Extinguished Voices

Gillen, Spencer and the last Aborigines

by Timothy Mason

Université de Paris 8

Introduction

In what follows, I will argue that, despite their attempts to present the Arunta – today the Arrernte – as a monolithic and heavily policed social system, in which the power of those they termed the 'old men' was absolute, the ethnographical team of Spencer and Gillen left in their writings enough clues for the reader to construct a more realistic and fruitfully confused picture of the lives of Central Australians in the late 1900s. I hope to show that, in so far as the picture presented by them was correct in its analysis of power relationships, it was so, at least in part, because they wanted it to be so and because Gillen, in particular, did his best to ensure that it was so, by backing up the old men's interests with the considerable resources that he had at his disposal as employer, magistrate and Sub-protector of the Aborigines. The two men conspired to maintain the Arunta in a pristine state. They did this because they saw them as a scientific specimen, to be shielded, as far as possible, from the ambiant corruptions introduced by the presence of the white invader. I will then go on to trick out of the writings – in particular the first book written by the duo, 'The Native Tribes of Central Australia', published in 1899, and the letters that Gillen wrote to Spencer while engaged in the research for the book – the ways in which those who were not at the centre of their interests – the young men and the women – attempted to exert some control over their own lives.

Transgression and punishment

I first came to an interest in Australian ethnography from an earlier engagement with the practice and discourse of nineteenth century social reformers and investigators in the United Kingdom.. While working in this area, I came across Gérard Leclerc's 'L'observation de l'homme', which I found intriguing and useful. Leclerc describes the development of sociology, on the one hand, and ethnography, on the other, as parallel processes, the actors in which were swayed by both technè, the need to know in order to intervene, control, and render foreseeable¹ the activities of the dominated, and by théoria, in which the construction of predictive structures is its own end. For Leclerc, a history of sociology which is not also a history of ethnology, a history of science without a history of social intervention is not simply incomplete, but of little interest.

This seemed to me at the time, and still seems to me today, a fruitful position to take. Not that one should deny that any scientific endeavour, even within such disciplines as sociology, psychology or anthropology, which are continually open to the winds of political and ideological confrontation, has its own inner compulsions and regularities, or that, indeed, a constellation of disciplines such as the social sciences, may turn around a central trope which furnishes it with its own peculiarities. For my own period, running from the late nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth, some form or other of Selectionist thinking has been one of the foundations on which the whole edifice was and is constructed, even though many of the protagonists would most strenuously attempt to forget it.

This may be illustrated by the evolutionist conception which informed thinking about both the English working classes and the Australian Aborigine. It is well known that the early ethnographers like Baldwin Spencer or Daisy Bates saw the Aborigines whose ceremonies and rules of marriage they studied as doomed to extinction, and it is notorious that out of such thinking grew the policy of forced adoption which lead to many thousands of children being taken from their mothers to be brought up in institutions or in the families of the white settlers. It is perhaps less well-known that the ethnologists' British counterparts among the social investigators saw that sector of the lower classes that they deemed least amenable to improvement as similarly doomed ; the residuum would, sooner or later, remove itself from the social scene. It was even suggested that, just as for the First Inhabitants of Australia or of the Americas, reserves should be set up for the muddy underclasses, in which they could be left to their own devices while provided with the minimum level of care and control which would allow them to fade away in comfort. Similarly, as with the children of the Aborigines, the children of the Residuum were to be taken from them before they could be fully enculturated, and brought up in decent institutions which would train them to fulfill some useful function and ultimately make their way into the new world from which their mothers and fathers were prohibited².

My specific interest in Spencer and Gillen, however, came rather later. For some years I gave a course in the sociology of deviance to third year students in sociology at the University of Versailles, St. Quentin. At first, this was a rather pedestrian historical survey of theories of deviance, culminating in an attempt to synthesize 'realist' and 'constructivist' accounts of criminality and delinquency. However, I found myself growing increasingly unsatisfied with the currents of sociological thinking which, despite the ritualistic invocations of Durkheim, took little notice of observations made within societies outside the UK or the United States, and virtually none at all of a broad anthropological literature which appeared, at first sight at least, to offer riches. This lead me to develop a course which made about as much use of the ethnographical as of the sociological³. It was while looking for readings for this course that I chanced upon Spencer and Gillen's 'The Arunta', and discovered a passage which, in its ambiguities and its apparent conundrums might give students much to chew on.

The passage occurs in a chapter devoted to the 'Atninga' or revenge party. Seeking to punish whoever it was that had, by magical means, brought about the deaths of a number of their companions, the Arunta warriors, after a journey of about a hundred miles across the desert, approach an Iliaura encampment. They make it clear to the Iliaura 'old men' that they will be satisfied only when they have taken life. As Spencer and Gillen tell the tale :

After a long talk extending over two days, during which the strangers set forth their grievances and gave the Iliaura men very clearly to understand that they were determined to exact vengeance, the two old men said, in effect, “Go no further. Our people do not wish to quarrel with your people ; there are three bad men in our camp whom we Iliaura do not like, they must be killed. Two are Iturka (that is men who have married within the forbidden degrees of relationship) ; the other is very quarrelsome and strong in magic and has boasted of killing your people by means of Kurdaitcha and other magic. Kill these men, but do not injure any others in our camp, and we will help you.⁴”

Elsewhere in their writings, the authors insist upon the almost absolute nature of the incest taboo, and on the automatic nature of the punishment which befalls all those who attempt to transgress it. If this were the case, then one would reasonably expect any Aborigine who had been so powerfully attracted to a forbidden mate as to set aside the rules to flee from all contact with those who would be certain to enforce it. Yet here, according to the old men, in a small group consisting 'of about a dozen families', two of the married men were involved in incestuous relationships, and yet remained within easy reach of punishment. It seemed that either these men and the women who had married them were suicidal, or they had a more sanguine judgment of their chances of survival than Spencer and Gillen would have us believe.

