THE LAST GREAT EXPEDITION
This ambitious US–Australia venture made history in 1948, when it set out to uncover the secrets of the Arnhem Land wilderness.
OUR TENTS FACED a large billabong, its surface spotted with water lilies and fringed with green grasses: on the far shore a eucalyptus forest spread to the 500-foot escarpment of the rugged Arnhem Land tableland,” wrote Charles ‘Monty’ Mountford in a lavish, nearly 40-page-long feature in the September 1949 edition of National Geographic. “It will be a long time before I see anything more stirring than the sight from our camp. Shortly after dawn a filmy mist crept slowly across the surface of the billabong, veiling and softening the lilies on the water, the outline of distant trees, and the ref lections of the tarlike hill called Inyalark.”
Mountford, a filmmaker and self-taught ethnologist at the South Australian Museum in Adelaide, was the leader of the 1948 American–Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. It was one of the most ambitious research expeditions in Australia’s history. Yet many people know nothing of it today, despite huge media attention and countless column inches during the ’40s and ’50s.
Seventy years ago this March, a team of scientists prepared to head east from Darwin, funded by the Commonwealth of Australia and the National Geographic Society – and led by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC and various Australian museums. Designated in 1931 as an ‘Aboriginal Reserve’, Arnhem Land’s 34,000sq.km had scarcely been explored by Europeans since Dutch East India Company ships, including the Arnhem in 1623, had f irst sailed into the Gulf of Car pentar ia three centuries earlier.
In fact, according to surviving team member and expedition botanist Ray Specht – now aged 93 – prior to 1948 there had been almost no study of the natural history of Arnhem Land, or collection of botanical and zoological specimens, since Captain Matthew Flinders mapped the Gulf of Carpentaria from the Investigator in 1803. Although it had long been visited by Macassan traders from Indonesia, Arnhem Land in the 1940s was regarded by most Australians as a wild place of mystery. “Far-off, unfamiliar country”, is how it was described by ABC radio journalist and author Colin Simpson, who travelled with the expedition producing radio features and didgeridoo recordings.
Beyond the excitement it generated, the expedition made major contributions to science and the European understanding of Aboriginal life and culture, propelling Aboriginal painting and carvings from the realm of ethnographic study to the nation’s art galleries.
Over the course of eight months, the party of 17 and their assistants set up camp in three locations and collected a staggering 50,000 or so zoological, botanical and archaeological specimens and hundreds of Aboriginal artworks. “No other expedition in Australia,” Mountford wrote, “has embraced so many interlocking branches of anthropology, natural history, and medical research.”
It began on Groote Eylandt, the largest island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, before moving in July to the coastline and billabongs of Yirrkala on the Gove Peninsula, and finally to the stony plateau of Oenpelli (now Gunbalanya) in western Arnhem Land in September, before breaking camp in November.
Aedition of National Geographic heralding the expedition declared: “Arnhem Land, an untamed no-man’s land in northern Australia, has remained unknown to the world
and virtually unexplored. It is the home of the only Australian Aborigines who have persistently dared to defend their way of life.”
The expedition would, the magazine noted, seek answers to such questions as: “How do Arnhem Land Aborigines subsist? How do they compare with other primitive peoples? What birds, beasts and fishes share Arnhem Land with them, and how do these creatures inf luence the native way of life?” It would also help build the NT collections of the Smithsonian and Australian museums and art galleries.
With World War II – particularly the Japanese bombing of Darwin and invasion of New Guinea – fresh in the minds of Australia’s leaders, the expedition also had several unstated purposes: to collect intelligence that could be useful in the event of an invasion from the north; to foster friendly relations with the USA, a vital military ally; and to learn what bush foods Aboriginal people exploited – knowledge that might benef it soldiers in the wilderness.
To answer the scientif ic questions, a team was assembled that included Ray Specht, who was then a botanist with the University of Adelaide, and expedition deputy leader Frank Setzler, an archaeologist and head of anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Washington, DC. Other team members included the Smithsonian’s curators of mammals, birds and f ishes; nutritional scientists and a biochemist from the Institute of Anatomy (IOA) in Canberra; an anthropologist from the Australian Museum; numerous Aboriginal guides; a cook doubling as an honorary entomologist; and Mountford’s wife, Bessie, as expedition record keeper and seashell collector.
National Geographic photographer and writer Howell Walker was capturing everything on film for the magazine, as well as writing an article about the adventure he’d had sailing from Darwin to Groote Eylandt on the ill-fated barge Phoenix.
Colin Simpson, the ABC journalist on the expedition, spent several weeks at the f inal camp in Oenpelli, 240km east of Darwin, recording sound for a pioneering radio documentary using a newly developed magnetic-wire recorder. This was the forebear of the tape recorder and, for the f irst time, allowed radio broadcasters to easily leave the studio.
