First In Their Field: Women and Australian Anthropology

By Julie Marcus

The image of early women anthropologists in Australia has been one of Daisy Bates seated in the middle of nowhere, recording the habits and customs of ‘a dying race’. A harmless eccentric, or a serious pioneer of field anthropology?

When anthropology began as a serious academic discipline in Sydney in the 1920s, its lecturers and theoreticians were male. Yet much of the fieldwork and research was carried out by women whose contribution remains marginalised or omitted from the history of anthropology.

In First in their Field seven distinguished women writers look at the way those remarkable women worked, their difficulties and their hopes. This volume, documenting their courage and determination, is long overdue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Mar 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9780522865585

Book preview

First in their Field

Olive M. Pink at The Granites, 1936

First in their Field

Women and Australian

Anthropology

Edited by

Julie Marcus

Melbourne University Press

1993

First published 1993

Printed in Malaysia by SRM Production Services Sdn. Bhd. for

Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Victoria 3053

U.S.A and Canada: International Specialized Book Services, Inc.,

5602 N.E. Hassalo Street, Portland, Oregon 97213-3640

United Kingdom and Europe: University College London Press

Gower Street, London WCE 6BT, UK

Designed by

Judith Summerfeldt-Grace

The loop-stitched bag from Groote Eylandt illustrated on the cover is in the Leonhard Adam Collection in the University of Melbourne, and is reproduced with permission.

Cover photography by Robert Colvin

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

© Julie Marcus and contributors 1993

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry First in their field.

Bibliography.

Includes index.

ISBN 0 522 84466 9.

1. Women anthropologists—Australia. 2. Ethnology—Australia —Field work. [3.] Aborigines, Australian. I. Marcus, Julie.

306.0922

Contents

To one first in her field—Isobel White

Preface

1 Women, Men and Anthropology

Marie de Lepervanche

2 Miss Mary, Ethnography and the Inheritance of Concern:

Mary Ellen Murray-Prior

Isabel McBryde

3 Daisy Bates: Legend and Reality

Isobel White

4 Jane Ada Fletcher and the Little Brown Piccaninnies of Tasmania

Miranda Morris

5 The Snake, the Serpent and the Rainbow: Ursula McConnel and Aboriginal Australians

Anne O’Gorman

6 The Beauty, Simplicity and Honour of Truth:

Olive Pink in the 1940s

Julie Marcus

7 From Sydney Schoolgirl to African Queen Mother:

Tracing the career of Phyllis Mary Kaberry

Christine Cheater

8 Letters from the Field

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Olive M. Pink at The Granites, 1936

Photograph T. Harvey Johnson Collection, Courtesy ΑΙΑTSIS, Canberra

In the Field: Isobel White, Yalata, 1969

Miss Mary Bundock, c. 1890s

Photograph Freeman & Co. Print courtesy Mitchell Library (from All About Australians, 1902)

The Clarence and Richmond Districts in the late nineteenth century

Map drawn by Winifred Mumford

Aborigines of the Richmond/Clarence River District in the 1870s

Photograph attributed to J. W. Lindt, Grafton, 1870s Courtesy AIATSIS, Canberra

‘Wyangarie’ homestead, c. 1900

Courtesy Oxley Library, Brisbane

The Bundock family’s farewell to ‘Wyangarie’, 1902

Courtesy Richmond River Historical Society

‘Maroon’, the head station

Photograph Dr Lightoller, from Rosa Campbell Praed, My Australian Girlhood

‘Wyangarie’, the Home Plain, 1991

Photograph Isabel McBryde

The first page of the manuscript copy of ‘Notes on the Richmond River Blacks’

Courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Clarence River Aborigines in the early 1870s

Photograph J. W. Lindt

Courtesy AIATSIS Canberra

Table: Museum collections of Richmond River material culture

‘Merton’ homestead, 1853

Courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

The Cottage ‘Yulgilbar’, c. 1850

Courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

‘Yulgilbar’ on the Clarence River, 1865

Courtesy Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

The Richmond River upstream of ‘Wyangarie’ homestead, April 1991

Photograph Isabel McBryde

Daisy Bates

Courtesy National Library of Australia, MS 4950, Elliot Lovegood Grant Wilson Papers

