Donald Thomson: Observations of Animal Connections in Visual Ethnography in Northern Australia

ABSTRACT

Donald Thomson is a legendary Australian anthropologist particularly noted for his early fieldwork in Northern Australia. He lived for extended periods in remote areas in Cape York then Arnhem Land from 1929 until 1943. While in the field, he made meticulous ethnographic and natural history fieldnotes, took aesthetically beautiful photographs and amassed a particularly large museum collection. Thomson made a delineation between his academic publications on anthropology-related subjects and those that related to natural history, reflecting the epistemological divide during his lifetime. Aboriginal engagement with different animals is hard to find by reading classic ethnographic texts, which tend to refer to animals as human symbols or totems, rather than as living beings of significance. Thomson’s fieldwork is exemplary, in terms of showing how anthropologists can utilise a combination of detailed observation, visual ethnography and zoological findings in order to enrich our understandings of relations between other cultures and other animals.

KEYWORDS:

• Donald Thomson
• Cape York
• Arnhem Land
• Aboriginal Australia
• natural history

Acknowledgements

All photographs were taken by D. F. Thomson and form part of the Donald Thomson Ethnohistory Collection. They are reproduced here courtesy of the Thomson Family and Museums Victoria. I would like to acknowledge Yolngu ancestors who appeared in the photographs. Without their collaboration and creative input, Donald Thomson would not have been able to produce the extensive record of visual material or museum collection archived today. Participants within the ‘Reconsidering the Classics’ workshop provided valuable feedback, as did the editors of this issue Marianne Lien and Gisli Palsson. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Centre for Advanced Study in Oslo, Norway, that funded the workshop and my participation within the research team ‘Arctic Domestication in the Era of the Anthropocene’ in early 2016.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A book featuring Thomson’s photographs is entitled ‘Thomson Time: Arnhem Land in the 1930s: a photographic essay’ (Wiseman et al. 1996). Thomson was in Arnhem Land from 1932 to 1933, 1935–1937 and again during the Second World War from 1941 to 1943.

2 The author has previously written about the potential for the combination of natural history and ethnography within filmmaking (Fijn 2007).

3 Lloyd Warner was the first anthropologist to write ethnography on the Yolngu (who he referred to as Murngin).

4 Thomson also shot thousands of feet of film stock while in the field in Arnhem Land but all was lost in a fire within government film archives, where the film material was supposed to be safely stored. Thomson was understandably devastated by this loss, as he hoped it would make audiences more sympathetic and understanding towards the Aboriginal plight in Australia and advocate for their human rights and autonomy. This experience also caused him to be protective of his natural history and anthropology collection, whereby he requested that his wife (and now daughters) were to be responsible for granting all access to the collection.

5 All photographs are shown with the permission of Donald Thomson’s family and the Museum Victoria, Melbourne.

6 Thomson notes that the butcherbird is engaged in play, which has only more recently been recognised as occurring in birds.

7 One reason why Aborigines in the North of Australia may have readily tamed cassowary and emu could be that, like many newly hatched birds, they imprint on the first moving being they see, adopting them as surrogate parents (for example, Schroer, this volume).

8 This is also where I resided during fieldwork, although the community that still lives there no longer tend to nurture emu chicks.

9 We now know from DNA evidence that dingoes were brought to the continent by humans from Southeast Asian stock (Savolainen et al. 2004).

10 For a recent article on the historical significance of companion animals in Aboriginal society, particularly during early European settlement of Australia, see Philip and Garden (2016).

11 The irony is that later, during the Second World War, Thomson was sent to Arnhem Land to form a reconnaissance unit of local Yolngu as defence against potential Japanese invasion. Thomson had to inform Wonggu that although he had convinced him that it was not acceptable to kill Japanese in the past, he was now encouraged to do so! (Thomson 2003).