Many Worlds of R.H. Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist

By Martin Thomas

Media and readers are ready to question notions of history and how it has been presented and interpreted in the past. The Many Worlds of R.H. Mathews is about the life and work of the renowned 19th century surveyor turned ethnologist, R.H. Mathews, whose studies of Aboriginal Australia were path-breaking and quite controversial. His childhood in Goulburn meant that he grew up with Aboriginal children as playmates, so when he began his obsession with documenting Aboriginal life, he came to his subject with fond familiarity, not the freakshow interest that spurred many of the English anthropologists of the time, especially Baldwin Spencer, who went out of his way to discredit Mathews' work, especially after his death. Largely due to this conspiracy, Mathews has been a reasonably unknown figure in early anthropology, but his legacy and work have been reassessed and he is emerging as one of our most important documentors of Aboriginal language, legends, and mythology. So important, in fact, that it is his legacy of papers, interpretations, and documents, held largely in the National Library of Australia, that is being used by contemporary Aboriginal people to rejuvenate their culture. Martin's approach to his subject is not conventional biography, but something more ambitious and unusual, and one perfectly tuned to the revelations it contains.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen Unwin
• Release date: Mar 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781741766769

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R. H. Mathews during his anthropological years, c. 1905. By permission of the National Library of Australia. NLA MS TEMP. ACC. 09.011.

MARTIN THOMAS

The Many Worlds

of R. H. Mathews

In search of an Australian anthropologist

First published in 2011

Copyright © Martin Thomas 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Australian Research Council through the award of a Post Doctoral Fellowship (project number F00104426).

This project has been assisted with a publishing grant by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

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Endpapers: Rock art documentation, dating from c. 1893.

Field Book No. 1, R. H. Mathews Papers. By permission of

the National Library of Australia. NLA MS 8006/3/2.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FOR MY SON AARON

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1 Ethnomania

CHAPTER 2 The Rage for Collecting

CHAPTER 3 The Cost of Empire

CHAPTER 4 The Path from Mutbilly

CHAPTER 5 Before the Conversion

CHAPTER 6 The Influence of Baiami

CHAPTER 7 The Initiate

CHAPTER 8 The Great Debate

CHAPTER 9 The Midden of Glass

CODA

NOTES

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Mathews family from the eighteenth century to the present

(Based on the genealogical research of William ‘Bill’ Mathews (1883–1967))

ethnomania / noun / 1. an enthusiasm for collecting and circulating information about a race, culture or society, usually other than one’s own. 2. a proclivity for indulgence or overindulgence in ethnological activity.

PROLOGUE

For more than a generation now, historians have challenged the heroic and congratulatory accounts of national foundation that were once canonical to settler societies. The public face and self-perception of nations have changed as a result of these inquiries, which are but a reflection of wider processes of evaluation and scrutiny. Historians are by no means the only contributors to the discussion, but they have played their part. Findings have percolated through to the public culture; the culture itself has become more open to the voices and experiences of colonised people. In Australia, we have tackled such themes as the savageness of frontier conflict, the race-based servitude of the mission and pastoral eras, and the dismantling of family and social structure, referred to as the Stolen Generations. Acknowledgment of this history was sufficiently widespread in 2008 to justify a prime ministerial apology. To the surprise of critics who had long resisted this possibility, the apology, which made headlines around the world, proved to be more cohesive than it was divisive.

Having passed this milestone, it is timely to think about where our dialogue with the past might next be headed. We could continue to marshal more evidence of injustice and violence. As a frequenter of archives, I know it’s out there. But if the objective is simply to throw further light in this one direction, an ever deeper shadow will be cast everywhere else. I have come to wonder whether in dispelling the always fanciful notion that the conquest of the continent was done nicely, a terrible error has been perpetrated—an error not of fact but of omission. Brutality, disgust, hatred, repulsion and willingness to exploit have indeed played their part in the meeting of cultures. Yet they have travelled in concert with other, quite different sentiments. Attraction, affection, empathy, curiosity, admiration, desire and, let us say it, love are also part of the emotional spectrum that has coloured the history of Australia’s colonisation.

