Anchors in the Desert Sand

Sounding the cultural waters in Australasia

by Timothy Mason

Université de Paris 8

 

Introduction

Although the broad sweep of my intervention here takes us through the works of Spencer and Gillen, on through Malinowski and up to Kaberry, the main weight of my remarks will be carried by the strange and perhaps rather pathetic figure of Daisy Bates. Bates's reputation is a bizarre, hicuppy sort of thing ; there are regular attempts to make of her an Australian heroine, and just as regularly she is debunked. Her most recent biographer, Julian Blackburn, announces at the outset that she knows her subject to have been a liar. Her stories about the Aborigines amongst whom she lived for decades are clearly monstrous fabrications. Her only close relationships among white people – her two husbands and her son – were failures, and her few white friends found her exasperating. What the people that she wrote about thought of her is something of a mystery.

Bates also had her ups and downs with the anthropological establishment : at one time she accompanied Radcliffe-Brown into the field, and Andrew Lang offered to put her notes into publishable form. Later she was to openly accuse Brown of plagiarism at a professional congress. Lang never finished his editing task. Some recent anthropologists have been sympathetic ; Rodney Needham revived the charge of plagiarism against Brown, and suggested that Lang had never finished editing Bates's book because her findings challenged some of his most cherished contentions. But although there may be some who find that her earliest work was sufficiently solid to deserve citation, the later writings, in which, as we will see, she invents a world full of ogres and devils, over which she reigns as Queen, take her so far beyond the pale of scientific discourse as to be of little use to anyone other than the specialist in morbid psychology.

I am not sure myself of the role that Daisy Bates will take within my own developing tale. My instincts at this time are to see the whole of anthropology as a tainted endeavour, but I am aware that this may be some lingering trace of juvenile absolutism on my part, as if Peter Pan were constantly astir behind my left ear. If I listen to him, I am tempted to do mischief, to tweak the noses of the great. I will say that Daisy Bates is an admittedly extreme case, that her mythomania was clearly pathological, but that nevertheless, it has the merit of revealing most clearly the dirty little secrets of the trade she claimed, at least fitfully, to follow. Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski, Elkin and their later avatars were not mad, as Daisy Bates may well have been, but they were fabulators and myth-makers, and if their myths were a little more reasonable, a little more controlled than hers were, they were – for that very reason - also more insidiously misleading.

I will say these things, and I will not be sure of how far they are just or illuminating. But it happens that after having plunged into anthropological discourse for the last ten years or so, this seems to be what wants to be said. Daisy Bates will hold aloft the light by which I will navigate my way through these sandy waters. It is a role she has played before.

Anchorages

The ocean-going vessel drops anchor where sea meets land. The desert traveler seeks repose where sand meets water. For many centuries, the desert dwellers of Australia have gathered at Ooldea, at Charlotte Waters, at Alice Springs ; there they have celebrated, created and exchanged. The water holes provide the anchorage points upon which their stories are articulated ; it is there that the Rainbow Snake lurks, there that the ancestor figures emerge from the underground and disappear back into it. The white invader appropriated their gathering places in his attempts to master the new continent : Ooldea became a watering place for the newly built railway, until the rapacious greed of the newcomers left it dry. At Charlotte Waters and Alice Springs were located the repeater stations that propulsed the telegraph signals across Central Australia, linking the coastal colonies of the South-East to the distant metropolis. New stories and new ancestors were pegged down into the sand with metal stakes, while the ripples of the finger-drawings were raked smooth. But although Aboriginal patterns of seasonal migration were disrupted, they did not cease ; the watering holes continued to exercise their attractions. Celebration, creation and exchange continued, but with the need to take into account new relationships of power, new ways of seeing the world and acting in it. The sandy ports of the Australian desert acquired new traffic, new goods and new harbour masters.

For some ten years towards the end of the nineteenth century, the harbour-master at Alice Springs was a man named Frank Gillen. Of Irish stock, he brought with him the a strong memory of his youthful Catholicism, an inquiring mind, and a capacity for human relationships which transcended cultural frontiers. He was, in many ways, a perfect middle-man, whose opportune arrival in Central Australia placed in a fine position to engage in the business of trading in symbols.

All trade is trade in symbols of course ; pepper undergoes translation as it makes its way from the Spice Islands to a market stall in Antwerp. Nevertheless, there are limits ; a chili will burn your tongue at whatever latitude you are when you pop it in your mouth. But what about those more rarefied goods, the ones that do not thump into the wooden hold in boxes? Can rites or rimes pass from one culture to another without becoming totally denatured? The radical post-modernist may make this claim, but not all would agree ; even among those who would seem to be the standard bearers of cultural relativism, the anthropologists, we find some who still argue for the existence of a unity of the human mind and being which permits the passage of even the strangest goods. Michael Harner, for example, believes that he has been able to identify in the practices and beliefs of magicians and healers across the world a common substratum that we can all comprehend. He calls it 'core shamanism', and if you will buy his book, or, even better, attend one of his courses, he will teach it to you.

Now, I suspect that Harner's conclusion may well be correct, although I can't say that I much like what he has done with it. So when Gillen tells us that he catches glimpses of Catholic theology in the beliefs of the men he found himself talking to around Alice Springs, I am willing to listen. Gillen began to take an interest in the Aboriginal way of life from the moment he found himself posted out on the line, but it was at Alice Springs that he canalized this interest. This came about because, as head man of the station there, he hosted the scientific investigators that came out to study the new world. It was when a group of scientists, the Horn Expedition, stopped over at Alice that he came to know Baldwin Spencer, with whom he was to write two books that, if not the first in their field, were to place Aboriginal culture firmly in the mainstream of anthropological research.

The first anthropologists were either armchair theoreticians or part-timers who found themselves involved in the mopping-up operations after the frontier had pushed its way further on and further out. Missionaries or agents of the state, their interest in the peoples who had been subjugated were sometimes professional, but not always. Frank Gillen might well have spent his days in the Australian centre as his colleagues and comrades did, doing the job for which they were paid, and looking upon the local Aborigines as a lower form of life – sometimes troublesome, sometimes amusing, but rarely of anything more than anecdotal interest.

