White grief, happy friendship: Jane Goodale and emotional anthropological research

ABSTRACT

In the 1950s, anthropologist Jane Goodale had bright hopes for her informant Happy Cook, an Aboriginal girl from the Tiwi Islands in North Australia, who she considered constrained by paternalistic government policies. Goodale was devastated witnessing Cook’s suffering over following decades. Looking at Goodale’s feelings of friendship turned to grief over the second half of the twentieth century, this article reveals a crisis of self-understanding among researchers in late twentieth-century Australia. This grief, originally private for Goodale, became increasingly public and performed in white anthropologists’ discourse as they wrote on Aboriginal communities’ experience. Goodale later concluded that this supposedly new era was, in many ways, similar to what had come before, a conclusion that brought on a grief shared by many of her generation. Her experience reveals how ethnographers’ subjective dilemmas and their performances of anti-racism through friendship shifted as they entered what they hoped to be a post-colonial context.

KEYWORDS:

• Aboriginal history
• anthropology
• research ethics
• emotions

Acknowledgments

I thank, above all, the Tiwi people for their generous welcome to their communities and support of my research, especially, the Cook family and Milikapiti community. I am grateful to Ben Silverstein, Shannon Foster and Lisa Slater for their input to earlier drafts of this paper as well as the anonymous reviewers of this paper. I also thank the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies for permission to quote from the Jane Goodale papers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Laura Rademaker http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4059-6729

Notes

1. A communal kitchen provided the Milikapiti community with three meals a day and employment from the 1960s until 1974.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number FL170100121].