To generalise about the contact experience is difficult, so thoroughly was it wrought with contradictions. Take as an example a letter from a South Australian settler. Her name, as she signed it, was Mrs Regen Gourlay and in 1900 she was writing about the Aboriginal employees on the pastoral station she ran with her husband. She had been pregnant that year, but went into labour prematurely and the child was lost. Aboriginal midwives saw her through the ordeal: ‘they were very good they press down the back a firm gentle pressure all the time bringing the hands gradually downwards.’ Her letter included a diagram of how they tied the umbilical cord. In earlier days the string used for this operation was spun from the pelt of a native mammal. Now rabbits provided the fur. Mrs Gourlay had been asked about the Aboriginal traditions of the area, but despite her experience of midwifery, she claimed there were none. ‘We are very interested in the blacks but this tribe is very dull, dirty, on the whole and lazy, of course there are exceptions . . . I don’t believe they have any traditions but will try and find out.’¹

This letter, written to the Australian anthropologist Robert Hamilton Mathews, shows how anthropological archives can provide an intimate perspective on the interactions between cultures. For Mathews, anthropology became a magnificent obsession. Born in New South Wales in 1841, he was fifty when he became entangled in an all-consuming study of Aboriginal Australians. Beginning in the early 1890s, his quest continued until his death in the last year of the Great War. Mathews did not make grand expeditions to pursue his passion. If he was searching for the exotic (and that is questionable), he looked for it in places that were to him quite familiar. He travelled by train or paddle-steamer to areas of New South Wales he had previously known as a roving surveyor. He sent pleas for information to people like Mrs Gourlay. He used his horse or the fledgling commuter transport system to access Aboriginal communities around the periphery of Sydney, his home town. One of his sons, Bill Mathews, was sometimes taken on these excursions. They went by tram to the Aboriginal settlement at La Perouse on Botany Bay, an area celebrated in settler culture as a landing place of Captain Cook. Bill particularly remembered his father’s sessions with Emma Timbery, an elder of considerable standing whose first language was Dharawal, the tongue indigenous to the bay and to the coastal areas south of Sydney. Bill was left to play with the Aboriginal children while his father went inside to work. Late in life, he recalled peering into a humpy to see Mrs Timbery and his father deep in conversation, both smoking pipes and sitting on boxes. Mathews was ‘writing very hard’ in his small notebook and young Bill was dismissed with the wave of a hand.²

Mathews himself said little about these conversations. Rather than reflect on his process, he preferred to plough on with his work. But the exchanges on which his studies depended, and the intellectual challenges they presented, acquire flesh when you read the papers that resulted from his time with Mrs Timbery and others in that community. Perhaps fancifully, Mathews liked to think that the readers of his treatise on Dharawal would use it as a score. Seated in their studies, they would vocalise the words he had set out in type. He gave advice on pronunciation that echoes the aural and oral challenges he himself experienced. We can think of him and Emma Timbery—student and teacher—sharing the tobacco pouch and surely some laughter, for foreignness in a language is nearly always funny. At the end of a syllable or word, dy or ty is sounded as one letter; thus, in bir-rity, stick, the last syllable can be pronounced exactly by adding e to the y, making it rit-ye. Then commence articulating the word, including the y, but stopping short without sounding the final, or added e.³ The notebook mentioned by Bill Mathews actually survives, partly through his own efforts, for he was a dedicated hoarder of paperwork. His father’s archives were kept in an old trunk containing treasures that never found their way into publications. There were Dharawal renditions of the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Sower.⁴ This might suggest that Mathews was trying to Christianise his teachers, but this would have been hugely out of character. He was a churchgoing Christian, but he did not proselytise. He accepted the validity of other faiths and he saw analogies between Aboriginal myths and the stories of the Old Testament. Missionary activity at La Perouse long preceded Mathews’ visits there in the 1890s, so it is possible that the Christian parables travelled not from Mathews to the Dharawal, but in the opposite direction. The La Perouse mob told the story of the Prodigal Son in Dharawal, knowing that Mathews’ familiarity with the narrative would allow him deeper insight into their language. Storytelling was foundational to the search for common ground.

Mathews operated by brokering these sorts of connections. He kept up his letter-writing, quickly wearying the few who responded with his incessant demands, and he conducted library-based scholarship. Despite his amateur status, his work was eagerly accepted by learned journals. To be without formal training was standard for anthropologists of that period since there was none to be had in Australia, and little available elsewhere, especially in the ancient centres of learning. In Britain, nineteenth-century anthropology was dominated by non-conformists who were barred from studying at Oxford until 1854 and at Cambridge until 1856. The Quaker E. B. (later Sir Edward) Tylor, who in 1896 became the first professor of anthropology at Oxford, could not have studied there as an undergraduate.⁵ The discipline owed its emergence not to universities, but to the vibrant culture of learned societies that had such an impact on intellectual life in this period. No sphere of knowledge emerges pre-formed, and in those early days there was energetic debate about what anthropology was or should be. By Mathews’ time, the label ‘anthropology’ already covered a diverse field of interests and activities, ranging from study of language to the precise measurement of human bodies. Often described as the ‘science of man’, its earlier origins lie in the voyaging and exploration that would take Europeans to the Americas and the Far East. Literate travellers developed an observational language for describing and classifying the customs, habits and manners of the exotic folk they met along the way. The gathering of tools, weapons or other examples of human handiwork frequently accompanied the notation of data. Books were published and objects found their way into collections where some savant might subject them to analysis or theorisation. Anthropology’s origins are in this regard similar to those of the natural sciences. Indeed, botanical and zoological collectors often diversified into the gathering of anthropological data.

