I'm really delighted
at this moment
to be able to share
with you all some
of the highlights from Philip's
career before he dives in.
Philip Jones has been a
curator in the South Australian
Museum's Department of
Anthropology since the 1980s.
Apparently, he was
a volunteer there
when he first
started out in 1981.
His doctoral thesis
concerns the history
of Australian
ethnographic collections,
based on an analysis
of 1,300 collectors
and their collections,
which is an impressive feat
for a doctoral student.
He's worked with several other
anthropologists and linguists.
He's undertaken fieldwork
in southern South Australia,
the Simpson Desert
in Central Australia.
And as a museum curator who is
expected to produce exhibitions
and publications,
he came to realize
at one point in his career
that research should not
be open-ended but should
result in a clear contribution
to knowledge, and ideally,
that this contribution should
be accessible and useful
to descendant communities.
His fieldwork with
Aboriginal people
has resulted in a large number
of publications on history,
art, and ethnography.
He has five books and about
30 articles and chapters,
and more than 30 exhibitions
curated from his base
at the South Australian Museum.
That museum is
the one that holds
the largest and most
representative collection
of Aboriginal material culture.
In Australia, he pioneered a new
approach to museum ethnography,
where he uses history
of particular objects
and their biographies
as entry points
into new examinations
of the frontier
of the zone of
encounter, characterized
by mutual curiosity
engagement just as much
as a zone of violence
and exploitation.
He used this approach
in his 2000 book, Ocher
and Rust, Artifacts
and Encounters
on Australian Frontiers,
an amazing book which
you should all check
out, which also
won the inaugural Prime
Minister's Award for Literary
Non-fiction in 2008.
In recent years, his
field of interest
has widened further
beyond the borders
of the Australian continent to
include scientific expeditions
and ethnography from
further on in the field.
And during 2001, Philip began
intensive investigations
on Australian
Aboriginal collections
outside of Australia,
so in European museums.
And his placement here
at the Peabody Museum
has really enabled him to extend
this investigation to North
American museums,
and particularly
through the
fortunate partnership
between the universities both
at Harvard and at Adelaide
in South Australia
during the 1930s, which
has resulted in a collection
that, as you heard,
he'll talk about today.
And while he studies these
intriguing historical figures,
Philip is a fascinating
man in his own right.
I recently found out
that in his spare time,
Philip retreats to a cottage
in the bush in Adelaide
in Australia and
distills eucalyptus oil.
I personally have watched him
studying a singular object
for hours and days.
Well, I haven't watched him for
hours or days, but I go back
and he's still studying
the same object.
And he's carefully sketching
every single detail,
and the results are truly
kind of amazing works
of art in their own right.
And I've no doubt that
they will one day also
be present in a museum
collection or museum archive.
He's also a joy to watch
working in the back storage
collections, especially
when we have other guests.
I am not an expert in
Australian collections,
so it's been really an amazing
thing to have him here with us.
Just recently, we had some
Indigenous or Aboriginal
Australian visitors, and as
we walked the shelves where
dozens and dozens of
19th and 20th century
unpainted wooden boomerangs
lie, boomerangs that really do
look quite similar, if not
identical to the untrained eye,
Phillip can pick one up, and
with incredible accuracy,
he can estimate its geographical
and cultural origin.
And so I can't emphasize enough
what a huge benefit Philip has
been to this museum, and what
a treat he's been to work with.
And it's truly an honor
to introduce you now
to Dr. Philip Jones.
[APPLAUSE]
Well, this is too kind.
Thank you very much,
and welcome everyone.
I'm honored to be here.
And I do want to thank the
Peabody, and particularly, Jane
and staff, for hosting
me during this period.
And also, I want to thank
David Hague and the Australian
Studies Committee for
enabling this placement here
at the Peabody.
And I particularly want
to thank the people
he staffed for
locating and retrieving
the Australian object for me--
I can see Diana in front of me--
for me to study,
sketch, and ponder
over, and for
organizing this lecture.
Thanks to Diana.
So to begin, the broader
context for my work,
Ingrid has mentioned,
lies in my interest
in what you might
call the distributed
collection of Aboriginal objects
in museums in North America
and Europe.
