, who had undertaken research and was critical of practices he saw as endemic, particularly the systematic brutality of ANGAU overseers (Hogbin n.d.). Hogbin went so far as to suggest that ANGAU was ‘losing standing in the people’s eyes by itself engaging in any form of recruiting’ (Hogbin, 1944), but Stanner questioned the objectivity of Hogbin’s report (see also Powell 2003, pp. 196; 198). Moreover, at the Native Labour Conference (held in Sydney on 1 December 1944, which examined ways of changing the various laws governing indenture) Hogbin represented DORCA; Stanner was in London (NAA 742/1, 274/1/246).

36

1. Stanner during World War II

Soon after the Field Officers conference in Port Moresby, Stanner and Kerr left to advise Blamey and the prime minister at the Imperial Prime Ministers’ conference in London. Kerr was sent with Stanner to keep watch over him as Conlon did not trust Stanner to represent the views of DORCA fairly or to promote Australian interests (NAA MP729/8, 49/439/73). Kerr and Stanner also attended a meeting on Borneo and Hong Kong, which formed the basis of planning for the installation of military, and eventually civilian, governments in those locations. Stanner prepared a number of papers on British colonial policy and its application to Australian territories. His 1944 report on ‘Post-Hostilities Planning’ contained an interview with Lord Hailey about policy in Africa and its application to Papua New Guinea.4 He noted changes in policy in the British Colonial Office and how these could be applied to post-war policy in Papua and New Guinea. Broadly speaking, he explained, they were compromises between ‘competitive influences of much the same kind and weight as those with which the Australian Government will itself have to deal’ and wished that there was some ‘way of bridging the gap between the highly developed experience of the African administrations and what we are attempting in the Pacific’ (EP 197/4/573, 25 October 1948).5 In Stanner’s opinion the directorate was failing to do the same for Australia. According to Stanner, ‘the network of power the “boys” have built up is so strong [but their] theory is showy but confused...using phrases which have long since been shown in Africa, their homeland, to have lost meaning’ (EP 197/4/573, 25 October 1948). He was suspicious of Conlon and the directorate’s plans and dismissed them as illustrating ‘the increasing erectility of the Directorate’s libido…likely to afford equal assistance to the bounding megalomanias or melancholias between which we now alternate’ (Pybus 1999, p. 45). Stanner was out of step with those from the LSE and the directorate who saw themselves at the vanguard of enlightened postwar colonial policy. Stanner’s apparent support of a pre-war British colonial system was anathema to the directorate (Hasluck 1980, passim). Commenting on Lucy Mair and her appointment to DORCA, Stanner noted that she was part of a small, self-interested coterie at the LSE which included Audrey Richards ‘and one or two others with whose views I have disagreed’. He believed he could ‘count on Radcliffe-Brown and EvansPritchard; and I think also…Firth’ for support. He condemned ‘the amount of outright nepotism, and the extraordinary coincidence that each burst of what purports to be zeal for liberalism and native rights always ends up the same way — higher salaries, expense accounts, positions of power, wider influence for one or other [of the group] — all these [things] sickened me’ (EP 197/4/2/573, 25 October 1948).

37

Geoffrey Gray

Notwithstanding his observation, and the obvious tension between Stanner and the ‘triumvirate’, Stanner’s reports on British colonial policy and its possible application to a post-war Papua and New Guinea were considered, as was his report on the Social Sciences Research Committee in the Colonial Office (Gray 2000, pp. 192–6). Stanner had the ability to present complex material simply and this no doubt was of use to DORCA. The report on the Social Sciences Research Committee was of particular interest to Conlon. He attempted to develop an Australian equivalent — the Australian Pacific Territories Research Committee (Wetherell & CarrGregg 1990, p. 148). Conlon believed that this had the potential to provide a process through which progressive policy for Papua and New Guinea and the other Melanesian colonies could be formulated. Stanner’s views on colonial policy in the south-west Pacific were further developed in work he undertook at the request of the American Institute of Pacific Relations. He was asked, in mid 1946, to ‘undertake a survey of postwar rehabilitation and reconstruction in the south-west Pacific’ (Stanner 1953, p. v).This was an opportunity to both distance himself from DORCA and their views, and also to point out their shortcomings and how these had impacted on policy in Papua New Guinea. In a presentation which covered his work for the institute to Chatham House in mid November 1947 Stanner explained his criticism of post-war policy in Papua New Guinea; it was a stinging criticism of the directorate: If the New Guinea scene is looked at closely it is difficult to resist the impression that what may well have begun as genuine idealism has now begun to degenerate into futile, piecemeal welfarism which is paying little regard to the limitations of the primitive culture of the natives on the one hand, and on the other of the controlling factors of Australian politics and economics. I do not think the local administration is to be held altogether responsible. A number of factors have made their contribution. The military authorities withdrew before the civil authorities were ready. The devastation and social disturbance …were of great magnitude. A large proportion of the trained staffs were lost in the war…The planning situation was badly mishandled. Evidently the Minister was given and acted upon some very bad advice. A number of administrative blunders were made. A large proportion of officials have been out of sympathy with the new policy. The present administration is deeply divided. Shortages of staff and material have been a heavy handicap. The natives have been unhelpful and restive. But the underlying mentality of the planners has been, or seems to have been if we judge by the outcome, at fault (MS 3752, 91, 12 November 1947).

38

1. Stanner during World War II

The previous year he had written a report for the Department of Territories on how it might ‘recover its influence on policy and development, and its control over research and planning’. It was an attack on the influence of the DORCA boys, the School of Civil Affairs (later the Australian School of Pacific Administration (ASOPA)), and the Conlon-inspired and controlled Australian Pacific Territories Research Committee.6 He objected to the ‘indirect effect of ambitious, untrained outsiders’ developing ‘showy research projects which will ultimately weaken the University departments, merely to please transient political interests’. He accused Hogbin of ‘pursuing consciously a policy which he knew could only weaken the Sydney department…And to please whom? A group of power-hungry thrusters on the one hand, and a political party on the other.This is bad stuff, Elkin. Shortsighted, unscholarly, and in my opinion politically venal’ (EP 197/4/2/573, 25 October 1948). Stanner completed South Seas in transition in 1947, revising it slightly in 1950; it was not published until 1953.This delay he blamed on the ‘triumvirate’. In fact he blamed the triumvirate for stalling his academic career in Australia. The publication of Lucy Mair’s Australia in New Guinea (1948), and Hogbin’s Transformation scene (1951) before South Seas was evidence of the opposition to him by Conlon, Kerr and Hogbin. He returned to East Africa and at the end of 1948 lamenting the continuing influence of the triumvirate, Evatt and Ward: I too would like to be back in Australia, where my roots and home and heart are. But to do what? Every avenue seems closed for reasons which you know as well as I...It seems a time when I need friends in Australia, for there are those, whom you know, who would stop it [South Seas in transition] coming out at all if they could (EP 197/4/2/573, 25 October 1948).

He confided in Ian Clunies Ross that there was ‘nothing for me in the Aust[ralian] universities until they found more chairs…and nothing in Canberra so long as Evatt and Ward are there. I found my disagreements with them insuperable, and their entourages don’t like the cut of my jib. Or my threat of competition’ (NAA A10651, ICR 23/28, 30 September 1948). He did however hold out the hope that he would assume Elkin’s chair, once Elkin retired. He confidently stated to Elkin that he expected his support for the chair, which he had raised initially on 28 Septemer 1944 (EP 197/4/2/573, 25 October 1948). However, when he applied for the chair in 1956 he was unsuccessful, due in part to a lack of support from Elkin himself (Gray 2007, p. 223). When Elkin’s successor JA Barnes resigned in 1958 to take up the ANU chair Stanner again applied, again unsuccessfully (Barnes, 2008, pp. 227–78).

39

Geoffrey Gray aftermath

The directorate developed a proposal for the establishment of a South Seas Commission, but it was Kerr who had most to do with its establishment. Stanner was supportive of regional commissions such as this as he anticipated that such regional bodies would bode well for the future of colonial rule. He made comparison with the Caribbean Regional Commission, set up during the war. In a radio broadcast on the ABC (‘The South Seas Commission’, broadcast 8 May 1946) Stanner pointed out that ‘when it is established the Commission should bring the machinery of administration to the Pacific right up into the vanguard of progressive colonial policy’ (MS 3752, item 83). The South Pacific Commission was established on 6 February 1947 under the Canberra Agreement — signed by Australia, France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the USA — as a way of promoting economic and social development in the Pacific Island territories under their administration. Kerr was the organising secretary for the first South Seas Conference and some of the staff of the ASOPA wrote background papers. There was certainly concern, among those opposed to Conlon and Kerr, that one of them would capture the key position of Secretary-General (EP 176/4/2/208, 22 July 1948). Kerr declined the offer and so Conlon requested Eddie Ward to nominate him for the position. Conlon’s appointment would, Kerr wrote, ‘open the way for him to do the sort of things he had done in the war time years’; both Kerr and Evatt supported Conlon’s nomination, with reservations (Kerr 1978, pp. 108–9). It was not until the next meeting, in Suva, that WD Forsyth, a career diplomat from External Affairs was appointed SecretaryGeneral (Woodburn 2003, p. 218). Kerr returned to the bar. Conlon, after a brief and disastrous principalship of the ASOPA, also ceased to exercise any influence (Pybus 1999, pp. 88–90). By the time Stanner returned to Australia in 1950 there had been a change in government and so Ward and Evatt were no longer in power. Conlon and Kerr had moved on too, and although Kerr retained an interest in the South Pacific Commission he had no formal role in it. Hogbin remained in Sydney, having ceased field work in 1949, and seemingly took little further interest in Papua New Guinea apart from continuing to write up his field work results. Almost from the moment he arrived in Canberra Stanner began field work at Port Keats, also having lost interest in Papua New Guinea.7 The war and its immediate aftermath was a time of great passions, bold ideas, idealism, treachery and ambition. For a brief period major changes in Australian colonial policy seemed possible — only to be dashed by a change of government and a new direction taken by Paul Hasluck, Minister for External Territories. Papua New Guinea had to wait for another ‘new deal’.

40

1. Stanner during World War II

By this time, the early 1960s, Kerr was at the bar; Hogbin was a reader in the University of Sydney’s Department of Anthropology; Conlon was dead. Stanner was immersed in Australia, which culminated in his membership of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs chaired by HC (Nugget) Coombs and the formulation of a new policy for Aborigines (Rowse 2000, passim; 2002, passim). In the end Stanner had, during the war and after, been ‘of some use to [his] country’ (NAA A10651/ ICR 23/28). References Unpublished sources AWM Australian War Memorial EP Elkin papers, University of Sydney Archives KIP Keith Isles papers, University of Tasmania Archives MS 3572 Stanner papers, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies NAA National Australian Archives Published sources Barnes, JA 2008, Humping my drum: a memoir, Lulu Publishing, lulu.com. Barwick, DE, Beckett, J & Reay, M 1985,‘WEH Stanner: an Australian anthropologist’, in DE Barwick, J Beckett & M Reay (eds), Metaphors of interpretation, Australian National University Press, Canberra. Coombs, HC 1983, Trial balance: issues of my working life, Sun Books, Melbourne. Cottle, D 2002, The Brisbane line: a reappraisal, Upfront Publishing, Leicestershire. de Groen, F 1998, Xavier Herbert: a biography, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia. Gray, G 2000, ‘Managing the impact of war: Australian anthropology, WWII and the southwest Pacific’, in RM MacLeod (ed.), Science and the Pacific war: science and survival in the Pacific, 1939–1945, Kluwer Academic Publishers, London. Gray, G 2007, A cautious silence: a political history of Australian anthropology, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra. Hall, R 1978, The real John Kerr, Angus & Robertson, Sydney. Hall, RA 1989, The Black diggers: Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in the Second World War, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Hasluck, P 1970, The government and the people: official history of the Second World War, Australian War Memorial, Canberra. —— 1976, A time for building: Australian administration in Papua and New Guinea 1951–1963, Melbourne University Press. —— 1980, Diplomatic witness: Australian foreign affairs 1941–1947, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne. Hogbin, HI n.d., ‘Report of an investigation of native labour in New Guinea’ (copy in possession of author). —— 1944, ‘The natives of the Salamaua Coast’, a preliminary report by Lieutenant Colonel Ian Hogbin forwarded to Brigadier Cleland, ANGAU HQ, for perusal and despatch to the Director of Research, LHQ, 7 October 1944 (in possession of author).

41

Geoffrey Gray Horner, D 1996, Inside the War Cabinet: directing Australia’s war effort, 1939–1945, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Jinks, B 1983, ‘Alfred Conlon, the Directorate of Research and New Guinea’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 12, pp. 21–33. Kerr, JR 1978, Matters for judgment: an autobiography, Macmillan, South Melbourne. McPhee, P 1999, ‘Pansy’: a life of Roy Douglas Wright, Melbourne University Press. Mair, LP 1948, Australia in New Guinea, Christophers, London. Manne, R 1999, review of Cassandra Pybus’s The devil and James McAuley, in Australian Book Review, August 1999. Monsell-Davis, M 1990, ‘Roro and Mekeo Labour for government work: Papua New Guinea’, in C Moore, J Leckie & D Munro (eds.), Labour in the South Pacific, James Cook University of North Queensland, Townsville. Moore, C 1990, ‘Workers in colonial Papua New Guinea’, in C Moore, J Leckie & D Munro (eds), Labour in the South Pacific, James Cook University of North Queensland, Townsville. Mulvaney, DJ (ed.) 1992, ‘Donald Thomson’s report on the Northern Territory Coastal Patrol and the Special Reconnaissance Unit 1941–43’, Aboriginal History, vol. 16, nos 1–2, pp. 1–57 Powell, A 2003, The third force: ANGAU’S New Guinea War, 1942–46, Oxford University Press, Melbourne. Pomeroy, J 1995, ‘Morale on the home front in Australia during the Second World War’, PhD thesis, University of Sydney. Pybus, C 1999, The devil and James McAuley, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia. Read, KE 1947, ‘Effects of the Pacific War in the Markham Valley, New Guinea’, Oceania, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 95–116. Reece, RW nd (c. 1993), ‘Alf Conlon, the fall of Singapore and British Borneo’, unpublished manuscript (copy in possession of author). Rowley, CD 1965, The New Guinea villager, FW Chesire, Melbourne. Rowse, T 2000, Obliged to be difficult: Nugget Coombs’ legacy in Indigenous affairs, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne. —— 2002 Nugget Coombs: a reforming life, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne. Ryan, P 1993, ‘Hasluck: the private man’, Quadrant, March. —— 2004, Brief lives, Duffy & Snellgrove, Sydney. Stanley, P 2002 ‘“They’re (not) coming south”: the invasion that wasn’t’, paper delivered at the Remembering 1942 conference held at the Australian War Memorial, 1 June 2002. URL (accessed 14 July 2008): <www.awm.gov.au/ events/conference/2002/stanley_paper.pdf>. Stanner, WEH 1953, The South Seas in transition: a study of post-war rehabilitation and reconstruction in three British Pacific dependencies, Australasian Publishing Company, Sydney. Thomson, J (ed.) 1964, Five to remember, Lansdowne Press, Sydney. Walker, R & Walker, H 1986, Curtin’s cowboys: Australia’s secret bush commandos, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Wetherell, D & Carr-Gregg, C 1990, Camilla: CH Wedgwood, 1901–1955. A life, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney. Woodburn, S 2003, Where our hearts still lie: a life of Harry and Honor Maude in the Pacific Islands, Crawford House Publishing, Adelaide. 42

1. Stanner during World War II

Notes 1 . See also NAA SP109/3, 318/48 for Stanner’s broadcast scripts. 2. Report: ‘Joint Services and US Army meeting on the organization of observer and intelligence services, North Australia’, 7 March 1942. (NAA MP 729/6, 29/401/618.) 3. William Malcolm Hailey (1872–1969) was by common consent the most distinguished member of the Indian Civil Service in the twentieth century. After leaving India he had what amounted to a second career in relation to Africa, during which he directed two editions of the African survey (1938, 1956), wrote two important reports on British colonial administration, and served as an adviser to the Colonial Office. 4. British Planning in the Pacific, Section I, pp. 3-4; Colonial Policy, Section III; Memo, Pacific Territories Research Council, 6 July, 1945. NAA A 518, R 815/1/1. 5. It is likely that Stanner was familiar with some of the key personnel in the Colonial Office when he was in London in 1938–39. 6. Administration and Policy External Territories, Report for the Department of External Territories, c. May-October 1946. Stanner Papers, AIATSIS, MS 3752, item 84. 7. The ANU was asked by the Department of External Territories to provide a report on the social political and economic situation in Papua New Guinea in 1951, and again in 1953 to report on economic development in Papua New Guinea. Stanner was not part of either contingent and as far as I can determine he was not consulted at all.

43

2.

Stanner and Makerere: On the ‘insuperable’ challenges of practical anthropology in post-war East Africa melinda hinkson

In April 1946 Stanner was recuperating at his mother’s house in Sydney. Demobilised from the army and recovering from a severe bout of malaria that flared up during a recent assignment in Borneo, he was very much preoccupied with the question of what he would do now that the war was over. He wrote to Raymond Firth, whom he had befriended during his undergraduate period at the University of Sydney: ‘What to do is a bit of a puzzle, as usual...I want to sit down and write, for preference. But one decides on activities from within alternatives which are both immediately available and practicable’ (Firth 6/32, 6 April 1946). The eclectic set of skills that Stanner had developed in the period he referred to as his ‘wasted years’ (ibid.) had both broadened and complicated this matter of choice. By the end of the war Stanner had one foot planted in the world of the university, the other in colonial administration. Anthropology remained his driving passion and it was to anthropology he wished to return, but in the academic arena there were few job prospects, especially in Australia. On the administrative and diplomatic front Stanner told Firth his name had been mentioned in relation to possible jobs in Malaya and Russia but, for political reasons, he expected these would come to nought. He was, in the immediate post-war period, actively involved in the establishment of the South Seas Regional Commission and was hopeful of being offered ‘a very good job’ (Firth 6/32, June 1946) in that area. But he complained to Firth in early June: ‘I am striking bad trouble once again with Evatt [then Minister for External Affairs], who seems to have been advised against me or just doesn’t like the look of my face or something’. He asked Firth to let him know ‘if you hear of anything opening up’ (ibid.). Just weeks after writing to Firth, Stanner received a cable from Audrey Richards, who sat alongside Firth on the Colonial Social Sciences Research Council, seeking his willingness to

44

2. Stanner and Makerere: Anthropology in post-war East Africa

be nominated for the position of foundation director of a new East African Institute of Social Research, to be based at Makerere College, Uganda. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s Stanner turned regularly to Firth for advice on matters to do with his career.The two had known each other since Stanner’s undergraduate days and their relationship deepened after Stanner moved to London to write up his PhD at the London School of Economics (LSE). During his 18-month candidature Stanner worked as Firth’s research assistant. He credited the intellectual exchanges between them as playing a considerable part in his development as a scholar. Stanner also grew close to Firth’s wife Rosemary — the two shared a love of poetry. Raymond Firth was for Stanner a teacher, mentor, sounding board, friend. And, as a man who commanded considerable authority in the relatively small but burgeoning field of British anthropology, Firth was a very powerful friend to have. He had a hand in the three anthropological positions that Stanner won after completing his PhD: first an Oxford research fellowship that took Stanner to Kenya for nine months in 1938-9; then the directorship of the East African Institute from late 1947 to early 1949; and finally the academic position he held at the Australian National University from late 1949 until his retirement. This chapter deals with the second of these positions. Drawing particularly on Stanner’s correspondence with Firth, as well as the files of the British Colonial Office, I consider an episode in Stanner’s working life which is relatively unknown in Australia. Very little of what Stanner wrote about Africa has been published.1 Much of this work was concerned with the sociological challenges and dilemmas of colonial development. In following Stanner through the complex political field of post-war East Africa we encounter debates and issues that remain as hotly contested today as they were 60 years ago. And, not surprisingly perhaps, in the African chapter of Stanner’s career we find significant resonances between themes in this work and what he comes to write about Aboriginal Australia a decade later. In terms of Stanner’s career his time at Makerere was something of a watershed. Over the previous decade he had moved, with relative ease, across the fields of anthropology and civil administration, and so the Makerere job promised a unique opportunity to combine expertise gleaned in both fields. Yet Stanner’s experience at Makerere fell well short of meeting such expectations. He resigned his position and left Africa in late 1948. A year later he finally secured an academic position at the ANU and turned his attention away from development issues, at least for the meantime, toward the concerns of pure anthropology and the more contemplative world of Aboriginal religion. In what follows I will explore one issue — why did Stanner stay only 18 months (10 of these on the ground in East Africa) in the Makerere post? Given the eclectic skill set he had developed, why, to use

45

Melinda Hinkson

the words of Raymond Firth, did Stanner find the challenges of Makerere ‘insuperable’ (interview with the author, London, 26 November 2001)? british colonial development policy in the 1930s

In the latter half of the 1930s the British government was engaged in a slow but determined process to reformulate its approach to colonial rule. The previous decade had seen an increasingly volatile set of circumstances unfolding across the colonial empire as the world economic crisis deepened. Where living conditions deteriorated, social unrest followed. In the West Indies and across Africa there were miners’ strikes and riots. The British public observed these events with a growing sense of alarm. Criticism of the government’s handling of the ‘colonial problem’ was at an unprecedented level (Constantine 1984, pp. 228–30). In 1940 the British Parliament responded by passing the Colonial Development and Welfare Act, laying the foundations for what was imagined to be a radical shift in approach to colonial development.The primary purpose of the new policy was stated in altruistic terms: ‘to promote the prosperity and happiness of the peoples of the colonial Empire’ (Constantine 1984, p. 258). At the end of the war, and on the wave of an economic boom, there was a push to bring rapid development to Africa to compensate for what was widely recognised as years of neglect. In an unpublished manuscript, ‘Economic development plans in the British colonial empire’, Stanner later wrote that there were ‘revolutionary principles’ expressed in this legislation (MS 3752 1/109, no date). Whereas colonial policy of a previous era had been transparently tied to Britain’s own economic interests, this new linkage of development and welfare promised something altogether different.2 Needless to say, a closer look at the level of implementation of this policy reveals a more contradictory situation. For example, government documents of the period direct that ‘from London there will be assistance and guidance, but no spirit of dictation’.The effort was to ‘be one of collaboration between the authorities in the Colonies and those at home’. Diverse circumstances across the Empire were to be recognised and it was argued ‘that Colonial governments, who best know the needs of their own territories, should enjoy a wide latitude in the initiation and execution of policies’ (MS 3752 1/109, no date). Contained within this promise of enhanced local governance was a contradictory rider regarding the ultimate location of authority. This was a colonial system increasingly straining between models of centralisation and decentralisation in the slow transition to decolonisation. Could development best be managed at a local or regional level or from the centralised but distant perspective of London? This debate was at fever pitch by October 1947 when Stanner arrived in London to formally take up the position of director of the East African Institute. It

46

2. Stanner and Makerere: Anthropology in post-war East Africa

was a debate that applied just as readily to the organisation of research. And within this debate lies the crux of the problems Stanner was to encounter at Makerere. development and research

Britain’s new approach to colonial development included an unprecedented role and new funds for research.3 A Colonial Research Committee was established in 1942 under the chairmanship of Lord Hailey to oversee the coordination of research activity and distribution of funds, initially £500,000 per anum, doubling to one million pounds from 1945. Beneath the Colonial Research Committee sat a series of subcommittees, including the Colonial Social Science Research Council (or the ‘research council’ as I shall refer to it). This was the body that funded most anthropological research across the British Empire in the post-war period (although social research attracted just five per cent of the available funds, with the greatest proportion of the annual budget going to medical and agricultural research). The vision for this research program was as wide as the empire; as Stanner was negotiating the terms of his Makerere position from Borneo,Wilson encouraged him to bring with him ‘any ideas about research needs and priorities in the Western Pacific’ (MS 3752 30/1, 10 February 1947). The proposal to establish a series of social research institutes, including one in East Africa, was conceived with a number of developmental goals in mind. The first was the pressing need for sociological insight into the challenges the colonists confronted in their attempts to bring rapid development to post-war Africa. Simultaneously there was a vision for social development across Africa that prioritised education. If Africans were to have an enhanced role in their own governance, a robust local education system was critical. With this goal in mind a series of vocational colleges were targeted for redevelopment as universities. One of these was Makerere College. The East African Institute was to be a relatively autonomous research centre, but simultaneously to contribute to Makerere College’s transformation into a reputable academic institution. It would be established in the grounds of the college and share many of its resources, but would have its own director. The director would undertake initial field surveys and develop a comprehensive research plan in consultation with the three East African governments (of Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika) and the institute’s advisory committee, and appoint staff to carry out the research. In a scoping study commissioned by the Colonial Social Science Research Council in 1944, Audrey Richards report recommended that the director be allowed ‘the utmost possible latitude in the planning of research’, but it was stipulated by the research council that ‘the central interests of those conducting the Institute should lie in the social, economic, political and linguistic problems

47

Melinda Hinkson

which now confront the inhabitants of the three territories’ (CCSRC in CO 927/172/5). In other words, this was to be an institute engaged in practical research. The institute was to be ‘linked’ with Makerere through an administrative committee, but the director of the institute would be answerable not to the College, nor to the Ugandan government (who had lodged the application for funds for its establishment), but to the research council. Stanner was wary at the outset. He made it clear to Firth that he saw the lack of definition in the relationship between the college, African governments and the research council as deeply problematic.4 He was also aware of the growing chorus of anthropological criticism that saw practical research as of little scientific value, or worse constituting ‘a moral deterioration’ of the discipline, as Evans-Pritchard put it (see Goody 1995, pp. 68–86). Within British anthropology at the time there was a tension between those who believed in the possibilities of practical anthropology, carried out through some collaborative arrangement with governments, and those who felt it was only possible to produce respectable work from within established academic institutions.The practical anthropology camp was most closely identified with Malinowski, Firth and the LSE (whose director, Sir Alexander Carr-Saunders, also chaired the research council), with the purist critics represented by Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard and Oxford (see Stocking 1995, pp. 409–20; Goody 2005, pp. 68–86). There were substantial and ongoing tensions between the Colonial Office and university-based anthropologists around such issues. Stanner was close to both Firth and Radcliffe-Brown, and he felt strongly that the distinction was a false one.5 But, as a theoretically engaged anthropologist, Stanner was at some level sympathetic to the purists’ arguments. Stanner was also concerned that in taking up the Makerere post he would be putting himself well outside the field of consideration for academic positions. He knew there would be little time for writing or his own research. Was he being drawn into a situation that would result in but more ‘wasted years’? On a more positive note Stanner felt his time in the Pacific had prepared him well for the task ahead. He wrote to Firth: You will be the first to realize that the sequence of problems one encounters in moving from New Guinea on the West to the Cooks on the East involves just about everything the British colonies have to face up to anywhere. One good thing it has done for me has been to set me reading and thinking so hard that I have just about made up now for all the years wasted on other things during the war. I am sure I shall be able to work much more quickly and surely in Africa as a result (Firth 6/32, 12 May 1947).

48

2. Stanner and Makerere: Anthropology in post-war East Africa

Stanner outside British consulate, South Pacific, c. 1947–53. Photographer unknown, Stanner Collection, AIATSIS N872-15.

He told his mother that he was ‘going out for three or four months’ to look into the establishment of the institute, and then would return to London to put the plan to the Colonial Office for their approval (personal papers of Mrs P Stanner, 8 February 1948). After drawn-out negotiations Stanner finally arrived in Kampala in February 1948. It did not take long for the challenges of the job to become apparent; just four weeks later differences between himself and WD Lamont, the principal of Makerere College, came to a head. Following a hot-tempered interaction in early March, the two exchanged lengthy letters. Stanner spelt out his frustrations with what he saw as the considerable list of ‘background problems’ that had to be handled. The greatest challenges arose from ‘the number of equities which have to be juggled’ in a highly dynamic and evolving situation on the ground in East Africa. ‘The SSRC,

49

Melinda Hinkson

the Research and African Departments of the Colonial Office, the three local Governments and the High Commission are rather a handful’ (MS 3752 30/1, 19 March 1948). The involvement of the College muddied the waters further and there were other factors and uncertainties to contend with including the unresolved issue of whether the institute would be a permanent organisation or not. It is clear that a convoluted conjunction of difficult issues came together in the establishment of the East African Institute. He told his mother that trying to understand the context in which he was working was ‘like trying to get hold of wet soap in the bath’, and that attempting to conceptualise a workable model for the institute had caused him ‘several months of anxiety’ (personal papers of Mrs P Stanner, 26 May 1948). Governance was a key factor, but Stanner also dedicated an inordinate amount of time to the challenge of securing buildings. Until there was suitable living and working accommodation there would be no prospect of attracting staff.Yet across Africa there were massive shortages of materials and lengthy delays in building projects. Other resources were also hard to come by. When Stanner managed, ‘with the aid of a spy’, to purchase a field work vehicle — a delivery truck that was spotted being off-loaded from a ship — he considered this a major coup. But fuel shortages restricted its use (MS 3752 30/1, 21 March 1948).

‘i

did not expect any situation quite like this’6

On 30 June 1948, just four months after he had arrived at Makerere, Stanner wrote to Carr-Saunders advising him that he was applying for a readership at Oxford and that he would tender his resignation as Director. He summarised the problems he encountered at Makerere: Putting it briefly, I think the notion of a local body to do regional sociological research has to be dropped, for the time being. Later, it may be found practicable. Now, it is not…The local perspective is poor. The scale of the area is vast, the research problem very great, the local pressures many, and the requirements immediate. I am most strongly of the opinion that the [research council] is the only body capable of making an attack with the weight and the authority required. If you put a Director out here, you merely bury him in the problem. The local machines are too strong, the regional machinery too undeveloped. A local director cannot plot research, sell its value to Government, and see that it is carried out, all at the same time. At all events, I do not think so.…it will take years of anxious local work, in which there is little administrative and no academic future for anyone...And research…cannot be considered apart from academic futures. The main key lies in London (CO 927/123/1, 9 September 1948). 50

2. Stanner and Makerere: Anthropology in post-war East Africa

At the core of Stanner’s difficulty with the proposed model for the institute lay his growing appreciation of the tensions between the various levels of academic and bureaucratic interests in the complex field of colonial Africa. In terms of the organisation of research, he felt local governments should have the capacity to commission and direct projects of immediate interest to them, while what he called the ‘fundamental projects’ should be undertaken by existing university departments and research institutes. According to Stanner, the East African Research Institute should be refocused on the ‘field of longer-range applied researches’. He was despondent and deeply disappointed when it became clear that his advice would not be heeded, but offered to stay on for a further six months to complete the major report on research needs and make whatever other arrangements the Council required if it decided to go ahead with the institute. Stanner was stubbornly convinced that his analysis of the situation was spot on. He protested to Firth that ‘[e]verybody out here, Makerere, Governors and Governments, think I know what I’m talking about’ (Firth 6/32, 18 December 1948). It is true that his work was well regarded by some local authorities, especially the Ugandan government. But Stanner would be proven wrong on the viability of the institute. Audrey Richards, who had done the original scoping research prior to the institute’s establishment, was appointed director after Stanner’s resignation. Under Richards’ stewardship the institute grew to be a success. As Raymond Firth described it to me, where Stanner encountered the lack of clarity in relations between African governments and the institute as a major barrier, Richards was able to use this lack of clarity to her advantage. By virtue of her background and close relations with key authorities in the region (she was close friends with the sister of the Governor of Uganda (Goody 1995, p. 70)) Richards was able to ‘get some privileges and opportunities for the Institute that she might not have got if everything had been written very clearly down’ (Firth, interview with the author, November 2001). In contrast, Stanner’s working class Australian background must have presented a barrier to him being fully embraced by the inner circle of the British colonial order.7 Firth also suggested that the differing attitudes of Stanner and Richards over Makerere revealed a ‘critical and negative’ side of Stanner’s character. What this observation implies is a tendency that is revealed in Stanner’s correspondence with Firth across the 1940s. A combination of Stanner’s passion for ordered forms of social organisation (witnessed elsewhere in his contribution to the war effort, as well as his anthropology), his strongly held views about colonial development and his confidence in his own analytic perspective did not dispose him well to deal with a situation involving multiple and conflicting sets of interests that lay outside of his control. Arguably, Firth’s observation points to two very different approaches to acting in that field. On the one hand Richards was no boat rocker. As she 51

Melinda Hinkson

reflected years later: ‘I made it my business not to criticize European or African officials or to express strong views on policy’ (Richards 1977, p. 169). On the other hand, Stanner was never one to shy away from expressing ‘strong views’ (Firth, interview with the author, November 2001). The pressure from London to transform Makerere College into a university-style institution played its own part in this complicated set of circumstances. In June 1948, the month Stanner officially advised of his resignation, anthropologist Marjery Perham was sent to Kampala by the research council to investigate what had come to be recognised as a ‘very unhappy position’ at Makerere. Tensions between principal Lamont and his staff were palpable as the college was forced through the early difficult stages of transition. Perham reported widespread disaffection among academic staff as the specialist programs they had developed to cater to local needs were ‘being sacrificed to the premature imposition of British standards of university work and customs’ (Carr-Saunders B/3/16, 1 July 1948). Her report also gives a sense of the growing politicisation of East Africans that was occurring in this period, manifest in demands for educational equality and rapid socioeconomic development. The tensions within Makerere were then cut across by an explosive conflict that erupted between Lamont and the research council just months after Stanner’s departure, when the chairman of the College Council sought to intervene in college staffing issues. Lamont was forced to resign when he refused to sack a young female lecturer who was accused by local government officials of being a communist sympathiser and provoking unrest among her African students. This incident was kept quiet by the Colonial Office, and Lamont’s resignation explained in terms of irreconcilable differences between himself and the research council over the roles of principal and chairman. Stanner kept well clear of these politics. He reports having completed some 16,000 miles of survey work in 1948, so would have had little time for such matters. He also felt that of the myriad challenges facing the institute its role in the development of higher education programs did not rank particularly highly.8 But these events go some way to explaining why he found Kampala ‘a hot, dull, culturally inactive town’ and Makerere an ‘isolated enclave within it’ (MS 3752 2/30, ‘Notes for report’). the reputation of research

As Stanner travelled through East Africa collecting data for his researchneeds survey he encountered very different responses from different levels of colonial authority.The field staff he observed were, ‘on the whole, eagerly cooperative.’ In his notes for a report on research needs in Tanganyika Territory he wrote that higher up the chain of command there was a great deal of ‘sensitivity to what is regarded as unreasonable political and

52

2. Stanner and Makerere: Anthropology in post-war East Africa

academic pressure from England’ (CO 927/62/3). Writing to Firth from Kenya in April 1950, this time with the confidence of having just secured his readership at the ANU, Stanner warned,‘I cannot impress on you sufficiently how irrelevant sociological research is thought to be by the majority of administration officials’: The belief is unshakeable that (1) anthropologists do not…carry out their contracts (2) the [research council] selects them badly in the first instance (3) the [research council]’s decisions are arbitrary — an example, a girl is coming to study kikuyu family structure, where this is already well covered by Leakey’s immense [manuscript], yet Kenya says it cannot get workers or funds for jobs it wants done…(4) anthropologists’ obsession with ‘theoretical’ research makes the results uninterpretable by Governments (Firth 6/32, 3 April 1950).

While he may have seen the distinction between practical and theoretical anthropology as a misconception, by the end of his time in Africa Stanner was very much dispirited at the prospects of anthropology having any real influence in this context.9 He complained to Firth that: Even if a new Tylor could establish that some condition opened up by a piece of research were due to a single factor in a single field of policy there’s no serious reason to suppose that a Government could be expected, or would know how, to change its policy and practice except in unimportant matters...It would be much better to whack into students heads the possibility of doing straightforward descriptive studies on a fairly shallow theoretical level and a broad factual front: and plump them down on the Governor’s desk the day the contract specifies…[This] subject’s beginning to bore me stiff, and I suspect you too (Firth 6/32, 3 April 1950).

Yet not all governors were cut from the same cloth. As Stanner was en route to London to take up his position at the East African Institute, a meeting of the African governors in November 1947 debated these issues hotly. A number of African governors were strongly critical of the Colonial Office’s proposed model that saw research remain firmly under the centralised control of London-based bureaucrats. Sir Phillip Mitchell, Governor of Kenya, was a passionate campaigner for decentralisation and the relative autonomy of researchers. He was fiercely critical of the Colonial Office for not having moved faster and more effectively to facilitate the research that Africabased authorities required as a matter of urgency (particularly in the areas of agriculture and medical science). Draft minutes of the 1947 Conference of African Governors show that there was widespread dissatisfaction among East African governors regarding research that had been carried out to date (CO 927/61/8).

53

Melinda Hinkson

While he may have been wrong on the viability of the institute, Stanner’s time in East Africa was by no means wasted. He gained considerable insights into the challenges of development, insights which would serve him well in coming years as he ventured once again into the world of practically engaged anthropology and policy making, this time in relation to Australian Aboriginal affairs. What Stanner observed on the ground in Africa only convinced him further that development aspirations would fail without the input of anthropological expertise. The East African work for which Stanner is best known makes this clear: his exposure of a massive post-war development project failure, the groundnut scheme in Tanganyika. the groundnut scheme

The idea behind the groundnut scheme was to clear massive areas of East African land — 25 million acres was foreshadowed at one point — to be planted with groundnuts, or peanuts. The scheme aimed to make use of hundreds of tractors that had been moved into Africa during the war and now lay idle, to establish a new agricultural economy. But the scheme was poorly conceived and implemented in a great hurry. It proved to be a failure for a whole raft of environmental, logistical and sociological reasons which Stanner documented in detail. While heralded as a large-scale program in mechanised agriculture, the plantation of groundnuts ultimately required a massive mobilisation of labour.Stanner pointed out that the African population being targeted as a workforce were predominantly cattle people who had only entered into waged labour since the outbreak of the war. He saw at the root of the program an attempt to induce Africans into ‘a fundamentally European way of life’ (Stanner 1949, p. 47), without any consideration for their pre-existing ways of doing things or their aspirations. In late 1948 when Stanner visited Tanganyika there were more than 18,000 Africans employed, but they were a tiny proportion of what was required. There were major problems retaining the local labour force and eventually workers were recruited from Mauritius,West Africa and India. By the end of the second year’s growing season, only 2,000 tonnes of peanuts had been harvested, just 50 per cent of the weight of what had been originally purchased as seed. The British Government spent £49 million before the failed scheme was abandoned. In respect of this failed project Stanner was particularly irritated by what he described as the ‘delusional tendency to explain various kinds of difficulties as due to African laziness, ignorance or torpor’: The strongest tendency...in natives, as in ourselves, is to remain as they have been, not to become other than they are and have been…It appears that there is a wide gap between our estimates of African needs, our insight into what should be done, our notions of the speed 54

2. Stanner and Makerere: Anthropology in post-war East Africa

with which we and they should move, and the corresponding ideas of the Africans themselves (Stanner 1949, p. 48).

In these lines we hear Stanner the cool-headed but passionate critic of popular modernisation ideas that were widespread in the middle of the twentieth century. In his criticism of the groundnut scheme’s failure to take local African aspirations into account lie echoes of what he comes to write subsequently about Aboriginal Australia: ‘Assimilation means that the Aborigines must lose their identity, cease to be themselves, become as we are. Suppose they do not know how to cease being themselves?’ (Stanner 1979 (1958), p. 50). In a BBC broadcast, ‘Calling East Africa: departure and landfall’, Stanner looked back on his experiences of pre- and post-war East Africa and identified what he observed to be a ‘growing lack of intimacy’ between colonial administrators and Africans as the most striking feature of the situation (MS 3752 1/103, 27 February 1949). Post-colonial scholars might interpret this observation in highly negative terms, but Stanner was referring to something quite particular — a shift in modes of relating and the introduction of increasingly complex governmental structures and processes that followed the implementation of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act. The new policy, with seemingly ‘revolutionary principles’, failed to meet up to its promise. ‘There are more new ideas’, he observed, ‘more new responsibilities, more plans, more “paper” than ever before. Especially “paper”’ (ibid.). Stanner was critical of what he saw as a veritable explosion of administrative processes, committees, and councils without sufficient coordination or oversight. On the question of the increasing involvement of Africans themselves in the governance of their countries, Stanner observed the growth of a native elite had merely consolidated rather than overcome the gulf between administrators and the people they administered. conclusion

Stanner stayed on in East Africa for a further six months after flagging his intention to resign, and completed a major survey of research needs. This provided the basis for Audrey Richards’ work once she took over as director of the institute. The Ugandan Government lobbied Stanner to continue his ethnographic work, and he returned to complete a short assignment in Uganda en route to Australia in 1950.There was no shortage of opportunities for Stanner in Africa. He felt more optimistic about what could be achieved working for a single government, rather than across the multiple points of negotiation required of the director of the East African Institute. He remained adamant that development would continue to fail while it was prescribed and implemented without critical intellectual input, and as long as ‘the vexing heterogeneity of…ethnographic facts’ (Stanner 1953, p. 422) continued to be ignored. 55

Melinda Hinkson

Ultimately, at the age of 44, he was impatient to return to academic anthropology, and to Australia. He took a gamble and left Africa without any firm job prospects. His timing was prescient. As plans to establish the ANU gathered pace, with Firth on the advisory council overseeing the development of the Research School of Pacific Studies, the prospect of a tenured academic position finally took shape. After drawn out negotiations Stanner was advised in November 1949 that his application for the position of Reader in Comparative Social Institutions was successful. A year later he arrived in Canberra. Stanner’s departure from Makerere marked the close of an important chapter in his career: this would be the end of his tangible participation in British anthropology. But he would carry the legacy of his experience back to Australia with him.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Jon Altman for research assistance at the London School of Economics and the National Archives in London in September 2005, as well as for comments on an earlier version of this paper. I also thank Patricia Stanner for her comments and for allowing me access to, and to quote from, her personal collection of papers. The first stage of research for this paper was carried out during a post-doctoral fellowship at the Centre for CrossCultural Research in 2001–03. The Faculty of Arts, Australian National University, funded periods of research in London in 2001 and 2005. Finally, I thank the staff of the AIATSIS Library for responding to my continual requests with efficiency and good humour. References Archival sources MS 3752 refers to the WEH Stanner collection, AIATSIS Library, Canberra. Firth papers are held in the London School of Economics Archives, UK. Carr-Saunders papers are held in the London School of Economics Archives, London. Colonial Office (CO) files are held in the National Archives, Kew, UK. Colonial Social Science Research Council (CSSRC) papers are held in the National Archives, Kew, UK. Published sources Constantine, S 1984, The making of British colonial development policy 1914–1940, Frank Cass, London. Goody, J 1995, The expansive moment: anthropology in Britain and Africa 1918–1970, Cambridge University Press. Richards, A 1977, ‘The colonial office and the organization of social research’, Anthropological Forum, vol. 4, pp. 168–89. Stanner,WEH 1949,‘Sociological problems of the groundnut scheme in Tanganyika’, The Colonial Review, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 45–8. —— 1953, The South Seas in transition: a study of post-war rehabilitation and reconstruction in three British Pacific dependencies, Australasian Publishing Company, Sydney. 56

2. Stanner and Makerere: Anthropology in post-war East Africa —— 1979 [1958], ‘Continuity and change among the Aborigines’, White man got no Dreaming, Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp. 41–66. Stocking, G 1995, After Tylor: British social anthropology 1888–1951, University of Wisconsin Press.

Notes 1. This work includes a completed manuscript based on his pre-war field work with Kamba people that was never published. 2. Other commentators, such as historian Stephen Constantine, are more sanguine in their analysis, arguing that ‘the emphasis on colonial development and welfare was…essentially a defensive operation, to provide a new justification which would legitimise the perpetuation of colonial rule’ (Constantine 1984, pp. 259– 60). 3. Lord Hailey, author of the monumental (1938) African survey (which had been partially prepared by Malinowski’s students and Stanner’s contemporaries Lucy Mair and Marjery Perham), convinced government officials that if they were serious about development they would need to fund a substantial and ongoing research program. (Memorandum by the Secretary of the Colonial Research Council l6 April 1949. Colonial Office files, file T220/76). 4. He wrote to Firth on 23 May 1947 from Suva: ‘To tell the truth, the papers and reports Wilson sent me have left me rather in the dark as to the state of plans for the Makerere Institute. Have really firm decisions been made, and approved by the Colonial Office, as to the scope of the institute’s work, the broad plan of research, staff arrangements, budget, relationship with the Research Council, the Council of the University, the local Governments; and the powers of the Director? I have now read all the papers sent me, but am still uncertain on many points. Some of them seem to be very important.’ (Stanner to Firth, 23 May 1947. Firth papers, file 6/32). 5. The CSSRC responded to some of the debate around these issues with an internal memo recommending that ‘the best approach for the future is to separate the two aims of undertaking research aimed at assisting the College, and the practical sociological research needed by East African governments’ — but rejects the idea that fundamental and practical research can be really separated into discrete things — ‘the colonial office takes the view that the distinction between “fundamental” and “practical” research is somewhat artificial’ (Colonial Office correspondence, file CO927/172/5). 6. Stanner to Carr-Saunders, 30 June 1948, MS 3752 series 30 item 1. 7. I thank Ian Keen for this observation. 8. ‘I am … coming to believe that higher education may not be the best axis on which sociological research should concentrate its still limited resources’ (Stanner to CSSRC, 9 September 1948, CO927/123/1). 9. Stanner identified certain research projects, especially the Banyu-ruanda migration survey, as ideal for demonstrating the ‘misconception that there is some necessary and irreconcilable opposition between “practical” and “theoretical” social science’ (Stanner to Hudson, September 1949, CO927/62/2).

57

3.

WEH Stanner and the foundation of the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies, 1959–1964 john mulvaney

In 1971 Bill Stanner retired from his Australian National University (ANU) chair and lodged his first application for an Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies research grant. It was rejected, following the emphatic advice of the AIAS council’s anthropologist members (which included Ronald Berndt and Bill Geddes), although it was recommended that he reapply providing more specific details. As acting principal of the institute that year I had the humiliating task of informing Stanner of this rejection. In light of his generous services towards establishing the institute, this was sad and unfortunate. Stanner accepted my personal visit and subsequent formal letter with his accustomed courtesy. He chose not to elaborate his application, not wishing to add, he wrote, to the institute’s ‘problems’ (Stanner to Mulvaney, 8 April 1971). Today, the Stanner Reading Room at the institute pays tribute to this prominent founder. Ignoring many early slights, Stanner generously honoured the institute by depositing in the library 17 metres of invaluable papers that document his varied life’s work. In promoting the concept of the institute, Stanner’s time was neither easy nor rewarding.This chapter attempts to unravel the conflicting strands of prudence, pressures, and politics — both academic and parliamentary — which preceded the institute’s statutory establishment in 1964. wentworth’s proposals

The concept of an Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies was proposed under that title by WC Wentworth MP in about August 1959.1 He circulated a discursive nine-page paper which stressed the ‘importance of the Study of Primitive Peoples’ and the urgency of salvage research before traditional Australian Indigenous culture perished (MS 3752 19/1(c), undated). This document typified Wentworth’s innovative ideas, always impatiently urged and demanding high priority, but too often impractical.

58

3. Stanner and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies

At the same time as Wentworth put forward his concept, the United Nations established an international committee in Vienna on urgent anthropological and ethnological research. Both TGH Strehlow and RM Berndt published papers in the Bulletin of this body during 1959 (Berndt 1959, pp. 63–9; Strehlow 1959, pp. 70–5). Many years later, Wentworth told AIATSIS staff member Jacquie Lambert that he read these articles, and it seems probable that they influenced his thinking. It is ironic that Strehlow and Berndt may have provided ideological inspiration for the institute as they were both fierce critics of the early AIAS. In view of prime minister Menzies’ negative attitude towards him, Wentworth also gave copies of his proposal to his personal friends in Cabinet in order to ensure its discussion. During subsequent months and with the assistance of officers in the Prime Ministers Department,Wentworth revised his paper giving it greater appeal both to academics and government. The proposal was noted at a Cabinet meeting on 8 April 1960 and again on 31 May 1960. KH Herde, a staff member of the Prime Ministers Department, wrote to acting prime minister J McEwen that he considered Wentworth’s ideas ‘too grandiose’ (MS 3752 19/(c)). Herde suggested a simple organisation with a modest program, a view that was supported by ANU vice-chancellor Sir Leslie Melville. Cabinet approved in principle a modest scheme of Aboriginal studies at the May meeting, authorising discussions with the ANU followed by a report to be prepared for government (MS 3752 19/1(c). The revised proposal stressed the practical advantages of a national institution for both its international status and efficient administration, and was designed to appeal to government. Ambitious as ever, however, Wentworth proposed that once this institute was established, it should then proceed to embrace New Guinea studies. Wentworth recommended that it should be established as a national body in Canberra and affiliated with the ANU, ‘under auspices which would give it the necessary standing in the scientific and academic world both in Australia and overseas’ (ibid.). The suggested preliminary council of 16 members may have been compiled astutely by someone other than Wentworth to attract the prime minister’s attention. It included the prime minister (or nominee), the Minister for Territories, the ANU vice-chancellor, a Treasury official, the chair of the National Capital Development Commission, five university representatives, two representing museums and four other persons. anu involvement

ANU vice-chancellor Sir Leslie Melville was asked in July 1960 to undertake a technical study (Stanner & Sheils 1963, p. xi).This initial ANU connection emanated from Wentworth, but was supported by the prime minister. The ANU took this request seriously and expeditiously. Deputy vice-

59

John Mulvaney

chancellor AD Trendall, a confidant of the prime minister, was prudently asked to chair a group consisting of two officers representing the Prime Ministers Department (EJB Foxcroft and Herde) anthropologists Stanner and JA Barnes, and historians Manning Clark and RA Gollan. They met in the University Council room on 21 July 1960 (MS 3752 19/1(c); ANU 742/1960). Hindsight and subsequent controversy make an alliance with the ANU seem academically undiplomatic, but the association requires consideration within the context of that time. In the first place, the request came direct from Cabinet, which is really to say Menzies. His support was essential, and he was a firm advocate for the decade-old university.2 Menzies’ request was a virtual command, while from the university viewpoint the addition of an Aboriginal institute may have been envisaged as a natural addition to the burgeoning university. ‘The university would welcome such a development’ voiced anthropology professor John Barnes (ANU 742/1960), whose enthusiasm diminished as matters progressed. The two prime ministerial officers were more cautious. Foxcroft stressed the informal nature of the discussions and Herde reported that while Cabinet was sympathetic it would only sponsor ‘a modest scale’ scheme, whereas Wentworth’s generous plans were ‘somewhat elaborate’ (MS 3752 19/1(c). Later Interim Council planning overlooked these cautions. Both Barnes and Gollan urged the case for coordinating research in Australia. Significantly, in light of institute policy throughout the 1960s (which largely eschewed historical studies and research into part-Aboriginal communities) Gollan and Stanner saw an opportunity to stimulate historical research on the effect of white settlement on east coast Aborigines. It was resolved that Stanner and Barnes should prepare a discussion paper across a wide thematic field before the group next met on 15 August 1960. Stanner produced such a ‘work paper’ by 27 July (MS 3752 19; ANU 815/1960). Barnes was presumably away and unable to discuss that paper with Stanner, and he wrote separate observations on Stanner’s paper on 9 August. These two contributions were tabled at the meeting on 15 August (MS 3752 19/1(b); ANU 817/1960). Stanner opposed the idea of including New Guinea within the institute’s scope. Barnes argued, however, that it was essential to include Torres Strait Islander studies. He also emphasised that ‘the Institute also will be concerned with the study of persons of partaboriginal descent’, although Stanner apparently disagreed. Barnes believed that affiliation with the ANU should guarantee the academic credentials of all research, but that firm support from all states was essential. Further, full cooperation with, and confidence of, Aboriginal people was a prerequisite. ‘Only in this way’, he wrote, ‘can we forestall the criticism that the Institute is merely another White Australian institution aimed at unmasking the

60

3. Stanner and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies

secrets of aboriginal life’ (MS 3752 19/1 (b); ANU 817/160).3 Barnes now argued that while the institute should be affiliated with the ANU, it should not constitute part of it. Such affiliation was possible, he believed, through ANU representation on institute council, and the assignment of honorary academic status to institute staff. Stanner’s views varied little from those of Barnes, it seems, though he expected the early appointment of a director (who might sit on the ANU Council). ‘There is a need...to avoid, from the outset’, he prudently stressed, ‘the fact and appearance of centralising all research within the institute’ (MS 3752 19/1 (b); ANU817/160), and that leading interstate authorities should be consulted on projects. He was to receive little credit for such moderate views. At the meeting on 15 August, Foxcroft requested a further paper which surveyed past and present Australia-wide activities in Aboriginal studies (MS 3752 19/1(b); ANU 846/1960). Stanner agreed, but argued that such papers were required in every specialist field before any proposed conference could successfully consider the situation. This was the course followed for the 1961 Conference on Aboriginal Studies, discussed below. Herde introduced political realism by stating that ‘the important thing was to obtain the necessary authority’ by making a presentation to the prime minister (ibid.). He supported a structure as outlined by Stanner, but the submission should propose calling a major conference stating the federal implications. Once the prime minister agreed to a conference it should ‘decide how to establish the Institute, not whether to establish it’ (ibid.). In order to meet these requirements, Barnes and (chiefly) Stanner prepared the paper which, presumably, went to the prime minister. It incorporated most suggestions made by Barnes, surveyed the history of Australian anthropology, detailed those universities and museums where (mostly meagre) Aboriginal studies were offered, and outlined research needs. The institute was to be staffed by a director, assisted by a permanent staff of specialists in different fields to guarantee the ‘need to ensure the work done by the Institute is of quality that will command respect’ (MS 3752 19/1(a)). This paper was discussed and amended slightly at the final ANU– government committee meeting on 29 August 1960 (MS 3752 19/1(a); ANU 888/1960). Stanner accepted the invitation to convene a conference in 1961, once Menzies approved the proposed paper to be forwarded to him by the vice-chancellor. There was one significant amendment to Stanner’s paper. Whereas he specified an Interim Council of about six persons, including ANU representatives, this was altered to ‘six to ten persons who are concerned with aboriginal studies’. Despite Stanner’s wording that ‘particularly close ties’ with the ANU were essential, the role of the ANU was weakening.

61

John Mulvaney

This omission of reference to ANU representation probably resulted from the decision to seek the conference sponsorship from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). Barnes offered to consult Professor SJ Butlin, chairman of the SSRC. In his letter accepting the request to sponsor the conference, Butlin expressed a reservation relating to ANU involvement. He wisely observed that: …some of your Anthropologists might not accept this without argument, and I feel that if there are to be domestic disputes of this style, the SSRC should keep clear of them. If the Institute should be created in Canberra, the kind of relationship described would come almost inevitably so I do not think the point is important in substance (MS 3752 19/1(a), 9 September 1960).

If it was considered to be essential, however, Butlin believed that it would be more appropriate for the ANU to sponsor the conference. Barnes sent Butlin’s letter on to Chairman Trendall with the following observations: I do not think that fellow anthropologists will want to quarrel with the arrangement whereby the director and staff of the Institute enjoy a special relationship with the ANU. However, there may be some point in Butlin’s argument that this...should be allowed to arise, but should not be mentioned in the document setting out the scope and functions of the proposed Institute. I think this matter was included in our draft because the Prime Minister’s Department representatives ...wanted us to specify what the relationship of the Institute to the universities would be (ibid., 12 September 1960).

Butlin had indeed grasped the essential problem which was to involve Stanner in bitter ‘domestic disputes’ with anthropologists. As Butlin was a staff member of the University of Sydney, possibly he had discussed these matters with Bill Geddes, professor of anthropology, and inferred that ‘domestic disputes’ were inevitable. the 1961 conference

The Conference on Aboriginal Studies met at University House and the ANU under SSRC sponsorship between 15 and 19 May 1961, and was attended by 55 persons representing many institutions and disciplines. No Aboriginal people were present. Convenor Stanner’s lengthy report recorded unanimous support for a ‘centre’ or institute, although its role was ambiguously portrayed. Readers could infer that it would undertake research, but it seemed more a centre that ‘would provide common facilities that could be drawn upon’ by other institutions and one that should collect records and ethnographic material (MS 3752 19/12(b)). Stanner later

62

3. Stanner and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies

insisted that discussions concerning the future form of the centre were not on the conference agenda, so his general description was in keeping with that understanding (MS 3782 2/16, 9 January 1962). Within a month of the conference, Ronald Berndt in Perth initiated an era of ‘domestic disputes’ and territorial claims, a variant of tiresome Canberra bashing. Berndt wrote a four-page summary of his understanding of the conference, supposedly for his Vice-Chancellor’s information, but more widely distributed (MS 3752 19/12(b), 15 June 1961). At the outset he pointed out that ‘some of us were…wary of the possibility that a Canberra-based body might assume too much authority at the expense of State university claims’ (ibid., and hereafter). Following a summary of the themes of presented papers, Berndt shifted focus from what had transpired to what he desired. It seems probable that he voiced the opinions of several social anthropologists or other anti-Canberra persons who may have lobbied outside the conference and described the centre as a ‘clearing house’ for administering funds to the states. ‘There was general opposition’, he asserted, ‘to the idea that it should have its own specific research workers’. Rather, it ‘was to work through existing universities...to supplement current research’. This conveniently self-interested clearing house would be controlled by a director and an executive committee consisting of representatives of university departments. As anthropology was then represented at only three universities, a critic must infer that this was an ambit claim which might benefit few universities. Such matters, Berndt argued, ‘were unanimously agreed on’. This was an ambitious claim: under Stanner’s chairmanship, the conference never officially discussed such issues. Little wonder that Stanner’s copy of Berndt’s report bears seven question marks in the margin. In a cool acknowledgement of having received Berndt’s letter, Stanner pointed out to Berndt that ‘a number of observations made in your report are at variance’ with his own official report, recently distributed to participants (ibid.). Berndt was not alone in pushing his particular barrow. When Donald Thomson wrote to thank Stanner for the successful conference, he added: ‘I was rather bewildered at the number of people pushing in to get to the grindstone to put an edge on their own personal little axes’ (MS 3752, Thomson to Stanner, 25 May 1961). Stanner forwarded Berndt’s letter to Trendall commenting that it foreshadowed ‘the kind of opposition that may now emerge from several quarters’ (MS 3752 19/12(b), 21 June 1961). the interim council

In early November the prime minister appointed an Interim Council of 16 members ‘to take immediate steps to form a national research organisation which will probably be known as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies’ (MS 3752 19/12(a)). Trendall was appointed as chairman, and

63

John Mulvaney

Stanner deputy chair and executive officer. The council met provisionally on 22 November 1961, when it established a subcommittee ‘to report on the most appropriate relations between the Institute, the Australian Universities and other research and scientific bodies, including the Commonwealth Institute of Anatomy’ (ibid.). Stanner was the subcommittee’s designated chair, while its members included historian RM Crawford, anthropologist AP Elkin, geographer GH Lawton and Wentworth (MS 3752 19/13). Stanner informed the first Interim Council meeting that ‘two outstanding questions were deliberately left open by the Conference’: the scope and organisation of the institute and its research priorities (ibid.). That meeting did, however, agree to a number of points: the prime ministerial title for the institute; that the conference proceedings should be published; that Stanner should act as executive member until a director was appointed; and that the above subcommittee should report by March 1962. In light of Stanner’s subsequent efforts in promoting the need for a national museum (see Stanner 1966), it is relevant that he addressed council on ethnographic collections offered to the Commonwealth and the unfortunate export of specimens from Australia and New Guinea. Stanner and Foxcraft were asked to examine legislation on relevant issues. Optimistically, Trendall looked to Capitol Hill ‘pavilions’ for a location for a permanent institute and museum, while Foxcroft agreed to consult the National Capital Development Commission concerning plans (ICM, 22 November 1961). During 1962 the Interim Council spent much time debating what premises the institute should have, including exhibition and storage areas. With hindsight, this was a mistake. The belief that it could be included within a cultural complex on Capitol Hill, in buildings covering an area Trendall emphasised would be the size of Parliament House, was unduly optimistic and unrealistic. High expectations were encouraged by the prime minister’s departmental representative, James McCusker, who informed the eager council at the 29 July meeting that ‘the Prime Minister has expressed the personal view that the extension of this building should be designed by a really first-rate architect’ (ICM, 29 July 1962). berndt’s role

Before the Interim Council’s meeting on 25 January 1962, Berndt fired his first volley at the institute. In an intemperate letter (dated 4 January) — which adopted ‘we’ before reverting to ‘I’ — he expressed ‘our dissatisfaction with the constitution of the Interim Council’ (MS 3782 2/16; ICM, 25 January 1962). Berndt queried the qualifications of five members, while implicitly criticising the exclusion of himself. He also conveyed an implied threat: ‘If the Interim Council is to be representative it should certainly include our own University. In my view, this is a serious overview which if not rectified will impair...

64

3. Stanner and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies

co-operation from all those concerned in Aboriginal Studies.’ Then he added: ‘Representatives of the three leading and research departments of Anthropology in Australia must be on the Executive Council of the projected Institute’. He clearly envisaged social anthropology as the key discipline (ibid., and hereafter). Stanner responded at length and with moderation to Berndt’s stinging criticism. He explained that the membership of the Interim Council was ‘too large’ in his opinion, but that it was necessary to embrace all disciplines and government advisers; he emphasised that it was only ‘an interim body’. He corrected what he believed were Berndt’s misinterpretations of conference proceedings and objectives and added, significantly: ‘your own main [conference] paper, in entering on the question of the proper arrangement of an Institute, went beyond what was asked. It arrived too late, as you know, for modification’. Stanner insisted that the conference had no authority to go further than its agenda. ‘There was no “implicit arrangement” for the future’, despite Berndt’s claims to the contrary. ‘The fact that some people insisted on going beyond the brief, to explore the question of what sort of Institute should be set up, in no way gave the Conference any rights...or created any sort of obligation’. Stanner assured Berndt that Western Australian university interests were secure. Berndt must accept, he continued, that the government intended an institute to be a national Canberra-based institution. It was a significant cultural innovation, he reminded Berndt, so ‘much more has to be taken into account than the concern of social anthropologists’. This was a timely rebuke. There was no chance that the institute would serve simply as an agency or post office as Berndt’s ‘centre’ envisaged, but it must pursue ‘active research’. Neither would it act like a foundation, merely dispensing research funds, a task more appropriate to the agency of the Universities Commission. Be optimistic, Stanner urged him: ‘with a little statesmanship’ good relations should exist between the institute and other institutions. Future discussions with vice-chancellors were assured. Geddes had written to Stanner before Berndt, on 22 December 1961. He advanced ‘two personal observations’ with brevity and tact. First he suggested that the Interim Council consider appointing representation from Queensland and Western Australia, as both were currently lacking. Second, he suggested that future council should have a majority elected membership from universities and museums, leaving nominated government members in the minority in order to ensure ‘truly impartial research’. Stanner saw little trouble in accommodating these views, provided that the council was not unwieldy in size as a result (ibid.). In discussion at the Interim Council on 25 January 1962, the matters raised by Berndt and Geddes were discussed. Several members reported that they had heard similar criticisms, to which Stanner replied in manner similar

65

John Mulvaney

to his response to Berndt. The meeting concluded that ‘members felt that Dr Stanner’s reply to Dr Berndt was sufficient and that no further action should be taken’ (ibid.). There remained the issue of the institute’s proposed connection with the ANU. Stanner reported to the meeting that he had held independent discussions with four senior colleagues (Sir Marcus Oliphant, Sir John Crawford and professors P Partridge and G Sawyer) at the ANU (MS 3782 2/16). The Interim Council was happy to accept the general drift of the opinions of these senior scholars as presented by Stanner. It resolved that the institute should be a national centre, independent of the ANU, but with the possibility that institute officers might be accorded appropriate ANU status (ICM, 25 January 1962). This issue of an institute–ANU relationship was not resolved until January 1964, as I discuss below. At this meeting some research grants or assistance were provided. Interim Council therefore established the ground rules for funding, specifically that projects had to be ‘reasoned and fully costed, but they should not take the form of general additions to departmental funds’ (ibid.). In future all applications should be considered by disciplinary advisory panels, four of which (Anthropology; Human Biology; Linguistics; and Prehistory and Material Culture) were approved at the third Interim Council meeting (ICM, 10 March 1962). General discussion followed on the respective roles of council and panels, matters left for the subcommittee on scope and organisation. Stanner made a significant comment, which was not then followed up: he felt it important that the Interim Council ‘should not be absolutely bound to follow the advice of the Panels’ (ibid.). stanner’s problems

After acting as the central administrator for institute affairs through 1961, Stanner found that matters became increasingly disagreeable early in 1962. Fortunately for the historical record, chairman Trendall spent January and February in Italy, and Stanner’s correspondence to him survives. In outlining developments it is obvious that Stanner found the institute’s demands on his time increasingly wearing and unrewarding. Barnes was overseas and Stanner was acting head of his ANU anthropology department. He felt anxious that he was neglecting his doctoral research students. Self-interested proposals and correspondence from the Interim Council membership jarred with his ethical code. Interim Council members Andrew Abbie and Wentworth proposed a scheme whereby the institute would establish a department of physical anthropology at the University of Adelaide, Abbie’s university. An irritable Stanner wrote to Trendall: I can make no impression with arguments that we should not commit the Institute at this stage on a principle not yet discussed...before a

66

3. Stanner and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies

Director and principal research officers are appointed...It is one of several matters in which Wentworth is hare-brained (MS 3782 2/13, 15 January 1962).