The suspicion that the taboo was less absolute than the authors wished to admit was reinforced by readings from othe anthropologists. For example, Malinowski makes it clear that the punishment of the offender in cases of incest is very much open to social negotiation ; the young man of whose suicide an account in given in “Crime and Custom in a Savage Society”, who, when his incestuous behaviour was made public, felt himself forced to leap to his death from the top of a tree had put himself in a particularly exposed position⁵, and his death was precipitated by the complaints of a jealous rival rather than by the act of incest itself. In another case reported by the same author, a sister and brother, although caught in flagrant delict, are left unpunished⁶. In Turnbull's account of the M'Buti⁷, a youth is condemned to death and chased into the forest, where it is firmly announced, he is certain to die. However, it is an open secret that his friends smuggle food out to him, and in the end he sheepishly wanders back into the village again, where his presence is accepted by all.

This is, indeed, what any sociologist of deviance would expect to find. It is, moreover, very much what Howitt reports for the Australian peoples among whom he lead his investigations ; time and again, we read stories of elopements, of quarrels sparked off by the discovery of one man that he had lost a promised bride to an illicit lover, and of how these quarrels would ultimately be settled with greater or lesser fuss, furore and loss of blood. Why, then, do Spencer and Gillen give the sanction such a quality of quasi-inevitability? For example, they write :

As amongst all savage tribes the Australian native is bound hand and foot by custom. What his fathers did before him that he must do. If during the performance of a ceremony his ancestors painted a white line across the forehead, that line he must paint. Any infringement of custom, within certain limitations, is visited with sure and often severe punishment⁸.

They go on to assert :

It has been stated by writers such as Mr Curr “that the power which enforces custom in our tribes is for the most part an impersonal one.” Undoubtedly public opinion and the feeling that any violation of tribal custom will bring down upon the guilty person the ridicule and opprobrium of his fellows is a strong, indeed a very strong, influence ; but at the same time there is in the tribes with which we are personally acquainted something beyond this. Should any man break through the strict marriage laws, it is not only an 'impersonal power' which he has to deal with. The head men of the group or groups concerned consult together with the elder men, and, if the offender, after long consultation, be adjudged guilty and the determination be arrived at that he is to be put to death – a by no means hypothetical case – then the same elder men make arrangements to carry the sentence out ... The offending native is perfectly aware that he will be dealt by something much more real than an “impersonal power.⁹”

Spencer and Gillen will not have it that an idealistic abstraction keeps the would-be lover in check. It is the power of the 'old men' that is seen as almost absolute. And yet even within their own writings, we catch glimpses of counter-powers and challenges to the diktats of the elders. Moreover, we also find evidence that the anthropologist did their best to weigh in on the side of the old men ; if the elders were successful in their endeavour to impose their will upon the young, it may have owed something to the fact that they had on their side one of the most powerful men in Central Australia : Frank Gillen himself.

The Virtual Administrator of Central Australia

When the Horn Expedition, of which Baldwin Spencer was a member, reached Alice Springs in 1894, Gillen had become, as his biographer puts it, 'virtual administrator of Central Australia, as Post and Telegraph Stationmaster, stipendiary magistrate and Sub-Protector of the Aborigines¹⁰'. He had been stationed out on the Telegraph line for almost twenty years, during which time he had accumulated much knowledge of the ways of the people that he and Spencer named the Arunta¹¹. His power and influence were considerable ; in his letters to Spencer, for example, he recounts an episode in which he sent the local head-man's favourite son off to gaol. Although the elder, whom Gillen refers to as 'the Old King', did his best to shield his son from punishment, he was sent off for a six months sentence.

Under such circumstances, it was clear to the local population that the genial stationmaster could wield the sharp edge of power when it was necessary to protect the interests of the invaders. Moreover, Gillen was able to present himself to the Aborigines as a powerful magician ; he was not only able to bring about cures that their own medicine men could not effect, he also claimed – with a success that he at least found sufficient – to be able to use their own magic against them.

The blacks believe that I have the power of communicating with the Irruntirinya. Some years ago, at daylight one morning, I caught a boy in the act of stealing jam, it was quite contrary to my custom to get up at such an ungodly hour and I explained to the blacks that the Irruntirinya had come to my window and told me that this boy was stealing jam. They were greatly impressed and there was much yabber among the old men¹².

Birth of a scientist

It is against this background that the research which informs Spencer and Gillen's books may be understood. However, as Gillen himself recognized, his relationship with the Aborigines, his position of power and authority, was not in itself sufficient to produce work of scientific worth. Thus he writes to Spencer :

I am thoroughly satisfied with the Preface (to 'The Native Tribes of Central Australia') as I told you when here I did not want any special recognition, to be associated with you in the work, on equal terms, was our original bargain to that I have adhered throughout – To speak of yourself as 'Compiler' is the sheerest nonsense and if I did not know you so well I should say it savored of that form of pride which apes humility. You are the inspirer of the whole work, without your guiding hand a line of it would not have been written. You could not have done more towards it if you had been on the spot, in fact you might not have done so much.¹³

What was the 'inspiration' that Spencer brought to their work? The answer must be – and Gillen himself tells us so – that the University Professor, who had studied with Tylor and Frazer, brought both intellectual rigour and scientifically approved theory with which to give shape to Gillen's folk-thinking about the people over whom he ruled and about whose cultures he wrote. Gillen was a largely self-educated man, and had mixed all his life with men whose understanding of the Aborigines was crude and shallow. Although he himself was exceptional in the interest he took in their customs, and in the sympathy that he felt for their plight, it is unlikely that without the impetus of first Stirling and later Spencer, he would have arrived at a fully theorized understanding. Spencer provided him with the intellectual tools – tools which we might now look upon as flawed and partial, but which nevertheless provided the leverage with which to raise his everyday observations of the Arunta from out of their various ipseities into the realm of generality – the process which Anthony Giddens has called 'disemebedding'. This Gillen recognizes quite cheerfully ; while he often felt it necessary to correct Spencer's errors of fact, he readily cedes precedence to his collaborator over questions of analysis, and expects to be sent out to chase up details when 'the 'Fessa' ' finds anomalies in the fit between data and theoretical expectation.