Gillen's point of anchorage was the telegraph repeater station at Alice Springs. Between 1894, when he first met Baldwin Spencer, until his move to Moonta in 1899, he carried out ethnographic investigations of the peoples living around his place of employment, peoples whom he named the Arunta. Gillen himself was not so much the voyager as the harbour-master ; it was the job of the repeater stations to freshen up the telegraphic signal and send it on its way refurbished. It was also incumbent upon the station master to provide haven for voyagers, both Aboriginal and White. So it was that when the Horn Expedition of 1894, a voyage of discovery across Central Australia, docked at Alice Springs, Gillen was there to welcome them – and to become the firm friend of Spencer, the party's biologist. Spencer, who had spent time with both Frazer and Tyler before taking up his post at the University of Melbourne, was, through Gillen's good offices, to make the acquaintance of the Arunta elders, and to remember that he had come to Australia with a letter from Tyler in his pocket.

The most fruitful moment in their collaboration came when Spencer was able to spend a full three months at Alice Springs, during which they were able to witness a set of important religious ceremonies such as had until then remained largely unrecorded. This was the Engwura, performed for the two field-workers in the summer of 1896-7. Why the Arunta allowed them to see such highly sacred rituals, usually reserved for the fully initiated, is not clear, but it seems to be the case that they were in fact eager in their desire to put before the two white men a considerable part of their cultural treasure, and that they organized what was, in fact, a most unusual occasion with the express intent of putting on a display for the outsiders.

Eric Venbrux¹ has argued that, on one of his later forays into ethnological field-work, Spencer acquired from the Tiwi a number of ceremonial objects, such as funeral poles, in ways that were adroitly controlled by the natives. Spencer also collected ritual objects during his time at Alice Springs, as did Gillen, and one may surmise that here also the Arunta were not simply passive victims of the white men's rapacity². To this one might add that the establishment of trading relations, with ritual objects being exchanged for tea, tobacco and for the rich possibilities that alliance with a powerful colonial official might bring, would not be limited to material goods. Australian peoples, like most others, regard their ritual performances as being in some way property, to be bought and sold, within a series of ritual exchanges. Spencer and Gillen had been able to furnish the Arunta elders with the details of rites that had been observed by other ethnologists, and in particular those reported by Howitt and Fison ; that in itself may have been reason enough for the headmen to decide that they could – indeed should – make their own offerings. We can catch a glimpse of this in Spencer's later work, when he tells us that the people of Bathhurst Island became talkative once he had shown them his photographs of the Arunta ceremonies.

The anthropologist, then, introduces himself into an already existing network within which both material goods and ritual performances are traded. His introduction into this system changes it, quite obviously ; the question is to know how. What appears to happen is that goods which had previously circulated within a relatively closed system now flow out into the main-stream of global exchange. However, those that are high in symbolic value, but low in use value³ – rituals, sacred ornaments or hand-crafted utensils – tend to be removed completely from the circuit, and to find their way into one or another form of cultural stockage – the private collection, the museum, the book or the film. Interestingly, their display remains reserved, as was often the case in their original setting, to specific times and to specific categories of people, even though the criteria determining the right to contemplate them are rather different.

Gillen, harbour-master, facilitated these exchanges to great effect : the sacred objects which he sought out vigourously⁴, and the sacred knowledge which he garnered through careful inquiry and participation, were stocked in museums and libraries to the great excitement of the small world of professional anthropologists, and even beyond – both Freud and Kipling were to make use of them. By doing so, he contributed to creating in Alice Springs one of the great centres of world trade. It may not be visible upon the maps of the world systems theorists, who take their cue from Braudel and look to the exchange of hard goods, thumping down in good solid crates upon the deck, and paid for in ringing tender, rather than the dance, the ritual or the song, but it is solidly embedded in the post-modern network that is woven from the very stuff of culture.

Adrift : Daisy Bates

Wherever there is exchange, there is change, and culture, by its nature, is syncretic. Much has been written about the ways in which the colonised changed and adapted the beliefs of their conquerors, how the Christian religion was read and reread through different lenses. But the arrow flies in both directions : Gillen saw the ceremonies and beliefs of the Arunta with the eyes of an Irish Catholic, even though, at the time of writing the ethnographies, he had lapsed in his beliefs⁵.

But Aboriginal mythology , as misread through and across European texts, may lend itself to other ways of thought than those offered by the Church. Where Gillen refers, sometimes openly, to the liturgy in his attempts to come to terms with the rituals of the desert, Daisy Bates, whose main link to the metropolitan anthropological establishment was through Andrew Lang, best remembered, perhaps for his series of fairy-tale books, placed the Aborigine at the service of an imagination peopled by fairies, changelings and ogres – and above all by herself.

As I have said, Bates was a liar. From the very moment that she emerges into public life, she is enmeshed in a thick net of fictions, fabulations and fibs. She is not to be trusted for an instant, and whatever she may have done for the Aborigines to whom she devoted the latter part of her life, nothing she says about them, or about her life among them, can be taken as true gold. She spent some forty years between 1904 and 1945 camping out among the Aborigines, during which time she filled notebook after notebook with her observations, and long lists of words.

As a writer, she was not particularly successful. Although she seems to have financed her long sojourn in the desert at least in part through selling sensational stories to the Australian newspapers, she was unable to complete her projected anthropological work, “The Native Tribes of Western Australia”, which had been commissioned by the West Australian government, and which was only to be published in 1985, after what must have been a considerable process of editing. Her autobiography, which was something of a best-seller, was written with the help of Ernestine Hill. Perhaps the structuring of a large project was difficult for her ; the autobiography is made up of short sequences, tales and vignettes. Although she tells us something of her own life, the main thread of the book takes the reader from one tale of Aboriginal life to another. Let us look at what she made of them.

