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AP Elkin, AO Neville and Anthropological Research in Northwest Western Australia

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AP Elkin, AO Neville and Anthropological Research in Northwest Western Australia Geoffrey Gray ‘The Natives are Happy’: A.P. Elkin, A.O. Neville and Anthropological Research in Northwest Western Australia Geoffrey Gray Elkin ‘[succeeded] in obtaining information about the aborigines which is of very great scientific value and we realise that this has only been possible as a result of your kind co- operation’.1 I would like to express here my appreciation of the very real help Mr Neville afforded me when engaged in anthropological field work in Western Australia. The head of the appropriate Department can do much to help scientists in their work.2 Elkin’s recent visit to the Kimberley District obtained ‘ethnological information of very great scientific value’ which was ‘only possible as a result of the co-operation of the Government of this State’.3 From the commencement of his field research A.P. Elkin sought to bring a practical application to his work on Aborigines.4 He positioned anthropology as an enabling science which had the capacity to reduce physical conflict and violence and misunderstanding on the frontier. Elkin stated that the ‘object of his mission’ (field work) was both ‘academic and practical’.5 He declared that the knowledge gained through anthropological field research was not only to serve academic aims alone but was also to be put at the service of government. Anthropology’s purpose was to inform and influence the formulation of government policy and practice. In this paper I examine Elkin’s early relationship with A.O. Neville, chief protector of Aborigines in Western Australia; a relationship which shows Elkin’s eagerness to cultivate the acceptance and approval of Neville and a desire not to upset government. It illustrates, moreover, the beginnings of what Gillian Cowlishaw has called a discourse of usefulness, that is anthropologists of the 1930s constructed a discourse framed about their usefulness to government.6 It was a discourse which seemed to lack any critical distance from the policies of government. Elkin went into the field expressing confidence in the policies of Neville and the West Australian government; he returned after nearly twelve months in the north west of the state, where he had heard about and no doubt witnessed some of the social and political realities of Aboriginal life, still expressing support for Neville’s policy. Elkin does give hints that he had some awareness of the way Aborigines were treated but he took no public or private action. He commented on the eagerness of Aborigines to supply him with information to get the white people to respect Aboriginal laws and customs, to enable understanding.7 He was appreciative of the West Australian government, which had helped ‘in every way possible, especially in 106 The Natives are Happy travelling and hospitality, as well as through its agents’.8 Elkin’s acceptance of Neville’s policies and his lack of criticism of those policies and practices demonstrate the beginnings of a sympathetic collaboration between government (Neville) and anthropology (Elkin). Neville and Elkin both valued a researcher who did not disturb the established order. This became obvious when Ralph Piddington, an Australian National Research Council (ANRC) sponsored researcher, made public his criticism of the treatment and conditions of Aborigines in Western Australia, particularly the La Grange area. Elkin offered Piddington no support and placed the continuation of the research program over Piddington’s public criticism of the failures of the Western Australia government to improve the treatment and conditions of Aborigines. Piddington’s criticisms were an embarrassment to both Neville and Elkin. Elkin assured Neville that future ANRC sponsored researchers would not be like Piddington but rather as he himself had been in 1928.9 The ANRC committee for anthropological research, the body responsible for administering anthropological research, decided at its first meeting in March 1927, that the northwest of Western Australia was one of three regions in Australia that should be worked.10 A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, foundation professor of anthropology at the University of Sydney and chairman of the ANRC’s committee for anthropological research, stressed in his first report to the executive committee of the ANRC the ‘pressing importance ... in view of the rapid passing away of the Aboriginal people of Australia ... that the work of the committee ... should be devoted ... to the organisation of research connected with the cultures of these peoples’.11 It was with this in mind that a plan for research was developed. It was to be a ‘systematic investigation’ of firstly the social organisation and religion of Aborigines and secondly an ‘investigation into the anatomy, physiology and psychology of the Australian Aborigines.’12 Ursula McConnel was sent to North Queensland,13 Lloyd Warner,14 an American, went