Stanner went on to report that ‘Berndt has written a rather offensive letter’. He notified Trendall that he was ready to stand down as executive member, observing that it ‘would improve relations with Berndt and possibly Geddes too, if I were...to step into the background’ (ibid.). A month later Stanner confided to Trendall, ‘I have not heard anything further from [Berndt] since replying to a second and even more intemperate letter, in which he accused me of having misled the May 1961 Conference.’ Stanner was hopeful that the establishment of the advisory panels would persuade Berndt that his views were mistaken (MS 3782 2/13, 13 February 4 1962). Given these difficulties, it is perhaps not surprising that Stanner developed a gastric ulcer and was advised to rest (MS 3752 19/15, 24 February 1962). However, he made a special effort to attend the March Interim Council meeting. In warning Trendall of that forthcoming meeting, he wrote: ‘I am not sure the Institute is yet out of the wood’. There was pressure for the panels to meet, which would prove expensive, and he had found that ‘they shrink a bit from doing the hard work I had planned for them’. The anthropologists continued to annoy Stanner.‘Elkin has written to ask that you and I will meet “the Sydney group” informally before the Sydney Council meeting’ he told Trendall in February. ‘I have not encouraged him; that “informal” meeting might look pretty bad to the Adelaide and Melbourne people, and I want none of it’. Stanner expected pressure to put Berndt on the Interim Council, even on the executive. ‘Both Geddes and Berndt have worked on me a bit to that end’, he wrote, ‘and Berndt from having wanted nothing to do with the Institute has now consented to join one of the Advisory Panels “to make my views more widely appreciated”’, Stanner wryly added. The 10 March 1962 Interim Council meeting marked the beginning of the end of Stanner’s creative role in the institute. He asked to be relieved of the chairmanship of the organisation and scope subcommittee. His place was taken by Crawford (ICM item 2, 10 March 1962). At the following meeting, on 28 April, it was announced that a new executive member was needed as Stanner was taking sabbatical leave (ICM item 8, 28 April 1962). Stanner reported to the March council on his correspondence with Berndt, who had agreed to join the anthropology advisory panel but ‘had not changed his views about the proper composition and foundations of the Institute’; no action was recommended by council (ICM item 6, 10 March 1962). At the same council meeting Wentworth suggested that when the permanent council is established ‘consideration should be given to adding

67

John Mulvaney

Some members of the National Conference on Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, 1961: (at rear) NB Tindale, FS Colliver, JH Bell; (on steps) SA Wurm, AA Capell, C Berndt, CP Mountford; (lower steps) TGH Strehlow, H Groger-Wurm, L Oates,TA Jones; (front from left) FD McCarthy, EA Worms, DC Laycock,WF Ellis,W Bryden, RM Berndt, MJ Meggitt, PH Partridge, A Moyle, OA Oeser,WC Wentworth, DJ Tugby, WEH Stanner, AP Elkin, NWG Macintosh, JA Barnes, M Raey, F Gale, AA Abbie, J Cleland, L West,WR Geddes, R Fink, D Casey,TD Campbell. Photographer LJ Dwyer, Stanner Collection, AIATSIS N872-15.

one or two aborigines as [council] members’. This matter was referred to the organisation and scope committee — it was ahead of council thinking (ibid.). Stanner’s reluctant predictions were met at the April meeting when both Berndt and Geddes were added to the Interim Council, subject to government approval (ICM item 1(iv), 28 April 1962). With six of the 20 members, social anthropology became the most highly represented discipline on council, a situation which Berndt doubtless believed was appropriate. At the same time, psychologist Professor DW McElwain was also endorsed as a member, addressing the issue of Queensland representation. stanner’s memorandums

With his own departure near, and with Barnes to assume duties from July, Stanner prepared two documents. The first was a draft written by Stanner for Trendall and addressed to Menzies, requesting additional appointments to the Interim Council (MS 3782 2/13, 13 February 1962). It was undated,

68

3. Stanner and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies

but its sequence must follow the April 1962 Interim Council, when Berndt, Geddes, Barnes and McElwain were recommended for appointment. Both Trendall and Stanner were friendly with Menzies. Earlier in the year Stanner had told Trendall that he had had dinner with Menzies and that the prime minister had asked after him. Doubtless Stanner would have discussed his problems at the institute, so this draft is likely to have struck a sympathetic and rather droll chord with Menzies. It was well suited to the prime minister’s understanding, but the rather prim and diplomatic Trendall never sent it, much to Stanner’s irritation, to judge from his appended note — ‘draft not approved by Chairman. Odd!’ My dear Prime Minister, At its last meeting the Interim Council decided that it would recommend that four additional persons should be co-opted as members — Professors A, B, C and D. While A, B and C have never shown any strong interest in aboriginal studies, and D has expressed himself as deeply opposed to the conception of a national Institute of the kind contemplated, it was felt that to make them members of the Interim Council is now probably the only way in which to remove the suspicion with which the Council’s activities seem to be regarded. In addition, several members of the Council felt that your selection and appointment of them had put them in an invidious position, and that some sort of conciliatory gesture on their part was needed towards others not so honoured. The Council confidently hopes that, from your long experience of public affairs, you will understand the necessity to yield to such pressure. There is of course no suggestion in the Council’s mind of any apology being due to the four ‘nominees’ for their omission in the first place. However, the extent of support within the Council for the co-opting of the four new members indicate a view that you were wrongly advised about its composition (MS 3752 19/15, undated (but post-28 April 1962)).

A further document spelt out Stanner’s concept of the institute’s staff structure in detail. In light of the debates which continued following Stanner’s departure, this memorandum of 1 June 1962 is significant because it sums up his vision for the institute (MS 3752 1/217). It was received by the Interim Council at its meeting on 16 June 1962, the same meeting at which Barnes was appointed executive member (ICM items 2, 17, 16 June 1962). An extract follows: I conceive the task of the permanent Institute to be a national task. The idea of a well-staffed, active national research body is an entirely proper one in the light of the importance of the aborigines in Australia’s domestic and international situation, as well as in the

69

John Mulvaney

light of their singular scientific interest. There appear to me to be no parochial interests to be defended on or through such a body, and none which will be threatened by its activities. Members of the Institute inevitably belong to particular institutions, but they will not represent those institutions on the Institute. They should represent, from a national viewpoint, broad scholarly and public interests in all the fields with which the Institute is concerned. The main function of the Institute will be to add a national effort to the research work undertaken by other bodies. It will do so by using funds that apparently will not otherwise be available to anyone (ibid.).

Possibly because Barnes had not yet returned from overseas, Stanner attended the Interim Council meeting on 7 July 1962. He sat through a recap of arguments against his institute model. Although Crawford found much to support in his proposal, Geddes and Berndt were resolute in their opposition. Berndt went so far as to claim perversely that should the institute become ‘virtually a small university department’ that it ‘would kill’ research in state institutions ‘because the Institute would demand the major allocation of moneys’ (ICM, 7 July 1962). This proved too much for public servant RJ Randall who reasonably intervened to point out that, as they were debating the structure of the constitution, such issues were irrelevant ‘and were the business of Council once it was established’. Stanner again defended his views without rancour and they moved on to drafting the constitution (ibid.). the constitution rejected

This constitution was submitted to the prime minister on 14 August 1962, but it was June 1963 before a lethargic government responded with a bombshell. The secretary of the Prime Ministers Department, EJ Bunting, wrote to the chairman of the institute. He stated that aspects of the proposed constitution were unacceptable. The idea that the institute would establish a museum, a library, and ‘centralise special research collections in Canberra’ was beyond its brief. Further, Cabinet ‘did not...think that the Institute should engage in research in its own right’ (MS 3782 3/11, 28–9 June 1963). Had Berndt and Geddes lobbied so effectively that the institute’s function was simply to be the encouragement and strengthening of existing work being carried out in Australia, by providing financial and other assistance? This ‘modest’ concept undoubtedly represented a reversal of the original instructions from the prime minister (ibid.). the second constitution

The Interim Council’s reaction was summed up by Crawford as one of disappointment and a feeling that they had been wasting their time. When it came to discuss Bunting’s implicit criticism of the need for a director

70

3. Stanner and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies

to head the institute, even Geddes quibbled. Surely, he thought, this post was a necessary requirement. As council recovered from its sense of angry resentment, compromises were agreed upon, and by 19 July 1963 a revised constitution had been written. To judge from subsequent transcripts and minutes, much time indeed was wasted debating the reluctant change from ‘director’ to ‘principal’ so that Cabinet would not regard the institute as unduly grandiose. A useful loophole was inserted to ensure possible expansion at the centre. In its explanatory preamble the following words were used: ‘It will be seen that the use of the words “primarily” in Section 2(a) of the amended draft, and “where necessary” in Section 2(d), puts the emphasis on supporting existing institutions. It does leave a restricted opening for the work directly undertaken by the Institute’ (MS 3782 3/12; ICM 10 August 1963). Not surprisingly, when a replacement for Barnes as executive member was discussed it was announced that Stanner had declined the appointment, which was then accepted by FD McCarthy, a curator at the Australian Museum (ICM, 10 August 1963). The revised constitution was acceptable to Cabinet and it moved relatively swiftly to an Act, receiving Royal assent on 2 June 1964.The resulting institute became a centre for disbursing funds, undertaking little of its own research during its early years. It was not until the 1970s, under the principalship of Peter Ucko, that the institute achieved something closer to the Stanner model. What had happened to change the academic-type model of 1962 affiliated with the ANU? Was it due to state lobbying, which seems possible, or had the prime minister lost interest? Some sense of the situation is revealed in a memorandum Stanner sent in December 1963 to Sir John Crawford, director of the Research School of Pacific Studies at the ANU. This was prompted by Crawford’s plans for expanding anthropology and related disciplines at the ANU. He needed to know whether the scheme for affiliation of the institute was any closer. At the time Stanner penned this he was now again officially involved with the institute for one year, having returned to the institute’s Interim Council in October 1963 to act as chair while Trendall was overseas for six months (ICM, 18 October 1963). The plan for the Institute which I outlined to you in 1961 has gone astray, and I doubt if the body which is taking shape will have much prospect of eventual affiliation with the A.N.U. as the Prime Minister had hoped. I also doubt if he has had all the facts on which he could form a good opinion of what it is to do… Our aim was to form a scientific body that would give all its time to fundamental research concerning the aborigines.The idea of giving it a staff and programme of its own was that it could concentrate on

71

John Mulvaney

basic problems in race, linguistics, prehistory and anthropology. The body now shaping will disburse most of its effort and funds between existing institutions which give part of their time to disconnected projects chosen and steered by those who receive funds.The principal of the Institute will be likely to have to serve as many masters as there are grantees. As I read the proposals, he will be in much the same position as the manager of a research foundation, with an Executive Committee possibly sitting on top of him. Perhaps he may do some personal research, if he has time, and may undertake a small project with one or two scientific officers. But this is a far cry from what we originally had in mind. It will certainly not add up to the well-staffed, active research body which we hoped the A.N.U. would eventually ‘recognise’. While the parallel is not exact, an ‘affiliation’ with the Institute would be rather like an affiliation with the Social Science Research Council… What I would hope for is a letter from the Prime Minister giving a directive: defining a field, setting its limits, saying what aim and method should be, and putting the power somewhere clear. Otherwise, academic politics will get the better of a good idea (MS 3782 1/10, 2 December 1963).

Following Stanner’s advice and a draft letter, Crawford wrote promptly to the prime minister seeking his views on any affiliation between the ANU and the institute, and requesting a meeting with Stanner and himself (MS 3782 1/10, 10 December 1963). A month later the prime minister’s response lacked detail or enthusiasm, its evasive prose contrasting with his purposeful directive in 1960. No meeting was proposed. ‘I have in mind’, he wrote that: …the Institute’s work should be at the level and of the character of university research in this field. For this reason, I envisaged that the Institute would have affiliation of one kind or another with the scholars working in the appropriate departments of the Australian universities. I am convinced that with goodwill the Institute can achieve its purposes, which I see to be in the main, the sponsoring of a modest programme of research in the field of aboriginal studies to assist and complement the work of the existing Australian institutions, thus strengthening their contributions in this field. I believe that the Interim Council is satisfied that on this basis an Institute of Aboriginal Studies can do important and effective work. I therefore feel that the Institute should be permitted to develop from this concept but, when sufficient time has elapsed to allow us to judge the effectiveness of its activities, it might be appropriate to examine the matter again.

72

3. Stanner and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies

In these circumstances, I think you will agree, there is little point in re-opening the discussion of the functions of the Institute and its relationship specifically with the Australian National University (MS 3782 1/10, 10 January 1964). the first council

The first meeting of the AIAS Council following elections under the Act was held on 20 November 1964. Geddes was elected, but he was overseas for a year. Ironically in light of his opposition to Stanner’s concept, Stanner was appointed an acting council member in his place. Stanner’s name was omitted from the list of nominated council members, much to his ‘surprise’. His omission concerned both Wentworth and the Labor MP Kim Beazley Snr. In a note to Beazley, Stanner acknowledged that there had been some ‘misunderstanding’:€‘It apparently did not occur to anyone to ask me what my interest and intention was, but judged them by report’ (MS 3752, 16 November 1964; AIASC 20 November 1964). That brief term ended Stanner’s official connection with the institute until, under Ucko’s principalship, he was provided with a visiting fellow’s office and a grant to collate his papers. In 1965, though, the institute’s concerns were revived by him in the Canberra Times. His proposal for a Gallery of Southern Man was a bold and imaginative concept which broke with traditional museum design and stressed the vibrant humanity of Aboriginal culture. He was continuing the interest in the future of the National Ethnographic Collection and public education which had drawn the Interim Council into areas unintended by government. Interest in Stanner’s concept simmered in the background, just as conservation issues concerning the National Ethnographic Collection worsened. Between 1970 and 1972 the AIAS actively campaigned for a Gallery of Southern Man, in which the institute would be housed.5 Following the election of the Whitlam Labor government in 1972, a Museum Planning Committee was convened. In a statement to that committee on 31 May 1973 titled ‘Observations’, Stanner canvassed his gallery concept. ‘I am concerned’, he said, ‘that the Gallery should not — as did the Institute of Aboriginal Studies in 1961–2 — get caught up in a “States v. Commonwealth” struggle because of dislike and envy of “National” effort. In my opinion the risk of such a development is greater than in the past’ (MS 3752 24/1, 31 May 1973). Unfortunately Stanner was correct, but that is beyond the scope of his contribution to the institute. The Pigott Inquiry on Museums and National Collections was appointed in 1974, followed on 23 April 1975 by the Planning Committee on the Gallery of Aboriginal Australia. As its chair I can testify to the input into that committee by Stanner, a valued member

73

John Mulvaney

whose ideas (and prose) are incorporated within our report. Stanner died 20 years before a much-diluted version of his gallery opened to its council’s criticism. Back in 1973 he prophesied the political pressures which the institution might suffer: There is of course a danger that the gallery could become an instrument of ‘political’ and ‘social’ policy in the narrower senses... There are already sufficient difficulties between and among both Aborigines and Europeans to indicate the wisdom of not allowing a gallery of larger purpose to be captured by any indirect, European or Aboriginal...intent on working for or against...‘narrower’ purposes (ibid.).

Acknowledgments I am indebted to AIATSIS authorities for allowing me access to Interim Council and the AIAS Establishment Papers. Ms Jacquie Lambert provided invaluable advice from her unrivalled knowledge of institute history. Dr Peter Veth and Ms Siv Parker assisted me at crucial times. I am grateful to Mrs P Stanner for assistance. References Unpublished sources ANU Australian National University archives AIASC minutes of the first AIAS Council ICM minutes of the Interim Council MS 3752 Stanner papers, held at the AIATSIS library MS 3782 AIAS Establishment Papers, held at the AIATSIS library NAA National Archives of Australia Published sources Berndt, RM 1959, ‘Areas of research in Aboriginal Australia which demand urgent attention’ Bulletin of the International Committee on Urgent Anthropological and Ethnological Research,Vienna, vol. 2, pp. 63–9. Stanner, WEH 1966, ‘Gallery of southern man for Canberra’, AIAS Newsletter, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 42–8. —— & Sheils, H 1963, Australian Aboriginal Studies, Oxford University Press, Melbourne. Strehlow, TGH 1959, ‘Anthropological and ethnological research in Australia’, Bulletin of the International Committee on Urgent Anthropological and Ethnological Research,Vienna, vol. 2, pp. 70–5. Ucko, P 1983, ‘Australian academic archaeology: Aboriginal transformation and its aims and practices’, Australian Archaeology, vol. 16, pp. 11–26.

74

3. Stanner and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies

Notes 1. In this chapter I use the abbreviation AIAS, as this was the official title during the years investigated. In 1990 the institute became the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, or AIATSIS. 2. This was the year Menzies forced the amalgamation of the Institute of Advanced Studies and Canberra University College, while the Menzies library at the ANU was being planned. 3. This percipient comment came back to haunt the institute with the 1974 ‘Eaglehawk and Crow’ declaration. In 1974 the institute was threatened with closure because of its academic orientation, by urban Aborigines identifying themselves as ‘Eaglehawk and Crow’. See Ucko 1983. 4. I have not seen this second letter. 5. For a summary of museum developments 1965–1973, see Report of the Planning Committee Gallery of Aboriginal Australia, pp. 34 (incorporated in Museums in Australia 1975, AGPS).

75

4.

Stanner: Reluctant bureaucrat barrie dexter

In this essay I reflect upon the nine years, from 1967 to 1976, during which I worked alongside Stanner and HC Coombs on the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. Stanner’s work with the council displayed his extensive knowledge, experience, perceptive wisdom, facility in discussion with anyone — high or low — but also his conviviality, his impish sense of humour, his skill as a cartoonist and writer of doggerel verse during meetings. Coombs put it best in his eulogy in October 1981 when he spoke of Bill as ‘the source of the intellectual and emotional energy behind the Council’s effort to change, not merely the policies of Governments in relation to Aborigines, but the very conception of Aboriginal Australians held by the great majority of their countrymen’. In an address to officers of External Affairs on 16 July 1969 Stanner reflected on this: Mr Holt evidently intended to make the Commonwealth’s response through the Council. He appears to have intended to set it up as some kind of statutory body, with a measure of autonomy, and standing to one side of the conventional public service or departmental structure. It was his intention, or so I understood, to give it a charter of definite responsibilities towards Aborigines throughout Australia. I understood, further, that it would be directly responsible to the Prime Minister but would also have the duty of reporting annually to Parliament.

Prime Minister Harold Holt gave the same outline separately to Coombs (to be chairman) and myself (executive member of the new council for Aboriginal Affairs), and in my case also asked me to accept appointment as head of the Office of Aboriginal Affairs. He also directed us to work through existing Commonwealth and state departments and agencies.

76

4. Stanner: Reluctant bureaucrat

Two meetings of the council were held in November 1967. We were very conscious of the great challenges ahead, and of the ultimate challenge identified by Stanner in his 1968 Boyer Lectures when he observed: The composition of their population is…undergoing a startling change: it is now, in at least some groups, very much more youthful, and growing in size at a very much faster rate, than ours. It follows that their conditions will have to improve faster than ours if they are to stay even at their present relative disadvantage. This is a sobering thought (Stanner 1969, p. 58).

But we were encouraged by the framework Holt had outlined. We agreed that our function was not to become involved in administration, but rather to show a way, and that therefore the life of the council would be short — about three years, we thought. Yet when Prime Minister Holt drowned on 17 December 1967 his promises sank with him. And our task took us nine years, five and a half of them in virtual opposition to the government of the day. We were able to salvage our location in the Prime Ministers Department — but the advantages we had hoped for by being in his department did not eventuate. The next prime minister, John Gorton, was not interested in Aboriginal affairs, and his department was unfriendly. Moreover, Gorton appointed WC (Bill) Wentworth as minister-in-charge responsible to himself (i.e. between us and him). And Billy McMahon, when he came to office, removed us from the prime minister’s office to his improbable creation, the Department of the Environment, Aborigines and the Arts. We had no autonomy, no statute or charter, no instructions of any kind. The staff establishment for my office, which had been agreed at the time of the council’s establishment, was subsequently purged, jeopardising the possibility of effective support for the council. The council considered resigning, as it did several times more during the next bleak five years — but each time it drew back, in the knowledge that it constituted an unprecedented opportunity to work towards real equality for Aborigines and Islanders. Having been left in the soup and without instructions by the change in government, we worked throughout our existence under Holt’s vision, to the extent possible. Stanner was as much committed to this as Coombs and myself. The minister-in-charge proved a problem for us. Wentworth was an improbable person and an even more improbable minister. He travelled furiously — which led Stanner to comment that he had ‘mounted his charger and ridden off in all directions at once’, and Coombs to suggest that he had ‘confused motion for action’. He resented the council’s existence as a diminution of his power. He would have liked to see us dissolved, but the government was not willing to do that against public opinion. We tried

77

Barrie Dexter

our hardest to cooperate with him and to refer most of our work to him, as minister. However, Wentworth rejected or scrambled our submissions, and Cabinet could not make head nor tail of his own submissions which went before it; it merely sent these to committees to study. Wentworth basically failed in almost all the submissions he did get to Cabinet. I wrote to Stanner, who was in hospital in Sydney, on 13 August 1968, reporting the manner in which our major draft outline of proposed policy and budget submissions had been scrambled beyond recognition, and received a reply of 18 August: The various papers all read, and wept over. You know what? Our Bill makes me think of one of those infuriating slot-machines on old railway stations. You put in your penny of advice or counsel; wait for the click that never comes; turn away in despair; and, just as you’re walking away, hear a queer rattle, and out pops — not a bar of chocolate or even an acid drop — but a card saying ‘a tall dark man is coming into your life’.

Yet Stanner and Coombs maintained a tolerant, almost avuncular, attitude to him, arising out of their close association before the war. Thus Coombs — commenting to Wentworth on his first ministerial instruction to me to ‘immediately’ build 5,000 toilets in the Northern Territory — was able to quip to him ‘it’s clear, Bill, why your parents gave you the initials “WC”’. Nevertheless we made progress. We held discussions with two score Commonwealth and state departments and agencies, most of them excluded from Aboriginal affairs in favour of ‘omnibus’ departments (which sought to provide all services for the Aborigines and usually provided none of them well). We and the functional departments devised new approaches and programs Australia-wide in research, health, education, housing, employment and art; and regional studies in some of the worst areas. The three of us travelled extensively, Stanner and Coombs together on some trips. In our first two years one or more of us made contact with most Aboriginal and Islander communities. We covered most of Australia with conferences with Aborigines and Islanders on a regional basis. We sought to achieve federally and in the states a transfer of responsibility for functions from the existing omnibus departments to functional departments or agencies. We were encouraged by the support, even enthusiasm, of all Commonwealth departments and agencies — except our own Prime Ministers Department and the Department of the Interior (responsible for the NT) — and of state departments, including even in Queensland. Stanner shouldered his council responsibilities alongside his position as professor of anthropology at the Australian National University (ANU). He worked hard as a perhaps reluctant bureaucrat. He believed strongly in the potential of the council, as suggested in his comment in a minute of 10 May 1968 to the minister-in-charge whose intention was to destroy it: 78

4. Stanner: Reluctant bureaucrat

Events over the last few months have made very obvious to me that, in respect both of the States at departmental level and of the Aborigines themselves, there is a real need for a consultative body which will give ample time and patience to the widest range of views and demands aimed at the Commonwealth. The Council has already acted in this way with good results.

We regretted that Wentworth did not want to work with and through us. Together we could have been effective. We held meetings with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, as it then was, and with Charles Rowley. He argued strongly that our programs should include ‘part-Aborigines’ on the basis that the white community had treated them as ‘Aborigines’, and this had imposed an attitude of mind in them which, although not the same as that of tradition-oriented Aborigines, was nevertheless different to that of the wider Australian community. On this basis we developed a definition of Aboriginal and Islander for the purpose of our programs:‘An Aboriginal or Islander is a person of Aboriginal or Islander descent who identifies as an Aboriginal or Islander and is so accepted by the community with which he or she is associated’. There were, in other words, three tests: descent (with no question of relative proportions of mixed ancestry, as in the past); identity; and acceptance. In some apprehension we put it through Wentworth to Cabinet in mid 1968, and somewhat to our surprise it was accepted. The definition still applies. During 1969 and 1970 Stanner spent much time in Darwin at the hearing of the Yirrkala writ against the Australian Government and Nabalco. He gave advice where possible to Frank Purcell, counsel for the Aborigines, and himself appeared in the proceedings. He was shocked at the adversarial approach of the Commonwealth counsel, and we tried with minor success to have this muted. He was also very unhappy at the Commonwealth’s role in general, and on return from a week on the Gove Peninsula he wrote a report for the minister-in-charge, the main theme of which was summarised in his first paragraph: ‘I feel obliged to say that I came away disappointed by the Commonwealth’s persona and stance in€the region and by the character and administration of its policy towards the aborigines’. At the end of the Yirrkala case Stanner was confident that Judge Blackburn would rule in favour of the Aborigines. He was bitterly disappointed when this did not eventuate. The end of the Gorton government came in March 1971. In an address to the ANU Congregation on 1 April 1971 on the occasion of being bestowed with the title Emeritus Professor, Stanner said: Unfortunately Gorton’s image of Australian society, like that of many of his compatriots, had no place for Aborigines as such. He saw no justification or need for special policies to help them, and€the idea that Aborigines had special rights to land based on traditional title 79

Barrie Dexter

was to him wholly€unacceptable. He went along with proposals to assist Aboriginal children to get access to€secondary, educational and occupational training and to create a fund to assist Aboriginal entrepreneurs to establish or develop their own business. But he ignored the Gurindji andYirrkala€Aboriginal demands for land, pushed aside Wentworth’s pleas to protect Aboriginal sacred sites€from miners, and dismissed the Yirrkala community’s objections to the opening of a hotel near their settlement with an offer to them of a share of the ownership! In effect he saw no reason to change the€established policy in the Northern Territory or in the States.

McMahon became prime minister on 10 March 1971. Coombs was with him two hours later! He secured several promises on our situation and Aboriginal proposals. (Most of these promises were not fulfilled.) McMahon told him that although he was moving us out of his department he would be appointing to our new department a minister in whom he had ‘full confidence’. But we were able to get out of him a statement of policy in respect to the conference of Commonwealth and state ministers in Cairns on 23 April 1972. This included a section, against pressure from Interior, dismissing the word ‘assimilation’ (but also ‘integration’) as inappropriate. Thus we had a Commonwealth commitment away from assimilation. McMahon’s choice of minister in whom he had ‘full confidence’ was Peter Howson, and it was the Department of the Environment, Aborigines and the Arts over which he was to preside, with Lennox Hewitt as permanent head. Howson has made his views on Aboriginal affairs apparent in a series of press articles in recent months. Coombs assessed him in Trial balance, agreeing with Phillip Adams’ summation that the minister was ‘a pain in the Arts’, and suggesting it would be ‘kindest to regard his term of office as a regrettable interlude best allowed to slide into prompt oblivion’. We had no success during our first five years in our effort to win land rights. On our suggestion McMahon established a committee of all relevant ministers to consider our proposals (and, as it transpired, Interior’s counterproposals). We had hoped that we might find at least some allies but instead we had created a monster, totally opposed to what we were advocating. McMahon did not seem to understand just where his ministerial committee had ended up. He thought they were approving of traditional rights, whereas they were rejecting them. Against our insistent advice that it would be inflammatory to make any statement, let alone one basically rejecting land rights, on Australia Day 1972 he insisted on doing so, reflecting during his long speech that: We decided to create this new form of lease rather than attempt simply to translate the Aboriginal€affinity with the land into some form of

80

4. Stanner: Reluctant bureaucrat

legal right under the Australian system…because we€concluded that to do so would introduce a new and probably confusing component.

The Aborigines were not hoodwinked, and on the same day made their brilliant reply — the establishment late that night of the Aboriginal ‘Embassy’ in front of Parliament House. The Liberal–Country Party Government of 1968–72 reached their lowest point in Aboriginal affairs on 20 July 1972 with the violent removal of the Embassy. Thereafter a virtual ‘non-speak’ existed between the disgusted council and Howson and the government. Astonishingly, in spite of having no executive power and a number of opposed Commonwealth ministers, we had achieved quite a lot by December 1972. We had succeeded in motivating some 40 Commonwealth and state departments to focus on the Aboriginal situation, and in many cases pursue policies and programs proposed by us or developed by them. In some states the administration of Aboriginal affairs was, on our advocacy, being moved away from omnibus departments to functional ones, with considerable benefit to the Aborigines (and this process would be greatly enlarged under the Whitlam government). In addition we had encouraged numerous special interest groups, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, to undertake studies or actual programs, especially in health, housing and law. On our urging some funds, as yet inadequate, were being provided in federal budgets for projects conducted by the states or Aboriginal people or other non-government organisations. Some funds were also being provided to Commonwealth departments for national projects; for example, by health, education, labour and national service. Other funds were made available for the purchase of some (very few) properties (Everard Park (SA) and Panter Downs (WA)) for the Aboriginal communities on them, though it was disturbing that title rested with the Department of the Interior rather than with the Aborigines. We were unable to obtain a proper settlement for the Gurindji at Wattie Creek, but we had nevertheless been able to secure from the government the promise of a 25 to 35-square-mile village area and a water supply, and privately to have been assured by Vesteys that they had no objection to surrendering a substantial area towards a viable property for the Gurindji. Our finger was on literally scores of projects across Australia. And it is not too much to say that the nation was thinking about Aboriginal matters as never before. How was all this possible? Stanner gave a partial answer in a talk to Foreign Affairs officers on 16 July 1969: ‘[Holt’s] conception of the Council…apparently died with him… Nevertheless, now, twenty months€later, a Council for Aboriginal Affairs does exist. Exactly how it has come to be what it is must remain€one of the minor mysteries of history…I do not conceal my disappointment or that it has been a second-rate affair. And when I say

81

Barrie Dexter

Members of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs: (from left) BG Dexter, HC Coombs (Chairman) and WEH Stanner in Adelaide for a meeting of the Council and state ministers, November 1968. Photographer unknown, Barry Dexter Collection, AIATSIS D000987.

that the Council ‘exists’ I have at once to add that that is possibly€not true in a formal sense…there is no basic document covering the Council’s existence and task. There is no formal charter or precise instruction that I have ever seen…We work by understandings that are not spelled out. It is a sort of twilight existence.Yet, on the other hand, in a€realistic sense, the Council is very much an entity, and very much a force to be reckoned with. We are responsible to the Minister-in-Charge of Aboriginal Affairs.We have a name, a telephone number, and an address known from one end of Australia to the other, including Aboriginal Australia. There is an Office of Aboriginal Affairs…We consult regularly with Federal and State instrumentalities, with Universities and research bodies, and with private enterprises, such as the€trading banks. There is no organisation in Australia with our range and intimacy of Aboriginal contacts. There is certainly no department which possesses a comparable body of information about the aboriginals and their needs.We have and spend a valid appropriation of Commonwealth money. We sit up late at night devising ways to help the NT Administration and the State Governments to spend more Commonwealth money, and more of their own, on projects of use to the aboriginals. I am fascinated that we can do all this from a position which is morganatic or de facto rather than€formal, and having so few of the benefits of the clergy’.

I have concentrated on this 1967 to 1972 period because much of what we did during it laid the basis for the next five years. Over the years we developed 82

4. Stanner: Reluctant bureaucrat

increasingly good relations with Labor. We saw eye to eye on most issues, including land rights. This was a good omen in case there was a change of government. Labor was elected on 2 December 1972. The Whitlam Labor Government was sworn in on 5 December, and under it prime minister Gough Whitlam became ‘our’ minister, just as Holt had intended. Two days later, on 7 December, we put three major submissions to him. Firstly, we proposed the purchase of Willowra station in the NT for the resident Aborigines. Whitlam approved this the same€day. This was a ‘major’ submission because its purchase had been blocked by Interior for many€months, and purchase would set the pattern for the future. Secondly, in relation to the Gurindji, we recommended a study of the viability of a cattle station. This was approved. This study led to€the creation of an extensive station, with Vestey’s agreement. It is noteworthy that Whitlam’s pouring of earth into Vincent€Lingiari’s hand at the ceremony for transfer of title was at Stanner’s suggestion, through Coombs. And thirdly, we recommended a freeze of applications for leases (e.g. mining) and of exploration licences on reserves in the NT to halt the mad rush which was occurring. Whitlam approved this, and sent out€instructions the same day, 7 December. On 12 December we recommended further on land rights. We proposed the establishment of a commission to recommend how (not whether) land€rights should be granted, and the appointment of Judge Woodward (who had been leading counsel for€the Yirrkala Aborigines) as commissioner. Whitlam approved this the same day. We subsequently€submitted suggested terms of reference, which were largely accepted. We also made a submission on the Australia–Papua New Guinea border. We recommended that the council be included in discussions (from which we had€been excluded under McMahon) and that we be authorised to consult — for the first time — the Torres Strait Islanders.Whitlam approved this the same day. The PNG border issue was complicated by calls for the border to be moved south, including by Whitlam during the election campaign, when he demanded it be moved south to 10.5 or even 10 degrees. This would have led to many Islanders, fiercely Australian, finding themselves in PNG territory. After consultations with the Islanders, we started from the concept that all inhabited islands must remain Australian, and that thus the border must include them. Here there was an example of Coombs’ brilliance — he developed the idea of an extensive ocean protected zone reserved for use of both Islanders and Papuans. This became a basis of the ultimate settlement. Others have subsequently claimed authorship of the concept. One question we thought hard upon was what we might suggest the government do about the Department of the Interior. It had sought to block any of our attempts in the NT, and assumed a right to try to block us in the states. Well before the election Coombs put a note to Whitlam drawing his attention to the problem. Coombs wrote that Interior was basically a purely 83

Barrie Dexter

administrative department trying to involve itself in matters of high policy. He argued that the only advice the council could give was to abolish it. On election Whitlam did just that. In our pursuit of an over-riding policy of self-determination Stanner was able to draw on his vast anthropological knowledge. For instance in September 1975 when there was much media and parliamentary criticism of the department’s non-intervention in the NT to prevent the continuation of certain traditional marriage customs, Stanner drafted a response for the minister Gordon Byant which Bryant read in parliament on 25 September 1973. In part it ran: I am particularly concerned by the suggestion voiced in some quarters that the Government should intervene, directly or arbitrarily, to prohibit certain betrothal and marriage customs…simply because the customs or arrangements are distasteful or repugnant to our ideas… there is evidence that Aborigines widely are beginning to adapt… voluntarily to their changed circumstances of life. But I believe it to be undoubtedly true that [traditionally oriented] communities by and large…still want to live and as far as we allow them do live in accordance with their own law. Their betrothal and marriage customs are part of that law…In the world of expert scholarship, Aboriginal marriage systems have been recognized for well over a century as a classical instance of institutions governed by rules of general application and enforced by moral and jural sanctions. I am against interference from mere doctrine.

We were shattered when the Whitlam government fell. Our cherished land rights legislation, which we had pursued for eight years, was through the Senate and only required its final reading in the House. Instead it lapsed. On the experience of 1968–72 we were apprehensive about Fraser’s Liberal– Country Party Government. Initially it was a repeat of 1967–72. Submissions by our fine minister, Ian Viner, were ignored by Fraser or bounced back to him. Fraser had been strident during the election campaign about alleged ‘waste and mismanagement’ in Aboriginal Affairs by the department, a vote-catching line in rural Australia. He continued to pursue this line in government. This was serious for the council, which relied entirely on the department. Stanner for his part was very troubled. Three inquisitions were launched against the department, conducted by Harry Bland, David Hay and Keith Pearson. They found nothing of consequence. But that did not stop Fraser and treasurer Reith using the catch-phrase as justification for substantial cuts in the department’s budget, a matter of great concern to the council, which saw its programs reduced or eliminated.

84

4. Stanner: Reluctant bureaucrat

The attacks by Fraser and his close ministers and his department intensified, and were more pronounced than the many assaults we had experienced in the past eight years. On 14 May 1976 I tended my resignation to the minister. He spoke to me like a Dutch uncle, and persuaded me to withdraw the letter (which he put in his bottom drawer) on the promise of joining me in confronting the lies and distortions.We were making some progress in this when Fraser was pulled up in mid 1977 when I managed to get word to him — in itself no mean feat — that I would have to sack 1,500 Aborigines next week. He was furious and lashed about with complaints; funds were restored through an extraordinary performance by the treasurer in the launch of his Budget in the House. Thereafter the department and the council were increasingly treated properly. In January 1976 the council submitted the lapsed land rights legislation to Fraser in some trepidation, as we were not at all sure he would pick it up, or sustain its principal provisions. A study for the government by David Hay proposed modifications we could live with. Fraser wavered under pressure from the right wing of the Liberal Party; but this was countered by strong pressure from senator Fred Chaney and colleagues. While the government was considering the Hay recommendations and parliament was debating the associated amendments there was much media attention to the issue of land rights. Stanner was finally goaded into responding to two articles by Peter Samuel published in The Bulletin in October 1976 that drew on writings by Pastor Albrecht opposing the proposed land rights legislation. His letter, published in The Bulletin on October 18, read partly as follows: In my opinion the best way of perpetuating the old days in which Aboriginals were tricked, cozened, bribed, dummied and done out of land in a score of discreditable ways, often in accordance with laws and regulations, and under the eyes of supine Christian missions, will be to do what Mr Albrecht recommends. That is, to scrap the present land rights legislation in toto, introduce no new legislation, grant no legal title to different tracts of land on Aboriginal reserves to Aborigines who have a traditional right to these lands, grants to be made through existing or amended Northern Territory legislation etc. It was this tricky formula which was cooked up in the late 1960s to avert the fate that white interests in Territory land most feared: an honest effort by government to give Aborigines a legally defensible interest in land, which could stand like a rock against ‘existing or amended Northern Territory legislation’.

It was clear the proposed legislation would be introduced and passed, and with its passing the council considered that it had completed its task. So on our own recommendation the council was terminated on 30 November

85

Barrie Dexter

1976. The Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1976 (NT) was duly passed. I stood down as head of Aboriginal Affairs on my own request two days later, on 24 December 1976. I was exhausted. The three years we had originally expected to devote to the council had stretched to nine. Had these nine years been worthwhile, with all their frustration and long hours? We had each suffered loss. Coombs had lost the respect of some of the business community by championing Aboriginal causes. I had inevitably lost my place as an up-and-coming officer in the Foreign Affairs pecking order, and could not hope for the positions I might otherwise have occupied. Stanner certainly suffered, in that his devotion to the council took up all the time he might otherwise have devoted to writing books. They were never written — a loss indeed to anthropology. Also I wonder whether the very great burdens of frustration and fatigue we each carried might not have led him to ill health. I remember an occasion in about 1975 on some airstrip in the NT, when he and I had just emerged from a grasshopper aircraft, and he began to fall sideways without knowing it. I was able to hold him up. I wonder whether that wasn’t the beginning of his Parkinson’s disease? But we each felt that without doubt it had been worthwhile.We had each gained considerably through our associations with exceptional Aboriginal and Islander people and those genuinely interested in their wellbeing. Above all, we felt that we had shown a way forward for legislators and administrators and contributed to the liberation of Aborigines and Islanders from political control. References Unpublished sources All sources referenced in this paper are from the private papers of Barrie Dexter. These papers have recently been deposited with AIATSIS. For more information on the Dexter papers, consult the Dexter Finding Aid at: <www1.aiatsis.gov.au/ finding_aids/MS4167.htm>. Or contact the AIATSIS Library. Published sources Coombs, HC 1981, Trial balance, Macmillan, South Melbourne. Stanner, WEH 1969, After the Dreaming: Black and White Australians. An anthropologist’s view, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney.

86

Part 2

In pursuit of transcendent value

5.

Frontier encounter: Stanner’s Durmugam jeremy beckett1

Stanner liked to talk about the Aboriginal men he met on the Daly River during his field work there in the 1930s and again in the 1950s. Paundak, the artist,came down and stayed with him at University House in Canberra in 1961. However, he memorialised his relationship with only one, in ‘Durmugam: a Nangiomeri’ (Casagrande 1960; Stanner 1979d). He wrote this in response to a request from a North American anthropologist, Joseph Casagrande, to contribute to a collection, In the company of man (1960), in which senior anthropologists each recalled a memorable informant. Among a number of more or less interesting vignettes, Stanner’s ‘Durmugam’ is remarkable for its vividness and passion. Evidently he meant it to be something more than an occasional paper, and in retrospect it is to be read in the context of the broader project that engaged him between the mid 1950s and late 1960s,2 and which can be summed up under the rubric ‘Appreciating Aboriginal difference’. Stanner was not the first to attempt this task, the genealogy is long (cf. Povinelli 2002, pp. 111–52), but his achievements outlast them: for their eloquence, their imagination, and their disregard for disciplinary boundaries. As we shall see, however, what he celebrated as difference was selective and idiosyncratic. Biography has not found much favour in anthropology; ruling concepts such as culture and society being predicated on some sense of the collective. Casagrande’s collection was out of the ordinary, and it had few successors (Oscar Lewis’s The children of Sanchez (1959) being an exception).The British anthropology in which Stanner was trained was even less sympathetic. However, he was not the first in the Australian field to use the form, since two of his predecessors, W Lloyd Warner and CWM Hart,3 had produced short biographies.

89

Jeremy Beckett

Hart’s and Warner’s biographies were part of ethnographic accounts, Hart’s as one of a series of journal articles on the Tiwi (1954), Warner’s as a ‘personal history’ appended to the second edition of his ethnography, A Black civilization (1958). Stanner’s ‘Durmugam’ attempted something more than ethnography or personal tribute to a favourite informant. He wrote eloquently, and with a style more literary than was usual in academic anthropology. If I were to look for a model, it would be his old — if not fondly remembered — teacher, Bronislaw Malinowski, who is said to have compared himself to Joseph Conrad (also a Pole writing in English).4 As in Malinowski’s stylish Argonauts of the Western Pacific, the anthropologist is his ‘own chronicler’; indeed it is Stanner’s voice that we hear, even though the encounter he is commemorating must originally have been a dialogue. This alerts us to the tension that is intrinsic to biography: against the writer’s temptation to give definition to his hero — and Stanner’s ‘Durmugam’ is all of that — is the ethnographer’s obligation to allow him self-definition, much as the historian is limited by the documentary sources. Warner, apart from an affectionate tribute to an informant who had just died, let Mahkarolla speak for himself in a series of monologues, though we are not told how they were elicited. Hart similarly. Stanner, by contrast, quotes Durmugam verbatim only twice, for the rest of the time reporting his speech or writing about him. This is the anthropologist’s story. Indeed, stepping down from the position of objective scientist, favoured in the anthropology of the day, he reveals something of himself. I think this was intentional. Stanner begins by transporting his reader back to the Daly River in 1932, a quarter of a century before the time he was writing. A fight is beginning, the first he has seen: the men are ‘garishly’ painted with ochres and carrying spears. He writes, ‘The human scene had a savage, vital splendour’ (1979d, p. 67). (When Stanner was writing, anthropologists were supposed to eschew such exotica; even now for rather different reasons they are questionable (Clifford & Marcus 1983, passim)). But, to be truthful, then or now, what field worker’s heart would not leap at such a spectacle! Presently his ‘eyes were drawn and held by an Aboriginal of striking physique and superb carriage’ (Stanner 1979d p. 70).This was Durmugam who, standing almost two metres in height, would have towered over him.The impact of his presence was such as to require Stanner to try to recapture the moment a quarter of a century later. It is discomfiting to think that other anthropologists of his generation might have performed an anthropometric examination, as Norman Tindale often did. Stanner, however, was trying to capture the whole man, in a way that was common enough in literature but uncommon in the anthropology of the day; even now we don’t do it, although we often slip in a photograph instead!

90

5. Frontier encounter: Stanner’s Durmugam

A moment later the spell is broken. This ‘noble savage’ has come over and asked the anthropologist if he ‘enjoyed the show’ — my words, not Stanner’s, of course. â•›This is not after all a primordial scene, we now realise, but the frontier — as of course it must be, or Stanner would not be here! But this irony affects the young anthropologist who had come to the Daly expecting to find ‘uncivilized tribes’ (ibid., p. 80), and it pervades the essay that he writes a quarter of a century later, leaving him and us still uncertain as to just what is his subject matter. Inga Clendinnen presents her paper on Durmugam as an object lesson in ‘the difficulties in the way of keeping cultural differences steadily in mind’ (2005, p. 410). No doubt she is right, but we also have to recognise the difficulty of keeping differences ‘steadily in mind’ when they and the ground are anything but steady. I confess that I am left uneasy by the rarefaction of ‘difference’. For me, it needs always to be seen within a frame of a common humanity, and of a shared history (cf. Wolf 1982), but always without losing it there. Stanner’s account of the frontier along the Daly is powerful and evocative. In North American writing, particularly Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, the frontier moves on, leaving a colonial order in its wake, and the lives of frontiersmen, both native and settler, in disarray (Pearce 1988, pp. 201–2). By contrast, along the Daly River it is ‘stagnant’. Existing in one way or another since the 1870s it is a ‘rotting frontier, with a smell of old failure, vice and decadence’ (Stanner 1979d, p. 80). As Stanner finds it in the middle of the Depression, it is poor, mean and desperate. There have been violent episodes, but the Aborigines have not been displaced; rather they have abandoned their country, drawn here by a craving for tea and tobacco, and a more reliable if meagre supply of food which they can extract from the settlers in return for various services. I detect a hint of reproach in Stanner’s account here for, unwittingly, they have paid a high price for their dereliction in terms of disease, population loss, and increased violence amongst themselves, and even more the breakdown of a cultural order. Stanner was too much an anthropologist of his time not to describe what he saw with nostalgia, in terms of what was missing: ‘many of the preconditions of the traditional culture were gone — a sufficient population, a self-sustaining economy, a discipline by elders, a confident dependency on nature — and, with the preconditions, went much of the culture, including its secret male rites’ (ibid., p. 83). But he is too good an ethnographer not to recognise the ‘vital will of the blacks to make something of the ruined life around them’ (ibid., p. 74), most of all that of Durmugam. Stanner describes the Aboriginal adaptation to the frontier as ‘parasitism’ and he finds it degraded. But Durmugam and perhaps some others seem to reserve some part of themselves outside instrumental relations with the

91

Jeremy Beckett

settlers, redistributing and redefining the effects of their dependence in a mode that is recognisably Aboriginal, even if it is not primordial. The Australian state does not yet have a monopoly of violence here. This is, to borrow Henry Reynolds’ title, The other side of the frontier (1982), where Aborigines are reproducing some parts of their own tradition, taking over other things from neighbours, but the settler presence is never far away. If this is deficient when set against a primordium that can only be imagined, it is what Stanner, like other anthropologists before him and since, has to settle for. In particular — remembering that Stanner was also writing On Aboriginal religion at the time of this biography — there was the ‘Big Sunday’, the Kunapipi cult, which had been introduced from neighbouring groups, taking the place of an earlier cult. At first he describes it, almost dismissively, as ‘a compensatory outlet’ (1979d, p. 85, and hereafter), but a moment later he dignifies it with a ‘concern for the continuity of life’ and ‘in intelligible series with the conventional initiations’. Stanner perceives a ‘family likeness’ to the Melanesian ‘cargo cult’ (a topic on which he was also writing at the time (Stanner 1958)) but he adds that there are differences to be ‘explained by the postulates and ontology of Aboriginal culture’. One might add that that there were also important differences between the external colonialism experienced in Melanesia and the settler colonialism experienced on the Daly, not least the settlers’ use of Aboriginal women and the spread of venereal diseases, matters to which Stanner refers in passing, and Povinelli has discussed at length (2002, pp. 141–3). Durmugam personifies, indeed after Stanner’s glowing physical description one should rather say embodies, this ‘vital will of the Aborigines’, as though so powerful a figure who has killed four men, seemingly as a ritual obligation, is better able to stand out against the forces of disorder and decay. He has ‘a rocklike steadiness’ and, compared with his contemporaries for whom Stanner provides brief and less appreciative vignettes, ‘a deeper and more passionate conviction … of the rightness of Aboriginal ways’ (1979d, p. 74). By an irony of the frontier, he enters into economic dependence on Stanner — appropriately subsidised by hunting, since Stanner like the settlers is hard up — as chief informant, introducing him to the life on ‘the other side’ sometimes directly, by bringing him to ceremonies, sometimes vicariously, as when he talks about the men he has killed. Seventeen years and a world war have passed when Stanner meets Durmugam again.The cash economy has recovered and even the Aborigines are able to acquire things like gramophones. They seem to spend less time on the other side of the frontier, and Stanner has ‘the impression that the traditional culture [is] on its last legs’. (ibid., p. 90) Durmugam, if not on his last legs, is now in his fifties and the keen eyesight that made him such

92

5. Frontier encounter: Stanner’s Durmugam

a formidable opponent in a fight is failing. Younger men are now trying to lure away his wives, particularly the youngest. He musters what is left of his power among his kin and enlists Stanner’s influence with government. This restores the situation briefly, but the truce does not hold. In 1959 he dies. The missionary now established at Port Keats gives him a Catholic baptism and burial. Stanner thinks that he did not really accept Christianity, and devotes the final pages to a description of the mortuary ceremony he would have had 20 and more years earlier, and — for Stanner — should have had even now. The biography the author gives his hero conforms to the western model, though it is perhaps better classed as a memoir since, as Clendinnen has remarked, ‘The Durmugam we are allowed to see is defined solely in terms of his interaction with Stanner’ (2005, p. 423). The writer singles him out from his contemporaries, comparing him favourably with them. At the same time, we don’t learn what his Aboriginal contemporaries thought of him, though gratuitously we are told what they will or should think of him after his death (Stanner 1979d, p. 98). Nor do we learn what Durmugam thought of himself. Regarding his career, it is Stanner who brings together the various phases of his life. Although he knew the man at only two periods, as a 37-year-old and as a 57-year-old, he essays a life-course narrative. He knows Durmugam’s early years only from the subject’s fragmentary memories. Interestingly these don’t go back far enough to touch the primordium: the frontier is already a presence, even if Durmugam spends much of the time on the ‘other side’ of it. Between their time together in the 1930s and their reunion in the 1950s the gap is scarcely filled, perhaps because the old man was not so communicative, perhaps because he was preoccupied with his marital problems. It has been suggested to me that traditionally oriented Aborigines do not take readily to anything like a structured autobiography, and tend to be laconic in remembering the past (Peter Sutton pers. comm., 2007). But even Europeans who are not historically minded may remember particular events, strung together merely as annals, at best a chronicle structured by bodily growth and decay (White 1987, pp. 1–25). Stanner joins up the ends not just to plot a life of a man but the decay of a culture, the trajectory of both pointing downward. On the subject of biography, sociologist Thomas Luckman has written:‘In addition to those elements of an individual life that are predetermined by a social structure, and those that are simply contingent, there are those that are the result of his own actions — and those are guided by biographical schemes that were internalised by him’ (1991, p. 164). Much of what has passed for biography in the anthropological literature has emphasised the structure, producing little more than a personalised life-cycle narrative. (Several of the pieces in the Casagrande collection are of this kind.) Others introduce

93

Jeremy Beckett

change, usually the result of colonial intrusion, as a negative contingency, to which people respond ad hoc so that there seems to be no meaning, and ending in cultural loss. It is the actions ‘guided by internalised biographical schemes’ that we normally think of as the stuff of western biography and autobiography, as well as fiction. Can we perhaps see something like a biographical scheme in Durmugam’s life, or at least Stanner’s telling of it? In 1932, Stanner estimated Durmugam to be about 37, and to have been born around 1895. He attempts to reconstruct the man’s early years, which seem to have been disordered by the recent movement onto the frontier: the father dies mysteriously, the mother soon after, leaving the boy to live with a brother’s brother who fails to get him initiated. Durmugam cannot produce a ‘sequential account’ of the years that follow; he drifts about, sometimes living a ‘truncated Aboriginal life in the bush’, sometimes working for settlers. But at a certain point he travels ‘for adventure and trade’ and becomes active in the Kunapipi cult. Stanner suggests these visits ‘were the most decisive and formative of his life…As he told me these experiences in the sequence of his life story, it was as though his mind and heart had suddenly unified. His expression was rapt, his mood earnest, and he seemed filled with passionate conviction’ (1979d. p. 83). Is it intrusive on my part to be reminded of Christian conversion narratives, with their theme of being lost and then found? But then, these are Stanner’s words, not Durmugam’s, and reflect the writer’s preoccupations. Thereafter, almost everything that Stanner writes about him is in reference to what he calls this ‘new High Culture’, even the descriptions of his stature and physique become integral to his obligation to fight, and on several occasions to kill, in defence of the cult. Durmugam did not himself rearticulate the tradition that went to make it up, and whether he sought out the cult, or whether it found him — perhaps he was the kind of man whom the cultists wanted to recruit — we do not know. The fact remains that he was someone who at a certain moment opted for this particular way of being, and committed himself to it. I think we are meant to understand that others of his generation chose differently, or perhaps fell away. This suggests what we now call agency, but one that, as often happens in our world, he discovered late, and that circumstances were to cut short. Of Durmugam’s career on the settler side of the frontier we hear little except that in the mid 1920s he had ‘joined forces’ with ‘an energetic, vital European’ who was trying his fortune as a farmer (ibid., pp. 82–3).The essay is equally brief about his relationship with the anthropologist. For some reason anthropologists tend to be reticent on this subject, although they may express personal affection, as Warner did (1958). According to Stanner, Durmugam made the first approach and a later one, until the anthropologist realised that here was his chief informant. The relationship took the anthropologist

94

5. Frontier encounter: Stanner’s Durmugam

Durmugam, Daly River region, c. 1950s. Photographer WEH Stanner, Stanner Collection, AIATSIS N2770-86.

onto the other side of the frontier, sometimes actually, sometimes virtually, and it was there that regard grew. But why the Aboriginal partner in this relationship initiated it, and how he understood it, are questions that are not asked, although we learn of his solicitude for his European ‘friend’ made kinsman, and his gratification in being able to discuss the mysteries of ritual and kinship with this stranger — a point that replicates my own field experience in another place (Beckett 1978). Stanner believed he rejected settler values, but evidently that didn’t prevent his recognising the strategic advantage of attachment to individual whites. Clendinnen suggests that his enlisting of Stanner’s influence with government in his marital problems was indicative of a failing influence among his own people, whether because of declining powers, or because he had become isolated (2005, p. 425). Stanner’s career, like that of his contemporaries, was interrupted by war service, but after peace was declared there were a number of false starts before he found a readership at the Australian National University in 1950. Even then he was for a while undecided about his direction. He made a brief visits back to the Daly in 1952 and 1954, and seems to have drafted the article that became ‘The Dreaming’ around this time, but it was not until mid 1956, when he returned from sabbatical leave overseas, that articles that were to make his name began to appear. He had written little on the topic since 1939,

95

Jeremy Beckett

but he now began a period of intense thinking and writing, during which he produced his most important work, and though he began in intellectual isolation he ended by achieving recognition, among colleagues and a section of the public. The period begins with ‘The Dreaming’, published in 1956 and ends with ‘After the Dreaming’, published in 1969, after which, although he continued to write, he became caught up with administrative and policy matters. These two pieces — and there are more, including many he never published — stand as signposts for his project, which can be summarised in terms of revealing the essential character of Aboriginal culture, particularly its religion, to settler Australians, and reflecting on the encounter between them and Aboriginal people. He wrote these pieces with the authority of an anthropologist with long experience of the field, but, as I have suggested, with literary flair, and — in some pieces at least — the capacity to reach beyond the scholarly readership to the public at large. His first essay, ‘The Dreaming’ (1979b), which although repeatedly anthologised in anthropology readers, was first presented to the Canberra Writers Association and published in a collection that was mainly literary (Hungerford 1956). Like Elkin before him, though more subtly and more eloquently, Stanner was arguing that settler Australians should recognise that Aboriginal religion is ‘strangely familiar’ even though profoundly different, to be apprehended inevitably perhaps within the conceptual framework of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also necessarily outside it. The more demanding papers later appearing as a monograph under the title On Aboriginal religion (1963) direct the same challenge to theologians, as well as anthropologists. The message of Durmugam is similar, but the focus this time is upon an individual, and the possibility of understanding and friendship between a settler Australian and an Aboriginal man, notwithstanding the difference. More than a century after Stanner’s birth such a project might seem unnecessary, even patronising, but we must remember that in 1959, if settler Australians thought of Aborigines at all, it was most likely to be in the lurid colours of writers like Ion Idriess (who, as it happened, had written about Durmugam, using his English name ‘Smiler’, writing up his career as a killer). The project required Stanner to persuade settler Australians not just that Durmugam was admirable in their terms, but that he could be admired for the integrity of his difference. The first proposition leads his readers on to the second, culminating in the revelation that Durmugam has killed several men — Aborigines, not whites — as a tribal duty, but, as though provoking the reader: ‘If his duty coincided too neatly with his personal interest, the same might be said of many honoured men in history’ (1979d, p. 88).

96

5. Frontier encounter: Stanner’s Durmugam

At other moments, however, the writing spills over into eulogy: Durmugam is an exemplary Aborigine representing and embodying ‘all the qualities which the blacks admired in a man’ (ibid., p. 98) — though we never hear what the other men Stanner knew thought of him. But he also has qualities that settler Australians can admire, not only a superb physique, extraordinary strength, grace and skill (ibid., p. 72), but a ‘rock-like integrity’; he is courteous of speech and conduct, proof against alcohol and opium, and last but not least, ‘neither importunate or greedy’ (ibid., p. 74). As Clendinnen acutely observes, there is something puzzling about this last quality, since one would expect Durmugam to — using the phrase Fred Myers (1986) has established in the literature — be ‘looking after’ kinfolk, and thus under pressure to use his courtesy kinship relationship with Stanner to meet their needs as well as his own. This, as Clendinnen suggests, makes him look less exemplary, perhaps his ‘hot belly’ (2005, p. 10) had made him too many enemies and alienated those who might otherwise have stood at his back. His being a loner might explain his offering himself as Stanner’s informant. Apprentice anthropologists are warned that the individuals who are most approachable, or who early approach them, tend to be out of the ordinary, and may have an agenda of their own. Since anthropologists spend a long time in the field, this usually becomes apparent as time goes on. However, even during the 1930s, the ‘field’ that Stanner finds himself studying is not going to provide him with either the ordered structures or modal personalities of the classic monographs; the frontier has done for that, and only a few individuals remain to remind him of what he had hoped to find. Durmugam opens to him that aspect of Aboriginal culture that most captivates him, the men’s ritual; it is this that he most wants to communicate to settler Australia, and inspires his most challenging anthropology.5 But the instrumental relationship was inseparable from a personal regard, certainly on Stanner’s part, which had rather more to do with the kind of man he was, than he was able to allow.6 ù Looking again at Stanner’s account of the frontier in the 1930s, it seems relatively non-judgmental as far as the settlers are concerned. They have not actually displaced the Aborigines, and if they are not particularly kind to them, they have no plan to reform them; all they seem to want is a rough and ready accommodation. The Aborigines have been drawn in by their desire for goods, unwittingly exposing themselves to physical and social destruction. Stanner must have known of the dispersals and the killings in other parts of the Northern Territory, but in describing a frontier that is relatively peaceable he is indicating other more insidious threats which the Aborigines could scarcely be expected to have anticipated.They are seduced

97

Jeremy Beckett

by tea and tobacco and devastated by alcohol; only Durmugam seems to hold out, but in the end another set of forces bring him down. The Darwin authorities are scarcely in evidence in the 1930s. By the 1950s they have become the agents of the policy of assimilation, which has been official since 1939, and has the articulate support of a more than usually interested and informed minister, Paul Hasluck. There was little in the way of alternative policy at the time; such criticism as one heard was about the denial of ‘citizen rights’. Stanner, however, has already questioned assimilation in his 1958 presidential address to Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (1979c) and he returns to the attack. Here it is the individual damage he wants to bring out: But old contempt and new solicitude have a common element: a kind of sightlessness towards the central problems of what it is to be a blackfellow in the here-and-now of Australian life. For this reason hundreds of natives have gone through and will go through, the torment of powerlessness which Durmugam suffered (1979c, p. 93).

At this point, eulogy becomes elegy written with scarcely contained grief and anger. But I have to voice a certain reservation. Which is what I would describe as the downside of the biographical mode. Luckman, on this theme, remarks on the ‘the non-identical diachronies of the body…and of “history”’ (1991, p. 151, italics in original). Having Durmugam in his prime, with his superb physique and commanding stature, embodying a still vital Aboriginal way, prepares the reader for the inevitable decline of both; as the body becomes infirm, so does the Aboriginal way. One doesn’t know whether in earlier times old men also lost their young wives to younger men; here we are to understand the man and the social order going down together before a misguided policy. At the time when Stanner was writing, other Australians had written, if less vividly and less perceptively, in what I have called the ‘obituary mode’. In this mode Aboriginal culture had its virtues, but they were not such as to equip them for the modern world; it and perhaps also the people were ‘dying out’, and what would come after was better not to think about. (This mode is comparable to what North Americans were writing about the ‘Indians’, and which Roy Harvey Pierce 1988 has called ‘savagism’.) Stanner, perhaps unintentionally, has slipped into this mode, but he is at the same time resisting it, mounting a last-ditch stand, much as Durmugam did, in the defence of Aboriginal difference. But by centring his argument on his hero, he is — so to speak — leaving out of account those same young men who are stealing Durmugam’s wives. He protests the ‘sightlessness towards the central problems of what it is to be a blackfellow in the here-and-now’ (1979d, p. 93), but what are the young men if not blackfellows? Moreover, as

98

5. Frontier encounter: Stanner’s Durmugam

Clendinnen has pointed out (2005, p. 429), the women are scarcely considered as ‘blackfellows’ either. For Stanner, the value of Aboriginal culture resides with the senior men in whose affairs, particularly their religious affairs, the women simply don’t count.They may in fact have their own ceremonial life, but in this paper the possibility is not entertained, any more than is their role as food gatherers. It’s the men’s hunting that matters, whether Durmugam is doing it or Stanner. The same selective approach to difference applied in other parts of the continent. A few months before writing this, Stanner had visited me where I was conducting a field study in New South Wales. To him the settlement seemed more Australian than Aboriginal, and he sought out an old man who looked a bit like Durmugam, and showed him a bullroarer. Sadly the old man was senile. Most of my informants were of mixed descent, and I fancied that for Stanner they represented a failure of Australian colonisation.7 Ironically, it was a ‘half caste’ who later that night provided a dramatic account of the borba initiation ceremony, putting Stanner in mind of the turn-of-thecentury debates of Frazer and Lang. This brings to the surface the subtext of my paper, for in interrogating the biography of Durmugam we have also been interrogating his biographer. Stepping out from behind the persona of the objective observer, he has declared his commitment, and will go on doing so, most eloquently in his Boyer Lectures, and then in the policy field as a member of the federal government’s Council for Aboriginal Affairs. By the end of the 1960s his recognition of difference has become more inclusive, but I would like to suggest that it began in that moment — an epiphany even — when he watched the fight and saw his hero for the first time. After desultory and inconclusive encounters, the Aboriginality that he was seeking was revealed. It was a glimpse, just for an instant — Stanner knew that the reality was flawed, because of the frontier — but he had seen it. Durmugam became his guide into what now passed for Aboriginal religion, and if it was not quite the ‘real thing’ it had resonances of it. Then, or I think more€likely when, he was remembering their friendship, it enabled an older and more reflective Stanner to think of Aboriginal man as homo religiosus. Maybe this was what he had been looking for all along, but I’m inclined to think that it was the recollection of the encounter that crystallised the idea, and with it a sense of its fragility. Just before writing this essay Stanner had gone in search of the primordium, exploring the stunning rock paintings along the Fitzmaurice River, but the country was uninhabited, and the Aborigines who came with him, apart from Tjandi, did not stay. References Beckett, J 1978, ‘George Dutton’s country: portrait of an Aboriginal drover’, Aboriginal History, vol. 2, pp. 2–31.

99

Jeremy Beckett Casagrande, J 1960, In the company of man: twenty portraits by anthropologists, Harper, New York. Clendinnen, I 2005, ‘The power to frustrate good intentions; or, The revenge of the Aborigines’, Common Knowledge, vol. 11, pp. 410–31. Clifford J & Marcus, G 1986, Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London,. Hart, CWM 1954, ‘The sons of Turumpi’, American Anthropologist, vol. 56, pp. 242– 61. Hungerford, T (ed.) 1956, Australian signpost, an anthology, FEW Cheshire, Melbourne. Luckmann, T 1991, ‘The constitution of human life in time’, in J Bender & D Welbery (eds) 1991, Chronotopes: the construction of time, Stanford University Press, Stanford. Myers, F 1986, Pintupi country, Pintupi self: sentiment, place, and politics among Western Desert Aborigines, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington DC & Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra. Pearce, RH 1988, Savagism and civilization: a study of the Indian and the American mind, University of California Press, Berkeley. Povinelli, E 2002, The cunning of recognition: Indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism, Duke University Press, Durham and London. Reynolds, H 1982, The other side of the frontier: Aboriginal resistance to the European invasion of Australia, Penguin Books, Ringwood. Stanner, WEH 1933, ‘Peril in racial crossing: research urged on half-caste scheme. Part 1. Part 2, The problem of the half-caste’, Sunday Sun and Guardian, (Part 1 published 18 June 1933, Part 2 published 25 June 1933). —— 1958, ‘On the interpretation of cargo cults’, Oceania, vol. 29, pp. 1–25. —— 1963, On Aboriginal religion, Oceania Monograph 11, Oceania Publications, Sydney. —— 1979a, ‘The Aborigines’, in White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938–1973, Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp. 1–22. —— 1979b, ‘The Dreaming’, in White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938–1973, Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp. 23–40. —— 1979c, ‘Continuity and change among the Aborigines’, in White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938–1973, Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp. 45–66. —— 1979d, ‘Durmugam: a Nagiomeri’, in White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938– 1973, Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp. 67–105. Warner, WL 1958, A Black civilization: a social study of an Australian tribe (revd. edn.), Harper & Row, New York. White, H 1987, The content of the form: narrative discourse and historical representation, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London. Wolf, E 1982, Europe and the people without history, University of California Press, Berkley, Los Angeles, London. Young, M 2004, Malinowski: odyssey of an anthropologist, 1884–1920, Yale University Press, New Haven.

100

5. Frontier encounter: Stanner’s Durmugam

Notes 1. The original version of this paper was presented at the Stanner Centenary Conference in November 2005. After reading it, Inga Clendinnen presented me with a copy of the article she had published only a few months before, also on Durmugam and Stanner (Clendinnen 2005). I was pleased to see that at many points we read the paper the same way, but also embarrassed since my article was not yet published. In this, a revised version of my conference paper, I note the main points at which Clendinnen and I converge and the one or two points on which we differ. I do however urge readers to seek out her excellent article. 2. Stanner continued to write after 1969, but he was increasingly preoccupied with administrative and policy matters, and his later writings tend to address these, rather than anthropological matters. 3. CWM Hart and W Lloyd Warner both did field work in the late 1920s under AR Radcliffe-Brown, at the University of Sydney, thus a few years before Stanner. 4. MichaelYoung regards this as apocryphal, although Malinowski certainly admired Conrad (Young 2004, p. 256) 5. Stanner several times told me that Radcliffe-Brown, his mentor, regarded ritual as prior and belief as secondary. 6. Clendinnen’s suggestion that what Stanner finds in Durmugam is ‘the familiar face of an English gentleman’ (2005, p. 426) is challenging, although we have to separate the young Australian of modest background, still in his twenties, who first met Durmugam, and the fifty-year-old university reader and former army officer writing the article. 7. While still a journalist, Stanner had written on ‘the peril in racial crossing’ and ‘the half-caste problem’ (1933). In his 1938 article, ‘Aborigines’ he refers to the ‘wretched half-caste remnants in the eastern States’ (1979a, p. 1).

101

6.

Journey to the source: In pursuit of Fitzmaurice rock art and the High Culture melinda hinkson

Lying at the heart of Stanner’s commitment to Aboriginal people was his experience of what he called the ‘High Culture’, and his writings reveal that its devaluation and decline distressed him profoundly. His pleas for European appreciation and understanding of Aboriginal lifeworlds centred on this concern. Although his writings on Aboriginal religion were grounded in the classics of anthropology, they reveal at moments a mystical tendency; Stanner insisted that in Aboriginal religion there were things that lay beyond the grasp of intellectual analysis (Stanner 1965). Those who knew him might suggest that such an observation revealed something of Stanner’s own makeup; perhaps, as Peter Sutton suggests, a nostalgia for the beliefs of ‘civilisation’ (Sutton to Jeremy Beckett, pers. comm. 2006) that had been undermined first in one world war, and then in a second. Stanner’s admiration, bordering on awe, for the High Culture, was engendered during his pre-war field work around Daly River and Port Keats, in his observations of ceremonial activity, and through his close relationships with men such as Durmugam (as discussed in Jeremy Beckett’s chapter) and Nym Bandak who produced for him a number of paintings of cosmological themes.1 Sutton has suggested that faced with the poverty and crudity of the frontier, Stanner experienced ‘a moral need to attribute positive value to these despised and variably degraded people’ (Sutton to Beckett, pers. comm. 2006). That Aborigines at least had remnants of the High Culture and a mythic and ritualistic commitment to higher things enabled a particular kind of identification with them. In 1958 Stanner undertook the first of two trips into the Fitzmaurice region of north Australia to locate rock-art galleries produced by ancestors of the people with whom he worked.This expedition reflected his scholarly interest in, but also his personal quest to come to terms with, these traces of Aboriginal religion, the vividness of which stood in ironic contrast to

102

6. Fitzmaurice rock art and the High Culture

what he observed to be their fading in contemporary Aboriginal life. The gruelling journeys Stanner made into the Fitzmaurice region in 1958 and 1959 need to be understood in the context of his wider pursuit of things religious.While he gave illustrated lectures on his return to Canberra, Stanner published very little about this work, yet the eloquent diaries he left behind provide a mesmerising window through which to glimpse a harrowing field work experience and at the same time some of the complexity of Stanner’s personality. This episode also helps to establish a broader context for considering his scholarly works on Aboriginal religion. While Stanner’s research in Aboriginal Australia spanned four decades, his most important writings were produced in a decade and a half — commencing with ‘The Dreaming’ in 1953 (published in 1956) and culminating with his 1968 Boyer Lectures, After the Dreaming. His first expedition to the Fitzmaurice provided a source of inspiration for his writings on religion in this compressed period of intellectual production. journey to the source

In a talk on the Fitzmaurice River rock paintings, delivered at University House, Stanner said: …sometimes when I am in that northern country, what the Dreaming stands for — all the ultimate meanings which the human intuition finds in life — take on a very great power. Then I have to resume diplomatic relations with the ANU. Sometimes this is quite hard (MS 845 (11), 30 September 1959).

