“Thomson is reputedly brilliant in the world of science, but does not think readily along the same lines as ordinary people”.
Is that assessment from Donald Thomson’s CO during the War high praise or damnation, made when he signed up for the RAAF in 1940? For it’s a report card that might equally have been delivered about Lawrence of Arabia by British officers around the Middle East during an earlier War. And that was actually a comparison made by DT’s alma mater, Melbourne University in 1967; both brilliant, driven and uncontrollable one-man-bands, each basically failing in their major project to win political freedom for the people to whom they were devoted – Australia’s Aborigines and the Arabs. Indeed, Robert Macklin’s book, Fighting for Justice : The Donald Thomson Story quotes his subject after delivering a 1937 report directly to the Lyons Cabinet as saying, “My success in bringing peace to Arnhemland meant the government lost interest. I have failed utterly”.
For DT as anthropologist had been calling for complete segregation for Aborigines in Arnhemland, Cape York and the Deserts, not yet despoiled “by the scourge of our modern ‘civilisation’”. Unfortunately, the times still favoured the ‘smoothing the pillow of a dying race’ theory, which was in the process of moving to the assimilation policy that persisted into the 1970s. While politicians, government Protectors, churchmen and academics in Sydney (lead by AP Elkin who would battle on after DT’s death, failing to publish an obituary in the anthropological magazine he edited) would resist DT’s reports and his equally trenchant journalism, Melbourne University would keep supporting him between his forays into peace-making and war, and eventually award him a professorship of anthropology.
As a result, MU has received his massive collections of First Nations art and cultural material, as I recently reported:
“The UNESCO-inscribed Donald Thomson Ethnohistory Collection, which offers rare insights into the rich cultural and economic lives of Indigenous peoples in Australia, has been gifted to the University of Melbourne by his family. It contains materials from over 90 communities as well as 11,000 photographs such as those that served as the inspiration for the award winning film The Ten Canoes. Also, there are 25,000ft of colour film, including some of the earliest of Pintubi people in Central Australia, and 2,500 pages of field notes. The gift has been made in the memory of its collector Professor Donald Thomson OBE (1901-1970), who dedicated his life to championing equality for Indigenous Australians, and of his (second) wife, Dorita Thomson who died in 2022.
“Considered one of the most detailed and finest collections of its kind, the donation unifies the two parts of Donald Thomson’s extensive field work under the University’s care after the Donald Thomson Ethnographic Collection was donated by his widow in 1973. The Ethnographic Collection is a highly significant collection of 7,500 Indigenous Australian objects and artworks, including some of the earliest and finest bark paintings in existence”.
And some it will play a prominent part in the exhibition 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art which opens at the University’s Potter Museum of Art on 30 May.
So Macklin’s timely book is the first general history of DT after ‘The Man and the Scholar’, a collection of essays from the Academy of Social Sciences. Mind you, Thomson’s own non-academic writings and photographs have appeared both in a book on his time in Arnhemland and in the delightful ‘Children of the Dreamtime’ which his widow brought out in 1983. Now we have a history which starts with his childhood in Bayside Melbourne and rushes him through his first marriage and a one-year Diploma in Anthropology to his first expedition to Cape York in 1928, coincident with Queensland anthropologist, Ursula McConnell – unmentioned by Macklin. It’s love at first sight for DT with the Yintingga of the Cape’s east coast, requiring three study trips before he hears of trouble across the Gulf of Carpentaria at Caledon Bay.
For a military expedition had been demanded following the death of Japanese fishermen and three whitefellars. But DT thinks he can resolve it on his own! And he does so over two long and arduous campaigns across Arnhemland where, in the East, he befriends the Yolngu leader Wonggu, begins to learn the language, studies the culture through the barks he encourages the Yolngu to paint and explain, and takes three of Wonggu’s sons off to prison in Darwin to answer White expectations that the killings – following rapes and other cultural infractions – must be punished.
Further west, his studied involvement and photographs of life on the Arafura Swamp will lead to the Yolngu calling this period ‘Thomson Time’. And his reports back to Canberra will see the three young men released as well as RAAF surveillance begin of the huge numbers of Japanese ships in Arafura waters. And that will lead to DT’s wartime efforts to set up an Aboriginal Special Reconnaissance Unit based in Milingimbi, Groote Eylandt and Roper River to watch 1000 miles of coastline for any Japanese arrivals. With an irony that Macklin enjoys pointing out, the men who were imprisoned for killing Japanese are now being encouraged to do precisely that!
By March 1943, this Unit is sufficiently secure for him to return home, but to immediately volunteer for similar service in Papua, where the Japanese have clung on post-Kakoda, and from which an Australian invasion might take place. It all ends, though when DT’s empathy with these very different natives fails him utterly as Asmat headhunters attack his party and have to be driven off with machine guns! It took DT 14 months to recover from his wounds, during which time serious diabetes was discovered.
Unsurprisingly, it must be obvious that family life with his first wife and twin boys took a low priority in this dynamic life. An acrimonious divorce post-War was inevitable, though the complete estrangement from his sons was a cruel blow, encouraged by his ex-wife and her family. Fortunately, research assistant Dorita McColl soon came to his attention, and, somewhat to her surprised, DT proposed marriage.
Mind you, it changed little, as he was off to the Deserts for the first time in pursuit of the virtually unknown Pintupi people – or Bindibu, as Macklin insists on calling them. Unlike various later “lost tribes”, these people were happy to be found and delighted their ‘discoverer’ through “the complete absence of colonial imposition” and their brilliant adaptation to such a “bitter environment”. “They have the fattest babies in the world”, he exclaimed as he snapped images that would delight in the book, ‘Children of the Dreamtime’. However, he’d also begun to appreciate family, and developed a collegial relationship with Dorita, as well as having four children with her. They even made an extensive family trip to Europe in the 60s to be hailed by Cambridge University and to make Desert films with David Attenborough.
Of course the 1967 Referendum took his attention. And both a Federal Office of Aboriginal Affairs and the Institute for Aboriginal Studies were established with his encouragement. But in 1970, “Aboriginals lost one of their greatest champions”. Then Dorita kept his reputation alive. And the Mabo Decision alerted the world to the value of anthropological research material by the likes of Thomson and Norman Tindale in proving unbroken connection to Aboriginal land. Timber Creek in 2016 saw $2.7m compensation paid; and the Yolngu are set to receive a whole lot more for their tribal land that the miners were given at Gove.
Robert Macklin has successfully brought Donald Thomson back to life. In some ways, it’s a pity that he has to admit that he found “the more arcane aspects of the anthropologist’s profession” tricky to deal with, making this a well-researched piece of journalism rather than the sort of politico/cultural book that El Laurens has attracted. I also wonder whether any First Nations people were engaged in the research?
Fighting for Justice : The Donald Thomson Story is published by Hardie Grant books.