How exactly it was that she came to see in the Aborigines something to give a thread to her life is obscure. Her first meaningful contact with them came about when, on her return to Australia in 1899, she accompanied Father Dean Martelli out to the Catholic Mission at Broome. She had, she said, a commission from The Times to investigate reports of ill-treatment of the natives of Australia, and she persuaded Martelli to take her with him, even though the mission was run by Trappist monks. She found that the accusations leveled against the settlers were unfounded :

I could not prove one charge of cruelty, except that of “giving offal to natives instead of good meat,” and “sending them away from the stations without food when work was slack.” So far as these were concerned, I found that the favourite parts of any animal, large or small, were the entrails, which were torn out of the beast and eaten half raw. Later, on my own station, I discovered that the blacks insisted on a “pink-hi” or walkabout season – they could not live without it – and that they would not carry flour and tea, preferring their own bush tucker⁶

Bates may have needed to look further afield for evidence of racial violence ; at about the same time as she was writing her report for the Times, a Queensland official reported ;

A few stations are remarkable for the fairness with which they treat their blacks and others have an unenviable notoriety for ill-usage of the men and disgraceful treatment of the women. Never before have I seen aboriginal men living under such extraordinary terrorism ... Many of them had long been treated as dogs are treated and were scared into a belief that their employers wielded the power of life and death⁷.

Queensland is a rather special case, and it is perhaps true that Western Australian Aborigines lived in better conditions. Even so, the reader may have some suspicion of Bates's report. Certainly, Aborigines would eat offal with relish, as do many peoples of other cultures, including Bates's own, but what does she mean exactly by 'torn out of the beast', and why are we told that it was 'half raw'? We will glimpse the beginnings of an answer as we follow Bates on to the Beagle Bay Mission at Broome. Her first encounter with the Aborigines occurs the morning after her arrival :

I woke to hear the natives singing a Gregorian chant in the little chapel nearby. Half clothed and, for all the untiring work of the missioners, still but half-civilized, they comprised the Nyool-nyool tribe of the totem of a local species of snake. Most of the women and men had their two front teeth knocked out, and some still wore bones through their noses. Infant cannibalism was practiced, where it could not be prevented – as it still is among all circumcised groups⁸.

The theme of cannibalism runs through the book, particularly in its infanticidal form. Although it seems possible that some groups among the Aboriginal people of Australia did practice mortuary cannibalism, eating their dead either completely or in part⁹, the evidence that cannibalism such as that reported by Bates ever existed is sparse and suspect. While one needs to tread carefully here – as in so many areas of anthropological research – for there is an ongoing and sometimes acrimonious debate over the existence of any institutionalised form of man-eating¹⁰, Bates's stories of mother's devouring their babies, or feeding them to their elder children in order to strengthen them, are literary creations, which owe as much to Dean Swift as they do to her decades of close contact with Australian peoples. But before I examine this question in more detail, I want to look at the passage that immediately follows on the one just cited :

There was one terrible manifestation of savagery that I can never forget.

A man had been found dying of spear-wounds out in the bush, and carried to the Mission as he was breathing his last. I watched two of the lay brothers bearing the stretcher to one of the huts, a horde of natives following. I noticed that they held their burden curiously high in the air. Suddenly, as it was lowered for entry to a doorway, the natives crowding round, to my horror, fell upon the body of the dying man, and put their lips to his with brutal eagerness to inhale the last breath. They believed in so doing they were absorbing his strength and virtue, and his very vital spark ...¹¹

Bates has, in these two pages, set forth the central fantasies around which both her work, and, it seems likely, her life were to revolve over the next half-century. Wherever she set her tent in the Australian outback, whichever Australian peoples she shared her food and her time with, these two images – of infant cannibalism and of the dying breath – are the weighty anchors of her imagination.

Catching the dying breath

It is Bates herself who is the most prominent vampire in her story. Convinced, as were many at the time, that the Aborigines were a condemned race, she seems to have set herself the task of being in on the death. The title to her book is no misnomer ; the tales she tell almost all lead to death, and she is there, an Angel of Death, to ease the path. Her first chapter on her life after finally leaving her husband and son is entitled “Last of the Bibbulmun Race”; it opens thus :

The call of the task to which my life had been dedicated was insistent. It drew me first to solacing the passing of the last of the Bibbulmun, that once great race which had roamed the fertile coastal plains on which Perth is set and the delectable uplands of the Darling Ranges.

She pitched her tent in the Maamba Reserve. Here she found, she tells us, the last two remnants of the branch of the tribe that had lived near Perth, and gathered with them “some thirty or forty stragglers” whose health and sight had failed, leaving them unable to remain upon their own lands.

She identifies the last of the race as a man she names Joobaitch. He, along with this fellows, was condemned by an unavoidable process :

It was the same story everywhere, a kindness that killed as surely and as swiftly as cruelty would have done. The Australian native can withstand all the reverses of nature, fiendish droughts and sweeping floods, horrors of thirst and enforced starvation – but he cannot withstand civilization.

This self-comforting hypothesis was a commonality among both the Australian white population at large and among anthropologists : indeed, there are grounds for arguing that anthropology as it was conceived of at this time, both in Australia and in the United States, was a form of necrology. Gillen and Spencer held much the same views, and Gillen was always on the look out for internalist explanations of the Aborigine's demise. But Bates ardently desires it to be her hand that “soothes the dying pillow”. She attributes to their deaths much mystic significance ; here she recounts the last days of the woman she decided was the last Perth woman, Fanny Balbuk :

When she lay dying in her shelter at Maamba, a female kangaroo, her totem, suddenly made its appearance among the bushes some yards away. With dimmed eyes she looked upon it. “My borunggur has come for me; I go now,” she said. She died a few days later in Perth Hospital.¹²

Swift in the Outback

Bates's story, as she recounts it in her book, “The Passing of the Aborigines”, is of a two-fold race – the circumcised and the uncircumcised, (or the Noble and the Ignoble Savage), whom she sees as arriving in Australia at different times – which is heading for extinction. She set herself the task of both easing and recording their final moments. Thus it is that she becomes a kind of ring-master to a circus of death – or the choreographer, and principal supporting role, of a long, drawn-out Dance of Death. For time and again she places herself – or thrusts herself – into the scenes of agony she describes with considerable insistence :

Joobaitch clung steadily to Maamba, his own ground, even when the doctor urged his removal to hospital. “No,” said Joobaitch, “I shall die on my own ground, and not in a white man's house. When I die, I shall go down through the sea to Kur'an'nup, where all my people will be waiting on the shore with meat food, my mother and my woman, my father and my brothers. Before it sets out on its journey, my spirit must be free to rest on the kaanya tree ...”