And I'm very interested in
understanding this phenomenon
partly from the perspective of
a curator fascinated by material
culture, but also
to understand how
it was that objects from remote
corners of a distant continent
found their way to Warsaw,
or Budapest, Chicago,
St. Petersburg, or
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
This process of
collection has applied
to every colonized
country, but that
tells you little
beyond reinforcing
a rather easily formed,
rather simplistic conclusion
that ethnographic collecting has
been integral to colonialism,
and must, therefore, be
subject to the same critique.
Now, this seems
reasonable on the surface,
until we begin to
recognize and differentiate
between the different
forms of collecting
and the actual biographies
of objects in collections
and begin to understand
that these differ widely.
Couple of years ago, I
attended a conference
in Berlin, which was
examining the detailed history
of collecting events occurring
during the sacking of Benin
City in West Africa during 1897,
The sacking of Beijing Summer
Palace during the Opium Wars,
the Namibian massacres of 1904,
and other instances of
violent colonial acquisitions
of treasured heritage.
These collecting
events, you might say,
were little more than looting.
Spectacular examples,
undoubtedly,
but looting or theft can occur
on any scale on any frontier.
And that certainly
happened in Australia.
Facing those realities
is part of a curator's
brief these days, so that
a historian's skill set
has to be added
to anthropological
knowledge and awareness
of contemporary issues
and sensibilities.
These are challenging
times for museums,
but the interrogation of
objects and their context
has always been
central to the task,
to their task, one
way or the other.
I've been fortunate to
have the opportunity
to pursue that research
both in Australia,
and here at the
Peabody and elsewhere.
I suppose I would say that
the results of my research
in the case of the
South Australian Museum,
which holds the largest
collection of its kind,
could be surprising.
For I estimate
that at least 90%,
or perhaps closer to
95% of the objects,
in the Australian objects in
the South Australian Museum
were acquired through
open exchange or barter
during the colonial period.
So in Australia's
case, at least,
it's possible to focus
in a different way
upon the bulk of
the collections,
rather than looking at
this idea of conflict
and polarities of
intentions and actions,
these collections arising
through the various frontier
encounters from first contact
in the Sydney region--
Sydney being there,
more or less--
of Southeastern Australia,
to the more recent
encounters in Central Australia
during the early to mid-20th
century.
Unlike the circumstances of
collection being discussed
at the Berlin Conference,
these encounters
were not characterized by
violence or intimidation,
generally, even if those
factors were present
during the colonial period
and should never be dismissed.
But if those factors are
diminished or put to one side,
another factor emerges as
the dominant force in those
encounters, and
that is reciprocity,
a principle of reciprocity.
It's the common trait
characterizing human encounters
across and within
cultures, and it's
impossible without
agency on both sides.
Until recently, we've
tended to recognize
agency only in the actions
of European collectors
rather than the Indigenous
makers and owners
of cultural material.
What may appear as a
lopsided exchange of objects,
a beautifully crafted
shield or a basket bartered
for a stick of
tobacco, for example,
can also be understood
as a transaction entered
into by each party, each
with their own motives
and expectations.
These transactions
occurred on uneven ground,
uneven colonial ground, but that
should not diminish the fact
that colonialism would
enable less and less agency
on the part of Aboriginal
people in these encounters.
But this, I would say,
did not necessarily
apply during the peak period
of ethnographic collecting
in Australia, when Europeans
were meeting Aboriginal people
on distant frontiers, and
Europeans were in a minority
compared to, let's say,
50 or 60 Aboriginal people
camped together encountering
two or three Europeans,
and under those conditions,
exchanges are taking place.
The power that
we've come to think
of as colonial power
residing only with Europeans
in those circumstances
for a very
long period of
Australian history
was not necessarily
so clear-cut.
European collectors
on the frontier
could be greatly outnumbered
by Aboriginal people, who
at that stage,
had little inkling
of the impending fragmentation
of their cultural lives
and material existence.
