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NLA News - home October 2004 Volume XV Number 1
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Portrait of R. H. Mathews in his later years
Reproduced from Some Peculiar Burial Customs of the Australian Aborigines by R.H. Mathews (Sydney: William Brooks, 1909)

SURVEYOR, ANTHROPOLOGIST, ‘INDEPENDENT GENTLEMAN’:
THE CONTROVERSIAL CAREER OF R.H. MATHEWS

Martin Thomas peruses the papers of R.H. Mathews who studied Indigenous Australians in the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth century and was published in many prestigious Australian and overseas journals despite a lack of formal qualifications in the field of anthropology

The National Library received an extraordinary donation from the family of Robert Hamilton Mathews (1841–1918) in 1987. The gift consisted of letters, notebooks and other manuscript material that had been assembled by a man who is now recognised as one of the pioneers of Australian anthropology. R.H. Mathews worked as a surveyor through the 1870s, mainly in rural New South Wales. In this line of work he was well placed to meet Aboriginal people and make some observations on their way of life.

He also made some canny property investments which enabled him, at the age of 40, to establish himself as an ‘independent gentlemen’. He fathered a large family, travelled widely overseas and within Australia, and served as a rural magistrate (then an honorary position). Some of his remaining hours were occupied with part-time surveying.

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A plate showing Mathews' documentation of Aboriginal rock art around Sydney. Published as an illustration to R.H. Mathews, 'Aboriginal Rock Pictures of Australia' in Proceedings and Transactions of the Queensland Branch of the Royal Geographical Society of Australia, vol. 10, 189495

Financial security allowed Mathews to become not only an independent gentleman but an independent scholar. The seed for his ethnographic research was sown unexpectedly in 1892 when, during a routine surveying job, he had an opportunity to document an impressive rock painting in the Hunter Valley north of Sydney. He described it in a short paper, the first in what would become a vast portfolio of anthropological articles.

Mathews’ writings are characterised by the scientism common to most early anthropology. There is little of a personal nature—which makes him a difficult quarry for the biographer. But in one paper, dated 1904, he gave insights on his upbringing and later professional experience. One can get a sense of how country life in colonial New South Wales provided the groundwork for his eventual labour of documenting Aboriginal society and beliefs.

Throughout a comparatively long life I have had special opportunities of studying the habits of these people. I was born in the Australian bush and black children were among my earliest playmates. In my youth I was engaged in station pursuits in the back blocks of New South Wales and in the new country of Queensland, when the blacks were in their pristine condition. In later years I was employed by the Government as a surveyor on the Barwon, Namoi, Castlereagh, and other distant inland rivers, where I was continually in contact with the sable sons and daughters of the soil.

Fortunately, also, I always had a keen proclivity for collecting all the information available in regard to their numerous highly interesting customs ... Owing to my familiarity with the ways of blackfellows, I always received the complete confidence of the chief men, and thus gained admission to their secret meetings. Moreover, my training as a draftsman enabled me to copy every description of aboriginal drawing with great facility ... 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.

A remarkable aspect of Mathews’ career is the way Indigenous knowledge gathered from the Australian backblocks fed into international debate. Mathews placed articles in several Australian journals as well as the American Anthropologist, the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society and London’s Journal of the Anthropological Institute. He also contributed to periodicals published in France, Germany and Austria. It always strikes me as rather fabulous that one can scan the footnotes of such a cornerstone of modern social theory as Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of the Religious Life and find references to R. H. Mathews, his friend Daisy Bates and to others among their Australian contemporaries.

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Charles Henry Kerry (1858–1928)
Native Camp, Tabulam  c.1895
photograph; 14.6 x 19.2 cm
Pictures Collection,
nla.pic-an3298931

Tabulam in northern New South Wales was one of many Aboriginal reserves visited by Mathews

Mathews personally corresponded with Durkheim and with others in his circle including the Paris-based sociologist, Arnold van Gennep. Amongst Mathews’ correspondence (part of the National Library Collection) there is a letter from van Gennep written in 1907. He supported the work of the Australian surveyor, but warned him that his publishing practice was overly dispersed. ‘You are overlooked because your papers are so scattered,’ he declared. He proposed that Mathews should immediately organise their ‘publication in 2 or 3 volumes’. But the advice went unheeded. The constant drive to collect more data meant that Mathews never found time to compile his magnum opus. He was also hindered by the machinations of certain competitors on the anthropological scene.