One day the cart came to take Joobaitch to the hospital. “Don't let them take me!” he pleaded. I said, “It is all right, Joobaitch. You will die before you pass the kaanya tree at Karrragullen, and your soul will rest there before it goes to the sea.” Joobaitch died as the cart crossed the little creek near Maamba, as he had wished it, still on his own ground, close to the kaanya tree¹³.

Bates's continual moves from one encampment to another in the early years are driven by the logic of her underlying story ; as the Aborigine 'passes' in one district, so she must go on to find yet another exemplum. During the years that Bates spend in the desert, the Aboriginal population was, in fact, undergoing demographic recovery, and at times her own text gives her away. Thus, after announcing the end of the Bibbulmun with Joobaitch, she sets out once again :

From the reserve at Maamba, with my old friends gone, I set out on a two years' pilgrimage of the South-West, through all the old camping grounds which had become railway cities and towns and centres of industry, pastoral and agricultural. In the whole Bibbulmun area I sought the living remnants of the various groups ... Many were completely extinct. Two or three old derelicts with women who were unlawful wives according to aboriginal convention comprised the largest camps I could find, all of them Government pensioners or beggars¹⁴.

It is likely that Bates missed the younger and more vigourous members of the groups she claimed to be seeking because, during the wet season, they would be working on the stations, and during the dry season they would be – as she had every occasion to know – out in the bush. As to the wrong marriages, although estimates vary, it seems likely that at no time were all marriages 'straight', and that under the pressures brought about by invasion, dispossession and displacement, it had become more difficult to maintain an application of the law as full as the more traditionally minded might wish¹⁵. In fact, the survival and replenishment of Aboriginal populations may well have depended upon setting in motion reproductive strategies that, by their nature, undermined the racialist conceptions that underlay the widespread conception of Aboriginal deperdition. So it is that Bates, like many of her contemporaries both in Australia and in other corners of the Empire, reserved her strongest strictures for the results of what she and they called miscegenation :

No more half-caste children were born in Ooldea from 1920 onward until the temporary cessation of my work there in 1934, nor was any half-caste ever begotten in one of my camps¹⁶.

The boundaries between the races had to be maintained ; Bates was not alone in believing this, and that, as far as possible the mixing of the two populations should be discouraged. Where the blood was tainted, it was best to eliminate the children in one way or another ; one solution was to take them away, bring them up in institutions and “whiten” them. Bates tells us that the Aborigine women themselves had other solutions :

Three half-castes had been begotten at Ooldea in the year before my arrival. One was taken to the German mission on the west coast of South Australia. The other two were destroyed in infancy, one of them thrown into a rabbit-burrow, the other scalded to death by a billy-can of hot tea thrown over both mother and child by the black husband¹⁷.

The half-caste was, then, in danger if left with the mother. Moreover, the child was as willing to quit its relatives as they were to see it go :

... The half-caste fears and dislikes his mother's people, and objects to the communal food laws, while the natives despise the half-caste for his colour and his breed and his odour¹⁸.

Under these circumstances, it clearly was in the interests of the children themselves to remove them from their families. How far Bates's views influenced public policy is difficult to assess, but she lived by her pen, sending in her anthropologically informed views to the national press in articles with titles such as “Aboriginal savages, Central Australian Natives : Lawless cannibals¹⁹. The picture that she drew of the ways in which Aboriginal mothers treated their infants, whether full-blooded or half-caste, could not but have encouraged all those who believed – or wanted to believe – that it was in the best interests of the children to put them in institutions :

Baby-killing was rife among these central-western peoples as it is west of the border in Central Australia. In one group, east of the Murchison Gascoyne Rivers, every woman who had had a baby had killed and eaten it, dividing it with her sisters, who, in turn, killed their children at birth and returned the gift of food, so that the group had not preserved a single living child for some years. When the frightful hunger for baby meat overcame the mother before or at the birth of a baby, it was killed and cooked regardless of sex²⁰.

Bates's descriptions of these grisly cannibal feasts are similar in form and detail to the tales of the witches' Sabbats, or early Christian Love Feasts analyzed by Norman Cohn. For example, we find this echo of the description of communicants passing a baby from hand to hand before eating it :

The Kaalurwonga, east of Bandu, were a fierce arrogant tribe who pursued fat men, women and girls, and cooked the dead by making a deep hole in the sand, trussing the body there and roasting it, and tossing it about until it cooled sufficient for them to divide it²¹.

As we see here, babies were not the only victims ; at times, Bates vision of the cannibal hordes is so excessive as to lead the reader to wonder how it was that the Australian had survived so long :

My first task, as the groups stepped over the threshold of civilization, was to set them at ease and clothe them, learn their names and their waters, explain the white man's laws and tell them of the resources and dangers of this new age that they had stumbled into. Most of the young people were orphans, their parents having been killed and eaten on the long journey down²².

However, it is the eating of babies that returns time and again in her work. How did she come to believe that the Aboriginal of the circumcised tribes – for she sees the uncircumcised as innocent of this practice – was given over to feasting on blood? One possibility is that she misunderstood – perhaps willfully – what the women themselves told her. Although she claimed to speak 120 native dialects²³ - she left a considerable wealth of linguistic detail among her papers – it is possible that she was only partially fluent in many of them, having recourse to creolized Australian English. Her informants may have been talking about something else ; Pickering notes that, according to Rose, the Aborigines of the Victoria River area in Northern Australia used the English term 'cooking the baby' to refer to a ceremony in which new born infants were “rubbed with a slurry of ant bed and water²⁴”. Moreover, argues Pickering, a number of Dreamtime tales speak of cannibalistic acts by ancestors, and the Aboriginal conception of time, in which the Dreamtime is ever-present, might lead to people acknowledging that their group did eat human flesh, even though they did not, in fact indulge in the European time-frame²⁵.