Throughout the 1950s Stanner travelled five times to Port Keats to revive relationships he had established in 1934–35 during research for his masters and then doctoral theses. The increasing frequency of his trips to north Australia at least partly reflects his growing determination to grasp the cosmological depths of Aboriginal society, culminating professionally in the publication of his Oceania monograph, On Aboriginal religion. He had been preoccupied with the Fitzmaurice since his first field research at Daly River in 1932, during which time he had tried, unsuccessfully, to enlist various of his Aboriginal informants to escort him into the area. The Fitzmaurice was not only a considerable distance and difficult to access from Daly River in the early 1930s. In order to reach the area it would be necessary to cross the territory of Aboriginal people who were feared for their reputation as kidney-fat stealers.2 But by 1958 the situation had changed and he was able to rally together a travelling party from Port Keats. That year he turned 53, and relatives and friends recall a much depleted and physically diminished man who returned home to Canberra on its conclusion. ‘The trip took a lot of steam out of me’, he said in a letter to his student, Jeremy Beckett (9 June 1958, copy in author’s possession). He had in fact lost three stone.

103

Melinda Hinkson

ù In early 1958 Stanner and four Aboriginal companions — Pandak, Perjert, Tjandi [Sandy] and Ngaringari — were taken by water on the HMAS Emu from Port Keats to the mouth of the Fitzmaurice River, and then upriver by workboat and dinghy. They carried with them a heavy load of petrol, engine oil, flour, assorted stores, radio and battery, swags, canvas and guns (MS 845 (9), p. 2).The swirling waters and rapidly changing tides made for a harrowing passage. Camping on the banks of the river the party was forced to rise in the middle of the night, struggling to secure the heavily laden boats in thigh-deep water, then deep mud, as the tide raced out some 20 feet.They stumbled around in the darkness, very much on edge at the real possibility of encountering river sharks and alligators (ibid., p. 3).The following days were hot, with intermittent downpours of rain, the air filled from sunrise with swarms of small flies and mosquitoes. It did not take long for a ‘disconsolate’ mood to settle over the party. Just two days after departing Port Keats, Pandak claimed he was ‘too sick’ to go on and Perjert made it clear he wished to return to the mission. They left Stanner and their two countrymen, choosing to return to civilisation with Commander Ploch as soon as the opportunity arose, just four days after the journey commenced. Stanner noted in his diary that ‘Pandak shook hands, simply wiped an [ironic?] tear from his eye and did not look back’ (ibid., p. 4, square brackets are Stanner’s).Their departure coincided with the breakdown of the outboard motor, and Stanner was immensely frustrated over the next six days as he tried unsuccessfully to repair it. On 23 April, while on the trail of a kangaroo during one of many fruitless hunting trips, the group climbed the hill immediately behind their camp and discovered a shallow rock-shelter that contained a large stylised Wandjina figure, three feet in diameter.This was Purmi, a resting place of the Rainbow Serpent (the original ancestor being, Kanamkek) and very closely located to what Stanner understood to be the cosmological centre of a most important myth that circulated through much of north-west Australia (ibid., p. 6). He was reinvigorated by this find. On 24 April Stanner and his companions finally abandoned the outboard and headed inland, carrying three to four days’ worth of stores. As they made their way north-west across difficult terrain, the two Aboriginal men drew Stanner’s attention to other signs of Kanamkek’s presence in the landscape. Ngaringari had walked through this country once as a child and was able, by memory, to locate the large Yambermin shelter. Stanner was ‘most gratified and excited’ (MS 845 (9), p. 27) by this find, and spent two days documenting the stunning galleries. For much of this work he had to lie on his back, as many of the paintings appeared on the low ceilings.

104

6. Fitzmaurice rock art and the High Culture

Stanner’s rapt engagement with the rock art caves seems not to have been shared by his companions. As they returned to their riverside camp after two days documenting the art at Purmi, having run out of stores, the two Aboriginal men were growing agitated. Ngaringari, whose customary lands they were exploring, announced that he did ‘not like’ this country, and wished to return to the mission. They continued to have sleepless, restless nights, disturbed by ‘spirits climbing the bottle trees’ (MS 845 (9), p. 7; MS 845 (2), p. 27) and a ‘noisy river’ as sharks and alligators flopped about in pursuit of the swarming fish (MS 845 (9), p. 8). On 29 April — after a meagre evening meal of roasted yams, one boiled mullet and a small bream — the men boarded the dinghy armed with shotgun and rifle and went after an alligator that had been prowling near their camp.They tracked him by his red eyes across the river and Stanner managed to give ‘him no.3 shot right in the eyes and skull’. The animal leapt violently into the air, then disappeared. Stanner remained on edge and unconvinced by his companions’ assurances that the alligator had been killed (MS 845 (9), p. 10; MS 845 (2), p. 27). Stanner returned to Purmi again, spending several days of intensive work sketching, measuring and producing careful drawings of the shelters’ paintings, which included images of bullroarer, spear-thrower, rifles, humanoid figures, ships, bottles, and Kanamkek figures. He was particularly pleased with the central Kanamkek figure, feeling that ‘its discovery compensates for all difficulties and privations’. Its proportions were beautiful, he noted, and the ‘effect of design and colour remarkably vigorous’ (MS 845 (9), p. 15). It is unclear what the Aboriginal men were doing while Stanner undertook this work. So caught up in the place, Stanner worked himself up into quite a state. He was overcome by fever and a badly upset stomach, and was forced to spend a day under his mosquito net. The following morning the party woke to grass fires bearing down on the camp ‘in an alarming way’. They ‘spent four exhausting hours beating and back burning in searing conditions, on stoney ground’ (MS 845 (9), p. 17). Stanner had not settled long into work at Purmi when Tjandi spotted smoke rising from the direction of their camp: We all ran to the scarp and were shocked to see a sea of fire roaring up from the river flat towards the camp. Abandoned Purmi — leaving everything there — and ran down hill. First job to get petrol (44, 2 x 4 gall cans, plus oil) aboard the dinghy, together with outboard, and anchored mid-river. Then up to protect camp. Nowhere to move anything: grass and reeds all around, as dry as a bone. Tried with the three of us to block the fire at a small dry creek 40 yds west of camp: front of fire too long (ibid.).

By 4.00 pm they had secured ‘a dead area for 50 yards around camp, and felt reasonably safe’ (ibid.).

105

Melinda Hinkson

The fire turned out to have been deliberately lit by a stockman passing through the area, seemingly unaware of their presence. On 5 May, having completed his meticulous documentation of Purmi, Stanner and party headed downriver in search of other art sites. The outboard motor was still broken, so they were forced to navigate the perilous waters of the Fitzmaurice with paddles.There were a number of close calls with whirling currents and rocks, which the Aboriginal men interpreted as Kanamkek trying to pull them under: Spent the afternoon and night on a high sandy point about midway down the bar. No fish or meat. Supper on a badly cooked damper, with very strong coffee and rum. Tipsy in the moonlight. The river at night here gives out an immense suggestion of natural forces — the roar of the tide, the jutting rocks, the broken skyline. Fires burning in the distance (ibid., p. 22).

On 8 May Ngaringari also abandoned the expedition, leaving for Port Keats with a group of eight Aborigines who were returning to the mission from Auvergne Station. Now only Tjandi remained. He continued to be very helpful but was also ‘acutely miserable at being left alone and very frightened at night’ (ibid., p. 23). Stanner reports that Tjandi lay awake all night with a loaded rifle and gun by his side. A generally depressed mood settled over the pair: ‘Felt too tired, hungry and despondent to do much for the rest of the day... Another cold, rather cheerless night. Both S and I were very hungry — no game, flesh or fish’ (ibid). On 10 May, after weeks of trying to fix the outboard motor, Stanner finally noticed it was missing a gasket between the below- and above-water components. Assembling a makeshift replacement from the cardboard cover of one of his notebooks and camphor from a chapstick, he found to his astonishment that the engine now ran for an hour ‘unfalteringly for 20 miles against the tide’. The men’s spirits were much restored as they set up camp at the end of the day. But the food quest continued to be a considerable challenge in this ‘dry, hopeless looking country’ (ibid.). Stanner was determined to continue this trip, despite ongoing engine trouble, dangerously low supplies, a hostile climate and ‘stark and forbidding’ (ibid., p. 30) territory in which the hunting of game was enormously difficult. It seems fair to speculate that by this stage Stanner and Tjandi must have been on the verge of physical exhaustion. But Stanner was clearly driven on by some greater force. He was not put off by another ‘long and fruitless search’ in intense heat for rock art shelters, nor by the dwindling food supplies. On 11 May he wrote: ‘made a large stew from old rather rotten onions and the last of my (now stinking) potatoes; plus some oatmeal, curry and marmite’ (ibid., p. 24). Meanwhile Tjandi was clearly feeling the strain: ‘S’s nerve cracked when he began to see devils. Came back [after a solo hunting

106

6. Fitzmaurice rock art and the High Culture

expedition] and has been a bit unhelpful about going out alone ever since. The hills are rather sinisterly suggestive’ (ibid., p. 30; emphasis in original). On the afternoon of 22 May Stanner finally shot a large kangaroo, from which he made an ‘excellent stew’ late at night, but he fell asleep too tired to eat. He awoke the following morning to find it ‘burned to cinders!’ (ibid., p. 31).The following night Stanner was awoken by Tjandi frantically hauling him out of his swag as a buffalo stormed their camp: I was dazed and facing wrong way…A breathless minute or two. My pants kept falling down — belt left in net. S with torch and gun, I with .22 and .45, searched for 100 yards back to dinghy. No sign of tracks. Half way there heard extraordinary sounds from river bank — something heavy running fast. Alligator! And, we concluded, coming after us. Our wakening scared it off. Rest of the night passed restlessly half awake, half asleep (ibid., p. 32).

Stanner had organised for HMAS Emu to collect them for the return journey to Port Keats towards the end of May. The day after he and Tjandi began looking out for signs of the boat’s arrival, they walked through lush but ‘unnerving’ country, scarred by buffalo tracks, in search of Paiyinimbi, a site with which Tjandi was familiar. In a ‘somewhat depressed mood’ Stanner broodingly looked up to scan the escarpment when he was ‘jolted’ to his ‘marrow’ by the sight of two large red eyes seemingly gazing straight into his own from the roof of an overhang. He wrote later that this experience left him spellbound for a period of seconds. ‘The first sight, on the instant, in surroundings of utter solitude and heavy quiet, was very disturbing’ (Stanner 1960, p. 9). On locating the Paiyinimbi shelter Stanner was rapt. It was, he noted, ‘an extraordinarily interesting find — a major discovery for this area. A two-level gallery over 200 yards long!’ There were many signs of recent occupation. On first glance Stanner observed the galleries contained ‘hundreds of paintings on walls and ceilings, some of the most excellent standard’. They had been produced by ‘men of genius’. It was a site that would require ‘weeks of very methodical work even of preliminary description’ (MS 845 (9), p. 32). Stanner’s obsessive determination to press on with his pursuit of rock art, despite the fact that they had by now exhausted their most basic supplies — no matches, baking soda, vegetables of any kind remained, just flour and a small amount of sugar — is revealing. He seems to have lost the ability to appreciate that his erstwhile companion Tjandi, who had until now remained so constant and committed despite his own great physical and emotional discomfort, was close to unravelling. Stanner sent Tjandi off to leave a note for the Navy advising of their whereabouts, and to bring their remaining supplies to the site. They would, he decided, ‘stick it out as long as possible’:

107

Melinda Hinkson

S did not return till late afternoon. In extraordinary state — could not account for the time taken; dejected; told me he had spewed from drinking rubbish water. I suspected he had been at the bottle of rum left in my gear but decided to say nothing. He shows great fear of the valley.Will not go deep into it; uses every excuse to get out of it; says it is a ‘proper bad place’. Opposed my burning the grass — all the blacks in the world would die! Gave in to him since he is my last surviving helper. But the snakes are bad, and the grass is a dreadful handicap. One can’t see the fallen rocks (ibid., p. 33).

The narrative account of Stanner’s diary for this trip ends abruptly soon after this entry. He managed a partial documentation of Paiyinimbi before the Navy arrived. Their departure was hampered after Commander Ploch fell badly on a cliff face while inspecting rock art sites (ibid., p. 1). It took Stanner and Tjandi 36 hours to get the wounded man back to the boat. After delivering him to Darwin hospital Stanner returned to Port Keats briefly to recover, and travelled from there to the Yarrar shelter, which lay within a day’s journey of Port Keats. At Yarrar he had, he wrote to Jeremy Beckett, ‘a few more weeks digging, all the drawing, and the main photography’ to complete (9 June 1958, copy in author’s possession). Stanner made another trip into the Fitzmaurice the following year. This time he was able to commission a helicopter to take him relatively close to Kirindjingin cave, an important site he had located on an earlier flight over the area in a light plane. But while the trip by air meant a rapid, troublefree deployment to the area, this second journey was no less harrowing than that of the previous year. (Father John Leary, who knew Stanner in north Australia in the 1950s, recalled Stanner returning from this trip ‘almost two stone lighter, but full of the things he had seen with his own eyes and through the eyes and memories of the old men with him’ (1981, p. 4).) Of the 1958 trip Stanner reflected in his letter to Beckett: ‘I did all I wanted there: found the boundaries and crossings I had hoped to find; three upriver caves, with some splendid drawings (including the original rainbow serpent)’. He surmised that he had by now documented some 600 to 700 art works, ‘enough, I think, to make a new kind of classification as against Mountford’s et al…But the trip took a lot of steam out of me. On the whole course of the river there is not a mark of man — except the paintings’. He was glad to return to the ‘sub-human setting’ at Yarrar (9 June 1958). in pursuit of transcendence

In an address to University House in late September 1958, Stanner observed that the rock art galleries he visited earlier that year were not as spectacular as those at Yarrar. In the absence of any real enthusiasm for his Fitzmaurice

108

6. Fitzmaurice rock art and the High Culture

Nym Bunduck in a rock art gallery at Providence Hill, c. 1954. Photographer WEH Stanner, Stanner Collection, AIATSIS CS 64241.

expeditions (and often in the face of clear demonstrations to the contrary) by the people whose cosmological world he was struggling to comprehend, what was it that drove Stanner, so determinedly, on this expedition? He told his audience he was interested to know whether the presence of Wandjinas could be traced through Arnhem Land across to Cape York: Part of my task is to go along the whole of the sacred path made by the dying Rainbow serpent to find the nature of the marks he [sic] left at each resting place. In this way I may be able to link up and correlate different uses of different kinds of signs and symbols. It seems to me reasonably possible — if physically punishing — to find out how the myths and the correlated art (whether of painting on the rock, or on the body, or in the arrangements of the stones) vary over space and time. I consider these detailed methods necessary if we are to get anywhere at the interpretive phase (MS 845 (11), p. 14, 30 September 1958).3

Ian Keen, in his essay in this volume, observes that Stanner approached Aboriginal religion via a symbolist perspective; ancestral sites and designs functioned as symbols through which meanings could be discursively

109

Melinda Hinkson

expressed. At the heart of this symbolism for Stanner, reads Keen, lay an ‘ontology of life, a “mood of assent”’ (Keen this volume; Stanner 1963, p. 56). Similarly, in a letter to his student and friend TN Madan, written just prior to departing on his second journey to the Fitzmaurice, Stanner wrote that he felt strongly that ‘one can make a truly “structural” study only after and on the basis of the symbolisms which are the matter of the structural forms. I am consequently very gratified to find how useful, reflexively, has been my work on the visual art of these folk’ (3 March 1959, copy in author’s possession). These ideas were consolidated in On Aboriginal religion and ‘Religion, totemism and symbolism’ where Stanner wrote ‘the manifestation of life on a visible, material plane was thus a spiritual function’ (1965, p. 218). Yet this pursuit of a new structuralist analysis provides no sense of the thoroughly corporeal nature of his experience. Stanner leaves a straightforwardly intellectualised description of what he was in fact pursuing along the Fitzmaurice River. In the essay that follows, Peter Sutton perhaps brings us closer to grasping what this trip might have been about. Sutton reminds us that Stanner was fiercely critical of the reductivist tendencies of sociological analysis — especially that of Durkheim (see Stanner 1965) — to attempt to get to the ‘veiled’ (Stanner 1963, p. 15) core of Aboriginal religion. There were dimensions of the beauty and mystery of Aboriginal religious thought and expression that ‘lay, and properly so, beyond the reach of anthropology’ (Sutton, this volume). The closest one might come to grasping these dimensions was through participating in the dense sociality of ceremonial activity itself, and in poetry. Here Sutton shines a light, not only on the great depths of Stanner’s regard for Aboriginal religion and the kind of conceptual model that might be required to grasp it, but also, arguably, on some intimate core of Stanner’s own make-up. This dimension of Stanner’s approach to religion was also observed by Father Leary: The technicalities of his trade could be simply applied, the factual elements could be easily discovered even at a distance, but the deeper things, the things that could not be tabulated, the things in the realm of spirit and motivation and identity, these were more to be absorbed than consciously studied, to be known more by intuition than by intellectual process (Leary 1981, p. 4, emphasis added).

Stanner himself seems to have hinted at something in his own disposition when he told his University House audience that the Wandjina paintings ‘make a profound impression when one sees them’, but that, ‘perhaps a good deal of this is due to being out for long stretches of time in the solitudes’ (MS845 (11), p. 2). In the voracity of his determination to complete these journeys lie signs that Stanner was in pursuit of profound transcendence — he was charged by something more than intellectual interest.

110

6. Fitzmaurice rock art and the High Culture

Beyond reflecting on his response to the hostile and spiritually charged nature of the country through which they travelled, Stanner exhibited little interest in making sense of Tjandi’s loss of nerve. It is almost as if he saw a clear demarcation between the world of the Fitzmaurice paintings and their symbolic meanings and that of the Aboriginal people who were descended from this place but no longer lived in it. Tjandi was guide, companion, assistant, but not teacher nor interpreter of the paintings, nor apparently was he interlocutor regarding their symbolic importance. The Fitzmaurice experience might have contributed something to Stanner’s attempt to wrestle broadly with the relationship between cultural continuity and transformation in Aboriginal life, or his reflection on questions about the value and meaning to Aboriginal people of country that has been abandoned. He later wrote (in an undated (c. 1960s) series of unpublished fragments, ‘The art of an aboriginal province’, in the possession of Mrs P Stanner) about wanting to reveal the ‘detectable unity between the life of the modern aborigines and the meaning of many of the ancient paintings’. But he never achieved this, and in the mesmerising intensity of the bush and charged by the heat, hunger and sleep-deprivation he seems to have been focused in another direction: inwardly. Is it that his time in the Fitzmaurice fed into Stanner’s own personal quest to come to terms with the mystical dimension of life? Stanner was moved to write a poem after his Fitzmaurice expeditions. Epic in scope and eight typescript pages long, ‘From Kimul to Blunder Bay’ has 10 verses, and ends as follows: Let none benighted in these sultry lands Marvel how red the sun, that its last light Should bloodily incarnadine their hands. The mark is on all men. No deepest night Beyond the dark could now obliterate that sight. Fail not to see how serpentine the range, How sinuously writhed in coils the stream, The rocks, how like to scales in the pale, strange Ophitic glitter of their weathered gleam. They are the outwardnesses of the founding dream Of primal Kunmanggur, killed by his son In first gratuity of Man to Man When parricidally the world first won Its fund and increase, and Life found its plan. Who comes here comes where sacramental blood first ran. Here is the Dreaming in its outward show, Timelessly under no meridian,

111

Melinda Hinkson

A groundless locus of the merging O That locked the first coordinates of Man, In viewless, sightless splendour where all things began (Stanner, unpublished manuscript, March 1960, in the possession of Mrs P Stanner).

Here we glimpse something of the conjunction between Stanner’s intellectual fascination and the deep impression the country itself made upon him. Hints of a mystical side to Stanner’s make-up have been alluded to but by no means explained by others, including his friend and mentor Raymond Firth (interview with the author, London, 26 November 2001). John Barnes recalls visiting Ely Cathedral with Stanner in the 1970s where, by chance, a service was in progress, ‘following a new liturgy in medieval surroundings’. Sceptical tourists, we were unexpectedly confronted with an active set of symbols and beliefs, half-familiar, half-novel. Stanner was visibly moved by this experience and muttered sadly something about ‘such a contrast with my own desiccated life’ (Barnes 1982, pp. 86–7).

It is likely that Stanner was in fact muttering about ‘our’ dessicated life. As OHK Spate, director of the Research School of Pacific Studies, observed on the occasion of Stanner being made Emeritus Professor at the ANU in 1972, Stanner found in the Aboriginal world ‘a profound feeling of social and cosmic harmony which we of the modern world have so largely, if not irretrievably, lost’ (Spate 1972, p. 19). continuity and change

There may be a number of reasons why the story of Stanner’s rock art expeditions has until now remained largely within the pages of his field diaries. An obvious and likely explanation is that he simply did not have time to write up this material.4 Another is that he was conscious of his lack of archaeological training. But an unresolved tension at the heart of his work on Aboriginal Australia — which is revealed to some extent in the different orientations of his unpublished and published works — may also provide some insight. Stanner had a deep interest in and understanding of the profound transformations that had been occurring in the lives of Aboriginal people in northern Australia since the late nineteenth century; indeed, this was the subject of his 1933 master’s thesis (see Hinkson 2005). He had become captivated by Aboriginal religion, and went in search of its presence in country, at a time when he observed Aboriginal ceremonial life to be in decline. Before setting off on his second rock art expedition he wrote to Madan: …there is really no true solidarity left yet there is no anarchy either; one has the predictable wings — modernists who can’t catch on to

112

6. Fitzmaurice rock art and the High Culture

the formless new, traditionalists who can’t let go of the deformed old — the expected parties; an almost complete abandonment of ritual; a great appetite for an inflexibly narrow range of things; a craze for gambling, aspirin, grog and such-like; yet somehow…all the timeless categories of thought and life have their way (3 March 1959, copy in author’s possession; see also Beckett this volume).

The recognition of this seemingly paradoxical set of circumstances — what might be characterised as radical transformation anchored in a pervasive and unchanging social orientation — lies at the heart of the wider challenge Stanner faced in coming to terms with Aboriginal religion and Aboriginal life more generally. It is a challenge that many have observed he was ultimately unable to resolve (see Beckett 1985; Keen 1986; Morphy 1988). In the essay that follows Sutton reads On Aboriginal religion as ultimately reconciling this tension in favour of continuity by folding ‘change itself into continuity’. We can only speculate as to whether in the end he may have recognised the paradox: ‘that Aborigines are much concerned with “life”’ (Stanner to Madan 3 March 1959) was an explanation not just for the ‘vitalistic’ content of their rock art, but perhaps also for his companions’ privileging of the domain of the living — back at the mission — over what at the time they may have regarded as abandoned relics of the past.5

Acknowledgments I am very grateful to Jeremy Beckett for sharing with me his insights into Stanner’s commitment to the High Culture and for his comments on an earlier version of this essay. References Unpublished sources MS 845 (2) Field diaries, held at AIATSIS. MS 845 (9) Field diaries, held at AIATSIS. MS 845 (11) ‘The Fitzmaurice River rock paintings’, a talk delivery at University House, 30 September 1958. Published sources Barnes, J 1982, ‘William Edward Hanley Stanner: 1905–1982’, Canberra Anthropology, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 85–7. Beckett, J 1985 ‘WEH Stanner and AR Radcliffe-Brown’, Social Analysis, vol. 17, pp. 126–9. Hinkson, M 2005, ‘The intercultural challenge of WEH Stanner’s first field work’, Oceania, vol. 75, no. 3, pp. 195–208. Keen, I 1986, ‘Stanner on Aboriginal religion’, Canberra Anthropology, vol. 9, pp. 26– 50. Leary, J 1981, ‘Doctor Stanner, anthropologist: an appreciation’, Nelen Yubu, no. 10, pp. 3–5.

113

Melinda Hinkson Morphy, H 1988, ‘The resurrection of the Hydra: twenty-five years of research on Aboriginal religion’, in RM Berndt & R Tonkinson (eds) Social anthropology and Australian Aboriginal studies: a contemporary overview, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, pp. 239–66.

Spate, OHK 1972, ‘Citation to Professor Stanner’, ANU News, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 19–20. Stanner, WEH 1960, ‘Aboriginal rock paintings’, The Etruscan, vol. 9, no. 4, p. 9. —— 1963, On Aboriginal religion, Oceania Monograph no. 11, Oceania Publications, Sydney. —— 1965, ‘Religion, totemism and symbolism’, in RM Berndt & CH Berndt (eds), Aboriginal man in Australia, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, pp. 207–37. —— 1979a (1956), ‘The Dreaming’, in White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938– 1973, Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp. 23–40. —— 1979b (1958),‘Continuity and change among the Aborigines’, in White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938–1973, Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp. 41–66. —— 1979c (1973), ‘Aborigines in the affluent society’, White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938–1973, Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp. 366–83.

Notes 1. In the 1950s Stanner acquired a number of important paintings by Bandak and others, most of which have subsequently been gifted or loaned to national cultural institutions including the National Gallery of Australia, Australian National University and AIATSIS by Stanner’s widow, Mrs Patricia Stanner. At the time of their production, one reputed gallery director allegedly dismissed these works as not being of any significant artistic value because they were painted on masonite. 2. Kidney-fat stealers were regarded as holding potent magic that could cause grievous harm or death. 3. See also Stanner (1979c, p. 378) where he writes: ‘The organon or logic of that system [the old ‘behavioural scheme’ of Aboriginal life] has yet to be fully understood. I think we may eventually find it through the analysis of the symbols by which the Aborigines “managed” the placement and movement of persons, groups and things in space and time, in life and death, and in change and constancy’. 4. Peter Sutton recalls an episode late in Stanner’s life when Stanner showed Sutton a map he had drawn up of the sites he had recorded on the Fitzmaurice. He told Sutton of his great regret that ‘time had run out on him’ and he felt he’d never get to write the book on that area that he once had had in mind (pers. comm., March 2007). 5. In recent years contact with the Fitzmaurice rock art sites has been reinvigorated through a series of major mapping and site recording projects. Graeme Ward, Mark Crocombe and traditional owners of the Fitzmaurice region presented early reports of this research at the Stanner centenary conference, Australian National University, 24–25 November 2005.

114

7.

Stanner’s veil: Transcendence and the limits of scientific inquiry peter sutton

Consistent with both halves, as it were, of his anthropological personality Stanner wrote to his student TN Madan in 1962: ‘We have to use the natural science approach — but we have to avoid AR-B’s [Radcliffe-Brown’s] effort of making human, man-made facts seem non-human; and we have to grasp more of the creative and aspirational side of man than BM [Malinowski] did’ (pers. comm., quoted in Barwick et al. 1985, p. 27; emphases added). Although consciously embracing these two perspectives, Stanner seems to have been somewhat ambivalent about them, alternating in emphasis, at times, between an anthropology which is a kind of natural history of human beings, on the one hand, and on the other an anthropology which is a kind of ennobling searchlight to be cast on even the despised of the world, with whom we share some central mysteries. In a rough and ready sense the latter is the anthropology of On Aboriginal religion (Stanner 1963a), and the former is the anthropology of the ‘territorial organization’ paper of 1965a. Under the On Aboriginal religion approach one truly treats Aboriginal peoples’ ontologies on their own merits, as experiences of transcendence rather than, in the Durkheimian manner of which Stanner was so critical, as the epiphenomena of beings who require the social glue of mystification. In some post-1970 Australianist writing — such as that of John Bern, Annette Hamilton, John von Sturmer, Ian Keen and Grahame Barker — Aboriginal actors are returned to a somewhat less than Durkheimian instrumentalism as individuals who use a dramaturgical arena of life as a medium of political competition between sophisticates as much as in pursuit of social bonds.1 As Jeremy Beckett (1985, p. 127) very aptly summarised Stanner’s position: ‘There were, thus, no maximizing individuals working their way towards an adjustment of interests’, at least not in a way that was integrated with ritual. Howard Morphy considered that Stanner’s ‘opposition to Durkheim led to a

115

Peter Sutton

perhaps reactive neglect of the political and social dimensions of Aboriginal religion, especially as Stanner clearly saw the importance of the political dimension’ (Morphy 1988, p. 243). Ian Keen (1986, p. 46) acutely observed that ‘there are no live actors in [Stanner’s] analysis of Murinbata [Murrinhpatha] religion’. But this is largely true of most writing on Aboriginal ceremonial life that reaches print. The PhD theses and unpublished field notes of the same authors may have abundant detail on the real live actors of the events that are later presented not as historically specific events accompanied by informed and penetrating political exegeses but as tokens of pattern.This is a gap that needs plugging further. A merging of biography and ritual description is what I am suggesting on theoretical grounds. In Stanner’s descriptions the transcendence of the Dreaming, for all the anthropology brought to bear on it, does not seem to be viewed entirely through the lens of cultural relativism. By contrast, for example, Elkin’s (1969) seldom-quoted paper ‘Elements of Australian Aboriginal philosophy’ takes a typically drier and more ‘scientific’ line on the matter — I say ‘typically’ even while mindful of the fact that one of the paradoxes in this story is that Elkin was very much the more openly religious of the two men (see e.g. Wise 1985, pp. 13, 36, 175). The Elkin of Aboriginal men of high degree (1945) is somewhat different. Jeremy Beckett has told me that when he and Elkin discussed Aboriginal ‘clever men’ Elkin’s eyes lit up. Elkin also told Beckett that when he was studying in London in the 1920s ‘he didn’t bother with Malinowski’s seminars, but went to lectures by Oliver Lodge and Alexandra David-Neal’ (pers. comm., 28 July 2006). Lodge was a physicist, humanitarian and spiritualist; David-Neal spent 1912–14 in Sikkim learning telepathy and ‘tumo’ breathing from the Gomchen of Lachen. And yet the very first line of Elkin’s 1969 paper curiously locates the source of the human development of philosophies of ‘cosmogyny’ [sic],2 cosmology and epistemology squarely in Darwinian terms, those of the mental adaptation of Homo sapiens ‘to his environment’, and also in functionalist terms, those of the human need to have a systematic explanation for how things originated and why they are as they are (Elkin 1969, p. 85).3 three forces

Stanner’s combination of scientific, humanistic and humanitarian interests are a nice example of the fact that the directions taken by intellectual work are not simply guided by rational choice, as logical or rebellious outflows from earlier work, but are subject to being driven by forces that come from several quarters. Our control over them is much more limited than we would usually prefer to feel. One force clearly is the legacy of other scholars, past and present, in the sense that so much research emerges from earlier work and gains much of its character from extending, improving or rejecting what came before or is

116

7. Stanner’s veil:Transcendence and scientific inquiry

currently emergent. Here the teaching of scholars plays a role, but also the self-teaching, the choice of exposure to this body of literature rather than that. In this sense Stanner’s recognition of his debt to his teachers RadcliffeBrown and Malinowski, and his critiques of Durkheim and Hiatt, for example, were strong influences in his generation of new ideas and choices of topics. Another force, however, in a sense comes from all directions: it is the often deeply embedded influence on all of us of the contemporary ideas, values, concerns and anxieties of our part of the world in our time in the world. Stanner lived through troubled and unstable and dangerous times, and it would be natural if he were to be partly driven by this to seek a still point in a turning world, a haven of continuity. One of his underlying struggles seemed always to be the reconciliation of continuity and change. I think he wished to deny change in favour of continuity — to maintain the distinction heuristically but at heart reduce the one to the other. The desire to kill off classical antinomies is a legendary pattern in the social sciences — various attempts have been made to erase dichotomies such as individual and society, structure and process, form and function, and so it goes. This mood of intellectual monism, apart from any worthy scientific reasons for its existence, could be interpreted psychologically in many ways, but principally, I think, it is either an attempted exercise in superordinate power, or it reflects a kind of mourning or nostalgia for existential oneness. It depends on whose monism we are talking about. From Stanner’s writings one gets little hint of the former, and strong hints of the latter. For example, in a private memoir he wrote, ‘In the deeper sense, a “tradition” is a flow, a continuity, of transmitted values.The continuity gets broken, so that the values weaken and may change, and men no longer steer by steady stars’ (Barwick et al. 1985, p. 31). It is notable here that it is values, and by implication things of value, not merely the clothes of practice and the forms of thought, whose weakening leads to our being lost. In his own terms, Stanner wished to treat, as ‘the essential problem of [anthropological] study, the stability and constancy of social and religious institutions’ (Stanner 1963a, p. 273, emphasis in original). In this cause, as he said right at the conclusion of On Aboriginal religion: The stable character of aboriginal initiations made them suitable [for the study of the operational structure of transactional life]; almost, so to speak, a ready-made statics, because of their ‘denial’ of time or, what is very much the same thing, their compounding of change (ibid.).

There is a curious rub or apparent inconsistency here, though, between an integrative theoretical standpoint that seeks to reconcile and ‘compound’ if not erase apparent opposites, and, when it comes to certain other matters, a preparedness to sever the personal and political from the ritual and religious

117

Peter Sutton

and place them in a distinct category.This concerns what Stanner called ‘the darker side of the [Murrinh-patha] religion’, including ‘the victimization of women’, ‘self-serving’ ways in which cult leaders used their power, and the use of real or fancied ritual slights as the excuse for frequent homicides (ibid., pp. 163–4). (On Durmugam’s justifications for his various killings see Stanner 1979, pp. 85–7.) Stanner commented that ‘the religion plainly was one that lent itself as easily to private as to political use’ (Stanner 1963a, p. 164). ‘Thus, openly as well as covertly, [the older men] used the rites to sustain the paramountcy of male interests…In this respect political force may have dominated the religion in the interest of men, but it did so only in their secular interest’ (ibid., p. 153), a remark I have always found mysterious. ‘Social and selfish objects were pursued within the religion’. And yet, in spite of all this, ‘in their rites the aborigines had some objects beyond themselves, beyond egotism, and beyond social gain’ (ibid., p. 154). Inconsistent as this may seem on the surface, I think it is in fact deeply consistent with Stanner’s need, if I may suggest this, to quarantine the precious spiritual and ontological core of the religion from attitudes of disrespect. Its abuses were not part of it but ‘uses’ of it. They were not part of its ‘values’. Stanner ‘depicted the use of religious forms as a medium for political action as an aberration’ (Keen 1986, p. 46). But ‘[p]olitical competition and conflict in the field of Aboriginal religion cannot be seen as an aberration, for it is an inevitable part of governance’ (ibid., p. 47). I would attribute Stanner’s quarantining approach to a third kind of force on the directions taken by the work of anthropologists. Rather like the temper of the age is the intellectual temper and axiological temperament of the individual scholar. I’m using the term ‘axiological’ deliberately as an echo of Stanner’s own use of it, because its very occurrence in his work is revealing of his cast of thought. Stanner’s definition of axiology was ‘the theory of the ideals and values by which social persons direct their behaviour’ (Stanner 1967, p. 234). The Macquarie dictionary (2005, p. 95) has it as ‘the branch of philosophy that deals with value systems, including ethics, aesthetics, religion, etc.’. These three curiously fit extremely well with Stanner’s three particular value-oriented interests in public advocacy (ethics), art (aesthetics), and totemism and ritual (religion). Like ‘supererogatory’, ‘postulate’ and ‘sacramentalism’, ‘axiology’ has a ring of the philosophy of religion about it. It is important to note that Stanner was, it is said, influenced in his later years by his study of theology (Barwick et al. 1985, p. 4). active man, contemplative man

In terms of his intellectual temper, Stanner was deeply engaged in the struggle between, on the one hand, the analytical facts of structure, which he could not help both acknowledging and also resisting, and, on the

118

7. Stanner’s veil:Transcendence and scientific inquiry

other, his need to recognise the central place of human action, especially transactions between people in relation to things of value. On this side he was, in terms of the mediaeval dichotomy between the ‘active man’ and the ‘contemplative man’, very much the active man. When it came to field work, administration, warfare and Aboriginal affairs he was also very much a man of action. But possibly one should not take this entirely at face value: sensitive people sometimes engage more vigorously with the world when overcoming a desire to withdraw from it. This desire is usually conceived as part of the need of the mystic for self-immolation, a desire to sacrifice one’s separate mortal self for immortal unity with the divine. It may thus have been Stanner’s own transcendentalism that influenced the way he made the model of ‘sacrifice’ an apt way of envisioning Murrinh-patha religion. Stanner’s field work, unusually for its time, typically gave great importance to getting out onto people’s country with them and mapping it in local cultural terms and in detail, right from the outset in 1932 (Stanner 1932; 1933, p. 378). Even in middle age Stanner took ‘pleasure always in bushcraft’ and undertook ‘two strenuous expeditions up the Fitzmaurice River’ (Barwick et al. 1985, p. 27; see also Melinda Hinkson’s chapter, this volume). In 1979 he gave me access to his Daly River field notes and I was able to compare his 1932 mapping of the Malak Malak and Mad-Ngele areas with my own, as I prepared materials for the Malak Malak land claim. Interestingly, it was Radcliffe-Brown who taught him the value of mapping (Barwick et al. 1985, p. 4). Presumably Radcliffe-Brown’s other students heard the same lectures but did not show as much interest as Stanner in this particular ethnographic process. Radcliffe-Brown, contrary to the bemonacled and caped urbane image some of us have of him, did actually get about at least a little in his early field work in Western Australia and produced a number of site maps for the Pilbara, which lie unpublished in the University of Sydney Archives (n.d. (c. 1911)).4 Stanner’s emphasis on anthropology as a kind of natural history of human beings, one that recognised that we are in a logical sense mammals first and persons later, also belongs here, arguably. There is a compatibility between this evolutionary backdrop position and Stanner’s foregrounded attempts to, as it were, fold change itself into continuity, in the sense that biological adaptation and survival are active processes that make change go to work in the service of genetic continuity (see also Keen 1986, pp. 27–8). On the contemplative side, Stanner’s attraction to matters of the spirit — metaphysical, ethical and aesthetic — stands in an almost awkward relationship to his scientific interests but not, I would suggest, in relation to his active pursuits. The key to this uneasy juxtaposition is Stanner’s ultimate resistance to pulling the wings off the butterfly in order to find out how they work — the creature is just too beautiful.

119

Peter Sutton

Djanba dancing at Wadeye, c. 1950s. Identified here are Kevin Bunduck,Timothy Tchoma, Leo Tchoma, Joe the Singing Man. Photographer WEH Stanner, Stanner Collection, AIATSIS CS 64289.

This reverence for the reverent, as it were, was combined in Stanner with an unpatronising but deeply protective attitude to Aboriginal people in their difficult situations, such that their spiritual values may have been, overall, given greater emphasis in his picturing of their lives than might otherwise have been the case. I believe this is what Francesca Merlan was referring to when she observed that a ‘tone of profundity and moralism…pervades On Aboriginal religion, some would say giving it a distinctively Stannerian rather than recognizably Aboriginal tone’ (Merlan 1989, p. xiv). Similarly, Ian Keen (1986, p. 37) said that Stanner ‘substitutes [for Murrinh-patha terms] expressions with complex connotations in English without providing evidence that the connotations match those of the Murinbata expressions or narrative elements’.

120

7. Stanner’s veil:Transcendence and scientific inquiry

ù Stanner had a strong distaste for anthropological writers who adopted what he called a ‘tone of conscious superiority to illusion’ (Stanner 1967, p. 237). I don’t think ‘illusion’ or even ‘mystification’ for Stanner were, in this religious context, terms of disdain or criticism. Rejecting two published summaries of Durkheim’s work, one ‘sublimated’ and the other ‘potted’, Stanner commented revealingly: ‘From the first all that is provocative has gone; the second transforms a theory of transcended selves into a theory of public conveniences’ (ibid., p. 239, emphasis added). One of the two main prongs of Stanner’s attack on Durkheim was concerned with Durkheim’s demystification of religion through his reduction of it to an epiphenomenon of society. Stanner’s own oft-quoted dictum in the 1965 paper was: ‘The religion was not the mirage of the society, and the society was not the consequence of the religion. Each pervaded the other within a larger process’ (Stanner 1965, p. 237). Shortly afterwards, in an ironic and cutting style, Stanner attacked Durkheim’s faith in ‘the destiny of science to discover and identify the empirical reality which, since there could be no other, must be behind the distorting veil of mythological imagination’ (Stanner 1967, p. 235, emphasis added). Aboriginal religion, on the contrary, abounded with what Stanner referred to as ‘opaque symbols’ that no amount of ‘painstaking observation’ could interpret. And there were a multitude of other such symbols which were more transparent, and appeared to point to things relevant to human life and experience and yet which also were outside the range of scientific observation, as indeed Talcott Parsons had said (Stanner 1967, p. 235). stanner’s axiology

This was part of the scientific argument against Durkheim. But there was another argument, the axiological one. Stanner attacked Durkheim’s account of Aboriginal religion as being ‘very depreciatory of man’ (ibid., p. 237). Disrespect for Aboriginal people was tantamount to a universal slur. I suggest this is because Stanner would have felt at home with the proposition that a true grasp of Aboriginal religion bolstered the truth of the universality of transcendent value itself. Durkheim was ‘rather too imbued with the notion of the primitivism of the aborigines to let us suppose that he would have thought [better information on Aboriginal rites and beliefs] a fruitful field of further inquiry’ (ibid., p. 237). One of Durkheim’s flaws was his dichotomy between sacred and profane, which Stanner believed needed conversion from ‘the categorical plane to the plane of human interactions or, as I prefer to say, operations and transactions about things of value’ (ibid., p. 234). So I will offer the suggestion here, that these ‘things of value’, in Stanner’s conception, included things of universal and transcendent value,

121

Peter Sutton

and included things of transcendent value to Stanner himself. These values were in this sense the starting point, not the end point, of Stanner’s process of reasoned resistance to the instrumentalism of Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski and others. This makes the general point that there is always an unavoidable role for the subjective, the gestalt, and the personality-based, in the intellectual research process. Reason has its reasons, but they don’t all have to be rational. Some support for this comes from Stanner’s own words: ‘I found that I disliked what had been written on many topics and subjects concerning the Aborigines. It did not square with my experience. I had to find first why I did not like it’ (quoted in Barwick et al. 1985, p. 30 emphasis added).This negative gestalt or intuitive recoiling preceded both the scientific dissection of what was wrong or missing, and also the expression of a certain love for Aboriginal religion. The latter was a risk, knowingly taken, that courted, as Stanner recognised, ‘being thought guilty of writing devotional exercises’ (Stanner 1965, p. 211). Ian Keen thought Stanner’s interpretative procedures imposed ‘a decidedly Protestant flavour on Murinbata thought’ (1986, p. 44). Curiously, at one time ‘Stanner recalled that some colleagues “scoffed and said I was on the road to Rome”’ (Barwick et al. 1985, p. 28). Howard Morphy thought that at times Stanner came ‘very close to a romantic new age view of Aboriginal religion’ (1997, p. 187). Stanner’s private relationship to religion remains a public mystery. ù One reason Stanner, speaking of Aboriginal ethnography, ‘did not like it’, I suggest, was his revulsion for the reduction of mystery to sociology, and thus for any ultimate and complete secularisation of value itself. And yet the essay of Stanner’s which focused most squarely on the subject of ‘value’ (1985) was one of his driest, most technical and least inspiring pieces of writing ever. It conveys repression. If its aridity were indeed sourced in repression, then it strikes me as evidence of Stanner’s deep ambivalence toward a science of feelings. If feelings could be intellectualised they could come under control. On the other hand, science without feeling was dust. Stanner explicitly saw anthropological reductionism of the Durkheimian kind as a failing of ‘sensibility’ on the part of the anthropologist as a person: ‘A desire to free study from emotion became a fear of emotion, and a drying out of true sensibility’ (Stanner 1965, p. 211). I do not think we should assume this critique only applied to others than himself. Light is shed on the question by Stanner’s reaction to an Anglican service in Ely Cathedral in the 1970s, as reported by his companion John Barnes: ‘Stanner was visibly moved by this experience and muttered sadly something about ‘such a contrast with my own desiccated life’ (1982, pp. 86–7). Unfortunately, perhaps, sensibility and desiccation could live side by side. Elsewhere I have

122

7. Stanner’s veil:Transcendence and scientific inquiry

commented on the shared value placed on ‘sensibility’ by Stanner and his contemporaries DF Thomson and CP Mountford (Sutton 2005, pp. 151, 153–4). Stanner’s remarks about Baldwin Spencer’s measured and restrained writing ‘not do[ing] his sensibility justice’ follow directly after the statement that ‘he [Spencer] was very much the natural scientist’ (1965, p. 210), thus possibly suggesting an association between the scientific and the desiccated in Stanner’s sense of things. And then Stanner tellingly quoted Sir James Frazer as saying, ‘without tenderness, without poetry, one cannot understand man or his creations’ (1965, p. 212). This was not to say that natural science, by contrast, was ‘free of metaphysic, or … that if the method of natural science is followed then human facts under study have to be treated as if they too are non-human’ (ibid., 211). ù It seems as if Stanner believed that to make a full revelation of the sociological causes of religious mysteries and illusions would be an act lacking in respect for some veiled core which lay, and properly so, beyond the reach of anthropology. He seems to have preferred the opacity of the veil to a complete transparency, even though the veil itself could be properly, if incompletely, subjected to structural, processual and transactional kinds of analysis. Writing of Murrinh-patha people he said: Myth, song, dance, mime, social organization and institutional practice all lie like so many veils between observer and that mystery which is phrased analogically. These acts in many cases are of unknown intent but they are carried on in love and loyalty.They are ancient things, and for this reason are venerated; they are good things, of which the oldest men are the witnesses; they are mysterious things and beautiful too; and being enacted in a spirit which has in it something of piety, the intellectual veil over them deepens rather than shallows their meaning (Stanner 1963a, p. 15).

Acknowledgments Research for this paper was funded by Australian Research Council Professorial Fellowship DP0452390. I wish to thank Jeremy Beckett and Melinda Hinkson for comments on an earlier draft. References Barker, G 1976, ‘The ritual estate and Aboriginal polity’, Mankind, vol. 10, pp. 225– 39. Barnes, J 1982, ‘William Edward Hanley Stanner 1905–1981’, Canberra Anthropology, vol. 5, pp. 85–7.

123

Peter Sutton Barwick, D, Beckett, J & Reay, M 1985, ‘WEH Stanner: an anthropologist’, in D Barwick, J Beckett & M Reay (eds), Metaphors of interpretation: essays in honour of WEH Stanner, ANU Press, Canberra, pp. 1–52. Beckett, J 1985, ‘WEH Stanner and AR Radcliffe-Brown’, Social Analysis, vol. 17, pp. 126–9. Bern, J 1979, ‘Politics in the conduct of a secret male ceremony’, Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 35, pp. 47–60. Durkheim, E 1915, The elementary forms of the religious life, Allen & Unwin, London. Elkin, AP 1945, Aboriginal men of high degree, Australasian Publishing Company, Sydney. Elkin, AP 1969, ‘Elements of Australian Aboriginal philosophy’, Oceania, vol. 49, pp. 85–98. Hamilton, A 1980, ‘Dual social systems: technology, labour and women’s secret rites in the eastern Western Desert of Australia’. Oceania, vol. 51, pp. 4–19. Keen, I 1978, ‘One ceremony, one song: an economy of religious knowledge among the Yolngu of North-East Arnhem Land’, PhD thesis, Australian National University. Keen, I 1986, ‘Stanner on Aboriginal religion’, Canberra Anthropology, vol. 9, pp. 26– 50. Merlan, F 1989, ‘On Aboriginal religion: an appreciation’, in WEH Stanner 1989, On Aboriginal religion (facsimile edition), Oceania Monograph no. 36, Oceania Publications, Sydney. Morphy, H 1988, ‘The resurrection of the Hydra: twenty-five years of research on Aboriginal religion’, in RM Berndt & R Tonkinson (eds) Social anthropology and Australian Aboriginal studies: a contemporary overview, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, pp. 241–66. —— 1997,‘Empiricism to metaphysics: in defence of the concept of the Dreamtime’, in T Bonyhady & T Griffiths (eds) Prehistory to politics, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, pp. 263–89. [Radcliffe-]Brown, AR n.d. (c.1911), ‘Tribes of Burduna type. Index of local groups. Series P129; 157 large cards’, University of Sydney Archives. —— 1913, ‘Three tribes of Western Australia’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 43, pp. 143–94. Stanner, WEH 1932, ‘Field notes, Daly River’, AIATSIS Library, Canberra. —— 1933, ‘The Daly River tribes. A report of fieldwork in north Australia’, Oceania, no. 3, pp. 377–405, no. 4, pp. 10-29. —— 1963a, On Aboriginal religion, Oceania Monographs, Sydney. —— 1963b, ‘On Aboriginal religion’, Paris seminar, May 1963, unpublished manuscript, MS 3752, item 229, AIATSIS Archives, Canberra. —— 1965a, ‘Aboriginal territorial organization: estate, range, domain and regime, Oceania, vol. 36, pp. 1–25. —— 1965b, ‘Religion, totemism and symbolism’, in RM & CH Berndt (eds) Aboriginal man in Australia, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, pp. 207–37. —— 1967,‘Reflections on Durkheim and Aboriginal religion’, in M Freedman (ed.) Social organization: essays presented to Raymond Firth, Frank Cass & Co., London, pp. 217–40.

124

7. Stanner’s veil:Transcendence and scientific inquiry —— 1979 (1958), ‘Continuity and change among the Aborigines’, in White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938–1973, ANU Press, Canberra, pp. 41–66. —— 1985, ‘Radcliffe-Brown’s ideas on “social value”’, Social Analysis, vol. 17, pp. 113–25. Sutton, P 2005, ‘Science and sensibility on a foul frontier. Flinders Island, 1935’, in B Rigsby & N Peterson (eds) Donald Thomson: the man and scholar, Academy of the Social Sciences & Museum Victoria, Canberra, pp. 143–58. von Sturmer, JR 1978, ‘The Wik region: economy, territoriality and totemism in western Cape York Peninsula, north Queensland’, PhD thesis, University of Queensland. —— 1983,‘Why field bosses don’t paint up’, unpublished transcript by Drid Williams of P Sutton audio tapes nos. 199–199a; presentation at Australia Anthropological Society conference, University of Adelaide, August 1983. —— 1987, ‘Aboriginal singing and notions of power’, in M Clunies Ross, T Donaldson & S Wild (eds), Songs of Aboriginal Australia, Oceania Monographs, Sydney, pp. 63–76. —— 1988, ‘Wanam revisited’, unpublished paper for the conference ‘Aborigines Making History’, Australian National University, Canberra, 16–18 May 1988. Wise, Tigger 1985 The self-made anthropologist. A life of AP Elkin, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.

Notes 1. Durkheim (1915), Bern (1979); Hamilton (1980); von Sturmer (1978, pp. 421–2, 446–8, 450–2, 549–55; 1983; 1987; 1988), Keen (1978, pp. 336–63). The Bern and Hamilton references ‘depict [Aboriginal] religious thought as a political ideology and religious organization as a mode of political organization’ (Keen 1986, p. 33). Von Sturmer’s work provides more detail on how the individual careers of men integrate their ceremonial and secular lives. Grahame Barker, who unfortunately did not pursue an anthropological career, and who was influenced by the work of John Bern, emphasised ‘the passage of individual careers in the ritual world’ (1976, p. 237) in his insightful analysis of the role of estates in the classical Aboriginal ritual polity. 2. This seems to have been an Elkin neologism for what is usually called cosmogony. 3. It is highly significant that this paper makes no mention at all of Stanner’s monumental work on Aboriginal philosophy, and yet was presented at the Adelaide ANZAAS meeting in August 1969, some years after the completed publication of On Aboriginal religion in 1963 and the release of ‘Religion, totemism and symbolism’ in 1965. 4. Radcliffe-Brown did admit that he had not carried out ‘an actual survey’ of local group territories in that case (1913, p.145), although he did publish a sketch map of Kariera territories (ibid., p. 144). He also published two sacred site photographs from that same Kariera area (ibid., figures 1 and 2).

125

8.

‘Religion’, ‘magic’, ‘sign’ and ‘symbol’ in Stanner’s approach to Aboriginal religions ian keen

At the beginning of his essay ‘Religion, totemism and symbolism’ Stanner (1965) briefly traces the history of thought about Aboriginal beliefs and rites, including the anthropological ‘discovery’ of ‘high cults’. He cites David Collins who wrote in 1798 that no country had yet been discovered where some trace of religion was not to be found. Stanner remarks that Collins felt that he could ‘safely pronounce’ Australia to be an exception, and comments, ‘There must have been a score of causes contributing to Aboriginal misery. But from the early nineteenth century, none had a more devastating effect than the pervasive doctrine of Aboriginal worthlessness’ (1965, p. 213). That doctrine depended to a decisive extent on the blindness to Aboriginal religion. Echoing an evolutionist framework, Aborigines, Stanner countered, ‘had taken, indeed had gone far beyond, the longest and most difficult step toward the formation of a truly religious outlook’ (ibid., 215). In seeking to counter prevailing views about and policies towards Aboriginal people in the mid-twentieth century, Stanner (1963a) represented Aboriginal beliefs and practices not merely as ‘religious’ but as containing elements in common with the Hebraic and Christian traditions, notably sacrifice, as had Durkheim (1915). In doing so Stanner adopted Durkheim’s (and Frazer’s) strong division between ‘religion’ and ‘magic’, thereby eliding the strongly ‘instrumental’ character of Aboriginal practices. Stanner’s writings on Aboriginal religion have another important feature, namely that they take a semiotic approach in treating sacred things as signs and symbols of deeper realities (Keen 2004). In this chapter I will briefly set these aspects of Stanner’s approach within a wider intellectual context, and go on to suggest that the strong religion/magic division and the semiotic approach entail some ethnographic costs — they lead to the omission of certain essential features of totemic ancestral religions, especially what we might call their corporeal character.This omission is consistent with Stanner’s downplaying of

126

8. Stanner’s approach to Aboriginal religions

the political character of religion (Keen 2004; Sutton, chapter 7 this volume). First, I consider Stanner’s semiotic approach to Aboriginal religion. stanner’s semiotic approach

Stanner was not a ‘symbolist’ in the sense that Skorupski (1976) gives the term, according to which religion ‘expresses’ social relations; he rejected what he saw as Durkheim’s reduction of religion to a reflection of the social order and saw Aboriginal religion and cosmology, rather, as a kind of philosophy (Stanner 1963a). Yet his approach was ‘symbolist’ in the sense of being semiotic. He construed ancestral sites, designs and rituals primarily as signs and symbols with meanings that can be discursively expressed. At the heart of the symbolism, he thought, is an ontology of life, a ‘mood of assent’. Stanner begins his sketch of ‘the positive character of the religion as we now understand it’ as follows: ‘The Aborigines thought the world full of signs to men; they transformed the signs into assurances of mystical providence’ (Stanner 1965, p. 213). He writes two pages later that people: had found in the world about them what they took to be signs of intent toward men, and they had transformed those signs into assurances of life under mystical nurture. Their symbolic observances toward the signs, in rites of several kinds, were in essence acts of faith toward the ground of that assurance (ibid., p. 215, emphasis in original).

Earlier he wrote that ‘The major cults inculcated a sense of mystery through the use of symbolisms pointing to ultimate or metaphysical realities which were known by their signs’ (ibid., p. 213). Again, ‘Pattern, shape, form, and structure…constitute for them a world of signs for men’ (ibid., p. 215). The clearest manifestation of the structure of signs comes with Stanner’s analysis of totemism. The ‘totemic-sign-function’ has three elements: living people; signs (the totems and totem-places); and ‘the significations or sign-objects (the marvels)’ (i.e. ancestral events) (Stanner 1965, p. 228). He represents the totem as an ‘abstract symbol’ for the set of people, living or dead, ‘symbolized by it’ (ibid., p. 229). Stanner’s analysis of symbols is consistent with a perspective in social anthropology that was prevalent at the time. For example, John Beattie (1964, p. 70) remarks that symbols ‘provide people with a means of representing abstract ideas, often ideals of great practical importance to themselves, indirectly…ideas which it would be difficult or even impossible for them to represent to themselves directly’. The semiotic analysis is linked to Stanner’s reading of ritual as sacrifice, for he drew on the concept of ‘sacrament’ in his account of signs and symbols. This is explicit in On Aboriginal religion in relation to the central rite: The main rite is marked by the use of external and visible signs betokening man’s dependency on otherworldly powers for an

127

Ian Keen

endowment and flow of life-benefits. It is the set of relations which obtain between these elements which constitutes sacramentalism. Men act through signs towards the grounds of dependency (Stanner 1963a, p. 28).

It is ironic that the religious scholar EO James, who was Stanner’s contemporary, depicts the concept of sacrament in European religious history as rather ‘magical’ in character (James 1962). In the early church, James writes, ‘sacrament’ became a convenient term ‘for efficacious sacred signs or symbols which convey something “hidden” — a mysterious potency transmitted through material instruments as appointed channels of divine grace in a ritual observance’ (James 1962, p. 232, emphasis added). Stanner did not extend his semiotic approach to sorcery and magic as far as I know. Had he done so he might have agreed with Beattie (1964, p. 210) that magic ‘says something’. ‘If ritual is a kind of language’, Beattie writes, ‘a way of saying things, then Trobriand canoe magic stresses the importance of canoe building for the Trobrianders; blood pact ritual emphasises the need for mutual support’ and so on (ibid.). Here, it is not the supposed efficacy of magic that is important but its value as a sign. What, then, of the distinction between religion and magic? the distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘magic’

The distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘magic’ is entrenched in anthropological and sociological discourse, although interpretations of their nature have varied.1 Frazer regarded Aboriginal religions as belonging to the ‘magical’ stage of social evolution (Swain 1985, p. 79), although he later speculated that Aboriginal totemism had a ‘religious’ origin (ibid., p. 88). He characterised the distinction between religion and magic in terms of agency: ‘Wherever sympathetic magic occurs in its pure unadulterated form, it assumes that in nature one event follows another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency’ (Frazer 1936, p. 220). But sympathetic magic involves mistaken views about causality, Frazer thought. Religion, by comparison, involves ‘a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life’ (ibid., p. 222). In his earlier work Frazer classified Aboriginal beliefs and practices as ‘magic’, although he later recognised the ‘religious’ character of Aboriginal totemism (Swain 1985). Magic, Frazer thought, was ‘older than religion in the history of humanity’ (Frazer 1936, p. 233). Having made the distinction Frazer deals with cases that do not fit his scheme as the result of ‘confusion’. Thus the Melanesians as described by Codrington believed that an invisible power caused all unusual events, and resided in ‘spiritual beings’ (ibid., p. 277). People of ancient India, ancient

128

8. Stanner’s approach to Aboriginal religions

Egypt, and indeed modern Europe, made parallel ‘confusions’ (ibid., pp. 228–33). The Frazerian view continues to be expressed in the sociology of religion. Stark, for example, defines ‘magic’ as ‘all efforts to manipulate supernatural forces to gain rewards (or avoid costs) without reference to a god or gods’ (Stark 1999, p. 281), and ‘religious rituals’ as ‘collective ceremonies having a common focus and mood wherein the common focus is on a god or gods’ (ibid., p. 283). Durkheim and Mauss, in contrast, made a strong sociological division between religion and magic rather than one in terms of agency: magic is a matter of individual action, while religion is communal in nature. Durkheim, who drew on early ethnography of Australian Aborigines to construct an account of the essence of religion (1965 (1915)), wrote that magic shares the structure of beliefs and rites with religion but that it is antithetical to religion. Citing Hubert and Mauss, Durkheim writes that ‘there is something thoroughly anti-religious in the doings of the magician’ (ibid., p. 43). Religion, Durkheim suggests, is above all communal while magic has no ‘church’ (ibid., p. 44). Durkheim rejected Tylor’s minimum definition of religion as a belief in spiritual beings — the criterion rather was the division between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’, and the communal nature of religion. But it is the Frazerian notion of efficacy that tends more generally to be taken as diagnostic of magic. Stanner was at pains to deny the applicability of the term ‘magic’ to central Australian rites: …historical rites, initiation rites, and ‘increase’ rites (talu, intichiuma) intended to maintain and renew the life of natural species — appeared in some sense to recapitulate some feature or aspect of the founding drama. One could doubtless speak of ‘imitation’ and thus cast all the ritual into the mould of ‘magic’, but that really will not do. The aetiology is obviously too profound (Stanner 1965, p. 215).

Among Stanner’s contemporaries, AP Elkin (1945, 1954) hardly uses the term ‘religion’ and prefers ‘philosophy, rites and beliefs’, which he treats as distinct from ‘medicine-men and magic’. RM Berndt, however, wrote that the division between religion and magic is an arbitrary one (Berndt 1974 p.5). Love magic is an important adjunct of religious activity, and occasionally a part of ‘sacred ritual’. In some areas sorcery was ‘supported by the patronage of great spirit beings who were believed to have given to man this kind of knowledge and the power to perform it’ (ibid.). More recently Erich Kolig (1989, p. 131) has complained that the efficacious or ‘magical’ aspect of Aboriginal religions had been neglected, although he retains the dichotomy

129

Ian Keen

as ideal types. Like Frazer on Melanesia, he sees certain practices as ‘mixing’ religious and magical elements. I agree with the spirit of Kolig’s critique; much Indigenous religious practice is about acting in and on the world and on people through the potency of ancestral traces. This point brings us to beliefs about the source of this potency. intrinsic connections

In his well-known analysis of magic, Frazer (1936) posited two ‘laws’ — of imitation and contagion — brought together under the concept of ‘sympathetic magic’. The law of contagion includes the relation of a part of a body to the person’s body as a whole. Lévy-Bruhl (1926) attempted to capture something of the nature of intrinsic connections through his concept of ‘participation’. He suggested for example that according to the ‘pre-logical’ mentality, ‘every picture, every reproduction “participates” in the nature, properties, life of that of which it is the image’ (1926, p. 79). The Frazerian analysis of magic is not very useful in the context of Aboriginal beliefs and practices, for it simplifies the subtleties of beliefs about the properties of persons and of bodily substance. For example, I have recently argued (Keen 2006) that there are very strong links between Yolngu ancestral doctrines and related practices, those of what have been called ‘sorcery’ (galka, ragalk) and ‘magic’, and aspects of exchange that involve the transfer of body parts. All three broad domains draw on beliefs about the inherent powers of the body including blood, flesh, fat and bone, and of mali’ (‘spirits’, ‘images’), and intrinsic relations between a detached part of a person, image or trace of a person and the whole person, and the causal efficacy of words. Detached aspects or parts of a person have intrinsic power which a living person can tap, according to Yolngu doctrines. Sorcery doctrines involve the extension of the person in space through the intrinsic connections between detached parts of the person (blood, sweat, faeces, urine), a person and his or her names, and a person and an image of the person (including footprints, figurative representations). The use of individuals’ bodily substance and ‘spirits’ in sorcery and magic is homologous with the appropriation and manipulation of ancestral extensions and transformations by individuals. People believe that they can tap ancestral power (ma:rr, ganydjarr) through the performance of ceremonies and other means. Both kinds of domain enable people to act on the world and on other people by accessing those powers and exploiting those intrinsic connections. They are connected in practice, for the threat of sorcery is used to guard religious secrecy, and ancestral powers can be used to harm enemies, just like sorcery. Certainly Stanner (1963b) expresses a view of what he calls ‘oneness’ in Aboriginal thought: oneness between body, spirit, ghost, shadow, name, spirit-site, and totem. (See Williams (this volume) on Stanner’s views about

130

8. Stanner’s approach to Aboriginal religions

‘inherent bonds’ between people and land, via totems.) But he does not elaborate on the specific nature of the connectedness or relate it to his views about signs and symbols. Some anthropologists, such as Geoff Bagshaw (1998), have appealed to the concept of ‘consubstantiality’ to capture relations between persons, ancestors and places (see also Langton 2005). In his unpublished thesis John Rudder (1993) refers to the relations between ancestors, traces of ancestors in the landscape, and ceremonial objectifications of ancestors as ‘qualitative equivalence’. This is quite similar to Lévy-Bruhl’s concept of participation. (But in sorcery beliefs a person’s sweat, for example, is not the same as the person.) I would say that the relations between part and whole, image and object involved in Yolngu sorcery, magic and ancestral practices are rather more specific than the concepts of ‘oneness’, ‘participation’, ‘consubstantiality’ or ‘equivalence’ suggest. But how do intrinsic connections relate to signs and symbols? Alfred Gell has provided an analysis of sorcery that might be helpful. indexes in gell’s art and agency

Gell’s analysis in Art and agency (1998) brings us back to signs, for while Stanner did not treat magic in terms of signs, Gell invokes signs of a particular kind, namely the Pierceian index. Gell does not discuss Aboriginal art and religion specifically, but he does discuss other systems of religious art as well as sorcery. Gell elaborates on the concept of ‘index’, exemplified by the relation of smoke to fire, or of a footprint to the person who left it. One can infer from the index to the cause, or in Gell’s theory, the ‘prototype’. In Gell’s terminology a work of art or other image is the index, and the thing represented the prototype. He elaborates this scheme to compare art situations in a variety of cultures, and to examine how ‘agency’ — causal efficacy and personlike features — is attributed to various parts of the structure. In the case of sorcery a footprint or urine is the index, the person who made the footprint or urinated is the prototype; the index ‘behaves as an agent with respect to its prototype’ (Gell 1998, p. 32). Thus exuviae sorcery ‘forges a direct link between the index as an image of the prototype, and the index as a (detached) part of the prototype’ (ibid.). In the case of image sorcery (‘volt sorcery’) ‘the victim appears twice: once as the prototype who causes the index to assume its particular form, and once as the recipient, whose injuries stem from the injuries that the index has received’ (ibid., p. 103). Exuviae do not stand metonymically for the victim; they ‘are physically detached fragments of the victim’s “distributed personhood” — that is, personhood distributed in the milieu, beyond the body-boundary’ (ibid., p. 104). (Gell glosses this intrinsic connection between index and object in terms of ‘direct links’ between index and prototype.)

131

Ian Keen

Stanner’s wet season camp, Port Keats region, c. 1935 (Aboriginal men unidentified). Photographer WEH Stanner, Stanner Collection, AIATSIS N2770-37.