With some justice, anthropology is often thought of as inherently sympathetic to the people it studies. The Ethnological Society of London, founded in 1843, was the first organisation in Britain dedicated to the study of anthropology. Its forebear was the Aborigines’ Protection Society, an offshoot of the anti-slavery movement.⁶ This branch of anthropology’s pedigree is as unequivocally humanitarian as you could get. Anthropology comes nearest to greatness when it makes one person’s worldview comprehensible or imaginable to someone outside it. Among the many advantages of sharing someone else’s conceptual space are the possibilities opened for self-understanding. The pursuit of this elusive goal can be life-changing for anthropologists, and many have become committed advocates of the societies they work with.

But it is not always like this. Empathy tends to grow with the immediacy of personal contact, and early anthropology could involve less of this than might be thought. On-the-ground fieldwork did not become an essential part of the anthropological process until well into the twentieth century. In Mathews’ time, the collectors of data might never meet the persons who studied it most intently. The ‘proper’ anthropologists at the top of the pecking order usually resided in the centres of empire, where they coolly evaluated the incoming evidence. Out in the colonies were fieldworkers who did the dirty work of dealing with ‘savages’ and reporting back. As we will see, the small and quixotic brigade of missionaries, administrators, surveyors and others who took on anthropological fieldwork were not always content with this division of labour. Although it still held sway when Mathews began to publish, the distinction between fieldworker and theorist had begun to teeter.

The long reliance on colonial reporters, who would not have been in the required locations were it not for their involvement in some aspect of the imperial enterprise, exposes one of many fault lines that have shaped the discipline. Anthropology is entirely mixed up with the history of conquest that was wreaking havoc in the very societies it set out to understand. Far from championing the rights of indigenous populations, it became common for anthropologists to justify their project in terms of ‘salvage’; data must be urgently collected and preserved prior to the extinction of these populations. The influence of Charles Darwin is fully discernible in these arguments, and anthropology was at times dominated by key Darwinians, among them Thomas Henry Huxley, known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, who was president of the Ethnological Society in 1868. Applied in this arena, evolution morphed from scientific theory into outright ideology. The competition between species was transferred to the competition between the races or divisions of humanity. Historical forces, such as the dispossession and annihilation of indigenous populations, were passed off as the work of nature, ever efficient in consigning the unfittest to oblivion.

That is why anthropology, as practised in Australia, displays as broad a spectrum of attitudes as existed in the wider population. In the Commonwealth of Australia, as it became when the colonies federated in 1901, Walter Baldwin Spencer, the influential biologist who won international fame as an anthropologist, represented the public face of the discipline. For all his astuteness as a scientist, there was a vast distance between him and the people he studied, as we see in a thumbnail description of Aboriginal women from Central Australia that he published in collaboration with the Alice Springs postmaster Francis Gillen.

Naturally, in the case of the women, everything depends upon their age, the younger ones, that is those between fourteen and perhaps twenty, have decidedly well-formed figures and, from their habit of carrying on the head pitchis containing food and water, they carry themselves often with remarkable grace. As is usual, however, in the case of savage tribes the drudgery of food-collecting and child-bearing tells upon them at an early age, and between twenty and twenty-five they begin to lose their graceful carriage; the face wrinkles, the breasts hang pendulous, and, as a general rule, the whole body begins to shrivel up, until, at about the age of thirty, all traces of an earlier well-formed figure and graceful carriage are lost, and the woman develops into what can only be called an old and wrinkled hag.⁷

Comments of this ilk are not really dealt with in the substantial biography of Spencer that was published in 1985. Defenders of this omission might point out (correctly) that they do not encompass the full sphere of Spencer’s interests and achievements; we should not cast judgment, for what is offensive now was normal then. The problem with this argument is that it treats normality as some pre-existent entity when it is nothing of the sort. Norms exist because people make choices that collectively define the margins of acceptability. They do this in many ways, not only by saying or writing certain things, but by remaining silent. Silence is itself productive. Australia was without doubt inhabited by many people who found descriptions like that of the desert woman highly entertaining. Yet others were deeply unnerved. You can sense it in comments by some of Mathews’ correspondents, like James Boydell, a Hunter Valley resident who plaintively alluded to his isolation. ‘I don’t know any of my neighbours that take any interest in the Blacks. I fancy I am alone in that.’⁸ Mathews was ever on the lookout for loners such as him, for they were the ones most likely to aid him in his search for information. He had a loose template for advising them on how to go about it. The blacks have so often been laughed at for their curious customs by white men of the larrikin type that it will be well for you to go alone to the blacks, and then they will be more confidential. Do not have any white man with you, unless he knows about native customs.⁹ Unlike Spencer, an establishment figure who won newspaper sponsorship for his expeditions, Mathews had a low profile in the public culture and little access to the mass media. So he used scientific forums to develop his own descriptive language for the people who so intrigued him. Around Moulamein, Swan Hill, Balranald and other nearby places, the natives make necklaces from the feelers of the Murray lobster, which, when cooked, have a light red coral colour. They are broken into pieces half an inch in length and strung on the sinews of a kangaroo tail. All necklaces mentioned form a pleasant contrast to the ebony coloured necks and shoulders of the wearers.¹⁰