Also, she may have been mislead by certain mortuary practices ; among many Australian groups, the bodies of the dead are stripped of their flesh – sometimes through cooking it – the bones are cracked open and the marrow removed. Women may carry body parts of the deceased with them for some time before finally disposing of them. These practices are allied to sorcery beliefs, and it is considered dangerous to neglect them. Many reports of cannibalism, suggests Pickering, may have been based upon Europeans' misunderstandings of these cultural traits.

But this does not suffice to explain the intense insistence with which Bates returns to the theme. In passage after passage, we are told of “the baby hunger”, a lust for human meat that drives the savage, both male and female, in all his or her daily dealings. Early on we are told that a sickly child will be given one of its baby brothers or sisters to eat, to give it strength. Almost at the centre of “The Passing of the Aborigines”, we find the tale of Dowie, the Insatiable Cannibal.

When he was a little boy he was given four baby sisters to eat and he was rubbed over with their fat. This made him grow so quickly and so big and strong that he was initiated at the same time as boys much older than he, but not so big and broad and fat. He was hairy and tall and big-mouthed, and from the moment when he first tasted the flesh of his baby sisters, he developed a taste for human food that grew and strengthened with the years²⁶.

Dowie's tale covers nine pages, making of him one of the most prominent characters in the book. We follow him through his ill-tempered adolescence, his bloody initiation, during which he discovered that he 'liked blood to drink better than water²⁷', and on to his manhood, during which 'there was never a journey in which he took part that did not end in bloodshed and a feast of human flesh²⁸'. He eats each of his wives, consuming eight of them before he discovers that he can make a more profitable use of his women by prostituting them to the white man. He only ceases his career of violent criminality when, caught in a thunderstorm, he goes mad, and, ultimately blind. It is while he is in this state that Bates meets him, nurses him through his last illness and digs his grave.

Breaking Ground

Bates was never to be accepted by the anthropological establishment. Although she received a CBE for her welfare work among the Aborigines, government officials tended to keep her at arms' length ; she spent many years at Oondea unfunded, using the money that she earned writing for the newspapers to carry on feeding and clothing the in-comers and the derelicts. For now, it appeared, she no longer needed to travel, seeking the dying savage : the savage came to her – or at least, that was how she saw it. In the end, her own health broken, she had to leave the desert, to spend her last years in Adelaide, finally leaving her papers to the University there.

There have been recent attempts to make her a celebrity of kinds ; a short film was made about her life, and the blurb described her as “a groundbreaking anthropologist and accomplished linguist”. Some have seen in her a figure to be captured by the feminist movement, and – rather bizarrely - she has been praised for her untimely recognition that the Aboriginal woman had her own sources of power. In fact, although she draws some portraits of apparently powerful women, in general she sees them as entirely submissive, chattels to be bought and sold at will, and beaten if they misbehaved.

Bates's anchor was on a long chain ; it leads back to her native Ireland, perhaps. She saw Aboriginal religion through lenses tinted by the tales of fairies under the sea, of infanticidal ogres or witches, and she projected upon the people she studied the readings of her youth and, perhaps, the fantasies of her adolescence. As she found herself caught up in the web of deceit which she had woven around herself, she slipped the light moorings that bound her to those she would consider her own community, and threw her lot in with a people that, she must have felt, had as weak a grasp of reality as she had herself. She told the same lies to the Aborigines that she told her – at first – fascinated white acquaintances. She spoke, she felt, to the mythological Aborigine Kings and Queens as their equal, if not their superior. In the end, she became a witch queen, working magic among the children of the desert. Her tent was indeed a Wendy House. And we know what would happen to the Lost Boys as they grew up.

In her day-by-day dealings with the Aborigines, it may be the case that she brought to some of those she knew a measure of succour. Food she gave them, and clothing, whether they wanted it or not. But she was always the white woman, and was ready to abuse such confidence as they might offer her in the interests of her own group. She describes one episode in which she tricks a group of desert dwellers to submit to examination by a policeman ; he puts the sick in chains and carries them off to one of the island concentration camps and mouroirs in which the government of the time sought the final solution to the problem of disease. She is remembered by some as one of the agents of the policy of child-stealing – a recent children's book is subtitled “Running From the State and Daisy Bates”, and recounts the story of a child who feared that Kabbarli, or “Grandmother” as Bates styled herself, would have her shipped off to one of the state orphanages. Bates dedication was to a fiction of her imagination, the dying Full Blood – these it was that she “mothered”. For their half-caste children, she reserved another fate – similar to the one to which she left her own son²⁹.

As an anthropologist, she seems to have heard the stories that were told her, and to have bent the scenes she saw, into the mythological patterns of her own youth. Anthropologists like Margaret Mead have often advanced that modern industrial and post-industrial societies could mould some of their institutions upon those of the societies they studied; in Mead's case, as we know, she moulded her findings to best forward the political agenda that she had formulated for her homeland. Kabbarli clung to her Aborigines – she only left them at the end of her life because a policeman bundled her into a car – to bring form and meaning to her own precarious life.

3. Buccaneer : Phyllis Kaberry

Phyllis Kaberry referred to herself as a 'nomadic anthropologist. Looking at her early work in Australia, one can see her point ; her first attempt at fieldwork ended prematurely when the local missionary took against her³⁰. On her second attempt in the Kimberleys she was more successful ; she stayed with pastoralists, including the Durack family, where she made friends with the daughters of the house – she was to remain in contact with them until the end of her life – and was able to carry out research among a number of Aboriginal groups. Her sojourn in the field lasted for about sixteen months, broken into two periods. She worked with about ten different groups, and as she admitted, never had time enough to master the languages. This meant that she had to work through those Aborigines who had enough English to converse with her – that is to say with those who had had most contact with the invaders. Let us look at her description of one of her main informants :

Bulagil, the daughter, is of medium height like her mother, has neat features, slender hands, and brown eyes that are apt to sparkle with laughter. She is about twenty-two, very poised and sure of herself, partly because she is valued by the whites as a “good house gin”, partly because she is pretty and as the elder of two wives is accustomed to make decisions and distribute the food³¹.