I have argued (Keen 2006) that a similar structure inheres in Yolngu ancestral doctrines, for ancestral bodies and appurtenances are distributed in space in a similar way to the traces of persons on which sorcerers are supposed to act. People believe (or believed) that they can draw on these intrinsic connections and tap these potencies in various ways and for various purposes. For example, ochres at certain ancestral sites enhance the potency of one’s weapon; a certain ancestral site can induce illness in one’s enemies; saying ancestral names enhances one’s chances when fighting or gambling. By the same token, harming an ancestral trace such as a sacred object or ancestral site is thought to have disastrous consequences. (I am not sure if people would say a totemic ancestor (wangarr) becomes sick in this way.) Where Stanner overemphasises signification,however,Gell underemphasises it. Morphy (n.d., p. 6) rightly points out that the index in Aboriginal art (and I would add ancestral sites) only comes into play in light of ‘semantic and communicative components of artefacts’. Morphy insists that ‘The analysis must include in the broadest sense the meaning that the object has in cultural context’ (ibid., p. 10).You might say that we need Stanner’s signs and symbols for a more complete account: the indexical value of ancestral sites, for example, is dependent on the narratives that link totemic ancestors to place.2

132

8. Stanner’s approach to Aboriginal religions are words mere signs?

Where does the distributed personhood view adumbrated above leave words? Stanner’s signs and symbols evidently depend on discourse. Their significata can be captured through exegesis — the analyst’s, the participant’s, or both. Are words — narratives, exegetical statements etc. — merely neutral conveyors of significance according to Aboriginal ontologies? Are they mere conventional ‘signs’ or do they partake in the intrinsic relations I have been talking about? People do explain ancestral and magical matters in a matter-of-fact way, though subject (depending on context) to the right to speak. But in Yolngu conceptions certain forms of words are powerful in themselves, both in sorcery and ancestral practice: as names of ancestors (for names bear an intrinsic relation to the bearer); as utterances of wangarr ancestors; and as ancestral songs that bear the same kind of intrinsic relation as does a footprint or ancestral design. Thus words both convey sense about powerful things, and are thought powerful in themselves.3 For examples, consider the healing power attributed to Yolngu ancestral songs (Keen 1978), and bound copies of the Bible in Yolngu Christianity (Bos 1988; Slotte 1997). applying ‘magic’, ‘sorcery’, and ‘religion’ to yolngu things

In spite of the connections between ‘religion’ and ‘magic’ Durkheim’s point that religion has a communal basis and magic is an individual matter appears to remain valid. In the case of Yolngu beliefs and practices there is certainly a difference between, on the one hand, communal practices and the foundations of the social order in ancestral law (rom), and on the other the enhancement of individual powers and secret personal attack. But the sources of powers overlap as do modes of their application. The threat of sorcery can be brought in to protect the integrity of religious secrecy; individuals may draw on ancestral substance and names to enhance personal powers, perhaps with aggressive intent. Thus there are no simple, discrete Yolngu domains of ‘religion’, ‘magic’ and ‘sorcery’ (see Reid 1983). Yolngu categories are more complex, and purposes overlap. But it makes little sense to say that Yolngu religion and magic are ‘mixed’. concluding remarks

In this chapter I have argued that Stanner followed the Frazerian and Durkheimian division between religion and magic, and so downplayed the ‘magical’ character of Aboriginal religions, representing Aboriginal sacred things as signs and symbols of underlying metaphysical realities. This deeply entrenched conceptual distinction has been criticised and modified by some scholars (including Berndt and Kolig). I suggested that there are very strong

133

Ian Keen

links between Yolngu sorcery and magic, on the one hand, and ancestral doctrines and related practices on the other; both domains draw on beliefs about the intrinsic powers of the body, about intrinsic relations between part and whole, image and object, and about the power of words. In their own way Stanner’s words are themselves efficacious. A significant virtue of his writings on Aboriginal religion is that they go far beyond descriptive ethnography, toward stimulating analysis and interpretation. There is plenty to chew over and to disagree with, and his words provide stepping stones (to change the metaphor) into explorations of alternative possibilities.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Jeremy Beckett and Melinda Hinkson for inviting me to participate in the symposium, Paul Burke for helpful suggestions on the draft, and participants at the symposium for their comments. References Bagshaw, G 1998, ‘Gapu dhulway, gapu maramba: conceptualisation and ownership of saltwater among the Burarra and Yan-nhangu peoples of north-east Arnhem land’, in N Peterson & B Rigsby (eds) Customary marine tenure in Australia, University of Sydney, Sydney, pp. 154–77. Beattie, J 1964, Other cultures: aims, methods, and achievements in social anthropology, Cohen & West, London. Berndt, RM 1974 Australian Aboriginal religion. EJ Brill, Leiden. Bos, R 1988, ‘Jesus and the dreaming: religion and social change in Arnhem Land’, PhD thesis, University of Queensland. Durkheim, É 1965 (1915), The elementary forms of the religious life, Free Press, New York. Elkin, AP 1945, Aboriginal men of high degree, Australasian Publishing Company, Sydney. —— 1954, The Australian Aborigines: how to understand them, Angus & Robertson, Sydney. Frazer, J 1936, The golden bough: a study in magic and religion (vol. I), Macmillan, London. Gell, A 1998, Art and agency: an anthropological theory, Oxford University Press. James, EO 1962, Sacrifice and sacrament, Thames & Hudson, London. Keen, I 1978, ‘One ceremony, one song: an economy of religious knowledge among the Yolngu of north-east Arnhem Land’, PhD thesis, Australian National University. —— 2004, ‘Stanner on Aboriginal religion’, in M Charlesworth, F Dussart & H Morphy (eds) Aboriginal religions in Australia, Ashgate, Oxford, pp. 61–78. —— 2006, ‘Ancestors, magic and exchange in Yolngu doctrines: extensions of the person in time and space’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 515–30.

134

8. Stanner’s approach to Aboriginal religions Kolig, E 1989, Dreamtime politics: religion, world view and utopian thought in Australian Aboriginal society, Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin. Langton, M 2005, untitled paper at the conference ‘WEH Stanner: anthropologist and public intellectual’, Australian National University, 24–5 November 2005. Lévy-Bruhl, L 1926 How natives think, AA Knopf, New York. Morphy, H n.d., ‘Some problems with Gell’s Art and agency’, unpublished seminar paper, copy in the possession of the author. Reid, J 1983, Sorcerers and healing spirits: continuity and change in an Aboriginal medical system, Australian National University Press, Canberra. Rudder, J 1993, ‘Yolngu cosmology: an unchanging cosmos incorporating a rapidly changing world?’, PhD thesis, Australian National University. Skorupski, J 1976, Symbol and theory: a philosophical study of theories of religion in social anthropology, Cambridge University Press. Slotte, I 1997, ‘We are family, we are one: an Aboriginal Christian movement in Arnhem Land, Australia’, PhD thesis, Australian National University. Stanner, WEH 1963a, On Aboriginal religion, Oceania Monograph no. 11, Sydney. —— 1963b, ‘The Australian Aboriginal Dreaming as an ideological system’, Ninth Pacific Congress, 1957: Proceedings, vol. 3, pp. 116–23. —— 1965, ‘Religion, totemism and symbolism’, in RM Berndt & CH Berndt (eds) Aboriginal man in Australia, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, pp. 207–37. Stark, R 1999, ‘Micro foundations of religion: a revised theory’, Sociological Theory, vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 264–89. Swain,T 1985, Interpreting Aboriginal religion: an historical account, Australian Association for the Study of Religions, Bedford Park, South Australia. Titiev, M 1979, ‘A fresh approach to the problem of magic and religion’, in WA Lessa & EZ Vogt, Reader in comparative religion: an anthropological approach, Harper & Row, New York, pp. 316–19. Young, DJB 2001, ‘The colours of things: memory, materiality and an anthropology of the senses in north-west South Australia’‚ PhD thesis, University College London.

Notes 1. Erich Kolig (1989) traces the history of the distinction from EB Tylor through Frazer, Piddington, Beals and Hoijer. Others, he writes, rejected the neat separation. This group includes Lowie, Goldenweiser, Radcliffe-Brown, R Kluckhohn and L Wax, and Philsooph — Philsooph on the grounds that magic often involves personified agents (Kolig 1989, p.131; Titiev 1979). 2. I would add, however, that indexical relations between ancestral things and ancestors draws on prototypical indexical relations between persons (and animals) and their traces and detached parts. The prototype indexical relation on which such narratives draw is a ‘natural’ one — it is the relation between persons and the traces they leave (so beautifully analysed by Diana Young 2001), and between persons and made images of persons. Even here, however, beliefs intervene — in this case the belief in continuing intrinsic connections between index and object implicit, for example, in sorcery beliefs and practices. It is significant here that Yolngu refer to the ancestral ‘foundation of the law’ as ‘foot/feet/footprint/s’

135

Ian Keen (luku) — note the use of the same term for index and prototype, emphasising the intrinsic connection between foot and footprint. 3. One thinks of mirrirri here — a brother feels compelled to attack his sister on hearing sexual reference in her presence, suggesting that words in an everyday context might be thought powerful in a similar way — their effects are not by convention.

136

9.

‘Joyous maggots’: The symbolism of Yolngu mortuary rituals howard morphy

Stanner’s On Aboriginal religion is a work of intuitive genius. For Stanner there is almost a disjunction between the complexity of social life and the simplicity of the metaphysical core that lies at the heart of it. The complex reality of life creates a series of masks that obscure the central truths. ‘Myth, song, dance, mime, social organization and institutional practice all lie like so many veils between the observer and that mystery which is phrased analogically’, Stanner wrote (1989, p. 121). I would like to argue that the complexity lies in both the metaphysics themselves and in everyday life, for when we break down the metaphysic by analysing how it is worked out in action we find that meaningful action is complex, multi-layered and multidetermined. I would argue that this is why the metaphysical core is never merely said because it is itself complex and intertwined with social practice. It cannot be condensed in a single sentence; rather it is performed, painted and danced, for if one tries to reduce it, it becomes oversimplified and loses its connections. The metaphysical core is deeply connected to aesthetics and the experiential dimension of ritual performance, for these too are multidimensional, engaging with individuals’ pasts and presents. Certainly ritual events can express core ideas, but always in a slightly ambiguous way so that actors can respond in quite different ways according to context. While I would agree with Stanner that ‘the relationship between the religious and the mundane life is continuous’ (Stanner 1989, p. 278), ritual creates a performative context in which for a while the mundane is transformed into a heightened way of experiencing the world. In this paper I will centre on a major theme of Yolngu mortuary rituals usually associated with the final stages of the ceremony: yithuwa (‘maggot’) dances. I have chosen the topic because it resonates with Stanner’s summary statement of the Murrinh-patha world view as it is represented in ritual:

137

Howard Morphy

‘A “theory” of that reality would have to be a rationalisation of a reality which, if my account is correct, Murinbata [i.e. Murrinh-patha] put to themselves as a joyous thing with maggots at the centre. It takes considerable temerity to try and improve this imagery’ (1989, p. 257). Stanner does not elaborate greatly on this interpretation even though it recurs throughout his analysis. It is clear that he means it to have a number of senses. The most obvious is that living is joyful but that life ends, and the maggots enjoy what remains of one’s existence. However, Stanner also associates maggots with the negative components of Murrinh-patha society, the fact that in the midst of commensality can lie deception: ‘there is an intuition of an integral moral flaw in human association’ (1989, p. 264). And at another point joy is juxtaposed with the social order itself: ‘A striking phenomenon is the way in which joyous sociality — one might say the perfect sociality of laughter and fun, in an apparent mockery of every stable institution — opens and closes the highest rite’ (1989, p. 278). I think that Stanner’s intuitions are salient, and they arise from his participation in Murrinh-patha society. I think that they can be applied in general to many aspects of Yolngu society. But I think that the ritual events that evoke such intuitions need to be analysed in detail before we can see how these powerful images resonate across so many aspects of the life of society. In analysing the place of yithuwa in Yolngu mortuary rituals I will be concerned with a particular set of themes that are central to that context. The themes are quite different from those associated with similar imagery in a circumcision ceremony or in a Ngärra ritual — the major regional-based initiation ceremony — though of course there is overlap (for an overview of Yolngu ceremonial performance see Warner 1958 and Keen 1994). maggots and some other creatures

Maggots have a central place in Yolngu symbolic thought, as they have in the iconography of many religions. Maggots are deeply connected with death. It is maggots that consume decaying flesh — food remains, the bodies of dead animals and people. Maggots create a sense of discomfit, associated as they are with dirt and disease, yet maggots are also connected with purification and cleanliness. In Western medicine maggots are still used to clean the flesh from gangrenous wounds.With the dead, maggots clean the flesh from bones, making them gleaming white like the bodies of the maggots themselves, but hard and inert, not soft and alive. In Yolngu symbolism maggots form part of a set with other creatures that have attributes in common. The set includes caterpillars, grubs, larvae of all kinds, and mangrove worms (these latter are, in fact, a type of mollusc).These creatures share the potential to eat their way through living organisms — to ‘bite’ flesh. Larval forms are transformational organisms — creatures that

138

9.The symbolism of Yolngu mortuary rituals

can change state and often fly away to another existence. While mangrove worms (teredo) do not actually change shape or leave their location, they do eat their way through the mangrove wood, leaving it channelled with tunnels that are lined with calcium deposits. The characteristics of these crawling, biting and transforming creatures provide a ‘natural’ basis for Yolngu symbolic imagery.The general framework that is enacted, in different contexts and with different emphases, is structured on the relationships between life and death, and decay and regeneration.The bodily forms and natural histories of these creatures — represented and performed in ritual through dance, song, and in painted and sculpted form — provide a rich and multivalent analogical resource. The maggot biting into the flesh is a symptom of decay, a warning of contagion, a sign of danger, but the maggot also cleans the flesh from the bones, making them safe. In Yolngu metaphysical thought the body is still in some senses alive when it has flesh on it — it is still dangerous. There is something both sacred and safe about the bones of the dead. In the past they were handled, carried around in bark coffins and eventually deposited in a hollow log. The bones are separate from the person’s spirit — the spirit has left them and become reincorporated within the ancestral dimension, potentially returning at some future time through the process of spirit conception. However, they remain as a permanent reminder of the person who died; and they, too, are a powerful symbol of the continuity of the clan. The clan’s sacred designs can be referred to as ngaraka (bone), and the inner form of sacred objects are analogous to the bones of the clan’s ancestors. The body is made safe through ritual and the spirit is returned to the ancestral dimension, but the bones remain (see Morphy 1991, p. 109).Yolngu mortuary rituals involve a powerful dialectic between the memory of persons and the separation of the dead from the living. Different species are associated with the dialectical relationships between life and death, the living and the dead, in different ways. While maggots clean the bones, the mangrove worms make the bones. They eat their way through mangrove wood, eventually killing the tree or limb and leaving behind deposits in the form of calciferous tunnels that occupy its inner space. The tree becomes bone-like. The Gadawarrk (mangrove tree) sacred object represents a walking mangrove tree riddled with mangrove worm tunnels. In some of its manifestations the tree is dead, in others alive. The form of the sacred object is that of a generalised human body as bone and sometimes, when wrapped in feather string, clothed in flesh. Yet both the mangrove worm and the maggot are as connected with life as they are with death. The mangrove tree provides the refuge, food and breeding ground for the mollusc, and the maggot converts flesh into its own transforming life cycle. The connection with life is also reflected in the

139

Howard Morphy

sexual imagery that is created in art and ritual performance. The elongated body of the mangrove worm eating its way through mangrove wood and the white swarming maggots crawling over decaying flesh, almost flowing like a viscous liquid, have analogies in human procreative processes. And those analogies are developed through Yolngu symbolism. dancing maggots

In this chapter I only have the space to focus on a single expression of this rich symbolism: the yithuwa dances associated with the yingapungapu ceremony. The yingapungapu is one of a number of ground sculptures that can be used in mortuary rituals or purification ceremonies. It is an elliptical shape divided into three sections. Its mythic origin lies in the life and times of the Wuradilagu women who travelled to the mainland at Blue Mud Bay from Groote Eylandt. They were a group of hunting and gathering spirit women who lived independently of men and had an ambiguous relationship with the spirit men whom they encountered on their journeys. Usually the men are referred to as their brothers. The women were concerned not to pollute the land with the refuse from their meals. After they had eaten fish, anything that remained would be placed in a hollow scooped out in the sand of the beach. The remains would then be consumed by maggots and sand crabs and eventually the beach would be washed clean by the movement of the tide.The only sign of their meals would be the bones of the fish cleansed of flesh. The food they ate was sometimes caught for them by the spirit fishermen; these fishermen paddled their canoes, fished, and hunted turtle and dugong in the waters of Blue Mud Bay. On a number of occasions in different places on their journey one or more of the spirit men drowned at sea and their bodies were washed ashore.The Wuradilagu women then made a ceremonial ground sculpture — a yingapungapu — based on the form of the scooped out ellipse in which they buried the remains of their meals (see image opposite). In this sand sculpture they laid the body of their dead ‘brother’. They sat beside the body and mourned his death. They cut deeply into their heads with their digging sticks until the blood flowed into the yingapungapu.There are four places along the Arnhem Land coast where the Wuradilagu made the original yingapungapu sand sculptures, and these places became over time burial grounds for the clans of the Yirritja moiety in whose country they are located. Maggots and sand crabs are strong themes of the yingapungapu ceremony. Small circles can be made at either end of the sand sculpture representing the holes of the sand crab into which the rotting fish remains are dragged. The painted and engraved designs associated with the sand sculpture and its mythology include a characteristic dashed infill that represents, among other

140

9.The symbolism of Yolngu mortuary rituals

A yingapungapu ground sculpture at Yilpara, Blue Mud Bay, 2000.The sand sculpture was made for the purification ceremony following the burial of a senior Madarrpa clansman. It is positioned in front of the shade where the body had previously lain before burial. In the evening following the purificatory rituals the hut was set ablaze in a final ceremony. Photographer Howard Morphy.

things, the maggots going about their business. Most dramatically, maggots and the bush flies they turn into are danced at various stages of the ceremony. The dance sequence usually begins with the spirit men cooking and eating the fish they have caught. The dances that follow portray the maggots as they consume the leftovers, the birds that eat the maggots, and the flies (the transformed maggots) that leave the area and fly away to another land. The maggot dances are performed as part of the final stages of the ceremony and result in the sand sculpture itself being destroyed by the movement of the dancers. I will summarise here three dance movements that occurred as the final sequence of a Madarrpa clan funeral ceremony in 2004, after the burial of the dead had taken place.

Dance sequence 1 The first dance began with the participants forming two groups at the point of the ellipse of the yingapungapu away from the burial shade — men in front and women behind. The singers stood beside the sand sculpture and led the dancers forward. The dancers knelt on the ground and, following

141

Howard Morphy

the contours of the sand sculpture, rhythmically crawled forward on their knees. The dancers moved to the mouth of the shade before dispersing. They had obliterated the sand sculpture and left behind a trail in the sand — a deliberately produced channelled pattern in the sand reminiscent of the dashed pattern of the painted designs, the marks left by the maggots on their journey (see image below).

Dance sequence 2 The maggot dance was followed by a series of dances in which men and women danced in opposition to one another on either side of the shade, where the body had lain. The dancers assembled away from the shade and moved towards it. Unusually for Yolngu dancing the male and female dancers employed similar movements, energetically stepping forward and running their hands all over their bodies with a pulling motion as if peeling or scratching off skin. The men covered more ground than the women but otherwise there was considerable similarity in the performance. This set of

The maggot dancers,Yilpara, August 2004.The performance shown here represents the penultimate phase of the yingapungapu ceremony as men and women dancers, as maggots, move forward on their knees towards the shade. In front of them two men dance with spears, thrusting them into the ground in front of the shade.The marks impressed in the ground by the dancers represent the tracks of the maggots as they approach the shade. Photographic still from a film by Howard Morphy.

142

9.The symbolism of Yolngu mortuary rituals

dances usually has an element of competition with each group of dancers trying to outdo the other in both the energy and quality of the performance. There is a general sense of hilarity and a degree of flirtation. The dancers are dancing bush fly, heralding the flight of the yithuwa back to the separate homelands of the participating clans. The country of each clan is sometimes called in turn and the performers dance as a group in the direction of its lands.

Dance sequence 3 The final dance in the series, and the concluding dance of the ceremony, centred on a group of male dancers with spears moving towards the entrance to the shade. This dance often involves individuals dancing in opposition to one another, thrusting their spears towards the ground in front of each other and surrounded by the others. Such dances have multiple references to the spearing of fish and the scavenging of birds, with underlying themes of vengeance and the expression of anger. In this context they are the prelude to the opening up of the shade.The final dance of this sequence usually ends with a spear being thrust into the ground in front of the entrance to the shade, symbolically opening it. After a suitable interval has passed, men enter the shade and take out any possessions that remain inside. symbolic themes of the yingapungapu ceremony

Most Yolngu dances and song cycles are at one level connected to simple narrative sequences of events that refer to the actions of ancestral beings.The narratives are often, on the surface, observations taken from daily life. The basic story alluded to in the sequence of dances described above has been touched on already. It concerns the spirit fishermen who went out to sea in a dugout canoe hunting for parrot fish (yambirrku). They caught some fish but then a storm arose.The boat was nearly overwhelmed and the fishermen returned to the shore wet, but happy to be safe. They then cooked the fish and shared them with their relatives. After they had feasted they placed the fish remains in a small hollow scooped out in the sand where they were soon consumed by maggots. The maggots in turn were eaten by sand crabs and the sand crabs by wading birds hunting along the shore. This apparently simple narrative provides the framework for the purification rituals that follow a Madarrpa burial ceremony. The event structure of the purificatory phase of the ritual comprises the ritual washing of the participants, purification by fire, the dancing out of the sand sculpture, the final clearing of the interior of the shade where the body had lain, and the burning of the shade. These events can be performed through different ritual episodes. In the case of a yingapungapu ceremony the washing is performed to songs that recreate the storm at sea. People are grouped

143

Howard Morphy

together in the centre of the sculpture and water poured over their heads. Purification by fire occurs later in the same place after dances in which the fish are consumed.Young men and sometimes young women dance on their knees around the fire, baring their chests to the flames. Women and men then place ironwood branches in the fire and brush or hit each other with the smouldering branches as sparks fly around.The event is highly structured. People form sets according to their relationship to the deceased and the roles they have played in the ceremony, and only people with designated roles will perform the ritual acts of washing and brushing fire on their relatives. Yingapungapu sand sculptures can be made for different phases of Yirritja moiety mortuary rituals. A yingapungapu may be used as the ritual ground to purify people who are close relatives or associates of the dead person, or people who have been preparing the body for burial. Or, as in the case just described, a yingapungapu sculpture can be constructed in front of or incorporating the shade in which the dead person’s body lies. Surrounding the shade, it acts as a container for the contagion associated with death. It also provides the context for freeing the participants from the restrictions associated with death and enabling them to return to everyday life. The symbolism of the yingapungapu ceremony expresses a set of apparently opposed and loosely connected themes of containment and freedom, of pollution and cleanliness, of sorrow and joy, of vengeance and reconciliation, and of the transition from life to death. Yolngu mortuary rituals involve a heightened dialogue between forgetting and remembering. The themes emphasised depend on the temporal sequence of the ceremony and the emotions felt — the ritual orchestrates the emotions of the participants. Dances in Yolngu ritual are in part performative (Fernandez 1977): they move the action on in harmony with the changing themes of the ceremony. The maggot dances perform a series of transformations: from unclean to clean, from grief to joy, from death back to life. There is movement over time from negative to positive, but as with all Yolngu rituals there is a continual process of recapitulation, allowing time for the resolution of conflicting emotions but laying open the possibility that matters will not be resolved.The idea is that at the end of the ceremony life begins anew. It is with these themes in mind that we can begin to interpret the maggot dances. The next stage is the one that we have introduced already in which the sand sculpture is danced out by maggot dancers and/or by fishermen with spears, preparatory to freeing the shade for re-entry.The concluding episode that follows the clearing of the interior of the shade usually takes place that night, with the burning of the shade in a spectacle of light and heat. The burning of the shade is not connected to the mythology of the yingapungapu, and in the Madarrpa case is usually associated with the ancestral crocodile, Bäru.

144

9.The symbolism of Yolngu mortuary rituals symbolic allusions

We are now in a position to consider the symbolism of the ceremony and the dances that we have described, and their emotional impact on the participants. The interaction between the symbolism and semantics of the ceremony and the emotions of the participants is highly complex. There are many different ways of coming to terms with death and regaining a sense of joy in the world. I would argue that Yolngu rituals allow individuals to make their own connections, yet at the same time they are encouraged to come together with others to share in moments of exuberant and at times irreverent exultation. In this analysis I will emphasise the multi-valency of the imagery. Each of the themes that I introduce can be active in different degrees according to context and individual focus.The symbolism moreover does not reside in any one form of expression — in dance, or song, or painting; each may express it in different ways. Hence an interpretation of a dance is always going to be, simultaneously, an interpretation of a painting, and a song, and beyond that of social life in its complexity. As Stanner wrote: Act, myth and spatial forms belong to distinct orders. We are thus not ‘discovering’ the same phenomenon under different names. What we find by analysis is a set of congruencies between components of a whole which are expressed according to the technique and system appropriate to each mode of symbolizing (1989, p. 112)…Myth, song, dance, mime, social organization and institutional practice all lie like so many veils between the observer and that mystery which is phrased analogically’ (1989, p. 121).

One theme of the ceremony is recognition of the finality of death and, complementary to this, encouragement to the bereaved to begin the process of forgetting. The imagery of the fish, the maggots and the birds is analogically associated with death and memory. The remains of the fish attract maggots; the maggots and flesh are then scavenged by sand crabs who bury the remains in their holes in the sand. They leave behind the bones cleaned of flesh. Guluwitjpitj (reef herons) then catch the sand crabs. Finally the tide comes in and sweeps the beach clean.What happens to the fish is an analogue for what happens to the human body following death. In the past it reflected closely stages in the treatment of the dead body.1 Yolngu mortuary practices once involved a prolonged process of bodily disposal that took place over many years. There were three separate burial ceremonies: an initial burial of the body in the ground or exposure in a platform burial; secondary burial in a bark container after the body had been dug up and any remaining flesh removed from the bones; and the final placement of the bones in a hollow log coffin many years later. Cultural practice here 145

Howard Morphy

becomes an analogue of nature, but in doing so it does more. It takes control of the process of bodily decay and the transformation from life to death. By removing the flesh from the bones,Yolngu sped up natural processes. In turn, this enabled them to extend the period of mourning. Stripped of flesh, the remains are inert and safe, transportable in a bark container. The bark coffin was painted with the same ancestral designs that were painted on the body immediately after the person died. The remains can be safely curated as the person’s spirit becomes ever more firmly incorporated in the ancestral past. The placing of the bones in the hollow log coffin — breaking them up and rubbing them in red ochre — is a final statement that the spirit is no longer there. The person has become one with the ancestral sacra. This prolonged process both reinforces the relationship between ancestral beings and the recently dead and also creates a long space for mourning. These practices made Yolngu mortuary rituals a core mechanism for creating the continuity of society while at the same time enabling people to come to terms with the death of a close relative. While people no longer dig up the bones of the dead, the themes of present-day mortuary rituals remain closely connected to those of the past, and representing images of bodily decay in a controlled manner achieves many of the same purposes. Moreover Yolngu have accommodated to changes in burial practices by extending funerals in other ways. Although the bones of the dead are no longer dug up, the primary phase of burial has itself been extended over a period of many weeks and a variety of purificatory and commemorative ceremonies can take place over a period of months and even years. Yolngu mortuary rituals were, and are still, an extended process of forgetting or letting go in which the memories of the person become absorbed into the ancestral dimension. In the past the memory of the person was almost literally conserved through the curation of the bones, but through symbolic analogy distance was created between the living and the dead, and at times with dramatic effect. These analogies persist. The image of the tide sweeping the beach clean encourages people to forget the painful emotions of the past, and firing the shade is part of the process of driving away any haunting spirit of the dead.2 Maggots clean the body, and the yingapungapu ground plays a role in the cosmogenic process of transforming the body into a relatively neutral and ancestral state. But why are maggot dances a context for the expression of joyful emotions bordering on the ribald and celebratory? Maggots, in their role as consumers of dead flesh, seem opposed to the joys of life.Yet there are clearly close connections between the maggots and the joys of life, and that connection is explicitly made in the dances. The dances draw a connection between the greedy maggots enjoying the flesh of the yambirrku and human

146

9.The symbolism of Yolngu mortuary rituals

pleasure in the same act (yambirrku are the most prized fish from the sea). The sequence of dances around the yingapungapu includes sets of dancers on their haunches messily consuming a rich feast of yambirrku. So maggots can be a symbol of human lust and the pleasures of the flesh, the delights of eating yambirrku. It is possible for people to empathise with maggots, in particular since it is people who are acting as maggots. Maggots are also symbolic of fertility and sex. The shade where the body lies is a symbolic womb, a nest or the body of an ancestral being. The yingapungapu sand sculpture itself has strong female connotations. The maggot dancers crawling towards the entrance of the hut (sequence 1, above) and the dancers with their spears entering the hut (sequence 3) are both sexually charged images. These later dances also introduce a theme of connection and community. The directions in which the dancers orient themselves reflect the relationships between the participating clan territories.The flies that are the transformation of the maggots take off and return to the territories of the participating clans: they fly to Madarrpa, Manggalili and Dhalwangu country. The participating clans refer to themselves as Yithuwa, signalling a very close relationship which is reflected in the co-ownership of certain areas of sea (Morphy & Morphy 2006). There is a great sense of pride in being yithuwa, or ‘maggot people’. The ceremony itself brings this set of related clans together, and at the end of the ceremony the clans return to their own places. However, these dances are equally about the relationships between men and women, for the main female dancers (in sequence 2) are women from clans of the opposite moiety to the men. The competitive dancing between men and women has a strong underlying sexual component.The dance enacts gender relations in the context of a community of intermarrying clans. These themes are all active in the concluding phase of the ceremony during which the images and emotions of death are transformed into images of the pleasures of life in the context of a sense of community.3 At this final stage, every effort is made by the ceremonial leaders to get maximum participation. The dances can be repeated again and again until the leader feels that the participating congregation has reached the point of cathartic exhaustion. Even those closest to the dead person are encouraged to dance, though their wish not to will also be respected. People are quite explicit that this phase of the performance is designed to create a sense of community and to encourage people to look towards their future life. Indeed in the particular ceremony described above yithuwa dances were performed for over half an hour at the grave side after the body had been lain to rest. The performance was continuous, with one dance transforming into the other. At times the energy was such that the musicians almost seemed to get ahead of one another, beginning the next song while the previous one was being

147

Howard Morphy

finished, and at other times they played with the participants, seemingly extending the songs forever by repeating sequences over again with minor variation.Yet there seemed to be nothing accidental about the performance. The quality of the sound was operatic and the performance ended in a crescendo of sound when participation was at its maximum.4 conclusion

A Yolngu ritual is an extremely complex event in which the aesthetics of performance are entangled with semantics, in which people engage with the expressive power of ritual: the effervescence of Durkheim’s (1971 (1917)) performance combines with the emergent mysteries of Stanner’s. Effects are not entirely independent of the meanings, but the meanings are not reducible to a verbal account of what the symbols mean. As Stanner wrote: …the fact that many of the dominant symbolisms are not clearly put into words does not condition their valence. It conditions only the capacity to express clear conceptions in words and sentences so that for the most part they remain beyond the symbolism of language. But not beyond the symbolisms which are independent of spoken language…They are drawing on a rich stock of conventional signs known and used skilfully without any necessity of verbal symbolism (1989, p. 118).

Stanner is undoubtedly right in not attempting to connect the meaning of ritual to a set of verbal glosses that might in context fix the meaning of a spear as a penis or a maggot as semen. Even if such interpretations are possible connotations, something is lost in translation. Ritual is full of wild ideas and hints of excess. The essence of communitas (Turner 1969) is that it is possible to overcome the emotions of individual life and be part of something much greater. It is possible to recover from the sense of loss at a funeral and reach a state of happiness. At an abstract level this can be seen to be the simple expression of wise pragmatism. Many of the themes of Yolngu mortuary rituals are a particular expression of messages frequently generated in the context of death and its aftermath: life must go on, normal service must be resumed as soon as possible. The rituals emphasise basic themes of life connected to pleasure (food and sex); allude to moments of triumph when we overcome the precursors of death (when we survive the storm at sea, or confront the heat of a fire). They also deal with the great religious imponderables: the fate of the soul, the continuity of life across the generations. Ritual in many ways is also going to be connected to the theatre of the absurd where ideas too improbable to be spoken or too complex to be fully grasped and expressed can be hinted at, where it is possible for maggots to express human emotions. It is in this context that many of the

148

9.The symbolism of Yolngu mortuary rituals

wild ideas, the inappropriate thoughts, can be expressed and shared without ever being made explicit. The ribald thoughts that are part of the process of forgetting the pain felt at death are hinted at in the symbolism of the dances and indirectly may contribute to that sense of community, that borderline irrational sense of joy at being alive and being supported. References Durkheim, E 1971, The elementary forms of the religious life, Allen & Unwin, Melbourne. Fernandez, JW 1977,‘The performance of ritual metaphors’, in JD Sapir & JC Croker (eds) The social use of metaphors: essays on the anthropology of rhetoric, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, pp. 100–31. Keen I 1994, Knowledge and secrecy in an Aboriginal religion, The Clarendon Press, Oxford. —— 2006, ‘Ancestors, magic and exchange in Yolngu doctrines: extensions of persons in time and space’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (NS), vol. 12, pp. 515–30. Merlan, F 1989, ‘On Aboriginal religion: an appreciation’, introduction to WEH Stanner, On Aboriginal religion, Oceania Monograph no. 36, (facsimile edition), pp. i–xviii. Morphy, H 1991, Ancestral connections: art and an Aboriginal system of knowledge, University of Chicago Press. —— 1997, ‘Death, exchange, and the reproduction of Yolngu society’, in F Merlan, J Morton & A Rumsey (eds), Scholar and sceptic: Australian Aboriginal Studies in honour of LR Hiatt, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, pp. 123–50. —— 2007, ‘Anthropological theory and the multiple determinacy of the present’, in D Parkin & S Ulijaszek (eds), Holisitc anthropology: emergence and convergence, Berghahn, Oxford, pp. 148–81. —— & Morphy, F 2006, ‘Tasting the waters: discriminating identities in the waters of Blue Mud Bay’, Journal of Material Culture, vol. 11, pp. 67–85. Stanner, WEH 1989, On Aboriginal religion (facsimile edition), with an appreciation by Francesca Merlan and an introduction by LR Hiatt, Oceania Monograph no. 36, Oceania Publications, Sydney. Turner,V 1969, The ritual process: structure and anti-structure, Aldine, Chicago. Warner, LW 1958, A Black civilization, Harper & Row, Chicago.

Notes 1. In addition to being enacted in ritual the imagery is developed in the paintings of Yolngu artists. Morphy (2007) illustrates a number of paintings on the themes of the yingapungapu by Narritjin Maymuru and relates them to his personal metaphysics.

149

Howard Morphy 2. The separation is always going to be imperfect and in the interstices between death and life imperfectly severed lie the resources for vengeance and sorcery (Morphy 1997, Keen 2006). 3. Ritual performances often contain within them moments in which a transcendent sense of community is created that cuts across conventional relationships within society. Victor Turner (1969, p. 96 ff.) developed the concept of ‘communitas’ to apply to such states. In his analysis Turner over-emphasised the opposition between structure and communitas and made the state of communitas almost a-cultural and universal. The emotional experiences generated in such contexts unquestionably have universal attributes that are relatively independent of the particularities of the society concerned. However, those experiences are usually produced in particular contexts in which the event structure results in moments of that heightened sense of being in communion with others that is expressed by the idea of communitas, and to that extent communitas is socially produced. Ritual processes indeed are often structured to produce a state of communitas at particular moments of transition or following trauma — initiation or death — and indeed in the case of many ritual performances communitas elides with catharsis. Furthermore the sense of communitas to an extent depends on aspects of the structure and value orientations of society — transgressing gender boundaries, challenging avoidance relations, mocking leadership. Anti-structure is not a-structure but depends on its dialectical relationship with structure. States of communitas gain their particular sense of revolutionary transcendence in many different ways. In certain contexts that may be achieved by contradicting the established norms of society; for example, by reversing established gender roles. However, releasing or hinting at ideas that are deeply felt but normally unspoken or by presenting contradictions that are normally repressed may also create such a state. 4. The following evening the shade was set on fire and spectacular dances took place in the light of the flames as dancers braved the heat and the sparks that flew everywhere. The entire community was prepared for this event. Women and children were warned what would happen and hid under blankets until the blaze erupted. Then people gathered around to watch the spectacle as the entire settlement was lit up by the fire.

150

10.

Indigenous songs as ‘operational structures of transactional life’: A study of Indigenous song genres at Wadeye alberto furlan

In his now famous Oceania monograph On Aboriginal religion, WEH Stanner proposed a new theoretical approach focusing on the ‘operational structure of transactional life’ (1963, p. 171). Unsatisfied with the reified aridity of structural-functionalism’s approach to social relations, Stanner was convinced that ‘if there is a system of social life then it is probably in the first place a system of operations’ (1963, p. 18). Acts of sociality constituting the relations between groups, Stanner maintained, can be studied as ‘operations with a distinguishable structure’ (1963, p. 37). I have taken this framework as a starting point for the investigation of three Indigenous traditional and popular song genres at Wadeye, the Aboriginal settlement known as Port Keats Mission during Stanner’s time. Songs are operations, in Stanner’s sense, as they are forms and objects of actions providing the ground for social interaction. The emergence of these genres provided a performative ground where significant historical changes could be redressed through a process of identity reproduction that employed songs as primary markers of identity. Stanner arrived at Port Keats in 1935, with the first settler party, after a period of field work in the Daly River settlement. During this time he collected material that constituted the basis for a number of articles published in the following years (Stanner 1936a, 1937), and a series of articles collated together as On Aboriginal religion. In the 1950s Stanner returned five times to the area, on each occasion spending a few months there. In a time of great economic and social change — brought about by the consolidation of the mission’s new socioeconomic model — his research in Wadeye deepened in the direction of the symbolic elements of secret ritual of Indigenous life. What amounted to a dual approach can be traced in Stanner’s writings. He was interested both in ontology and in developing a transactional approach to the analysis of social life. Both these emphases implied criticism of the

151

Alberto Furlan

static analysis that Radcliffe-Brown’s structural-functional method involved. Stanner rejected the functionalist paradigm of ‘relations between points in a network’ for an investigation of the ‘composition and structure of observable processes’ (1963, p. 171). Stanner put aside the idea of ‘a social system which is supposed to exhibit a structure’ (1963, p. 36, emphasis in original), in favour of the concept of ‘structure of operation’, namely an identifiable pattern of repeated relational ‘conjoint acts’ of association between individuals within clans (ibid.). In On Aboriginal religion he observed that ‘if any Australian aborigines lived, as used to be suggested, in a stationary state of society with a static culture, the Murinbata were certainly not among them’ (ibid., p. 154).Yet he also emphasised the stability and the encompassing nature of cosmology in an order of experience that sustained the ‘continuous art of making the past consistent with an idealized present’ (ibid., p. 40). As a consequence, Stanner gave prominence to the transactions between humans and the ancestral beings, and less prominence to careful analysis of the transactions of the everyday. Thus it can be said that, notwithstanding his declaration, Stanner — by privileging a discussion of symbolism over the social exchanges between those involved in ‘religious’ activities — failed, to a certain extent, to pursue his project (see Keen 1986; Morphy 1988). He addressed cosmology and ontology rather than the forms of social process that sustained this panoply over time.1 Stanner overlooked the interaction between clans that was progressively shaped by a mission presence at Port Keats. This, in part, was due to the timing of his field work and the privileged subject of his investigation, namely restricted men’s ceremonies, as opposed to the open ceremony genres that were emerging in Port Keats in those years.2 I do not intend with these remarks to criticise Stanner’s accomplishments that were, undoubtedly, significant. However, Stanner’s work distanced him from the analysis of everyday interaction between clan groups that is extremely interesting for its heterogeneous character. The fragmented structure of the groups of people that participated in the ceremony he observed disappeared in the face of a ritual unity that became a shared property of all ‘Murinbata’ people. By privileging this line of investigation, Stanner overlooked the dynamics of interaction between different language-groups — some of whom were traditional enemies — that took place in the settlement. Despite the direction taken by Stanner in his writings, his approach was a key starting point for my research. As I progressed in the investigation of song genres at Wadeye, it became clear that this musical production could be recognised as a concrete example of what he defined as ‘operations that symbolize transitivity’ (1963, p. 171). My investigation of songs parallels

152

10. A study of song genres at Wadeye

Stanner’s analysis of ritual as a ‘dynamic structure of operations, exemplified in transactions about things of value’ (ibid., p. vii), where the emergence of open ceremony songs can be seen as the reproduction of Indigenous values, negotiated within but also outside an Aboriginal cultural space, in the face of historical change. I would go even further and argue that songs must be considered as instrumental to the development of social processes and not only as a reflection of them. This chapter is concerned with a musical ethnography in which music is regarded as a key to understanding social processes. It is based on the principle that music production and performance must be understood as the enactment of wider cultural forms, principles and historical circumstances. Songs are operational structures, indeed strategies, that have made possible, and still make possible today, the continuation of an Aboriginal domain in Wadeye. By investigating the production of new traditional and popular song genres, I cast light on the instrumental role that music played in accommodating the social changes brought about by the establishment of Port Keats as a Catholic mission in the 1930s (Malgarrin); also the new patterns of relatedness articulated between different language groups that came to live within the boundaries of the settlement in the late 1950s (Djanba); and the revitalisation of local clan identities that sustained the outstation movement in the 1980s (Popular music). 1930s: malgarrin and the performance of christianity

Stylistically,Malgarrin can be described as a clapstick-accompanied,unrestricted song genre generally performed by men and women together. This model of performance and other elements, such as cyclical text, isorhythmic setting and the relationship of beating to text-rhythm, are similar to a cognate style — that of Balga, from the Kimberley region of Western Australia — and suggests the likely Western Australian origin of this genre. This genre facilitated an Indigenous engagement with Christian cosmology by including it in the mythopoesis of an Aboriginal world. Strikingly, the production of these songs — texts which contain explicit Christian imagery — predates the Port Keats mission’s founding.3 The process of song production was initiated by a vision in which the Christian God appeared in a dream to Mollinjin, a local man with a reputation as a sorcerer. God ‘gave’ Mollinjin the first Malgarrin song. Mollinjin’s vision has attracted the attention of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike and therefore has become a key motif of the Port Keats/Wadeye area. Mollinjin, so the story goes, was stricken by a sudden illness, and he was forced to rest under a tree while his peers went hunting. During his sleep, he had a vision in which a bird took him up to ‘a beautiful place’ and later, after turning into an angel, it showed him a city. On the outskirts of the city he

153

Alberto Furlan

saw a ‘beautiful lady’, later identified as the Virgin Mary, who was stepping on a snake that was trying to bite her. In the course of the dream, Mollinjin came into the presence of God, who was wearing a traditional paperbark hat. God gave him a song called Malgarrin, and urged him to stop his previously violent behaviour and to become a good man.The dreamer awoke a changed man and told everybody about his vision. A few people who had travelled to Western Australia recognised the places and the language but could not understand how Mollinjin had acquired this knowledge. He had neither been to these places nor previously heard the language. An explanation came when, during the first mass held by Father Docherty at the original site of the mission, people recognised a portrait of Holy Mary as the woman Mollinjin had seen in his dream (Furlan 2005, p. 85). The order in which the events develop is typical of traditional Dreaming stories: the appearance of ancestral agents, in this case biblical figures that include an angel, Jesus, theVirgin Mary and God; the progressive revelation of new knowledge; and the communication of a new model of performance. As noted above, this narrative embodies both the reproduction of an Aboriginal cultural system (dreams, dances and songs) and the introduction of a new knowledge (epitomised by the figure of the Christian God). Alongside these elements of an Aboriginal logic there is also an interplay of Indigenous and non-Indigenous elements. Here the boundaries between the two cosmologies are not clearly defined. On the contrary, they often blur. God is both an ancestral agent and an agent of a different type of knowledge. At the same time, he provides this knowledge in an Indigenous way, by giving a new song to Mollinjin. Rather than describe this as an instance of syncretism, it seems more appropriate to interpret these Christian elements as engagement with knowledge identified by Mollinjin as part of a peripheral but nonetheless Indigenous cosmology.4 This narrative should not be seen as an a posteriori construction of foreknowledge; for example, as a dream anticipating the arrival of the settlers who thereby receive an ancestral authorisation. Mollinjin had not experienced the pervasive presence of colonists at the time of his vision. Therefore his narration cannot be interpreted as a strenuous defence of Indigenous values or as an attempt to mediate the introduction of a new cult, made in the awareness of an inevitable arrival of missionaries.5 Like other new cults that had come to the area in previous decades this one, with its elements now identified as ‘Christian’, was incorporated into local ceremonial life through the advent of Mollinjin’s vision. Mollinjin’s vision does not explain how Aboriginal people adapted to Christianity. Rather, it points to the way in which Christianity was incorporated into an Indigenous world. The vision transposes the historical factuality of Christianity, which could have been interpreted in the first place as the product of the settlers,

154

10. A study of song genres at Wadeye

into the ‘everywhen’ of the Dreaming (see Stanner 1979, p. 24). Most importantly, Malgarrin songs were integral to this incorporation. They bridged the space between the dreamed inspiration of a single individual (Mollinjin, the composer), and the communal performance of rituals in which these new elements were made explicit. This process provided a later, socially and culturally elaborated Christian order with an initial Indigenous legitimation. Whatever the moral and social tensions to come, at the outset Christianity was not simply imposed by the settlers. It was also generated from within the Indigenous cosmology. The emergence of these new genres can be thus seen as ‘transactional’ inasmuch as they allowed the reproduction of an Indigenous domain through the transaction of values between different ontologies, where the arrival of the new Christian order was accompanied by the production of a ritual performance that allowed a new cosmology to coalesce ‘change to the form of permanence’ (Stanner 1963, p. 139). The production of new songs is exemplary in understanding this type of innovation: these new compositions are not merely the product of historical circumstance but, from the point of view of Aboriginal people in Wadeye, the very condition of new events emerging, and this is reflected in people’s remarks today. Wadeye residents stress that Mollinjin’s vision and Malgarrin occurred prior to the arrival of the missionaries by proudly asserting that they were ‘Christians before the Christians came’ (see Furlan 2005, p. 88). This affirmation stands both as a political statement of autonomy and as a reaffirmation of an Indigenous moral and aesthetic order over that of the settlers. The experience of the vision — ancestors, places and events — is shown through the songs and dances received. This performative space of ritual is the prime channel for the communication of new knowledge, and also the medium through which social relationships are constructed and negotiated. New elements of Christianity are translated into the language of performance and, in this form, they are regarded as Indigenous elements. Here are a couple of these elements at play: [Malgarrin 02] Siti iana kalawurrka kalawurrka Going up! Here’s the city. [Malgarrin 03] Yinimala kukpi pana yinimala kayer kayer. The snake is attacking, the tongue [is coming out] (Furlan 2005, p. 114).

Mollinjin’s vision and Malgarrin songs were institutionalised as Indigenous knowledge when they were incorporated in the Indigenous–missionary

155

Alberto Furlan

cultural order. Today Malgarrin is not performed regularly. The reason for this decline is to be found in the progressive waning of the influence of the Christian Church in Wadeye, but also in the emergence of other song genres in the 1960s. 1960s: djanba and the tripartite ceremonial exchange

There are three main public ceremonial songs6 in Wadeye today. Each of them relates to different language groups. These are Djanba, performed by Murrinh-patha speakers; Lirrga, performed by Marri Ngarr people; and Wangga, performed by speakers of the Magati Ke, Marri Tjevin and Marri Amu languages.These three groups, each of which is composed of a number of different clans, identify themselves on the basis of the genre they perform. They are known in English as the Wangga, Lirrga and Djanba ‘mobs’. These mobs are social groups that constitute the basis on which ceremonial interaction operates.This tripartite ceremonial interaction is carried through the performance of these three genres. Djanba is a clapstick-accompanied song genre performed by men and women together, which belongs to the Murrinh-patha speaking group, historically associated with the area around the township of Wadeye. Djanba was first composed by Robert Dungoi Kolumboort, of the Yek Diminin clan, probably around the beginning of the 1960s. Cultural contacts with neighbouring western tribes played a significant role in the creation of this genre. In the 1950s, many people belonging to the Murrinh-patha language group were employed in the cattle-station industry of the Victoria River District and in the neighbouring part of Western Australia. The night ‘corroborees’, enacted on a daily basis on these cattle stations, included examples of Junba, a Kimberley style of clap-stick accompanied songs, performed by men and women together, which is stylistically quite similar to Djanba. Three main causes induced the emergence of these new genres and the system of tripartite ceremonial exchange: the contraction of regional ceremonial exchange; the need to accommodate tension between formerly hostile clans now living together; and the need to resist the homogenisation imposed by Christianity and the mission’s domestic economy. Historical precedents for group exchange in the Daly River area have been discussed in the literature, particularly by Stanner (1933–34, 1963), who describes a system of ceremonial ritual and economic exchange between the people of Wadeye and the groups to the north-east and southwest in the decades preceding the foundation of the mission. However, by the time Stanner arrived at what was to be the mission site in 1935, the pressures exerted by the presence since the 1870s of white settlers outside the boundaries of the Daly and Victoria rivers had led to a localisation of

156

10. A study of song genres at Wadeye

cultural contacts. The foundation of the mission in 1935 caused a further contraction of the ceremonial activity in the area: exchanges began to falter as commodities could be easily obtained from the missionaries, and in the mid 1940s circumcisions were suppressed by the new Christian order. Historical changes made wider regional exchanges increasingly difficult to sustain, and people’s attention turned towards more localised interactions. In this context, the potential for a rebirth of ceremonial activity around Port Keats materialised when groups to the east and north were progressively drawn into the mission. Wadeye itself became the place of interaction between different groups, which were no longer engaging with distant tribes but had their ceremonial counterparts at hand within the boundaries of the township. The location of the different groups within the mission took a clear shape at the beginning of the 1950s, with the cessation of the fortnightly shifts that allocated different language-based groups alternately to bush life or settlement residence. However the presence at the mission of groups such as the Murrinh-patha and the Marri Ngarr — who were formerly tribal enemies — created a series of tensions. Moreover, the secular organisation of life based on communal work and the Christian organisation of sacred life threatened to dissolve the cultural differences between different groups within the settlement. Differences needed to be addressed in a way that both the secular and sacred life administered by Christianity was not able to satisfy. It is in this context that new song genres emerged, specifically to implement a system of exchange that could restructure traditional patterns of reciprocity based on each group’s acknowledged uniqueness within a radically changed social and economic environment.The point to be stressed is that this tripartite ceremonial exchange sustained both the constitution of each mob’s identity and the articulation of social reciprocity between them. Songs accompanied a renewed and thriving ceremonial activity that continues to this day. The composition process of Djanba song is almost invariably initiated by a dream in which song-giving agents, in the guise of human ancestors or Dreaming ancestors, appear to the composer and perform the song for him/her. This category of beings is known as Kardu Wakal (Little People), human-like spirit beings about a metre tall. Once awake, the composer recollects clap-stick rhythm patterns and song text and gives form to the new composition. People refer to this process as ‘finding a new song’. Because Djanba songs are composed to be performed, their essence must be understood in the light of the performative context; namely, an arena of exchange in which each group sings and dances its own totemic country, but does so for another group. For instance, for the funeral of a person from the Djanba mob, it will be either Lirrga or Wangga mob to perform; similarly,

157

Alberto Furlan

it will be either Djanba or Wangga to dance at the circumcision ceremony of a Lirrga young man. During the dream in which the composer receives the songs, Kardu Wakal engage in a series of actions that epitomise human beings’ social and ceremonial life: they look after their country, they visit other people’s estates and they perform ceremonial dances. It is from these dreams that people learn how to interact and constitute ceremonial exchange. Kardu Wakal are a key component of the Indigenous cosmology across the region. They are found not only in Murrinh-patha territory, but also in other countries and in the compositions of the other two genres: Walakandha are the totemic beings of this class that are associated with Wangga, Kanybubi are those associated with Lirrga. One of their key characteristics is the eagerness to perform. In the dreams that inspire the composers, they sing and dance with great intensity, thus providing the composer not only with the song, but also with the actions for a complete performance. [Djanba 38] Kardu djanba bamperar wurran pelpith-nu Kunbinhi kathu Ngarrim thakunh nhinida kunbara warra wurran-yu The Little People are going up and down [dancing] on top of Kunbinhi The Left-handed one is there: you’re leading now! (Furlan 2005, p. 166).7

In the performance space, the audience is not only confronted with the specificities of the cosmology described by the performers but, more importantly, by a prototype that articulates the proper relationship between country, Dreaming beings and human individuals. This paradigm extends across the genres, and for this reason the performance of Djanba song and dances also stands for the relationships that individuals associated with either Lirrga or Wangga hold with their countries. This is evident during mortuary ceremonies, where the primal focus of attention is not the country of the deceased as spatial specificity but, rather the relationship that people have with their countries and the modalities by which individuals connect with them. As these relationships are based on cosmologies and methodologies that are homologous across the region, they can be expressed with reference to countries other than those of the deceased. For this reason, it is possible to sing Kunbinhi — the Murrinhpatha totemic country of Djanba songs — while sending away the spirit of a Wangga individual to his totemic country at Yendili. Djanba songs provide a ritual performative space for an active forum of intergroup negotiation. The tripartite reciprocal exchange constitutes

158

10. A study of song genres at Wadeye

a system of ritual transactions in which each group’s identity is brought to the performance in order to be sustained by its performers, and to be acknowledged by the audience.This practice can be seen in light of Stanner’s operational concept, where associations between individuals within clans are visible as ‘conjoint acts’, that is, when repeated, they ‘exhibit a form or pattern’ (1989, p. 36). Performative interaction based on parallel cosmologies constitutes a ritual arena, thus creating a space for negotiation in which difference and contrasts can be administered and settled. 1980s to 1990s: popular music and the reproduction of clans’ identities

Aboriginal popular music has been an integral part of the lives of Indigenous people for the past five decades and has become, in more recent years, a powerful vehicle for depicting the Aboriginal cultural system to an audience that comprises both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.8 In the case of Wadeye, popular music works — as traditional music previously did — as an instrument for reproducing Indigenous structures. Common elements are present in the works of the vast majority of Indigenous rock bands around Australia. In particular, it is the relationship between songs and country and the performing relationships between the various bands that constitute the most interesting areas of investigation (see Corn 2002). On the other hand, the relative isolation that characterises the community of Wadeye, and the fewer opportunities for interaction with other Aboriginal bands and non-Indigenous Australians compared to those experienced by other Aboriginal people around the country, means that their songs are more strictly related to the Indigenous milieu of that area. None of the songs collected can therefore be characterised as ‘political’ protests against such matters as social disparities, past practices of segregation, and lack of cross-cultural understandings.9 It must be noted, however, that popular music at Wadeye has, nonetheless, been produced in order to articulate their experience of modernity. Popular music, in fact, was initiated by the generation of youngsters that grew up in close contact with the missionaries in the dormitory institution.10 Popular music helped the people of Wadeye to reconstitute an Indigenous moral order during the post-missionary era, to cope with the non-traditional education received in the mission dormitory, and to reassert clan identities — producing differences and reciprocities through new models of exchange — during a specific moment of Indigenous history, namely the outstation movement. The transaction patterns used in ceremonial context to demarcate and redefine wider language-group identities within the mission was now

159

Alberto Furlan

tuned to the new historical situation of the early 1980s, when a centrifugal movement of people relocating onto their clan estates took place across Australia. In the context of these developments, bands shifted from being ‘mob’ phenomena to units mainly identified with one patrilineal group (clan) or another.This involved the emergence of popular music as instrumental in the process of generating separate and delineated identities among groups. An example of a popular song, Kardu Diminin Country, follows: Palyrr Bape, ngarra kura kulurduk yingamngarrawatha-yu da pangu-yu Ngarra kangkurl nganki pardida, da pangu-yu da lelunhka Ngarra nhipilin da Kumeway, da lelunhka da pangu yu Nanthi ngarra thathangaday yingamngarrawatha-yu, da Memarl da lelunhka Nanthi ngarra marrurru yingamngarrawatha-yu, da Mawurt da lelunhka Yile, thangarrangkarda-nu ku ngarra ngakumarl yingamngarrawatha-yu Yile, da thingarru, Kunbinhi da lelunhka Neki-yu The hill Bape, Kura Kulurduk over there Where our paternal grandfathers used to live, a beautiful place The creek Kumeway, a beautiful place over there Where the Dreaming site of the eucalyptus flowers is, at Memarl, a beautiful place Where the Dreaming site of the Milky way is, at Mawurt, a beautiful place Father, show me where the Dreamings are Father, Ah, my country! Kunbinhi, a beautiful place! Our place (Furlan 2005, p. 230).

The song’s lyrics present a list of localities that impart order to important places in the clan estate. The song is like a map. It describes a totemic topography in reference to which the individual can chart his or her individuality, and articulate a personal identification with the song and with the larger clan group. By mentioning that his ‘paternal grandfathers used to live’ around these places the composer reaffirms his authority, derived through a patrilineal line of descent to that country.The phrase ‘Father, show me where the Dreamings are’ is a heartfelt request for knowledge that will allow the composer to understand and consequently nurture and preserve his totemic country. The song ends with the name of this country, Kunbinhi, designating it as ‘our

160

10. A study of song genres at Wadeye

Wangga dancing at Port Keats, c. 1950s. Photographer WEH Stanner, Stanner Collection, AIATSIS N887-3.

country’. Here the composer is speaking to his father and the country that is their clan estate. The recurrent presence of country in popular songs derives from the circumstance of these compositions. Popular songs, as noted above, flourished in the years of the outstation movement, composed by a generation of people who had grown up in the dormitory system. For this generation, popular songs were — and still are — a means to express their loss at being separated from country but, more importantly, they are also an instrument for reasserting identity. By singing about country, each band reaffirms the place of its clan in the cultural landscape of the community. Naming country in songs is also typical of traditional music. This practice, which is modelled on the totemic ancestor’s naming/creative action, is fundamental in the process of articulation of identities and in the revitalisation of ancestral life forces in the ritual arena.11 Popular music also serves this purpose. By performing and naming the country, each band is making the country ‘real’ once again, re-establishing connections between people and their ancestors, reasserting identities which were homogenised by mission practices and nurturing the interests of younger generations towards their estates.

161

Alberto Furlan

This performance provides a vehicle for personal identification with a particular estate, namely the one the song describes. But the collective performance of different bands also allows each person to have a broader vision of the world, as songs evoke a number of estates. A person’s identity is therefore actively constituted through a bivalent process: he or she is part of a group — self (clan) identity — and also part of a larger network of groups where identity is constituted in juxtaposition with others. A process of reciprocal recognition takes place. On-stage performance, to use Stanner’s concept, is ‘transitive’ (1989, p. 18); that is, it acts intentionally on the ‘object of activity’, namely the identity of each clan, by making people understand their place in the world. Popular music has been instrumental in giving expression to forms of clan-based identity subdued by the mission and reinvigorated in the postmission era. Therefore it is inaccurate to suggest that popular music simply stemmed from cultural contact with, or the increasing dominance of, a non-Indigenous genre. This process of interpretation and transformation of popular song has also involved marked Aboriginal agency in which particular intentionality in the local milieu has left its mark on the numerous songs produced. conclusion

In this chapter I have proposed that the analysis of song genres can offer an evocative realm for investigating the process of sociocultural change experienced by Indigenous people at Wadeye. This approach suggests that people encompassed change in ways that allowed the reproduction of Indigenous culture, not through the simple reproduction of traditional ceremonies but rather through the creation of new performances that also became new vehicles for expressing specifically Indigenous values. This account has emphasised the strategies that Stanner identified as ‘transactional’. In the case of musical production in Wadeye, the production of three new song genres coalesced around the transaction of values and identities within and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous orders.These song genres, to paraphrase Stanner, sustained ritual ‘acts of sociality’ that allowed the continuation of an Aboriginal domain in Wadeye.With Malgarrin this exchange took place between Indigenous values and Christian cosmology; with Djanba, antagonist language groups relocated within the mission came to terms with each other, constituting an arena of ritual exchange; finally, with popular songs, clan estates regained a sense of individual identity in the context of the ‘outstation movement’. It is thus within the space of performative transaction that people produced continuity in the course of change. It is not so much that this continuity is a ‘constructed’ Aboriginality but rather that all tradition is a form of dialogue

162

10. A study of song genres at Wadeye

and one in which continuity and change are constant poetic partners. For this reason the challenges that Wadeye residents currently face will not disperse their identity as Indigenous Australians. It is safe to say that in the future these and other challenges will elicit further forms of narrative and poesis. References Corn, A 2002,‘Dreamtime wisdom, modern time vision.Tradition and innovation in the popular band movement of Arnhem Land, Australia’, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne. Furlan, A 2005, ‘Songs of continuity and change: the reproduction of Aboriginal culture through traditional and popular music’, PhD thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney. Hiatt, L 1989, ‘On Aboriginal religion: an introduction’, in WEH Stanner, On Aboriginal religion, Oceania Monograph no. 36, pp. xix–xxxix. Keen, I 1986, ‘Stanner on Aboriginal religion’, Canberra Anthropology, vol. 9, pp. 26– 50. Kolig, E 1972, ‘Bi:n and Gadeja: an Australian Aboriginal model of the European society as a guide in social change’, Oceania, vol. 43, pp. 1–18. —— 1980, ‘Captain Cook in the western Kimberleys’, in RM Berndt & CH Berndt (eds), Aborigines of the west: their past and their present, University of Western Australia Press, Perth, pp. 274–82. Merlan, F 1989, ‘On Aboriginal religion: an appreciation’, introduction to WEH Stanner, On Aboriginal religion, Oceania Monograph no. 36, (facsimile edition), pp. i–xviii. Morphy, H 1988, ‘The resurrection of the Hydra: twenty-five years of research on Aboriginal religion’, in RM Berndt & RTonkinson (eds), Social anthropology and Australian Aboriginal studies: a contemporary overview, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, pp. 241–66. Munn, N 1970, ‘The transformation of subjects into objects in Walbiri and Pitjantjatjara myth’, in RM Berndt (ed.) Australian Aboriginal anthropology, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, pp.141–63. Regev, M 1997, ‘Rock aesthetics and the musics of the world’, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 14, pp. 125–42. Rose, D 1984, ‘The saga of Captain Cook: morality in Aboriginal and European law’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, vol. 2, pp. 24–39. Stanner, WEH 1933–4, ‘Ceremonial economics of the Mulluk Mulluk and Madngella tribes of the Daly River, north Australia’, Oceania, vol. 4, pp. 156–75. —— 1936a, ‘Murinbata kinship and totemism’, Oceania, vol. 7, pp. 186–216. —— 1937, ‘Aboriginal modes of address and reference in the north-west of the Northern Territory’, Oceania, vol. 8, pp. 300–15. —— 1963, On Aboriginal religion, Oceania Monograph no. 36, Sydney.

163

Alberto Furlan Stanner, WEH 1973, ‘The Port Keats story’, address to the Newmann conference, Canberra, 9 October 1973. ——1979 (1953), ‘The Dreaming’, in White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938–1973, Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp. 23–40. —— 1979c (1959), ‘Durmungam: a Nangiomeri’. in White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938–1973, Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp. 67–105. —— 1989, On Aboriginal religion, Oceania Monograph no. 36, facsimile edition, Oceania Publications, Sydney. Tamisari, F 1998, ‘Body, vision and movement: in the footprints of the ancestors’, Oceania, vol. 68, pp. 249–70.

Notes 1. Merlan (1989, p. vii) has aptly noted that Stanner’s analysis was not ‘directed to real time social acts as they can be observed, but rather to segmentations of rite and myth...that contribute to his main theme, the interpretation of Aboriginal ontology’. 2. Stanner mentions ‘open’ ceremonial songs in his description of circumcision rites (1989, pp. 108–14); however, song texts are not transcribed, nor analysed. 3. Although people stress the autonomy of Mollinjin’s vision, it is likely that cultural contacts with Christian missionaries took place when Jesuit missionaries established Daly River mission in the late 1880s. Spanish missionaries were also present in the neighbouring region of the Kimberley in Western Australia. 4. Kolig (1972, p. 3) points out that, in the Kimberley, the Indigenous process of understanding settlers’ culture was based on the concept of a ‘cosmological periphery’. That is, the settlers were thought to have originated from the same domain from which the ‘exotic’ and the ‘unknown’ came, namely, the fringes of the Indigenous cosmology. Albeit surprising, Kolig says, Europeans were not regarded as ‘fundamentally new’ because they were considered part of the broader Aboriginal world. The same can be inferred of Mollinjin’s vision and its numerous Indigenous elements juxtaposed to the Christian ones (i.e. God wearing Aboriginal ritual paraphernalia). 5. Mollinjin did not challenge Christianity or try to substitute his Indigenous knowledge in lieu of Western history, as happens in the various Aboriginal sagas reported by Kolig (1980) and Rose (1984), in the well-known Captain Cook complex. 6 . Performances occur during public rituals, such as mortuary rites and circumcisions, or for entertainment. There is no secrecy involved in these performances. Even children are encouraged to participate in the dances in order to learn their group’s songs. 7. The Left-handed one is Mayamungum, the dance leader of the Little People. 8. A similar pattern may be found with regard to other Indigenous popular music around the globe (see Regev 1997). 9. Such ‘political’ songs are a key part of the repertoire of many other Aboriginal bands in Australia. Protests about past segregation are found in the work of artists such as Archie Roach, and bands such as Blekbala Mujik and No Fixed Address. Exhortations for a better cross-cultural understanding are to be found in the repertoire of Yothu Yindi.

164

10. A study of song genres at Wadeye 10. Between 1946 and 1967 two generations of Indigenous people spent their childhood in the dormitories. 11. Munn (1970, p. 102) claims that singing ‘one’s way from place to place implied that marks and names are being “put” at each place — that is, that the site is being claimed’. Tamisari (1998, p. 254) suggests that ‘the shaping of the ground involves the act of naming’. The connection here is between places and personal or group names which, according to the author, ‘reveal once again the corporeal connection between people, places and ancestors’.

165

Part 3 Land and people

11.

Stanner and Aboriginal land use: Ecology, economic change, and enclosing the commons peter sutton

In the early 2000s debate rattled around the Australian media over whether or not Indigenous communally owned land should be legally permitted to undergo privatisation, should its owners wish it. Some Australians thought, rather simplistically, that the connections between Indigenous people and their lands were so intrinsic to their identity, and to their spiritual life, that they would not contemplate such a change and its potential for severance of the people from the country. Many of these people were probably dismayed to learn that there were some Indigenous Australians who actually liked the idea. In 2007 the issue of private leases of Aboriginal residential land was again in the headlines, during the debate over the then federal government’s intervention in the Northern Territory. Some called it a ‘land grab’. But some traditional owners signed up for the new arrangements with enthusiasm (see for example Hughes & Warin 2005; Pearson 2005; Hughes 2007; Karvelas 2007a, b; Karvelas & Wilson 2007; Pearson 2007). The question of whether or not Aboriginal people could voluntarily transform, modernise or even sever relationships with their ancestors’ sacred geographies was not a new one. WEH Stanner had been there long before. He was struck, as so many others have been, by the suddenness with which bush populations stopped basing their economies on foraging over the land. His early interest in economics led him not only to develop a theory of social transactions in things of cultural, spiritual or other value, but also to take an interest in the changing mundane economics of Aboriginal people’s lives, as they moved from dependency on the ecology of the bush to the economics of settlements (Stanner 1933, 1935, 1938).

