A COLONIAL LEGACY
At a time when Christian missions sought to wipe out the ‘heathen’ customs of Arnhem Land’s Aboriginal people, the 1948 expedition treated their cultures with greater respect.
HOW DID Arnhem Land’s Aboriginal people feel about the expedition? Relations seem to have been mostly friendly. This was at a time when many white Australians were indifferent to the plight of their Indigenous countrymen. The expedition, at least, arrived with great interest in their artwork and way of life. Arnhem Landers also participated, not only as test subjects for nutrition studies, for example, but also as guides, carriers and collectors – and specially created many of the artworks the expedition collected.
Much sought-after blocks of tobacco were the main way local people were compensated. Cans of food, cloth, sewing kits and scissors were also often exchanged, says ANU historian Associate Professor Martin Thomas.
Honorary entomologist and expedition cook John Bray enlisted “cockroach committees” of women and children at each camp to gather insect specimens in return for tobacco and lollies. From Groote Eylandt, botanist Ray Specht wrote to his mother that the children spoke good English and “are very lovable and a great help in getting the native names and uses of plants…children used to gather around my tent and name every plant I collected.”
One way in which Aboriginal people were treated very poorly, however, was the Smithsonian’s collection of human remains from burial caves – which later became controversial.
Oenpelli’s traditional owners later petitioned for the return of the bones through the Australian government, and the Smithsonian relinquished the last of the remains in 2010.
The following year a ceremony saw them wrapped in paperbark and interred into the ground at Argaluk Hill, one of the sites Frank Setzler had taken them from.
Ray had his work cut out for him as botanist, because he had to collect 10 of every specimen, to be supplied to various herbaria in cities in the USA, Europe and Australia. By the end of the eight months he had 13,000 pressed plants to label and process.
Doctor Brian Billington and biochemist Kevin Hodges of the IOA set about studying the health of the Aboriginal population, while at the same time dispensing medicines.
The press was particularly interested in a lone white woman, nutritionist Margaret McArthur, heading off unaccompanied into Aboriginal communities. She and Bessie Mountford were the only women in the expedition party. Food gathering was a female activity in Arnhem Land so McArthur could work closely with Aboriginal women and children. She also monitored what people ate, weighing and measuring meals before consumption.
McArthur’s f indings were another expedition bombshell. Far from being impoverished, the hunter-gatherer diet was sound, says Professor Martin Thomas, a modern-day historian at the Australian National University in Canberra. “It was a rather surprising discovery of the expedition that Aboriginal people were not caught in this perpetual, 24-hour quest for survival,” he says. “McArthur found that they could do the necessary work of food gathering very quickly and they actually had a lot of leisure time.”
The expedition also began to debunk another contemporary myth: the ‘dying race theory’ that Aboriginal people were dwindling in number. This had been an impetus for the collection of Indigenous art – to document it before it was lost. Mountford himself had said his previous work had “saved the art of the Central Australian from extinction”. In a subsequent book about the expedition, Simpson argued, quite accurately, that the Aboriginal population of Australia was in fact increasing, as it continues to today.
Pthe long delay of the Phoenix, which was laden with supplies, combined with the fact there was no working radio at Groote Eylandt for Mountford to ascertain the ship’s whereabouts, led to grumblings of discontent among the expedition members.
Mountford later suspected McCarthy of writing letters maligning him, which led to the attempt by the DOI to sack him as leader. However, Martin Thomas’s research into letters in Canberra archives reveals it was in fact Billington’s “savage” complaints to his IOA superiors that fomented the crisis.
Negative reports of Mountford’s conduct were nevertheless fair, Martin argues. Aside from his selfish tendencies, Mountford had little experience of this kind of leadership. “The expedition was much bigger than anything he’d ever done,” Martin explains. “He was leading a group of mostly much younger, scientif ically ambitious men, many of whom had had some military experience during the war. They had a different notion of leadership.”
When the DOI’s director f lew to Yirrkala in July, he gave Mountford “an incredible dressing-down” and told him they would replace him with Setzler. Mountford and Setzler were stunned, but once the American had conferred with his Smithsonian colleagues, it became clear he wouldn’t accept the promotion. They believed the symbolism of an American leading a joint expedition on Australian territory would be all wrong, Martin says.