Note that Bulagil is described as drawing psychological benefit from her position with the pastoralists. This benefit would have had real, material bases, for she would have had privileged access to station goods such as tea, flour and tobacco, as well as clothing and ornaments. In the Aboriginal economy, as among most foraging societies, although the women furnish the bulk of consumption goods, it is the men who hold a monopoly of meat which, as Kaberry herself notes, is the most coveted of foodstuffs. Through the awakening of new desires, and through placing women at key points in the distribution network for scarce but coveted goods, the white colonist radically altered the internal economy of the Aboriginal groups.

It is of great importance to bear this in mind when reading Kaberry's work and when considering her place in the Australian ethnological tradition. For it is the general opinion that Kaberry demonstrated that the previously held conception of woman's place in Aboriginal society was mistaken. Prior to Kaberry's reports, we are told, the women had been seen as little more than beasts of burden or as sexual commodities, banished to the fringes during the sacred ceremonies, of earth rather than spirit.

Now, there is something in this. The earlier ethnologists had been mainly concerned with the activities and beliefs of the Aboriginal males. Even Daisy Bates, although she offers several portraits of strong females, was of the opinion that the women were mistreated :

Only those who live and work for years in native camps can realize the daily struggle of the poor women for the barest subsistence. They come behind the dogs in the economy of camp life³².

Nevertheless, ethnologists did not totally ignore the women. Howitt, for example, made a point of approaching the old women, whom he saw as major repositories of traditional knowledge. Spencer, even though his pages on the women make unpleasant reading today, was sure that they knew more about the men's ceremonies than they would admit to, and urged Gillen to work with them. But it was difficult for the male anthropologists to work with the other sex, and some of the women anthropologists – such as Olive Pink – refused to limit themselves to the 'woman question', regarding it as an unwarranted confinement. It had become clear that if anthropology was indeed to be the science of society, it was necessary to put women in the field with the goal of working with the Aboriginal women.

It was at the instigation of a male anthropologist – A.P. Elkin – that Kaberry undertook her research. In his introduction to her book, Elkin makes this clear :

My own fieldwork in Australia, 1927-8 and 1930 convinced me that valuable as my researches in social organization, totemism, initiation, and economics might be, I was hardly getting in touch with a very large section of native life and that would have to be done by women workers. I therefore appealed in an address to the Anthropological section of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science at its Melbourne meeting in January, 1935, to the wives and daughters of station-managers, settlers and officials to carry on the work ... and depict for us the life of native women and children, and urged that specially trained women who do anthropological research among the Aborigines, should work consistently through the native women ...³³

The pressure was on Kaberry to produce evidence that Aboriginal women were not as oppressed and voiceless as they had been depicted to be. The need may well have been particularly acute , given that the white settlers had made of the women's condition a clear marker of the savagery and barbary of the people that they had dispossessed, thus justifying their cultural annihilation. This points to what may be a central paradox in the feminist and feminine tradition in social anthropology : it is arguable that those anthropologists who have been most sensitive to feminist concerns have found themselves underplaying the extent to which women are dominated in societies other than our own. They are thereby drawn into putting forward arguments that are in many ways similar to those that have been made to justify male dominance in Europe and the United States.

Kaberry was to discover that the women had rich full lives, that they had their own ceremonies, that they did not feel excluded from the men's ceremonies and nor did they lack the means to make their voices heard. For example, she continues her description of Bulagil thus :

There is nothing submissive in her attitude towards her husband, Lanburidjen, a man of about thirty-four, who is inclined to be bumptious and complacent on the score that he was once a police-boy and is now head stockboy at Bedford³⁴.

One may contrast here the description of Bulagil as 'poised and sure of herself' – put down partly to her being a “good house gin” - with the more dismissive epithets ascribed to her husband. Both man and wife derive some status, in Kaberry's eyes, from their recognition by the white invader, but the man's is seen as in some way over-inflated, while the woman, in some way, is allowed to fulfill her promise. The story continues :

Nevertheless, he was destined to lose Bulagil, who eloped with her tribal son-in-law two weeks later³⁵.

Now this was an act of some considerable daring. The relationship between a woman and her classificatory son-in-law is of great importance, and is governed by extremely strong taboos. This is understandable ; a woman's son-in-law is, in fact, usually in the same age-cohort as she is, whereas her husband is usually considerably older. That they should be reciprocal objects of desire is not surprising. Now it is quite clear that one of the keys to understanding relationships of power and influence among the people of Australia is that social organization functions in such a way as to place the young women at the disposition of the older men – a circumstance which today causes some anguish to convinced multi-culturalists, who are faced with the demand to choose between protecting under-sixteen year old girls from the attentions of older men, or justifying tribal practice.

Bulagil, eloping with her son-in-law, clove through, at one stroke, the Gordian knot of male power, and of traditional marriage law. Kaberry sees this as evidence of female independence, and well she may. However, it is also clear that Bulagil may well have taken her chances – for the traditional punishment for such behaviour was death – because she believed that she would be protected by her special relationship with the settlers.

In this, she was probably right. Throughout the ethnographic record we find instances of whites favouring the breakdown of traditional marital rules and incest taboos. Kaberry herself at one point comments :

... under conditions of white contact, the young stockboys occasionally had two wives, their position as employees with additional supplies of food, tobacco, clothes, ornaments, tools, giving them wealth and prestige they would not otherwise have enjoyed. The whites favoured an early marriage, in the hope of keeping them on the station : in this respect they have undermined the authority of the headmen, although the latter are still supreme in the sphere of ritual life³⁶.

We will need to return to this question of the ritual power of the old men. For the moment, we may note that the relations of power between men and women, young and old, had been affected, perhaps quite profoundly, by the presence of the interlopers, and that the women's attitudes to masculine power may have been considerably modified. Kaberry is aware of this possibility. Thus she writes :

Some may be inclined to suggest that the number of alternate marriages is indicative of the extent of detribalization in these areas. But I found just as many in the first and second ascending generations as in the younger generation. But this does not apply to the number of wrong marriages, and the infringements of tribal law in this regard would seem to be due to culture contact³⁷.