Daisy Bates and Joombaitch, c. 1905

Courtesy Western Australian Museum

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown

Courtesy National Library of Australia

Daisy Bates and the Duke of Gloucester

Courtesy National Library of Australia, Canberra

Jane Ada Fletcher

Courtesy Archives of Tasmania

Jane Ada Fletcher in her garden at ‘Lyelta’ Courtesy The Emu, 1956

Ursula McConnel

Courtesy McConnel Family Collection, Cressbrook, Queensland

Ursula McConnel’s notebook

Courtesy McConnel Family Collection, Cressbrook, Queensland

Ursula McConnel’s camp at Aurukun, 1927

Courtesy Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra

Rosie Mammus

Courtesy Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra

Initiation ceremony at Aurukun, 1927

Photograph Ursula McConnel, courtesy McConnel Family Collection, Cressbrook, Queensland

Olive Muriel Pink

Courtesy Reg Harris, Alice Springs

Olive Pink’s camp at Thompson’s Rockhole, c. 1943

Photograph Rev. Gordon Michael

Courtesy National Trust of Australia Collection, Alice Springs

Dryblowers on the Granites goldfield, 1930s

From C. T. Madigan, Central Australia

Aborigines on the Granites track, c. 1943

From C. T. Madigan, Central Australia

A sketch map of Olive Pink’s proposed ‘secular sanctuary’, 1935

Australian Archives, Northern Territory

Miss Pink’s tent

Courtesy Trustees, Olive Pink Flora Reserve, Alice Springs

Miss Pink’s hut on the Arid Region Flora Reserve, Alice Springs c. 1956-1957

Courtesy Trustees, Olive Pink Flora Reserve, Alice Springs

Phyllis Kaberry, March 1948

Photograph and documentation courtesy Sally Chilver, Oxford

Dedication: To one first in her field—Isobel White

We were delighted when Isobel White acceded to our wish to dedicate this volume to her. We are the more honoured as she is not one to seek tributes of this kind, being reticent about her academic achievements.

Her contributions to anthropology, however, have international renown. This book surveys the work of some of the discipline’s women pioneers, those ‘first in their field’. Isobel (Sally) White, stands beside them in a very real sense. With Catherine Berndt, Diane Barwick and Marie Reay, in her research she pioneered new perspectives on women’s roles in Aboriginal society. They inspired and encouraged scholars who followed, such as Annette Hamilton and Diane Bell.

Not all the women whose work is the subject of this book were professional anthropologists. Many contributed to a study that fascinated them but were denied formal training or opportunities by historical circumstances or physical isolation, if not discrimination. Sally White also did not begin her career as an anthropologist. She read economics at Cambridge in a department headed by Keynes during those important years for thinking on economics and society. Those studies did not gain her a degree because at that time Cambridge gave women access to its courses but would not grant them degrees. Her first professional appointments were in the economic field, both with large retail firms and government. During the war both she and her husband Michael White were with the Food and Agriculture Department. Based for most of those years in London itself, they experienced the intensity of continual bombing raids.

From these experiences and their prewar involvement with those concerned with social questions, came an urge to seek new directions. Michael White was especially keen to work in America. In all they were to spend ten years in the United States, first at Long Island and Austin and then, after moving to Australia, a brief return to Columbia, Missouri. As the children grew to school and university age at Columbia, Sally was able to consider returning to her own academic interests. Rather than return. to economics she elected to face the challenge of a new field. Building on her earlier concern with social issues she took courses in anthropology with Robert Spier at Missouri. Those courses emphasised cultural and physical anthropology. So she was trained in an anthropology offering different perspectives from those she would have received at an English university.

The Whites’ stay in Missouri was interrupted when Michael took up the chair of zoology at Melbourne and later a special chair in genetics. The duties of mother and professorial wife demanded much of Isobel White’s time in these first few years in Melbourne. Indeed, throughout Michael’s career, before and after his retirement from Melbourne, she was a strong academic support. She accompanied him on most field trips, traversing the continent in search of the special grasshoppers he was working on.

Despite her responsibilities, however, Isobel White maintained her new interest in anthropology. She worked with a research group at the Museum of Victoria and was active in the Anthropological Society. In the early 1960s she was offered a teaching post in the newly created Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Monash University. There she soon became known as an inspiring and dedicated teacher, rigorous in her own work and supportive of that of others. For lectures she mastered new areas of her discipline, teaching them with authority. She is remembered by very many young scholars with great respect and affection.

In her new career in the 1960s she began her own research on Aboriginal women and their roles in society. She brought fresh approaches to this from the breadth of her intellectual background. With Catherine Ellis and Luise Hercus she worked in northern South Australia and with Luise in the Flinders Ranges. From this and her later work at Yalata came a series of important papers offering new insights into the social roles of Aboriginal women. Fieldwork, and the opportunity to join with Aboriginal women in the life of their community was always important to her and to the women who shared their life’s experiences with her. The women of Yalata took her to their important places, among which were Ooldea and Pidinga.