And there's a lot more
to say about this,
but with that
introduction, I want
to turn to the particular
collecting event, which
has been the focus of my
research here at the Peabody,
and this was the
expedition known
by the rather cumbersome
title of the Harvard-Adelaide
University's Expedition
of 1938 to '39,
henceforth, the expedition.
The main protagonists
were the Harvard
physical anthropologist,
Joseph Birdsell--
he's shown here in his pajamas--
who was really one of
Earnest Hooton's star
graduates here in Harvard
and at the Peabody.
And he would go on to
an outstanding career
as a geneticist based at UCLA.
And his colleague, the South
Australian Museum's Norman
Tindale, whose 50-year
career in Adelaide
was hugely influential
in the development
of Australian anthropology.
Tindale deserves
a book on his own.
And that's on my list.
But his most
obvious contribution
is right in front of
you here, and that's
the Tindale map, the
first comprehensive map
of Aboriginal language groups
to be compiled in Australia.
And really, it was
his life's work.
This is the 1974 version.
And I opened with
the 1940 version.
And if you look at
them closely, you'll
see the gaps and what he did
in between 1940 and 1974.
The story of that map and how
Tindale put the jigsaw together
during the course of his
lifetime cannot be told without
understanding this expedition
and its productions,
which include not
only the objects,
which are partly here and partly
in the South Australian Museum,
but also maps, photographs,
cine film, genealogies,
and thousands of data cards, and
a range of other observations.
Several of those objects in
the Peabody and the South
Australian Museum
have been displayed
over the years, both
here and in Adelaide,
usually within the apparently
straightforward context of use
and function, and usually
with a simplified caption
of a dozen words, if that.
Our tendency in museums
is to bring objects back
to the ethnographic
present, or that
has been the tendency, the
timeless ethnographic present,
to paper over the
discontinuities
or inconsistencies that
objects might represent.
And often, this seems to
be the only course where
the threat of provenance
has been broken.
And in the case of
this expedition,
though, we have the
extraordinary resource
of Tindale's journal.
And you will see that
cropping up in the slides
that we'll move to.
And even more significantly, the
testimony of Aboriginal people
whom the expedition encountered
at the various stations
along the route.
And I've sort of mapped
those out here, or at least
marked them.
Every green dot is one of
the stations that Tindale
and Birdsell visited on their
16,000-mile journey in 1938,
'39.
So the background to the
expedition, how did it happen?
By the early 1920s,
Australian anthropology
had emerged from an earlier
semi-professional base
in museum ethnography, informed
by the central paradigm
of natural history, part of
the British scientific legacy.
in.
Adelaide, this
amalgam of interests
had led to the formation of a
distinct group of naturalists
and medical men who, personified
by the South Australian
Museum's director, Edward
Sterling, developed
a coterie of interest focused
on physical anthropology,
a number of individuals.
And under his directorship
from 1888 until 1913,
he'd seeded a particular brand
of physical anthropology, which
gradually broadened into social
anthropology during the 1920s.
But it retained a
strong empirical basis
focused on defining the physical
types of Aboriginal people
and investigating their
physical, social, and material
culture trace.
By the early 20s, these
successors to Sterling,
and particularly, the
zoologist and anatomist
Frederic Wood Jones--
no relation-- had begun to
focus their efforts on salvage
ethnography in Central
Australia, where Aboriginal
communities had only recently
experienced the effects
of European contact.
By 1925, when representatives
of the Rockefeller Foundation
had visited Australia
with the plan
to fund Australia's first
chair of anthropology,
Wood Jones considered
that Adelaide
had a good chance of securing
it along the lines being pursued
by his group of researchers.
When this bid failed,
the Adelaide group
formed their own Board for
Anthropological Research
and mounted an
extraordinary series
of short, intensive
field expeditions
to Central Australia each August
in the university vacation
from 1926 until the
Second World War.
And Tindale was the
social anthropologist
on those expeditions.
And these are the--
not these, but these
are the destinations
of those expeditions
during the 1930s, which
gathered an extraordinary
amount of material.
The board was based at the
University of Adelaide,
but Tindale, as mentioned, was
at the South Australian Museum,
and that's where the
material gathered
on these expeditions ended up.