169

Peter Sutton the ruling conventions of interest

While Stanner is justly famous as the deepest writer on Aboriginal spirituality, he had an acute appreciation of Aboriginal people’s former ecological relationships with their landscapes. One of his most influential papers sought to provide a better basis for understanding the links between the sacred trust of land custodianship and the daily economics of land use. This 1965 paper, ‘Aboriginal territorial organization: estate, range, domain and regime’, laid out a highly reconstructive research program. It was as much about researching classical-period relationships between Aboriginal people and the physical environment as it was about the more abstracted relationships of clanship and totemism. This ecological dimension of the paper has been historically overshadowed by its other main topic, Stanner’s response to Les Hiatt’s 1962 publication on Aboriginal local organisation and Hiatt’s critique of the model earlier put forward by AR Radcliffe-Brown.This debate about ‘local organisation’ attracted a lot more attention than Stanner’s proposals for ecological studies, and soon became particularly relevant politically and legally, as the land rights era arrived with force a decade later. Stanner’s proposal for a research push on Aboriginal ecological relationships may also have largely missed its intended impact because Australian anthropology itself, with some notable exceptions, was by then already losing interest in classical Aboriginal material culture and pre-contact economic systems and their reconstruction. Increasingly such things were being left to the archaeologists and museum curators. This was a time when anthropology was increasingly defining itself as a largely synchronic and humanist pursuit rather than as a deeply diachronic and scientific one as well. This is not to say that anthropologists have stopped writing about Aboriginal/ environmental relationships. There has been a recent resurgence of interest in the subject (see for instance Langton (1998), Rose (1992, 1995, 1996, 2002), Strang (1997), and Mulcock et al. (2005)). But the emphasis is now much more centred on phenomenological or cultural constructionist models of human knowledge of the environment rather than on total ecological relationships per se. The classificatory and behavioural aspects of the latter have been left to an extent in the care of natural historians (e.g.Waddy 1988; Latz 1995), and the archaic and evolutionary aspects in that of prehistorians. Cultural anthropology has become more anthropocentric. Stanner recognised that the demise of environmental determinism, the recognition of layers of ‘non-adaptive features’ in human life, and the almost total collapse of pre-contact Aboriginal local organisation in the sense of physical land occupation, had ‘dissuaded some fieldworkers from serious attempts at reconstructive study. But, past and present, the great inhibitor seems rather to have been the ruling conventions of interest’ (Stanner 1965, p. 4). By that I understand Stanner to have meant the state of anthropological taste, as it shifted away from the more scientific and towards the more humanistic. 170

11. Stanner and Aboriginal land use

Stanner in a sense encompassed this shift coevally within his own intellectual work over many years. He did not see the natural history of Homo sapiens sapiens and an appreciative cultural anthropology of transcendent religion as antithetical pursuits (see Sutton, Chapter 7 this volume). This capacity to integrate and balance the scientific and the humanistic is arguably one of the most important lessons of his work for the present era. It is in line with one of the anthropology class notes Stanner made in 1929 when he was just 24 years old. He quoted his teacher AR Radcliffe-Brown:‘To see man first as an animal and then as a very exceptional animal is the problem of anthropology’ (in Barwick et al. 1985, p. 2). In the 1965 paper Stanner argued for a close study of the role of climate and the biota in the evolution of structural differences between Aboriginal societies, including land tenure systems, and praised the work of Norman Tindale and Joseph Birdsell in this regard (Stanner 1965, p. 22). (Stanner’s praise for Tindale and Birdsell may come as a surprise to some who now write off their works as positivist efforts irrelevant to the tasks of academic anthropology, but who continue to draw upon the writings of Stanner.) The ‘proper structure’ for such an inquiry would be one that began with ‘a classification that makes empirical and systematic sense in terms of natural history, human ecology, and social habits’ (Stanner (1965, p. 23).1 Its theoretical object would be the ‘effects of regime and habitat on human association [and an] across-the-map approach to territorial organization would then, and only then, be acceptable scientifically’ (Stanner 1965, p. 25). This was Stanner in natural history mode. ‘Natural history’ was an expression he used a number of times in his writings. I suspect it appealed to him possibly on some of the grounds it appeals to myself and to a number of my anthropological contemporaries, as standing for an aesthetic of knowledge that sees joy in the detail, as a cool holiday from the hothouse of intellectualism, a corrective to the excessive claims of cultural constructionism, a rejection of narcissism, and a taking of refuge in what originally fascinated many of us when we started looking into anthropology: the richness of the lives and imaginations of different human beings, rather than debates about post-metaphysical Heideggerianism. We cannot claim to penetrate the meanings of others in a powerful sense if we have no knowledge of those things about which others weave systems of meaning. Much of the detail and poetic inspiration of Aboriginal mythology and ritual representation concerning totemic animal and plant species rests on a refined knowledge of the natural history of those species. The choice of a male emu character who looks after the initiation novices in Aboriginal mythology makes immediate sense when we know that in nature it is the male emus that incubate the eggs and not the hens, and in initiation it is men who re-birth boys and thus give birth to men. The association of Arrernte subincision imagery with a marsupial species (native cat) which has a bifid penis, high fertility, plays vigorously while young, and is cared for 171

Peter Sutton

by both parents, becomes far more resonant and more richly scientific, as it were, when the zoology is known as well as the mythology (Morton 1997, pp. 157–8). Stanner suggested on one occasion that an operational, rather than structuralist, approach to the study of ‘the structure of sacrifice’ was ‘more akin, at least to begin with, to a natural philosophy or a natural history of a type of conduct’ (Stanner 1963a, pp. 108–9; this is referred to in Barwick et al. (1985, p. 33) as ‘using a natural history approach’). I interpret this to mean that the operational or transactional is much closer to the immediacy of our experience of each other than is the more highly abstracted domain of structural analysis. The operational level of behaviour is where natural history lies. It was perhaps ironic, then, that, influenced by Stanner among others, those who drafted the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (Cwlth) based the definition of traditional ownership on membership of a descent-structured customary corporation, while a concrete economic history of living on and using the land, or of operational commitment to ‘transactions of value’ in ceremonial life, took a back seat merely as evidence of strength of attachment. a loosening nexus

The chance to study Aboriginal ‘local organisation’ in its classical forms had largely disappeared by the 1960s, in the sense that almost all people were now no longer living off the land as a full-time activity and the shapes of their social and imaginative lives were no longer informed daily by a close dependence on botanical, zoological and meteorological observation and accumulated knowledge. Scholars could still record their estates but no longer, in most cases, the ranges once occupied by shifting camps or bands. The nexus between plants, animals, water and warmth both as givers of life and as providers of the totemic symbolism of various human groupings had been loosened or was well on the way to being sundered. To explore and record bush country with people who had grown up on it beyond the reach of the sedentary economy, whose very lives had once depended on an intimate relationship with the land’s resources and seasons, was to see a rather different set of emotions than among people whose lives have been those of householders on settlements. Identification with the same country may sometimes be felt equally by older and younger, but it still has a different feel to it, the older people bound to it more comprehensively and viscerally, and less secular-politically, the younger bound to it more ideationally, and from their position in a more secular polity. For many, country is no longer simply the world. It has become an objectification. Of deeper impact, and with greater implications for the future, are related changes through which remote-area Indigenous Australians have been passing for decades. Expanding mobility, the emergence of individual self-

172

11. Stanner and Aboriginal land use

consciousness, the diminution of the encompassing power of kinship, the swelling tide of emphasis on private property and consumer goods, and the rising importance of residential community identities, among younger generations, are interconnected. They also impact on land relationships. There were always two different degrees and kinds of connection with the land: one experienced as intrinsic, the other as more circumstantial. The clan-estate relationship was more intrinsic, stable, and ideologically prescribed than the band-range relationship manifested by shifting camps of unstable memberships. Stanner’s 1965 paper clarified these distinctions and his terminology has been enduring.The nature of the articulated relationship between the two domains, that of the structural clan-estate and that of the operational band-range, has never been plumbed in a fully satisfying way. There is still a two-sided ecological life-space for Aboriginal people, one that keeps on changing, but it now includes Australian law, bureaucracy and capitalism as deeply structuring factors. So deeply structuring are they that at least the first two of them now vie for being experienced as among the more intrinsic of Indigenous people’s modes of being related to place. I refer here to legally recognised traditional owner status and membership of landbased organisations and associations.The cultural stuff of legal incorporation may still be rather foreign for many Aboriginal people, but the fact and consequence of belonging to a place or group in a legally incorporated or employed way has, for many, become deeply assimilated as a focus of economic and political striving and a key medium for transactions between kin and others. Here a new nexus between the structural and the operational has been achieved. Loosened from each other in the exodus from the bush, they have become reunited in town. stanner’s corrective

During the early phase of my work on a land claim on the Daly River in about 1979 I happened to mention to Stanner, who was sharing his 1932 Daly field data with me, that I’d had a fair bit of difficulty getting together an interested party of claimant traditional owners to come out and map sites for the anthropological report. They seemed to have other priorities at the time, including some heavy flagon sessions. Stanner’s rather vehement response was: ‘They don’t give a damn about the land!’ After recovering from the shock of hearing this I reflected on the distinction between the land as ancestral country and spiritual home and the land as sand, lagoons and rocks, a contrast that is usually given expression by two distinct lexical items in Aboriginal languages, although the first of such pairs of terms can usually cover both sets of meanings. Stanner himself was, even by 1958, clearly irritated by simplistic nonAboriginal views under which Aboriginal attachment to both country and soil — the intrinsic and the circumstantial — was equal:

173

Peter Sutton

I have come not long since from a part of Australia, the Fitzmaurice River in the Northern Territory, which is entirely empty of its former inhabitants…There is no evidence of any kind that the exodus was other than entirely voluntary (Stanner 1979, p. 46). Eventually, for every Aboriginal who, so to speak, had Europeans thrust upon him, at least one other had sought them out. More would have gone to European centres sooner had it not been that their way was often barred by hostile Aborigines (ibid., p. 48). Some of our general ideas may need drastic revision. A view which has had considerable influence in the past is that to part an Aboriginal from his clan country is to wrest his soul from his body…I have seen a man, revisiting his homeland after an absence, fall on the ground, dig his fingers into the soil, and say: ‘O, my country’. But he had been away, voluntarily; and he was soon to go away again voluntarily. Country is a high interest with a high value; rich sentiments cluster around it; but there are other interests; all are relative, and any can be displaced. If the bond between person and clan-estate were always in all circumstances of the all-absorbing kind it has sometimes been represented to be, then migrations of the kind I have described simply could not have occurred (ibid., p. 49 emphasis in original).

Basil Sansom perspicaciously called this train of thought and fact ‘Stanner’s corrective’ (Sansom n.d., p. 11). It is also an example of Stanner’s freedom from cant. Are such things so freely sayable in today’s climate? We trust. But in the 2000s such thoughts seemed far away from the land tenure debate. There were vested interests operating on more than one side of the discussion. There were those who were accused of wanting to increase the privatisation and commodification of Aboriginal land for their own gain. On the other side, it was hardly surprising that those whose careers and power rested on a constituency of communal property holders, for whom they performed many vital and other functions, would see the questioning of that communalism as a threat. the evolution of territoriality

What Stanner saw as the collapse of ‘local organisation’ — the exodus from the bush — was in one regard the movement of pre-colonial aspects of local organisation from a more concrete to a more abstract formation, as patterns of residence, the gaining of sustenance, and the holding of symbolic and real rights in sacred estates, each drifted further apart from the other. The effects of this disarticulation of religious territory from economy were much the same whether it happened by coercion or voluntary movement or some combination of both. New forms of localism based on a more sedentary life sprang up, and in time the identities and rights conferred by belonging

174

11. Stanner and Aboriginal land use

to a particular mission or settlement or town, or to a particular pastoral station or run of stations (including the ‘beats’ of western New South Wales, reported by Beckett (1965, p. 9)), became new norms of local organisation in particular regions, overlaying and in many regions displacing the older ones. People also gained rights of linkage to places through a new labour theory of value, able to assert themselves where they or their immediate forebears had built yards, branded stock, scratched for tin or constructed dormitories. (For Cape York Peninsula examples see von Sturmer (1989, p. 4), Chase et al. (1998, pp. 52–9), Smith (2002, p. 24; 2003a, p. 137, 2003b, p. 33, 2003c, p. 90– 3), and more widely cf. McGrath (1987, p. 174).) Stanner had seen in 1932 an emergent subdivision of the Daly River, centred largely on farms which employed Aborigines, into sections ‘held’ by different groups of Aboriginal people (Hinkson 2005, p. 204). The whites had become a new object of desire and competition in the economic and tenure systems.The operational present was a stronger driving force than the structural and ideological past. It often is. Welfare not only kills incentive, it also kills totemism. As the demographic distribution and economic base of Aboriginal people changed on the frontier, their local organisation and customary links to places evolved in tandem, something that legislated forms of belonging may not have the flexibility to allow for. In that majority of places where the strongest abstract rights in country were conferred by ancestry rather than biography, this meant that there was often a stretching, and a growing disarticulation, of the mutual links between residence, economy, and rights in places. The traditional ecological life-space of which Stanner had written in 1965 was now less of a unity. Stanner’s point about pre-colonial Australia had not been that the environment in some simple sense determined the territorial system, but that the varied environmental and economic regimes were a powerful influence on the evolution of different territorial systems in different regions. From an anthropological point of view there is no absolute difference between the pre-colonial factors influencing the evolution of new and different tenure systems in different regions and the post-colonial ones, although the loss of autonomy occasioned by the imposition of the rule of a system of external law deeply alters the context in which forces for change can operate. One effect of sedentariness and the general abandonment of foraging has been a decline in the land’s importance as a physical supplier of economic value, except where modern enterprises such as mining or tourism have replaced foraging in the role of granting economic substance to place. Even the symbolic and political value of traditional country suffered a dip in force after the foraging economies collapsed and before the land rights era led to the legal recognition of traditional ownership (see Sutton 2003, p. 100). David Martin (1993, pp. 203–40) provided an acute account of this shift of land

175

Peter Sutton

from being an economic and symbolic resource to a principally symbolic one in the case of the Wik people of Aurukun, Cape York Peninsula. (The relevant chapter in his thesis is called, with great percipience, ‘From culture to “culture”’.) In July 2007, as I flew into Aurukun, for the first time in more than 30 years there was not a single bushfire smoke to be seen on the horizon, across the vast lands that belong legally and historically to the Wik. These lands are very rich in wildlife.The season was just coming into nhoom penthang, ‘burngrass time’. Not a single outstation was occupied. The entire population, about 1100 people, was in town. While there are many inhabited remote Aboriginal settlements there are also many large tracts of Aboriginal land, in the broadacre sense, which now lie untenanted for most or all of the year. In the early 2000s I visited regions of central Australia where homeland centres offered shelter, water and even power but were being inhabited with increasing rarity. By 2007 funds formerly allocated to homeland housing in the north-west of South Australia had been withdrawn on the grounds that the outstations had become largely uninhabited.2 In other regions of Australia, such as north-east Arnhem Land, decentralised small populations have been more sustained. The physical occupation of Aboriginal territory has in many regions been long declining, not only in the huge areas of arable land where dispossession occurred, but also in those vast tracts of desert and monsoon-belt land where its effects were minimised. Most of the great ex-reserve tracts of the north and centre, by the early 2000s, were being utilised physically only at certain locations and by small numbers of people. It is not an unusual experience to find that traditional countries are more the currency of intra- and inter-settlement relationships, including religion, and religious and secular politicking, than of regular dispersals of rights-holders across the landscape. The land is still important, but attention becomes increasingly restricted to key places, whether for camping, fishing and hunting, mining, tending to graves, or looking after sacred sites. A four-wheel-drive vehicle can be the means to get to an outstation, but an outstation, lived at or not, can also be the means to get a Toyota. Under these modern circumstances the known detail of country away from roads becomes rapidly attenuated, especially since the collapse of employment on mustering teams. The landscape, as an artefact of material culture, in this sense gradually becomes something other than what it was. Its structure is no longer principally physiographic or anatomised by Dreaming tracks. Its new skeleton is the road system.3 While many will mourn the loss of the past that these shifts entail, it is gauche and paternalistic for people who do not belong to or speak for these lands to seek to impose an inapplicable or fading traditionalism on those who do. It was noticeable in the press coverage of the debate over encouraging greater individuation and commodification of the use of Aboriginal land titles that there was some confusion about what the

176

11. Stanner and Aboriginal land use

Bill Stanner and Peter Sutton at the time they were working together on a land claim on the Daly River, c. 1979. Photographer Arthur Beau Palmer, Northern Land Council, courtesy Peter Sutton.

issues were. A popular stereotype suggested that all traditional Aboriginal land rights were communal, and that individual entitlements and interests granted by the holders of the commons are simply a Western introduction. This does not tally with what old people have told anthropologists over the years. Elsewhere I have discussed literature on this question, and described individual lifetime rights in specific resource sites which remain dependent on underlying common titles; standing permissions for non-owners to make economic use of traditional owners’ lands; and the customary formalised granting of rights in parcels of land to non-owners (Sutton 2003, pp. 24, 66–7, 116). So if you were wanting to credential an increase in the creation of private interests in Aboriginal land by using tradition, you could, perhaps with a little Jesuitry, find a precedent. But the communalism of traditional title always stood in clear contrast to the high individualism allowed for in choosing where to go, and with whom, when making a living. Personal claims on specific resources, alongside collective rights, were normal. If you discovered a bee’s nest you could mark the tree as ‘yours’ so that no competitor took the honey before you could return to cut it out. If your spear or gun or dugout canoe were

177

Peter Sutton

used in a successful hunt you would have personal claims on a portion of the meat. It is true, on the other hand, that many acts of traditional hunting, fishing and vegetable-gathering involved cooperation. The butchering of large game involved prescriptive sharing according to anatomical parts.Thus the old foraging economy required relationships of mutual dependency, and displayed a significant amount of communalism in both production and distribution. The economic basis for shared effort was sent into decline by the new economy, and especially by personalised welfare payments. This economically driven shift away from the role of mutual dependency in generating cooperation has probably contributed to the decline of the social fabric in Aboriginal communities.4 Increasing individuation of the social psychology of the person has paralleled the decline of communalism in other departments of Aboriginal life. enclosing the commons

In 2005 Helen Hughes and Jenness Warin wrote that a ‘new deal’ for Indigenous Australians would rest upon, among other things, legally creating the option for them to privatise their lands. A range of other views quickly emerged, most of them sceptical about the move towards greater privatisation and commodification (Altman this volume; Altman et al. 2005; Sanders 2005; Dodson & McCarthy 2005). Perhaps the greatest fear was that, as had happened in some Native American cases in the United States, people would sell off their inheritance for short-term gain and become landless (see, for example, Tom Calma in Karvelas (2007a); also Dalrymple (2007, p. 219). Few seem to have asked, at the time, whether this fear assumed that traditional owners needed to be protected from themselves, like so many naïve children. Then there were middle of the road views such as those of Noel Pearson, who said that ‘transferable property rights are integral to development’ but then identified the challenge of the issue to be that of preserving ‘the culture of communal tenure while enabling maximum individual and private economic use of the land’ (Pearson 2005). He did not suggest a means by which these apparently antithetical principles were to be put to bed together. A model of mixed tenures might be such a means. In England and France, unenclosed commons persist in the twenty-first century but both private and collective forms of tenure have also become entrenched and ‘traditional’ (Layton 2000, pp. 336–46). In the Northern Territory such a means had been feasible under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (Cwlth) since 1976. Section 19 of the Act allowed for leases to be granted over lots within townships on Aboriginal communal freehold land. In 2006 the Howard government amended the Act so that entire townships on Northern Territory Aboriginal land could be leased to the Commonwealth for 99 years, and the ante was upped dramatically in mid 2007 with that government’s intervention into

178

11. Stanner and Aboriginal land use

Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory (‘the Intervention’) that entailed the compulsory acquisition of five-year leases over some 70-odd townships. This was primarily about establishing Commonwealth control, in the face of the Northern Territory Government’s failure to stem spectacular and long-known rates of violence, child abuse and truancy in the Indigenous communities. Those who used the ‘land grab’ slogan to describe the Intervention were relying on the ignorance of the populace. The Commonwealth takeover was not about gobbling up acres in the middle of nowhere but a grab for the imposition of a new and tougher order in the face of a real crisis of social breakdown in many of the communities and in town camps (Dalrymple 2007, p. 213). But the new measures did not break the bond between Northern Territory Aboriginal land and underlying inalienable communal title. In this sense Aboriginal tenure was still far from the ‘normalcy’ of tradeable leaseholds in the Australian Capital Territory, or the more common freeholds of most of the country’s towns and cities. A section 19 lease was not ‘home ownership’ and was of secondary value compared with freehold, yet it remained a real property asset that could be mortgaged. David Dalrymple, on whose work I draw here, described the 2007 section 19A measures as the ‘abnormalisation’ of land tenure. He challenged the Howard government to ‘bring greater honesty and clarity to the debate’ by openly stating that they wanted Aboriginal land ownership to enjoy the same benefits and risks as that of other Australians. ‘What they are doing instead is imposing on Aboriginal people a third-rate system of ersatz land tenure’ (Dalrymple 2007, p. 219). Ersatz or not, a number of Aboriginal communities and spokespersons saw attractions in this ‘abnormalisation’ and publicly adopted it. National figure Galarrwuy Yunupingu signed a memorandum of understanding agreeing to enter negotiations over a 99-year lease on his Ski Beach community in Arnhem Land (Wilson & Karvelas 2007, p. 2; Karvelas & Wilson 2007). It was a far cry from the private home ownership Noel Pearson had been advocating unambiguously at least since February of the same year (Karvelas 2007a). For once the Howard government was to the left of a major Indigenous leader. The historically portentous issue is that of whether Aboriginal people will ever be granted the right to ‘enclose the commons’, should they wish to, and render at least parts of their vast estates alienable, as tradeable or sellable commodities on the market. Such a passage could get very rough. EP Thompson’s account of the turbulent English experience of the clash between those asserting ancient common rights in timber, grazing and turbary (turfgetting) and those enjoying the fruits of the enclosure (privatisation) of the commons in the early eighteenth century is instructive (Thompson 1975, pp. 81–115).

179

Peter Sutton

‘Nothing could extinguish the fact and claim of estate’, said Stanner — but this was an ideal (Stanner 1965, p. 2). Would Aboriginal people contemplate deliberately ‘extinguishing the fact and claim of estate’ — or rather, the fact and claim of that to which they held legal title, which is not the same — voluntarily, and for compensation? Is Aboriginal land tenure, in this sense, capable of what some would call ‘modernisation’ through its own version of ‘enclosing the commons’? Or would it be capable only of extinguishment through incorporation into the mixed economy of the market and the bureaucracy? Or would the two processes be just the same anyway? I don’t know. It’s an emotive area and it’s hard to be detached from the issues if you have had any longstanding interest in the land rights process.5 The debate over land title conversion echoed similar arguments about ‘enclosing the commons’ in the fields of information technology, genome knowledge, medical research, Antarctica, and fishing zones. There were also debates about the possibility of real estate on other planets (see, for example, Kennedy 2001 and Apostle et al. 2003). The communal seemed to be on the run. conclusion: respect, detachment, and knowledge

In ‘Description as politics’ Marilyn Strathern (2005) put the view that there were ‘new’ reasons in 2005 to find much knowledge worthless, and to regard anthropological description as something incomprehensible as an end in itself. She said that impatience with ethnographic detail was part of a politics of knowledge that was concerned largely with what parts of social science really contributed to society. This wave of incuriousness may also be part of the explanation for the lack of interest in furthering the pursuit of some of the things Stanner laid out in 1965. It raises the question as to whether the directional shifts taken by anthropological taste can be unpacked and attributed mainly to the logically derivative evolution of knowledge. Or is it that much of the apparently logical flow of this evolution comes from our ability to rationalise post hoc those tectonic shifts in thought that were really based on the temperamental and gestalt-like visions of particular eras? The gestalts of the times do tend to lead the social sciences by their nose-rings. It is in the nature of the humanities and social sciences to be far more susceptible to this atmospheric pressure than most other disciplines. It has been said that the more scientific the discipline, the more insulated are its practitioners from the opinions, standards and reactions of the wider society in which they work (Kuhn 1970, pp. 162–5). Detachment requires more effort in the softer disciplines. Writing of the history of scholarly and scientific studies of Aboriginal people, in 1963 Stanner said: It has required an immense intellectual struggle to bring the native Australians within a perspective that is at one and the same time 180

11. Stanner and Aboriginal land use

detached, informed and respectful. At one time it was indeed detached, but ill-informed and disrespectful; at another, better informed but full of preconception and thus still disrespectful; and later again, more respectful but far from detached and only half-informed (Stanner 1963b, p. xvii).

These are still sobering words. Respect, and its excessive form, idealisation, have both done well since this comment appeared. Stanner’s life’s work as an anthropologist was inspired by the scientific or natural history paradigm which gave detachment a kind of sacred value. On the other hand, when it came to respect for Aboriginal religion and Aboriginal people and Stanner’s need, which he shared with them, to preserve ultimate mysteries from desecration by investigation, Stanner was prepared to demonstrate the limits of detachment, and the limits of knowledge (see Sutton, Chapter 7 this volume).

Acknowledgments Research for this paper was funded by Australian Research Council Professorial Fellowship DP0452390. I wish to thank Jeremy Beckett, Melinda Hinkson, Robert Layton, John Avery and Petronella Vaarzon-Morel for comments on an earlier draft. References Altman, JC (ed.) 1989, Emergent inequalities in Aboriginal Australia, Oceania, Sydney. ——, Linkhorn C & Clarke, J 2005, ‘Land rights and development reform in remote Australia’, Discussion paper No. 276/2005, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Canberra. Apostle, R, McCay, B & Mikalsen, KH 2003, Enclosing the commons. Individual transferable quotas in the Nova Scotia fishery, ISER [Institute of Social and Economic Research] Books, St Johns, Newfoundland. Barwick, D, Beckett, J & Reay, M 1985, ‘WEH Stanner: an anthropologist’, in D Barwick, J Beckett & M Reay (eds), Metaphors of interpretation: essays in honour of WEH Stanner, Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp. 1–52. Beckett, J 1965, ‘Kinship, mobility and community among part-Aborigines in rural Australia’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, vol. 6, pp. 7–23. Chase, A, Rigsby, B, Martin, D, Smith, B & Blackwood, P 1998, ‘Mungkan, Ayapathu and Kaanju people’s land claims to Mungkan Kaanju National Park and Lochinvar Mining Field’, word-processed document 125 + 4pp, Cape York Land Council, Cairns. Dalrymple, D 2007, ‘The abnormalisation of land tenure’, in J Altman & M Hinkson (eds), Coercive reconciliation: stabilise, normalise, exit Aboriginal Australia, Arena Publications Association, North Carlton, Victoria, pp. 213–21. Dodson, M & McCarthy, D 2005,‘Customary land as the key for future development: empower those who want to use their land and protect those that don’t,’ paper 181

Peter Sutton presented at the National Land Summit, Land, economic growth and development, Papua New Guinea University of Technology, Lae, 23–25 August 2005. Copy held at the Australian National University, Canberra, word-processed document, 31pp. Hiatt, LR 1962, ‘Local organisation among the Australian Aborigines’, Oceania, vol. 32, pp. 267–86. Hinkson, M 2005, ‘The intercultural challenge of Stanner’s first field work’, Oceania, vol. 75, pp. 195–208. Hughes, H 2007, Lands of shame. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ‘homelands’ in transition, The Centre for Independent Studies, St Leonards, New South Wales. —— & Warin, J 2005, ‘A new deal for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in remote communities’, Issues Analysis No. 54,The Centre for Independent Studies, St Leonards, New South Wales. Karvelas, P 2007a, ‘Axe public housing: Pearson’, Australian, 21 February. —— 2007b, ‘Canberra in grab for tribal land’, Australian, 14 March. —— & Wilson, A 2007, ‘PM’s victory on land deal’, Australian, 20 September. Kennedy, D 2001, ‘Enclosing the research commons’, Science, vol. 294, issue 5550, 14 December, p. 2249. Kuhn, TS 1970, The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd edn), International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, vol. 2, no. 2, University of Chicago Press. Langton, M 1998, Burning questions, Centre for Indigenous Natural & Cultural Resource Management, Northern Territory University, Darwin. Latz, P 1995, Bushfires and bushtucker: Aboriginal plant use in central Australia, IAD Press, Alice Springs. Layton, R 2000, Anthropology and history in Franche-Comté. A critique of social theory, Oxford University Press. Martin, DF 1993, ‘Autonomy and relatedness: an ethnography of Wik people of Aurukun, western Cape York Peninsula’, PhD thesis, Australian National University. McGrath, A 1987, Born in the cattle: Aborigines in cattle country, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Morton, J 1997, ‘Totemism now and then: a natural science of society?’, in F Merlan, J Morton & A Rumsey (eds), Scholar and sceptic: Australian Aboriginal Studies in honour of LR Hiatt, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, pp. 151–70, 274–8. Mulcock, J, Pocock, C & Toussaint, Y (eds) 2005, Australian anthropologies of the environment, Special Issue 17 of The Australian Journal of Anthropology. Pearson, N 2005, ‘Working towards peace and prosperity’, Australian 26 October. —— 2007, ‘Taking ownership. Noel Pearson explains why privatising housing can lessen the problem of passive welfare in settlements’, Australian 3–4 March. Rose, DB 1992, Dingo makes us human: life and land in an Aboriginal Australian culture, Cambridge University Press. —— 1996, Nourishing terrains. Australian Aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness, Australian Heritage Commission, Canberra.

182

11. Stanner and Aboriginal land use —— (with S D’Amico, N Daiyi, K Devereaux, M Daiyi, L Ford & A Bright) 2002, Country of the heart: an Indigenous Australian homeland, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra. —— (ed.) 1995, Country in flames: proceedings of the 1994 symposium on biodiversity and fire in north Australia, Biodiversity Unit/North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University, Darwin. Sanders, W 2005, ‘Housing tenure and Indigenous Australians in remote and settled areas’, Discussion paper No. 275/2005, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University, Canberra. Sansom, B n.d. (c. 1980), ‘Statement on the Finniss River land claim’, seven-page typescript, exhibit 125, Finniss River Land Claim, Northern Territory, held at University of Western Australia, Perth. Smith, BR 2002, ‘Pastoralism, land and Aboriginal existence in central Cape York Peninsula’, Anthropology in Action, vol. 9, pp. 21–30. —— 2003a, ‘“All been washed away now”: tradition, change and Indigenous knowledge in a Queensland Aboriginal land claim’, in J Pottier, A Bicker & P Sillitoe (eds), Negotiating local knowledge: power and identity in development, Pluto Press, London, pp. 121–54. —— 2003b, ‘Whither “certainty”? Coexistence, change and some repercussions of native title in northern Queensland’, Anthropological Forum, vol. 13, pp. 27–48. —— 2003c, ‘Pastoralism, local knowledge and Australian Aboriginal development in northern Queensland’, Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, vol. 4, pp. 88–104. Stanner, WEH 1933, ‘Ceremonial economics of the Mulluk Mulluk and Madngella tribes of the Daly River, north Australia. A preliminary paper’, Oceania, vol. 4, pp. 156–75, 453–71. —— 1935, ‘Native food rations: a thorough investigation necessary’, Aborigines Protector, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 16–7. —— 1938, ‘Economic change in north Australian tribes’, PhD thesis, University of London. —— 1963a, On Aboriginal religion, Oceania Monographs, Sydney. —— 1963b, ‘Introduction’, in H Shiels (ed.) Australian Aboriginal studies, Oxford University Press, Melbourne (for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies), pp. xi–xviii. —— 1965, ‘Aboriginal territorial organization: estate, range, domain and regime’, Oceania, vol. 36, pp. 1–25. —— 1979 (1959), ‘Durmugam: a Nangiomeri’, in White man got no Dreaming; essays 1938–1973, Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp. 67–105. Strang, V 1997, Uncommon ground: cultural landscapes and environmental values, Berg, Oxford. Strathern, M 2005, ‘Convenor’s notes, Panel 4 (5 July 2005): What is the point of description?’ Description and creativity conference, Kings College, University of Cambridge. <www.nomadit.co.uk/dnc/panels/panel4.htm>, accessed 16 July 2008. Sutton, P 2003, Native title in Australia: an ethnographic perspective, Cambridge University Press.

183

Peter Sutton Thompson, EP 1975, Whigs and hunters: the origins of the black act, Allen Lane, London. von Sturmer, JR 1989, Merapah reports, 40-page word-processed document produced for the Commonwealth Department of Aboriginal Affairs, Brisbane. Waddy, JA 1988, Classification of plants and animals from a Groote Eylandt Aboriginal point of view, (2 vols), North Australia Research Unit, Darwin & Australian National University, Canberra. Wilson, A & Karvelas, P 2007, ‘Activist Yunupingu to form Arnhem Land elders group’, Australian, 21–2 September.

Notes 1. A number of anthropologists, working with botanists, zoologists and an ecologist, tried to pursue this research design in the Cape York Peninsula region in the 1970s and 1980s, even working on a ‘transect’ through a sequence of ecotones from east to west across the Peninsula (the CAYET (Cape York Ecology Transect) Project, funded principally by AIATSIS; cf. Stanner 1965, p. 23 on his proposed continental ‘transect’). Vast amounts of data and botanical specimens were gathered but resulting publications have been few and the project was never completed. The principal researchers were Athol Chase, Bruce Rigsby, Dermot Smyth, Peter Sutton, John von Sturmer, John Taylor, Geoff Tracey and Len Webb. 2. Matt Parkin, Aboriginal Asset Services, Adelaide, pers. comm., December 2007. 3. Of course there is also the continuity of use of waterways, now largely by powered boats. 4. I thank Robert Layton (pers. comm., 22 November 2005) for this last point. 5. I assisted, in varying capacities, with 50 Aboriginal land claims between 1979 and 2005, under three legislative regimes (the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (Cwlth), the Aboriginal Land Act 1991 (Qld), and the Native Title Act 1993 (Cwlth)).

184

12.

‘Too sociological’? Revisiting ‘Aboriginal territorial organization’ nicolas peterson

According to the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) citation index, Stanner’s ‘Aboriginal territorial organization: estate, range, domain and regime’, published in Oceania in 1965, is the most cited of his papers. It received more citations than any of the components of On Aboriginal religion (1963), or even his famous paper ‘The Dreaming’ (1953). While this underlines the rather specialised nature of the citation index, and does not reflect the actual level of citations of Stanner’s work in the literature at large, it does emphasise the significance of this paper and its ongoing impact not only within Australianist anthropology but more widely across the discipline. While most anthropologists citing the paper are Australian, a small number of North Americans and Europeans have also drawn upon it. What attracted them to the paper is what has made it so significant in Australian anthropology: the provision of a fresh and clear terminology for the conceptualisation of the basic spatial aspects of Aboriginal territorial organisation. Following the advent of Northern Territory land claims from the late 1970s, Stanner’s spatial terminology took on a new lease of life. Although its terminology was not used in the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (Cwlth), which created the possibility of land claims, the four terms he used became the basis for most anthropological reports for claims lodged under that Act.The two most widely used terms relate to ownership: ‘clan’, the group that owned an area of land; and ‘estate’, the area owned by a clan. Less used have been the two terms relating to land use: ‘band’, for residence groups using the land; and ‘range’, the area used by the members of a band supporting themselves day to day. The separation of ownership from use, and the area owned from the area used, was certainly a giant leap forward. The problem with the previous work was, in Stanner’s view,

185

Nicolas Peterson

that it was too sociological, and his solution was to introduce an ecological perspective. Today there is a renewal of Stanner’s critique of Aboriginal territorial organisation as too sociological, though the cause this time is not structural-functionalist theory but legal discourse. Now the solution is not ecology but phenomenology. With the reappearance of this criticism of the sociological emphasis, and a new solution, it is timely to consider its apparent significance. First, however, I begin by examining Stanner’s key terms and arguments. estate, range, domain and regime

Of the four concepts proposed in the subtitle of the paper it is only the first two that have had any enduring significance. The concept of domain, defined as ‘an ecological life-space’ made up of the combination of estate and range (1965, p. 2), has never really caught on, although the issue of the relationship of estate to range is a significant one. In the land rights and native title eras attention has focused on the issue of boundaries and of overlap of estates and/or ranges, often discussed in terms of the nature and existence of company areas but with little or no use of the domain concept since it collapses the distinction. The concept of regime, which is used to refer to the ecology of any area, is of a different order from the first three terms and only relevant in that it emphasises that in considering estate, range and domain, the ecology is a critical variable. Each territorial group was, Stanner argued, associated with an estate: ‘the traditionally recognized locus (“country”, “home”, “ground”, “dreaming place”) of some kind of patrilineal descent-group’ which was, usually, a more or less continuous stretch of country (ibid., p. 2). It was also associated with a range defined as ‘the tract or orbit over which the group, including its nucleus and adherents, ordinarily hunted and foraged to maintain life’. In his view the range normally included the estate ‘but in some circumstances, the two could be practically dissociated’ (ibid.). Although Stanner does not reduce his new conceptualisation explicitly to the formula of a (patrilineal) clan owning an estate and a band using a range (indeed, the word ‘band’ does not appear until page 16, it being referred to as the ‘livelihood-group’ (ibid., p. 5), ‘ life-and-survival group’ (ibid., p. 10), and ‘local or “residence” group’ (ibid., p. 15) among other terms, before that) it is that formula which is the core of the conceptual contribution that has been responsible for the frequent citation of the paper. As Nancy Williams (1986, p. 216) points out, there has been relatively little ambiguity about clan and estate as these are defined by rules, and it is to the issues of band and range that most attention has been directed.

186

12. Revisiting ‘Aboriginal territorial organization’

In addition to the four terms listed in the subtitle, Stanner in fact proposed a fifth term, ‘heartland’, but did not explore it in detail (1965, p. 12). He used the term when discussing the issue of exclusive possession and overlap to say, ‘In actuality, under traditional conditions, there could be no doubt over what might be called the “heartland” of any group’s existence’. This gave it ‘a habitation and a name, or co-ordinates of existence which were those of no other group’ (ibid.). I found this term useful in writing the Warlpiri and Kartangarurru-Kurintji land claim report (Peterson et al. 1978). Interestingly, Stanner, in his evidence as the judge’s anthropologist in this claim, repudiated the term, commenting: I am afraid that I invented the term. I have subsequently ceased to use it…On second thoughts I thought it was a bad idea because it tends to draw in other emphasis [sic] which I didn’t want and I didn’t think relevant to the Aboriginal matters. I see no point in using the term. What it simply means is that there are some areas where there is more water and food about than in other areas. You identify it with space, but you must not do so with the idea that beyond that there is nothing significant to the tribe — to the clan. It is all significant. I think it is a false [term] in my opinion (Stanner 1978, p. 218).

As can be seen, his reason for rejecting the concept bears little relationship to the original definition. Indeed, one could be forgiven for thinking that Stanner’s comment here is influenced by the context of the land claim hearing. This is because an issue in this claim was the question of the extent of which the whole landscape was notionally divided up between estates, as opposed to just being made up of sites owned by patriclans, with the area in between either communally owned or some sort of no-man’s land, in the way Olive Pink had reported for the northern Arrernte (1936). The classic debates in Aboriginal territorial organisation have focused on the relationship of clan to band, and somewhat less attention has been given to the relationship of estate to range, or to the nature and existence of communities (see Sutton 2003; Peterson & Long 1986). The use of these four terms in the debates and in the preparation and presentation of evidence for land and native title claims convincingly demonstrates the conceptual advance they introduced under the guise of an ecological perspective.

‘too

sociological and insufficiently ecological’

Stanner’s core complaint — that the analysis of Aboriginal local organisation had been up to that time ‘wholly in terms of social relations’ (1965, p. 1) — was made at much the same time as he was making the same kind of allegation about the study of Aboriginal religion (see Keen 2005, p. 62).

187

Nicolas Peterson

Anthropologists, he argued, treated Aboriginal religion as a mirror of social relations and in doing so were disrespectful of it, failing to treat it as a religion and worldview. In examining this complaint Keen has argued that in denying a necessary connection between religion and social structure, and in seeing the use of religious forms for political action as aberrant, he greatly weakened his analysis and ignored what was undeniably true (Keen 2005, pp. 75–6). In respect of relations to land Stanner did not go nearly as far in rejecting the sociological, but nevertheless the failure to see relations to land in the context of political relations between Aboriginal people is a weakness of his account. The title of Stanner’s paper refers to ‘territorial’ organisation not ‘local’ organisation. While these two terms are often used interchangeably the distinction between them is important for Stanner. Local organisation, has, Stanner emphasises, a dual reference (1965, p. 1). On the one hand it refers to territorial organisation and on the other to social organisation. By territorial organisation he meant that relations between members of a group and its land are, among other things, ecological relations, and it is these that had been neglected and which he places centre stage. When he uses local organisation he is referring to the sociological aspects of relations to land, specifically clan and estate. The ecological concept he introduced is the concept of range which is the key contribution of the paper, even though it was no more than the adoption of a term commonly used in primate studies (cf. Stanner 1965, p. 3). The principal reason Stanner was attracted to an ecological approach was that despite much ethnography about relations to land, the findings seemed to be ungeneralisable. Yet in his view, ‘no set of connected facts can be ungeneralizable’ (ibid., p. 19). He perceived the difficulty to be that the question of the variation was being approached from an unhelpful point of view and what was required was a comparative natural history of territorial groups (ibid., p. 3). Indeed, it seems that he felt that ecology was fundamental, in some way, which was, of course, a key attraction of the cultural ecological approach that was emerging at this period and offering the exciting possibility of a material causality in social affairs, which structural-functionalism had for so long ruled out. Ecological causality was an advance on environmental determinism, even if it would quickly come to be labelled vulgar materialism. An ecological approach was also attractive to Stanner because it easily encompassed what he saw as a universal pattern of concentration and dispersal that correlated, broadly, with good and bad times that were very variable across the continent (ibid., p. 5).1 He also recognised that there were long-term ecological changes on the continent (ibid., p. 12) and that these in turn were likely to have produced social changes, thus introducing further recognition of process. It was these long-term changes

188

12. Revisiting ‘Aboriginal territorial organization’

that he thought accounted for isolated sites belonging to one clan being found surrounded by the estate of another clan. I think the consensus today would be that such an explanation for these sites is too much ecology and not enough sociology.2 It is in the discussion of the possibility that ecology could shed light on Radcliffe-Brown’s suggestion that patriliny was an ecological adaptation (ibid., p. 3) that we see the limits to Stanner’s ecological understanding. Because, he argues, Aboriginal society and culture are the end-products of millennia of non-linear development, they are made up of forms and values far removed and transformed from an adaptive plane, so it is unlikely that ecology could resolve speculation about patriliny being the product of the need for local familiarity with the landscape to ensure male hunting success (ibid., pp. 4, 3). Here he seems to be on the verge of formulating the adaptive conundrum that claiming patrilineal clans to be the land-owning group across the continent poses: how could there be a common form of land ownership (and use) if there is very marked ecological variability and what people do is adapted to the environment? Indeed Hiatt posed that very question to Stanner in 1970 (Hiatt 1970, p. 135), but it was never answered directly. Radcliffe-Brown’s somewhat mysterious explanation was that there was a ‘principle of similitude’ at work across the continent, such that the territorial group observed limits of size in keeping with the structure of life enforced by a nomadic life. Stanner felt that if there were more or less invariant properties to the territorial group in structure and size (there is a muddle here between band and clan) then a topological model might be instructive (1965, p. 24). This suggestion manifests too much sociology and not enough ecology. As we now know from the work of Fred Myers (1986), much desert territorial organisation is marked by an absence of descent groups even though there is often a patrilineal or patrifilial ideology. Stanner could not be blamed for not knowing this as people like Tindale (1974) and Berndt (1959) were still trying to squeeze their ethnography into the Radcliffe-Brown model, despite the evidence before them. It is ironic, in the light of his complaint about the over-emphasis on social relations, that Stanner’s only other writing explicitly on Aboriginal relations to land was entirely sociological. This is his unpublished paper ‘The Yirrkala case: some general principles of Aboriginal land-holding’. He prepared this paper at the time of the Gove land rights case, in which he appeared as an expert witness, but it was never put before the court. This paper was, as Rigsby notes (1998, pp. 31, 32–4), an attempt to reduce the traditional land tenure system to principles constructed with terms deriving from Roman and common law traditions.The paper marks the beginning of the influence of the use of overly legalistic terminology and thinking in writing about

189

Nicolas Peterson

Indigenous relations to land, which all anthropologists working on land claims have been drawn into, and even more so those engaged in the field of native title where lawyers and legal thinking dominates. Stanner was crossexamined at length in the Gove case about local and territorial organisation but the resulting transcript is not very illuminating, given the adversarial nature of the proceedings and the quagmire of the mala-mada analysis with which Ronald Berndt had landed him (see Nancy Williams, this volume).3 Stanner’s last published writing on these conceptual issues was a very short piece that appeared as a ‘Comment’ in Current Anthropology, strongly endorsing Birdsell’s Radcliffe-Brown-like views.4 Birdsell’s account, Stanner observed, ‘seems to me to be argued fairly and to be about as conclusive as the present state of knowledge allows’ (1970a, p. 136). It is now 38 years since Aboriginal territorial organization appeared and, given all the work that has been done on relations to land since the advent of land claims, it seems an appropriate time to reconsider Stanner’s contribution in the context of the state of knowledge now. perceiving the environment

From the research that has been done since the advent of land claims, it is clear that both Stanner’s sociology and ecology needed to be more sophisticated. Sociologically we have seen the development of models of succession (Peterson et al. 1977; Peterson 1983), of core and contingent rights (Sutton 2003), and of cognatically informed models (Sutton 2003). Ecologically there has been a much better understanding of the nature of direct appropriation, and of adaptive resilience through models of optimal foraging and evolutionary biology. While these developments are broadly compatible with Stanner’s model, the sociological developments emphasising flexibility and process, and the ecological developments giving more precision to the ways in which ecological factors impinge on social arrangements, there is a more recent trend that is less compatible. This is the strongly phenomenological approach that has been most clearly stated in relation to Aboriginal land tenure by Tim Ingold. In his 1996 paper ‘Hunting and gathering as ways of perceiving the environment’ he mounts an attack on the view that nature is a cultural construction, a claim that he believes to be incoherent, not least because it reproduces the dichotomy between nature and culture (1996, p. 117). He uses the work of Fred Myers on Pintupi relations to land to criticise past work and to develop his case for an ‘ontology of dwelling’ (ibid., p. 121). Hunter-gatherers, he argues, ‘do not, as a rule, approach the environment as an external world of nature that has to be “grasped” conceptually and appropriated symbolically with the terms of an imposed cultural design, as a precondition for effective action’ (ibid., p. 120), which he sees as a Western way of apprehending the environment.

190

12. Revisiting ‘Aboriginal territorial organization’

Mariwanda and Maringa men crossing a salt arm of the Timor coast, Port Keats region, in a dug-out canoe, c. 1935. Photographer WEH Stanner, Stanner Collection, AIATSIS N1024-5.

Rather, he believes that hunter-gatherers apprehend the environment through practical and perceptual engagement with it; that is, being immersed in it. Environments, in his view, are constituted through living in them not just in thought, making ecological relations a subset of social relations (ibid., pp. 150–1). In contrast to this view he sees Myers’ representation of the Pintupi relations to land, and by extension most past writers on Aboriginal territorial organisation, as creating a separation between them as meaningmakers and the physical environment, which he argues is, in Myers analysis, simply the raw material for the ‘culturalization of space’ (ibid., p. 140). Myers replied to this sociologically naive analysis by pointing out that people do not simply experience the world, but rather are taught, indeed disciplined, to understand their experiences in particular ways (1998, p. 77). One obvious way that this is so is through learning the language relating to land and the environment with its explicit and implicit classifications and categorisations. Further, Myers argues, Ingold’s emphasis on the primacy of perception completely ignores the fact that people’s practices and experiences of place-making have to be understood as socially and politically organised. However, Myers does not reject the significance of the experience of ‘dwelling’ in a landscape, which, as he says, is the basis of it becoming home

191

Nicolas Peterson

(ibid.) — that is of developing deep emotional attachments to place — but he is concerned about the implication that people’s experience is largely unmediated by social relations and social processes. Myers’ analysis of Pintupi relations to land presented a major reorientation in the study of desert systems, in particular because he focused on relations from an individual perspective in an area where people lived at very low densities. Descent groups were lacking, although not a commitment to patrifilial ideology, and people’s primary ties to country were based on conception, although a range of other links were important. In understanding the ownership of place, he gave primacy to the control over the stories, objects, and ritual associated with the mythological ancestors of the dreaming at a particular place (1982, p. 188) and focused on residential groups. Myers was happy to call these groups ‘bands’, which he understood through the related Pintupi concept of ‘one countrymen’; that is, as those who potentially share a camp and cooperate in the food quest (ibid., p. 187). His analysis was processual and emphasised that people had to assert claims on the basis of one or more of a variety of links and have them recognised by others. This goes substantially beyond Stanner, who as has been observed above ignored the political in his work on territorial organisation and religion. Subsequently a number of other accounts of Aboriginal relations to land have appeared that in one way or another are influenced by phenomenology. These seek to provide an account of relations to land that is ‘experience near’; that is, presented as being much closer to how Aboriginal people themselves perceive and think about these relations. Deborah Bird Rose (1992) has provided such an account of how people in the Victoria River District relate to land that seeks to give a better appreciation of how they think and feel about it than a conventional sociological account. She indicates that the Aboriginal people perceive the landscape as a living entity with which they are in life long interaction, and characterises this relationship as reciprocal, the people having an obligation to nurture the country through burning, selective foraging, and verbal communication with the country and its deceased owners. The country in return yields up its bounty. The more sociological aspects of relationships to land receive some attention with the description of descent groups, patrilineal totemic identities, Dreaming tracks and shared interests, but the emphasis is on providing a poetic key to Aboriginal realities. Elizabeth Povinelli’s account of the importance Belyuen women, west of Darwin, give to foraging and talking in a locality as a way of building up a relationship with it is more grounded in a concern with daily activity (1993). It is a richly detailed account of everyday economic and speech practices among the women she spent time with in the bush.What is significant in the context of the discussion here, however, is that the women Povinelli worked with, or their parents, came from some distance away to the south-west and

192

12. Revisiting ‘Aboriginal territorial organization’

ultimately saw that country, to which they were linked by patrilineal descent, as the country in which they held the strongest rights. In all her accounts of the relationships to land she underplays this sociological fact because it does not sit easily with her argument. Although Sylvie Poirier (2005) has not published a detailed account of relations to land in the Balgo area where she worked, her expressed preference for thinking about these in terms of itineraries (following de Certeau) rather than as maps, and for describing the landscape as sentient, is conceptually framed by the same concerns as Rose and Povinelli. Even more recently Marcia Langton (2005) and Daniel Vachon (2006) have both developed this line of analysis in respect of relations to land in eastern Cape York and the Gibson Desert respectively. None of these authors use the language of band and range for analytical purposes, which is not particularly surprising since all of them are presenting contemporary ethnographies well after people have given up an independent self-supporting existence. conclusion

Band and range belong now to the domain of reconstructionist ethnography and the world of land claims and land rights. They cannot, therefore, be expected to feature prominently in contemporary ethnographic work, as they were developed to help understand relations to land in self-sustaining bush-dwelling societies. Clan and estate, however, remain at the heart of how rights in land are dealt with at present in many contexts both inside and outside the legal system. We can look back on Stanner’s claims that both the study of Aboriginal local organisation and of Aboriginal religion were too sociological as, in part, an early and self-conscious Australian take on the critique of structuralfunctionalism and understandable as part of an attempt to try to open up the Australianist anthropological imagination. It marked the beginning of the ecological turn in archaeological and anthropological studies in Australia, by challenging the over-emphasis on closed social organisational and ideational systems (see Anderson 1988, pp. 133–55). Attention was turned to what people actually did to survive, how their lives were influenced by the seasons and the way their economy actually worked. This of course had been an interest of Donald Thomson’s (e.g. 1949) and Norman Tindale’s (1974), but they were unable to relate their interest in living by hunting and gathering to the principles of social organisation. What both Thomson and Tindale lacked was any understanding of social reproduction, of the process of the domestic cycle, or of the interplay of demography and competition. They could not integrate the sociological with the ecological and the processual. For a brief period from the early 1960s until the beginning of land claims in 1978, ecological and ethno-archaeologically oriented research provided a huge stimulus to Australianist work, giving rise to a range of field-based

193

Nicolas Peterson

studies (e.g. see Peterson 1972; Chase 1978; Sutton 1978; von Sturmer 1978; Meehan 1982; Altman 1987) and the development of mapping methodologies, called for by Stanner, that came to underlie land claim work (e.g. see Taylor 1976). All of these strongly ecological studies integrated their analyses with the sociological. Although the ecological approach quite quickly came under attack from neo-Marxists as simplistic (e.g. Friedman 1974), it has been the demands of land claim and native title research, defined and distorted by legal discourse, that led to a very real over-emphasis on the sociological from around 1980 onwards. Whereas Stanner called on ecology to combat the narrow structuralfunctionalist focus on the sociological aspects of land, some present day anthropologists are calling on phenomenology (i.e. a focus on lived experience) to combat the narrow legal discourse which is undoubtedly overly sociological. Interestingly, however, current attention is not on the material aspects of Aboriginal people’s lives, since all Aboriginal people are now quite distanced from self-sufficiency by hunting and gathering, but on the emotional, psychological, cognitive and cultural perception of attachment to land. With hindsight, another narrative can be discerned which would have Stanner’s protest against the sociological as an early expression of something less positive, but which nevertheless has become a widespread trend in the anthropology; that is, the retreat from the social. It is a topic addressed by a group of authors brought together by Bruce Kapferer in a recent issue of Social Analysis (2004). Beginning with the critique of structural-functionalism and fuelled by the rise of reductionism — especially in the forms of sociobiology, neo-Darwinism and evolutionary psychology on the one hand, and economic rationalism on the other — there has been a shift to a focus on the individual, to strategising, to agency and diversity, all of which has been seen as adding complexity to social analysis. In a parallel way this new anti-sociological approach in the conceptualising of land tenure has manifested itself in the headlong embrace of a phenomenological approach. As a result social relations, social institutions, social organisation and social context have all come to be relatively neglected by many field workers. It is largely an understandable reaction to the greatly increased influence that the courts, legal discourse and legal thinking are having on anthropological practice, and the extent to which anthropologists are being forced to compromise their understandings of concepts like society, tradition and, indeed, land tenure. If this is alienating to us, it is an even greater alienation from how many Aboriginal people have lived their relations to land, and life more generally. However, in questioning Stanner’s complaint about the study of relations to land being too sociological, the point to be made is a small but important one. He was not making the

194

12. Revisiting ‘Aboriginal territorial organization’

case for abandoning the sociological, and nor should those adopting a phenomenological approach do so either. In the end, if they do, their work will be in danger of being swamped by a romantic nostalgia that overlooks the significance of structures and norms in all societies, as well as beliefs and feelings, for both the people themselves as well as for the institutions of the Australian nation-state. References Altman, J 1987, Hunter-gatherers today: an Aboriginal economy in north Australia, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra. Anderson, C 1988, ‘Anthropology and Australian Aboriginal economy 1961–1986’, in RM Berndt & R Tonkinson (eds) Social anthropology and Australian Aboriginal studies: a contemporary overview, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, pp.125–88. Berndt, RM 1959, ‘The concept of the “tribe” in the western desert of Australia’, Oceania, vol. 30, no. 2, pp. 81–107. Blackburn, J 1970, Judgement in Milirrpum v. Nabalco Pty. Ltd. and the Commonwealth of Australia, The Law Book Company, Sydney. Chase, A 1978, ‘Between land and water: Aboriginal coastal groups in Cape York Peninsula’, in Papers and proceedings of workshop, Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Townsville, pp. 159–78. Friedman, J 1974, ‘Marxism, structuralism and vulgar materialism’, Man, vol. 8, pp. 444–69. Hiatt, L 1962, ‘Local organization among the Australian Aborigines’, Oceania, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 267–86. —— 1966, ‘The lost horde’, Oceania, vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 81–92. —— 1970, ‘Comment’, Current Anthropology, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 134–5. Ingold, T 1996, ‘Hunting and gathering as ways of perceiving the environment’, in R Ellen & K Fukui (eds) Redefining nature: ecology, culture and domestication, Berg, Oxford, pp. 117–55. Kapferer, B (ed.) 2004, ‘The retreat of the social’, Social Analysis, vol. 48, no. 3. Keen, I 2005 (1986), ‘Stanner on Aboriginal religion’, in M Charlesworth, F Dussart & H Morphy (eds) Aboriginal religions in Australia: an anthology of recent writings, Ashgate, Aldershot, pp. 61–78. Langton, M 2005, ‘An Aboriginal ontology of being and place: the performance of Aboriginal property relations in the Princess Charlotte Bay area of eastern Cape York Peninsula, Australia’, PhD thesis, Macquarie University, Sydney. Meehan, B 1982, Shell bed to shell midden, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra. Meggitt, M 1968, ‘Discussion’, in R Lee & I DeVore (eds), Man the hunter, Aldine, Chicago, p.148. Myers, F 1982, ‘Always ask: resource use and land ownership among Pintupi Aborigines of the Australian Western Desert’, in N Williams & E Hunn (eds), Resource managers: North American and Australian hunter-gatherers, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, pp. 173–95.

195

Nicolas Peterson —— 1986, Pintupi country Pintupi self, Smithsonian Press, Washington. —— 1998, ‘Ways of placemaking’, in K Flint & H Morphy (eds), Culture, landscape, and the environment: the Linacre Lectures 1997, Oxford University Press, pp. 72– 110. Peterson, N 1972, ‘The structure of two Australian Aboriginal ecosystems’, PhD thesis, University of Sydney. —— 1983, ‘Rights, residence and process in Aboriginal territorial organisation’, in N Peterson & M Langton (eds), Aborigines, land and land rights, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra, pp.134–45. ——, Keen, I & Sansom, B 1977, ‘Succession to land: primary and secondary rights to Aboriginal estates’, in Official Hansard Report of the Joint Select Committee on Aboriginal land rights in the Northern Territory, Australian Government Printer, Canberra, 19 April, pp. 1002–14. —— & Long, J 1986, Aboriginal territorial organization: a band perspective, Oceania Monograph no. 30, Oceania Publications, Sydney. ——, McConvell, P, Wild, S & Hagen, R 1978, A claim to areas of traditional land by the Walpiri and Kartangarurru-Kurintji, 1978, Central Land Council, Alice Springs. Pink, O 1936, ‘The landowners in the northern division of the Aranda tribe, central Australia’, Oceania, vol. 6, pp. 275–305. Poirier, S 2005, A world of relationships: itineraries, dreams, and events in the Australian Western Desert, Toronto University Press. Povinelli, E 1993, Labor’s lot: the power of history, and culture of Aboriginal action, Chicago University Press. Radcliffe-Brown,AR 1930–31,‘The social organization of Australian tribes’, Oceania, 1930, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 34–63; vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 206–46; vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 322–41; 1931, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 426–56. Rigsby, B 1998, ‘A survey of property theory and tenure types’, in N Peterson & B Rigsby (eds) Customary marine tenure in Australia, Oceania Monograph no. 48, Sydney, pp. 22–46. Rose, DB 1992, Dingo makes us human: life and land in an Australian Aboriginal culture, Cambridge University Press. Stanner, WEH 1963, On Aboriginal religion, Oceania Monograph no. 11, Oceania Publications, Sydney. —— 1965, ‘Aboriginal territorial organization: estate, range, domain and regime’, Oceania, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 1–26. —— 1969, ‘The Yirrkala case: some general principles of Aboriginal land-holding’, unpublished manuscript, pp. 1-12, copy in the possession of the author. —— 1970, ‘Comment’, Current Anthropology, vol. 11, no. 2, p. 136. —— 1978, Transcript of evidence in Walpiri Kartangarurru-Kurintji land claim hearing, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra. Sutton, P 1978, ‘Wik: Aboriginal society, territory and language at Cape Keerweer, Cape York Peninsula, Australia’, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, Brisbane. —— 2003, Native title in Australia: an ethnographic perspective, Cambridge University Press.

196

12. Revisiting ‘Aboriginal territorial organization’ Taylor, J 1976, ‘Mapping techniques and the reconstruction of aspects of traditional Aboriginal culture’, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Newsletter, vol. 5, pp. 34–43. Thomson, D 1949, ‘Arnhem Land: explorations among an unknown people. Part 2: the people of Blue Mud Bay’, Geographical Journal, vol. 63, pp. 1–8. Tindale, N 1974, The Aboriginal tribes of Australia (2 vols), University of California Press, Berkeley. Vachon, D 2006, ‘The serpent, the word and the lie of the land: the discipline of living in the Great Sandy Desert of Australia’, PhD thesis, University of Toronto. von Sturmer, J 1978, ‘The Wik region: economy, territoriality and totemism in western Cape York Peninsula, north Queensland’, PhD thesis, University of Queensland, Brisbane. Williams, N 1986, The Yolngu and their land: a system of land tenure and the fight for its recognition, Stanford University Press.

Notes 1. He was well aware that the situation was more complicated than this, especially in the desert regions (Stanner 1965, p. 5). 2. For example see Williams (1986, p. 79) on ringitj in Arnhem Land. This matter was discussed in the Gove land rights case where Stanner repeated the same view (see Blackburn 1970, p. 47). 3. The issue here was the relations between mala (group — and a polysemic term) and mada (language), which Ronald Berndt had discussed in a complex, indeed confusing, way. 4. Stanner was cross-examined in the Warlpiri Kartangarurru-Kurintji case in 1978, which resulted in a substantial transcription of his evidence, but as in the Gove case the nature of the proceedings greatly influenced the orientation of what he had to say, and was not particularly illuminating.

197

13.

Stanner, Milirrpum, and the Woodward Royal Commission nancy m williams

Stanner’s characterisation of Aborigines’ relationship to land as inherently spiritual and indissoluble may seem at odds with recommendations he made to a royal commission that would give them the capacity to make radical changes in their relationship to land. Resolving this apparent contradiction requires looking at some of the things Stanner wrote and the contexts in which he wrote them during the course of some four decades. While reading Stanner is reward in itself for the elegance, dignity, and richness of his interpretation (Hinkson 2002, p. 3), his thinking that bears on issues surrounding Aborigines’ interests in land and their desire for economic development repays examination in the current rapidly changing policy environment. Stanner’s publications on Aboriginal religion and symbolism and his widely read essay on the Dreaming (1956) reveal his respect and admiration for the sophistication of Aborigines’ thought and its expression in bonds with their country. He also wrote admiringly about their rational approach to the challenges of imposed change, and his recommendations to the inquiry drew on his understanding of individuals’ capacity to deal with and adapt to change. Both understandings can be seen in his approach to issues that were crystallised for him in the Milirrpum Case (Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd (1971) 17 FLR 141) and the Woodward Royal Commission that followed. They were in fact issues that were critical to Stanner’s involvement in both, and what he had to say in his submissions to the Woodward inquiry remains relevant to recent policies and programs and proposed changes that affect Aborigines’ ability to gain control over land and to manage it for economic development. The Milirrpum Case was the first in Australia to test an Aboriginal claim to interest in land and Stanner played a central role in arguing that the

198

13. Stanner, Milirrpum, and the Woodward Royal Commission

interest was proprietary in nature. In 1971 the judge found that Aboriginal claimants’ interest in land was not proprietary, and in 1973 the newly elected Commonwealth government established the Woodward Royal Commission to recommend how land rights might be granted to Aborigines. Stanner’s contribution to the commission’s inquiry was again substantial. The recommendations led to the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (Cwlth), which acknowledged that the proprietary rights of Aborigines still existed. This recognition was significant in the build up to the Mabo native title case, decided in 1992.1 The discussion that follows considers Stanner’s analysis of the religious basis of Aboriginal connections to land, describes the immediate antecedents of the Milirrpum Case and its historical context, discusses the substantial difficulties in translating and interpreting the Aboriginal evidence, and finally looks at Stanner’s submission to the Woodward inquiry to suggest its contemporary relevance. the religious connection

From the late 1950s, Stanner’s publications increasingly indicate the depth of his interest in Aboriginal religion and his concern to represent it to an Anglophone audience in analytical terms that did justice to its intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual dimensions. His interest in comprehending Aboriginal connection to land in a comparable way received critical impetus from his involvement in the Milirrpum Case. Stanner’s last published essay on Aboriginal religion (1976b) illuminates his concern to comprehend both Aboriginal religion and Aboriginal land tenure in terms that were conceptually apt and shows that his intellectual proclivities both interwove and separated them. At the beginning of the essay he wrote: If Aboriginal culture had an architectonic idea I would say that it was a belief that all living people, clan by clan, or lineage by lineage, were linked patrilineally with ancestral beings by inherent and imperishable bonds through territories and totems which were either the handiwork or parts of the continuing being of the ancestors themselves.This belief was held in faith, not as an ‘official truth’ or dogma, but as part of a body of patent truth about the universe that no one in his right mind would have thought of trying to bring to the bar of proof. The faith was self-authenticating. The very existence of the clans or clan-like groups, the physical features of the countryside, the world of animate and inanimate things, were held to make the truth, as received, visible (1976b, p. 19).

In the essay Stanner also drew attention to a misunderstanding of the Aboriginal concept of the Dreaming which had entered into Australian law

199

Nancy Williams

as an outcome of Mr Justice Blackburn’s 1971 judgment. ‘The Dreaming’, he said: …is coming in for a lot of attributions that I think it should accept only under advisement. There is, for example, a distinctly zoological undertone to the idea of any person being ‘owned’ by a tract of country. This notion has entered into Australian law, at least as an obiter dicta, as an outcome of Mr Justice Blackburn’s judgment in the Yirrkala land case (1976b, p. 34).

Stanner insisted that: …there is something wrong at the heart of this proposition…a ‘property’ relation is a direct relation between a person and an object only in an elliptical way. It is a relation between persons in respect of an object: and this is vastly different. It is at the least a triadic, not a dyadic relation (ibid.).

In the Aboriginal world, he argued, the triad consists of a patrilineal local clan or similar group, a finite territory, and ‘the whole world of other persons’ with whom the clan has a relationship expressed as ‘a claim of right’ in respect of the territory (ibid.). Stanner’s scholarly interests in Aboriginal culture and society as well as his involvement in Aboriginal affairs before the Milirrpum Case are prominent in accounts by various people who knew him and his writings, inter alia by Barwick et al. (1985, pp. 1–52), HC Coombs (1978, 1981), WC Wentworth (1982), and Woodward (2005) in his recently published memoir. These accounts (including perusal of his bibliography in Barwick et al. (1985, pp. 270–308), reveal that an interest in Aboriginal culture, in particular religion, continued to motivate Stanner’s scholarly work while he remained actively committed to efforts to achieve economic and social justice for Aborigines.2 the milirrpum case and its antecedents

By 1967, with the passing of the referendum amending the Australian constitution to enable the Commonwealth government to legislate in relation to Aborigines and the formation of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs, interest in Aboriginal land rights had become increasingly widespread. It could be seen in the public response to the Yirrkala bark petitions of 1963 and in media coverage of the 1966 Gurindji walk-off. In July 1968, despite proposals by the Council for Aboriginal Affairs for the means by which claims of traditional rights to land could be examined and met, ‘the government rejected Aboriginal claims to ownership of any land in the Wattie Creek area’ (Coombs 1978, p. 162).

200

13. Stanner, Milirrpum, and the Woodward Royal Commission

Aborigines who accompanied Stanner overland from Port Keats to Daly River, 1935. Photographer WEH Stanner, Stanner Collection, AIATSIS N1885-1.