What these expectations were is well-known : the Aborigine was to provide a window into the deep pre-history of the human species¹⁴. To this end, the ethnologists concentrated most particularly upon three sets of data ; the rules that governed marriage and sexual congress, rituals and their accompanying myths, and magic. In a later, post-Malinowskian, post Boasian anthropology, these data sets were to be divorced from evolutionary theory, and were to become the primary subject-matter of the discipline : for the early Australian ethologists they were of interest not for themselves¹⁵, but for the opportunities they offered to catch a glimpse of what life had been like for our own far distant forbears. Following Morgan, the rules of marriage and of filiation were seen as likely to bear traces of a time when group marriage was practiced. In the rites and myths, they expected to find an insight into the growth of religion¹⁶, Frazer's second stage in the intellectual evolution of mankind. Magic was itself the first stage, and so merited analysis for its own sake.

Strange encounters

By the time Gillen met Spencer and began his ethnological work in earnest, the people of the Central area had been in direct contact with the invader for over twenty years . The Stuart expedition crossed the centre in 1862, and the telegraph arrived ten years later. A handful of the more adventurous settlers had pushed their cattle into the central region, encroaching the Arunta's hunting grounds and sacred places, altering the environment and forcing the Aborigines to look for other sources of subsistence. The discovery of gold some five years before the arrival of the Horne expedition brought an influx of invaders into the region. As we have seen, Gillen's own intervention in the lives of the local people was considerable, as was that of the constabulary. The very fact of the station's existence, providing clothing, food, employment for men and women – and encouraging a taste for tea, tobacco, alcohol and clothing – implied radical changes in life-ways.

Moreover, it is likely that indirect contact had already made radical inroads into their way of life. Gillen himself remarked that the people living a hundred or so miles north of Alice Springs had got hold of blankets issued by the government of Queensland ; Aboriginal trading lines were long and efficient. Doubtless such goods as iron knives had reached the central area long before the white man himself made an apparition. Although Australians made much of the distinction between the tame and the wild Aborigine, the knock-on effects of the arrival of the First Fleet and of the establishment of the penal colony had been given time enough to profoundly change the ways of even the most remote of First Peoples¹⁷.

This comes over clearly in one or two places in Spencer and Gillen's published works ; it is indeed, seen as an inevitable process, part of the march of social evolution. Confronted with a people who have attained a superior level of social, political, spiritual and economic organization, the Arunta were destined to disappear. This being so, one might expect the observer to celebrate those members of the group who showed signs of embracing the new order, of attempting to come to terms with it and change their ways. But the writers were not to take this tack :

With the spread of the white man it can only be a matter of comparatively few years before the same fate will befall the remaining tribes, which are as yet fortunately too far removed from white settlements of any size to have become degraded. However kindly disposed the white settler may be, his advent at once and of necessity introduces a disturbing element into the environment of the native, and from that moment degeneration sets in, no matter how friendly may be the relations between the aborigine and the new-comers. The chance of securing cast-off clothing, food, tobacco, and perhaps also knives and tomahawks, in return for services// rendered to the settler, at once attracts the native into the vicinity of any settlement however small. The young men, under the new influence, become freed form the wholesome restraint of the older men, who are all-powerful in the normal conditions of the tribe. The strict moral code, which is certainly enforced in their natural state, is set on one side, and nothing is adopted in place of it. The old men see with sorrow that the younger ones do not care for the time-honoured traditions of their fathers, and refuse to hand them on to successors who, according to their ideas, are not worthy to be trusted with them ; vice, disease, and difficulty in securing the natural food, which is driven away by the settlers, rapidly diminish their numbers, and when the remnant of the tribe is gathered into some mission station, under conditions so far removed as they can be from their natural ones, it is too late to learn anything of the customs which once governed tribal life¹⁸.

This tragic vision has become a tradition within Australian anthropology. There is, of course, much to support it : the sufferings of the Aborigines brought about by the invasion and the subsequent land-grab have been and remain considerable. One does not have to wear a black arm-band to acknowledge their extent, or to hope that conditions may improve. But to see the behaviours of those who sought to adapt, as best they could, to the new conditions and the new powers, who traded what little they had in order to survive and, in one way or another, bring forth fruit and multiply, as nothing but evidence of degeneration, and to refuse any legitimacy to the voices of those who seized the opportunities offered by the new dispensation to live otherwise, was politically and intellectually lop-sided.

The two ethnologists threw their weight behind the old men, whom they saw as the last repositories of the practices that offered the evidence they sought. It was not simply that Spencer and Gillen used, for the most part, the old men as informants ; they also systematically favoured them in their conflicts with the young.

It is a common enough finding in societies which appear to be gerontocratic that whenever the young are offered an opportunity to escape the power of their elders, they will do so¹⁹. It is clear from the quotation above, and from other moments in the writings, that the young Arunta males were adopting similar strategies – and that some of them, at least, were happy to be able find themselves wives without having to undergo the painful ordeals of initiation. Spencer and Gillen were by no means neutral in their attitudes towards these youngsters ; they disapproved of them almost as much as the old men seem to have done themselves. Partly their enthusiasm for the ceremonies of circumcision and sub-incision is anthropological ; thus Gillen writes to Spencer :

A young fellow arrived with a sheep party from Newcastle Waters and as luck would have it he belonged to the Undiara district, the old men of the district at once proposed that he should be fixed up (circumcised) – you can imagine how I chortled – the result you will find set out with much detail²⁰

But there are indications that Gillen's enthusiasm goes beyond that of the researcher offered a fine opportunity for observation. He continues :

My first waninga pictures were very inferior and when, on the following day, I found them preparing for another such ceremony – with perfect weather – I nearly fainted with emotion. Everything was done in the good old alcheringa style, no modern nonsense and no clipping ... Lately these ceremonies in this locality have been much curtailed, the boys will not submit to discipline and a few months ago an Arakurta was seized and subincised in the bed of the creek at Middle Park – there are two Arakurta now camped on the Auruncha hill. I hope to get a picture of the Koperta Kakuma ceremony in a few days²¹.

It is to be noted here that Gillen's stance here is in sharp contrast to that of other state agents, magistrates, policemen and missionaries. In most places where the white man's law had been imposed, the young males could hope to be protected from their elders– and that, indeed, was why the 'boys' would not submit to discipline.