The contrast between the two observations of Aboriginal women points to the great chasm between Spencer, a leviathan of the discipline, and Mathews, the self-described ‘quiet worker’. The first was a fervent Darwinian; the other dismissed as bunkum the great shibboleths of evolutionism, especially its claim that the Aboriginal traditions of betrothal were proof of a white man’s fantasy known as ‘group marriage’. One regarded initiation as slavishness to ritual; the other described it as ‘a great educational institution’. One went to the heart of the continent in his search for the primeval; the other regarded Aborigines who lived in the older settled districts as authentic and worthy of study. One wrote doorstopper books; the other short reports, hidden away in myriad journals. One relished collaboration; the other was a loner. One loved photography and sound recording; the other stuck to his old-fashioned notebooks. One was born to an English captain of industry; the other to a smalltime papermaker who fled from Ireland and the mother of all scandals. One hailed from Melbourne; the other from Sydney. One received a knighthood; the other not a skerrick of recognition from any branch of officialdom. Amid all these differences it is little wonder that one thing only united them: mutual hatred. Spencer, who in one of his kinder moments described Mathews as ‘a nuisance’ who ‘will do more harm than good’, used his global network of influential contacts to disparage him, and he especially urged them never to acknowledge or cite his work. For twenty-five years, Mathews kept pumping out the publications—an ‘interminable series of papers’, as Spencer called it. Some in the field took notice, yet overall he remained the great unquoted.

Spencer’s handling of Mathews is but one (admittedly extreme) example of the internecine politicking endemic to this early phase of Australian anthropology. The authority not only of Mathews but of numerous contemporaries was greatly diminished by these ‘anthropology wars’ that make our recent ‘history wars’ look civilised in comparison. The feuding did in its way affect the development of the social sciences, which in fields ranging from sociology to psychology took enormous interest in ‘primitive’ life, especially the traditional cultures of Australia. But the impacts were more than academic. They affected the perception of Aboriginal society in the world at large. I was long inured to the style of writing favoured by Spencer and his great friend Alfred Howitt, also an evolutionist, when I first read Mathews. With time—as will become apparent—I have learned to hear in him a more complex register. However, for me, the initial and sustaining motivation for delving into his life and the world he occupied was the fascination of finding a voice so lacking in any show of superiority; a writer who attempted scientific dispassion, yet whose tone is so penetrating in its warmth. The desire to know more about this tone—to understand its maker and the making of him—seemed a natural response. So began the search for R. H. Mathews.

I have searched and found much, but I am no more the ‘discoverer’ of him than he the discoverer of the cultures he studied. Undoubtedly, the silencing that was used against him by his rivals did enormous damage to his reputation and personal wellbeing. That is all part of the story. Although he never craved the limelight, he felt compelled to protest against his mistreatment. After his death, his defenders were few and he lapsed into an obscurity from which he has yet to fully emerge. Anthropology itself changed greatly after the First World War. As the discipline became established academically, a generation of university-trained professionals arrived on the scene, some of whom were embarrassed by their amateur antecedents. But Mathews’ great opus of publications remained on record. Occasionally, somebody would pull one from the vaults and begin to wonder.

Mathews published on all Australian states except Tasmania, but it is the large, imprecise triangle of south-east Australia, ranging from southern Queensland through New South Wales and into Victoria, where his legacy is most keenly felt. These are the areas where he personally worked with Aboriginal communities and he quickly realised the extent of their diversity. Despite the ravages of invasion and dispossession, there remained across this vast region a patchwork of cultures, distinguishable by language or dialect, and by the distinctiveness of their ceremonies, stories, songs, social organisation and much else. Mathews argued that each tribal group had an organised system of governance, as he explained in an article called ‘Australian Tribes—Their Formation and Government’ (1906). There ‘was no kingly rule or arbitrary chieftainship . . . but matters of tribal interest were managed by a sort of informal council composed of the leading men of each local group.’ Leadership was not hereditary, but decided by the qualities of the individual. Magic or clever men, warriors or noted song-makers, were typical candidates for leadership.¹¹ That is to say, this was a society in which prestige was derived from a high level of knowledge and proficiency in matters of culture.