However, she generally underplays the influence of this factor. Like many anthropologists, she prefers to see her subjects as inhabiting a timeless present. It is in this present that she follows her women out to forage in the surrounding bush – and this brings us to the question of how far the division of labour between the genders can be seen as putting an undue burden on the women. Kaberry cites Malinowski's opinion that, in Australian society, “the relation of a husband to a wife is in its economic aspect, that of master to its slave.” She objects :

It is true the woman provides the larger part of the meal, but one must not automatically assume that her work is more onerous. Actually, it is less so than the men's, as I can speak from experience. Merely to follow them in their hunting over rugged hills and the blazing sun (sic) left me so exhausted that after two attempts, I was content to amble with the women over the plains and along the dry river-beds. The element of sport distracts attention temporarily from fatigue, but too often it ends in the disappointment of seeing one's dinner leaping into the distance over the hills. On the other hand, women's work has its moments of excitement when a particularly toothsome comb of wild-honey is cut out of a tree, or a succulent iguana is dragged from its burrow clawing the earth, to be knocked on the ground and killed³⁸.

It is interesting to compare this with Spencer and Gillen's account of hunting among the Arunta. According to this, the men spend much time lying in wait beside a kangaroo track, or squatting in hiding by a water-hole. Sometimes, they send the women out to beat the game, while they remain in hiding until an animal passes within range of their spears³⁹.

Differences between Arunta practices and those of the Kija, who were the main group studied by Kaberry, may be related to long-term ecological factors – or to the fact that Kaberry only went out hunting twice, and may have had her legs run off her for the men's amusement. But they may also be due to changes in the ecological conditions brought about by increasing white settlement. Throughout Australia, the arrival of the white pastoralists put pressure on the indigenous fauna, leading to a fall in the numbers of the Aborigines' traditional prey. Men were forced to travel further and work harder in order to maintain normal kill-rates. Once again, one cannot assume that what our anthropologist reported was a direct reflection of the traditional balance of work between the genders.

Where it is clear that normal practice is to the benefit of the males, Kaberry indulges in special pleading which has a familiar ring to it. For example, she argues that while it is true that whenever they move camp, it is the Aborigine women who carry the greater part of the burdens, there is a good reason for this :

Now, the long training which is necessary for the use of a spear, speed of foot and powers of endurance, are factors which make the man especially fitted to hunt. The spear is rarely out of his hands, except when he is sitting or dancing and even then it is always near at hand in case of emergency. In stalking the animal and racing after it, freedom of action is essential ; the man must not be hampered by a swag or a dilly-bag full of roots⁴⁰.

Whatever one may conclude about the realities of relationships between males and females amongst the Australians, viewed from a distance of seventy years this argument hardly seems conclusive. Often, when she addresses the question of male/female relationships, Kaberry appeals to the disparities in gender roles in 'our society' :

... they generally have the loads to carry, whilst the men go off gaily with only a spear, and perhaps a tomahawk stuck in their hair-belts ... The phrase, without closer analysis, suggests that the woman is a miniature pantechnicon, whereas in reality the household effects usually comprise blanket, kulamon, digging stick, a frock, shirt, knife, twine, and perhaps a small axe, the whole weighing about thirty or forty pounds at most, and less than the enthusiastic walker carries in his rucksack. Freedom from such a burden would be pleasant, but it does not tax the strength unduly, and is less tiring probably than the load the European housewife often carries home from the market, with perhaps a child in her arms as well.

How she knows this about European housewives, we are not told. We can also note that the enthusiastic walker is male. Modern ergonomic studies suggest that an adult should carry no more than 20% of body weight, well distributed in a properly designed back-pack – and this is an upper limit. The Aborigine woman, according to data collected by Andrew Abbie, over several years up to 1970, working with groups who maintained a traditional way of life, weighed an average of 48.4 kilos. She would be able to carry 9.6 k without overstraining herself – just over 20 lbs. According to Kaberry she would be carrying 13.6 k. Moreover, she would be carrying it partly on her head, partly on her arm and hip. Moreover, just like Kaberry's European housewife, she might well have to support a fairly hefty infant.

The Sacred Woman

One of the most celebrated findings reported in Kaberry's book was the existence of specifically female rituals – or what is now known as 'women's business'. It had always been clear that some practices fell fully in the female domain ; menstruation, particularly at its first onset, and childbirth being two occasions that were ritually marked by the women, and also sometimes introcision – although among the Arunta it was the men who operated on the young women. However, the main large-scale fertility and initiatory rituals that had been reported on by the first anthropologists were primarily male occasions, with limited, although necessary, participation by the women. Moreover, women were excluded from the central and most powerful moments of celebration, and might be punished by death if they showed too much knowledge of the inner secrets.

This had lead some anthropologists to make the claim that in the Aboriginal conception of gender relations, men inhabited the domain of the sacred, while women were merely profane. This overly schematic view is certainly mistaken ; the male's sacred ceremonies revolve around male/female relationships and the feminine lies at the heart of the most sacred mysteries. Women are excluded not because they are profane, but because there is a strong risk that if they were to fully understand their nature, they would be in a position to overthrow and challenge the spiritual power of the men. This power is founded upon their taking the role of the female⁴¹.

Kaberry, however, did not see the exclusion of women from the men's ceremonies as of great importance. For one thing, she reported, the women did not seem particularly concerned that they were unable to join in the boys' games. Although they recognized that male initiation was necessary, and that they would not want to marry an uninitiated male⁴², they did not express any envy of the males participation in the rites, being more apt to express pity at the painful mutilations that the young man would have to undergo. On the other hand, they had their own ceremonies, from which the men were excluded. For the most part :

Unlike the male ceremonies, many of the women's had not the additional function of being both collective and recreative. From one point of view they were severely practical, in that they appeared to be solely concerned with solving a particular problem, protecting from danger and alleviating pain⁴³.