The American scientists arrived in Australia in early 1948 expecting to set straight off into Arnhem Land. But they were whisked by Mountford and the Australian Government’s Department of Information (DOI) to a parade of receptions in Canberra, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. Finally, in early April, most of the expedition party boarded a Royal Australian Air Force Catalina f lying boat from Darwin to Groote Eylandt, where their real work to investigate the people and environment of the Top End began.
That six Australian government departments, including the military, were involved, showed the importance with which the expedition was regarded. But problems were already brewing. The radio-less and battered supply vessel, Phoenix, would soon become grounded on a reef at Boucaut Bay – with most of the food, scientif ic supplies, several academics and National Geographic’s Walker aboard.
Mountford had no inkling when they set out that, within a few months, there’d be a serious crisis as his leadership of the expedition was called into question. The director of the DOI would f ly to Yirrkala, with an American official and the NT administrator, to depose Mountford as expedition leader and move Setzler into his place.
THE ARNHEM LAND expedition was conceived several years earlier while Mountford was on a speaking tour of the USA, at the behest of the DOI, which was tasked with pro-
Mountford had no inkling when they set out that, within a few months, there’d be a serious crisis .
moting Australia to the world. Mountford’s 1944 tour, when he lectured about f ilms he’d produced on Aboriginal life in Central Australia, was part of a propaganda campaign to foster cooperation with the USA and encourage migration to Australia.
“During the course of my lectures, I spoke before a large audience of the National Geographic Society at Washington. This so interested that society, that they f inally appointed me the leader of a small party to visit Arnhem Land,” Mountford recounted to Simpson. “When I returned to Australia, Mr Calwell, the minister for information, became most interested in the expedition and – realising this was a unique opportunity to weld together the scientif ic groups of both countries more closely – suggested a larger party with a much-increased scope.”
Intriguingly, Ray Specht says, the US funding for the expedition came from the accumulated prof its of National Geographic magazine in Australia – money that, shortly after WWII, could not be transferred home. That grant was at least US$18,500 (about A$244,000 today), but was likely dwarfed by the Australian government contribution.
Charles Mountford had not become an expert on Aboriginal art by traditional academic means. He hadn’t even completed high school in Adelaide, becoming a stable hand, tram driver and telephone technician before developing a talent for filmmaking that took him into Aboriginal communities in the arid centre of Australia.
What he lacked in academic training, he made up for in charisma and skill at pulling political strings. He was later credited with helping start a movement that saw Aboriginal art displayed in Australia’s major art galleries. But his lack of a university education put him at odds with the academic establishment who regarded him as an ignorant upstart.
As Professor Margo Neale of the National Museum of Australia told the ABC in 2009: “There was a very Sydney-based anthropological establishment, who thought it was rightfully their place to lead Australia’s greatest ever scientif ic expedition… I mean the audacity of this tram driver – amateur, untrained, so-called ethnographer – leading this enormous expedition.”
Simmering academic rivalry between Mountford and the expedition archaeologists – Setzler and the Australian Museum’s Frederick McCarthy – led to problems even in the trip’s early days that were exacerbated by Mountford allocating himself the lion’s share of resources. But mostly this multi-disciplinary group muddled along well together.
Walker later recounted to Mountford’s biographer: “If there was any question about his leadership, there was certainly no doubt about Monty’s uncanny ability to staff his expedition with scientists of the highest calibre – scientists who, incidentally, got along with each other like schoolkids on holiday. Generally, they stayed happy because Monty let each pursue his work in his own way, just as he let me alone to my writing and photography.”
Mountford spent time documenting rock-art galleries, and was particularly taken with the region’s characteristic X-ray and Mimi art. Setzler and McCarthy excavated the f loors of caverns and other sites, seeking ancient chipped stone implements, such as blades and axes.
Smithsonian ichthyologist Robert Miller collected a massive 30,000 fish specimens during the expedition, using hook and line, seine nets, powdered derris root – which poisoned f ish, causing them to f loat to the surface – and even a shotgun. He discovered an unusual f lying f ish relative that skipped along the water’s surface when threatened and another f ish that perfectly mimicked a f loating dead leaf.
Smithsonian ornithologist Herbert Deignan and mammologist David Johnson were stranded on Phoenix with Walker, but when they finally arrived at Groote Eylandt, seven weeks late, they got to work in earnest. Here Deignan recorded 89 birds, while Johnson collected more than 100 mammal specimens, many of species not now known from the island. Later at Oenpelli, Johnson distinguished himself, and worried his colleagues, by spending 12 days walking 257km solo on a return trip hunting for specimens.