The Milirrpum Case was the first case in which Aborigines sought to have Australian law recognise their ownership of land.3 The plaintiffs were representatives of Yolngu clans of north-eastern Arnhem Land, and they lodged their claim in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory, also in 1968. Impetus for the claim may be traced to events related to mineral exploration on the Gove Peninsula of which local Yolngu people became aware in the 1950s and to subsequent mining developments. Stanner’s association with the case began in 1968 through his membership of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs (see Dexter, this volume). In the same year, Frank Purcell, solicitor for the Yolngu claimants, invited Stanner to be involved in the case on the basis of the impression he had formed upon hearing Stanner’s 1968 Boyer Lectures (pers. comm. c. September 2005). Subsequently Purcell and Edward Woodward, lead barrister in the case, conferred with Stanner and also with Ronald Berndt, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia, in Melbourne.4 The first action in the case began in the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory when the Yirrkala clans’ writ was issued in December 1968. Early in 1969, the Commonwealth took out a summons to have it struck out ‘as disclosing no cause of action’. (Woodward (2005, p. 100) remarks, ‘It was true that

201

Nancy Williams

there seemed to be no clear precedent for what we were attempting, and if we succeeded we would be making new law’). Mr Justice Blackburn of the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory set down the summons to strike out for hearing in Darwin (Woodward 2005, p. 101) at the same time as the Yirrkala clans’ summons for an interim injunction ‘to restrain the Commonwealth and Nabalco from continuing with allegedly wrongful acts within the Gove region of the Arnhem Land Aboriginal Reserve’ (Stanner 1979, p. 275). Some two months later, in March 1969, Blackburn ‘refused the Commonwealth’s and Nabalco’s main prayer for summary judgment’. He also struck out the clans’ statement of claims, but, crucially for the Yolngu claimants, gave them ‘liberty to make another statement within 28 days’ (ibid., pp. 276–7).5 Blackburn had named many ‘defective elements in the statement of claims’. Some, Stanner said, shortly before the amended statement of claims was heard more than a year later, caused him anxiety. They were ‘failures to explain the use of words such as “clan”, “possession”, and “proprietary interest”, and to give particulars of sacred areas and objects and of the traditional manner in which the land was and is used’ (ibid., p. 277). In the event, because of delays occasioned by a number of unrelated factors, the trial took place in Darwin in May 1970. Barwick, Beckett, and Reay note that ‘From December 1968 through 1971 Stanner was deeply involved as adviser and expert witness’ (1985, p. 40). It was the first time that an Australian court had ‘examined Aboriginal anthropological evidence about indigenous systems of land tenure’ (ibid., p. 40). A number of people remarked (some in May 1970 during the Darwin hearing when Yolngu leaders gave evidence) that never had so much anthropology been heard in an Australian court. In February 1969, Stanner prepared a sworn affidavit for the Yirrkala land case (no. 341 of 1968), and in 1969 and 1970 he prepared a number of papers dealing with Aboriginal land tenure generally and the Yirrkala case specifically for counsel representing the Yirrkala clans, for the Council for Aboriginal Affairs, for ministers, for seminars, and for private circulation. Of Stanner’s 30 reports on the problems of securing recognition of Aboriginal concepts in Australian law (ibid.) prepared during 1969–70, ‘[n]one could be published while these matters were sub judice’.6 The discussion of papers dealing with principles of Aboriginal land tenure that are the focus of the following comments is limited by the small number that were available for the preparation of this chapter. Even so, it is apparent that during the course of the Milirrpum Case Stanner honed his interest in and appreciation for the form and precision of legal analysis, which suited his aim to translate understanding of Aboriginal land tenure in terms as elegant and yet as potentially complex and comprehensive (or at least serviceable) as those of any other society. It posed the same kind of intellectual challenges

202

13. Stanner, Milirrpum, and the Woodward Royal Commission

as any other system of law, and gave the same scope to Aboriginal authorities responsible for its administration as to their counterparts in other societies. It is in this sense that Stanner’s exposition of principles of Aboriginal land tenure is comparable to and parallels his understanding and analysis of Aboriginal symbolism and religion. An example, drawn from a paper prepared for a private seminar at the Australian National University (‘The Yirrkala case’, 28 February 1969), begins with a caveat: ‘Allowance must be made for the fact that aboriginal words often cannot be translated into strictly equivalent English words. There is still greater difficulty with the ideas that attach to the words. Conversely, it is useless to look for exact equivalents of English words and ideas, especially those with legal meaning or implication’ (ibid., p. 2).Yet Stanner found sufficient ‘coincidence of underlying ideas’ to justify his conclusion that Aboriginal systems of land tenure had a conception of land as property: The three ideas necessary to the conception demonstrably co-existed. That is, (a) an idea of ownership under right of title, (b) an idea of corollary right of possession, and (c) an idea of connected rights of occupation and use. There were also customary rules determining with whom rights properly lay and by whom they could properly be exercised (ibid.).

These three ideas supported the ‘inference that there was a real if unverbalized conception of “estate” in land, and that there was a true “system” of landholding, occupation and usage in rational connection with the circumstances of aboriginal society’ (ibid.). Stanner argued on several grounds that Aborigines had a conception of estate in land: the relationship of ownership was simultaneously in animum and in rem, and the ownership relation between persons and land was ideally that of a patrilineal descent group and a locality. Each member of a patrilineal clan or similar group was related to the locality jointly with every other member of the group. A patrilineal clan, by having title, had estate in and dominion over a territory which was publicly acknowledged by other clans and which included a kind of sovereignty and the assumption of succession from an apical or mythological ancestor. Ownership was continuously asserted in ceremonies, art, mythology and symbolism as well as affairs of daily life. Woodward reflects on the case and Stanner’s involvement in his recently published memoirs (2005, pp. 97–106). He remarks that Stanner was an anthropologist of international repute, and: …also excellent company, a jovial man with wide-ranging interests and a host of stories about his experiences in Africa and outback Australia. He had great sympathy for the Aboriginal situation and was

203

Nancy Williams

anxious to do whatever he could to help, within the confines of his professional opinions (ibid., p. 101).

Woodward found that, in contrast to Stanner, ‘Professor Berndt was more reserved and scholarly, and he did not enter into the spirit of our enterprise with any particular enthusiasm. Nevertheless, his assistance was very welcome’ (ibid.). Purcell (pers. comm. c. September 2005) similarly observes that from their first meeting Berndt did not appear to be as willing as Stanner was to be of assistance.7 problems of translation and interpretation in the milirrpum case

In 1981, Berndt recalled: Prior to the case being heard in Darwin early in 1969, we [he, Catherine Berndt and Stanner] prepared a great deal of material for the solicitors…We were concerned with establishing, anthropologically, justification for the Aboriginal claim, describing what was considered to be traditional ownership in that area, and how ownership was linked to land utilization. We also compiled maps of clan and dialect unit territories, to substantiate ownership.The exchange of correspondence at that time between the solicitors and ourselves, demonstrates beyond doubt the tremendous difficulty in getting over our views (which were translations of Aboriginal views, as we saw them). Avowedly, this was virtually the first occasion where solicitors and other legal persons were called upon to cope seriously with Aboriginal concepts. Frankly they, including Woodward, were in foreign territory (1981, p. 11).

Unfortunately, the material to which Berndt alludes — including maps and correspondence — is not yet available for study.8 Berndt and Stanner both gave expert evidence at the hearing of the Milirrpum Case. By the time the hearing commenced in Darwin in May 1970, it appeared that their approach to what would be appropriate evidence and the manner in which it would be presented differed. Woodward (2005, p. 103) remarks blandly, ‘The two did not see eye to eye on all points, but I managed to steer clear of most of their points of difference which, in any event, were not central to our case’. It could also be that Woodward’s remark is a token of his skill as lead barrister. ù One of the major differences between Berndt and Stanner centred on use of the terms mala and matha (and the concepts they labelled). At Yirrkala during the week of 18 to 25 November 1969 Stanner wrestled with this problematic issue. Among the papers he had taken with him were copies of

204

13. Stanner, Milirrpum, and the Woodward Royal Commission

Warner’s A Black civilization (1958), some of Berndt’s publications (including the 1955 paper in American Anthropologist on Yolngu social organisation) and Shapiro’s recently completed (1969) thesis on Yolngu alliance relationships. On the afternoon of the day he arrived at Yirrkala Stanner had ‘worked over Berndt’s writings, esp[ecially] mada-mala business on which P[urcell] is confused’.9 On the afternoon of 21 November, with informant Mungurrawuy and interpreter Galarrwuy, he made a list of ‘mada’ by moiety. He ascertained that mada meant ‘dialect’ or ‘talk’ and that mala designated a ‘group’ — not only of people but potentially of any kind of thing. He questioned Mungurrawuy about why people might want to divide into two mala, and received a reply that led him to conclude: ‘Mala evidently formed by ordinary fission into brother-clans — why not call them “sub-clans”?’ (unpaginated field notes, copy in the possession of the author). His final thoughts at this point were: Clear enough: mata is a patril[ineal] exog[amous] descent g[rou]p defined by dialect rather than descent, also defined by land or territory though mala is owning possessory land-tending g[rou]p. Only important distinction if several mala; otherwise no apparent reason why land owning and holding can’t be discussed in mata terms… Could not get much sense out of informant on Berndt’s mala list.

The situation was not much clearer six months later in the Supreme Court in Darwin in May 1970. In fact, it was more confused. The problem was that Stanner had had only a week of research with the Yirrkala plaintiffs and had to rely for detailed ethnography on Berndt’s publications, and on Berndt’s explanation of the role of matha and mala in the Yolngu system of land tenure. The resulting confusion is clear in Blackburn’s decision, in which he relied both on published works and the transcript of the hearing, as the following excerpts (Blackburn 1971, pp. 172–3) illustrate: I have said something of the meaning of the word ‘clan’, but a much more elaborate explanation is now required, and was offered in evidence by the plaintiffs… The explanation was based principally on the evidence of Professor Berndt. Professor Stanner’s explanation of the clan was in accordance with what appears to be implied in the statement of claim: ‘A group of people of both sexes, any ages, who think of themselves and are thought of by others as being very closely related in the patrilineal line, and are thought of and think themselves others as being particularly closely related to a specified territory, and who as a group act in marriage exogamously’. Professor Stanner explained that the word ‘mala’ was commonly used among the aborigines of the subject

205

Nancy Williams

land to indicate a clan. He also said that…people tended to use the name of their language as a clan name. The word ‘mata’ is commonly used for ‘language’ and literally it means ‘tongue’ (as Flinders noted in 1803). Professor Stanner had put to him the names of the various clans which are named in the title to this action, and he was asked whether they were mata names or mala names; he replied: ‘As far as I could determine they all belong to the mata type of designation.’ He was asked whether, in a typical language group or mata, one would expect to find one mala or more than one malas, and he replied: ‘I think on the whole there would be more likely to be a congruence of such a kind that the group known as the mata group and the mala group are one and indivisible…’ Professor Berndt, on the other hand, gave an explanation which made a somewhat different impression…Any given aboriginal could be referred to in terms either of his mala or of his mata; but neither classification was, for Professor Berndt, by itself the ultimately significant classification — the classification which linked the aboriginal to his territory.This was, he said, the ‘mata-mala combination’ or ‘mata-mala pair’ or as he sometimes said simply the ‘mata-mala’. Such a group could be defined as those who were of a certain language and of a certain patrilineal descent, as distinct from another mata-mala which was of, say, the same language but a different patrilineal descent. But this did not complete the explanation. There might be the converse case. ‘Each mata is usually linked with more than one mala, and vice versa…’ The evidence of the aboriginals was quite consistent with this view…But I could not help noticing from their evidence that even though they might be aware of the ‘mata-mala’ concept, it did not occupy the forefront of their own thinking about their clan organization. This impression of mine was confirmed by Professor Berndt, who said [in answer to the question]…they do not normally refer to themselves by reference to both the mata and the mala? A. ‘In ordinary everyday speech the mata term would be more generally used.’

Berndt’s account of the confusion is described in a paper published some five years later: I think both Stanner and myself provided either too little or too much material. I was concerned with interpreting the local ethnographic situation to the best of my ability, ensuring the Aboriginal views were faithfully represented. I believe Stanner was concerned with that dimension too; but he — in my view — erred on the side of over-

206

13. Stanner, Milirrpum, and the Woodward Royal Commission

generalizing and attempting to fit the facts into a broader abstract model which, if I understand him correctly, was designed to establish a bridge between the ‘raw material’ and legalistic theory and practice. I think we were both wrong in embarking on this undesigned division of labour (1981, p. 11, original emphasis).

A year before Berndt and Stanner presented their expert evidence, Schebeck (1968, p. 63), a linguist who had studied Yolngu dialects in the 1960s, wrote that a communication problem had been central to anthropologists’ consistent failure to comprehend the Yolngu theory of group names and their meanings. Schebeck says that Berndt’s ‘analyses are presented as if they were clearly formulated by a native theory…Thus the distinction between native theory and underlying structure is not made in Berndt’s descriptions, and a confusion of these two levels is implied in his interpretations’ (ibid., pp. 64–5).10 Added to the problems created by conflating Yolngu labels and theories of their use was reification of the labelled groups. In Williams’ understanding, the significance of context to Yolngu meaning had not been fully appreciated: Yolngu use of rules of group designation is situationally governed …It is the rule plus the situation that yields specific meaning. The rules may be applied in many different contexts to yield many different meanings…Yolngu would very likely agree that most (if not all) anthropologists’ explanations of their social organisation and the definitions of rules on which they were predicated were correct. Further questioned as to their accuracy in different contexts, the likelihood of Yolngu agreement would be much reduced. To put it another way, it is likely that [they] would reject very few (if any) such explanations as being wrong in themselves. The question is one of adequacy in terms of the domain to which the explanations apply (1986, pp. 229–30).

Blackburn’s decision in the Milirrpum Case was handed down in April 1971. All the people who had worked in various capacities on behalf of the Yirrkala claimants were bitterly disappointed.The Yolngu were angry. Coombs (1981, p. 282) recalls that, ‘The public response to this judgment was one almost of outrage. The press overwhelmingly demanded a change in the law, and trade unions threatened to block the mining development at Gove until Aboriginal claims were met’. Between the time the decision was handed down and Woodward had provided the defeated claimants with written advice against appealing the decision, recommending instead that legislation would be the course more likely to produce a favourable outcome for the Yolngu, Stanner and the other members of the Council for Aboriginal Affairs were exploring

207

Nancy Williams

various means, including a number of policy proposals, to secure land for Aborigines. The results were not encouraging. However, shortly after Labor won government in 1972, the new prime minister, Gough Whitlam, asked Woodward (Woodward 2005, p. 133) if he would undertake a royal commission into land rights in the Northern Territory.The royal commission came into existence in February 1973. the woodward royal commission

Stanner (9 May 1973) made a written statement to the Woodward Royal Commission into Aboriginal Land Rights in the Northern Territory in response to a questionnaire dated 7 March 1973. He had in mind the relevance of his statement to the entire Northern Territory, not just to the Yolngu area, and some of his comments seem difficult to reconcile with his earlier analysis of Aboriginal land tenure — at least without further reflection. Stanner was still thinking about the Milirrpum Case and Blackburn’s decision. He introduced his statement by cautioning against generalising from the evidence in the Milirrpum Case. In his opinion the difference between the Yolngu case and other possible cases was one of emphasis rather than structural principle: The more important differences are threefold. (i) The ‘cultural bloc’… demonstrated is in my opinion probably more palpable [in the Yolngu evidence] than elsewhere. (ii) The difficulty of demonstrating whether there is one ‘tribe’ or several ‘tribes’ according to a standard definition is greater [in the Yolngu area] than elsewhere. (iii) The very marked tendency for particular descent-groups (e.g. Djapu, Rirratjingu) to regard themselves and to be regarded as distinctive language-groups is unusually pronounced (Stanner 1973, p. 2).

Stanner (ibid., p. 13) made the case for granting title to Aborigines whose land was on or near reserves an early priority. He then remarked that he had not found any Aborigines in that environment who, in his judgement, yet had an adequate understanding of European forms of tenure. This might change in the future, but in the meantime, he said: I would think it advisable to ensure that at least three elements of continuity should be provided as far as reserved land is concerned. There should be a specified group of ‘right people’ (‘owners’) for every major tract of land recognized by the public Aboriginal tradition as rightly ‘belonging’ to a group; power and ability in the ‘right people’ to allow or disallow entry and use by others, whether Aboriginal or European; and contractual freedom for the ‘right people’ to negotiate

208

13. Stanner, Milirrpum, and the Woodward Royal Commission

terms of entry and use by others, short of outright transfer or sale to non-Aborigines (ibid.).

He saw these three elements as continuous with tradition, but as not inconsistent with European forms of tenure, so that evolution to the latter would be possible ‘if and when Aborigines wish to take such a step’ (ibid., p. 13). He added: ‘I make this suggestion because I see no practicable way of protecting Aboriginal social structure from all external causes of change, and no justification for preventing such “internal” changes as Aborigines may opt to accept in the course of time’ (ibid.). Later in his statement, Stanner (ibid., p. 22) added a fourth element in conjunction with the provision for Aborigines entering into lease arrangements with non-Aborigines: ‘The Aboriginal land-owners should have, among other considerations, a substantial equity in all undertakings carried out by non-Aborigines under leasehold’. In the context of the form of title to be granted, Stanner enlarged on the implications of change. He said: I wish for the moment to reserve my opinion about the kind or character of the title to be granted, while agreeing that it should contain a restriction — for some time though not for ever — upon the right to sell or transfer to non-Aborigines. My reason for reservation is my poor understanding of the difficulties which Mr. Justice Blackburn found in accepting the Aboriginal interest in land as ‘proprietary’. These difficulties seem to me to come from accepting European property notions as defining a genus rather than a species. Alienable (which is to say marketable) property is certainly in sociological terms only a species. The Aboriginal interest in land was not speciated in that way…[But] I do not consider that there is any necessary inference that their interest was not proprietary (ibid., p. 14).

Concluding his consideration of potential change, Stanner wrote: I hope that a way can be found to establish what I have called (in the Aboriginal conception) ‘the right people’ for a particular tract as its lawful ‘owners’ (in our conception) even though with restriction on their power to sell or transfer to Europeans. It may well be that in the course of time, and in their rapidly changing context of life, some or all Aborigines may wish to adapt their control of land to circumstances which cannot now be foreseen.While I fully believe that the Aborigines known to me intensely desire to have their traditional land-system made lawful under our law, I do not think it necessary, or desirable in their long-term interest, to make it mandatory for them to maintain that system forever (ibid., p. 15).

209

Nancy Williams

In these observations Stanner foreshadowed, presciently, events now the subject of passionate debate. But further considering the possible alienation of land in the context of future economic development, Stanner presumed that it was not the intention of Commonwealth policy to establish land titles which by their incidents would ‘prohibit Aborigines from gaining the advantages of ownership’. He saw evidence of social change, but considered that it was: …necessary to bear in mind that their capacity, unaided, to develop and sustain the economic, industrial and social arrangements for a productive use of land in a market-economy is still, and is likely to remain for a considerable time, unproven and that their present need to draw on external loan and grant capital, management and expertise may be very protracted. Private industry may have as much to offer them as government or public organizations (ibid., p. 22).

However, as noted above, Stanner said that Aboriginal land holders should have a substantial equity in all leasehold undertakings carried out by nonAborigines. Ultimately, Stanner was not fully convinced that the sale of land might not be to Aboriginal advantage at some time, and so he was not in favour of this being made a legal impossibility: I hope, nevertheless, that it will be made extremely difficult for a considerable time to come and then possible only with the consent of the legislature. I consider that those Aborigines who are fortunate enough to be given land-title will need a long time to grasp the significance of what has happened and to rearrange their ideas of what they would like to do with the land (ibid.). concluding remarks

What is the ground of Stanner’s pragmatism here, which could seem to jar when compared with earlier — and later (recall, for example, the ‘architectonic idea’ in the 1976 Strong lecture) understanding of Aboriginal notions of property? Can inferences about his set of mind and moral stance provide the underpinning that will perhaps allow consistency to be seen? The evidence of his writings reveals a basic concern with equity — fairness and justice at their broadest — in the economic and social arrangements of relations with Indigenous peoples.At the same time, both through disposition and immersion in academic study characterised by the then highly valued ‘scientific objectivity’, he was committed to intellectual rigour. Coombs’ (1978, pp. 4–5) assessment was that ‘[Stanner’s] training as a scholar…and his own integrity gave him high standards in the search for and the assessment

210

13. Stanner, Milirrpum, and the Woodward Royal Commission

of evidence, and a ruthless contempt for careless and unsound reasoning and for sloppy expression’. It may have been during his time in London in the late 1930s, when he was writing about the situation of Aborigines, that a commitment to equitable dealings in Aboriginal land interests was formed.11 In the interplay of his scientific impulse to describe accurately his observations in his field work with Aboriginal people and his increasing understanding of their religion and their systems of kinship, he developed a profound respect for the humanity of the people he had become acquainted with. It led him to portray them as individuals with individual capacities and interests. His (1960) essay on Durmugam is not just a moving and powerful biography, it reveals the kind of empathy that allowed Stanner to see the challenges that individual leaders faced and to remark on their imagination and genius in dealing with them. Aborigines had developed systems of religion and kinship and law of such complexity that their proper description and analysis required an intellectually adequate lexicon in English. And it was individual Aborigines who were the architects and sustainers of the systems. All of these elements may have played a role in Stanner’s sometimes wavering hope that Anglo-Australians would have the wit to see Aborigines as he had learned to see them — as intelligent, even brilliant, human beings. An eminent colleague, OHK Spate, upon the conferral of an honorary degree on Stanner in 1972, said: I think that the righting of nearly two centuries of wrong is one of the passions of Stanner’s life, perhaps the master-passion…It is not just on the plane of social welfare, of ‘helping the Aborigines’, that Stanner fights, vastly important as welfare and advancement are. He takes higher ground: the recognition of the intrinsic dignity and value of Aboriginal modes of thought and belief (Barwick et al. 1985, p. 41).

WC Wentworth (1982, p. 47), who had known Stanner since 1934, recalled in his obituary that, ‘Even before the Second World War he was talking of land rights for Aborigines’. Wentworth also said that Stanner: …accorded dignity to the Aborigine at a time when the stereotype was tinged with popular contempt. He did as much as any one to destroy this false stereotype, and more than anyone to destroy it in his own field. He made many of us aware for the first time of the wholeness of traditional Aboriginal life (ibid.).

Stanner’s appreciation of Aborigines as intelligent and rational individuals is the key to reconciling — to the extent that reconciliation in the interest of consistency is useful or necessary — the acknowledgment of the intrinsic

211

Nancy Williams

relationship between individuals and their land with the potential for individuals to deal with their land as marketable property. Individuals should have the power, that is, the legal ability to rationalise alienability of property. That is a matter of morality. Stanner’s 1972 Charles Mackay lecture (published in 1976), indicates the effect that his involvement in the Milirrpum Case had in crystallising his appreciation of the ability of Aborigines to deal with change, although he attributes its origin to earlier experience. He said that in the 1930s he had begun to see and to recognise ‘some extremely complex changes in ideas and social organization going on within a few Aboriginal societies in the Northern Territory’: I trace to that experience convictions from which I have never wavered and which have been confirmed time and again. They are that Aborigines, unquestionably, have the mental capacity to unravel and make sense out of complex new things, even abstractly complex things; that they have the social skills to come to a consensus of rational decisions whether to reject, modify or accept them; and that if given half-way decent conditions of life they would reveal their capabilities more widely to us (1976a, pp. 201–2).

He linked this conviction to the Milirrpum Case: ‘no one who took part in the Yirrkala land-case came out of it without a heightened respect for Aboriginal life, ideology and values. What we all saw there were black men, who, in the very process of failure, won white minds to a new point of view. Their only failures were against eighteenth-century law, “history” as we construct it, and some rather intractable European superstitions about land’ (ibid., p. 203). During the two years following Blackburn’s decision (in April 1971) against the Yirrkala claimants, Stanner ‘drafted many chapters analysing arguments used by the Crown and the mining company [for a planned book. He] was tormented by the failed case’ (Barwick et al. 1985, p. 40). Regrettably the book was never published, but what he wrote in notes for the planned book reveals both his despair and his abiding concern that Aborigines’ humanity be acknowledged: If there is one thing more clear to me about the Yirrkala case than anything else it is the paradox that if the Aborigines had by accident or design pleaded and established the truth — that Australia was a conquered and not a settled colony — and thereby committed legal suicide, they could not have fared worse than by falling in, under legal advice, with the untruth that it was a settled colony. Under the law applying to a conquered people the British Crown by prerogative act could have lawfully extinguished all their rights. According to the

212

13. Stanner, Milirrpum, and the Woodward Royal Commission

Blackburn judgment, it did the same lawfully under the law applying to settled colonies. The conclusion is inescapable. The Aborigines by law were held to be outside the category of human beings, though British subjects (ibid.).

What Stanner recommended to the Woodward Royal Commission could be seen as a framework that would enable individual Aborigines to control the development of their relations to land in order to benefit economically from their land ownership. Equitable dealings in land could be the basis of rectifying the effect of the Blackburn judgement.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank the book’s editors for a critical reading of the first version of this chapter and Bruce Rigsby for a critical reading of a subsequent draft. I also thank Frances Morphy for contributing substantially to the readability of the final draft. For whatever improvements resulted, I am in their debt; for the issues that may remain unresolved, I am of course responsible. References Barwick, D, Beckett, J & Reay, M 1985,‘WEH Stanner: an Australian anthropologist’, in D Barwick, J Beckett & M Reay (eds), Metaphors of interpretation, Australian National University Press, Canberra. Berndt, RM 1955, ‘“Murngin” (Wulamba) social organization’, American Anthropologist, vol. 57, pp. 84–106. —— 1981,‘A long view: some personal comments on land rights’, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Newsletter, n.s., vol. 16, pp. 5–20. Blackburn, R 1971, Judgment, Milirrpum v. Nabalco Pty. Ltd. And the Commonwealth of Australia FLR, vol. 17, pp. 141–294. Coombs, HC 1978, Kulinma: listening to Aboriginal Australians, Australian National University Press, Canberra. —— 1981, Trial balance, Macmillan, Melbourne. Hinkson, M 2002, ‘Reading anthropology across time: towards a framework for a biographical treatment of the work of WEH Stanner’, paper presented in the Anthropology departmental seminar series, Australian National University, 18 September 2002. Hiatt, LR 1962, ‘Local organization among the Australian Aborigines’, Oceania, vol. 32, pp. 267–86. —— 1982, ‘Letter to the editor’, Oceania, vol. 52, pp. 261–5. Hocking, B 1982, ‘Is might right? An argument for the recognition of traditional Aboriginal title to land in the Australian courts’, in E Obrei (ed.), Black Australians: the prospects for change, Students Union, James Cook University, Townsville. Maddock, K 1980, Anthropology, law and the definition of Australian Aboriginal rights to land, Publications over Volksrecht VI, Nijmegen. Russell, PH 2005, Recognizing Aboriginal title; the Mabo case and Indigenous resistance to English-settler colonialism, University of Toronto Press.

213

Nancy Williams Schebeck, B 1968, ‘Dialect and social groupings in northeast Arnhem Land’. Manuscript lodged in AIATSIS Library, Canberra. —— 2001, Dialect and social groupings in north-east Arnheim [Arnhem] Land, Lincom Europa, Muenchen. Shapiro, W 1969, Miwuyt marriage, PhD thesis, Australian National University. Stanner, WEH 1939, ‘The Aborigines’, in J Kevin (ed.), Some Australians take stock, Longmans, Green & Co., London. —— 1956,‘The Dreaming’, in TAG Hungerford (ed.), Australian signpost: an anthology, FW Cheshire, Melbourne. —— 1960, ‘Durguman, a Nangiomeri’, in JA Casagrande (ed.), In the company of man: twenty portraits by anthropologists, Harper & Brothers, New York. —— 1965, ‘Aboriginal territorial organization: estate, range, domain and regime’, Oceania, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 1–26. —— 1969, ‘The Yirrkala case’, 17-page typescript produced for private seminar at Australian National University, copy in the possession of the author. —— 1973, ‘Statement by WEH Stanner [to] the Aboriginal Land Rights Commission’, 24-page typescript, copy in the possession of the author. —— 1976a, ‘Aborigines and Australian society, Mankind, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 201–12. —— 1976b, ‘Some aspects of Aboriginal religion’, paper delivered to the Charles Strong (Australian Church) Memorial Trust, reprinted from Colloquium, Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Theological Studies, Melbourne. —— 1979, White man got no Dreaming, Australian National University Press, Canberra. Warner, WL 1958, A Black civilization: a social study of an Australian tribe (rev. edn), Harper, New York. Wentworth, WC 1982, ‘Emeritus Professor WEH Stanner 1905–1981: a personal reminiscence’, (obituary), Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Newsletter, n.s., vol. 17, pp. 45–7. Woodward, Sir E 2005, One brief interval: a memoir, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne.

Notes 1. In an account of the Mabo Case, Canadian political scientist Russell (2005, p. 174) cites Hocking’s (1982) observation that ‘the act’s express recognition of traditional ownership was that the proprietary rights of Aborigines were still in existence’. 2. Including institutionally through the founding of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, and his work with Dexter and Coombs in the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. 3. Maddock (1980, p. 10) says, ‘The Gove case was the first in which Aborigines asserted their traditional rights to land before an Australian judge’.The case began as the Mathaman Case and, after Mathaman’s death in January 1970, continued as the Milirrpum Case. It was also known as the Gove Case for its geographic location, or the Blackburn Case for the name of the judge who decided it. 4. Woodward (2005, p. 100) writes that they, ‘had enlisted the services of the two leading anthropologists of the day, Professor WEH (Bill) Stanner and Professor

214

13. Stanner, Milirrpum, and the Woodward Royal Commission RM Berndt, and they introduced us to the anthropological literature on the subject and answered our questions about the particular situation existing in Arnhem Land. This gave us hope that we would be able to make out a case for an Aboriginal system of land ownership that should have been recognised by the different governments that had jurisdiction in the Northern Territory over the years’. Maddock (1980, pp. 17–8) observed in 1980 a historical convergence of anthropological and legal analysis: ‘In the significant legal steps of recent years — the Gove Case, the Woodward Commission, the Land Rights Act, the claims brought under the Act — lawyers have been analysing and defining traditional land law…in reliance largely on evidence given by anthropologists or culled from anthropological writings.Anthropologists have, of course, been making their own rudimentary legal analyses for a long time…The importance of this is that lawyers in the 1970s are not handling material free of legal “conceptualization”’. 5 . Stanner (bibliography item 288, p. 294, in Barwick et al. 1985) prepared a ‘transcript of incomplete and long-hand notes made in court’; it was the only record of this hearing and was circulated to interested persons. Its substance was included in a paper (Barwick et al. 1985, p. 275) written for a private seminar at the Australian National University held in May 1970 and published in 1979 in White man got no Dreaming with the title ‘The Yirrkala land case: dressrehearsal’. 6. The papers are listed in the Stanner bibliography (Barwick et al. 1985, pp. 293–6) and include ‘Anthropological matters arising from the Commonwealth’s reply to the Aborigines’ statement of claim’, ‘The Yirrkala case: some general principles of Aboriginal land-holding’, and ‘The Yirrkala case’. 7. Along with Stanner and Berndt, Hiatt was a senior anthropologist who might have been expected to play a prominent role in the Milirrpum case. Hiatt had undertaken research in north central-coastal Arnhem Land with Aboriginal people related to the Yolngu and his 1965 book, Kinship and conflict was highly regarded. An article he published earlier (1962) questioned assumptions about Aboriginal relations to land that had become more or less regarded as anthropological orthodoxy, and was significant in the development of anthropological studies of Aboriginal land tenure; but Stanner’s (1965) response to the article included a hostile reaction to what he alleged was unfair criticism of his mentor, RadcliffeBrown. In 1982, Hiatt wrote a letter to the editor of Oceania (1982, pp. 261–5) and described his role in the Milirrpum case as beginning with a request from the Crown Solicitor’s Department to read and comment on anthropological affidavits submitted by anthropologists. (The Crown was a co-respondent in the case.) He declined, and instead wrote to Frank Purcell on 23 August 1969 offering his services to the Yolngu plaintiffs. He concluded this letter by asserting that his writings supported the Yolngu case against the Commonwealth and Nabalco to the hilt, and that they did not, as Stanner believed, constitute a threat to the Yolngu case. Hiatt suggested that the relevant question was not one of scholarly debate about the analysis of Aboriginal relations to land, but whether Stanner and he disagreed in significant ways about the facts of land ownership and use among the Yolngu. Hiatt said that while Stanner believed they did, he believed they did not. Comparison of Hiatt’s summary of his understanding of

215

Nancy Williams the topics in his letter to Purcell with Stanner’s summary in the February 1969 paper quoted above, appears to corroborate Hiatt’s conclusion that there was no significant disagreement. From the perspective of nearly 40 years, it seems a matter of great regret that Hiatt had no direct involvement in the Milirrpum case. 8. John Stanton (pers. comm.), director of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia, advises that any relevant material is yet to be catalogued. 9. Stanner’s typescript copy of his handwritten notes, from a copy Stanner provided to the author. The day after his arrival he visited Melville Bay. He was plainly distressed, as his field notes reveal, at the impact bauxite mining activity (at that stage infrastructure development) was already making. He wrote, ‘A remarkable change since last visit. Dundas Pt nearly unrecog. A young Kurnell in making’. 10. Schebeck (2001) has written a more detailed critique of Berndt’s (as well as Warner’s 1958) analyses of the Yolngu terms mala, matha, and bapurru; see his ‘General conclusions’ (pp. 80–4). 11. Barwick et al. (1985, p. 11–2) mention articles in Australian journals and London newspapers that were critical of Aboriginal administration and a 1938 address to the Royal Anthropological Institute ‘criticising Australian policy developments and noting that no attempt seemed to have been made to assess the reasons for past failure’. Stanner (1939) also made a scathing attack on the 1937 welfare conference resolutions, published in England in 1939; however, it contained no explicit reference to land rights.

216

14.

Counting the cost: Stanner and the Port Keats/Wadeye population john taylor

The composition of their population is…undergoing a startling change: it is now, in at least some groups, very much more youthful, and growing in size at a very much faster rate, than ours. It follows that their conditions will have to improve faster than ours if they are to stay even at their present relative disadvantage. This is a sobering thought (Stanner 1969, p. 58).

Bill Stanner’s published work is replete with succinct yet crucial insights into the emerging condition of Aboriginal peoples, not least in respect of those at Port Keats/Wadeye who were the sustained focus of his research across his working life. His warning about the implications of rapid Aboriginal population growth, presented in his 1968 Boyer Lectures, is no less apposite and sobering now than it was 40 years ago. More’s the pity, as this signals that his prescient advice available to governments and bureaucracies at that time (and since) has gone unheeded.We know this because Stanner’s words echo in the findings of recent inquiries into the socioeconomic condition of Wadeye — now the largest Aboriginal town in the Northern Territory — which has highlighted the abject failure of essential services and government investment to keep pace with demographic expansion, with dire consequences for living conditions (Taylor 2004; Taylor & Stanley 2005). Stanner understood the necessity and value of detailed population counts. They formed the basis of his anthropology, they supported his case to government that Aboriginal peoples were not a dying race, and they are increasingly used by Aboriginal people themselves to argue for rightful shares of citizen entitlements, not least at Wadeye itself. Stanner’s foundation work in constructing a demography of Murrinh-patha and allied peoples now enables an appreciation of the rapid pace of population change in remote Aboriginal settlements and to assess the consequences. As such, he provides the essential backdrop to the measurement of contemporary social change. 217

John Taylor early encounters

In June 1935, Stanner boarded the St Francis with Father Docherty and assorted party in Darwin to sail for Port Keats. On his first field trip, three years prior, he tacked short of the coastline now pursued and followed the Daly River upstream in the expectation of finding ‘uncontaminated’ country in which to apply his newly acquired structural-functionalist tool kit (Hinkson 2005, p. 197). Instead, at the Daly River settlement he encountered a confusing mix of peoples long since transformed by a combination of mission influence and encounters with a frontier economy based on mining, pastoralism, and peanut farms (ibid., pp. 197–200). In a very real sense the Daly at this time was the frontier (and still is in many ways), and Stanner’s awareness of this was aroused by the fear held by many along the river of the hostile and autonomous Brinken group in country beyond the south bank (ibid., pp. 200–2). Following unsuccessful attempts to establish contact with this group, Stanner returned to Darwin with a lingering fascination at their ability to maintain geographic and cultural separation. This glimpse of a world beyond the pale, as it were, accords well with the official view and popular imagery of the time immortalised in part-fiction by Idriess (1941, p.4) as the ‘wild lands’. Despite the importance of these lands in the Aboriginal world, by Stanner’s own reckoning (1933, p. 381) the area between the Daly and Fitzmaurice rivers was one of the least known parts of the continent up to the time of his arrival there. Accordingly, in the national census of 1933 the numbers resident beyond the Daly were simply guesstimated and then incorporated into the general estimate of ‘full-blood’ Aboriginal population for the entire Daly River census district. Of course, there was nothing unusual about an information void for isolated Aboriginal populations around the Top End at this time. What was unusual though, was that Stanner happened to arrive on the first mission boat as a party to the very agency of subsequent change. From a purist stance, this timing was more fortuitous than that of CWM Hart, whose census of the Tiwi between 1928 and 1929 was conducted almost two decades after the establishment of the mission on Bathurst Island, although Hart’s census was more complete in terms of age data and country affiliation than that about to be attempted by Stanner (Peterson & Taylor 1998). Not that the population around Port Keats was in any way a complete isolate devoid of contact with the outside world. On the contrary, among Stanner’s initial observations was the fact that many from this area were away at Auvergne, Bradshaw and Legune stations to the south, and at Daly River (MS 3752, 4/2), while trade and contact with other Aboriginal peoples up and down the coast between Wyndham and Darwin had long connected the wunan exchange cycle from the south with the merbok system to the north (Akerman 1979; Stanner 1933–34, 1936, p. 187). However, the salient point here is less to

218

14. Stanner and the Port Keats/Wadeye population

do with issues of preemption, and much more about the fact that Stanner’s presence and participation at the outset of mission influence, and for many years thereafter, yielded a steady flow of statistical information that now enables a reconstruction of demographic history from the very point of first permanent contact with European settlement. In pursuit of this task, two broad historic phases provide the essential backdrop: the mission years from 1935 to 1975, and the subsequent years of self-management (Kardu Numida)/self-government (Thamarrurr). ù Knowledge of the numbers of people in social groupings, their age, gender and location, was a fundamental ethnographic concern of anthropologists such as Stanner, and it has become a primary input to planning for service delivery by modern governments and Aboriginal organisations. Stanner was very much at the forefront of building this information base. His initial encounter with the peoples around Port Keats occurred at a time when the Aboriginal population of Australia overall was at its lowest ebb. He spent five weeks camped at the Murrinh-patha estate of Wentek Nganai country (Old Mission), and immediately set about enumerating those present leaving a record of the number of males, females, children and adults. Interestingly, most of the 138 people counted at this time were adults (aged over 18, though how this age was established is not made clear). Of these, 57 were male and 32 were female. Thus, only 47 children (24 male and 25 female) were identified, suggesting that either this was a select gathering of people, or that infant mortality was rather high (MS 3752, 5/23c). Not surprisingly, in pursuit of his anthropological quest, he immediately sought to classify individuals by various family name, clan and language group categories. Thus, from his notes, we have present in 1935: ‘Kinmu’ (the clan name Rak Kirnmu), ‘Dimini’ (the clan name Yek Diminin), ‘Nagor’ (the clan name Yek Nangu), ‘Panjack’ (a spelling of the individual Nym Pandek, or family name spelt today as Bunduck), ‘Jeder’ (either the clan name Yek Yederr, or the cave painting site of Yadarr (or Yarrar)), ‘Wakal Tjinang’ (sometimes used to describe the people of and the country of the Rak Kubiyirr clan group), ‘Wung’ (the clan group Yek Wunh), Maijilindi (the Madjelindi Valley country, the land of the Murrinh-Nyuwan language people), ‘Kurngor’ (the Rainbow Serpent, the centre of mythology for people in the area now spelt ‘Kunmanggur’), ‘Marin’ (the Marri-Tjevin language), ‘Wackel Tjinang’, (the same as Wakal Tjinang above), ‘Madjilidi (the Madjelindi Valley again), and ‘Wang’ (the clan group Yek Wunh) (MS 3752, 5/23c). By 1936 he began to report the process of others moving in to congregate around the fledgling mission (MS 3752, 4/2) with particular reference to individuals originating from stations on the Victoria River (MS 3752,

219

John Taylor

Men tilling vegetable gardens, Port Keats c. 1950s. Photographer WEH Stanner, Stanner Collection, AIATSIS CS 64300.

5/23c). In 1939, the permanent mission site was relocated 10 miles inland to Diminin land and the first picture of a population distributed widely across the region according to custom is provided: ‘200–300 people in the region divided into small local bands each of which had its own hunting and camping area. The local family-group wandered about over their own domains following the fluctuating food supply’ (MS 3752, 1/82). While the war years left a brief gap in his noting of population numbers, this resumed in 1947 with Stanner counting 312 resident at the mission (153 males and 159 females), a notable rise from the pre-war years. He also observed that many from the ‘Jedi’ (Yek Yederr?) and ‘Tjaoin’ (?) tribes still lived in their tribal country but visited the mission intermittently, coming in for a few days for tobacco before returning out bush. However, others (notably Marri Ngarr speakers) began to settle at the mission just after the war by activating affinal and other ties (MS 3752, 5/23c; Barber 2000). census and estimates

With the bedding down of civil administration under mission rule, regular annual counting (at least of those ‘in contact’ with the mission) now became a requirement, initially to the Native Affairs Branch, and then (from 1953) to the Welfare Branch of the Northern Territory Administration.

220

14. Stanner and the Port Keats/Wadeye population

This distinction between Aboriginal people ‘in contact’ and those who were ‘nomadic’ is an interesting one as it has bedeviled the compilation of accurate regional statistics more or less to the present. It is clear that people were highly mobile at the time (as indeed they still are), moving frequently between mission and bush, and to and from far-flung destinations.This much is evident from weekly data on the turnover of population in and out of the mission gathered in great detail by Stanner for the first nine months of 1954 when he recorded the activities and location of adults (MS 3752, 5/23c). Similar insight is gained from Falkenberg’s 1952 census of clans in the Port Keats district in which he enumerated individuals according to their precise location at the time (Falkenberg 1962, pp. 26–32). Not surprisingly, given patrilineal social organisation, Falkenberg found a much greater share of men living on their customary lands than women (45 per cent compared to 12 per cent), although the key observation was the overall degree of absence from those lands due to time spent at the mission and to a lesser extent at distant cattle stations.Thus, from the outset, the precise size and composition of a ‘mission’ as opposed to a ‘regional’ population has been somewhat blurred. For much the same reasons of frequent mobility, and intermittent outstation and settlement residence, this difficulty has persisted. These nuances aside, what we have from the historic record are total population counts for Port Keats sporadically from 1935 to 1947 and then continuously for each year of mission administration from 1950 to 1973, with occasional verification and insight from Stanner and others. For the most part, these counts report the number of male and female adults and children, but provide no specific age breakdown. For the latter we are reliant on specific events such as the Commonwealth census of 1954, the compilation of the Register of Wards between 1953 and 1956, Jeremy Long’s census for the Welfare Branch in 1961, and Stanner’s census of 1964. It should also be noted that throughout his field work at Port Keats Stanner kept detailed records of vital events such as births, deaths, baptisms and marriages. These remain to be collated and analysed. This intense enumeration activity — almost obsession — suddenly abated with the handover from mission to local council administration in 1975. Along with this change, responsibility for producing official counts of the population fell to the five-yearly Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) census. Thus, from 1976 to 1996 we have a count of individuals present at Wadeye on Australian census night. Those at outstations now in the region designated as the Thamarrurr Regional Council area were simply included as part of a much larger number representing the balance of the entire Daly Statistical Local Area (roughly equivalent to the Daly Land Trust area). For the 2001 ABS census, however, these outstations were collectively identified and reported on for the first time as a separate ‘Indigenous Location’.

221

John Taylor population growth

By 1950 a total of 310 Aboriginal people were counted at Port Keats mission and Stanner claimed in 1952 that the rate of growth was such that the numbers would double within 20 years (Sydney Morning Herald 8 December 1952, p. 6). According to Long’s (1961) survey of the mission population, this prediction was well on track as he counted 447 residents and noted that others were located at East Arm leprosarium and generally in the ‘bush’. By the time of the 1971 ABS census, the population at Port Keats outstripped Stanner’s claim with 766 counted. According to Stanner’s assessment (MS 3752, 4/2) this steady rise in numbers was due to declining death rates and sustained high fertility during the mission years of the 1950s and 1960s, together with some in-migration. There is certainly evidence that fertility in the region was traditionally very high with Gray (1983) reporting a total fertility rate of nine children per women using entries from the Daly River baptismal register in the late nineteenth century. One wonders, then, at the likely effect of the original ‘baby bonus’ recorded by Stanner and allocated to parents at Port Keats on the birth of each child: ‘[three] double sticks of tobacco each, one pipe each, one mirror each, one comb each, one calico each, one blanket each, and clothes for the baby provided by the sister’ (MS 3752, 5/2b). The effect of such pro-natalism, and basic medical care to support it, is reflected in the steady rise in population through the 1950s, and especially the 1960s (Figure 1). Figure 1. Counts and estimates of the Aboriginal population of Port Keats Mission/ Wadeye/Thamarrurr, 1947 to 2003.

Sources of non-official counts and estimates: + Natoli 1982; X Desmarchelier 2001; # ABS ERP for Thamarrurr; * Taylor 2003.

222

14. Stanner and the Port Keats/Wadeye population

Extrapolation of the high growth trend observed during the 1960s would place the current population in excess of 2000. While some post1971 estimates do point to a continuation of high growth into the selfmanagement era (Figure 1), the various ABS census counts from 1976 to 2001 suggest a quite different and more subdued trajectory. Between 1971 and 1976, the ABS count at Wadeye barely increased (from 766 to 819). It then fell to 768 in 1981, then rose slightly to 844 in 1986, rose substantially to 1236 in 1991, only to fall again to 1183 in 1996 and to 936 in 2001. Historically then, since 1971, census counts suggest that the town of Wadeye experienced a period of no growth, followed by a period of rapid growth, followed by population decline. However, it should be noted that these counts refer only to the settlement at Wadeye and do not include outstations. As noted, up to the 2001 ABS census any persons counted at Wadeye outstations were included in the count for the much larger balance of Daly Statistical Local Area. In 2001 a total of 443 persons were counted within the newly created Wadeye outstations Indigenous Locality. Combined with Wadeye town, this produced a regional total Aboriginal population for the Thamarrurr region of 1379. As noted, this was the first census that recorded a separate outstation count and so it is not known to what extent previous census counts for the region might also have been augmented by people present at outstations, except to suggest that they would have. Notwithstanding these difficulties, the indication based on historic mission data is that census counts after 1976 fall short of what might have been expected unless one of two demographic events occurred — either a substantial reduction in natural increase, or a significant net out-migration. While evidence to inform these propositions is slim, both Natoli (1982) and Stanley (1985) report an average of 50-plus births per annum at Wadeye in the early 1980s, which is suggestive of continued high natural increase in line with levels of growth observed by Stanner during the 1960s. As for the notion that people were leaving the region in large numbers, this does not accord with the collective memory of service providers and local informants. Indeed, one of the factors identified as leading to the collapse of the Kardu Numida Council in 1994 was its inability to respond to the needs of a growing town (Desmarchelier 2001, p. 41). community census

As the newly formed Thamarrurr Regional Council began its business in 2003, doubts were raised by local service providers and community leaders in the Thamarrurr region regarding the utility of ABS data in representing the true size, and to some extent the composition, of the resident population. In the Realpolitik of community funding and representation, this was seen as a crucial shortcoming by the newly established council, and it

223

John Taylor

resolved to address the matter by conducting its own census employing local people as enumerators and advisers. By assembling a team of senior men and women through the regional council and the Wadeye Palngun Wurangat (Wadeye Women’s Association), and with assistance enlisted via them from representatives of the various family groups within Wadeye and at outstations, the simple strategy was to conduct a count of individuals present (including absent usual residents), and to then cross-check this against available administrative data sets to identify and follow up any discrepancies between the two. The first of these exercises in 2003 revealed a resident Aboriginal population in the Thamarrurr region of 2034, and a database of all individuals was compiled by family name, age and sex. A follow-up exercise in 2005 counted 2150 people. age composition

Underlying the more or less steady growth in population size is a significant shift in the age structure of the population. If we take Stanner’s early data on age distribution to be representative of the wider regional situation, then we observe a gradual shift from an initial deficit of children and youth to adults in the early mission years to one in which the ratio has reversed, resulting in substantially more children and youth compared to adults. In 1935 the child (under 18 years) to adult ratio was 0.55; in 1952 it was 0.87; by 1956 there was parity at 100.5; by 1964 there were clearly more children than adults at 108.0; and currently this is emphatically the case at 136.5. What this reflects over time is an early improvement in child survival, a persistence throughout the mission years and beyond of high fertility, and continuing high adult mortality (especially among males). These effects are consistent with the growing sedentariness of the regional population around the mission site and subsequent town of Wadeye, and the increased access to social services and income that this has provided. How the shape of the Aboriginal population of the Port Keats/ Thamarrurr region has altered since the 1950s is shown in Figure 2. Several features are of note. First of all, incipient growth is evident in the 1956 profile with the beginnings of a broad base to the population pyramid. This has simply become more exaggerated over time. Second, the rapid taper with advancing age highlights continued high adult mortality. Third, there appears to have been growing uniformity in the decline of population with age for both sexes suggesting increased net balance in inter-regional migration. Finally, relatively large numbers of women in the child-bearing ages, and even larger cohorts beneath them, indicate high potential for future growth in numbers, even if the actual fertility rate were now to decline.

224

14. Stanner and the Port Keats/Wadeye population Figure 2. Aboriginal population of Port Keats and the Thamarrurr region by age and sex, 1956 and 2003.

Sources: Northern Territory of Australia 1957; Taylor 2003.

Presently, almost half of the population (46 per cent) is less than 15 years of age, with a slightly higher proportion among males (48 per cent) compared to females (44 per cent), as is to be expected given the observations above regarding differential mortality. Overall the sex ratio of the population is 0.89, which is much lower than that recorded for the Aboriginal population of the Northern Territory as a whole (0.99). Furthermore, the underlying age distribution of males and females is quite distinctive, with females tending to predominate at ages above 29 years, and especially over 65 years (Taylor 2003). Overall, this is a very different demographic profile to that first encountered by Stanner and it raises significant questions about the balance of authority structures and succession. The significance of these age data is best revealed by grouping them into age ranges that typically form the target of policy intervention. For example, compulsory school age in the Northern Territory ranges from six to 15 years inclusive, although here we use ages 5 to 15 to incorporate the pre-school year. Accordingly, the infant years leading up to school age includes those aged 0 to 4 inclusive. The transition years from school to work are set at 16 to 24 years, while the prime working age group is identified as ages 25 to 49.1 The results indicate an infant population of some 350 accounting for almost 20 per cent of the regional total, while the school-age population of almost 630 is approaching one-third of the regional population.Those in the

225

John Taylor

transition years from school to work number almost 400, or 20 per cent of the population, while the working age group of 530 comprises one-quarter of the total, and is the second largest group after those of school age. By comparison, the relatively small size of the aged population is striking, even given the lower age at which this is set. age grades

According to Falkenberg (1962, p. 176), in Murrinh-patha society of the 1950s, and for all other tribal groups at that time between the Fitzmaurice and Daly rivers, kinship terms were deployed to express the relative age difference between ego and other individuals, although this was not by reference to actual age but to special age-grade terms. These terms and their cultural significance remain intact. Thus, age grades have important cultural meaning as they express social status and normally indicate whether a person is married or unmarried, initiated or uninitiated, or has a particular degree of prestige and so on (ibid., p. 184; Stanner 1936, p. 311). In such age-grade systems purely social, ritualised factors have great importance in determining the status of males in particular (Warner 1937, pp. 125–37). In his field notes from 1958, Stanner refers to these categories as ‘age divisions’ and the broad classification for Murrinh-patha society at that time are shown in Table 1.While the progression and underlying social significance remain the same, some of the terms in current usage differ and further work is required to establish these more precisely. For example, ‘wakul’ rather than ‘konunganga’ is now typically used to refer to young children. Table 1. Murrinh-patha age divisions.

Increasing age

Males Konunganga Mamai Kigai Kadu Kake Yelander Pulea

Females Konunganga Madinboi Nalaru Palnun Kake Kunu’gunu Mutjinga

a An additional term (introduced from Western Australia) is used today to indicate a higher ceremonial status beyond Pule. It is often used by senior men but public reference to its name is restricted. Source: MS 3752, 5/23.

Falkenberg’s (1962) account, based on his 1952 field work, identifies the youngest of the age grades (Konunganga) as including all children, irrespective of sex, up to around the age of about four to six years among boys, after which time they are considered Mamai until puberty (Falkenberg

226

14. Stanner and the Port Keats/Wadeye population

1962, pp. 179–80). Girls, on the other hand are considered Konunganga through to puberty (Madinboi). For both, this represents a period of considerable autonomy. Subsequent grades from Mamai through to Kake for men, and Madinboi to Kake for women, represent various incremental stages to full adult rights and responsibilities involving several ceremonial rituals for men and marriage and child-bearing for women. These broad categories were also recognised by Stanner, and he goes much further than Falkenberg in identifying nine stages of childhood (Konunganga) based on physical abilities such as crawling, walking, running etc., and then five stages of Mamai up to about age six, with two important ritualised post-Mamai stages for boys (Djauan and Tjambilj) leading into Kigai.Thereafter, marriage and parenthood precede Kake (middle-age) and Yalandar/Kunu’gunu (old) and Pule/Mutjinga (very old) (MS 3752, 5/23). Thus, Stanner was among the first to demonstrate that — parallel with contemporary chronologically-based Western age categories of infants, pre-schoolers, school age, youth, working age, middle-age, old age and retirement — there are uniquely Aboriginal life stages that carry with them different obligations, expectations, behaviours, and statuses. These stages are developmental, ritual and gender-based and often do not mesh neatly with Western age categories. For example, the age range from around 10 to 16 in which Western education expects full attendance at school to progress from primary through the years of secondary schooling is also the time during which boys progress in stages to manhood with potentially quite different priorities and commitments in mind. At the same time, there seems little doubt that the system of age grading was disrupted by the mission practice of establishing dormitories for school-age children (Falkenberg & Falkenberg 1981, p. 34), and one of the expressed wishes of the new Thamarrurr leadership is to restore the customary order (Ivory 2005, pp. 67–70). conclusion

The interest in population revealed in Stanner’s work reflects his training and the kinds of questions that anthropologists of his generation were focused upon; that is, the question of whether and how a society could reestablish equilibrium in the wake of culture contact. This interest, coupled with the popular belief that Aboriginal societies were dying out, meant that population was a primary concern. In his masters thesis (on Daly River) Stanner wrote: It might be said that social equilibrium is not possible without population equilibrium, but I am inclined to think this suggests a false antithesis. It seems to be theoretically possible for a society with a slowly declining population to work out a general social adjustment

227

John Taylor

to a new set of conditions, and to have that adjustment vitiated in the end by population losses. I am rather of the opinion that this is the position amongst the Mulluk Mulluk (MS 3752, 1/9, p. 12).

Ultimately he seems to have thought that the preservation of kinship structures was the most fundamental aspect of survival, so long as population decline was slow. Accordingly, Stanner was a great supporter of the Port Keats mission because he felt that Aboriginal people of that region would not survive without it. Documenting population growth was clearly a key aspect of exploring that process.2 In the present this work takes on a new significance. Stanner’s long association with the people of Port Keats and his assiduous record-taking laid the foundation for tracking the demographic impacts of mission life and subsequent management regimes. Such an understanding of where people came from and where they had arrived has provided a useful platform for assessing where residents of the largest Aboriginal township in the Northern Territory might be heading. While far more can be done to trawl Stanner’s statistical archive, the preliminary analysis presented here suggests an almost immediate impact of mission-induced sedentariness leading to increased fertility and child survival. This gained momentum throughout the mission years and has persisted ever since leading to persistently high population growth in situ for a population that is committed to its customary lands (undeniably mobile, but not overtly migrant).Thus, contrary to the situation of out-migration and ageing that constitutes the ‘regional problem’ for many parts of agricultural Australia, the ‘problem’ at Wadeye (and many similar such towns across the tropical north) is how to accommodate growth and a burgeoning youthful profile. Population growth raises many issues for service delivery and community governance, and not least for Kardu Diminin on whose land the growing town of Wadeye is located. Stanner’s (1968, p. 58) fears that disadvantage would simply escalate due to a failure to match this growth with adequate resourcing are now borne out (Taylor & Stanley 2005). Not surprisingly, perhaps in reaction to this situation, one aspiration expressed by people at Wadeye is a return to a more decentralised mode of life closer to that observed by Stanner on his arrival. Whether this represents an attempt at reestablishing equilibrium after 70 years of tumultuous change is a moot point, but one that I am sure Stanner would have warmed to. References Archival sources MS 3752 refers to the WEH Stanner Collection held in the AIATSIS Library, Canberra.

228

14. Stanner and the Port Keats/Wadeye population Published sources Akerman, K 1979, ‘Material culture and trade in the Kimberleys today’, in RM Berndt & CH Berndt (eds), Aborigines of the west: their past and their present, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands. Barber, K 2000, ‘All the world: the paintings of Nym Bandak’, in Aboriginal art in modern worlds, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Desmarchelier, X 2001, ‘A historical and cultural overview to the re-emergence of Thamarrurr: a traditional form of governance for the people of Wadeye’, MA thesis in Aboriginal Affairs Administration, University of South Australia, Adelaide. Falkenberg, J 1962, Kin and totem: group relations of Australian Aborigines in the Port Keats district, Humanities Press, New York. Falkenberg, A & Falkenberg, J 1981, The affinal relationship system: a new approach to kinship and marriage among the Australian Aborigines at Port Keats, Universitetsforlaget, Oslo. Gray, A 1983, ‘Aboriginal fertility at the time of European contact: the Daly River Mission baptismal register’, Aboriginal History, vol. 7, no, 1, pp. 80–90. Hinkson, M 2005, ‘The intercultural challenge of Stanner’s first fieldwork’, Oceania, vol. 75, no. 3, pp. 195–208. Idriess I 1941, Nemarluk, Imprint, Sydney. Ivory, W 2005, ‘Indigenous governance and leadership: a case study from the Thamarrurr (Port Keats) region of the Northern Territory’, paper presented at the Indigenous Community Governance Project, Western Australian and Australian Government Partners Workshop, Perth, 18 October 2005. Long, JPM 1961, ‘Port Keats population’, unpublished report to the Northern Territory Administration Welfare Branch, Darwin (held at AIATSIS, Canberra). Natoli, M 1982,‘Cultural influences on birth practices in northern Australia amongst Aboriginals’, Australasian Nurses Journal, vol. 11, no. 5, pp. 12–3. Northern Territory of Australia 1957, Government Gazette No. 19B:Welfare Ordinance Register of Wards, Northern Territory of Australia, Darwin. Peterson, N & Taylor, J 1998,‘Demographic transition in a hunter-gatherer population: the Tiwi case, 1929–199’’, Australian Aboriginal Studies, no. 1, pp. 11–28. Stanley, O 1985, The mission and Peppimenarti: an economic study of two Daly River Aboriginal communities, North Australia Research Unit, Darwin & Australian National University, Canberra. Stanner,WEH 1933,‘The Daly River tribes: a report of fieldwork in north Australia’, Oceania, vol. 3, no.4, pp. 377–405. —— 1933–34, ‘Ceremonial economics of the Mulluk Mulluk and Madngella tribes of the Daly River, north Australia’, preliminary paper, Oceania, vol. 4, pp. 156– 75. —— 1936‚ Aboriginal modes of address and reference in the north-west of the Northern Territory’, Oceania, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 301–15. —— 1969, After the Dreaming: 1968 Boyer Lectures, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney.

229

John Taylor Taylor, J 2004 Social indicators for Aboriginal governance: insights from the Thamarrurr region, Northern Territory, ANU E Press, Canberra. —— & Stanley, O 2005, ‘The opportunity costs of the status quo in the Thamarrurr region’, CAEPR Working Paper No. 28, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University, Canberra. Warner, WL 1937, A Black civilization: a social study of an Australian tribe, Harper & Brothers, New York.

Notes 1. Typically in the Australian workforce, and in International Labour Organisation convention, working age extends to 64 years, with those over 65 years representing the aged and pensionable. However, given the evidence for premature ageing in the population, this has been set here at the much earlier age of 50 years. 2. I am grateful to Melinda Hinkson for this observation and for the reference to Stanner’s unpublished master’s thesis.

230

Part 4 A public intellectual

15.

WEH Stanner and the historians ann curthoys

I begin with a famous quotation, one that you may well have heard or read already, possibly many times. It is, in fact, quoted with ever increasing frequency and ever greater claims for its significance. It comes from Stanner’s Boyer Lectures, After the Dreaming. After listing a range of general books about Australian history written between 1939 and 1955 and noting their slight or non-existent treatment of Aboriginal history, Stanner said in the second lecture: I need not extend the list. A partial survey is enough to let me make the point that inattention on such a scale cannot possibly be explained by absent-mindedness. It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale. We have been able for so long to disremember the aborigines that we are now hard put to keep them in mind even when we most want to do so (Stanner 1974, pp. 24–5).

This was followed by a call for a new and different kind of history. ‘I am no historian’, Stanner went on: …but the history I would like to see written would bring into the main flow of its narrative the life and times of men like David Unaipon, Albert Namatjira, Robert Tudawali, Durmugam, Douglas Nicholls, Dexter Daniels, and many others. Not to scrape up significance for them but because they typify so vividly the other side of a story over which the great Australian silence reigns; the story of the things we were unconsciously resolved not to discuss with them or treat with

233

Ann Curthoys

them about; the story, in short, of the unacknowledged relations between two racial groups within a single field of life supposedly unified by the principle of assimilation (ibid., p. 25).

These were probably the most famous Boyer Lectures ever given from their inception in 1959 to the present.The published lectures sold extremely well; my copy is dated 1974 and is the seventh edition; from 1979 they were also available in Stanner’s collection of essays White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938–1973. In a radio anthology of Boyer Lectures selected by ABC chairman Donald McDonald in 2003, they were included along with lectures by Manning Clark in 1976, Shirley Hazzard in 1984, Noel Pearson in 1993, Inga Clendinnen in 1999 and Geoffrey Blainey in 2001 (McDonald 2003). One of Australia’s leading Indigenous spokesmen, Noel Pearson, who trained in both history and law in the 1980s, said in his Boyer Lecture in 1993 that the lectures: …hold their own amongst this country’s finest writings on matters black and white. Today, more than ever, the series which Professor Stanner delivered for the ABC in 1968 makes compelling reading. His lectures articulate, illuminate and provide some guidance with questions that will consume the people of this continent for as long as we need to consider them (Pearson 2001, p. 89).

Many historians have noted the impact of Stanner’s words on their own work, and on the writing of Australian history generally. Henry Reynolds tells us that he read the lectures some time late in 1969. The lecture on ‘The great Australian silence’, he writes, ‘helped strengthen my disquiet about mainstream historical writing’ (Reynolds 1999, p. 91). He was especially struck by the remark that the inattention was not simply absent-mindedness but a structural matter (ibid., pp. 91–2). In 1984, Reynolds declared that the work on Aboriginal history had been so extensive since Stanner’s lecture 16 years earlier that one could now say that ‘the Great Australian Silence has been shattered, the cult of forgetfulness abandoned. Slowly, unevenly, often with difficulty, white Australians are incorporating the black experience into their image of the national past’ (Reynolds 1984, p. 19). Bain Attwood has noted many times that Aboriginal people had been excluded from Australian history when Stanner spoke and were increasingly included thereafter (Attwood 2005, p. 17; Attwood & Foster 2003, pp. 1, 3; Attwood 1996, pp. xiv–xv; Attwood & Arnold 1992, p. x). Robert Manne begins his introduction to his 2003 edited collection Whitewash with these words: ‘In 1968, the anthropologist WEH Stanner delivered what turned out to be perhaps the most consequential lecture ever broadcast on the ABC’ (Manne, 2003, p.1). He, too, argued that the hundreds of books and

234

15. Stanner and the historians

articles on Aboriginal history published since the late 1960s had collectively shattered the silence of which Stanner spoke. Clearly Stanner’s lectures have been important. But as time has gone on, the narrative of how Australian history came to be transformed from a largely white settler narrative to one at least attempting to deal with the history of interaction between Aboriginal and settler peoples since 1788, and indeed earlier, has become a little too simple. Stanner’s brilliant and now iconic phrase the ‘great Australian silence’ and the analysis that went with it have come to stand in for a much more complex process of social and cultural change. I want to complicate this narrative, not least because it is a white narrative, a return to the ‘great man’ theory of history. I want to suggest that the change that occurred was at least as much driven by Aboriginal people, voices, and politics, and that Stanner was an important register and publicist of these voices and these changes rather than their sole originator. I also want to suggest that this simplified narrative belongs more to the subsequent memory of Stanner’s Boyer Lectures than to the lectures themselves. It is to this more complex history I now turn. the argument

Let’s start by going back to the lectures.There are five, the first two of which are the most relevant to my discussion. The opening lecture, ‘Looking back’, begins with an evocation of the first five years of British settlement, with the aim of showing how formative for subsequent Australian history these initial few years were. It traces the sequence of events from Governor Phillip’s offer of friendship and desire to form good relations with the Aboriginal people of the Sydney region, through a period of avoidance marred by some violent incidents, Phillip’s subsequent authorising a firing party to keep Aborigines away and his kidnapping of Arabanoo, Colby and Bennelong, and finally to a climactic period at the end of 1790. ‘Three themes’, he writes of this period, ‘are now starting to weave themselves together in a way that will have a signal bearing on Australian history’ (Stanner 1974, pp. 9–17 and hereafter). These are: a break in the ‘fabric of native life’ leading Aborigines to cease attacks and instead to come into the settlement for survival; the achievement of settler self-sufficiency; and the formation of a punitive expedition to revenge the killing of a convict named McEntire, ‘a villainous man’. When the expedition fails and Aborigines continue to flock into the settlement, the ‘streets of Sydney are filling with the dispossessed, the homeless, the powerless and the poverty-stricken’. And so already in the first few years we see ‘a basic structure of relations which ever since has formed a part of the continuing anatomy of Australian life’. In the last part of the lecture Stanner shows how this structure was still operating in the 1930s, when there were some changes in attitudes and relations away from negative and unsuccessful

235

Ann Curthoys

policies of protection and segregation towards more positive policies ‘for their social, economic and political advancement’. Yet a general change in public attitudes did not follow, he argues, because there was still in place ‘a real structure of life — a racial structure — akin to that of Phillip’s day’. Even those who made the conceptual breaks found it ‘a very difficult struggle to escape from a style of thinking that unconsciously ratified that order of life as natural and unalterable’. The second lecture,‘The great Australian silence’, continues the discussion of why the change in attitude amongst non-Aboriginal Australians in the 1930s was confined to those, such as administrators and anthropologists, who were closely associated with them. To prove his case that even the ‘socially conscious’ had little interest in Aboriginal people at this time he looks at what such people were likely to have been reading in the 1930s and beyond (Stanner 1974, p. 22). He considers a ‘mixed lot of histories and commentaries dealing with Australian affairs in a more general way’ published between 1939, when government policies of assimilation began to take shape, and 1955, when assimilation policies first came under critique (ibid.). His point is that these histories and commentaries both reflected and helped form the socially aware, and they showed little interest in or understanding of Aboriginal people; while some of these texts discussed Aboriginal history, it was always marginal to and somewhat outside the main story.1 He then makes the argument that I quoted at the beginning of this paper, that this inattention or marginalisation was a ‘structural matter’ and calls for a different kind of history, one that will bring the story of Aboriginal people ‘into the main flow of its narrative’, and deal with ‘the unacknowledged relations between two racial groups within a single field of life’. The lecture ends with a reference to the recent explosion of interest, predicting that ‘I hardly think that what I have called “the great Australian silence” will survive the research that is now in course’ (Stanner 1974, p. 27). Here he referred to the work of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in promoting studies which ‘will bring the historical and the contemporary dimensions together and will assuredly persuade scholars to renovate their categories of understanding’ (ibid.).2 The lectures are thus both a criticism of historians and other intellectuals of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s (and early 1960s) and also a foreshadowing that the great Australian silence is in the process of being broken. It is the criticism, however, rather than the suggestion of impending change, that is most remembered. who were stanner’s targets?