At Tennants Creek I found on of the Station blacks about 30 yrs of age circumcised but not subincised, living with a lubra who was Unawa but of another tribe, they would not give him his proper lubra. Of course he was under the protection of the Station Master but sooner or later he will be operated upon – at present he dare not leave the Station without firearms -²²

Gillen, on the contrary, not only refused his protection to the young, but positively encouraged the old men.

But not only did the two anthropologists throw the weight of Gillen's administrative power behind the elders ; they also offered them considerable economic leverage. For example, in one of his letters Gillen describes how he acquired a pair of magician's crystals :

A very old and celebrated Railtchawa from the northern side of the West'n McDonnells ... is here on a visit to me in quest of tomahawks etc. He has given me two atnonjara stones which the old villain with wonderful dexterity appeared to extract from his body ...²³

The gifts made to the old man were of considerable value ; for people who have discovered the advantages of steel over stone, the tomahawk or knife can become an object of desire of such power as to shape and twist relationships of power and authority²⁴. Gillen's control of the distribution process will have reinforced the dominance of the tribal elders – as Sharp illustrates in his analysis of the result of similar distribution among the Yir Yoront, this was not always the case, and Europeans could use their largess in ways that disrupted lines of authority.

At crucial moments, the gifts and resources that Gillen and Spencer were to put in the hands of the old men were of some importance. In a land impoverished by prolonged drought, the two anthropologists were willing to provision large numbers of Aborigines who had congregated for such important and traditional ceremonies as the Engwura of 1897 - an occasion which asserted the power of the old men both ritually and economically²⁵. As Gillen remarks in one of his later letters to Spencer :

The weather continues horribly dry, feed is growing scarce and our stock are beginning to look very skinny ... there is no indication of rain and I am beginning to think that we are in for a drought? The Niggers mourned your departure and are constantly making enquiries about you, your stay here must ever be to them a red letter period in the history of the tribe, never again will bacca be so plentiful or flour so liberally dealt out²⁶.

Similarly, the trip that the two men took to interview the old men of the Northern Tribes was undertaken with a “Wagon laden with good things in the rear²⁷”.

We may conclude Gillen and Spencer not only privileged the old men in their writings, but also in their interventions in Arunta politics. Their activities may well have had the effect of prolonging the power of the elders over their sons, grandsons and daughters, in contrast to the interventions of missionaries at other sites who promoted and defended those who broke away from the conventions of their people, and distributed their favours – and thereby distributed also the instruments of power – to the women and younger men. This is not to say that either the ehtnologists or the missionaries were mistaken in their choice : at this distance, cultural, historical and geographical, it would be a presumption to be overly judgmental. Sharp saw the missionaries' choice as undermining the culture of the Yir Yoront so dramatically that in the end they were most completely destroyed²⁸. But when Spencer returned to Alice Springs in 1904, he found not a single member of the group that they had studied in 1894 was still alive²⁹. Certainly both the missionaries and the anthropologists believed most sincerely that their activities were in the interests of the Aborigines :

You will be disgusted to hear that one of my boys has been allowed to take a lubra without being subincised. This is the beginning of the decay of this rite, five years later our work could not have been done effectively for once the begin to drop the old Customs degeneration – true degeneration from our, which is the proper point of view, - rapidly follows³⁰

Interview and Participation

Gillen's anthropological work, then, took place within a set of power relationships that included not only his own relationship to the anthropological establishment, to the Telegraph bureaucracy and to the state³¹, but also his relationships with the different groups among the Aborigines, situated in terms of age, gender, and spatio-linguistic considerations. As I have argued, the background theoretical assumptions within which he did his work drew him to concentrate upon the rules of marriage, the magical and the ritual, all of which he saw as being domains which were reserved to the old men, either because they had succeeded in forcibly excluding the other groups, or because the latter had turned away from them. This meant that he ignored, for the most part, the ordinary everyday lives of the Arunta³².

And of course, these ordinary and everyday lives were those in which accommodation, resistance or flight from the conditions imposed by the invasion were at their strongest. Yet it is in the context of this everyday struggle by the Aborigines to maintain some control over their own lives while entering, forcibly and inevitably, the new lives that they were squeezed into by the colonial adventure, that Gillen and Spencer extracted from their informants the secret and dangerous knowledge that they were to compile in their books. Let us take a glimpse at how this came about.

My Dear Spencer

Once again I am addressing you from the old familiar den which reeks more than ever of things anthropological. In addition to the old smell an odour peculiar to my Royal brother, the Alaartunja of the Udnirringeeta, pervades the place, he and a few of his Chosen disciples have visited and collogued with me here daily much to the disgust of my wife who declares that I am courting another attack of typhoid³³.

There is much to be drawn from this short passage – not least from what is not said. Gillen's nose is much exercised by the odours given off by his visitor – but one may wonder whether the Alaartunja has not had to overcome a certain repugnance himself. Daisy Bates reports that some of the Aborigines she knew had told her that the whites smelled bad³⁴. Furthermore, if Gillen's wife is worried that he will catch typhoid from his contact with the Arunta elders, from what we know of the morbidity and mortality among the Aborigines from diseases imported by the invaders – and from what Gillen himself wrote to Spencer – the local people had far more to fear from their uninvited guests than the latter had to fear from them. Finally, one can note that the den itself, the masculine centre of Gillen's world, from which he would emerge to play his role as station master, sub-protector of the Aborigines, magistrate, with the power to wrench men from their homes and send them off in irons to a far-off gaol, had been erected on land which had been stolen from the very men who squatted before him to speak of ceremony and dreaming.

Gillen, once he had been inducted into the arguments of the anthropologists by Stirling and Spencer, chose his informants in consequence. However, he could not fully rely on those who were old enough to be fully initiated and those who were untouched by the cultural influence of the invader. On the one hand, no group of Aborigines has ever been observed “in the wild”³⁵ ; Gillen's group around Alice Springs had been both directly and indirectly affected by conquest for decades, and the very presence of the telegraph repeater station had impinged upon their lives in countless ways³⁶. On the other, he himself does not seem to have been sufficiently fluent in the tongues of the vicinity to gather all the data he needed without recourse to an English-speaking Aborigine on occasion³⁷ – particularly when he needed corroborating information from one or another of the neighbouring peoples :

I received a letter from Cowle last night in which he informs me that he is bringing in a Luritcha prisoner whom he has arrested for Cattle Killing – I know the Nigger, he is about the most intelligent Luritcha I have met and if he is guilty I should much like to sentence him to do his term of imprisonment in my den, what a splendid chance it would be, he could not receive greater punishment than to be under my cross examination for six months. The pity of it is I'm afraid such a sentence would be illegal ... He did 6 months in gaol some years ago and learnt to speak English fairly well while there – Oh the pity of it³⁸.

