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The Many Worlds of R. H. Mathews
In Search of an Australian Anthropologist
By Martin Thomas Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2011 Martin Thomas
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74176-676-9
CHAPTER 1
Ethnomania
When ethnomania seized him in early 1892,R. H. Mathews was fifty. The onset of the condition is unwittingly described in his first work of anthropology, a modest paper presented to the Royal Society of New South Wales. I was engaged on some extensive surveys under the Real Property Act in the Parishes of Whybrow and Milbrodale ... and whilst so employed my attention was drawn to the existence of some caves in the vicinity, containing aboriginal drawings ... Thinking that the result of my inspection may be of some interest to the members of this Society, I have prepared a few notes, with illustrative diagrams, which I will now place before you. In this way he described his metamorphosis from country surveyor to ethnological observer, seemingly oblivious to the gravity of what had occurred. We can read him as we would some explorer in the tropics who unthinkingly wrote in his diary, 'Have been much plagued by mosquitoes,' only to die of malarial fever.
For Mathews, death and rebirth occurred in those caves at Milbrodale in the Hunter Valley north of Sydney (see colour plate 1). But he always emphasised the continuities between his old life and the new. As well as a surveyor, he was a Justice of the Peace in three of the Australian colonies (soon to become states). This was an era when the letters 'J.P.' had real cachet, since they permitted their bearer to sit as a magistrate and cast judgment upon his fellow beings. Yet it was the post-nominal 'L. S.', for licensed surveyor, that Mathews used in his authorial by-line, preceding a text that often began with a bluff statement of credentials. I was appointed by the Government of South Australia land surveyor in 1883 and a Justice of the Peace in 1884, both of which positions I still hold, by which means I have had opportunities which would not otherwise have occurred of carrying on my inquiries respecting the customs of the aborigines in that colony. So yes, the connections between surveying and anthropology were in a way obvious; his profession laid the groundwork for that day in Milbrodale when he used his instruments of trade to measure the cave paintings, copying them into a notebook already crowded with sketches of graziers' allotments and a wilderness of numerical calculations. But his claim that the transition was natural — even inevitable — is repeated so insistently and so often that it invites suspicion. If a professional familiarity with the land and its inhabitants was sufficient to turn an unsuspecting colonial into an anthropological researcher, why did so few of the eligible thousands undergo the transition?
And why did Mathews himself wait so long, despite a lifetime's involvement in surveying and other rural activities? He had no shortage of time or money. According to his ornithologist son Gregory, Mathews' business had been so successful in the 1870s that by the age of forty he had amassed 'a competence and could call himself an independent gentleman'. He departed Australia for a world tour in 1882, and reduced his surveying to a part-time practice after his return home. That he had long harboured scientific interests is indicated by his membership of the Royal Society of New South Wales — a small though influential organisation, committed to the advancement of science according to the model of its London namesake. It is revealing that in 1877 the society received a request for assistance from one Edward Micklethwaite Curr of Victoria. They agreed to help him in his project of collecting 'information concerning the aboriginals of New South Wales in order that reliable information may be recorded of a race now rapidly becoming extinct'. Curr obtained information by distributing questionnaires among settlers who might employ, or in other ways associate with, Aboriginal people. Given that the Geography and Ethnology Section of the Royal Society had already identified surveyors as likely candidates for the collection of anthropological data, it is unlikely they neglected to send a circular to the member who styled himself 'R. H. Mathews L. S.', then stationed on the Castlereagh River north-east of Dubbo. Curr received sufficient responses to fill four large volumes of varying reliability, but nothing from Mathews. The resulting book, The Australian Race(1877), became a famous compendium on Aboriginal Australia and in his later incarnation Mathews studied it assiduously. Not only did he quote its findings, but he emulated its methods and mined it for contacts, printing his own circulars and begging the assistance of Curr's contributors, perhaps forgetting his own failure to respond to similar requests.
His unwillingness to help Curr sits at odds with his own self-image. Mathews frequently imputed that the collection of information on Aboriginal Australians had been a regular part of his life as a surveyor and magistrate. Yet if this were the case, surely there would be papers to prove it. Mathews was too cautious a scholar, and too proud of his accuracy, to entrust to memory the fruits of scientific labour. Indeed, if anything is known about him, it is his zest for scribbling. No envelope, bank statement or reverse side of a plan was safe from his anthropological note-taking. Even his children's school books were purloined for the purpose. Hundreds of these loose leafs and scores of his notebooks survive, crammed with information about the 'natives of Australia', as he called them. But there is a commonality to this substantial, if rather bewildering, body of evidence: all of it postdates 1892.
