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Donald F. Thomson: scholar, farmer, advocate ...(Images of Aboriginality)

Article from:Arena Journal
Article date:September 22, 2006
Author: Sharp, Nonie

In The Savage Mind Claude Levi-Strauss pays tribute to the wide interdisciplinary range of an Australian anthropologist. One 'begins to wish,' he reflects there, 'that every ethnologist was also a mineralogist, a botanist, a zoologist and even an astronomer'. (1) After all, as the influential American anthropologist Paul Radin observed several generations earlier, most anthropologists are only at home with books. The eminent French anthropologist was referring, perhaps wistfully, to Donald Thomson: ethnologist, naturalist, zoologist, photographer and, in the language of today, cultural ecologist--a student of people living within their local environments. That was in 1962, eight years before Thomson's death.

Yet, notwithstanding this acclaim by a scholar as revered as Levi-Strauss, only one obituary appeared for Thomson in an Australian anthropological journal. Today things are different. Out of a long silence, the question is being asked: why has it taken so long to rediscover what Donald Thomson understood in the 1930s? A short answer is that his understanding of Aboriginal cultures was so far ahead of the anthropology of his time that it took more than half a century for members of the discipline to catch up. Unlike many of his peers, Thomson did not hold to the widespread assumption that Aboriginal people had no future except as 'assimilees' of a more industrious race.

In July 2001, a group of anthropologists and other scholars gathered together at a symposium on his life and work at the University of Melbourne. They were meeting to commemorate the centenary of his birth. Fifteen essays drawn from that symposium were published in 2005 in a finely illustrated volume, Donald Thomson: The Man and Scholar, by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, with support from Museum Victoria. The essays provide a good sense of the range and depth of his scholarship and interests, his place in Australian anthropology, his ecological stance, his contribution to herpetology and entomology, concern with Aboriginal rights, knowledge of Aboriginal languages and ethno-architecture, his informed interest in woven baskets and line drawings, and his knowledge of a magnificent collection of artefacts.

The editors, anthropologists Bruce Rigsby and Nicolas Peterson, sum up the broad range of his scholarship and his concerns: 'he not only carried out major anthropological fieldwork ... he also made scholarly contributions to ornithology and ecology, was an outspoken advocate for Aboriginal rights, and practised as a journalist, publishing over nine hundred articles covering all these interests'. (2) He was also 'A Photographer of Brilliance', the title of Lindy Allen's nicely illustrated chapter in the volume. The 2006 film Ten Canoes, a story of cultural pride narrated in the Yolngu language by David Gulpilil, was inspired by photographs Thomson took in Arnhem Land in the 1930s. Who else could have combined membership of the Standing Committee of the Royal Anthropological Institute and be writing a weekly nature column for young people in The Weekly Times, a Victorian farmers' paper with a long history?

He was chastised by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, for spending time on 'extraneous subjects' and A. R. Elkin disparaged his zoological and journalistic proclivities. In the present era, when scholars are encouraged to study humans and other species in their local environments, Thomson's emphasis appears praiseworthy. So too his efforts, journalistic and practical, warning against the threat to the survival of native species: his call was prophetic on the extinction of the thylacine or marsupial wolf of Tasmania.

In the field of anthropology, the legacy he left is rich, varied and ongoing. His work in Cape York, in Arnhem Land, in Central Australia is to be found not only in published articles, but also very importantly in unpublished manuscripts, in hundreds of pages of fieldnotes, meticulously documented photographs and artefacts. The Donald Thomson Collection housed at Museum Victoria for the University of Melbourne continues to be a rich source and inspiration to anthropologists and other scholars today. Some of his fieldnotes--for example his work in Arnhem Land on ancestral power--have been published since his death. (3) His major 219-page manuscript of twenty-five chapters, The Aborigines of Australia, based on his work in eastern Arnhem Land, has never been published. He saw this work as 'the story of the aborigines with whom I lived and worked ... during the best years of my life'. (4) As it happened, in 1937 when Thomson was taking his rich knowledge of ceremonial life and myth towards book publication, Lloyd Warner published A Black Civilisation based on his own work in Arnhem Land, more than half of which concerned ceremonial life.