Who were Stanner’s targets in these two lectures? It is quite clear they were mainly the historians of his day. Those he mentions (and he makes no claim

236

15. Stanner and the historians

to comprehensiveness, just illustration of a general trend), include M Barnard Eldershaw’s My Australia (1939), which, he says, treats Aboriginal people as marginal to the story. He also names Brian Fitzpatrick’s The Australian People (1946), which he says almost ignores Aboriginal people altogether; RM Crawford’s 1952 work of history, Australia, which has some interesting material but little on the recent past; and most notably and notoriously Gordon Greenwood’s edited collection and textbook, Australia: a social and political history (1955). The Greenwood example is especially telling; a professor of history at the University of Queensland, his edited collection was a staple for history students for many years, and was still in use in the late 1960s (Foster 2003). It has no index reference for Aborigines, and Stanner finds only six mentions in the text. Remarkably, Frank Crowley’s first chapter, ‘The foundation years, 1788–1821’ has only two.3 Stanner more or less ends his list of historians there, though he also notes that this lack of interest ran on into the 1960s, citing Peter Coleman’s edited collection, Australian civilization (1962), with its ‘total silence on all matters aboriginal’ (Stanner 1974, p. 24). He treads very carefully and selectively, though. Perhaps as a professor of anthropology in the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University he did not want to antagonise his fellow researchers at his own university. At the time, his fellow history professors at ANU were Manning Clark in the Faculty of Arts and John La Nauze in the history department of the Research School of Social Sciences. Both would have made good targets. Manning Clark’s otherwise excellent Select documents in Australian history, 1851–1900 (1955), which was so important in the development of the university teaching of Australian history, contains very few references to Aborigines, and only one comment from Clark himself, who writes of ‘the absence of a serious threat from the aborigines’ (Clark 1955, p. 320). The first his six-volume History of Australia (1962) begins with the sentence, ‘Civilization did not begin in Australia until the last quarter of the eighteenth century’ (Clark 1962, p. 1). Aboriginal people are represented as barbarians unable to adapt to and survive colonisation. As Clark wrote much later, ‘My eye was on the coming of the white man. My eye was on the men and women of the First Fleet, and the civilization they brought with them in their baggage. My story began with the coming of civilization to a country where previously there was barbarism…In my mind’s eye the First Fleet was a Noah’s Ark of civilization’ Clark 1992, p. 38–9). In his own Boyer Lectures, in 1976, Clark wrote, without referring to Stanner, that ‘my eyes had to be opened so that I might see the coming of the white man possibly as a curse for the land’ (Clark 1976, p. 21). Stanner comes closer to criticising ANU’s other history professor, John (Jack) La Nauze, quoting him directly, but not by name. In the first lecture

237

Ann Curthoys

he quotes three unnamed historians on what happened after the early years of contact: one said ‘the native question sank into unimportance’; another that they became ‘a codicil to the Australian story’; and yet another that they became ‘a melancholy footnote to Australian history’ (Stanner 1974, p. 11). I have not yet tracked down who made the first remark; the second came from Marjorie Barnard, of whom more later.The third, the ‘melancholy footnote’, comes from La Nauze’s presidential address to the history section of the Australian Association for the Advancement of Science in 1959. Entitled ‘The study of Australian history 1929–1959’, this lecture argued in part that Australia was unusual in having ‘no real experience of formidable opposition by the native inhabitants. Unlike the Maori, the American Indian or the south African Bantu, the Australian aboriginal is noticed in our history only in a melancholy anthropological footnote’ (La Nauze 1959, p. 11). Stanner left out the word ‘anthropological’ but in fact it is quite revealing; La Nauze meant that Aboriginal people had drifted out of history altogether; they could be only of anthropological, not historical interest. stanner as historian

Stanner was, of course, not the first to notice that Australians generally had great difficulty in coming to terms with their colonial past. In a speech four years after the Boyer Lectures, to the Australasian College of Surgeons in October 1972, Stanner drew attention to the work of HM Moran, an Australian surgeon, who wrote in 1939: We are still afraid of our own past. The Aborigines we do not like to talk about.We took their land, but then we gave them in exchange the Bible and tuberculosis, with for special bonus alcohol and syphilis.Was it not a fair deal? Anyhow, nobody ever heard them complain about it (Stanner 1979c, p. 321).

Stanner commented that ‘in those fifty words, as I now discover, he summed up in advance the substantial thesis of my Boyer Lectures of 1968: our unwillingness to contemplate some of the truths of the past’ (ibid.). Indeed Stanner himself had made some of the same argument 30 years before the Boyer Lectures, and a year before Moran. In an essay entitled ‘The Aborigines’, which focused on the continuing disappearance of Aboriginal people and tribes and the urgency of doing something to stop the process, he commented that there were ‘a few vestigial regrets appearing here and there in a mass of solid indifference’ (Stanner 1939, p. 2).Their life and death had made little impact, he suggested, on ‘the thought, the culture, even the literature’ of Australia: ‘The native tragedy does not yet serve as the motif of dramatic, literary or artistic work of any consequence. There are no epics on the last of the tribes. There are no national monuments to a vanishing people’. Their disappearance is regarded, erroneously, as ‘something which

238

15. Stanner and the historians

took place a long time ago, in the very early days’, and not seen as a ‘matter for self-reproach’ (ibid., pp. 5, 8). These comments were largely about popular attitudes, rather than being directed at historians in particular. Stanner moved closer to commenting on historians more specifically in his presidential address to the Anthropology Section of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science congress in 1958 (but not published until 1979, in White man got no Dreaming). There were, he stressed, some large tasks of scholarship ahead if Australian history involving Aboriginal people was ever to be properly understood, for few historians had found Aboriginal history of interest, and Australia lacked a tradition of historical anthropology. He makes a positive reference to younger scholars such as Russel Ward, describing him as one who had ‘shown how much might be done’, though it’s not clear to me what he meant here, for Ward’s important book The Australian legend was innovative for white but not for black Australian history (Stanner 1979b, p. 51). He also points towards the story which so dramatically enlivens the first Boyer Lecture, the early history of European ideas about Aboriginal people, saying he once planned to write on this subject jointly with Melbourne historian Margaret Kiddle, until her death (which had occurred earlier that year) ‘broke a partnership I had hoped to make with her in this field’ (ibid.). Now, he says, he will leave the study of this history to others. Yet he could not leave the subject alone, and an opportunity soon arose for him to pursue this early history in more detail. Leonard Broom, an American who had been Professor of Sociology at ANU and had since returned to the United States at the University of Texas, wrote to him in June 1960 inviting him to write a general book about Australian Aborigines for a series published by the San Francisco-based Chandler Publishing Company. After some pressing Stanner agreed, and signed a contract for a book entitled The Australian Aborigines.At this point, the book was to be largely anthropological, but its second chapter was to be called ‘The development of knowledge’; this chapter would in a narrow sense be a history of anthropology but more broadly a history of changing European ideas about Aborigines. Stanner did considerable work on the book during 1962–64; as he went on, the historical aspect kept expanding in importance within the book as a whole, taking in not only European ideas but also a detailed history of interactions and conflict between Aborigines and Europeans (MS 3752, 11/1, folder 224). Although the book was never completed, the work he did for it influenced the Boyer Lectures, both in the discussion of European ideas about Aboriginal people, and especially his evocation of the first few years of contact between the settlement at Port Jackson and the Eora people. Two of the draft chapters were eventually published. One, initially written in 1962 and going through many drafts over the next three years, eventually

239

Ann Curthoys

appeared as ‘Caliban discovered’ in the collection of essays entitled White Man got no Dreaming (1979a). It considers four lineages of thought that make up non-Indigenous ideas about Aboriginal people: the grudging counting of Aborigines as human beings; the anthropological-style attempt to observe and study them; the idea of the ‘noble savage’; and finally the hardening of attitudes into ‘contempt, derision and indifference’. They are not successive visions so much as ‘lineages of thought which have all been present from the beginning’ (Stanner 1979a, pp. 145, 152). The second, written in 1963, at that stage entitled ‘The foundation’, was eventually published as the opening essay in the first issue of the new journal, Aboriginal History, in 1977. The editor, Diane Barwick, knew of it from the Boyer Lectures — as well as Stanner’s unpublished papers, which she was helping him sort. Barwick asked for a copy of the chapter, urged him to emphasise the likely Aboriginal understanding of events, and suggested a new title (‘The history of indifference thus begins’). This is a stunning essay, a much more detailed evocation of the early years of the settlement at Sydney than the brief sketch that animates the opening Boyer Lecture. Stanner did considerable research for these essays, especially the study of the first few years of contact (MS 3752, 11, folders 224, 225, 269; 45/11, folders 10, 18.). He consulted extensively the Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, finding articles on many aspects of local and general Australian history from which he could draw hints and clues concerning the history of Aboriginal–European relations. And he read and took notes from a range of published books on these early years, such as GB Barton’s History of New South Wales from the records. Volume I: Governor Phillip, 1783–1789 (1889), M Barnard Eldershaw’s Phillip of Australia: an account of the settlement at Sydney Cove 1788–92 (1938), and Eleanor Dark’s novel The timeless land (1941). These and other texts led Stanner to many of his primary sources, including the journals of the First Fleet officers Watkin Tench, David Collins, John Hunter, Ralph Clark and John White, and the invaluable Historical records of Australia, with its printed dispatches between Britain and the colony. What Stanner produced, however, was no mere retelling of a previously told story; using his anthropological knowledge to suggest Aboriginal attitudes and motivations in a way no historian had been able to do, he recreated the story of the first few years as an origin story, an encapsulation of so much that was to follow. In his hands the historians’ accounts of gradually escalating conflict becomes a tragic tale of epic proportions. It was while he was undertaking the research for the never-published The Australian Aborigines that Stanner came across Marjorie Barnard’s phrase ‘a codicil to the Australia story’ (which he slightly and understandably misrenders in the first Boyer Lecture as ‘a codicil to the Australian story’). This phrase, which he uses to illustrate historians’ marginalisation of Aboriginal

240

15. Stanner and the historians

history, and which he does not reference by name, comes from her History of Australia (Barnard 1986, p. 647, first published in 1962). His treatment of this quotation seems to me not entirely fair. Barnard begins the last chapter of her history, entitled ‘The dark people’, in this way: To discuss the aborigines in the last chapter of this history may appear at first glance to be a reversal of the proper order of things, but history has made of them a codicil to the Australia story. By using the word ‘codicil’ I do not intend to be derogatory. As things stand, the nature and history of this ancient and different people is an appendage to the success-and-failure story of the white man in their traditional home. To bring the two together as one people should be, and I hope will be, one of the advances of the future (Barnard 1986, p. 647).

While one might well question Barnard’s decision to place this chapter at the end of the book, it seems clear she is not saying that Aboriginal history should be regarded as a codicil to the story of Australia, only that the way this story is currently understood makes it impossible at the time of writing to narrate together the two histories; their integration into a single history is a task for the future. It is in implicit reply to this argument that Stanner in the unpublished chapters and then in the Boyer Lectures both emphasises the importance of, and himself begins to narrate, the story of relations between the two groups ‘within a single field of life’ (Stanner 1974, p. 25). Barnard seems to have particularly irked him; perhaps he was (justly, in my view) irritated by her reference to him as one of those ‘many and valuable friends who plead their [the Aboriginal people’s] cause, sometimes with more enthusiasm than understanding’ (Barnard 1986, p. 665). aboriginal history in australian history: inside and outside the academy

How fair is Stanner’s characterisation of the historians? In broad terms, very fair: the representation of Aboriginal history in general works on Australian history had reached a low ebb, and had become marginal, in the period he discusses.4 Yet it is important to note several qualifications: first, it had not always been so; second, even in the period of lowest representation there was some interest, especially outside the academy; and third, as Stanner himself intimates, there were in the histories written between 1955 and his speech in 1968 some interesting and significant signs of change. Let’s consider these three qualifications in turn. First, as Henry Reynolds and others have noted, nineteenth century historians had been much more likely to include Aboriginal people in their story (Reynolds 1984, p. 1).They varied widely in their attitude to Aboriginal people and cultures, sometimes

241

Ann Curthoys

WEH Stanner, HC ‘Nugget’ Coombs and Wang Gungwu (Director, Research School of Pacific Studies), at the launch of the first issue of Aboriginal History, March 1978. Photographer unknown, ANUA 225/11 73/1.

sympathetic, sometimes crudely racist, with their texts replete with terms like ‘savages’ and ‘low on the scale of humanity’.Yet these nineteenth century historians and commentators often exhibited an awareness of frontier conflict that had disappeared by the twentieth century, and they worried over its moral implications. This was especially true of histories of Tasmania. Henry Melville spent many pages in his 1835 book, The history of Van Dieman’s Land, on depredations, murders and conflict, noting for example that in the late 1820s the Aboriginal people were ‘massacred without mercy...they were slaughtered in cold blood’ (Melville 1967, p. 71). ‘The historian’, he said, ‘must ever lament, that he has to record outrages so inhuman and so unjust on the part of a British community’ (ibid., p. 107). John West’s History of Tasmania in 1852 provided extended and detailed accounts of the Indigenous people and the frontier conflict they endured, depicting the cruelty and

242

15. Stanner and the historians

brutality of the whites. Like most if not all nineteenth century histories, he defended colonisation itself, but he criticised sharply the manner of its conduct in Tasmania (West 1852). James Bonwick’s history, The Last of the Tasmanians, first published in 1870, focused on the destruction of Aboriginal people and society and remained the most detailed account of frontier conflict for a century (Bonwick 1969). A little later, in 1883, GW Rusden’s History of Australia also pointed to the prevalence of slaughter, ‘a sin crying aloud to the covering heavens, and the stars the silent witnesses, [which] can be denied by none who know the course of Australian history’ (Rusden 1884, p. 127). Even in the early decades of the twentieth century some histories continued to include Aboriginal history as part of the national story. Ernest Scott’s immensely popular A short history of Australia (1916) noted the ‘sheer brutality and treacherous murder by white settlers and their convict servants... The tragedy of the process was very grim and hateful’ (pp. 190–1), while James Collier’s history, The pastoral age in Australasia (1911) was sympathetic to Aboriginal people’s part in Australian history, pointing to instances of harmony where stations depended on native labour and describing settlement in terms of invasion and resistance (Scott 1916, pp. 190–1; Collier 1911, p. 124). Second, there was some interest in Aboriginal history in the period Stanner considers, from the 1930s to the 1950s. What is especially important here is the historical consciousness of Aboriginal people. The lively Aboriginal movement based in New South Wales organised protests such as the Day of Mourning in Sydney on 26 January 1938, which pointed out that 1938 for them was not a day for sesquicentennial celebration but one of mourning for the people and the basic human rights that settlement had destroyed (see Goodall 1996, pp. 230–4). Aboriginal activists increasingly alluded to a view of history that was unknown to most white Australians, a history of loss and survival against the odds. This political movement had an impact on some non-Aboriginal people, and histories began to appear which did include Aboriginal experience. Some were specialist studies produced in academic contexts, like the works of Hasluck and Foxcroft to which Stanner briefly alludes. Others were histories produced by anthropologists, a notable example being Ronald and Catherine Berndt’s Arnhem Land: its history and its people (1954), based both on information collected during anthropological research and ‘documentary material from official and unofficial European sources’ (Berndt & Berndt 1954, p. v). Another important work in these years was journalist Clive Turnbull’s Black War: the extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines (1948), which drew attention to the destruction of Aboriginal people and society in Tasmania (Foxcroft 1941; Hasluck 1942; Turnbull 1948).

243

Ann Curthoys

There was also a host of popular texts, a mix of travelogue, personal reminiscences, and non-fiction storytelling, which dealt with the history of Aboriginal–European engagements and contact as part of their story. Many of these books were part of the great rediscovery of the outback, the north and west of the continent that fascinated many Australians in these years.5 There are many examples of reminiscences that prominently include Aboriginal people, such as Alice Duncan-Kemp’s Where strange paths go down (1952), reminiscences of her childhood on a cattle run in the Channel Country of south-west Queensland and Doris Blackwell’s Alice on the line (1965), reminiscences of her childhood at the turn of the century growing up as the daughter of the officer-in-charge of the Alice Springs Telegraph Station. Books that mix travel, reportage and ethnography, and which include considerable Aboriginal history, include Charles Barrett’s, Blackfellows of Australia (1942) and Norman Bartlett’s The pearl seekers (1954). Ion Idriess’s many popular books of these years often included some Aboriginal material, notably Outlaws of the Leopolds (1952), which told the story of Pigeon, or Jandamarra (whom he called Sandamara), and his rebellion against authority in the late-nineteenth century. An Idriess novel, The Red Chief: as told by the last of his tribe (1953), told of the ‘chief ’ of the Gunnedah district, whose story had been supposedly handed down from generation to generation to the tribe’s last survivor, ‘King’ Bungaree, and thence to the white settlers of the district. Two years later, Idriess’s The vanished people (1955) told of the Aboriginal people of northern and western Australia, whose survival seemed to be endangered. Third, the historical works that appeared between Stanner’s cut-off date of 1955 and his speech in 1968 are also worth a closer look. Many of them continued in the tradition he identified. This was the era of the general history written by academic historians, developed to serve the growing numbers of people studying Australian history at university and secondary school level. Most of these did, in fact, give low or no priority to Aboriginal history and told a fairly brief story of a people providing little resistance and easily defeated; examples include AGL Shaw’s The story of Australia (1955) and Douglas Pike’s Australia: the quiet continent (1962, republished 1970, p. 36). Manning Clark’s A short history of Australia (1963, republished 1995) had more Aboriginal content than was usual for the time and paid attention to the ‘long, unequal struggle of fighting the white man’, though it seems at times rather to sympathise with the negative views of the settlers (Clark 1995, p. 31). Russel Ward remarked in his book Australia (1965) that one ‘difficulty that Australian pioneers — unlike those of North America, South Africa, and New Zealand — did not have to contend with was a warlike native race’ (Ward 1965, p. 21).Yet not all historians ignored or marginalised Aboriginal history, and some studies of more specific regions or themes did include

244

15. Stanner and the historians

Aboriginal material. John Mulvaney’s two part article in Historical Studies in 1958, on European views of Aborigines since 1606, was an important landmark, containing also a critique of anthropology and archaeology’s lack of interest in their own history. Two years later Bernard Smith’s European vision and the South Pacific 1768–1850 (1960) traced European scientific and artistic knowledge of the peoples of the Pacific, including Australia. Margaret Kiddle’s Men of yesterday (1961) included Aboriginal history within the larger history of pastoralism in western Victoria; she was able to use Elkin, Donald Thomson and other anthropologists to help her understand aspects of Aboriginal culture, such as the nature of the ‘loan’ of women as a mark of friendship (Mulvaney 1958; Smith 1960; Kiddle 1961, see especially p. 121). Stanner noted the work of all three in his 1958 presidential address, but did not mention them in the Boyer Lectures. Outside the academy there were also important signs of change after 1955. Several developments, academic and political, led to a new interest and rethinking of the nature and meaning of Australian history. Political concern with racism in its local and international manifestations increased, along with a growing protest movement seeking equality and social justice for Aboriginal people, embodied in the mixed-membership Aboriginal Advancement Leagues of the 1950s and 1960s, the Yirrkala bark petition of 1963, the Freedom Ride of 1965, the Gurindji strike and walk-off of 1966, and above all the successful referendum campaign of 1967. We see in this period Eve Pownall’s Mary of Maranoa, first published in 1959, an early women’s history of Australia that began with a chapter about Aboriginal women. (Pownall 1959, see especially p. 267). More extensive was EG Docker’s book Simply human beings, published in 1964, which was a detailed history of Aboriginal–white relations, from first contact through to the policies of protection, laissez-faire, and assimilation (Docker 1964, pp. 237, 248, 254). Docker mounted a thorough attack on the prevailing policy of assimilation, and urged instead an approach that emphasised ‘everything that is still valuable in aboriginal life, particularly its communal features’ (ibid., p. 248). It opposed those do-gooders who wanted to incorporate Aboriginal people into white Australian society, and asked how many thought they had anything to learn from the Aboriginal. The book ended by urging acknowledgment of the Aboriginal person not as an imitation white man but as ‘a full-fledged man’, and also advocated the restoration of Aboriginal lands (ibid., p. 254). Most influential of all, however, was political scientist Charles Rowley, principal of the Australian School of Pacific Administration and then Professor of Political Studies at the University of Papua New Guinea, who was commissioned in 1964 by the SSRC to undertake a major study of Aboriginal history, policy, and practice. His work was largely completed by

245

Ann Curthoys

the time Stanner gave his Boyer Lectures, and Rowley, now in New Guinea, was editing and checking it for publication (Rowley 1970, p. vi). It is probably this work that Stanner had in mind when he predicted near the end of his lecture, ‘I hardly think that what I have called “the great Australian silence” will survive the research that is now in course’ (Stanner, 1974, p. 27). Indeed, he referred to the work of the SSRC in promoting studies which ‘will bring the historical and the contemporary dimensions together and will assuredly persuade scholars to renovate their categories of understanding’ (ibid.). The first volume of Rowley’s trilogy, The destruction of Aboriginal society (1970), was published by Penguin, widely distributed, and put Aboriginal history on a new footing. Exhibiting a strong emphasis on policy issues, drawing attention to social and economic effects of dispossession, discriminatory government policies, and institutionalised racism, it helped provide a sound chronological and analytical structure for the histories which followed. So important was Rowley’s work that frequently Stanner’s Boyer address is coupled with Rowley to indicate a joint turning of the tide, as Anna Haebich did on ABC Radio National during History Week in November 2005. In my own case, Rowley was more important to me than Stanner, although Aboriginal and pro-Aboriginal activism from the Freedom Ride to the referendum was probably more important than either of them. Early in 1968 I began my PhD on race relations in mid-nineteenth century New South Wales at the then brand new Macquarie University, which was embarking on an active program of teaching Aboriginal history at both undergraduate and graduate levels. My supervisor was Mervyn Hartwig, who had completed at the University of Adelaide an excellent, much quoted, but never-published thesis on the history of Aboriginal–white relations in central Australia. During the early stages of my doctoral research, the work which influenced me most was not Stanner’s lectures but Rowley’s article, ‘Aborigines and other Australians’, published in Oceania in 1962. Then, in my third year, The destruction of Aboriginal society appeared, and at last I had a broad narrative and analytical framework for my research. conclusion: what impact did stanner have?

To conclude, then: what role did Stanner play in changing our understanding of Australian history? More precisely, what was his influence on the historians? I think it was very considerable, as many have attested. Rather, however, than prompting a new approach to Australian history, I think it is better seen as giving impetus to a process that was already underway through a growing and powerful combination of Indigenous and non-Indigenous initiatives. As Stanner himself said in the first lecture, ‘the melancholy footnote is turning into a whole chapter of Australian history, and the codicil is becoming a major theme in the Australian story’ (Stanner 1974, p. 11). Most important of

246

15. Stanner and the historians

all Stanner gave the marginalisation of Aboriginal history a name: ‘the great Australian silence’.The metaphor of silence, and being silenced, is a common one in speaking of the claims of politically oppressed peoples. Stanner’s role in naming and calling for an end to the silence is to be remembered and whole-heartedly applauded. Yet it is precisely because the metaphor is so striking that the too-simple narrative I mentioned at the beginning has taken hold.Too often it is taken to imply a kind of historiographical periodisation where there was no Aboriginal history before Stanner’s own lecture and an end to the silence after it. Neither half of this statement is quite true: there was neither complete silence before 1968, nor was it completely ended afterwards. As this essay has argued, some historians, both inside and outside the academy, did take Aboriginal history seriously before 1968, and the ‘cult of forgetfulness’ of which Stanner spoke had some life in it afterwards. Where Reynolds concluded in 1984 that the great Australian silence had ended, Mark McKenna, writing 18 years later, is much less hopeful. Settler history, he reminds us, is more than a simple forgetting; it is an active denial of responsibility, moved by the settlers’ desire to ‘create history in their own image’ (McKenna 2002, p. 94). Even where frontier violence is acknowledged, it can too often become simply another means of placing Aborigines in the past, of removing them from the narrative so that the rest of Australian history, a history in which they are said to figure no longer, can continue without them (ibid.). In current public discourse, moreover, the urge to ‘get over it and move on’, to focus on the practical issues in the present and forget the history, has become a new way of advocating a return to the great Australian silence. I have written elsewhere of the strain of victimology, of seeing white Australians as historical victims (of the British government, of the land, at Gallipoli), that makes it difficult for recognition of their agency in the destruction of Aboriginal societies to take hold (Curthoys 1999, pp. 1–18). As a result of this deep need and desire to refuse a history of Aboriginal dispossession and destruction, the task of truly including Aboriginal history within Australian history seems to be much greater than either Stanner or Reynolds believed. References Unpublished sources MS 3572â•… Stanner papers, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Published sources Attwood, B (ed.) 1996, History in the age of Mabo: history, Aborigines and Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. —— 2005, Telling the truth about Aboriginal history, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. —— & Arnold, J (eds) 1992, Power, knowledge and Aborigines, La Trobe University Press, Melbourne.

247

Ann Curthoys —— & Foster, S (eds) 2003, Frontier conflict: the Australian experience, National Museum of Australia, Canberra. Barnard, M 1986 (1962), A history of Australia, Angus & Robertson, Sydney. Barrett, C 1942, Blackfellows of Australia, Lawrence Kay, Melbourne. Bartlett, N 1954, The pearl seekers, Andrew Melrose, London. Barton, GB 1889, History of New South Wales from the records.Volume I: Governor Phillip, 1783–1789, Charles Potter, Sydney. Berndt, RM & Berndt, CH 1954, Arnhem Land: its history and its people, FW Cheshire, Melbourne. Blackwell, D 1965, Alice on the line, Rigby, Adelaide. Bonwick, J 1969 (1870), The last of the Tasmanians or, the Black War of van Diemen’s Land, Libraries Board of South Australia, Adelaide. Clark, CMH (ed.) 1955, Select documents in Australian history, 1851–1900, Angus & Robertson, Sydney. —— 1962, A history of Australia, Volume I, Melbourne University Press. Clark, M 1976, A discovery of Australia (Boyer Lectures), Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney. —— 1992, A historian’s apprenticeship, Melbourne University Press. —— 1995 (1963), A short history of Australia, Penguin, Ringwood. Coleman, Peter 1962, Australian civilization: A symposium, Cheshire, Melbourne. Collier, J 1911, The pastoral age in Australasia, Whitecombe & Tombs, London. Crawford, RM 1952, Australia, Hutchinson, London. Crowley, F (ed.) 1974, A new history of Australia, Heinemann, Melbourne. Curthoys, A 1999, ‘Whose home? Expulsion, exodus, and exile in white Australian historical mythology’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 61, pp. 1–18. Dark, E 1941, The timeless land, Collins, London. Docker, EG 1964, Simply human beings, Jacaranda Press, Melbourne. Duncan-Kemp, A 1952, Where strange paths go down, WR Smith & Paterson, Brisbane. Eldershaw, M Barnard 1938, Phillip of Australia: an account of the settlement at Sydney Cove 1788–92, Harrap, London. —— 1939, My Australia, Jarrolds, London. Fitzpatrick, Brian 1946, The Australian people, 1788–1945, Melbourne University Press. Foster, S 2003, ‘Contra Windschuttle’, Quadrant, vol. xlvii, no. 3. Foxcroft, E 1941, Australian native policy. Its history, especially in Victoria, Melbourne University Press. Goodall, H 1996, Invasion to embassy: land in Aboriginal politics in New South Wales, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Greenwood, Gordon 1955, Australia: a social and political history, Angus & Robertson, Sydney. Griffiths, T 2003, ‘The frontier fallen’, Eureka Street, Melbourne. Hancock, WK 1966 (1930), Australia, Jacaranda, Brisbane. Hasluck, P 1942, Black Australians: a survey of native policy in Western Australia, 1829–1897, Melbourne University Press.

248

15. Stanner and the historians Idriess, I 1952, Outlaws of the Leopolds, Angus & Robertson, Sydney. —— 1953, The Red Chief: as told by the last of his tribe, Angus & Robertson, Sydney. —— 1955, The vanished people, Angus & Robertson, Sydney. Kevin, JCG (ed.) 1939, Some Australians take stock, Longmans, Green & Co., London. Kiddle, M 1961, Men of yesterday: a social history of the Western District of Victoria, 1834– 1890, Melbourne University Press. La Nauze, JA 1959, ‘The study of Australian history, 1929–1959’, Historical Studies of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 9, no. 33, pp. 1–11. Manne, R (ed.) 2003, Whitewash: on Keith Windschuttle’s fabrication of Aboriginal history, Black Inc, Melbourne. McDonald, D 2003, ‘Boyer Lectures’, ABC Radio National, 16 April 2003, <www. abc.net.au/rn/boyerlectures/stories/2003/1715570.htm> accessed 8 February 2007. McKenna, M 2002, Looking for Blackfellas’ Point, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney. Melville, H 1967 (1835), The history of the island of Van Diemen’s Land, from the year 1824 to 1835 inclusive, to which is added, a few words on prison discipline, Libraries Board of South Australia, Adelaide. Moran, HM 1939, Viewless winds: being the recollections and digressions of an Australian surgeon, P Davies, London. Mulvaney, DJ 1958, ‘The Australian Aborigines 1606–1920: opinion and fieldwork’, Historical Studies, no. 8, Melbourne University Press. Pearson, N 2001 (1994), ‘Mabo: towards respecting equality and difference’, in M Yunupingu, D West, I Anderson, J Bell, G Lui (Jnr), H Corbett & N Pearson, Voices from the land: the 1993 Boyer Lectures, ABC Books, Sydney. Pike, D 1970 (1962), Australia: the quiet continent, Cambridge University Press, London. Pownall, E 1959, Mary of Maranoa, tales of Australian pioneer women, FH Johnston, Sydney. Reynolds, H 1984, The breaking of the great Australian silence: Aborigines in Australian historiography 1955–1983, Trevor Reese Memorial Lecture, University of London. —— 1999, Why weren’t we told? A personal search for the truth about our history, Penguin, Ringwood. Rowley, C 1962, ‘Aborigines and other Australians’, Oceania, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 247– 66. Rowley, C 1970, The destruction of Aboriginal society, Penguin, Ringwood. Rusden, GW 1884, History of Australia, Chapman & Hall, London. Scott, E 1916, A short history of Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne. Shaw, AGL 1955, The Story of Australia, Faber, London. Smith, B 1960, European vision and the South Pacific 1768–1850: a study in the history of art and ideas, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Stanner,WEH 1939, ‘The Aborigines’, in JCG Kevin (ed.) Some Australians take stock, Longmans, Green & Co., London.

249

Ann Curthoys —— 1974 (1969), After the Dreaming: the 1968 Boyer Lectures, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney. —— 1977, ‘The history of indifference thus begins’, Aboriginal History, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 3–26. —— 1979a, White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938–1973, Australian National University Press, Canberra. —— 1979b (1958), ‘Continuity and change among the Aborigines’, presidential address to the Anthropology Section of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science Congress, 1958, published in WEH Stanner 1979, White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938–1973, Australian National University Press, Canberra. —— 1979c (1972), ‘After the Dreaming: whither?’, address to the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, 1972, published in WEH Stanner 1979, White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938–1973, Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp. 320–39. Turnbull, C 1948, Black War: the extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines, Cheshire, Melbourne. Ward, R 1965, Australia, Horwitz, Sydney. West, J 1852, The history of Tasmania, H Dowling, Launceston. Windshuttle, K 2002, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Macleay Press, Sydney.

Notes 1. For two opposed views as to what Stanner was actually arguing see Windschuttle 2002, pp. 406–11, and Manne 2003, pp. 1–2. 2. The third lecture, ‘The appreciation of difference’, argues that the rise in anthropological scholarship in the twentieth century did not change action or policy because it ran counter both to popular attitudes of denigration and the conflicts over land accompanying the spread of the pastoral industry which led such attitudes to thrive. It did, however, play a small part in the success of the 1967 referendum.The fourth lecture, ‘Confrontation’, focuses on Aboriginal responses to Europeans, and is also a plea against romanticism and sentimentalism.The final lecture, ‘Composition’, talks mainly of policy, of assimilation, integration, and finally of land rights. 3. Interestingly, Crowley went on to edit his own collection, A new history of Australia, in 1974, which continued the tradition of ignoring Aboriginal history, though it was probably the last university text to do so. 4. Keith Hancock, another ANU professor of history, had said in 1930 in his book, Australia, that the advance of British civilisation made inevitable ‘the natural progress of the aboriginal race towards extinction’ (Hancock 1966, p. 21). 5. I am indebted to Peter Sutton for drawing this literature to my attention, and supplying many useful references.

250

16.

After the Dreaming: The Boyer lecturer as social critic tim rowse

In 1959, the Talks Department of the Australian Broadcasting Commission initiated the ABC Lectures, a series of four to six pre-recorded talks on a theme chosen by a speaker invited by the ABC Board. Inspired by the BBC’s Reith Lectures, which commenced in 1947, they were the idea of Sir Richard Boyer, chair of the ABC. From 1961, the lectures were known as the Boyer Lectures in honour of the chair, who died that year. In the words of the ABC’s recent chair, Donald McDonald, the lectures ‘grew out of ABC Radio’s already well-established traditions of discussion and debate and the practice of providing a platform for a respected figure to present views of interest to the audience unmoderated by an interviewer’ (McDonald 2001, p. 1). In the first few years of the Boyer Lectures, Aborigines were not mentioned by the chosen speakers. In his 1967 lectures Robin Boyd, seeking an analogy for the difference between two kinds of Australians — the easygoing, complacent ones and the restlessly intellectual ones — remarked that they were ‘as different and wary of each other…as the Aborigine and Captain Cook’ (Boyd 1967, p. 3). That was all, until the ABC invited WEH Stanner to be the Boyer Lecturer in 1968. Compared with the no less eminent scholars AP Elkin and TGH Strehlow, Stanner had not been a prolific commentator on Australia’s race relations. He had first published on the topic of Australians’ treatment of Aborigines in 1937, declaring that there had been ‘no clarity, and much humbug’ in approaches to Aboriginal needs (Stanner 1979a, p. 22). Since then, although he had contributed influentially to the academic study of the traditional forms of Aboriginal civilisation, he had commented little on the contemporary circumstances of Aborigines. He had devoted his 1958 Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science presidential address to the theme ‘Continuity and change among the Aborigines’. ‘Authority

251

Tim Rowse

does not know what it is doing’ in the Northern Territory, he said of the administration’s blindness to the significance of Aborigines’ group life (ibid., p. 43). He lamented officialdom’s indifference to what anthropologists had to say (ibid., pp. 45–6).‘Self-will and vitality’, not helplessness, were characteristic of contemporary Aborigines with whom he was acquainted (ibid., p. 48); they retained a ‘zest for life’ (ibid., p. 49). Noting certain flickerings of serious attention to Aboriginal art and to information about Aborigines, he wondered if Australia had ‘crossed a kind of watershed’ in its approach to Aborigines (ibid., p. 50), but his 1958 observations evoked Australians’ collective complacency rather than any moment of national self-criticism, and he did not predict improvement. Stanner’s observation that ‘neither side has clearly grasped what the other seeks. All this issues in a dusty encounter in which nothing is yet particularly clear’ (ibid., p. 43), strikes the essay’s characteristic note of dubiety. Adducing the results of his field research into Aboriginal cosmology, Stanner doubted the possibility of ‘true juncture of the Christian and the Aboriginal mind’ (ibid., p. 57). Cosmology all but confounded politics, this student of Aboriginal religion told his audience: a sympathetic reader of his essay is asked to doubt the reach of politics itself, however enlightened its foundations. As a presidential address to fellow anthropologists, this critique remained faithful to the discipline’s potential for radical disbelief in the very idea of a secular politics. He was sure that ‘assimilation’ was not attractive to the Aborigines of his acquaintance, but he did not set out policy innovations that would enact, constructively, his critique of the assimilationists’ self-satisfied ignorance. His presidential address to the Canberra Sociological Society in 1967, ‘Industrial justice in the never-never’, asked how the government could bring all Aboriginal adults equitably into the world of paid employment, following the 1965–66 Arbitration case that had awarded ‘equal wages’ to Aboriginal stockmen. His stance, again, was more questioning than prescriptive, as if the best crop that intellectual honesty could harvest was a strong sense of the irony of good intentions, the impotence of a deeper understanding. In his introduction to the proceedings of the 1961 symposium that founded the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Stanner had commented that ‘it has required an immense intellectual struggle to bring the native Australians within a perspective that is at once and the same time detached, informed and respectful’ (Stanner 1963, p. xvii). The result, for the worldly anthropologist, could be rendered as mildly comic. In a wry cameo of the mundane uses of such scholarship, he remarked in 1967 about the evidence tended in the ‘Equal Wages’ case that ‘Professor Elkin’s “intelligent parasitism” was used so continually — by pastoralists, Union, Commonwealth and Commission itself — to draw such different conclusions that I am inclined to think Professor Elkin may never want to hear it again’ (Stanner 1979a, pp. 258–9). In his foreword to Marie Reay’s 1964 edited collection Aborigines

252

16.The Boyer lecturer as social critic

now — a piece that rehearses some of After the Dreaming’s themes and phrases — he leavened his praise for the contributors with the observation that ‘the writing is more judicial and less contentious than the facts warrant’ (Stanner 1964, p. viii) — an odd comment for someone so practiced in the limitation of his own political imagination. In short, by the time he was chosen as Boyer Lecturer, Stanner had been an occasional, rather than a prolific, critic of government policy and popular attitudes. His characteristic tone had been more elegant dismay than programmatic bluntness.These interventions’ sparse punctuation of his more than 30 years of writing about ‘native’ peoples bespeaks diffidence about the task of social and political critique: could any public policy negotiate the radical alterity of white and Aboriginal authorities? The contrast with Elkin’s and Strehlow’s contributions to public debate in the 1950s and early 1960s is stark: for Stanner, social criticism had been an intermittent (if heartfelt) avocation whose political point was ever debatable.1 Nonetheless, the moment of After the Dreaming struck Stanner as promising. At least, that is how he saw it when looking back 10 years later. In a paper published in 1979 he noted the following actions by Aborigines and European activists as having stirred Australians in the 1960s into paying more attention to Aboriginal points of view: • the presentation to parliament by Yirrkala Aborigines of a petition of protest against an excision of land from the Arnhem Land Reserve for mining leases • litigation by the same Aborigines against the Commonwealth and a mining consortium • a walk-off by Gurindji pastoral workers at Wave Hill cattle station, and the ensuing transformation of an industrial dispute into a land rights struggle • freedom rides to towns in New South Wales where racial relations had caused offence • a marked growth in militant demands for the restoration of land, for the recognition of Aboriginal law, for legislation against discrimination, for compensation for alienation, and for a massive attack on poverty and ill health (Stanner 1979b, p. 160). In addition, Stanner listed seven events that marked the intensification of non-Aborigines’ interest during the 1960s: • the establishment of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (1961) • the decision by the Social Science Research Council of Australia to undertake a study of the whole Aboriginal situation (1964) • the national referendum which by an overwhelming majority changed the constitution so as to free the Commonwealth Parliament from statutory restrictions on its power to deal with Aboriginal problems (1967)

253

Tim Rowse

• the establishment of the Commonwealth Council of Aboriginal Affairs (CAA) and an Office of Aboriginal Affairs (1967) • the first meeting in Australian history of Aboriginal spokesmen drawn from every part of the Commonwealth (1969) • the unprecedented intrusion of Aboriginal affairs as a policy issue into the federal elections of 1969 • the subsequent appointment of a minister in charge of Aboriginal Affairs (ibid., p. 161). According his own later historical analysis, the ABC’s invitation to Stanner was well timed. the obscure mandate of 1967

On May 27 1967, over 90 per cent of voters agreed to remove words from the Australian Constitution that were understood to discriminate against Aborigines. Section 51 (xxvi) enabled the Commonwealth Parliament to make laws for ‘[t]he people of any race, other than the aboriginal race’; and the second, section 127, stipulated that ‘[I]n reckoning the numbers of people of the Commonwealth…aboriginal natives shall not be counted’. In campaigning for the Commonwealth to be able to make laws applying to all Australian Aborigines and for the national population tables to include those defined as ‘Aboriginal’, the advocates of change emphasised the values of inclusiveness, equality and non-discrimination. Evidently, these values were dear to the heart of nearly every Australian voter. The near unanimity of opinion registered in this referendum was unprecedented, but for Stanner, lecturing 18 months later, the significance of the ‘Yes’ vote was not ‘plain’ but ‘difficult to interpret’. Although he felt encouraged in 1968 by ‘evidences of a large swing from depreciation towards appreciation’, he complained that ‘the psephologists missed the biggest bus in not analysing what the voters had in mind’ (Stanner 1979a, p. 225). Empirical social science had not been as uncurious about the Australian public as Stanner’s remark implied, though much of the research on racial attitudes in the mid to late 1960s was not available to him when he was writing his Boyer Lectures. Studies by Ronald Taft (1970) and Lorna Lippmann (1973) shed some light on the terms in which Australian public sentiment was ‘inclusive’ of Aborigines. Elsewhere, Murray Goot and I (Goot & Rowse 2007) have drawn three conclusions from these late-1960s studies about Australian attitudes to Aborigines: first, by a slight margin, respondents favoured ‘part-Aborigines’ over ‘full bloods’; second, by substantial majorities they rejected the idea of an Aboriginal person marrying into their family; but third, they overwhelmingly accepted the idea of less intimate relationships with Aborigines. By far the biggest distinction that respondents to attitude surveys made was not a distinction based on considerations of descent (the full-blood/half-caste distinction), but a distinction between more intimate

254

16.The Boyer lecturer as social critic

and less intimate forms of association, between having an Aboriginal person (‘full-blood’ or ‘half-caste’) marry into one’s family and having an Aboriginal person (‘full-blood’ or ‘half-caste’) as a friend, neighbour, work colleague, café/restaurant worker or shop assistant.That is, out of every three respondents willing to accept social contact with Aborigines as friends, neighbours, or in forms of impersonal encounter, only one would also go so far as to countenance an Aboriginal person as a relative by marriage. Most Australians were distinguishing between the impersonal inclusiveness of society at large and the exclusiveness of their own family.They could accept Aboriginal people having the same formal entitlements as themselves, without necessarily liking the idea of having more to do with Aborigines on a personal level. John Western’s research in the late 1960s (Western 1973) found two dimensions in people’s responses to his questionnaires: whether the respondents attributed certain qualities to Aborigines and whether they recognised Aborigines as having certain formal entitlements.What Western’s Canberra and Condobolin respondents thought of Aborigines did not determine the rights they conceded them. The Taft, Western and Lippmann studies confirm Elkin’s point that the political and social dimensions of assimilation were proceeding relatively independently of each other. In his 1964 edition of The Australian Aborigines, Elkin wrote that a ‘social colour-bar’ persisted in Australia in the 1960s, notwithstanding Australians’ concession that Aborigines were entitled to be part of the political community, that is to have full citizenship rights (Elkin 1964, p. 378). The Taft, Western and Lippman studies support his intuition. The ‘inclusiveness’ expressed in the 1967 referendum was not only unspecific about the policies that would bring about inclusiveness; it was also ‘inclusive’ in abstract and impersonal terms, the terms of a common citizenship, not shared kinship. In finding the message of the referendum opaque, Stanner evidently did not look for guidance from public opinion studies. The Morgan Gallup poll had pointed to wide support for governments spending more on Aborigines. ‘Do you think we are doing enough to educate and house Aboriginals or should more be spent on them?’, Morgan asked in August 1964. While 16 per cent thought that enough was being spent, three out of every four respondents wanted some authority to spend ‘a little more’ (19 per cent) or ‘a lot more’ (56 per cent).2 Morgan asked only three questions about the referendum issues themselves. In May 1965, respondents were reminded that ‘Under the Constitution’ Aborigines were ‘excluded from the population counts which decide electoral boundaries’ and (less accurately) that the government now planned ‘a referendum to include Aborigines in the census’. Asked how they would ‘probably vote’, 88 per cent said they would vote ‘Yes’.3 Again in December 1965, 87 per cent said they would vote ‘Yes’ at ‘referendum to include Aboriginals in the census’. Morgan predicted

255

Tim Rowse

‘big “Yes” majorities on this question in all States’.4 In the month of the referendum itself, Morgan also asked respondents how they would vote, and found opinion unchanged: 86 per cent said they would vote ‘Yes’. ‘What’, respondents were then asked, ‘would you say the chief effect will be if the referendum on Aboriginals receives a “Yes” vote and is carried?’ Only four per cent anticipated bad effects (‘drinking, more discrimination’) and only six per cent expected ‘no effect’. Overwhelmingly, the predicted effects would have been regarded as desirable: ‘better opportunities, improved conditions, better housing, education’ (38 per cent); ‘equal rights as citizens’ (22 per cent); and ‘higher morals, improved status, freedom’ (14 per cent).5 Almost every respondent in this poll owned to ‘very favourable’ (35 per cent) or ‘fairly favourable’ (53 per cent) rather than ‘unfavourable’ (five per cent) ‘feelings about Aboriginals in general’. Nonetheless, the mention of ‘morals’ among the anticipated effects of the referendum’s passing suggests that some of those who were to vote for constitutional reform harboured negative perceptions of Aborigines. ù Whatever informed his judgement about the Australian public’s state of awareness and sympathy, After the Dreaming states Stanner’s hope that, at last, Australians would find the wisdom to deal properly with Aborigines. In the degree to which Australians were at last paying attention to Aboriginal affairs, Stanner suggested, this was an extraordinary moment in Australian history. Where had this refocusing of Australians’ attention come from? And what good actions could now flow from the apparent wave of public goodwill? In answering these questions, Stanner was intellectually cautious and politically modest. Whatever we remember his Boyer Lectures for, it could not be programmatic boldness underpinned by a confident historical teleology. Stanner presented himself not only as encouraged by his times but also as puzzled by them. after the dreaming as autobiography

Stanner conveyed this persona of perplexed intellectual authority partly by inserting himself into the Australian history that he narrated. As a genre, the Boyer Lectures permit autobiographical presentation; Stanner took the opportunity to make himself a participant of the history that he wished to narrate, in three ways. First, he proposed that there had emerged in the earliest years of colonisation a ‘basic structure of relations which ever since has formed a part of the continuing anatomy of Australian life’ (Stanner 1979a, p. 198). Describing Phillip’s misjudgement of the way to act out his good intentions towards Aborigines, Stanner told his audience that Phillip soon found ‘the streets of Sydney…filling up with the dispossessed, the homeless, the powerless and

256

16.The Boyer lecturer as social critic

the poverty-stricken from all over the County of Cumberland and, before long, from places beyond’ (ibid., pp. 201–2). The colonial authorities were simultaneously solicitous and bewildered, burdened by their responsibility while abhorring those for whom they were responsible. Having wrecked the Aborigines’ world, they had no idea about what to do to help them make a better one. Stanner effectively made himself a contemporary of Captain Arthur Phillip by going on to say that he himself had directly observed scenes of this kind. The first was around the Daly River in the Northern Territory. As an anthropologist working on the frontier, he claimed to have witnessed in 1932 the same ‘structure of race relations’ that had formed in the Sydney region by 1800. Stanner’s second personal encounter with that structure had been in 1968, at Gove Peninsula, when he witnessed Yolngu who knew that momentous changes were upon them but had little idea of the scope and dynamics of those changes. Second, Stanner related his own thoughts and feelings about Aborigines to the history of Australians’ concerns. After recently re-reading his own ‘letters and reports’ from 1932, he was struck by their emotional detachment, ‘a very interesting absence of declamation’ (ibid., p. 204). He inferred that he must then (in 1932) have thought that these miserable conditions ‘could possibly be palliated, but not ever changed in any fundamental way’ (ibid.). His stance had been that of a detached scientist trying to make sense of the remnants of a society. He had not then thought that the ‘development of Aboriginal economic, social and political life from its broken down state was a … possibility’ (ibid., p. 205). However, he reminded us, people were then starting to advocate a positive policy towards Aborigines, and his own initiation into such hopes had begun in 1934 when he had become upset at the mistreatment of the ‘Warramunga’ around Tennant Creek. His outrage had led him to file a report to the Australian National Research Council (published 46 years later, as Stanner 1980). However, as he went on to say, the Australian awakening to a positive policy had been slow, and Stanner admitted in 1968 that his own thinking about the possibility of a better policy had been nurtured more by exposure to reformers of British African colonial policy in the late 1930s than by Australian discussions. Briefly surveying the works of some Australian writers from the late 1930s to the early 1960s, Stanner concluded that Aboriginal Affairs had been intellectually and politically isolated from other reformist currents of thought in those years. He referred to this lack of interest, by Australian intellectuals in this period, as ‘the great Australian silence’ and as ‘ethnocentric social history’ (ibid., pp. 214, 215).The silence had slowed down the emergence of ‘positive policy’, for about 20 years, until the mid 1950s. He cited his own essay on ‘The Australian way of life’ (Stanner 1953a) as an instance of ‘the great Australian silence’.

257

Tim Rowse

Stanner’s third presentation of himself was implicit in his assessment of the part that the discipline of anthropology had played in supporting and challenging the great Australian silence. He noted in his first lecture that ‘the interests of anthropology as it was at that time’ had much to do with his detached response to the social inequality and devastation of his early Northern Territory field site (Stanner 1979a, p. 204). Was anthropology morally disabling? he needed now to ask. Devoting his third lecture to a history of ideas about Aborigines, he contrasted the informed few with the many benighted by prejudiced folklore. How effective had the informed few been in offering an alternative to popular indifference and disdain? He noted the rise of an intellectually disciplined curiosity among the pioneer anthropologists of the late Victorian world. However, this florescence of inquiry had coincided with the nadir of interest by politicians and the wider public, and it had been expressed in terms that made it hard to imagine Aborigines having a future.The singular value of the Aborigines to scholarship had been their ‘extraordinary primitivity’ (ibid., p. 224); their contemporary dilemmas and prospects had aroused much less academic interest, and governments had found little use for anthropological knowledge. In evaluation of the discipline to which he had devoted most of his professional life, Stanner applauded anthropology’s humanism, its contribution to ‘awareness that there are no natural scales of better or worse on which we can range the varieties of men, culture and society’ (ibid., p. 226). The Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies was giving rise to ‘a treasury of good knowledge’. But would Australians know how to use it, in schools, to challenge popular prejudice? The gap between scientific enlightenment and popular ignorance and contempt might continue, he worried. aboriginal disengagement

Stanner’s lecture series bore a subtitle, ‘Black and white Australians — an anthropologist’s view’, that hinted that he would make it an essay in popular education.There was a noble precedent for the anthropologist to be a public teacher. AP Elkin had titled his first book about Aborigines The Australian Aborigines: how to understand them (1938). That book, revised several times, had never been out of print. In his fourth lecture, Stanner began by attacking the view that Aborigines, unlike other native peoples, had no will or military capacity to resist the colonists. He then summarised in four words the demoralisation that followed their defeat. To evoke their ‘homelessness’ he drew attention to Aborigines’ deep customary bonds with their lands. In speaking of their ‘powerlessness’ Stanner pointed out that the colonists had found it necessary to kill powerful Aboriginal men. Leaders had not emerged from the Aborigines who survived because their social life was so disrupted, because traditional norms inhibited

258

16.The Boyer lecturer as social critic

the assertion of leadership and because leaders had been at risk of being seen by their fellows as becoming too much like white people. Aborigines had not only been in ‘poverty’, Stanner next argued, they have been rendered ‘paupers’ by paternalist responses to their poverty. Finally, Stanner pointed to Aborigines’ ‘confusion’ about the ways of Europeans. To a people whose traditional social life had been equipped with many internal checks and balances, the Europeans had seemed desperately immoral, anarchic, lacking a sense of fair play and proportion. Thus homeless, powerless, poor and confused, the Aborigines have always shrunk back from us, Stanner explained; they have been unresponsive and anomic, unsure how to react to Australians’ continuing encroachments. Stanner had recently witnessed the onset of that characteristic bewilderment among the people of north-east Arnhem Land, threatened by mining. ‘The development explosion of the 1960s and 1970s is the pastoral expansion of the 1860s and 1870s vastly intensified’ (Stanner 1979a, p. 237). This remark returned Stanner to the present: are Yes-voting Australian people now equipped to deal with the same situation that they have always, in the past, handled so badly? Would the encouraging ‘events’ of the 1960s at last transform the ‘basic structure of relations’? (A structuralist philosophy of history, as well as a national historiography, was at stake here.) Stanner cautiously welcomed the public’s recent rapidly growing interest in Aborigines. Australians must now give their critical attention to several issues: the assumptions behind Australian law about land as property would cease to be tenable, if questioned in courts; the young were now researching the past in a less blinkered way; and the continent was experiencing unprecedented ‘development’ that would have to take into account the interests of Aborigines because they had recently been granted civil rights. Stanner was therefore confident that a moment of change had come; things could never be the same, and that was to be welcomed. However, in his fifth and final lecture, Stanner admitted that he did not know what governments now should do. Having offered a history of the delayed emergence of the ‘positive’ policy of ‘assimilation’, Stanner acknowledged that Aborigines, for many reasons, had found much of what assimilation offered very difficult to accept. He was frankly uncertain about whether positive intentions would engage Aboriginal cooperation. To formulate a new policy philosophy and to give it a name was a quest with little appeal for him. After the Dreaming was no manifesto for ‘selfdetermination’. In this hesitancy, Stanner recapitulated the scepticism of his concluding chapter in South Seas in transition. That late 1940s survey of possibilities in New Guinea, Samoa and Fiji had been overwhelmed by the author’s refined sense of the difficulty of any colonial policy that sought to discharge its moral responsibility towards native peoples (Stanner 1953b).

259

Tim Rowse

Stanner brought to Aboriginal affairs a deeply felt intellectual pessimism about colonial government. In After the Dreaming he saw many precedents for the probable miscarriage and rejection of the ‘positive’ actions of non-native authorities.The best that we can do, Stanner advised, is to develop particular techniques of government in many diverse practical experiments. In 1968, even ‘land rights’ was open to his questioning: it was relevant, practical and politically viable in some regions, but not in others, he argued. His one encompassing insight was that Aborigines had long wished to combine with other Australians on their own terms, not on the terms that Australians had offered. In combination, Stanner’s account of Aboriginal withdrawal and of the perils of well-intentioned governance were a spur to open-ended dialogue with them, rather than a prescription for any specific governmental action. after after the dreaming: narrative redemption?

Responding to his critique of the ‘great Australian silence’, many Boyer lecturers since Stanner have not only mentioned Indigenous Australians, they have made them a point of reference in a discontinuous conversation about national history, identity and moral purpose. How to tell the national story so that the Indigenous/non-Indigenous relationship is an important, if not a central, topic? In the seven series immediately following Stanner’s, from 1969 to 1975, Aborigines were mentioned briefly by all except Zelman Cowan (The private man, 1969) and Hugh Stretton (Housing and government, 1974). Of the five making passing references to Aborigines — HC Coombs (The fragile pattern, 1970), Basil Hetzel (Life and health in Australia, 1971), Dexter Dunphy (The challenge of change, 1972), WK Hancock (Today, yesterday and tomorrow, 1973) and Roma Mitchell (The web of criminal law, 1975) — only Hancock and Hetzel alluded to the unrelieved injustice of the colonial relationship; and Hetzel suggested specific policy measures to overcome Aboriginal health problems.6 However, none of the five made a sustained argument about making the colonial relationship central to Australian history and social studies. This lack of an immediate response by Boyer lecturers to Stanner’s critique of ‘the great Australian silence’ was thrown into relief by Manning Clark’s 1976 lectures, A discovery of Australia. Clark’s second talk was a brisk sketch of the phases of mutual incomprehension and distrust between Aborigines and colonists in the nineteenth century. He found the story of Australia’s colonial relationships to be dramatically rich and morally redolent. By the end of the nineteenth century, the colonists believed Aborigines to be doomed: The ruthless raised the cry: ‘The nigger must go’, the realists shouted there was no occasion for holy howling over the business: the men of good will urged white men to ease the sufferings of their black 260

16.The Boyer lecturer as social critic

Stanner in his room at University House, Australian National University, c. 1958. Photographer unknown, ANUA 225/11 73/2.

brethren until such time as they disappeared off the face of the earth. One of my tasks was to tell that story, not to award praise or blame, but because this bloody battle between the white man and the black man was one of those events which gave us a history. Without evil there can be no history, because without evil there can be neither high seriousness nor tragic grandeur in the story of a people (Clark 1976, p. 25, emphasis added).

Clark’s assumption that national storytelling is a kind of moral work was implicitly endorsed by Inga Clendinnen’s insistence on the moral significance of the historical imagination in True stories. The telling and the hearing of the stories of colonisation, she suggested, contribute to ‘civic virtue, and therefore to the coherence of a democratic liberal state…imagining expands our moral comprehension’ (Clendinnen 1999, p. 6–7). 261

Tim Rowse

Although both Clark and Clendinnen presented the historian as a moral tutor to the nation, Clark differed from Clendinnen in insisting on the absurd and tragic character of human endeavour and in being less explicit about the ameliorative impact of his reflections. If there is ‘tragic grandeur’ in the story of the Australian people, then Clark was not explicit about the civic benefit, to listeners and readers, of seeing their past in that way. For Clark, evil was a constant presence in the human condition and a presupposition of the historical imagination. In Clendinnen’s lectures the struggle to be good was less a contest with evil and more an encounter with human complexity; and there was a stronger implication, in her lectures, of the possibility of the nation’s moral progress if listeners accepted her invitation not to simplify the past. Martin Krygier (Between fear and hope: hybrid thoughts on public values, 1997) devoted 15 pages to the story of Aborigines and colonists in a lecture he titled ‘Pride, shame and decency’. He began by narrating his own transition from ignorance to knowledge (‘I lived in a world of vague clichés, wellmeaning enough but empty’, Krygier 1997, p. 83), before proposing the nation’s transition. Much of the ‘tragedy’ of colonisation could have been avoided had not the colonists placed their own interests first and had their interests not infected their humanitarianism and produced such inhumane ‘solutions’ to Aborigines’ distress. The Australians had denied, in effect, that Aborigines were ‘human like themselves’ (ibid., p. 92). Krygier was Boyer lecturer in the year that the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission urged the prime minister to apologise, on behalf of the nation, to the ‘stolen generations’. The commission’s report, Bringing them home (1997), and this recommendation gave concrete expression to a narrative structure that has emerged in certain Boyer Lectures. Situating him or herself in a moment of enlightened awareness of the badness of the past, the Boyer narrator’s painful story initiates the nation’s better future. Some Boyer lecturers have presented themselves as the revealer, to the nation, of that which is hidden from the nation. At the end of her second lecture, Clendinnen announced: ‘What you will be hearing from now on will be some stories drawn from that hidden history: a history inextricably entwined with ours, part of ours, but too often kept from our sight’ (Clendinnen 1999, p. 34). Krygier presented himself not so much as the revelator of the hidden, but as the reminder of what was shaming to recall. He urged on his listeners a sense of national shame: the ‘public expression of shame’ (but not ‘guilt’) was, in his view, an essential step towards national ‘decency’ and a better founded national ‘pride’ (Krygier 1997, p. 95). Clendinnen in 1999 gave a name to the moral progress brought by telling and hearing ‘true stories’: ‘cultural authenticity’. Australians would be inauthentic as long as they continued to see themselves as fair-minded

262

16.The Boyer lecturer as social critic

without repairing their ‘systematic injustice’ to Aborigines (Clendinnen 1999, p. 17). Bernard Smith had introduced the issue of cultural authenticity in his 1980 lectures (The spectre of Truganini), when he reviewed the moral and aesthetic terms in which the colonists had learned to make sense of Australian experience. Like Stanner, he lamented the slow growth of a culture that could come to terms with the truth of the colonial encounter. ‘For most of our artists the Aborigine has been an aesthetic rather than a moral presence: influencing the sensibility rather than disturbing the conscience’ (Smith 1980, p. 32). The challenge of Australian cultural development was to be able to dwell on the ‘nightmare’ of the colonists’ abuse of Aborigines rather than guiltily to thrust that knowledge ‘out of mind’ (ibid., p. 17). One task facing the revised Australian narrative would be to write: …the history of the concerned Australian conscience…It will not be easy to write. For such a history could readily fall into sentimentality, making oppressive institutions and practices tolerable, even enjoyable, in the very process of exposing them: a contribution as it were to a national masochism (ibid., p. 27).

It was not good enough, he insisted, to weep and sympathise like Lewis Carroll’s lachrymose walrus. In his own effort to outline the history of a less facile sympathy for the Aborigines, Smith celebrated the humanism of the twentieth century novel as helping to displace the Victorian certainties about non-white races that had been assured by the Bible and then later by social Darwinism. Smith praised the novelists Xavier Herbert and Katherine Susannah Prichard for being able to imagine Aboriginal characters. It is in their work, surely, that our culture first begins to be built upon firm ethical foundations…What Prichard and Herbert grasped was that at the heart of the Australian experience lay a sexual tragedy of enormous historical dimension in which love, mockery and hatred battled for the mastery, and that the tragedy was performed across the bodies of Aboriginal women (ibid., p. 31).

When Smith put forward a telos for Australian history, a vision of national redemption, he referred not to reformed economic and political institutions but to new cultures and identities. Citing poet Les Murray, he called it ‘cultural convergence’. His language for making this point tended to be abstract: ‘Different variants of Aboriginal culture will emerge and seek different relationships with Aboriginal culture as a whole. Equally, white Australians on their part will look increasingly to Aboriginal culture for a variety of reasons’ (ibid., p. 50). What gave Smith hope in this scenario was his regard for ‘one of the greatest achievements of modernism, its capacity to erode the narrow Europeanism which has dominated western art and

263

Tim Rowse

its colonial appendages’ (ibid., p. 51). The possibility of Australia achieving cultural authenticity was in this way made plausible for Smith by his narrative of modernism. Coming to terms with the colonial past would be Australia’s way of realising modernism’s ethical potential. When Eric Willmot continued this discussion of Australia’s emergent authenticity in 1986 (Australia: the last experiment), he also envisaged ‘convergence’. In Willmot’s story nature exerts considerable power over culture. ‘[T]his land created the nature of the original Australians and, indeed, has created at least part of the nature of all modern Australians. That nature, their culture, is what, above all other things, determines their destiny’ (Willmot 1986, p. 11). However, he continued, the land has imposed itself harshly on European Australians, stealing their energy. ‘Many became little more than real estate agents, content to make a livelihood from the exchange of land, or by engaging themselves in industries that denuded the country’s grasslands, cut down her fragile forests and dug up her minerals for the rest of the world’ (ibid., p. 11). Australians, nonetheless, had potential because they are a ‘polygenetic’ society — made up of people from all over the world. It is a great challenge, Willmot argued, for such a society to form an identity. One of the barriers to the development of an Australian identity, he contended, was reluctance to acknowledge the Aboriginal patriots who unsuccessfully resisted the British invasion. That past was a ‘secret’ to Australians; they were victims of a ‘conspiracy of silence’ (ibid., p. 35). Willmot’s redemptive, identity-building narrative included telling the deeds and motives of those patriots, to make them characters in the national story; and he subsequently published a biography of the warrior Pemulwuy (Willmot 1987). Another barrier to the formation of an identity adequate for polygenetic Australia was ‘the ideology of Terra Nullius…the nonsensical notion that this continent was unoccupied, or that nobody owned it by right of prior occupation’ (Willmot 1986, p. 48). By re-characterising the original occupants of Australia as people of property and sovereignty, he challenged this obstacle to Australian identity. The following year, 1987, Davis McCaughey implicitly took up Willmot’s pluralising comment that ‘We are a land of many heritages’ (Willmot 1986, p. 50) when he emphasised that ‘the valour and sufferings of many peoples have contributed to our many-sided life’ (McCaughey 1987, p. 2). Many Australians’ sense of belonging and identity, therefore, ‘is not ethnic origin or national culture but a loyalty that over-rides such factors’ (ibid., p. 4). Like Willmot, McCaughey saw the unresolved Aboriginal question as a weakness in this identity: ‘the claims of the Aboriginal peoples remain at the back of our minds, the background of our lives and history, calling in question the easy acceptance of one another’s ways: the test case, it is sometimes said, for a multicultural society’ (ibid., p. 5). To forge a shared vision, McCaughey argued, we Europeans must encounter Aboriginal culture as a living tradition,

264

16.The Boyer lecturer as social critic

different in the ways that it interacts with the natural environment. We can learn from Aborigines a sense of reverence, McCaughey urged; we can share their intimations of the sacred. Similarly, he solicited our ‘humility before the past’ (ibid., p. 16). McCaughey’s lectures were titled Piecing together a shared vision, but his remarks on the ennobling effects of historical awareness raised doubts about what he meant by ‘shared’. The rediscovery of the past and its significance is never finished. If, as we must, we apply this to multicultural, pluralist Australia, we have much to learn from each other, from the oral history of Aboriginal tribal life, from those who see our history and development through eyes that have worn continental European and Asian glasses as well as those manufactured in the United Kingdom and Ireland. To all the truth of the matter must be sacred, even though we shall never attain it (ibid., p. 17).