Although the word ‘culture’ appeared infrequently in Mathews’ writings, he was an early student of cultural difference. Ethnically he was Irish; religiously he was Protestant. From this perspective, the settler society in which he was raised was anything but ubiquitous. Nor did he discern any great uniformity to the Aboriginal populations he studied. One of the dazzling insights communicated by his work is the manner in which the differences between Aboriginal communities were preserved and respected through the maintenance of ritual institutions, such as male initiation, which involved the mass gathering of culturally and linguistically distinct peoples. To use a contemporary yet highly apposite term, Australia was multicultural long before the arrival of the British. That Mathews himself thought along such lines is suggested in his drafting of a map showing the boundaries of major linguistic groups and ceremonial traditions. Published the year before Federation, he titled it ‘Map Showing Boundaries of the Several Nations of Australia’.

Such is the dearth of primary information in many parts of south-east Australia that anyone with an interest in the Aboriginal heritage must in some way deal with Mathews’ work. Specialists have long recognised his significance, as we see in an exchange between William Stanner and Adolphus Peter Elkin, two of the best-known figures in twentieth-century Australian anthropology. In 1975 Stanner expressed delight that Elkin was publishing on Mathews: ‘[i]t is something I had always hoped to do myself . . .’¹² Elkin had first championed the surveyor-anthropologist in the 1950s when he published an obituary of his one-time mentor, Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown. It is said to have scandalised the profession because Elkin effectively accused his deceased colleague of plagiarising Mathews’ work on Australian kinship.¹³ Elkin’s interest in Mathews continued over the next two decades, and at the end of his life he published a trilogy of long articles. They remain the most sustained appraisal of Mathews’ contribution from within the profession.¹⁴

By this time, others in the burgeoning field of Aboriginal studies had come round to Mathews’ way of thinking, shaped as it was by a professional interest in land and locality. Norman Tindale turned to Mathews when finessing his map of Australia’s tribal boundaries (see colour plate 3), as he mentioned in a 1958 letter to the Australian Museum curator, Frederick McCarthy. ‘In going through Mathews’ papers for the purpose of checking the second edition of my tribal map and its data, I have been more than ever impressed with the vast scope and general accuracy of this work. Despite earlier critics I am coming to believe that he was our greatest recorder of primary anthropological data.’¹⁵

McCarthy’s reply shows that he too was in awe of the ‘quiet worker’. ‘Yes, Mathews’ contribution to Australian anthropology is an amazing one, the more so when one considers that all his writing was done in his private time. His family, a member of which is President of our Board of Trustees, still possesses an iron trunk of his manuscripts . . .’¹⁶

Those manuscripts survive, and gradually they are seeping into the public domain. They show that Mathews’ published work, itself substantial, is merely the tip of a proverbial iceberg. The letters, drafts and notebooks once held in that chest reveal a wealth of information that never made it into print. The injection of the unpublished data and the changing cultural and political landscape of contemporary Australia have resulted in new alignments that affect our perception of R. H. Mathews. Within Aboriginal communities there is ever-greater interest in how the old people engaged with researchers. Legislative changes have further complicated the picture, particularly the official recognition of native title. In cases before the Native Title Tribunal, Mathews’ work is used on an almost daily basis to support land claims. In this environment, Mathews’ fastidious attention to nitty-gritty detail is far more valuable than the theoretical edifices of the men with whom he quarrelled. A trio of contemporary anthropologists, among them Deborah Bird Rose, have declared Mathews the most reliable scholar of the south-east. ‘In contrast to Howitt, Mathews was a more sober and thorough researcher. He recorded information in areas where he worked as a surveyor, and he pursued his interviews with a humanity that was acknowledged at the time and subsequently . . . He was a genuinely interested observer, wrote copious field notes and published immense amounts of detail.’ Describing the pivotal role played by his work in winning heritage protection for the sacred site of Gulaga (Mount Dromedary) on the South Coast of New South Wales, Rose and her collaborators noted that ‘Mathews did not share Howitt’s penchant for suppressing the particular in favour of the grand theory, or for suppressing women in favour of men.’ Remarkably, for a male anthropologist of his period, he acknowledged ‘the existence of women’s law and ritual’.¹⁷