Although Gillen resists his first impulse, he nevertheless uses the occasion offered him by the local police officer, and by his own status as magistrate, to anthropological advantage :

Cowle arrives this morning and with a pang, which I still feel, I was obliged to commit the prisoner 'Friday' to gaol for six months hard – After the court proceedings were finished I took him to my den where for three quarters of an hour I questioned him closely when suddenly, to my horror, he reeled and fell up against the black tracker to whom he was chained. I quickly shunted him into the open air where I administered some sal volatile after swallowing which, he fainted and did not rally for about half an hour. Cowle made some characteristic remarks about the questions being worse than the sentence but this did not deter me from tackling him again this afternoon when I went through the table of relationships and other matters. I am more than ever convinced that they have no class system and the totems most certainly do not regulate marriage³⁹.

Innocence, blindness? A total failure of imagination? In any case, the relationship here between colonial anthropologist and colonised informant appears at its starkest. The contrast between Gillen's interviews of the old men, who seem apt to wander into his den at any moment, and his quizzing of the younger ones, on some occasions at least, such as this one, under duress, is marked. We can sense resistance in their replies :

Martin of Tempe Downs brought in an intelligent Looritcha man who has been a great deal among the whites and I have had him in the question box for a week and failed to Elicit anything pointing to the existence of a class system amongst his people. He asserted time after time that he could take any woman as his wife, even his own sister, and that he knew of cases amongst his people where this had been done. He told me that children were always Eaten when killed and that the tribe also Eat their Enemies when they were fortunate enough to kill them⁴⁰.

And the women? Spencer and Gillen's works have been found wanting by subsequent workers precisely because they appear to downplay the role of women in the ritual and political aspects of Aborigine life. Certainly the women of the Arunta, as described by the two ethnographers, occupy but a minor role, although there is room to argue as to why this should be so. It may have been that Gillen found it difficult to take them seriously ; I have, in another paper, looked at how Gillen treated one of the housemaids, whom he objectified as a figure of fun⁴¹ ; the other household servants appear from time to time as they intervene in the lives of one or the other of Gillen's children, but do not figure as informants. (Mulvaney suggests that it may have been Amelia Gillen who picked their brains, but there is no direct evidence of this⁴²). In the early stages, Gillen shows but little interest in the non-Station women either :

When this reaches you in your snug University quarters I shall be plodding along somewhere between barrow and Tennants Creek ... I do wish you could be with me, that country is totally unexplored from a Zoological point of view, my present plan is to stay a week at each place and the whole of my spare time will be devoted to digging information out of the Niggers, while the men are engaged anthropologising I shall have the women scouring the country for beasts and my luck should be very bad indeed if I am not able to fill the tin⁴³

But Spencer seems to have been progressive on “the woman question”; he encouraged his female students to make careers in science, and we find him urging Gillen on to look into the contribution that Arunta women made to ceremonial life ;

I note what you say about the old women, I have already begun the attack in diplomatic style. I doubt very much whether they know anything about the Churinga names although your opinion to the contrary impresses me ...⁴⁴

Gillen approached the old women, by his own account, with great circumspection⁴⁵ - as well he might, for he had reason to believe that any woman who admitted to possessing too great a familiarity with the 'men's business' risked death, blinding with a fire-stick or at least a thrashing from the old men. However, he does feel free to question them about the defloration ceremony that the adolescent girl undergoes just before marriage :

Before I ventured to put that note (about the marriage ceremony) on paper for you I was very careful to make enquiries in all directions. I could not believe it myself at first but after numerous enquiries from old men and women, I was forced to accept it as truth ... There can be no doubt about the thing being so, for women questioned separately after I had become conversant with the relationship terms, all adhered to the same story⁴⁶.

For the most part, the ethnologists were reduced to working out how much or how little the women really did know by observation and inference – which brings us to an important aspect of the ethnologists' work, that is, direct participation in the activities of the people being studied.

Heat in the ethnological kitchen

At one point in their observations of Arrernte ceremonies, the two ethnologists are to be found upon their hands and knees, attempting to understand at first hand what it is that the young initiates have to undergo. At one point in the ceremony, the young men are “smoked”, lying on a set of logs that are set across a fire. Spencer and Gillen crawled across the fire : they reported that it was very hot indeed, and that they could not bear to remain on it for any length of time. They do not mention whether they singed their trousers.

What exactly is meant by 'participant observation'? The question is worth asking, and the answer that comes from anthropologists themselves is not particularly clear ; this lack of clarity appears to be almost deliberate, for it is part of the deep culture of the trade that each young tyro should be expected to make up his or her own method as he or she goes along. Jean E. Jackson, after interviewing seventy American anthropologists on their use of field-notes, concluded :

I have argued that fieldnotes and fieldwork do represent an individualistic, pioneering approach to acquiring knowledge, at times even a maverick and rebellious one. I have argued that the hints of a deliberate know-nothing spirit in graduate training, which emerged in discussion of lack of // preparation for ethnographic fieldwork and fieldnote taking, may even be part of a hidden curriculum designed to force to student to become an active creator, or re-creator, of anthropological technique. As one interviewee put it: « There was the image that each anthropologist was going into terra incognita and had to reconstruct, or reinvent, anthropology. ⁴⁷»

But while there is (or has been) little formal discussion of the method, one can discern an underlying model that emerges from the ethnographies themselves. This model is certainly evolutive and even went through something of a crisis during the sixties and seventies. However, I would suggest that the 'bedrock', as Gillen might have put it, is can be perceived in his own practices. Moreover, because of Gillen's status, because of the fact that he can account for himself in ways that the 'pure' fieldworker cannot, the distinctions between moments that are 'participant' and those that are not are particularly marked. Although he lives his life among the Aborigines, and although his activities and his decisions are of the utmost importance in shaping and directing their daily round, it is only on those occasions when he can present himself as occupying that status which the Arunta themselves have conferred upon him, and when the activities can be understood as directed by them, rather than by him, that he fully takes on the role of 'observer'. These occasions are, above all, ritual and ceremonial. They are conceived of, by the anthropologists, as being those moments when the native is most completely and authentically himself.