Thomson's scholarly story begins in 1928 when this highly intelligent and practical young man travelled northward from Melbourne to Cape York Peninsula. During that year and from 1929 to 1933, Donald and his wife spent months with local Aboriginal people first at Stewart River and then at Bare Hill community, an Aboriginal Reserve and Mission at Lockhart River on the eastern side of Cape York Peninsula. Already a qualified naturalist-zoologist from the University of Melbourne, Thomson, before travelling north, took a Diploma of Anthropology at Sydney University. He also obtained a necessary permit from Chief Protector J. W. Bleakley in Brisbane to visit a reserve for Aboriginal people.

What he found among the people at Stewart River was 'something strange and beautiful'. Feelings sprung first by the music of their dancing. And his aesthetic appreciation of the people he soon came to know and to love, his sense of the integrity and originality of their humanity, coloured his most detailed and often mundane observations of their daily and yearly rounds.

Out of this work and experience he soon wrote seminal and lastingly influential papers in the field of anthropology: 'The Hero Cult, Initiation and Totemism on Cape York', a major article published in the prestigious Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 1933; 'The Dugong Hunters of Cape York' in the same journal for 1934; and the highly influential 'The Seasonal Factor in Human Culture', published in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society for 1939. They reveal an understanding that not only goes to the heart of their lives, that 'reads' them like a musical score, but also offers a guide to the principles people live by. Now, so many years later, these insights into the principles that guided the 'sandbeach people' of Cape York, as they call themselves, remain invaluable to researchers in the same and neighbouring areas. Myself for example. In no small measure his rich understanding of these saltwater Aborigines led me on a saltwater journey of my own on Cape York Peninsula, the Torres Strait Islands and beyond.

Yet his experience at Cape York has another aspect: one that left an indelible mark on his character and his life. Side by side with his ready aesthetic appreciation of the integrity and cultural difference of the sandbeach Aborigines, Thomson was moved to anger by the cruelty shown to Aboriginal people by some members of his own society. He reacted forthrightly to the official practice of sending people who 'escaped' from Reserves in chains to the Palm Island penal settlement.

In these early years of his anthropological career and his life's work (one that was already going far beyond that particular and important discipline), was the dual memory of beauty and discord to shape his future and himself? There is evidence that these experiences marked the beginnings of a transformation in this young Donald, that they shook him to the core. Did a spiral of tragedy in the lives of the people he knew, loved and felt part of become a spiral of anguish, even tragedy within himself? A man thrown back on his own resources, what did he draw on to nurture his own sense of well-being and of hope? Did Donald Thomson's young man's appreciation of the grace and integrity of Aboriginal culture combine with his first experience of a tragedy, stir a level of himself of which he could be only partly aware? There is reason to believe it did so. Even more, that his ongoing appreciation and knowledge of Aboriginal people in other remote parts of Australia combined with a growing resentment at their treatment by officials and some citizens of his own society. The outcome, as Peterson suggested two decades ago, was an ongoing spiral of 'otherness' in Thomson. True, though this is only part of the story.

In many ways, he was like the Aboriginal people he responded to so positively: the world around him in its myriad aspects and vicissitudes enthralled him. This, he soon found, was also dear to them. In his later work, he reproduces an old square-faced bottle washed up on the shores of Arnhem Land, 'reborn' as a ceremonial totem among the Yolngu, that they had painted with clouds and beche-de-mer in a geometric design.5 Work of art and ritual object. He lived their lives; his earliest field notes record how he learnt to 'actually catch fish' in his first weeks at Port Stewart on Cape York Peninsula; he enjoyed their company, spoke their language, and helped them in all sorts of ways, as they did him. They brought creatures for him to identify; he shared his knowledge of the local fauna and flora at Lockhart River community. 'We loved Dr Don. We felt he was ours,' Torres Strait Islander Flo Kennedy (nee Savage) recalls her joyful childhood memories of him at Lockhart River mission settlement where her parents worked. He let her watch him milk the taipan (the snake he named in the local language), he identified her father's Greater Frigate bird (Fregata minor) and he let her rename 'Nutmeg', the family's pet Torres Strait pigeon, 'Don'. No wonder then he felt part of them and soon came to see himself as 'thinking black': he became their advocate as well as a student of their culture.

Eighteen years after Donald Thomson first met the local Sandbeach People camped beside the Stewart River estuary on north-eastern Cape York Peninsula, he wrote eloquently of that moment as a vivid experience. That first glimpse recollected in 1946 he would long remember. 'It was low water ... and in [the Stewart River] estuary were miles of fine, clean sandbanks, with pools and rivulets winding through the sand.' Everything he saw was in place for the south-east season when cool trade winds blow along the coast: 'the people were living ... just above the high water mark, in beehive shaped wurlies thatched with great sheets of tea-tree (Melaleuca) bark'. Their canoes were moored in the shallows close by. Sea swallows or terns hovered overhead and farther out black and white pelicans conducted spectacular fishing operations.