I have long thought that the story of R. H. Mathews and his remarkable project should be better known outside the specialist circles where his name has long been familiar. Yet satisfying as it would be to see him publicly known and recognised, that was not my objective in writing this book. My initial interest in the tone of Mathews’ writing, and the question of how it came to be, presented a bewildering array of paths. The most obvious course was biographical. What was it in his life story that led him on his journey of inquiry? As will soon become evident, his biographical trail is a tricky thing to follow. I have often found myself waylaid, sometimes because certain pathways were too tantalising to ignore, but more often because the trail stopped abruptly at some dense entanglement. I realised that for Mathews, as is the case for many anthropologists, estrangement from his own society enhanced the desirability of wandering off into someone else’s. He lacked close friendships among his peers, refused to document his private life, and was highly selective in what he disclosed to others. As a biographical subject, he is a slippery fish. Elements of his background and early life have come to light in the course of this research. To an extent that I never thought possible, we can glimpse the trauma of his family’s flight from Ireland shortly before his birth. The systematic burial of these events, to the extent that they were completely unknown to the current generation of descendants, explains much about his secretive demeanour. But even the most dramatic of revelations do not mitigate the ultimate futility of trying to encage his improbable life story in that particular cultural form we call biography. My solution was to seek a form of narrative that is shaped by the unique body of evidence concerning him. This brought me back to the matter of tone.

What is it that we hear in Mathews’ meditations on language, his transcriptions of story, or his evocation of a necklace looped around someone’s neck? Is it entirely his voice that we hear? I think not. Biographical factors do play their part in the making of the voice, but no voice is heard in isolation from the world in which it speaks. Consciously, or more often unconsciously, we project our voice through the thicket of sound that is unique to our world, our moment. And so the voice assumes its tone. Accounting for that acoustic became one of my objectives. I have done this by trying to understand the spaces Mathews frequented, and by building an image of his historical world. But more than that, I have thought about the voices, quite separate from Mathews’ own, that are audible in his writing. For it is I believe a chordal quality, a harmonic effect, that reverberates down through the years. This I can explain only by example. Take at random some words and their translations from Mathews’ Dharawal paper.¹⁸ Whose voices, apart from our own, do we hear if we do as he recommended and sound the words out loud?

Self-evidently, we hear Mathews the author, for the sound of the words was affected by the capacity, or incapacity, of his hearing and by his method of transcription. But to hear only the anthropologist in the anthropological text is to miss nearly everything that makes anthropology important. The voice of Mrs Timbery is in some way captured in this seemingly dry list of words. The plurality of voices is chordal in its effect. We can think of those voices as variant notes that found an unlikely harmony. That confluence of voices has shaped the search for R. H. Mathews.

CHAPTER 1

Ethnomania

When ethnomania seized him in early 1892, R. H. Mathews was fifty. The onset of the condition is unwittingly described in his first work of anthropology, a modest paper presented to the Royal Society of New South Wales. I was engaged on some extensive surveys under the Real Property Act in the Parishes of Whybrow and Milbrodale . . . and whilst so employed my attention was drawn to the existence of some caves in the vicinity, containing aboriginal drawings . . . Thinking that the result of my inspection may be of some interest to the members of this Society, I have prepared a few notes, with illustrative diagrams, which I will now place before you.¹ In this way he described his metamorphosis from country surveyor to ethnological observer, seemingly oblivious to the gravity of what had occurred. We can read him as we would some explorer in the tropics who unthinkingly wrote in his diary, ‘Have been much plagued by mosquitoes,’ only to die of malarial fever.

For Mathews, death and rebirth occurred in those caves at Milbrodale in the Hunter Valley north of Sydney (see colour plate 1). But he always emphasised the continuities between his old life and the new. As well as a surveyor, he was a Justice of the Peace in three of the Australian colonies (soon to become states). This was an era when the letters ‘J.P.’ had real cachet, since they permitted their bearer to sit as a magistrate and cast judgment upon his fellow beings. Yet it was the post-nominal ‘L. S.’, for licensed surveyor, that Mathews used in his authorial by-line, preceding a text that often began with a bluff statement of credentials. I was appointed by the Government of South Australia land surveyor in 1883 and a Justice of the Peace in 1884, both of which positions I still hold, by which means I have had opportunities which would not otherwise have occurred of carrying on my inquiries respecting the customs of the aborigines in that colony.² So yes, the connections between surveying and anthropology were in a way obvious; his profession laid the groundwork for that day in Milbrodale when he used his instruments of trade to measure the cave paintings, copying them into a notebook already crowded with sketches of graziers’ allotments and a wilderness of numerical calculations. But his claim that the transition was natural—even inevitable—is repeated so insistently and so often that it invites suspicion. If a professional familiarity with the land and its inhabitants was sufficient to turn an unsuspecting colonial into an anthropological researcher, why did so few of the eligible thousands undergo the transition?