In Gillen's case, his Aboriginal status was elevated :

I am specially interested in the first ceremony because the performer represented Urangara, my ancestor of the Alcheringa or dream times, and the ceremony is in reality my property : I am supposed to be the reincarnation of a celebrated Alcheringa man who is famous for his skill as a great magician, the old men of the tribe had to account in some way for the remarkable interest I took in their manners and customs and the quite unusual sympathy I showed for their beliefs so they talked the matter over and persuaded themselves that I was the reincarnation of the great Urangara whose name must not be mentioned in the presence of women or the uninitiated⁴⁸.

This afforded him the status of Oknirabata, or great teacher. As for Spencer :

However Gillen persuaded them to let me in I cant imagine but the first night I got here the old head man came up to me and of his own accord said “you Bultharra Udnirringeta” which meant that I was a Bultharra man of the Udnirringita or large grub totem the same as himself and then he called me “Weteey-aitcha” which means my younger brother. After that I went in and out amongst them and they took no more notice of me than if I were one of themselves which in fact I now am ... they seem really anxious to let us know all about them⁴⁹.

Why the Arunta elders should have been so keen to let these two white men into their inner secrets is a matter for speculation⁵⁰. That they did so, and that subsequently the elders of other peoples were also inspired to take them into their confidence, is evident. It is also clear that once they had been allowed to participate in the ceremonies and had been given specific social roles, it was difficult for them to do more than catch a glimpse of the roles, attitudes and beliefs of those whose roles were dissimilar to their own ; the old and young women, the young men, for the most part only appear in the published accounts at those moments when they are called upon to share the scene with the old men. In the main body of the work, then, which concentrated upon the rituals that Gillen – accompanied for a couple of months by Spencer – was able to observe, these sections of Arunta society are peripheral.

Other Voices

If we are to hear voices other than those of Gillen and Spencer themselves, and, less clearly but nevertheless audible, those of the old men, we will rarely find them in the main body of the text, in those moments where the authors focus fully upon the rituals directed by their 'tribal peers'. It is mainly in the opening chapter of introductory material, or in the theoretical discussion – which, at Frazer's bidding, Spencer kept to a minimum⁵¹ - or, of course, in the letters, that one can trace them at all. I will turn first to the letters ; recall Gillen's account of the prisoner who collapsed under his interrogation. Here is the account given by Cowle, the policeman, of the same incident :

Did Gillen tell you that my prisoner took his sentence most impassively and only murmured that “a crimson lubra make him kill cattle” - but when he got at him in his den and unfolded a papyrus as long as himself and started to trace his descent through endless aunts, and great great grandfather's mothers he fainted away completely⁵².

It is difficult to evaluate this remark ; Cowle was given to making sarcastic comments about his acquaintances, and we may suspect that he did his best here to draw a contrast between the state of the prisoner as he delivered him up to justice, and the state in which Gillen's anthropologizing later plunged him. The prisoner's remark about his motivations, which, although between inverted commas, is indirect ('him' rather than 'me'), and which is embroidered by the unlikely adjective 'crimson' qualifying 'lubra', may be largely Cowle's own construction. However, I want to suggest that it is worth pursuing.

Wherever the pastoralists drove their cattle, they were sure to run into trouble with the Aborigines, who often killed them. The reasons were various ; obviously, the Aborigine would feel fully justified in killing any edible animal that he found upon what his own grounds, and more particularly so as white farming methods often led to a depletion in the numbers of their traditional prey. On the MacIntyre River frontier, by contrast, cattle were also killed in the hope that this would drive the newcomers away. Gillen mentions several incidents in his letters to Spencer ; it is difficult to tell whether the cattle-killers were motivated mainly by hunger, by a desire to punish or take vengeance on the people who had dispossessed them of their land, or by other impulsions. However, it does seem clear that the killing of large-scale game such as kangaroos – or cows – would have been a fully social activity, not simply in that the hunter would be likely to operate with a group, but that the results of any kill would be distributed according to a set of rules. These rules, in turn, were posited upon a fairly simple meta-rule, which has been enunciated by Chris Knight as “Sex for meat⁵³.”

This being so, control over sexuality included control over meat – and conversely, control over the supply of meat included control over sexuality. From the point of view of the old men of the Arunta, the traditional rules as they were enunciated to Gillen, which ensured that young men were maintained in a state of dependency until their mid-thirties or later, and which maintained male control of female sexuality, was highly profitable. Young males were ideally to remain unmarried until their mid-thirties or later, and both before and after marriage were expected to provide their prospective in-laws with a portion of their prey :

... we find that a man may not eat the flesh of any animal which has been caught and killed, or even handled, by his Ikuntera (father-in-law),Umba (children of his sisters), female Mura and Ipmunna, nor by the man who is the father of his mother-in-law. On the contrary he must share his food with his Ikuntera or actual and tribal fathers-in-law, and it is his duty on killing game to ascertain if any of them are in want of food ... a man continues, as it were, to pay a kind of tribute to his wife's group during his lifetime ...⁵⁴

In Cowle's account of his prisoner's crime, however, it is not the in-laws who are to profit from the killing, it would seem, but the young woman whose favours he covets. In this case, the cow-killer is sidestepping the old men's rules. Although Spencer and Gillen insist that the rules on sharing are usually carried out, they also indicate that the young men are not completely compliant :

As a matter of practice a man will never to out hunting with either his Ikuntera or Umba men, as they will appropriate everything which he kills while he is with them, so that he takes care to keep out of their way as much as possible⁵⁵.