All of it, that is, with one exception — a letter written twenty years earlier. At the age of thirty-one, he was enjoying an intense correspondence with twenty-two-year-old Mary Bartlett, who would soon become his wife. She was in Tamworth and he was stationed at Narran Lakes in north-west New South Wales. I was talking to a blackfellow who can speak English, and he told me a lot of their words and expressions which I made a note of in my book ... I can't find letters in our language to express the proper sounds ... The notebook he mentions has perished, and strictly speaking the letter itself is of dubious evidential value, for I quote not the original, but a copy handwritten by William 'Bill' Mathews, the third of the four sons of Robert and Mary. Still, there is no apparent reason why Bill, a fastidious genealogist and the author of an incomplete manuscript about his father's life, should forge such a document. Nor is it really conceivable that Mathews could have gone for decades, working in some of the more sparsely populated areas of south-east Australia, without encountering Aboriginal people, who by the latter half of the nineteenth century were largely dispossessed of their ancestral territory. Mathews met them on official reserves, in unofficial fringe camps, and as workers for the pastoralists who required his services as a surveyor.
I have read some of his workbooks from that period, and they contain not a jot of anthropological inquiry. Rather, they document a hectic work regime at a time of colonial prosperity and expansion. The thread that linked the old Mathews and the new is that in business, as well as anthropology, he was a workaholic. He exaggerated his role as a researcher during that first phase of his life, even though it left him with something more valuable and less easy to fabricate — a love for the people he studied. Just occasionally, Mathews fleshed out some detail about his days as a surveyor, as occurs in the opening to a paper on Kamilaroi initiation, published in 1896. After I had pitched my camp, I entered into conversation with the head men, some of whom were known to me, having been acquainted with them when surveying Crown lands in that part of the country in 1875 and 1876. I had been kind to them in those days, while listening to their legends and their songs, and studying their wonderful class system [of organising marriage]; and when I met them now I found their friendship of the greatest value to me.
His rare use of the word friendship suggests that the songs and legends he heard in the 1870s were shared convivially, not in the spirit of formal inquiry. Mathews and his team would often stay out for weeks at a time, and since they required flat ground and water for themselves and their horses, there must have been occasions when Aboriginal groups were camped close by. They might have approached him for food or tobacco, or simply to pass the time. Although he says so little about these interactions, the hints are there. Throughout the summer months, and during fine weather at other periods, the blacks usually camp out in the open air, where they have every opportunity of watching the starry vault above them ... There are always some clever old men in the camp, who are the recognized repositories of the lore of the tribe, who take advantage of this out door life to teach the young people stories about some of the different stars ... As soon as an old man commences one of these stories, the young folk from the neighbouring camp fires congregate around him and listen with avidity to his marvellous narrations. Clearly, Mathews was privy to such renditions, told in argots that he understood imperfectly. And the knowledge of astronomy which my profession demanded, made it easy for me to identify with precision all the different stars and stellar groups which figure so prominently in the aboriginal folklore.
In his book Tristes Tropiques (1955), perhaps the most celebrated memoir by an anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss lamented the failure of his untrained predecessors, the pioneers of the discipline, to ask what to him were the really crucial questions. But he immediately qualified his complaint. 'A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see. I am subject to a double infirmity: all that I perceive offends me, and I constantly reproach myself for not seeing as much as I should.' When I read this it occurred to me that it applies very directly to R. H. Mathews, not only because of the questions that I wish he had asked, but because I suspect that he felt something of the same self-reproach.
Ostensibly, he was studying the Aboriginal society that he saw around him. Yet in some respects he was not interested in this society at all. For example, it never occurred to him to ask his informants about the changes they had witnessed in the course of their lives. Bear in mind that Mathews worked with people seventy and eighty years old in the 1890s. Had he tapped their memories of the invasion of their homelands, what a perspective on colonisation it would be. But his agenda, concordant with the social and anthropological values of the period, was to look beyond the contaminant of history. His mission was to extract and document supposedly timeless customs and traditions, an ambition that caused tremendous disagreement among rival anthropologists, who regularly denounced information that varied from their own findings as corrupted by European influence.