And by 1938, he'd developed
a remarkable capacity
for correlating the variations
he was observing in Aboriginal
cultures across the country.
And here, you can see--
I mean, all of these
dots are basically
representing where Tindale
was in this period from 1921,
and that's his first
expedition, through until 1938.
In 1936, he was awarded
a Carnegie fellowship
to examine Aboriginal
collections in Europe and North
America.
And by the time he
reached America,
he was already inclining
towards the emerging
cultural relativism
of Franz Boas.
But his key references
remained with
the empirically-grounded
physical anthropology
of the Adelaide group.
And that's why and how he found
common ground with Earnest
Hooton here at the Peabody.
As many of you will be
aware, Hooton's career
was built upon the
knowledge, or the notion,
rather, that it was
possible, indeed, desirable
to investigate and document
the physiological differences
between human cultures.
If only, as his
defenders might say,
to demonstrate how
those differences do not
extend to the
shared commonalities
of social and
intellectual culture.
And that point is
arguable, of course.
And we need to be aware
that Hooton was continually
courted, largely unsuccessfully,
by eugenics groups
at this time, whose views
were contributing worldwide
to forms of scientific
racism during the late 1930s.
By the mid-1930s,
Hooton's students
were measuring and
documenting Indigenous peoples
from the Caucasus
to South America.
Tindale's visit to
Harvard reminded
Hooton of an entire
overlooked continent.
Tindale's record of
intense fieldwork
among a series of
Aboriginal groups
and his knowledge of the
field provoked an entirely new
project.
And Hooton encouraged Tindale
to apply for Carnegie money
for a collaborative expedition
between Adelaide and Harvard
aimed specifically
at what Hooton
considered to be a key
research problem for the time.
There are various ways of
describing that problem
or characterizing it,
but essentially, it
was the question of whether what
had occurred physiologically,
as well as socially,
to an isolated people,
the Australian
Aboriginal people who
had developed their own unique
characteristics over the course
of millennia, when
suddenly confronted
with European culture and
European physiology, what
happened to
physiology and culture
under these circumstances?
Put that way, it
sounds innocent enough.
During the 1930s,
with a plethora
of theories regarding race,
miscegenation, degeneration,
and extinction, it was an
extremely loaded question.
In most regions of
the globe, contact
between Europeans and Indigenous
people, as in North America,
had occurred too
far back to analyze.
But in Australia, the
meeting of peoples
was quite recent,
less than a century,
and often within living memory.
Hooton played a key role
in obtaining the funding.
The money was
awarded, and Hooton
allocated his most outstanding
student to the task,
Joseph Birdsell, 33 years
old, graduate of Columbia,
who had already shown
great promise in genetics,
and had experience in
Native American archeology.
Tindale and Birdsell would
become lifelong friends
and colleagues.
Both of them lived
into their 90s.
The Carnegie funds
enabled the purchase
of two brand new Ford pickups
and the infrastructure required
for a 14-month expedition,
lasting from May, 1938,
until June, 1939.
So that's your last
look at the large map.
And now we'll move into some
slides, which will rotate.
So I'll let them do their
thing in the background.
The Carnegie funds essentially
set the whole thing up.
Tindale and Birdsell
were accompanied
by their wives, Dorothy and
Bea, Dorothy Tindale and Bea.
Normally, one might expect
they would either be along
for the ride, or
would be conscripted
as sort of camp labor,
but they had a lot more
to do than that, a lot
more responsibility.
In their own right, carried
out our observations
and measurements on more
than 1,500 individuals
during this expedition,
more than 30 field stations
from Queensland's Cape York
to Southwestern Australia.
Hooton's project was the
core of the expedition,
but within Australia, it
served another purpose,
with social implications aimed
partly at informing Australian
policy towards an issue which
had become the principal topic
of discussion in Aboriginal
affairs since the early 1920s,
when the phrase
"half-caste problem"
began to recur frequently
in public discussions
and in newspapers.