In order to uncover secret birth songs, the anthropologist went to some lengths :

I had more difficulty in obtaining an account of the songs for childbirth from the women, that I had in discussing initiation and the tsiringa with the men, perhaps because I did not know for certain whether they existed, and perhaps because they were known only in full detail to the advanced in middle-age or the very old women, who guarded them jealously. It was not until I had been seven months in the country that I finally heard the first songs ... An old Womeri woman began by saying decisively; 'no got 'em song, no got 'em ; me no savvy.” By dint of sitting in front of her for half an hour and declaring just as decisively: “You savvy, you got 'em; me bin hera alonga 'nother one tribe you got 'em” (a lie on my part), I finally heard her begin to chant in a low rather hoarse voice words which were at first unrecognizable. But she became more confident, and I was then able to take them down and obtain a translation⁴⁴.

One may wonder whether Kaberry would have been ready to allow her own mother to be subjected to similar investigative techniques on the part of an Aboriginal anthropologist. One may also wonder whether one can put much faith in the information so obtained.

But Kaberry did unearth one ceremony which was rather more elaborate and celebratory in nature. She witnessed six special corroborees specific to women. These consisted of elaborate song-cycles, and their attendance was strictly limited to the women – any men who interfered would fall ill⁴⁵. The ceremonies are seen as a form of love-magic, and the participants use them to ensure the continuation or the commencement of sexual relations with the male of their choice :

(they) continually stressed the fact to me that this was “proper lubra business; blackfellow can't see him. This one play belonga djibönir (sweetheart). Lubra no more want him old ngu:mbana (husband); him get 'em young boy”. A statement that can be readily understood if it remembered that some of the younger women were married to men considerably older than themselves⁴⁶.

As we have seen, sexual taboos forbid the women from taking the most desirable of the young men – their potential sons-in-law – as lovers. It therefore comes as little surprise to learn :

The corroboree was also wa:dji. Now, wa:dji is a term applied to a man or woman who married into the wrong subsection. The marriage par excellence, which is wa:dji, is that with mother-in-law. Now in the songs the tribal son-in-law is cited as a particularly desirable lover – a man, in short, whom the women should have been most assiduously avoiding. They giggled when they explained this and seemed to delight in the illicit character of the dance and the fact that they were breaking one of the strictest tribal taboos⁴⁷.

These ceremonies were new to the area that Kaberry was working in – they had come in from the central desert area. The women knew that they were coming and received them eagerly. This raises the question of whether they were only made possible in the new circumstances brought about by the invasion. The anthropologist is aware of this possibility :

Since the yirbindji is an innovation in the Kimberleys, some may be tempted to claim that the women have only been able to assert themselves because of the detribalization in these areas; if it indicates a higher status for women than was generally assumed to exist, this is not necessarily true of the past⁴⁸.

However, she feels that she can dismiss this argument because she has already “established the privileges a woman enjoys” in other domains. If one is not fully convinced by her evidence, then one will give the argument more weight.

Kaberry, setting out on her career in a masculine world, may well have drawn comfort from the idea that even the women seen as being the most down-trodden of beasts of burden had their own sources of power and their own satisfactions. She was, in a number of ways, primed to find them – and she did so. Although her work cannot be seen as a web of utter fantasy, from which little or nothing can be drawn other than some insight into the workings of an imagination at its limits, as is the case with Bates, and although she managed to draw information from the women which Gillen either failed to do or failed to report on, her passage among the Aborigines was so swift that her understanding cannot have been very much more than superficial. She did this work when she was 24-25 years old, fresh from school and graduate studies – she had done a one-year Master's degree in anthropology after a BA in English, psychology, history and Latin. There is little to surprise us if we find her comprehension of Aboriginal society to be shaped by her youthful concerns. That she so easily dismissed the evidence before her eyes of the extent to which the presence of the invaders had affected the lives and the social structure of the people she was studying may be in large part due to her implication in white society. As one reviewer of Toussaint's book on Kaberry remarked, the Duraks were among those who had dispossessed the Aborigines of their land, and who heedlessly trampled and flattened their sacred grounds⁴⁹. And yet her long-term links were made not with the Bulagil, but with the daughters of the invader.

Conclusion

The waterholes of the Australian desert have seen many ships come into dock in the decades between 1870 and the present. Some of their crew have stepped ashore and ventured into the hinterland. Some have stayed and made their homes among the natives. They have brought with them their goods – both material and spiritual – and they have traded. A few ounces of tea may purchase a man's soul. A half-told tale may be exchanged for a steel knife. The owner of the tsuringa may have no idea of what it will be doing in a museum display case – or in a trunk in the cellar, or how his trading partner will appreciate its ritual significance. The folk-lorist may have but an inkling of what his jack-knife can mean when slipped into the hand of an uninitiated young man.

“Buy cheap and sell dear” goes the adage. “You only get what you pay for”, goes the reply. In the back and forth of trading between anthropologist and native, it is not absolutely clear who wins and who loses. Gillen died a disappointed man, by-passed for promotion, and wasting away of sclerosis. In a final blow of fate, his favoured eldest child died just before he did himself, in a stupid shooting accident. Daisy Bates was wrenched away from her Aborigines by big police, fighting and scratching like a wild-cat⁵⁰ ; she ended her days in hospital, largely forgotten. Phyllis Kaberry died a year after retiring from her job at University College, seemingly embittered by the turn the world had taken, and by her failure to find a full and satisfying relationship with another⁵¹. And Malinowski wrote to her in his 55^th year :

AF Your letter ... was a lovely birthday present on my sad 55^th anniversary of the most calamitous event which befell my life – except perhaps the one which preceded it by 9 months; or else my decision to become an anthropologist⁵².

He died three years later.

Why would Malinowski have regretted his decision to take up the trade which brought him fame throughout the world? Why did Kaberry find herself so dissatisfied with the life that she had made for herself? In the early part of the century, they, along with Bates and Gillen and others of their ilk must have felt that they were on the brink of producing a brand-new way of seeing the world, and this way of seeing would have enormous consequences on their own societies. But as the century wore on, it became increasingly clear that the news they brought back from nowhere had become yet another form of exotica, like the travelers' tales that they despised. Once the initial work of cultural commodification had been done – as it inevitably must be if there is to be exchange – the goods leave the merchants' hands, and they are ultimately consumed in places so far away, both in space and in custom, that it is difficult to justify to oneself the conditions under which the initial trade was made