And why did Mathews himself wait so long, despite a lifetime’s involvement in surveying and other rural activities? He had no shortage of time or money. According to his ornithologist son Gregory, Mathews’ business had been so successful in the 1870s that by the age of forty he had amassed ‘a competence and could call himself an independent gentleman’.³ He departed Australia for a world tour in 1882, and reduced his surveying to a part-time practice after his return home. That he had long harboured scientific interests is indicated by his membership of the Royal Society of New South Wales—a small though influential organisation, committed to the advancement of science according to the model of its London namesake. It is revealing that in 1877 the society received a request for assistance from one Edward Micklethwaite Curr of Victoria. They agreed to help him in his project of collecting ‘information concerning the aboriginals of New South Wales in order that reliable information may be recorded of a race now rapidly becoming extinct’.⁴ Curr obtained information by distributing questionnaires among settlers who might employ, or in other ways associate with, Aboriginal people. Given that the Geography and Ethnology Section of the Royal Society had already identified surveyors as likely candidates for the collection of anthropological data, it is unlikely they neglected to send a circular to the member who styled himself ‘R. H. Mathews L. S.’, then stationed on the Castlereagh River north-east of Dubbo.⁵ Curr received sufficient responses to fill four large volumes of varying reliability, but nothing from Mathews. The resulting book, The Australian Race (1877), became a famous compendium on Aboriginal Australia and in his later incarnation Mathews studied it assiduously. Not only did he quote its findings, but he emulated its methods and mined it for contacts, printing his own circulars and begging the assistance of Curr’s contributors, perhaps forgetting his own failure to respond to similar requests.

Figure 1.1. Surveying and rock art research are combined in this page from a Mathews notebook. By permission of the National Library of Australia. NLA MS 8006/3/2.

His unwillingness to help Curr sits at odds with his own self-image. Mathews frequently imputed that the collection of information on Aboriginal Australians had been a regular part of his life as a surveyor and magistrate. Yet if this were the case, surely there would be papers to prove it. Mathews was too cautious a scholar, and too proud of his accuracy, to entrust to memory the fruits of scientific labour. Indeed, if anything is known about him, it is his zest for scribbling. No envelope, bank statement or reverse side of a plan was safe from his anthropological note-taking. Even his children’s school books were purloined for the purpose. Hundreds of these loose leafs and scores of his notebooks survive, crammed with information about the ‘natives of Australia’, as he called them. But there is a commonality to this substantial, if rather bewildering, body of evidence: all of it postdates 1892.

All of it, that is, with one exception—a letter written twenty years earlier. At the age of thirty-one, he was enjoying an intense correspondence with twenty-two-year-old Mary Bartlett, who would soon become his wife. She was in Tamworth and he was stationed at Narran Lakes in north-west New South Wales. I was talking to a blackfellow who can speak English, and he told me a lot of their words and expressions which I made a note of in my book . . . I can’t find letters in our language to express the proper sounds . . .⁶ The notebook he mentions has perished, and strictly speaking the letter itself is of dubious evidential value, for I quote not the original, but a copy handwritten by William ‘Bill’ Mathews, the third of the four sons of Robert and Mary. Still, there is no apparent reason why Bill, a fastidious genealogist and the author of an incomplete manuscript about his father’s life, should forge such a document. Nor is it really conceivable that Mathews could have gone for decades, working in some of the more sparsely populated areas of south-east Australia, without encountering Aboriginal people, who by the latter half of the nineteenth century were largely dispossessed of their ancestral territory. Mathews met them on official reserves, in unofficial fringe camps, and as workers for the pastoralists who required his services as a surveyor.

I have read some of his workbooks from that period, and they contain not a jot of anthropological inquiry. Rather, they document a hectic work regime at a time of colonial prosperity and expansion. The thread that linked the old Mathews and the new is that in business, as well as anthropology, he was a workaholic. He exaggerated his role as a researcher during that first phase of his life, even though it left him with something more valuable and less easy to fabricate—a love for the people he studied. Just occasionally, Mathews fleshed out some detail about his days as a surveyor, as occurs in the opening to a paper on Kamilaroi initiation, published in 1896. After I had pitched my camp, I entered into conversation with the head men, some of whom were known to me, having been acquainted with them when surveying Crown lands in that part of the country in 1875 and 1876. I had been kind to them in those days, while listening to their legends and their songs, and studying their wonderful class system [of organising marriage]; and when I met them now I found their friendship of the greatest value to me.⁷

His rare use of the word friendship suggests that the songs and legends he heard in the 1870s were shared convivially, not in the spirit of formal inquiry. Mathews and his team would often stay out for weeks at a time, and since they required flat ground and water for themselves and their horses, there must have been occasions when Aboriginal groups were camped close by. They might have approached him for food or tobacco, or simply to pass the time. Although he says so little about these interactions, the hints are there. Throughout the summer months, and during fine weather at other periods, the blacks usually camp out in the open air, where they have every opportunity of watching the starry vault above them . . . There are always some clever old men in the camp, who are the recognized repositories of the lore of the tribe, who take advantage of this out door life to teach the young people stories about some of the different stars . . . As soon as an old man commences one of these stories, the young folk from the neighbouring camp fires congregate around him and listen with avidity to his marvellous narrations.⁸ Clearly, Mathews was privy to such renditions, told in argots that he understood imperfectly. And the knowledge of astronomy which my profession demanded, made it easy for me to identify with precision all the different stars and stellar groups which figure so prominently in the aboriginal folklore.⁹

