The Claypan Anthropologist

It’s 1918 and Brother John Consterdine is jogging steadily West out of Bourke in his sulky doing the rounds of a parish roughly the size of his home country, England. He’s got rations on board that should last him a couple of months. He is one of the young clergy known as the Bush Brothers who had answered a call to venture out to the very edges of settlement in NSW and Queensland.
 
Their university degrees weren’t guaranteed to win a hearing with station families or the shifting population of shearers, stockmen, well sinkers and fencers – mostly graduates from ‘The School of Hard Knocks.’ But, by nicknaming him ‘Brother Connie’, the bush people signalled they thought he wasn’t a half-bad bloke. Loneliness can make people inventive and Connie had turned the long tedious stretches through the Gidgea, Mulga and treeless salt pans of back country NSW into a rich university education of his own. He wrote,
    
When it is remembered that Australia is perhaps the only country in the world where a 1918 motor tyre may easily be punctured by a Paleolithic or Old Stone Age spear head, which in other countries would take deep digging to find and that these remains are fast disappearing, it will be easily seen how important and fascinating it is to collect what remains before it is too late.
​(Pictured are some of the Bush Brothers at their base in Dubbo.)

Beside him on this journey was a young, Maitland-born priest on stress-leave from his parish in Armidale. This man of the cloth had been struggling to reconcile his Christian world-view with his reading of Charles Darwin’s explosive Origin of the Species which argued life began without a Creator.  
 
As the sulky rolled through the red country, Connie opened his friend’s eyes to search for clues to an ancient culture. Water holes, dry creek beds, rocky outcrops, eroded sandhills became archives of information. Stones, knocked into tiny flakes, smoothed by grinding or blackened by fire on a claypan, were rapidly fading lines in a fascinating story. Here were hunter-gathers who had skilfully used stone and wood to enable them to survive in arid conditions for thousands of years, remote from other civilisations.
 
The searching young priest was enthralled. His traveling companion’s infectious enthusiasm for surface archaeology lifted him out of his ‘dark night of the soul’ by lighting a flame in him that was to burn bright for the rest of his life. It made him one of Australia’s leading fighters for justice and citizenship for the Aboriginal people – Professor A. P. Elkin of Sydney University.
 
Back in Bourke, he learned that Connie was a perfectionist. Axes in his collection were polished and arranged in size, fragments of stone sown on cards and labelled, fragile articles wrapped in cotton wool. It was a labour of love. He explained, ‘Every specimen of ceremonial stones should be picked up and sent with a note stating the exact locality of its discovery, to the Sydney Museum.’
 
All across Australia at the time, amateur archaeologists were conscientiously doing their best to ‘rescue’ the remnants of Aboriginal culture they saw littering the landscape, sending them to museums for safekeeping. (Currently there is a repatriation policy to return the artefacts to their communities of origin to be cared for on country.)
 
After years of gathering a vast store of knowledge in this field, Elkin selected ten founders of social anthropology in Australia, all of whom he described as skilled amateurs. They did it out of a natural love for it, not for money. Five of them were people of active Christian faith who lived among the indigenous people.
 
The Bourke tour of discovery launched Adolphus Elkin to become one of them. Over the following decades he explored developments in anthropology, sociology and functional psychology that gave him a plausible framework for his practical and ritual work as a priest. He learned Aboriginal people did have a spiritual awareness that included a Creator. He saw how religion uniquely ministered to the whole personality.
 
 He met traditional Aboriginals during field-work in the Kimberley, Western Australia in 1928. The brutal clash between settlers and indigenous tribes shocked him, the missions seemed ambivalent and government policies aimless. That launched him on his own long campaign of social justice for the Aboriginal people.
 
During the 1930’s Elkin used his position as the head of the Anthropology Department at Sydney University to drive a significant shift of immense proportions in thinking about the Aboriginal people. Where many had predicted they were a dying race needing protection, Elkin, with others pressed for assimilating them into the white community.
 
Assimilation seemed at the time to be what Aboriginal Christian activists like Bill Ferguson in Dubbo and William Cooper in Melbourne and David Unaipon in Adelaide were asking for – the ‘uplift of the Aboriginal race’ and a future. Today it can seem patronising and racist, but with all its shortcomings, it was a move in a positive direction for a disenfranchised native people.
 
Elkin differed from the evolutionary anthropologists who saw the Aboriginals as less evolved and unable to adapt. As one of the new breed of social anthropologists, he believed they could adapt and take their place in the Australian community as equal citizens.
 
Elkin had his own interpretation of the Aboriginal cause and spent decades championing it before State and Federal governments. His heart conviction was simply that all human beings as children of the Creator must adjust to their circumstance. Humility, reverence, communion, courage and goodness would help White adapt to Black, and Black to White.
 
I suspect Brother Connie would have been quietly proud that his travelling ‘Bourke Bush University’ had produced a champion of such high calibre. Professor A. P. Elkin was from the start ‘the self-made anthropologist’. There was virtually no school of anthropology in 1920’s Australia – he had to more or less make it up as he went along by independent study and practical field work, while working as a clergyman. His career has been summarised by AI;
 
“During his 23-year tenure as Professor of Anthropology at Sydney University he
 dominated the field in Australia and essentially defining the profession as it transitioned from amateur pursuit to an academic discipline.”