It was exactly
this problem which
had attracted Hooton's
attention here in the US,
for it had risen
through the collision
and entanglement of two
starkly contrasting cultures
in Australia, European
culture, and the culture
of Australian hunter-gatherer
peoples, who had perfected
their way of life,
one might say,
during the course of
50,000 years in a continent
without domesticable
animals or cereal crops,
and therefore, without village
life, writing, the wheel,
or social hierarchy.
In the popular view, and the
view held by many scientists,
the yawning gulf
between these cultures
meant that the growing
numbers of people
born of unions between
Aboriginal people and Europeans
were by definition
degraded and problematic.
The genie could not be
put back in the bottle.
But with eugenics
and institutions
of social control on the
rise during the 1930s,
perhaps solutions could
be found and imposed.
There was little thought that
Aboriginal people themselves
had already found the
only possible answer.
Reading from a typical newspaper
column published just a few
months before the expedition
departed, and I quote,
"half-caste problem, should
they merge with whites?"
That was the subheading.
And, "with official
statistics revealing
a gradual decline of the
Aboriginal population
and an increase of so-called
half-caste Aboriginals,
the Protection Authorities
today" and this
is the quote, "agreed
with one exception
that the half-caste population
must merge with the white.
Queensland delegates disagreed
and made the suggestion
that a native community
should develop
on self-supporting lines with
the aid of a government grant."
So you have this
division, this debate,
which is ongoing in
Australia during the 1930s,
and is going to lead
to a shift in policy.
Along come Tindale and Birdsell,
feeding into this debate.
While they each had their
own private research agenda,
there's little doubt
that the expedition
was sanctioned and supported
in Australia partly
because their insights were
germane to this so-called
half-caste problem.
Not surprisingly, the
surrounding discourse
was replete with
racial epithets,
half-caste, quadroon,
octoroon, and both Tindale
and Birdsell's journals
are full of these epithets.
Birdsell's much
more so because it
was the currency of his
scientific work at the time.
They were terms of art,
necessary, in his view--
although he didn't use them much
after the Second World War--
for understanding the basis
of the so-called problem.
Before the advent of DNA, he was
employing the full repertoire
of racial science to determine
which particular trace had made
their way from Europeans
to the mixed heritage
descendants of what he
called the first cross,
the initial cross.
His principal
task, in a way, was
to determine whether this
mixing would result necessarily
in any form of degeneration.
Seems extraordinary
to us today, but it
was the nature of the discourse.
It's clear enough
that the answer was
no, and that both Tindale
and Birdsell saw reason
for great optimism in a
new hybrid population which
might contain the best
qualities of both lineages,
even if the institutionalization
of these populations
as second-class citizens,
sequestered in missions
and government settlements
with substandard housing,
lack of employment,
and poor education
had greatly reduced
opportunities for these people
to express themselves
in that way.
One of the expedition's
paradoxical aspects
was that while on the surface,
the data gathered by Tindale
and Birdsell seems totally
infused by the racialism
of the early 20th
century, it's clear
that theirs was a
humanistic inquiry, running
like a red line through
the anthropological project
until the present day.
This was particularly the
case on Tindale's part,
for he went to
lengths to understand
the so-called problem through
the perspective of Aboriginal
people themselves, whom
he came to know briefly
enough during the expedition.
His journal-- and you may have
seen an extract or two from
it--
makes it clear that he
trusted the testimony
of those individuals, those
Aboriginal individuals
caught between cultures on
these missions and settlements,
often more than he trusted
the advice received
from the missionaries
and the bureaucrats who
were directing their lives.
While we have no
direct indication
of how Tindale and Birdsell
explained their project
to Aboriginal people at
their 30 odd field stations,
the journals confirm that they
did present their research
as collaborative and as a means
of proving to that population
on those missions and
settlements-- which often
may have ranged
from 40 individuals,
to 200, to a 300 maximum.
The journals confirm that
they presented their research
as collaborative and a means
of proving to those populations
that there was nothing to
fear from miscegenation
scientifically.
As an aside, when I interviewed
Tindale during the 1980s
when he was in his
late 80s, he estimated
that by the end of
the 21st century,
most of rural South Australia
would have some component
of Aboriginal blood.