I see a profound connection between his sense of the integrity of Aboriginal culture, his respect for the Aboriginal people he lived and worked with, and his sense of their tragedy. Now in his 1946 article 'Justice for Aboriginals', published in the Melbourne Herald on 28, 29 and 30 December, he connects these together. An appeal to readers to become aware of and act on the tragic consequences of dispossession and paternalism. His was an early call for land rights--of the 'hereditary ownership of land by clans in Australia'. Why at this moment did a long-treasured memory break out into almost lyrical prose? Because he was stirred by the harmonies of beauty in the lives of the sandbeach people he came upon long ago? Yes, but also because he was deeply stirred by the cruelty towards them, and he was speaking out for Justice. Although many saw him as having an artistic temperament, lyrical prose, even in the manner of William Stanner, or in the elegiac moments of Clifford Geertz, are almost absent in Thomson. The compass of his voice lay in a deeper range of notes. Had he been moved to write poetry it might have been more in Shelley's register than, say, that of Wordsworth or Keats.

Donald Thomson had more than his share of personal disappointments, sadness and traumas in his life. The Queensland Aboriginals Department did not allow him to return to Cape York after his second visit ended in 1933. His first marriage soured in court battles. On 25 March 1946 a fire in the Commonwealth Department building destroyed his 22 000 feet of film based on his work in Arnhem Land, a heartbreaking loss of a significant part of his life work. His health declined; and in the domain of the academy, he experienced both a terrible aloneness and grave disappointment at the lack of a chance to publish his most extended work on the Aborigines of Australia.

In their essays in Donald Thomson: The Man and the Scholar, both Geoffrey Gray and Bain Attwood document his intellectual estrangement from the anthropological establishment. Certainly this rift opened more and more during Thomson's life. But beyond this, his times were awaiting intellectual change. In a seminal essay, anthropologist Ad Borsboom identifies a lacuna that may have been especially intense for Donald. Structural-functionalism, the acclaimed theory of his time, had nothing to say on changes or continuities that lay below the observed categories in which Aboriginal groups were living, even though these were defined by outside authorities. Thomson's field notes made during his work in Arnhem Land offered Borsboom a way of seeing that took the Yolngu structures into account. Thomson was visionary, he concludes. This gave him a sense of Thomson's dilemmas: available theory was inadequate to handle continuity-in-change. Where was he to take his understanding that identities are open-ended and contextual in the face of a theory whose language was exclusively about fixed structures? Levi-Strauss or even Marcel Mauss had not 'arrived' in the anthropological discourse of Thomson's times, and Borsboom contemplates his past colleagues' feelings of silent desperation.

For thirty years I have carried around with me feelings of indebtedness to the inspiration and work of Donald Thomson. Why was his work so important to me? I have asked myself many times. Why did so much of what I learnt stay in my memory? Because his work was a beacon. I read it at a time when the right to put the colonial Other under the anthropological microscope was in question. On the ground, I had found that the old policies that killed initiative, induced apathy and crushed people's fighting spirit were still rife in the Torres Strait Islands and Cape York Peninsula even in the late 1970s and 1980s. And I carried a deep-seated wish to separate myself from an anthropology that placed them under the microscope. Donald Thomson was different.

Three qualities of his life and work stood out for me. First, he gave a lucid picture and understanding of the people he worked with. He grasped their profound and extensive awareness and knowledge of their environment and its patterns of cyclical movement. In his matter-of-fact way he conveyed a sense of peoples who lived by certain cultural principles different to those of his own culture. In doing so he was part of that understanding of the 1970s and beyond that cultures and peoples may only be understood within their own cultural terms. Second, he accorded them respect for their prowess, their courage and their humanity. These qualities came to me strongly: the Sandbeach People as great hunters and splendid seafarers, qualities that befit a warrior people. Or the manner in which the seasonal cycle not only dictates activities, but also stamps people's identities: seasonal activities vary so widely that to an onlooker they might appear to be different peoples in different seasons. I loved that. He respected the Sandbeach People for their fearlessness--'an utter disregard for danger' during a dugong hunt that seemed to be perhaps the most dangerous activity practised by any Aboriginal person anywhere in Australia. Not until I became familiar with the understanding anthropologist John Bradley conveys of the 'dugong hunters of excellence' among the Yanyuwa of the Sir Edward Pellew islands, or the work of the late David Lewis on Pacific Islander and arctic people's wayfinding, did I find a match for the respect that Thomson displays towards the prowess of the sea hunters of Cape York. Third, I see his courage to speak out as tied directly to his sense of the spiritual strength and practical skillfulness of the Aboriginal people he worked with. In his own fearlessness I see him as akin to the people whom he held in high regard.