Avoiding the injunction to share seems to be a fairly general characteristic among foragers⁵⁶, but the opportunities and the risks attached to taking them will vary. As wee have seen, it is likely that it had become easier to flout the diktats of the old men since the invaders had sapped their power and lowered their status. Moreover, it is possible that the very nature of the prey – cows rather than Euros – made the avoidance of sharing with in-laws easier :

Among the Gunwinggu in Northern Australia, for example, the head and one of the forequarters of macropods (kangaroos, wallabies) goes to the hunter, the other forequarter to the hunter's companion or brother. The rump and tail go to the hunter's mother's brother's son or his mother's mother's brother's daughter's son. Each hindquarter goes to a senior man, while the heart, liver, tripe, and other internal organs go to the hunter and senior men, or other men present at the kill⁵⁷.

Such rules are common throughout Australia, although whether they are followed by the Arunta I not (yet) know. Moreover, distribution was also influenced by the totem system, so that not all were allowed to eat of any animal. The cow, a relatively new apparition in the Aborigine's universe, and not being constructed in altogether the same way as a macropod, may have offered opportunities for a denial of distribution that the young men would be quick to seize upon. Moreover, the domesticated cow, being far more approachable than the wild Euro, could be easily killed by one man, who could then dispose of the meat discretely, by-passing his usual obligations.

The prisoner whom Gillen reduced to insensibility through his questioning may, if we put some credence in Cowle's account, be one indication that the old men did not have everything their own way, and that the monolithic political system that a quick reading of the texts advances was, in reality, rather more complex. As I have intimated, there are others.

The white men offered not only illicit – from the invader's point of view – occasions for outflanking the rules of the group, but also licit ones. Thus, for example, Cowle, when hunting cattle-killers, would employ the services of a police tracker. This figure appears in the first chapter of the book :

The experience of Mr. E.C. Cowle, to whose kindly aid we are much indebted, and than whom no one has had better opportunities for judging, is decisive upon this point (the variability in tracking skills of different men). When in pursuit of wild natives amongst the desolate scrubs and ranges he has had ample opportunities of comparing the different capacities in this respect, and, from long experience, is qualified to speak with certainty. At the present time Mr. Cowle has under him one native who, in difficult country – and what this means those who have traveled over the wild and desolate parts of the interior know well – can follow with unerring certainty, and while riding, tracks which the other black fellows with him will only distinguish with difficulty, or, sometimes, will even fail to see⁵⁸.

This may be Nat, who appears by name twice in Gillen's letters, and is obviously known to Spencer. Nat's father was of some consequence, as he was in charge of Undiara, one of the sacred sites of the Okira (Kangaroo) totem⁵⁹. Interestingly, this charge was only temporary, for the man was not himself of the correct totem ; the person who by right should have taken the position is named as 'Jim Oroka' by Gillen. Oroka, however, was absent at this time – because he also was employed as a policeman. Oroka is an interesting figure, who weaves his way in and out of the letters, a somewhat liminal character : he was evidently one of Gillen's informants, and seems to have been present at the Engwura ceremonies as one of the initiated men, and yet he is also depicted as one of the young who does not really know the inner secrets :

I have given this matter (the Churinga) much careful thought and for hours and days I have threshed it out with the hoariest headed of the tribe, it is only the hoary headed from whom we can extract information on this subject now that we have got close to the bed rock – The younger men like Oroko and Jim don't know and the old men ... by judicious silence pretend to know more than they really do know if you can understand what I mean⁶⁰.

It may be that Oroka first joined the police as a result of Gillen's sentencing him to prison, for the editors suggest that the following excerpt may refer to him :

The Luritcha table (of relationships) does not differ much from the Arunta. I am taking it to Barrows Creek where there is an intelligent Luritcha man in the employ of the Police from whom I hope to get fuller information, he is under an obligation to me as I sent him to Port Augusta gaol some years ago for cattle killing and thus converted him into a respectable member of the Police force⁶¹.

Both Nat and Jim Oroka seem to be men who could have hoped to rise to some prominence among their people. Oroka already had, by right, a claim to the sacred Kangaroo totem cave, and Nat's father was well placed to look after the interests of his son. Yet both men seem to have found it profitable to look to the new regime for opportunity, even though this was likely to leave them exposed in other ways. Nat, for example, was to be involved in a killing :

There has been considerable trouble with the Luritja niggers for a long time, they persistently Kill Martin's cattle and in trying to arrest one a few weeks ago, Nat, in the absence of Cowle, shot him in the thigh and he bled to death⁶²

The man's involvement in enforcing the pastoralists' law could lead to attempts on his life on the part of the family of his victim. Moreover, he risked discovering that he would not be fully backed by his white superiors :

I have told the Minister that there is nothing to be gained by further enquiry. I expect the result will be that the trackers will be forbidden to use firearms except in the presence of and by direct orders from the Police Officers. I have made a recommendation to this effect⁶³.

Caught between a rock and a hard place, the young men seem to have had recourse to a multiplicity of strategies. Jim Oroko and Nat are in some ways emblematic of the ducking and diving that their contemporaries were forced into in order to survive. From cattle-thief to policeman, from celebrant of the tribal rituals to stockman or station-hand, the men of the younger generation seem to have done their best to navigate between the old world and the new. Some of them failed most miserably :

Cowle was here a few days ago – an outlaw boy – that is an outlaw from his own people owing to his taking an ipmunna⁶⁴ woman – Killed a man named Beattie whose remains he cleverly unearthed, arrested the boy who subsequently struck him with handcuffed hands and trying to make off, was shot dead⁶⁵.

Significantly, Cowle, commenting on the episode in a letter to Spencer, calls the dead Aborigine 'one of the semi-civilised natives'⁶⁶. However value-laden the term, its recognition of the man's liminality is telling.

What about the women? Spencer and Gillen offer this summary of their status in traditional Arunta society :

The women are certainly not treated usually with anything which could be called excessive harshness. They have, as amongst other savage tribes, to do a considerable part, but by no means all, of the work of the camp, but, after all, in a good season this does not amount to very much, and in a bad season men and women suffer alike, and of what food there is they get their share. If, however, rightly or wrongly, a man thinks his wife guilty of a breach of the laws which govern marital relations, then undoubtedly the treatment of the woman is marked by brutal and often revolting severity⁶⁷.