So it is not surprising that Mathews, working within this framework, was always looking back in time. Consider a remark Bill made about his father: 'Robert saw something of the passing of an order of things that probably had existed for many thousands of years, as well as the development of the new era inaugurated by the coming of the white man.' It is a penetrating observation of a mercurial individual, a man who was stinting in what he disclosed of his inner life. Bill described his father as a 'self-contained man' who 'felt little or no desire to seek the society of his fellows, but rather was disposed to avoid them as much as he reasonably could ...' Although he was always eager to shield himself, there are moments in his writings that suggest some correlation between the Aboriginal world that seemed to be dying and the lost domain of his own youth. In 1904 Mathews mentioned his upbringing near Goulburn in rural New South Wales. I was born in the Australian bush and black children were among my earliest playmates. Three years later he wrote about Aboriginal games and recreations. During the warmer months of the year swimming in deep waters offered a good pastime. Most of us have entertained ourselves as boys by seeing who, during diving, could stay longest under water. The young blacks do the same as well. On a given sign the competitors dive at the same time, while some old men wait for their resurfacing.
Mathews himself displayed the frantic energy of a diver struggling to surface. 'Now is the time' was his catchcry. In a letter to an American editor: Now is the time to locate the different nations, while the blacks are still alive, and not in a few hundred years after they are all dead, as is done with most races. In a letter to fellow ethnomaniac, Daisy Bates: Now is the time — NOW or NEVER. The sober self-image he promulgated, that of the lifelong researcher who had finally found time to write up his observations, was the necessary mask of a zealous fanatic. Whatever it was that happened on that day in 1892, when Mathews began sketching rock art in those caves at Milbrodale, it can only be thought of as a conversion. How the floodgates opened from that time! Far from writing up past labours, his quest was to recover details that had slipped through the fingers of his former life; a belated asking of unasked questions.
By 1893, when his first paper on the cave paintings was published, the pathology of his condition was fully evident — and it never diminished in the quarter-century until his death. Out poured the publications: the work on rock art, initiations, kinship. He transcribed legends and documented languages, bombarding journals around the globe with the produce of his pen. One hundred and seventy-one articles, totalling 2200 pages of printed reportage, were the public legacy of his anthropological years. Many people have written more and plenty have written more elegantly, but an opus of such size would shame many a professor. Yet Mathews had no position in government or the academies. Self-taught and independent, he was paid not a penny for his work. The scale of the labour is brought home when you realise that the publications are but a portion of the information he gathered. The rest of it can be found in his notes and letters, nearly all handwritten since he did not type. The handwriting itself bespeaks the frantic energy that led to its production. Although seldom illegible and never displeasing to the eye, it always appears to have left home in a hurry. Each line advances jerkily across the page, as if to recall the long trips from his house in Sydney, like that to southern Queensland for a ceremony in 1895: This journey was accomplished by going 350 miles by railway to Narrabri, and thence by stage coach 150 miles to Mungindi ... At Mungindi I obtained a horse and sulky and drove an additional distance of 55 miles to the aboriginal camp on the Tallwood run, making a total distance of 550 miles. One can visualise the agile movement of his right hand. Writing that gallops, racing time.
Every life is a cluster of contradictions. In a modest way, Mathews' time as a surveyor had contributed to the dispossession of Aboriginal communities by preparing land for sale, settlement and subdivision. Like most of his contemporaries, he was convinced that racial extinction loomed. The native tribes of New South Wales are disappearing rapidly before the advancing tide of European population, and unless some person qualified for the task shall take up this highly important subject, the languages and the customs of an interesting primitive people will be lost to science. Now he is gone, and I am trying make sense of him and what he did, sketching a figure who lurks perennially in the shadows. The room in which I work is lined with papers, maps, books, audio tapes and other source material designed to bring me closer to my subject. There are works on Australian history and postcolonial studies, dictionaries and histories of anthropology, and also a few treatises on what is known as 'life writing', but these are half buried and only half read. More conspicuous are biographies that have enthralled me. Boswell on Johnson and David Marr on Patrick White share company with A. J. A. Symons' magnificent 'experiment in biography' The Quest for Corvo, and A. S. Byatt's romance of biographical investigation, Possession. Sometimes, when one of these books catches my gaze, I think jealously of the shrewdness or good fortune of biographers who found subjects less protective of their 'self-containment' than R. H. Mathews.
My room is a carapace, cemented together in the hope of unearthing Mathews the person. If I stopped now and tossed into a barrow my laptop computer (full of evidence) and the lever arch files of published works and the photocopies of manuscripts that fill the filing cabinet, they might total some eighty kilograms — a bodyweight of data. A corpus in every sense, it sometimes evokes the bodily being who brought it into existence, but just as often, I have come to realise, the carapace reveals nothing more than a space where a person has been.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Many Worlds of R. H. Mathews by Martin Thomas. Copyright © 2011 Martin Thomas. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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