In the field: Isobel White, Yalata, 1969, with Alice Mungatina’s grandson

Visiting these areas led Sally White to an interest in Daisy Bates, who for many years had lived with Aboriginal groups at Eucla and Ooldea Soak. Bates’s ethnographic records were fundamental but had been treated with reserve by the scholarly community. When the Whites settled in Canberra on retirement Isobel began the monumental task of editing Daisy Bates’s book, still in manuscript, on the native tribes of Western Australia. This involved exacting historical and anthropological research, both in Canberra and in Western Australia. Her first-hand knowledge of the people and places concerned, as well as her broad anthropological and scientific background, made her an ideal editor and interpreter of this text and its enigmatic author. She brought Daisy Bates and her records into the mainstream of historical ethnography in Australia.

Interests in the historical questions posed by her work on Daisy Bates flourished in Isobel White’s involvement with the journal Aboriginal History. She has edited volumes of the journal and been an energetic review editor for many years. To contributors she offers the same inspiration and encouragement she offered her students at Monash. We have all been grateful for her wise counsel and deep knowledge, generously expended on our draft articles.

Isobel White has many intellectual interests. She is an intellectual voyager, ever ready for new ventures. Yet she is no restless academic wanderer; her explorations are rigorous and systematic, and all her work commands scholarly respect. In dedicating this volume to her, we not only celebrate the academic achievements of her teaching and research. They are empowered by the personality that drives this scholarly enterprise; and so we celebrate, with deep appreciation and affection, the perception, understanding and wisdom that she brings to her own work and so generously shares with others. We have all, on so many occasions, been grateful for her support.

We thank you, Sally, for your scholarship, and for your friendship.

Isabel McBryde

December 1992

Preface

Anthropology has attracted large numbers of competent women scholars, yet the nature of the discipline and the staffing of university departments have not reflected their interests or acknowledged the substantial nature of their contribution. This has been particularly so in Australia where anthropology has developed within the racialised politics of a settler culture in such a way as to retain a peculiarly ‘malestream’ cast.

This book is the result of a small conference, ‘When the Voice of the Turtle Shall be heard in the Land. . . Women and Anthropology in Australia’, held at Glenelg, Adelaide, in 1990, and a small workshop session held at the Academy of the Humanities, Canberra, in 1991,¹ The conference brought together women anthropologists who shared an interest in establishing the place of those who had preceded them into the field, while the workshop allowed the contributors to discuss their papers with each other in much more detail. Not all those papers appear in this volume, and some additional papers have been included. And not all the women who should appear in this volume have done so. Mrs Langloh Parker and M. M. Bennett are only two notable women who should have been included. There are many others as yet unrecognised and I hope this volume will pave the way for a successor.

The women who appear here have not necessarily been recognised as anthropologists, but each has contributed to public understandings of Aboriginal life as well as to the field of ‘anthropology’. That early field drew on many sources but eventually followed two distinct trajectories: one flowed toward material culture, museum collecting, and prehistory, the other toward social and cultural anthropology. Then as now, women were active contributors to both streams; then as now, their contributions risked being lost, marginalised and undervalued. Many of us have found that the problems facing the women in this volume, as well as their successes, have helped us to understand the forces at work in our own interactions with our disciplines and institutions.

In this volume, all contributors have had to confront their growing familiarity with the women of whom they wrote, and as the work progressed, have come to feel a part of the private worlds in which those women lived. Through the recognition of ourselves in our subjects’ lives and the intimacy of our work, we have all wished to refer to our subjects by their given names — Ursula, Mary, Daisy, Jane or Olive. Such familiarity would not have been welcome. Rather than breach the formality which once governed women’s contacts with the public world, and so as not to infringe a code of manners which insisted on women being addressed by title as ‘Miss’ or ‘Mrs’, we have decided to take a middle path and use neither the familiar first name nor the titled name. Throughout, we have written Ursula McConnel in preference to the familiar Ursula and the formal Miss McConnel. Olive Pink, for example, was always known as ‘Miss Pink’, there being no one alive who was close enough to her for the familiar ‘Olive’. She would have been horrified to find later generations adopting that mode of address. Many of those who knew her in her later years were unaware of her first name until it began to appear in newspaper articles and obituaries; she was harassed in the streets by young boys calling out ‘Hullo Miss Blue’. Anne O’Gorman notes that Ursula McConnel felt the same. Readers may wonder at the choice, but we have wanted to avoid what has appeared to us an inappropriate familiarity.