It is difficult to make much of this : what might be considered 'excessive harshness', how much time the work of the camp takes, and how heavy that work may be are left unquantified. As we have seen, Gillen was unable to make much headway with the women, whether old or young, so we get little insight into the political and emotional interplay between male and female. Moreover, the power of the old men is represented as quasi-absolute ; any woman who sees one of the sacred stones, or one of the store-houses in which they are kept, is ineluctably punished – blinded or put to death.

As Cowle's account of the crime of Gillen's unhappy informant suggests, some, at least, of the younger women would seem to have encouraged the uninitiated men to short-circuit the elders. This is certainly true elsewhere than at Alice Springs :

From what I gather ... utter demoralization has set in amongst the Urrapunna and the Arunta where they come together ... and now they are setting aside their ancient tribal laws and marrying anyhow. I found Coomarras and Puroolas living together at Macumba. Their Headmen and old mens influence had been destroyed by the Whiteman, never to rise again. My Urrapunna friend deplored the departure from Ancient custom and said that most young men and women of today who live within easy distance of the Railway line laugh at the idea of tribal restrictions ...⁶⁸

The older women were also willing to take risks to avoid the compulsions of the kinship system ; Gillen was told that widows, who were expected to marry their dead husband's brother, would often run away rather than comply⁶⁹.

Many of the women had relationships with the invaders. They might be servants, such as Polly, who was employed by Gillen's wife, along with a number of other kitchen workers and maids (see Spencer's photograph of the housemaids and their children⁷⁰). Some of them were stock-minders and all-round farm hands, and many had sexual relations with white men – or with the Afghans or the Chinese who sold their labour to build the new Australia. These are murky waters ; where did rape end and prostitution begin, and where and how often the latter might blend into long-term companionship is difficult to ascertain⁷¹. That some of these relationships were considered legitimate by the Aborigines themselves – or at least, by the men – is arguable :

It is quite true, on the other hand, that a native will sometimes offer his wife, as an act of hospitality, to a white man ; but this has nothing to do with the lending of wives (to other Aborigines). The white man stands outside the laws which govern the native tribe, and therefore to lend him a wife of any designation does not imply infringement of any custom⁷².

Beyond that, if we rely on Spencer and Gillen themselves, it is difficult to go. That some Aboriginal women willingly allied themselves to non-Aboriginal males is certain. That the Aborigines who today trace their descent to the Arunta can also evoke other forefathers is also the case, although how many of those who crossed the line did so under duress cannot be ascertained.

Jen Gibson, writing of the Oondatta region, and citing a young Arrernte, writes : “Many Aboriginal people today trace their descent to Chinese, Irish, English or Afghan forebears. Fred Ah Chee ... recalls :

They associated or solicited with Aboriginal women ... It was the Aboriginal women who did all the washing, all the house work, and this is where the part-coloured originated. So they actually played a part in the destruction of the Aboriginal people even though they were pioneers ... Oh it's so complicated⁷³.

As Fred Ah Chee looks back across the generations to the men and women whose seed he is, the washerwomen, the camel drivers, the whores and the railroad navvies, the pioneers who braved the desert to civilize it, and the Aborigines who were destroyed by the civilising process, he sees a complexity that is, perhaps, forgotten too easily in these times when the notion of Aboriginal identity has become something of a political football ; the man or woman who today carries the genes of Gillen's Old King may also carry those of one of Gillen's white fellow-workers, or of his friend and neighbour, Police Constable Cowle.

Conclusion

In their main published works, Gillen and Spencer wrote the Arunta with an anthropological pen. In the letters and notes that Gillen wrote to Spencer, he tells another, rather different story. Reading the latter allows us to read in between the lines of the former, and to glimpse traces of the ways in which the people whose lands were crossed by the telegraph line, and who were so rudely thrust into modernity by their invaders, attempted to come to terms with the upheavals that faced them. Men and women, young and old, they were used by the white man, as workers, as police-auxiliaries, as objects of their lust, or as anthropological informants. They, in their turn, did their best to use whatever arms they already possessed, and the new ones that they found in the cast-off clothing, the cattle and the dark bottles of the invader. Both groups and individuals seem to have essayed and cycled through each of the possibilities that are open to an ill-armed small group when faced with the invasion of a heavily armed and well-organized enemy, with seemingly inexhaustible supplies: resistance, retreat and accommodation. But, ducking and diving, bobbing and weaving, the Arunta and their progeny did their best to survive, and even to prosper. They did so, even though their observers – not alone in that – believed that they were vowed to extinction.

I have here insisted mainly upon those whose voices have left little trace in the ethnographies. This is not because I would downplay the role of the old men ; I have argued elsewhere that Gillen's informants knew pretty much what he and Spencer were up to, and that they collaborated with them because they saw an interest in doing so – an interest which served both short-term and long-term needs, for Gillen, as we have seen, helped them to maintain immediate control, and also inscribed their important religious ceremonies for later generations to discover⁷⁴. But Gillen himself did downplay the importance of those strategies of which he could only disapprove, but which the young and the women played their part – often as much against as with the will of the old men – in ensuring their own, and their group's survival.

Anthropologists and political activists today tend to judge the younger men and women almost as severely as Gillen and Spencer were wont to. Often they are seen as traitors to their people – particularly those who became members of the Native Police. Given the choices with which they were confronted and the multiplicity of oppressions with which they had to contend, such judgementalism is inappropriate. Spencer and Gillen's old men may have done their utmost to preserve the beliefs and rituals of their people. The young, in one way or another, did something to preserve its flesh.

I will leave you with a passage from the first chapter of “The Native Tribes of Central Australia”. It may, I suggest, be quite fruitfully read in the light of Keats' “Woman! when I behold thee” :

The idea of making any kind of clothing as a protection against cold does not appear to have entered the native mind, though he is keen enough on securing the government blanket when he can get one, or, in fact, any stray cast-off clothing of the white man. The latter is however, worn as much from motives of vanity as from a desire for warmth ; a lubra with nothing on except an ancient straw hat and an old pair of boots is perfectly happy⁷⁵.

If we can slough off the blinding confinement of white masculine contempt, perhaps we may here catch a glimpse of a young woman taking what there is to hand and seeing what she can do with it.

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