to the Northern Territory. Elkin was to conduct a general survey of the ‘remaining’ tribes of the Kimberley district of Western Australia. Elkin saw himself equipped with the necessary skills; he described himself to Radcliffe-Brown as ‘a native bushman’ who was ‘not unfamiliar with the Blacks and the problems concerning them and as a student who has for some years been studying their customs and beliefs.’15 Elkin, an ordained Anglican priest, had returned from the University of London in late 1927 where he had recently completed his PhD under Grafton Elliott Smith and J.W. Perry, the most celebrated proponents of diffusionism.16 Using written sources Elkin had produced a ‘vast historical survey of burial rites, initiation rites, the making of medicine men and mythology... studded with maps on the distribution of circumcision rites, the use of shell, and ending with ... Elliott Smith’s hobbyhorse: the diffusion of mummification rites of the Egyptian XXI Dynasty.’17 Elkin’s knowledge and experience of Aborigines was thus largely confined to that acquired in libraries18 and he had, for both his MA and PhD, consulted every text that dealt with Aborigines. Elkin’s knowledge of the written material on Aborigines was therefore extensive. His inexperience in matters to do with Aboriginal affairs was tempered by his interest in Aborigines while living at Morpeth.19 Nevertheless, he was the only anthropologist in Australia with a PhD.20 Survey work was a means of investigating areas which may be suitable for future intensive field work. Such a method provided ‘a rough preliminary account of social conditions which [could]... be more thoroughly studied before it is too 107 Geoffrey Gray late’.21 W.H.R. Rivers, in his History of Melanesian Society, published in 1914, endorsed such preliminary and superficial surveys; firstly, because of the then believed imminent disappearance of the ‘data’, and, secondly, kinship and marriage regulation, ‘bodies of dry fact’, were ‘susceptible to scrutiny in relative isolation from the rest of the [dying] culture.’22 Rivers argued that the ‘greater merit of the genealogical method’ was that it ‘often [took one] back to a time before ... [European] influence had reached the people’.23 In the context of Australia the genealogical method, by concentrating on kinship and social organisation, displaced the field worker from the violent realities of the frontier which enabled a re-construction of a past, a time before European contact. Aborigines, paradoxically, were unaltered by contact yet were fast disappearing.24 The genealogical method ideally suited Elkin’s proposed ethnological survey. He saw no role for Malinowski’s methods; he had taken the opportunity, while in London, to attend a short course given by Malinowski on the methods of field work which he found ‘interesting and helpful’ but ‘needless to say, could not be applied to Australian work’.25 Elkin’s view of the inapplicability of Malinowski’s method and theory was re-inforced when he was confronted by an Aboriginality that was fragmenting and disintegrating as a result of white settlement and consequent Aboriginal dispossession and resettlement; he was ‘chasing after the few remainders’26 to collect the genealogical data. The choice of field site was decided by Radcliffe-Brown with the consent of Neville. Radcliffe-Brown suggested that Elkin, should he ‘get sufficient time’ at Fremantle on his way to Sydney from London, might go up to Perth and see Neville, as both chief protector of Aborigines and as the Western Australian member of the committee on anthropological research and discuss with him the ‘question of finding a suitable place for your work in the Kimberley district and the methods of getting there with the approximate cost. This will enable us to plan your trip from this end’.27 It was originally suggested by Radcliffe-Brown that Elkin conduct his field research in the Drysdale River area where there was a mission station which had been there for a ‘few years and the natives are sufficiently friendly’.28 However, Neville provided a different view to that of Radcliffe-Brown’s.29 He warned Elkin that it was ‘an entirely unsettled district, except for the two Mission Stations and the Government Station at Avon Valley, and you are bound to meet with many difficulties’. He thought it advisable that Elkin ‘have another white man with you, besides one or two trustworthy natives.’30 The people in that area ‘have unfortunately had a rather bad experience in their contact with whites, and are said to be treacherous. They are certainly very shy, and may be difficult to get into touch with.’ In addition the ‘natives move about a lot, and consequently not many are to be found at our native stations and missions during this period excepting those who are unable to get about by reason of old age or infirmity.’31 Neville had not been to Drysdale, Sunday Island or Port George IV and, as Elkin wrote to Radcliffe-Brown in February 1928, Neville ‘doesn’t realise the change that has been wrought in the twenty years of the Mission at Drysdale.
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