It was, he thought,
not only inevitable,
but something to be celebrated.
I mentioned Dorothy
Tindale and Bea Birdsell.
Unsurprisingly,
perhaps, they were
responsible for managing
the clerical aspect
of the expedition, completing
and filing the data cards
with more than 100
physiological measurements
for each individual, labeling
hair and blood samples,
and probably keeping
the camp running.
But they contributed
far more than that.
They developed a rapport
with women and children
in the field stations,
and certainly played
a crucial role--
played a crucial role in
humanizing the expedition's
work and explaining
it to the people.
The Carnegie
Corporation had just
funded the opening of
a children's museum
at the South Australia Museum,
which opened a few days
before the expedition departed.
But they also, in the
Carnegie Corporation--
I wish they were
still as active.
They also funded the
establishment of a regime
for testing Australian
schoolchildren
for their abilities and
achievements in English,
mathematics, and other subjects
known as the ACER tests, which
is still going today.
The scheme had barely
been implemented
in Australian schools,
but Dorothy and Bea
arranged with mission
schools for the tests
to be part of the
expedition's work.
Once again, it was found that
Aboriginal children performed
as well as European children,
despite their fundamental
social and economic
disadvantage.
Neither Dorothy nor Bea
would have been surprised
by the testimony relayed
to Tindale by the community
leaders wherever
the expedition went
that their key concern
for their people
was the education
of their children.
And I'll quote-- well,
I'll give you an example.
At Swan Reach Mission,
on the 14th of May,
1938, where Tindale noted the
tribal breakdown, as he put it,
had begun to occur almost
100 years earlier in 1845,
and where the community
of 75 to 80 people
lived in weatherboard houses
with leaky roofs, dirt floors,
and poor sanitation, the
community leader, Malcolm Cook,
told him that, and I quote
from Tindale's journal,
"the community must become
just like the white one.
And he wants equal education
advantages for them.
His people were not inclined
towards the religious teaching
of the missionaries, but
were grateful to them
for getting help for them.
The men all have the vote.
Malcolm is proud to pay 1
pound for his fishing license."
At Walgett in central New
South Wales a few weeks later,
the expedition encountered
a group living apart
from the local mission in
even poorer circumstances--
and I think there has been
an image of that camp--
having to carry water a
long distance from the town.
And Tindale noted that
their children attend school
with white children.
Objections are sometimes
raised, but so far they
have maintained their
right to attend.
When he asked why they
did not opt for an easier
life on a nearby mission,
he was told, and I quote,
"the people have
decided to live away
from the mission, where
there are rations,
but no work, for as
independent people,
they can earn up to
150 pounds annually.
And this gives them meat,
bread, and butter and fruit,
whereas on stations, they only
get soda damper and poor meat."
Soda damper is a sort
of flour-based bread.
"Our water supplies
are very poor,
but we cannot go
away from the town,
for our children's
education would suffer.
We don't want charity, but
a chance to live decently."
This sentiment was
repeated over and over,
and it was not a sentiment that
had penetrated to the broader
Australian community.
Perhaps it still hasn't.
Excuse me.
But Tindale wove this sentiment
into his final report, which
did ultimately contribute to
a major shift in government
policy away from segregation
and towards assimilation,
which was, he noted,
happening in any event.
These were people
of mixed ancestry,
unsure of whether they
and their children
would find a place
in white society,
but well aware that the old ways
and the ancient cosmologies,
integral and familiar to their
parents and grandparents,
would not be available in
anything like the same form
to their children
and grandchildren.
Their uncertain future rested
partly with unsympathetic
governments who shared the
apprehension regularly aired
in newspapers of the period
concerning this expanding--
and it was a rapidly expanding
population of half-castes,
as the term went--
while simultaneously,
those newspapers
were promoting the idea of
reserves with buffer zones
to protect the
remaining populations
of uncontacted Aboriginal
groups in central Australia,
as though there was no
connection between the two
populations.
This combination of
policies and actions
is difficult to
unravel, but it lies
at the heart of understanding
the Harvard-Adelaide
expedition.