Mountford continued on as leader, but was “absolutely devastated”, which was hinted at by the fact that he abandons his journal for the rest of the expedition. “He’s completely humiliated,” Martin says. “It has a big effect on the expedition, because the rest of the party, who’d complained and cursed about him, ended up feeling really sorry for him.”
The expedition continued, despite this crisis, and became a remarkable success. There are many lighter moments and evocative anecdotes recorded in the expedition’s numerous surviving journals, papers and recordings.
Simpson, for example, in his ABC documentary, describes a sweltering evening scene at Oenpelli billabong: “a big boomerang of shining blue water fringed with emerald green grass and decorated right down the middle with waterlilies… Down at the far end of the lagoon natives are gathering lily roots to eat and hand netting f ish, and in the middle foreground of this picture are 14 male members of the expedition bathing. From wearing only shorts in the sun they are copper brown to the waist, but here they are wearing nothing except beards.”
Simpson also created recordings of traditions and performances that have become important historical records. For instance, Martin says, he recorded a male initiation rite, a Wubarr ceremony. For senior Bininj men of West Arnhem it “provides an invaluable record of a venerated ceremony that has now fallen into abeyance”.
Simpson and Walker were not the only media that accompanied the expedition. Australian magazine Pix sent cartoonist Eric Jolliffe to Yirrkala, where he made humorous sketches of the scientists, illustrating the peculiar behaviour of these puzzling balanda – whitefellas – as they may have appeared to their Aboriginal hosts.
The fact that expedition members often swam in the area’s billabongs and waterways suggests crocodiles were far rarer here prior to the hunting bans of the 1970s. Ray says they encountered few other dangers, although he had a shock one day upon realising he’d climbed into a blind-your-eye mangrove, which exudes a poisonous sap that causes blistering and blindness.
As he wrote to his mother from Groote Eylandt in July, he had help from a “6ft 3in man” named Kumbiala, who’d “spent some time in… jail for murder”, but was a skilled axeman and an “informative and extremely willing worker”. Ray was touched one day when Kumbiala announced he’d made him a painted woomera (spear thrower). This “gift from one of the f inest Aborigines I have met” still hangs on his dining room wall today, seven decades later.
One delightful anecdote involves a “native cat” – a northern quoll, or njanmak, as it is known to the Bininj people – “a dusky marsupial with whitish spots”, Mountford noted, that visited the kitchen at Oenpelli seeking discarded morsels. One evening Walker left a tin of sardines out and set his camera up to get some photos. The little marsupial was very obliging until a f lash bulb, moved to within a metre of it, sent it scarpering.
Ioverstate the importance of the expedition in opening the eyes of Australia and the world to the natural and cultural wonders of Arnhem Land. “The expedition put Arnhem Land on the map in a whole new way – and it had an incredible effect on the recognition of Aboriginal art,” Martin says. “This is one of these key moments where Aboriginal art becomes something recognised for its aesthetic and artistic value.”
The very best bark paintings collected were distributed to Australia’s state art galleries, not its natural history museums. About two-thirds of the natural and cultural specimens remained in Australia, with most of the rest sent to the Smithsonian.
One of the last huge, interdisciplinary expeditions of the 20th century, the 1948 endeavour has multiple legacies, says Dr Joshua Bell, a present-day curator of ethnology at the Smithsonian’s NMNH. “Its various collections – cultural artefacts, f ield notes, natural history specimens, and still and moving images – are invaluable materialisations of the region’s cultural and ecological diversity,” he says, adding that these collections form crucial baselines from which to study changes and losses over time.
Back in November 1948, as the first rains of the Wet dampened Oenpelli, the expedition members broke camp and sped over the rapidly moistening f loodplains to a date with a barge on the East Alligator River that would carry them to Darwin.
As Mountford wrote in 1949: “Calmly, slowly, the Aborigines returned to their halcyon life in Arnhem Land, where haste had no place, where time never mattered, where tribal folk didn’t reckon in days or years or even centuries.”
“The expedition put Arnhem Land on the map in a whole new way – and it had an incredible effect on the recognition of Aboriginal art.”