My path crossed only twice with Donald Thomson's. On the first, in 1960, he shooed us and our young child off his property. On the second occasion he bought my Large White boar; yes--I had a pig breeding herd highly recommended by the Department of Agriculture. The animal had excellent credentials. It happened in the late 1960s and, strangely, I was on the way out of farming and farm writing and on the way into anthropology. As I delivered the pig I did not see then a conundrum in how a famous anthropologist was also a farmer. His preparedness to speak out against assimilation and for the right of Indigenous people to live on their own lands as the original owners had landed him in difficult terrain. Had I known it, his experience of being marginalized by the institutions of power and conformity may not be unconnected with his seeking satisfaction or solace on a tractor. It so happened that I had unusual reasons of my own to farm and to empathize with some of Thomson's own circumstances. But I was not ready to think about that just then.

Did his sense of the tragedy of a dispossession that crushed people's spirits and left them often without hope continue to weigh heavily on him to the end? Was his inability to get through to those who held power over Aborigines a source of despair as well as frustration for him? Would he see those troubles today--of dependence on welfare and alcohol--now matters of public attention, as built upon the old edifice of Protection and paternalism? What would he be saying now?

In his chapter on Thomson as 'Ecologist and Public Educator', Ian Temby evokes nicely a man with fine feelings for nature (the boys at his school called Donald 'Kanga'): how his Birds of Cape York Peninsula and several of his popular articles on snakes were published in the mid-1930s, the same years as his early anthropological articles; how readers sent him live quolls, a threatened species, by rail; how he urged young people to 'Study natural history in your garden'; and his public advocacy of the protection of native wild life. 'As an Australian I resent bitterly the right of politicians to dispose of these [fur-bearing] native animals,' he wrote in The Sydney Mail ('Save the Silver-Grey Opossum') in 1931. I imagine him here today. Pleased about Mabo. Explaining to young people the meaning of our fingerprints on the climate, the loss of species, water crises. Somewhere close to James Lovelock's awareness in his 2006 book The Revenge of Gaia, 'that we have infringed the environment of the other species' in a world taking us all along inexorably towards devastating climate change.

Donald Thomson: The Man and Scholar gives a rich sense of a remarkable scholar the world was not yet ready for. He suffered in so many ways for its lack of readiness. In many of the essays one senses feelings of regret, of awareness of injustices done to a man whose inspiration left most of his colleagues and his fellow citizens far behind. Of course that did not make for easy relations with many of his colleagues. And while there were those who perceived what he was about and sought to listen to him, their imagination was limited to particular subjects.

Because his range, his vision, his aesthetic sense, his sense of right and wrong, his preparedness to advocate, went beyond the understanding or the gut feeling of most of his contemporaries, even this fine volume leaves unanswered the deep questions of the meaning of his life--of his sojourn here.

What does being ahead of one's time mean? That's hardly an academic question. Because here we're speaking of a man's Inspiration, his vision, some would say his soul. At the symposium in 2001 and in this volume, one detects a wish among scholars to make amends, to say now what their predecessors--scholars, governments, legislators, officials--were not big enough or brave enough or insightful enough to say then.

In due course, someone will write Donald F. Thomson: A Life. She or he will have to be big enough--even a wee bit odd as well--to do justice to this man. If not, that story must await another teller ...

(1.) C. Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962, p. 45.

(2.) B. Rigsby and N. Peterson (eds), Donald Thomson: The Man and Scholar, Canberra, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, 2005, p. 2.

(3.) See for instance 'The Concept of "Marr" in Arnhem Land', Mankind, vol. 10, 1975, and Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land, 1983, both prepared for publication by Nicolas Peterson.

(4.) N. Peterson, 'Thomson's Place in Australian Anthropology', in Rigsby and Peterson (eds), Donald Thomson: The Man and Scholar, Canberra, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, 2005, p. 38.

(5.) D. F. Thomson, Economic Structure and the Ceremonial Exchange Cycle in Arnhem Land, Melbourne, Macmillan, 1949, Plate 5.