How a hybrid population forming
just two or three generations
after first contact
could and should
relate to the dominant
European population, and how,
or even whether it should,
be regulated or controlled.
In many ways,
Tindale and Birdsell
were practicing
empirically-based forms
of anthropology
founded on the fiction
of a timeless ethnographic
present, which
could be conjured up in
publications and museum
exhibitions as the appropriate
context for presenting
the other.
The expedition marked a shift
in Tindale's own practice,
though, partly
through his exposure
to the personal and
deeply corrosive
effects of colonialism which
he and his expedition partners
observed during
1938, '39, but also
because the cataclysm
of World War II
precipitated enormous change
across Aboriginal Australia.
Many aboriginal people from
the missions and settlements
visited during the expedition
joined that war effort
on behalf of a country
which had barely
recognized their humanity
until that point.
In some sense, the
war was a catalyst
for social action on
behalf of Aboriginal people
who had gone out and seen
the world, with social reform
movements gathering pace
during the 1940s and 1950s,
leading both to the
Land Rights Movement,
and for the 1967 referendum,
which was overwhelmingly
passed, bestowing full
citizenship rights
on Aboriginal people,
and the beginnings
of a broader
appreciation in European
Society of the damage caused to
Aboriginal culture and society.
I'm hoping that my research
will cast light on the role
that the Adelaide-Harvard
expedition played
in that history, but one of
its legacies is already clear.
In 1987, with the full support
of Tindale and Birdsell,
by then approaching their 90s,
the South Australia Museum
founded the Aboriginal
Family History Project,
now running for
more than 30 years,
principally upon the
genealogies and portrait
photographs gathered during
the expedition and its sequel,
which was another
expedition across Australia
between Tindale and
Birdsell, undertaken
by Tindale and Birdsell, the
1952 to '54 UCLA-Adelaide
expedition, which revisited
some of the '38, '39 stations,
but concentrated on
the missions and cattle
stations of Northwestern
Australia, filling in the map
and enabling Tindale to pursue
his mapping project as well.
And this family history project
is staffed by descendants
of individuals encountered by
Tindale and Birdsell during
the '38, '39 expedition,
and has recently resulted
in a partnership
with the University
of Adelaide's ancient
DNA laboratory,
working with descendants who
have almost unanimously--
and these decisions are
made at essentially,
town hall meetings, where
all views are expressed.
But overwhelmingly, there's
been support for and approval
for the research, which is
based on the hair samples
that Tindale and
Birdsell obtained
during the '38, '39 expedition.
These samples were snipped
off and put into envelopes
and labeled by Dorothy
or Bea, I would imagine,
and correlated with the
photographs, the portrait
photographs and the genealogies.
So it's possible now to
take these hair samples back
to Aboriginal people and to let
them know that this hair was
taken from their grandfather,
or their great uncle,
or grandmother, and to let them
know what could be achieved
through the research.
And I think everyone
was surprised to find
that rather than the
outright rejection of such
a intrusive research
project, overwhelmingly,
there's been support for what
these relics or records can--
what light they can cast
upon the contemporary scene,
but also the idea
of deep history,
given that every Aboriginal
person in Australia
is well aware of the extension
of the date of occupation
of the country.
By the time Tindale and Birdsell
were there in 1938 and '39,
it was thought that Aboriginal
people may have been
in Australia for 12,000 years.
The figure now is between
50,000 and 60,000 years.
So this database, which
contains 7,000 samples,
is the largest in the world
for an Indigenous population.
And only a very small
number of these samples
have been part of
the program so far.
But by analyzing the frequencies
in paternal and mitochondrial
DNA, the potential is there
to construct an ancestral
map of internal
migration and settlement
in the Australian continent
over that span of 50,000 years.
That's another
complicated story,
but perhaps it gives
an example of how
what might seem to be
an antique and forgotten
anthropological project can
become relevant once more,
and relevant in particular
to the descendant
communities, who during the
course of the past 200 years,
have been solving their
own problems with patience,
ingenuity, and solidarity.
So that's where I'll leave it.
Thank you very much.
And maybe some questions.
[APPLAUSE]