If I have understood him correctly, McCaughey argued not that seekers of historical truth would agree in their conclusions about Australian history but that they would all ‘share’ a common humility about every claim to know the past. In the national telos commended by McCaughey, the scenario is not convergence but continuing, respectful plurality.7 One variant of the ‘authenticity’ theme in the Boyer Lectures has been the difference between Indigenous and colonial approaches to the natural environment. We find in Smith and in Willmot the suggestion that the people who colonised the Aborigines have not yet made the land their own. McCaughey invited us to learn from Aborigines’ reverence for the environment. David Malouf in 1998 said that ‘it has taken us 200 years to see that there might be another and more inward way of possessing a place, and that in this, as in so much else, the people we dispossessed had been there before us’ (Malouf 1998, p. 16). Partly through poetry, Australians were coming ‘at last into full possession of a place. Not legally, and not just physically, but as Aboriginal people, for example, have always possessed the world we live in here: in the imagination’ (Malouf 1998 p. 39). Like Smith and Willmot, he saw in Australian history the potential for a ‘convergence of indigenous and non-indigenous understanding’: the way to this convergence was led by poets such as Judith Wright (ibid., pp. 39–40). Notwithstanding the prominence of the notion ‘convergence’, among the Boyer lecturers we find no consensus about how to put environmental history and Aboriginal history into the national story. Geoffrey Bolton (A view from the edge: an Australian stocktaking) in 1992 evoked less the differences and more the similarities of the Aboriginal and colonists’ position in the Australian landscape. In three passages in his lectures he pointed to their common difficulty in filling up its immense spaces and defending them from uninvited aliens (Bolton 1992, pp. 49, 54, 67). Geoffrey Blainey in the 2001

265

Tim Rowse

lectures (This land is all horizons:Australian fears and visions) acknowledged that non-Aborigines have taken a long time to achieve a love of the land: ‘it has not yet been fully achieved, if contrasted to the feeling of those Aborigines who never lost their sense of place, or have recently refound it’ (Blainey 2001, p. 49). However, Blainey was worried that in becoming influential over Australia’s land use policies, the Aborigines (with the Greens) have benefited from ‘the decline of the belief, among Australians generally, that the vast interior holds economic promise. Gone — gone temporarily or permanently — is the old faith in national development’ (ibid., p. 16). He insisted that it is not necessary to give up pride in Europeans’ achievements in national development in order to take pride in ‘the achievements of Aborigines before 1788’. ‘But in practice most Australians barrack either for one or the other, as if they are opposing teams’ (ibid., p. 56).The European colonisation of the Australian continent was inevitable and not to be regretted, Blainey argued, and we should not allow the Greens and the Aborigines to remove so much land from economic development. As Blainey has been the most recent Boyer lecturer to address the themes that Stanner introduced to the series, I would like to close this essay by comparing their approaches to Australian history. At first sight, they are very different. The new eminence of Black and Green in Australia, Blainey regretfully explained, is sustained partly by a revised and unduly sorrowing account of Australia’s past that Blainey called the ‘black armband’ view. Australia had been a fairer society in the past than the revisionists conceded, he argued. Stanner had been at pains in 1968 to make the opposite point, and as Ann Curthoys shows in her contribution to this book, his Boyer Lectures can be seen as among the early stirrings of the revisionist account that Blainey has recently found so worrying. Blainey refused in 2001 to present the national story as a movement from a bad past, through a moment of contemporary enlightenment, to a better future. It was not only that he saw much that was good in Australia’s past; he also suggested that in the perspective of history there is no guarantee that now is a time of enlightenment from which the better future will ensue. In this latter point he was much closer to Stanner. Earlier in this essay I characterised Stanner’s presentation of the moment of 1968 as ‘puzzled’ and as lacking a ‘confident historical teleology’. He was genuinely unsure about whether the 1960s was a turning point for Australians or a false dawn for a humanitarian tradition still baffled by Aborigines’ disengagement. Lecturers since Stanner have generally been much more confident in presenting a synthesising or totalising argument about the structure and meaning of Australian history. The ‘present’ of their lectures is not opaque, but a moment of enlightenment in which they confidently project, in a whole sequence, the nation’s past, present and future. David Malouf, in his final 1998 lecture ‘A spirit of play’, made explicit the difficulty,

266

16.The Boyer lecturer as social critic

for Australians, of seeing our history ‘as a continuity, as a whole’ (Malouf 1998, p. 100). Echoing Stanner (but not citing him), Malouf continued that this was a problem of ‘selective memory. We remember the bits that speak well of us, the freedoms we have achieved, the good life we have created for so many here; the dark bits we suppress’ (ibid., p. 101). If we put the ‘dark bits’ in, he asked, will the national story have the coherence and the meanings that we need? One way to recuperate narrative coherence, as I have shown, has been for Boyer lecturers to present the moment of their own lectures as pivotal, to assume that their own words contribute to the nation’s definitive self-recognition and re-constitution. As we all peer eagerly through the ‘window’ that Stanner, in 1968, flung open on the previously hidden part of the nation’s past, these speakers have implied, the nation comes to its senses about what Smith in 1980 called the ‘nightmare’ of Australia’s past. That moment of collective self-awareness is the threshold to a future that will be better. Although Blainey wished (I presume) to be treated as a source of insights about Australian history, he distanced himself from the narrative structure that I have identified insofar as he suggested that there is nothing to guarantee that now is a moment of enlightenment. ‘One hundred years from now, some of the momentous reforms of our time will probably be looked upon with disdain by historians and politicians who do not know the assumptions and difficulties of the times we live in’ (Blainey 2001, p. 92). While Blainey may have intended this remark to deflate the hubris of Green and Black, as he saw it, he expressed the point in terms general enough to apply to any of the certainties of our time (including his own certainties about resource development). As the author of a book about the cycles of Western opinion about progress and its costs (Blainey 1988), Blainey concedes a great deal to historical relativism when he writes of human progress. Distancing himself from certainties about the present, and uneasy about the nation’s apparent loss of faith in its own development, his Boyer Lectures were the least teleological of those that I have considered in this essay. That is, his account of the present did not assume it to be a moment of illumination, the gateway to a future superior to a discreditable past. All confident contemporary selfimages, his remark implied, were open to posterior revaluation. In this way (if in no others), Blainey’s Boyer Lectures were the closest to Stanner’s, for as I have argued Stanner too admitted his uncertainty about how to characterise the moment of his lecturing. Was ‘now’ a national coming to consciousness, or another episode in a history of Indigenous refusal and of baffled and selfdeluding non-Indigenous goodwill? To the extent that most post-1968 Boyer lecturers have been confident in plotting a national trajectory from bad past to good future via a contemporary moment of enlightenment, they have not followed Stanner’s studied uncertainty in 1968; they have overcome it.

267

Tim Rowse

References Blainey, G 1988, The great see-saw: a new view of the western world, 1750–2000, Macmillan, South Melbourne. —— 2001, This land is all horizons: Australian fears and visions, ABC Books, Sydney. Bolton, G 1992, A view from the edge: an Australian stocktaking, ABC Books, Sydney. Boyd, R 1967, Artificial Australia, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney. Clark, M 1976, A discovery of Australia, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney. Clendinnen, I 1999, True stories, ABC Books, Sydney. Coombs HC 1970, The fragile pattern: institutions and man, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney. Cowen Z 1969, The private man, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney. Cowlishaw, G 2006, ‘On “getting it wrong”: collateral damage in the history wars’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 127, April, pp. 181–202. Dunphy D 1972, The challenge of change, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney. Elkin AP 1938, The Australian Aborigines: how to understand them, Angus & Robertson, Sydney. —— 1964, The Australian Aborigines: how to understand them (third edition), Angus & Robertson, Sydney. Gale, F & Low, I 1991, Changing Australia, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney. Goodall, H 2002,‘Too early yet or not soon enough? Reflections on sharing histories as process’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 118 (special issue edited by K DarianSmith), pp. 7–24. Goot, M & Rowse, T 2007, Divided nation? Indigenous affairs and the imagined public, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South. Gray, G 1998,‘From nomadism to citizenship:AP Elkin and Aboriginal advancement’, in N Peterson & W Sanders (eds), Citizenship and Indigenous Australians: changing conceptions and possibilities, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, pp. 55–76. Hancock WK 1973, Today, yesterday and tomorrow, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney. Hetzel B 1971 Life and health in Australia, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney. Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission 1997, ‘Report of the national inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families’, Bringing them home, Sterling Press, Sydney. Krygier, M 1997, Between fear and hope: hybrid thoughts on public values, ABC Books, Sydney. Lippmann, L 1973, Words or blows: racial attitudes in Australia, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic. McCaughey, D 1987, Piecing together a shared vision, ABC Enterprises, Crows Nest, NSW. McDonald, D 2001, ‘Introduction’, D McDonald (ed.), The Boyer collection: highlights of the Boyer Lectures 1959–2000, ABC Books, Sydney. McGregor, R 2005, ‘Assimilation as acculturation: AP Elkin on the dynamics of cultural change’, in T Rowse (ed.), Contesting assimilation, API Network, Perth, pp. 169–83. 268

16.The Boyer lecturer as social critic Malouf, D 1998, A spirit of play: the making of Australian consciousness, ABC Books, Sydney. Mitchell R 1975, The web of criminal law, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney. Rowse, T 1999, ‘The collector as outsider — TGH Strehlow as “public intellectual”’, Strehlow Research Centre: Occasional Paper, no. 2, pp. 61–120. Smith, B 1980, The spectre of Truganini, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney. Stanner, WEH 1953a, ‘The Australian way of life’, in WV Aughterson (ed.), Taking stock: aspects of mid-century life in Australia, FW Cheshire, Melbourne, pp. 2–14. —— 1953b, The South Seas in transition: a study of post-war rehabilitation and reconstruction in three British pacific dependencies, Australasian Publishing Company, Sydney. —— 1963, ‘Introduction’, in H Sheils (ed.), Australian Aboriginal studies, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, pp. xi–xviii. —— 1964,‘Foreword’, in M Reay (ed.), Aborigines now, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, pp. vii–x. —— 1979a, White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938–73, Australian National University Press, Canberra. —— 1979b, ‘The Australian Aborigines’, in WS Livingston & WR Louis (eds), Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands since the First World War, University of Texas Press, Austin and London, pp. 148–67. —— 1980, ‘Report to Australian National Research Council upon Aborigines and Aboriginal reserve at Tennant Creek 1934’, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Newsletter, (n.s., 13), pp. 43–8. Stretton H 1974, Housing and government, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney. Taft, R 1970, ‘Attitudes of Western Australians towards Aborigines’, in R Taft, JLM Dawson & P Beasley, Attitudes and social conditions, Australian National University Press, Canberra. Western, JS 1973, ‘The Australian Aborigine: what white Australians know and think about him’, Race, vol. 10, no. 4, 1969, pp. 411–34; reprinted as ‘What white Australians think’, in GE Kearney, PR de Lacey & GR Davidson (eds), The psychology of Aboriginal Australians, John Wiley, Sydney, pp. 244–68. Willmot, E 1986, Australia: the last experiment, Australian Broadcasting Commission, Sydney. Willmot, E 1987, Pemulwuy, the rainbow warrior, Weldons, McMahons Point, NSW.

Notes 1. For recent appraisals of Elkin as an advocate of Aboriginal interests see Gray (1998) and McGregor (2005); on Strehlow see Rowse (1999). 2. Morgan Gallup Poll no. 1787, August 1964 (National Library of Australia). See also Morgan Gallup Poll no.1864, April 1965 which shows the same result and that a higher proportion of ‘youth’ than ‘adult’ respondents supported more money being spent on Aborigines (National Library of Australia). 3. Morgan Gallup Poll no. 1846, May 1965 (National Library of Australia). 4. Morgan Gallup Poll no. 1883, December 1965 (National Library of Australia). 5. Morgan Gallup Poll no. 1964B, May 1967 (National Library of Australia). 269

Tim Rowse 6. Boyer lecturers have rarely discussed public policy towards Indigenous Australians. Let me note some important exceptions in addition to Hetzel. In 1991 the geographer Fay Gale (Changing Australia) warned that ‘to place too much emphasis on programs especially identified for Aborigines can suggest that all Aborigines are the same and that all Aborigines need special treatment’ (Gale 1991, 26). She argued that ‘equality of opportunity’ should not require Aborigines to understand opportunity and achievement in terms identical with other Australians nor in the same way as other Aborigines. Insisting on the dignity of their difference, she pointed out that Aboriginal culture was not uniform because Aborigines, in order to survive, had had to adapt their life intimately to the particularities of the many different physical environments of Australia. These differences had been accentuated by the differentiated impact of colonisation. In 1992 Geoffrey Bolton (A view from the edge: an Australian stocktaking) saw possibilities in Australian federalism for accommodating different approaches by Aborigines to regional governance (Bolton 1992, 33-4); his words would be relevant to the recent pursuit by Noel Pearson of delegated powers to adapt the terms of welfare payments to the needs, as he sees them, of Cape York Aborigines. 7. Heather Goodall (2002) and Gillian Cowlishaw (2006) have discussed the difficulties of ‘sharing’ the various histories and memories of Australia’s colonisation.

270

17.

From ‘After the Dreaming’ to ‘After land rights’: WEH Stanner’s legacy as Indigenous policy intellectual jon altman

This chapter focuses on several aspects of WEH Stanner’s contributions as a public policy intellectual during the period 1968 to 1976 when he was a member of Council for Aboriginal Affairs (CAA).The period is book-ended by his Boyer Lectures After the Dreaming in 1968 and with the passage of land rights legislation in 1976. This was the most tumultuous and progressive period in twentieth-century Australian Indigenous affairs, though some might argue that the late 1990s to the early 2000s was equally tumultuous, if not as progressive. The chapter begins in the present with a consideration of the dominant policy discourse in Indigenous affairs during the last three years (2005– 07) of the Howard era. This discourse was based on the premise of failure in Indigenous affairs over the last three decades and the need for radical reform focused on neo-liberal notions of the individual and the free market. This is another take on the phrase ‘after land rights’ in the chapter’s title, with statutory reform to dilute important aspects of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (Cwlth) being vigorously advocated and implemented by the last Howard federal government.1 We then journey back through time to consider Stanner’s contributions to several of the important issues currently under debate: land rights and development futures; welfare and associated costs; and mainstreaming. In conclusion I put forward a framework, developed by Tim Rowse and myself, to assess the contributions of the social sciences to policy development that focuses on two discourses of difference: socioeconomic, and cultural (Altman & Rowse 2005). This framework is used in order to consider the utility of Stanner’s approach as a contribution to recent policy debates in Indigenous affairs.

271

Jon Altman recent debates

There has been a somewhat one-sided, dominant and simplistic view emerging in public discourse on Indigenous affairs in recent times. It runs something like this. The last 30 years — or, more specifically, the period since 1972 when ‘self-determination’ became the central term of policy — has been one of policy failure as evidenced by the persistence of relative Indigenous disadvantage. The focus of the debate is on remote and very remote Australia where less than 30 per cent of the Indigenous population lives but where many reside on Aboriginal-owned land in small, discrete (and hence visible) townships and outstations. A synopsis of the malaise is as follows: Aboriginal land rights and native title has been a part of the problem rather than the solution, since Aboriginal people (according to a past minister responsible for Indigenous affairs) are ‘land rich but dirt poor’ (Vanstone 2005). Remote regions need development and Indigenous people need to engage with the market (some prefer the term ‘real’) economy rather than remaining highly dependent on their social security entitlements as Australian citizens. There are a number of emerging views about how to fix, or at the very least ameliorate, the Aboriginal development problem, that past policies have failed to recognise.To simplify considerably, Helen Hughes advocates private property rights, individuation, welfare reform, health checks and a greater focus on education (Hughes 2007). Bob Gregory’s (2005) view is that if Aboriginal people aspire to robust economic futures then they must migrate from marginal backwaters where employment opportunity is absent, give up elements of their culture, and engage with the mainstream economy. Noel Pearson (2005) seeks welfare and land reform, education for engagement with the ‘real’ economy (a concept that is never rigorously defined) and circular migration or ‘orbiting’ away from home communities to employment and back again. Warren Mundine (2005) believes that private property rights are needed to encourage home ownership, economic development and profitable business. All these advocates for policy change hold the view that the way forward requires the abolition or radical restructuring of the institutions of Indigenous Australia, land ownership by corporate groups (the hallmark of land rights and native title laws) and Indigenous-specific programs. The way forward for them is via a new approach based on mainstreaming, mutual obligation focused on relations between the individual and the state, and shared responsibility between Indigenous communities and the state and between Indigenous communities and resident families and individuals. All exponents of such views refer back to the halcyon days before selfdetermination when assimilation and integration were the central terms of policy and when Aboriginal people in remote and very remote Australia

272

17. Stanner’s legacy as Indigenous policy intellectual

were less welfare dependent, more active and supposedly better off living on government settlements, missions and pastoral stations. The influential mainstream print media endorses such views and attacks alternatives: we read about customary activities and living on Aboriginal land in terms of ‘preserving a traditional hunter-gatherer economy inside a modern capitalist one’ and that such economies are so prevalent because of the destructive separatist notions foisted on Aborigines by the chattering classes’ (editorial, Australian, 25 October 2005). Many of these views, and especially those of Noel Pearson and Helen Hughes, influenced and informed the Howard government’s draconian ‘national emergency’ intervention in the Northern Territory in June 2007. A series of punitive and neo-paternalistic measures to reform welfare and land rights for Indigenous Australians were enacted in Australian law in the controversial Northern Territory Emergence Response statutory package in August 2007. These measures have been described in some detail in the collection of essays Coercive reconciliation (Altman & Hinkson 2007) and will not be discussed in any great detail in this chapter, in part because it is currently unclear which will actually be operationalised with the recent change of federal government. Needless to say, I do not share such views, in part because they are not supported by the available official statistics (Altman et al. 2005), in part because they provide a very partial and blinkered view of policy history and past and current economic reality (Altman 2004), and in part because they lack theoretical or comparative empirical justification. In the Northern Territory intervention such views have provided ideologically-based justification for the passage of racially discriminatory laws that in my opinion cannot be condoned. However, my aim here is not to engage directly with the broad conservative depiction of the Aboriginal situation but rather to consider how WEH Stanner as a policy intellectual might have engaged with it. I do so with reference to some of Stanner’s writings, especially in the period 1968 to 1976 when he was a member of the CAA, but also to his earlier work dating back to the 1930s in north Australia and the 1940s in Africa and the Pacific. stanner as a policy intellectual

Stanner initially trained in economics and anthropology and had a rich and varied career in pure and applied (or ‘practical’ or development or policy) anthropology in Britain, Africa (see Hinkson this volume) and the Pacific (see Gray this volume; also Stanner 1953), as well as in north Australia (see Hinkson 2005), before he joined the Australian National University in 1950. While his work in the 1950s focused on Aboriginal religion, by 1958 he was

273

Jon Altman

probably the first anthropologist to develop a coherent critique of the notion of imposed assimilation as government policy (Stanner 1979a); Stanner’s was not a critique of the socioeconomic equality implied by assimilation, but of a process of implementation that left little room for plurality or negotiation. In the early 1960s he championed the establishment of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (see Mulvaney this volume) and then was a passionate advocate for the ‘Yes’ vote in the constitutional amendment referendum of 1967 (see Curthoys this volume). The Holt government was institutionally unprepared for the unprecedented positive vote for change in the referendum; its response was to establish the CAA in late 1967 (see Dexter this volume). There is no doubt that of the three members of the CAA, Stanner was the expert, having been involved as a social scientist in Indigenous affairs for the previous three decades. As Dexter’s account suggests, the CAA operated very much as a consensus team where positions were negotiated between the three members, so discerning Stanner’s personal position is not easy. As an anthropologist, social scientist and public intellectual, Stanner was poised and well positioned to have policy influence. He believed that, in principle, social science could improve government (see Rowse 2000). What is not well known is that between the years 1968 and 1971, while a professor at the Australian National University, Stanner devoted almost his entire time to the CAA, continuing this high level of involvement after ‘retirement’ in 1971 (interview with Barrie Dexter, 18 November 2005). today’s issues yesterday

Gleaning Stanner’s perspectives on issues dominating recent debates is not difficult; there are some close correlations between then and now, which suggest a degree of intractability in the problems facing Aboriginal people in remote Australia, then as now. In what follows I briefly and selectively focus on Stanner’s views about land rights, economic development, welfare and mainstreaming.

On land rights In his Boyer Lectures Stanner was somewhat conservative on land rights, concerned that land claims might prove unpopular with non-Indigenous Australians who held no property (Stanner 1969, p. 60). But it was clear that two events associated with the Gove land rights dispute already influenced his views. First, when he visited north-east Arnhem Land he was surprised by the strength of Yolngu attachment to the land and of customary practice, including distinct Yolngu laws regarding land ownership (see Williams this volume). Second, he was unpleasantly surprised by the willingness of the Australian Government to side with the miners in establishing the mine without consultation with Yolngu.

274

17. Stanner’s legacy as Indigenous policy intellectual

Aborigines who accompanied Stanner overland from Port Keats to Daly River resting on sandstone hills, c. 1935. Photographer WEH Stanner, Stanner Collection, AIATSIS N1014-1.

It was then that Stanner, as a member of the CAA, began articulating the view that reserved lands should be a resource to be used for the benefit of Aboriginal people collectively. This view accorded with one earlier position taken by Paul Hasluck when Minister for Territories in the early 1950s. Hasluck believed that any major commercial development, such as mining, that occurred on Aboriginal reserves should be levied a double royalty earmarked for Aboriginal interests. The notion of a double royalty was largely based on the view that this would deter marginal or speculative mining operations (Altman 1983, p. 5). Hasluck’s position was somewhat ambiguous because it sat alongside a view that mining development would be beneficial to Aboriginal assimilation. It was challenged at a later time by others, like Peter Nixon, Minister for Interior in the late 1960s, who wanted reserve land to be leased to individuals for economic development purposes, rather than held in trust for general Aboriginal benefit. Stanner was deeply concerned that such proposed leasing, for a term of only seven years, would result in land alienation to non-Aboriginal commercial interests and opposed it vigorously, both in 1968 and later in a short but scathing critique of the position of one of its main proponents, Ralph Hunt (Stanner 1979b). From that time, and following his involvement as an expert witness in the Gove

275

Jon Altman

case, Stanner became a strong advocate for Aboriginal ‘collective’ land rights for traditional owner groups.This was the form that inalienable freehold title took in the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act (Cwlth) passed in 1976.

On economic development Stanner endorsed the view that reserved land should remain under Aboriginal control for Aboriginal benefit. But from his earliest writings, it is clear that he was sceptical about the over-arching project of northern development, a view partly formed in the 1930s when he saw groundnut farmers struggling to eke a livelihood from the relatively fertile and well watered Daly River area (see Stanner 1933). Stanner’s views about the development potential of the Northern Territory were articulated in an early unpublished paper ‘Northern Australia and closer settlement’ in which he outlined the climatic, ecological and geographic — or structural — shortcomings of this region (Stanner c. 1937). He was well aware that Aboriginal reserves were especially disadvantaged in this regard as land which remained unalienated was extremely remote and of low agricultural or pastoral value. Even when other development options emerged, as with a new mine, Stanner remained sceptical. Rowse relates how Coombs and Stanner disagreed on the likelihood that Yolngu would take up employment at the Nabalco mine. Stanner viewed such employment in part as a program to Europeanise the Aborigines, in part as an option destined to fail because it was imposed rather than negotiated. He was proved right when Yolngu opted for outstation living over mine employment (Rowse 2000, pp. 81–3). Stanner recognised, however, that some form of development was needed and recommended, along with Coombs (Coombs & Stanner 1974, pp. 5–6), that in remote communities this be based on export of goods and services, import substitution, provision of community services, housing and infrastructure, and enterprise development. There was a realistic recognition that community economies would need subsidisation, a feature of the dependent Northern Territory economy more generally, which is all too rarely publicly discussed even today (Morris 2005). On mainstreaming and difference Mainstreaming is a term that can have many meanings, but there is no doubt that Stanner and the CAA were of the view that special Indigenous programs and an omnibus Department of Aboriginal Affairs would not only make expenditure on Aboriginal people highly visible, but would also result in mainline Commonwealth and state and territory agencies reneging on their obligations to Aboriginal people as Australian citizens — and that this would perpetuate under-expenditure. This was a view that did not prevail when Gough Whitlam established the federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs in 1972 (Altman & Sanders 1991). 276

17. Stanner’s legacy as Indigenous policy intellectual

Rowse captures this issue with his discussion of the ambiguity inherent in the term ‘difference’ (Rowse 2000, p. 29). The CAA was of the view that difference in the standard of government servicing of Aboriginal clients was to be eliminated but not in a way that denied Aboriginal people’s options to be culturally different. Stanner’s cultural analysis of plurality was evident here. From his writings it is clear that he was opposed to neither socioeconomic progress nor assimilation; he just believed that this should be based on Indigenous choice. He was concerned that the more vigorously such policies were imposed the less likely they were to succeed. Stanner’s views on choice were clearly stated in the Report on a visit to Lajamanu and Hooker Creek that he co-authored with Coombs in 1974. Here there was clear support for the outstations movement and the choice that outstation residents might make to have less material prosperity by living in remote communities on the land they owned, largely devoid of commercial opportunity (Coombs & Stanner 1974).This view was replicated in the CAA’s last publication, Report on Arnhem Land in 1976 (CAA 1976).

On welfare Stanner had a sophisticated take on welfare, bearing in mind that until the 1960s Indigenous Australians were largely excluded from the mainstream provisions of the Australian welfare state (Altman & Sanders 1991). Part of his argument for mainstreaming was to ensure access to the full range of social services that all Australians enjoyed as citizens. But Stanner was also well aware of the relationship between welfare and development, due to his time in Africa and familiarity with the British Colonial Development and Welfare Act 1940.2 This statutory framework recognised the need for Britain to invest in the welfare of its colonial subjects, while also providing investment in human resources to ensure development of material wealth after decolonisation. Stanner articulated a view that development action was urgently needed, otherwise, disadvantage, coupled with rapid Aboriginal population growth, would result in an exponential growth in public cost: The gap between the average real conditions of the aborigines and ours shows signs of widening not narrowing…It follows that their condition will have to improve faster than ours if they are to stay even at their relative disadvantage. This is a sobering thought. The bill for welfare expenditure will increase without offset until such time as aborigines begin to make a contribution to the national product (Stanner 1969, p. 58).

To summarise Stanner between 1968 and 1976 in a paragraph: he was not critical of assimilation as a term of policy but more of the process by which it had been forced onto Aboriginal people and had failed. In some contexts this failure could be explained by limited opportunity and remoteness. In 277

Jon Altman

others it could be explained by Aboriginal cultural preferences. Stanner was critical of state policy that targeted individuals as if divorced from their social embeddedness in community (Stanner 1979a) and he understood well the role of Indigenous agency in choice (Stanner 1970, 1973-4). Stanner was extremely sophisticated, for his time, in seeing development as an intercultural process; Indigenous communities as mixed; and development processes incorporating a diverse range of articulations between western and customary practices. He was also a proponent of community-based or bottom-up development, possibly influenced by the writings of the ‘opportunity and response school’ of the time that believed that traditional (non-market) institutions could readily adapt to market opportunity (see Firth 1967; Epstein & Penny 1973. Note that Stanner was a close friend of Firth, and knew the Epsteins well.). yesterday’s views on today

In the last 30 years there have been considerable changes in the circumstances of Aboriginal people in remote Australia, with improved transport and communications giving rise to enhanced mobility and greater experience and awareness of being part of an interconnected world. The Aboriginal estate in the Northern Territory now covers nearly half the Territory and an estimated 70 per cent of the Aboriginal population lives on this land in small townships and smaller outstation communities. There is far greater diversity of circumstances today; in some situations people participate in mine or national park employment, while in other situations there are very negative effects from intergenerational welfare dependence. Everywhere there is state under-investment in development, even where there is success. Despite these changes, there are enough continuities with the earlier period to be able to meaningfully ask how Stanner might have commented on the current circumstances of remote-living Aboriginal people and on current policy debates. A recent report on Wadeye by John Taylor and Owen Stanley estimates the enormous backlogs in expenditure on Aboriginal housing and infrastructure, education, health services and employment opportunities (Taylor & Stanley 2005, see also Taylor this volume). If not addressed immediately, these deficits will expand exponentially as population grows with associated massive economic and social costs, as noted by Stanner in his Boyer Lectures. This scenario, at the community Stanner knew best, is replicated statistically at the national level. Despite popular views that there is over-expenditure on Indigenous Australians, in fact there is under-expenditure on any equitable needs-based criteria (see Neutze et al. 1999; Deeble et al. 1998; Commonwealth Grants Commission 2001). Stanner would be appalled. In his earliest writings he referred to the ‘almost unbelievably mean finances’

278

17. Stanner’s legacy as Indigenous policy intellectual

of Australian native policy and administration (Stanner 1939), and in his Boyer Lectures he warned of the exponential costs that would eventuate if backlogs were not addressed as the Aboriginal population increased and unless welfare support was turned to productive contribution. If he were alive today he might well ponder if the inertia in addressing such issues is not just another manifestation of Australian indifference to the plight of Aboriginal people. Stanner would not argue about ‘allowing Aboriginal people to realise the long-term potential of their land’, as articulated by Senator Vanstone3 and others (see also Williams this volume), but his practical side might ask for some more detail on how this is to be done, say at Yuendumu and Hooker Creek (Lajamanu), or at Wadeye, where poor communications and lack of commercial opportunity might constrain development options, or at Yirrkala where he found a reluctance among the Yolngu in the late 1960s, that is still generally apparent to work at the Nabalco mine they had opposed so vigorously. Stanner might remind the current generation of policy makers that land rights was, and is, as much about social justice as about development (Woodward 1974). Stanner might direct those promulgating market (‘real’ economy) solutions to Indigenous development problems in very remote locations to a general recommendation in his 1974 report on Yuendumu and Hooker Creek: We recommend that policy be directed to ensure that Aborigines are not forced by economic and social pressures to accept a European style of life…i.e. that Aborigines be allowed and helped to adapt freely to their own requirements and circumstances such white Australian practices as they consider to be of value to them (Coombs & Stanner 1974, p. 3).

Against the Howard government’s catchcry that policy must be made ‘for all Australians’, Stanner might counsel recognition of plurality both in Australian society and within the Indigenous population. concluding observations

In our contribution to Ideas and influence: social science and public policy in Australia (Altman & Rowse 2005), Tim Rowse and I examined the history of disciplinary contestation in the relationship between social sciences and Indigenous public policy, focusing as exemplars on economics and anthropology. To simplify considerably, the economics approach has viewed socioeconomic difference as a deficit to be addressed by policy, while the anthropological approach highlights cultural difference with policy proposals

279

Jon Altman

that focus on choice and self-determination. How does Stanner’s approach fit within this framework? Stanner had a disciplinary background in economics and anthropology and was concerned with both practical and symbolic issues. Consequently, much of his work as a policy intellectual focused on the economic problems associated with Indigenous disadvantage and an acute awareness of the need to reduce the gap in socioeconomic wellbeing between Aboriginal and other Australians. At the same time, as an anthropologist, his cultural analysis was acutely aware that difference could be viewed as a social good in a plural Australia. Stanner was able to skilfully amalgamate both perspectives in his policy contributions: he was comfortable with socioeconomic sameness, as long as this was based on Aboriginal choice. And he was equally comfortable with Aboriginal adherence to different lifeworlds and resistance to transformation. In recent disciplinary and policy contestation, economic liberalism has been in the ascendancy in Indigenous affairs and elsewhere in Australian public policy. Most Indigenous policy focus is on mainstream notions of land ownership, economic development that highlights the individual and family, and on the need for welfare reform. It appears that the policy pendulum has swung a little reactively to focus primarily on the elimination of socioeconomic difference, while overlooking cultural difference and plurality. Stanner recognised that policy frameworks and the state could only, at best, structure opportunities for Indigenous Australians. Ultimately, it would be Indigenous agency that would underpin highly variable Indigenous responses. Such responses would need to be locally owned and controlled if they were to be effective. Stanner’s enduring legacy is an approach that recognises the unavoidable tension between the equality and pluralism agendas. This allowed him to develop a sophisticated analysis of the Indigenous situation using both economics and cultural analysis, an approach that is as necessary now as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Melinda Hinkson for comments on an earlier version of this chapter and for many Stanner leads, Bill Fogarty for research assistance, and Tim Rowse and Barrie Dexter for assisting with interviews on 16 and 18 November 2005 respectively. Tim also assisted me greatly with some references and access to his notes on the Dexter papers. The comments of anonymous referees also assisted greatly. References Altman, JC 1983, Aborigines and mining royalties in the Northern Territory, Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Canberra.

280

17. Stanner’s legacy as Indigenous policy intellectual —— 2004, ‘Practical reconciliation and the new mainstreaming: will it make a difference to Indigenous Australians?’ Dialogue, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 35–46. —— & Hinkson, M (eds) 2007, Coercive reconciliation: stabilise, normalise, exit Aboriginal Australia, Arena Publications, Melbourne. —— & Rowse,T 2005, ‘Indigenous affairs’, in P Saunders & J Walter (eds), Ideas and influence: social science and public policy in Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 159–77. —— & Sanders W 1991, ‘From exclusion to dependence: Aborigines and the welfare state in Australia’, CAEPR Discussion Paper No. 1, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University, Canberra. ——, Biddle, N & Hunter, BH 2005, ‘A historical perspective on Indigenous socioeconomic outcomes in Australia, 1971–2001’, Australian Economic History Review, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 273–315. Commonwealth Grants Commission 2001, The Indigenous funding inquiry, Commonwealth Grants Commission, Canberra. Coombs, HC & Stanner WEH 1974, Report on a visit to Yuendumu and Hooker Creek, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra. Council for Aboriginal Affairs 1976, Report on Arnhem Land, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra. Deeble, J, Mathers, C, Smith, L, Goss, J, Webb, R & Smith, V 1998, Expenditure on health services for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, Department of Health & Community Services, Canberra. Epstein, TS & Penny, D (eds) 1973, Opportunity and response: case studies in economic development, Hurst, London. Firth, RW (ed.) 1967, Themes in economic anthropology, Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA) Monograph 6, Tavistock, London. Gregory R 2005, ‘Between a rock and a hard place: economic policy and the employment outlook for Indigenous Australians’, in D Austin-Broos & G Macdonald (eds), Culture, economy and governance in Aboriginal Australia, University of Sydney Press, Sydney, pp. 135–50. Hinkson, M 2005, ‘The intercultural challenge of Stanner’s first fieldwork’, Oceania, vol. 75, no. 3, pp. 195–208. Hughes H 2007, Lands of shame: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ‘homelands’ in transition, Centre for Independent Studies, St Leonards, NSW. Morris, A 2005, ‘Powerhouse or mendicant? Is the Territory an engine of growth or a drag on the federation?’ in T Lea & B Wison (eds) The state of the north: a selection of papers from the 2003 Charles Darwin Symposia, Charles Darwin University Press, Darwin, pp. 65–73. Mundine, W 2005, ‘Aboriginal governance and economic development’, National Native Title Conference, Coffs Harbour, 3 June. Neutze, M, Sanders, W & Jones, G 1999, ‘Public expenditure on services for Aboriginal people: employment, education, health and housing’, Discussion Paper 24, Australia Institute, Canberra. Pearson, N 2005,‘Freedom, capabilities and the Cape York reform agenda’, Viewpoint, Cape York Institute for Policy & Leadership, Cairns.

281

Jon Altman Rowse, T 2000, Obliged to be difficult: Nugget Coombs’ legacy in Indigenous affairs, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne. Stanner,WEH 1933, ‘The Daly River tribes: a report on fieldwork in north Australia (part 1)’, Oceania, vol. 3, pp. 377–405. —— c. 1937, ‘North Australia and closer settlement’, unpublished typescript, AIATSIS Library, Canberra. —— 1939, ‘The Aborigines‘, in JGC Kevin (ed.), Some Australians take stock, Longmans, Green & Co., London. —— 1953, The South Seas in transition: a study of post-war rehabilitation and reconstruction in three British Pacific dependencies, Australasian Publishing Company, Sydney. —— 1969, The 1968 Boyer Lectures: after the Dreaming, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Sydney. —— 1970, ‘Foreword’, in HP Schapper, Aboriginal advancement to integration, Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp. vii–ix. —— 1973–74, ‘Aborigines in the affluent society: the widening gap’, Anthropological Forum, vol. III, nos 3–4, pp. 249–63. —— 1979a (1958),‘Continuity and change among the Aborigines’, in White man got no Dreaming: Essays 1938–1973, Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp. 41–66. —— 1979b (1973), ‘Land for Aborigines: Mr Hunt’s criticisms examined’, in White man got no Dreaming: essays 1938–1973, Australian National University Press, Canberra, pp. 359–65. Taylor J & Stanley O 2005,‘The opportunity cost of the status quo in the Thamurrurr region’, CAEPR Working Paper No. 28, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University, Canberra. Vanstone, A 2005, ‘Address to National Press Club, Canberra, 25 February’, also in Australian, 19 November 2005. Woodward, AE 1974, Aboriginal Land Rights Inquiry, Second Report April 1974, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra.

Notes 1. These included options to facilitate leasing of Aboriginal land held under inalienable communal title to individuals and to government authorities within Aboriginal town boundaries, as well as radically altering the financial provisions of the land rights legislation in the Northern Territory. In August 2006, after a brief Senate inquiry, the Howard government used its Senate majority to amend the Aboriginal Land Rights Act. 2. Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords, vol. 116, no. 66, Tuesday 2 July 1940 (Second Reading Speech, Lord Lloyd, The Secretary of State for the Colonies). 3. Media release, Senator the Hon AmandaVanstone ‘Reforming the NT Aboriginal Land Rights Act’, 18 November 2005.

282

Index (numbers in italics refer to images)

Abbie, Andrew, 66, 68 Aboriginal Advancement League, 245 Aboriginal Affairs, 84, 86, 254 see also Indigenous affairs Aboriginal ‘Embassy’, 81 Aboriginal ‘High Culture’, 10, 17–18, 102 Aboriginal history, 234, 236 1930s to 1950s, 243–4 1955 to 1968, 244 academic and popular writings, 241–6 and historical consciousness of Aboriginal people, 243–4 lack of interest in, 239 and nineteenth century historians, 241–3 teaching of, 246 Aboriginal History (journal), 240, 242 Aboriginal humour, 10 Aboriginal land claims, 173, 177, 185, 187, 190, 193–4 Aboriginal land ownership ‘clans’ and ‘estates’, 185, 193 collective rights, 276 custodianship, 170 definition of traditional ownership, 172 distinct laws governing, 274 Aboriginal land rights, 80–1, 83, 85, 211–12, 253, 260, 272, 274–6 legislation, 9, 35, 84, 85–6 see also Milirrpum Case; Woodward Royal Commission Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (Cwlth), 86, 172, 178, 185, 199, 271, 276

Aboriginal land title, 177–8, 209–10 principles of tenure, 202–3 privatisation of, 178–80 Aboriginal land use, 169 ‘bands’ and ‘ranges’, 185 ecological perspective, 170–2, 175, 186, 187, 188–90 physical occupation of territory, 176 Aboriginal life stages, 226–7 Aboriginal local organisation debate over, 170 land use and connection to the land, 172–3 and new forms of localism, 174–8 sociological analysis vs. ecological analysis, 187–90, 193–5 vs. territorial organisation, 188 Aboriginal relationship to land and attachment to country, 173–4, 198, 274 perceiving the environment, 190–3 the religious connection, 199–200 Aboriginal rock art, 8 ‘Aboriginal territorial organization: estate, range, domain and regime’, 170, 185 Aboriginal territorial organization estate, range, domain and regime, 186–7 evolution of territoriality, 174–8 ‘heartland’, 187 spatial terminology, 173, 185 vs. local organisation, 188 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), 11, 13, 23 283

Index Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal relations, 16, 97, 211, 254–6, 260 Aboriginal disengagement, 258–60 and Australian identity, 264–7 and colonial relationship, 260, 262–3 and cultural authenticity, 262–3 history of, 240, 244, 245 ‘structure’ of, 235–6, 256–7, 259 Aborigines Now, 252–3 ‘Aborigines, The’ (essay), 238 Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders census and estimates, 220–1 civil rights protests in 1950s and 60s, 245, 253 definition developed by CAA, 79 equal wages case, 252 involvement in NAOU, 31 involvement in NTSRU, 30–1 on the other side of the frontier, 91 place in Australian society, 10 and PNG border issue, 83 and popular music, 159–62, 164 protest movement in 1930s, 243 and settler colonialism, 92 see also Aboriginal Affairs; Aboriginal headings; Indigenous Affairs Adams, Phillip, 80 Africa, British colonial policy, 46–7 After the Dreaming see Boyer Lectures by Stanner age grades, 226–7 Andrews, John, 32 anthropological reductionism, 122–3 anthropology Aboriginal ethnography, 122–3, 129, 180–1, 189, 193 attitudes to ‘practical’ research, 48, 53 in Australia in the 1920s and ‘30s, 3 in Australia in the 1950s, 7–8 in Australia in the 1960s and ‘70s, 63, 170, 193 in Australia in post-war years, 7–8, 44 and biography, 89–90, 93–4, 98, 116 British anthropology in the 1950s, 8 ethnographic collections, 64 explaining changes in tastes, 180–1 focus on Aborigines, 6–7 impact of legal discourse and thinking, 194, 214–15 importance of population counts, 217, 219

and Indigenous policy, 30, 279–80 musical ethnography, 153, 162 ‘obituary mode’ writings about Aborigines, 98, 238 reputation of research in East Africa, 52–4 retreat from the social, 194–5 role in supporting and challenging ‘great Australian silence’, 258 salvage research, 58, 59 Stanner’s perspective, 115, 117–18, 119, 121 transactional approach to analysis of social life, 151–2 antiquarianism, 7 Arnhem Land: its history and its people, 243 Art and agency, 131–2 assimilation policy, 9, 12, 13, 16, 55, 80, 98, 236, 252, 255, 259, 272, 274, 277–8 Attwood, Bain, 234 Aurukun, 176 Australia: the quiet continent, 244 Australia: a social and political history, 237 Australia (Crawford), 237 Australia (Ward), 244 The Australian Aborigines: how to understand them, 258 The Australian Aborigines (unpublished book), 239–40 Australian Army Directorate of Research, 5 Australian Association for the Advancement of Science, 238, 239, 251 Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), 27, 251 Australian Bureau of Statistics census, 221, 223 Australian civilization, 237 Australian identity, 264–7 Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Aboriginal involvement, 68 aims, focus, scope and structure, 60–1, 62, 64, 68, 69–70, 253 ANU involvement in foundation of, 59–62 Conference on Aboriginal Studies (1961), 61, 62–3, 65, 68 criticisms by Ronald Berndt, 63, 64–6 first constitution, 70 first council, 73–4 Interim Council, 63–4, 65, 68–9

284

Index

political pressures, 74 relationship to ANU, 66, 71–3 second constitution, 70–3 Stanner Reading Room, 58 Stanner’s role in establishment, 8, 58, 60–70, 73 Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), 75 Australian legend,The, 239 Australian National University (ANU), 5, 8, 59–62, 66, 71–3 see also Research School of Pacific Studies Australian New Guinea Administrative Unit (ANGAU), 32, 35–6 Australian Pacific Territories Research Committee, 39 Australian People,The, 237 Australian School of Pacific Administration (ASOPA), 39, 40 Australian Territories, post-war policy and administration, 32–3, 34, 37, 38, 39, 40 autobiography, 256–8 axiology, 118, 121–3

role in Milirrpum Case, 9, 190, 201, 204–7 biography, and anthropology, 89–90, 93–4, 98, 116 Birdsell, Joseph, 171, 190 The Black diggers, 30 Black War: the extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines, 243 Blackburn, J, 200, 202, 205–6 Blackfellows of Australia, 244 Blackwell, Doris, 244 Blainey, Geoffrey, 234, 265–6, 267 Blamey, Thomas, 32, 33, 37 Bland, Harry, 84 Bolton, Geoffrey, 265, 270 Bonwick, James, 243 Boyd, Robin, 251 Boyer Lectures by Boyd, Robin, 251 by Manning Clark, 237, 260–2 by Martin Krygier, 262 by Noel Pearson, 14–15, 234 history of, 251 Boyer Lectures by Stanner After the Dreaming, 2, 17, 96, 256–8 ‘The appreciation of difference’ (third lecture), 250 ‘Composition’ (fifth lecture), 250, 259 ‘Confrontation’ (fourth lecture), 250, 258 ‘The great Australian silence’ (second lecture), 14, 15, 233–4, 235, 236 influence and significance of, 2, 9, 12, 234–5, 260–7 ‘Looking back’ (first lecture), 235–6, 237–8 Boyer, Richard, 251 Bringing them home (HREOC report), 262 British colonial policy, 37–8, 43, 46, 46–7 Broom, Leonard, 239 Bruce, Lord, 4 Bryant, Gordon, 84 Bryden, W, 68 Bunting, EJ, 70 Butlin, SJ, 62

Bagshaw, Geoff, 131 Balga song genre, 153 Banduck, Kevin, 120 Banduck, Nym, 102, 109, 114 Barker, Grahame, 115, 125 Barnard Eldershaw, M, 237, 238, 240–1 Barnes, John, 8, 23, 39, 60–1, 62, 68, 68, 69, 112, 122 Barrett, Charles, 244 Barry, Keith, 29 Bartlett, Norman, 244 Barton, GB, 240 Barwick, Diane, 8, 22, 240 Beattie, John, 127 Beazley, Kim (Sn), 73 Beckett, Jeremy, 8, 103, 108, 115, 116 Bell, James, 22 Bell, JH, 68 Bern, John, 115, 125 Berndt, C, 7, 68, 204, 243 Berndt, RM, 7, 59, 189, 243 membership of AIAS, 58, 67–8, 68, 69, 70, 129 opposition to AIAS, 59, 63, 64–6, 67–8, 68, 69, 70, 129, 189, 190

Calley, Malcolm, 22 Calwell, Arthur, 29, 30 Campbell, TD, 68 Canberra Sociological Society, 252

285

Index Capell, AA, 68 Carr-Saunders, Alexander, 48, 50 Casagrande, Joseph, 89 Casey, D, 68 Casey, RG, 4 census see demography Chaney, Fred, 85 change see continuity and change Charles Mackay lecture, 212 Chinnery, EWP, 30 Christian cosmology, Indigenous engagement with, 153–6 Clark, Manning, 60, 234, 237, 244, 260–2 Cleland, J, 68 Clendinnen, Inga, 91, 95, 97, 99, 234, 261–2 Coleman, Peter, 237 Collier, James, 243 Collins, David, 126 Colliver, FS, 68 Colonial Development and Welfare Act 1940 (UK), 46, 55, 277 colonial policy, 259–60 in Africa, 7, 37–8, 43, 46, 46–7 for Australian Territories and colonies, 35–40 in Pacific, 7 Colonial Research Committee (UK), 47 Colonial Social Science Research Council (UK), 47, 57 communitas, 148, 150 Conference on Aboriginal Studies (1961), 61, 62–3, 68 Conlon, Alfred A, 28–30, 32–3, 37, 38, 40, 41 Conrad, Joseph, 90 constitutional amendment referendum of 1967, 245, 253, 254–6, 274 consubstantiality, 131 continuity and change, 112–13, 117, 119, 153, 162–3, 209, 212, 251–2 ‘Continuity and change’ (essay), 14 Coombs, HC ‘Nugget’, 9, 41, 82, 210, 242, 260, 276 and Australia–PNG border issue, 83 cost of supporting Aboriginal causes, 86 eulogy for Stanner, 76 involvement in CAA, 77 on Prime Minister’s Committee for National Morale, 29 view on Department of Interior, 83–4

view of Peter Howson, 80 Cooper, Fennimore, 91 Council for Aboriginal Affairs (CAA) achievements of, 81–4, 86 articulation with government, 77–9 definition of Aboriginal and Islander people, 79 formation, 200, 254 Holt’s vision for, 76–7, 274 meetings with AIAS, 79 members, 82 operation of, 274 relationship with ALP and Whitlam Government, 83 relationship with Fraser government, 84–5 relationship with Gorton Government, 77–80 relationship with McMahon Government, 77, 80–2, 208 role and function, 77 and self-determination, 11, 13 Stanner’s involvement and influence in, 9, 12, 41, 76, 86, 274, 275–8 Stanner’s view of the importance of, 78–9 submissions to Cabinet, 78 Cowan, Zelman, 260 Crawford, John, 71–2 Crawford, RM, 29, 64, 66, 67, 70, 237 Crocombe, Mark, 114 Crossed purposes, 14 Crowley, Frank, 237 cultural authenticity, 262–3 cultural convergence, 263–4 cultural redevelopment, 14–15 cultural relativism, 116 cultural transformation, 4 Curtin Government, 28–9, 33 Dalrymple, David, 179 Daly Land Trust area, 221 Daly River region, 3, 80, 90–1, 95, 102, 103, 151, 226 Daly Statistical Local Area, 221, 223 Dark, Eleanor, 240 David-Neal, Alexandra, 116 Day of Mourning, 243 Deamer, Sid, 29 demography 1933 national census, 218 286

Index census and estimates of Aboriginal population, 220–1 fertility rate of Aboriginal population, 222 implications of rapid Aboriginal population growth, 217 necessity and value of population counts, 217, 219 population growth, 222–3 rate of population growth, 222–3 Department of Aboriginal Affairs, 276 Department of the Environment, Aborigines and the Arts, 77, 80 Department of Information, 27, 29 Department of the Interior, 81, 83–4 The destruction of Aboriginal society, 246 development in Africa and Pacific, 7, 12 appreciation of challenges of, 4 reputation of anthropological research, 52–4 and research, 47–50 see also economic development Dexter, Barrie, 9, 82, 274 Aboriginal Affairs, 84–6 difficulties with WC Wentworth, 77–8 establishment of CAA, 76–7 Office of Aboriginal Affairs, 76, 82 difference, 277 integrity of, 96 rarefaction of, 91 selective approach to, 98–9 Stanner’s appreciation of, 99 Directorate of Research and Civic Affairs (DORCA) appointment as Assistant Director of Research, 32 plans for post-war Australian Territories and colonies, 34 recruitment of anthropologists, 34–7 role in policy formulation, 28, 35–40 Djanba dancing (Wadeye), 120 Djanba song genre, 156–9 Docherty, Richard (Fr), 3, 218 Docker, EG, 245 Dream Time, doctrine of, 17 ‘The Dreaming’, 17, 95, 96, 185, 199–200 Duncan-Kemp, Alice, 244 Dunphy, Dexter, 260 Durkheim, E, 17, 110, 115, 117, 121, 126, 129, 133

‘Durmugam: a Nangiomeri’ (essay), 89, 90, 211 Durmugam, 95, 118 first meeting with Stanner, 90–1 integrity of difference, 96 involvement in Kunapipi cult, 94 personal qualities, 97 as personification of ‘vital will of Aborigines’, 91–2 relationship with Stanner, 94–5, 97, 102 reunion in 1950s, 92–3 ‘Eaglehawk and Crow’, 75 East African Institute of Social Research (Makerere College) intellectual and administrative problems, 48, 49–52 role and focus, 47–8, 51, 52 Stanner’s directorship of, 45, 46 survey of research needs, 52–3, 55 economic development and land use policies, 266 and reserved lands, 275, 276 and welfare, 277–8 economic liberalism, 280 Elkin, AP, 7, 22, 34, 39, 64, 68, 245, 251, 252, 253, 255, 258 on Aboriginal religion, 116, 129 advice on Indigenous role in WWII, 30 supervision of Stanner’s early fieldwork, 3 Ellis, WF , 68 environmental determinism, 170, 188 European vision and the South Pacific 1768—1850, 245 Evans-Pritchard, EE, 5, 8, 48 Evatt, HV, 39, 40, 44 exchange systems, 218 exuviae sorcery, 131 Falkenberg, J, 221, 226 fieldwork in Daly River region, 3, 80, 90–1, 95, 102, 103, 151 in Fitzmaurice region, 102–8, 110–11 with Kamba people, 57 in Kenya, 5 in Port Keats area, 102, 103, 132, 151, 218–20, 221, 226, 228 in Uganda, 55 287

Index Fink, Ruth, 22, 68 Firth, Raymond, 51, 112 influence on Stanner’s career, 4, 22, 44–5, 48, 56 supervision of Stanner’s early fieldwork, 3 Firth, Rosemary, 45 Fitzmaurice River, 104, 106, 108 Fitzmaurice River region, 8, 102–8, 110–11 Fitzmaurice River rock art, 102, 104–5, 107, 108, 111, 113, 114 Fitzpatrick, Brian, 29, 237 Fold, Ralph, 14 Forde, Frank, 27, 28 Forsyth, WD, 40 Fortes, Meyer, 5 Foxcraft, EJB, 60, 61, 64 Fraser Government, 23, 84–5 Fraser, Malcolm, 84 Frazer, James, 123, 126, 128–30 Freedom Ride, 245, 253 Freeman, Derek, relationship with, 8, 23 Freud, Sigmund, 17 ‘From Kimul to Blunder Bay’ (poem), 111–12 functionalism, 5 Gale, Fay, 68, 270 Gallery of Southern Man, 73 Geddes, Bill, 58, 62, 65, 67, 68, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73 Gell, Alfred, 131, 132 Gluckman, M, 5 Gollan, RA, 60 Goot, Murray, 254 Gorton Government, 9, 77, 79 Gorton, John, 77, 79–80 Gove Case see Milirrpum Case ‘great Australian silence’, 14, 16, 234, 235 Greenwood, Gordon, 237 Gregory, Bob, 272 Groger-Wurm, H, 68 groundnut scheme (Tanganyika), 54–5 group exchange, in Daly River area, 156–7 Gurindji people, 81, 83 Gurindji walk-off, 200, 245, 253 Haebich, Anna, 246 Hailey, William Michael, 43, 47, 57 Hall, Robert, 30

Hamilton, Annette, 115, 125 Hancock, Keith, 250 Hancock, WK, 260 Harney, William Edward (Bill), 32 Hart, CWM, 4, 7, 89–90, 218 Hartwig, Mervyn, 246 Hasluck, Paul, 29, 40, 98, 275 Hawke Government, 11 Hay, David, 84, 85 Hazzard, Shirley, 234 Herbert, Xavier, 31, 263 Herde, KH, 59, 60, 61 Herring, Edmund (Major General), 31 Hetzel, Basil, 260 Hewitt, Lennox, 80 Hiatt, Les, 8, 117, 170, 215–16 history Aboriginal history inside and outside the academy, 241–6 ‘black armband’ view, 266 and cultural authenticity and cultural convergence, 263–4 and environmental history, 265 exclusion and marginalisation of Aborigines, 234, 236, 237–8, 247, 257 and historians as moral tutors to nation, 261–2 incorporating environmental and Aboriginal history into national story, 265–7 influence of Stanner, 246–7 ‘obituary mode’ writings about Aborigines, 98, 238 revisionist accounts, 266 settler history, 247 see also Aboriginal history History of Australia (Barnard), 241 History of Australia (Clark), 237 History of Australia (Rusden), 243 ‘The history of indifference thus begins’ (essay), 240 History of Tasmania, 242–3 The history of Van Dieman’s Land, 242 ‘history wars’, 14 HMAS Emu, 104, 107 Hogbin, H Ian, 4, 29, 33, 34, 36, 39, 40, 41 Holt Government, 9, 76–7, 274 Holt, Harold, 76, 77 Howard government, 11, 178–9 abolition of ATSIC, 13 end of self-determination policy, 13 288

Index Indigenous affairs policy discourse, 271, 272–3, 279 national emergency intervention in NT, 273 Howson, Peter, 80 Hughes, Helen, 178, 272 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 262 humour, 10 Hunt, Ralph, 275

Kaberry, Phyllis, 4, 7, 23 Kanamkek figures, 104, 105 Kapferer, Bruce, 194 Kardu Diminin Country (popular song), 160 Kardu Wakal, 158 Keen, Ian, 109–10, 115, 116, 120, 122 Kenya, fieldwork, 5 Kenyatta, Jomo, 4 Kerr, JR, 29, 32, 33, 37, 40, 41 Kiddle, Margaret, 239, 245 kidney-fat stealers, 103, 114 Kirindjingin cave, 108 Kolig, Erich, 129–30, 135 Kolumboort, Robert Dungoi, 156 Krygier, Martin, 262 Kunapipi cult, 92, 94

Ideas and influence: social science and public policy in Australia, 279 Idriess, Ion, 96, 244 image sorcery, 131 Imperial Prime Ministers’ conference (London, 1944), 37 indexical relations, 131–2, 135–6 Indigenous affairs and 1967 referendum, 245, 253, 254–6, 274 bureaucratic responsibility for, 12 and economic development, 272, 275, 276 mainstreaming and difference, 276–7 national emergency intervention in NT, 178–9, 273 national policy on, 9, 271, 279–80 partnerships between communities and private enterprise, 13 policy making bodies, 11–13 population growth and service delivery, 217, 219, 223–4, 228, 277, 278–9 public discourse on persistence of disadvantage, 272–3 shift in symbolic politics of, 11 and the social sciences, 279–80 using Indigenous people to support war effort, 30–2 and welfare, 277–8 Ingold, Tim, 190–1 instrumentalism, 115, 121–2 integration policy, 13, 80, 272

La Nauze, John, 237, 238 Lamont, WD, 49, 52 land rights see Aboriginal land rights landscape and sense of place, 265 Langton, Marcia, 193 The Last of the Tasmanians, 243 Laves, Gerhardt, 3 Lawton, GH, 64 Laycock, DC, 68 Leach, Edmund, 8 League of Nations, 4 League of Nations Mandates Commission, 35 Leary, John, 108, 110 Levy-Bruhl, L, 130, 131 Lewis, Oscar, 89 Lingiari,Vincent, 83 Lippman, Lorna, 254, 255 Lirrga song genre, 156 Lloyd, CEM (Major General), 33 local organisation see Aboriginal local organisation Lodge, Oliver, 116 London School of Economics (LSE), anthropology centre, 4, 37, 48 Long, Jeremy, 221 Luckman, Thomas, 93, 98

James, EO, 128 Joe the Singing Man, 120 Jones, TA, 68 Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, 240 journalism career, with Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), 27 Junba song genre, 156

Mabo Case, 199 McCarthy, FD, 68, 71 McCaughey, Davis, 264–5 McConnel, Ursula, 7 McCusker, James, 64 McElwain, DW, 68, 69 289

Index McEwen, J, 59 Macintosh, NWG, 68 McKenna, Mark, 247 McMahon, Billy, 77, 80 McMahon government, 9, 80–1 McPhee, Peter, 28 Madan, TN, 110, 112–13, 115 maggots and religious iconography, 138 in Yolngu symbolic thought, 138–40 magic, vs. religion, 126, 128–30, 133 Mahkarolla, 90 mainstreaming, 276 Mair, Lucy, 37, 39 Makerere College (Uganda), 45, 49–50, 52 see also East African Institute of Social Research (Makerere College) Malgarrin song genre, 153–6 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 4, 5, 16, 22, 48, 90, 115, 116, 117 Malouf, David, 265, 266–7 mangrove worms, 139–40 Manne, Robert, 14, 234 mapping, 119, 194 marriage customs, 84 Martin, David, 175–6 Martin, Jean, 6 Meggitt, Mervyn, 7, 22, 68 Melville, Henry, 242 Melville, Leslie, 59 Men of yesterday, 245 Menzies Government, 27, 59–60 Menzies, Robert, 59, 60, 69, 75 merbok exchange cycle, 218 Merlan, Francesca, 120 Milirrpum Case, 9, 79, 189–90 antecedents, 200–2 Berndt’s role, 203–4 Blackburn’s decision, 207–8, 212–13 differences between Stanner and Berndt’s evidence, 204–7 problems of translation and interpretation, 204–8 significance of, 198–9, 201 Stanner’s role, 9, 79, 198–9, 201, 202–4, 212 Milirrpum and others versus Nabalco and the Commonwealth see Milirrpum Case Mitchell, Phillip, 53 Mitchell, Roma, 260

modernism, achievements of, 263–4 monism, 117 Moran, HM, 238 Morgan Gallup poll (1967 referendum), 255–6 Morphy, Howard, 115–16, 122, 132 Mountford, CP, 68, 123 Moyle, A, 68 Mulvaney, John, 245 Mundine, Warren, 272 Munn, Nancy, 8 Murinbata/Murrinh-patha religion, 10, 118, 120, 122, 123 Museum Planning Committee, 73 musical ethnography, 153 My Australia, 237 Myers, Fred, 97, 189, 190–2 ‘Nackeroos’ see North Australia Observer Unit (NAOU) Nadel, Siegfried, 6, 8 National Aboriginal Conference, 11 National Aboriginal Consultative Committee, 11 National Ethnographic Collection, 73 Native Affairs Branch (NT), 220 Native Labour Conference (Sydney, 1944), 36 native title, 199, 272 native title claims, 190 natural history approach, 171–2 New Guinea, as site for anthropological fieldwork, 6, 7 Ngaringari, 104–5, 106 Nixon, Peter, 275 North Australia Observer Unit (NAOU), commander of, 5, 28, 31–2 Northern Territory Administration, 220 Northern Territory Emergency Response statutory package, 273 Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit (NTSRU), 31 Oates, L, 68 Oeser, OA, 68 Office of Aboriginal Affairs, 76, 82, 254 Oliphant, Marcus, 66 On Aboriginal Religion, 8, 17, 96, 103, 110, 113, 115, 117, 120, 127–8, 137, 151–2 Outlaws of the Leopolds, 244 outstation movement, 161, 176, 277

290

Index Pacific Island territories, post-war policy and administration, 40 Paiyinimbi shelter, 107, 108 Pan-Aboriginalist politics, 12–13 Pandak, 104 Papua and New Guinea Territories anthropological studies of effects of war, 34–5, 36 post-war policy administration, 32, 37, 38–9, 43 Parkinson’s disease, 86 Partridge, PH, 66, 68 The pastoral age in Australia, 243 The pearl seekers, 244 Pearson, Keith, 84 Pearson, Noel, 13, 14–15, 178, 179, 234, 270, 272 Penny, Ronald, 6 Perham, Marjory, 52 Perjert, 104 phenomenology, 186, 190, 192, 194 Piddington, Ralph, 4, 7, 34 Pierce, Roy Harvey, 98 Pierceian index, 131 Piggott Inquiry on Museums and National Collections, 73 Pike, Douglas, 244 Pink, Olive, 187 Planning Committee on the Gallery of Aboriginal Australia, 73 Ploch, — (Commander), 104, 108 poetry, 45, 111–12, 265 Poirier, Sylvie, 193 population see demography Port Keats, 6, 8, 40, 153, 161, 219–20, 221, 226–7 see also Wadeye Port Keats Mission, 153–7, 219–20, 222–228 Port Keats/Thamarrurr region age composition of population, 224–6 population by age and sex 1956–2003, 225 Povinelli, Elizabeth, 192–3 practical anthropology, 48 Prichard, Katherine Susannah, 263 Prime Minister’s Committee on National Morale, 28–30 Providence Hill rock art gallery, 109 Purcell, Frank, 79, 201, 204 Purmi, 104, 105–6

Radcliffe-Brown, AR, 125 anthropological theory, 115 chair at Oxford, 4 impact on Stanner, 3, 16, 117, 119, 171, 189 and practical anthropology, 48 Rainbow serpent, 104, 106, 109 Randall, RJ, 70 Read, KE, 34 Reay, Marie, 7, 68, 252 reconstructionist ethnography, 193 reductionism, 122–3, 194 Register of Wards, 221 Reith, Ian, 84 Reith Lectures, 251 religion, 8, 17–18, 92, 96, 99, 102–3, 109–13, 115–18, 120–1 Aboriginal, 9, 17–18 anthropological interest in, 8 Indigenous engagement with Christian cosmology, 153–6 of Murinbata/Murrinh-patha, 10, 118, 120, 122, 123, 138, 152 and politics, 115–16, 118, 125, 127 power of words, 133 and ritual, 137 semiotic approach to, 126, 127–8 sociological analysis of, 188 sociology of, 129 symbolist approach to, 109–10, 127 vs. magic, 126, 128–30, 133, 135 ‘Religion, totemism and symbolism’ (essay), 8, 17, 110, 126 Report on Arnhem Land (CAA), 277 Report on a visit to Lajamanu and Hooker Creek (CAA), 277 Report on visit to Yendumu and Hooker Creek (CAA), 13, 279 Research School of Pacific Studies (ANU), 5–8, 9, 22, 23, 56 Reynolds, Henry, 234, 241, 247 Richards, Audrey, 37, 44, 47, 51–2, 55 Roper, ED, 29 Rose, DB, 192 Rouse, Tim, 271 Rowley, CD, 35, 79, 245–6 Rowse, Tim, 276, 277, 279 Rudder, John, 131 Rusden, GW, 243 Ryan, John, 32

291

Index sacrament, concept of, 127–8 St Francis (ship), 218 Samuel, Peter, 85 Sansom, Basil, 174 savagism, 90 Sawyer, G, 66 Scott, Ernest, 243 Select documents in Australian history, 1851–1900, 237 self-determination policy, 11–13, 14, 84, 259, 272 self-management policy, 23 sensibility, 123 settler history, 247 Sharp, Lauriston, 7 Shaw, AGL, 244 A short history of Australia (Clark), 244 A short history of Australia (Scott), 243 Simply human beings, 245 Smith, Bernard, 245, 263–4, 265, 267 Social Science Research Council (SSRC), 23, 62, 245–6, 253 sociology of religion, 129 sorcery, 130–1, 133 South Pacific Commission, 7, 40 South Seas Regional Commission, 40, 44 South Seas in Transition, 7, 22, 35, 39, 259 Spate, OHK, 112, 211 Spencer, WB, 123 Spender, Percy, 27, 28 Stanke,Victor PH (Major General), 32 Stanley, Owen, 278 Stanner, Patricia, 114 Stanner, WEH, 6, 36, 49, 68, 82, 177, 242, 261 academic career, 5–10, 22 appointment as Emeritus Professor at ANU, 79, 112 birth, 2 character and personal qualities, 1, 51–2 death, 1 doctoral studies at LSE, 4, 45 early aspirations, 1–2 early life, 2 on economic development, 276 employment during doctoral studies, 4 intellectual influences on his ideas, 117 intellectual legacy, 1, 10–18, 171 on land rights, 274–6 MA thesis, 3, 4, 112, 227

on mainstreaming and difference, 276–7 as a policy intellectual, 8–9, 273–4 political ambitions, 27 political conservatism, 7, 27–8, 33, 44 post-war employment, 5 retirement, 9–10 scope and influence of career, 1 undergraduate studies, 2–3 on welfare, 277–8 as a writer, 16–17 Stevens, Bertram, 27 ‘stolen generations’, 262 Stone, Julius, 29 The story of Australia, 244 Strathern, Marilyn, 180 Strehlow, TGH, 7, 59, 68, 251, 253 Stretton, Hugh, 260 structural functionalism, 5, 7, 151, 152, 193, 194 Sturmer, John von, 115, 125 Sutton, Peter, 102, 110, 114, 177 sympathetic magic, 128, 130 Taft, Ronald, 254, 255 Tanganyika Territory, 52, 54–5 Taylor, John, 278 Tchoma, Leo, 120 Tchoma, Timothy, 120 territoriality, evolution of, 174–8 things of value, 121–2 Thompson, EP, 179 Thomson, Donald, 7, 30, 31, 63, 123, 192, 245 Tindale, NB, 68, 90, 171, 189, 193 Tiwi islanders, 218 Tjandi [Sandy], 104, 105, 106–8, 111 totemism, 127, 128 traditional ownership, definition, 172 transcendence of the Dreaming, 116 pursuit of, 110–12 Stanner’s legacy, 10, 17 and things of transcendent value, 121–2 transcendentalism, 119 Trendall, AD, 60, 62, 63, 64, 66–7, 69 Tugby, DJ, 68 Turnbull, Clive, 243 Turner,Victor, 148, 150 Tylor, EB, 129

292

Index Ucko, Peter, 71, 73 Uganda, 55 United Australia Party, 27 University of Sydney Department of Anthropology, 34 University of Sydney Extension Board, 27

Western, John, 255 White man got no Dreaming, 7, 14, 234, 239, 240 Whitewash: on Keith Windschuttle’s fabrication of Aboriginal history, 14, 234 Whitlam Government, 9, 13, 73, 83–4, 208, 276 Wik people, 176 Williams, FE, 30 Williams, Nancy, 186 Willmot, Eric, 264, 265 Woodward, Edward, 201, 207, 214 Woodward Royal Commission, 199, 208–10, 213 World War II commander of North Australia Observer Unit (NAOU), 5, 28 contributions to war effort, 5 influence of intellectuals on running of country, 33–40 member of Prime Minister’s Committee on National Morale, 28–30 role in Directorate of Research and Civic Affairs (DORCA), 32–40 using Indigenous people to support war effort, 30–2 Worms, EA, 68 Worsley, Peter, 6 Wright, Judith, 265 Wright, Roy, 29 wunan exchange cycle, 218 Wurm, SA, 68

Vachon, Daniel, 193 value, 122 values, 117, 118 Vanstone, Amanda, 279 Victoria River District, 192 Viner, Ian, 84 vulgar materialism, 188 Wadeye, 151 counts and estimates of Aboriginal population 1947–2003, 222–3 Djanba and the tripartite ceremonial exchange, 156–9 Kardu Numida Council, 223 Malgarrin and performance of Christianity, 153–6 popular music and reproduction of clans’ identities, 159–62 population growth and service delivery, 223–4, 228 song genres, 152–3 Thamarrurr Regional Council, 221, 223 see also Port Keats; Port Keats Mission; Port Keats/Thamarrurr region Wadeye Palngun Wurangat (Wadey Women’s Association), 224 Wandjina figures, 104, 109, 110 Wang Gungwu, 242 Wangga song genre, 156 ‘War morale: a challenge to Australian youth’ (radio script), 27 Ward, Eddie, 39, 40 Ward, Graeme, 114 Ward, Russell, 239, 244 Warin, J, 178 Warner, W Lloyd, 7, 89–90 Warumungu people, 3 Wedgwood, Camilla, 34 Welfare Branch (NT), 220 Wentworth, WC, 8, 9, 58–9, 60, 64, 66–7, 68, 77–8, 211 West, John, 242–3 West, L, 68

Yambermin shelter, 104 Yarrar shelter, 108 Yirrkala bark petitions, 200, 245, 253 Yolngu ancestral doctrines, beliefs and practices, 130, 132, 133 land ownership, 274 maggot dancers, 142 maggots in symbolic thought, 138–40, 146–7 matha and mala and land tenure, 204–7 mortuary rituals, 139, 145–9 relationship to land, 274 yingapungapu ceremony, 140–4, 141, 142, 146–7 yithuwa (‘maggot’) dances, 137, 140–3 see also Milirrpum Case Yunupingu, Galarrwuy, 179

293