We have also, when citing or quoting, retained the author’s spellings, even though they are no longer current. While all the women in this volume wrote ‘aboriginal’ rather than ‘Aboriginal’ in their notes and letters, there is no doubt that they would not do so today. And they, like others of their time, wrote of ‘blacks’ and ‘boys’, ‘lubras’ and even the extremely derogatory ‘gin’, in ways that speak powerfully of the colonising discourse of which anthropology was, and remains, a part. I hope that these usages will serve to raise these issues with readers and to provoke a better understanding of the relations between anthropology and racism. Similarly, the use of the male pronoun as universal is retained within quotations.

The essays collected here bring together details of the lives, times and work of six women, each of whom had a sustained interest in Aboriginal Australian culture. The collection is introduced by Marie de Lepervanche’s analysis of the issues which gender and race pose for women in the universities who would study anthropology. Following the detailed essays on Mary Bundock, Daisy Bates, Jane Fletcher, Ursula McConnel and Olive Pink, Christine Cheater’s essay explores the ways in which Phyllis Kaberry’s response to the constraints of Australian anthropology led her into Africa. Her paper reviews the career paths of the first three women to venture into the field, Ursula McConnel, Olive Pink and Phyllis Kaberry, and adds new material to provide some interesting insights into gender and the distribution of research funds. Access to funding remains a central issue for academic women. To end, two brief letters from the Kimberley district of Western Australia commemorate Phyllis Kaberry’s fieldwork and scholarly contributions.

I am immensely grateful for the help and encouragement I have received for this project. In particular, I should like to thank Isobel White and Isabel McBryde for their continuous support and frequent declarations of faith in it. Without them, the conference papers could never have matured into this volume. I should like to thank, too, Betty Meehan for making possible the very enjoyable workshop at the Academy of the Humanities and for her intellectual contributions. We all look forward to her forthcoming paper on Mrs Langloh Parker. I am grateful to Michael Rowlands for allowing the publication of Phyllis Kaberry’s letters and to Sally Chilver for providing the photograph of Kaberry in Africa, and thank them both for their speedy response to my urgent requests. I offer my heartfelt thanks to each of the contributors for their tolerance and persistance as they struggled not only with their papers but with all the technicalities of a volume of uncertain shape and content. And finally, I should like to thank Andrea Malone for unselfish assistance, encouragement and support well beyond the call of duty.

It may be some time before the ‘voice of the turtle’ will be heard in this land, but in the meantime, these essays ensure that some women, at least, are being heard. This has been a wonderful project; it has given me continuous pleasure to be able to work with so many distinguished, scholarly, and staunchly feminist women on such an important topic. I thank you all.

Julie Marcus

December 1992

ONE

Women, Men and Anthropology

Marie de Lepervanche

Women’s contribution in many fields of knowledge has not only been neglected or marginalised by conventional (male) scholarship. Even when that contribution has been recognised, what often emerges is the blatant power-play men have exercised, or tried to, over the women themselves and consequently over their right to speak and be heard, or write and be read. This silencing of women’s voices is not simply an artefact of a patriarchal past in which most of the women discussed in this volume lived and worked; it continues to be an almost essential element of conventional (male) knowledge-making itself. Within the academy, the power of the ‘men of the university totem’, to borrow Olive Pink’s expression, remains a formidable barrier for women who work and write as feminists. That field of knowledge called anthropology, sometimes defined as ‘the study of mankind’, is no exception to this criticism.

In a recent canonical work from California, for instance, James Clifford wrote:

Feminist theorizing is obviously of great potential significance for rethinking ethnographic writing. It debates the historical, political construction of identities and self/other relations, and it probes the gendered positions that make all accounts of, or by, other people inescapably partial.¹

In the same passage, Clifford also refers to the strong intellectual and moral influence of feminism in university milieux which has given us new theorising in anthropology. Yet the book which begins with these respectful gestures towards feminist work fails to include any feminist contribution, for which the authors rather lamely apologise. As Pat Caplan notes, there is the token bow but ‘a total failure to grapple with . . . the implications [of feminist theory]’.²

Is this failure perhaps because we in anthropology (and particularly feminists) really have taken up the challenge Edwin Ardener threw out to women over twenty years ago in 1968 (and again in 1975), namely, ‘to split apart the very framework in which they conduct their studies’?³ Have we traumatised the fraternity to such an extent that the patriarchal discipline, including its most sensitive men, can only genuflect to women on the one hand while ignoring feminist scholarship on the other? Perhaps, but this is still failure for us, and absence.

Ardener issued his challenge because, he said, women themselves were reluctant to deal with what he called (androcentrically) ‘the problem of women’ for the very