In his book Tristes Tropiques (1955), perhaps the most celebrated memoir by an anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss lamented the failure of his untrained predecessors, the pioneers of the discipline, to ask what to him were the really crucial questions. But he immediately qualified his complaint. ‘A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see. I am subject to a double infirmity: all that I perceive offends me, and I constantly reproach myself for not seeing as much as I should.’¹⁰ When I read this it occurred to me that it applies very directly to R. H. Mathews, not only because of the questions that I wish he had asked, but because I suspect that he felt something of the same self-reproach.

Ostensibly, he was studying the Aboriginal society that he saw around him. Yet in some respects he was not interested in this society at all. For example, it never occurred to him to ask his informants about the changes they had witnessed in the course of their lives. Bear in mind that Mathews worked with people seventy and eighty years old in the 1890s. Had he tapped their memories of the invasion of their homelands, what a perspective on colonisation it would be. But his agenda, concordant with the social and anthropological values of the period, was to look beyond the contaminant of history. His mission was to extract and document supposedly timeless customs and traditions, an ambition that caused tremendous disagreement among rival anthropologists, who regularly denounced information that varied from their own findings as corrupted by European influence.

So it is not surprising that Mathews, working within this framework, was always looking back in time. Consider a remark Bill made about his father: ‘Robert saw something of the passing of an order of things that probably had existed for many thousands of years, as well as the development of the new era inaugurated by the coming of the white man.’¹¹ It is a penetrating observation of a mercurial individual, a man who was stinting in what he disclosed of his inner life. Bill described his father as a ‘self-contained man’ who ‘felt little or no desire to seek the society of his fellows, but rather was disposed to avoid them as much as he reasonably could . . .’¹² Although he was always eager to shield himself, there are moments in his writings that suggest some correlation between the Aboriginal world that seemed to be dying and the lost domain of his own youth. In 1904 Mathews mentioned his upbringing near Goulburn in rural New South Wales. I was born in the Australian bush and black children were among my earliest playmates.¹³ Three years later he wrote about Aboriginal games and recreations. During the warmer months of the year swimming in deep waters offered a good pastime. Most of us have entertained ourselves as boys by seeing who, during diving, could stay longest under water. The young blacks do the same as well. On a given sign the competitors dive at the same time, while some old men wait for their resurfacing.¹⁴

Mathews himself displayed the frantic energy of a diver struggling to surface. ‘Now is the time’ was his catchcry. In a letter to an American editor: Now is the time to locate the different nations, while the blacks are still alive, and not in a few hundred years after they are all dead, as is done with most races.¹⁵ In a letter to fellow ethnomaniac, Daisy Bates: Now is the time—NOW or NEVER.¹⁶ The sober self-image he promulgated, that of the lifelong researcher who had finally found time to write up his observations, was the necessary mask of a zealous fanatic. Whatever it was that happened on that day in 1892, when Mathews began sketching rock art in those caves at Milbrodale, it can only be thought of as a conversion. How the floodgates opened from that time! Far from writing up past labours, his quest was to recover details that had slipped through the fingers of his former life; a belated asking of unasked questions.

By 1893, when his first paper on the cave paintings was published, the pathology of his condition was fully evident—and it never diminished in the quarter-century until his death. Out poured the publications: the work on rock art, initiations, kinship. He transcribed legends and documented languages, bombarding journals around the globe with the produce of his pen. One hundred and seventy-one articles, totalling 2200 pages of printed reportage, were the public legacy of his anthropological years. Many people have written more and plenty have written more elegantly, but an opus of such size would shame many a professor. Yet Mathews had no position in government or the academies. Self-taught and independent, he was paid not a penny for his work. The scale of the labour is brought home when you realise that the publications are but a portion of the information he gathered. The rest of it can be found in his notes and letters, nearly all handwritten since he did not type. The handwriting itself bespeaks the frantic energy that led to its production. Although seldom illegible and never displeasing to the eye, it always appears to have left home in a hurry. Each line advances jerkily across the page, as if to recall the long trips from his house in Sydney, like that to southern Queensland for a ceremony in 1895: This journey was accomplished by going 350 miles by railway to Narrabri, and thence by stage coach 150 miles to Mungindi . . . At Mungindi I obtained a horse and sulky and drove an additional distance of 55 miles to the aboriginal camp on the Tallwood run, making a total distance of 550 miles.¹⁷ One can visualise the agile movement of his right hand. Writing that gallops, racing time.

Every life is a cluster of contradictions. In