Impelled by the conviction, common at the time, that the ‘Aboriginal race’ was fast disappearing, Mathews searched voraciously for information. He was always eager to get it into print as soon as possible. Editors accepted his work, even when they bemoaned its want of theory, its failure to speculate, in that evolutionist age, on the origins of man. At the rate of a dozen or more papers a year, Mathews kept on publishing— perhaps spreading himself too thin.

The fact that he had many contacts, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, in rural New South Wales, Victoriais an understandable legacy of his surveying years. But how did this man with no scientific background, no university qualifications, transform himself with such rapidity from an affluent though inconspicuous colonist to an internationally published scholar? How did he know the addresses of scientific organisations like Washington’s Smithsonian Institution or London’s Anthropological Institute?

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Photographs of Aboriginal rock paintings from the Kimberley
region of were sent to Mathews
by F.S. Brockman who led an
expedition sponsored by the Western Australian government in 1901
Manuscripts Collection, MS8006/6/1

 

 

The answer lies in the small amateur societies of colonial Australia. Since the mid-1870s, Mathews had been a member of the Royal Society of New South Wales, a scientific body based in Sydney and modelled on its august London namesake. The society met regularly to hear papers presented by members. Their annual Journal and Proceedings provided a publishing forum for Mathews throughout his anthropological years. Members also had access to the society’s library. He must have spent many hundreds of hours there during his quarter-century of anthropological research.

In the back of each year’s journal, the Royal Society of New South Wales detailed other bodies around the world with which it exchanged publications. The list, which runs into several pages, included libraries, museums, colleges and a great many other independent societies. This was the era of the amateur scientist. Through a vast network of exchange—truly a global system for distributing knowledge—scholars in far-flung parts of the world could remain up-to-date in their discipline. In this way Mathews would have learned about the activities of Durkheim and his circle in Paris. Similarly, it allowed scholars in the Old World who, in that evolutionist era, were hungry for data about ‘the primitive’ to access and quote an article Mathews might have written about Wiradjuri initiation ceremonies or Kamilaroi marriage customs.

Working without government or institutional support, Mathews could pursue his research and interpret his results according to his own methods. He travelled extensively by rail and steamer to speak with Aboriginal people. He also used the penny post, coaxing and sometimes cajoling a network of white informants who gathered ethnographic information from places he would never, or only seldom, visit. It must have cost him a fortune and he sometimes grumbled at the expense.

Regrettably, his independent manner of working did not immure him from the feuding and factionalism for which the discipline of anthropology is still somewhat infamous. Mathews fared poorly in anthropological warfare that was as vindictive and grubbily fought as any of the ‘history wars’ of the present day.

None of the participants gave an adequate account of how the feuding started. Broadly speaking, it was a combination of personal and theoretical differences. But the animosity towards the surveyor-anthropologist is clearly documented in correspondence between Mathews’ principal opponents, the most powerful of whom was W. Baldwin Spencer, a professor at Melbourne, who had become known internationally as co-author (with F.J. Gillen) of The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), one of the most influential anthropological monographs of all time.

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1901 photograph of Meriman, a well-known elder from Wallaga Lake, South Coast of New South Wales, where Mathews did fieldwork
Manuscripts Collection, MS8006/6/1

Spencer loathed Mathews passionately. With a sense of horrified fascination, I have traced the persistence with which he blackened Mathews’ name. In one of his signature putdowns, Spencer wrote to his friend A.W. Howitt:

As to that miscreant Mathew [sic] ... I don’t know whether to admire most his impudence his boldness or his mendacity—they are all of a very high order and seldom combined to so high a degree in one mortal man ... I have serious thoughts of making a few polite remarks—I only wish I dare say in print what years ago I said to him in private but it was just a little bit too libellous.

Spencer was a particularly dangerous enemy. He besmirched Mathews’ name to many of his Oxbridge contacts. At Spencer’s behest, Sir James Frazer—the renowned author of The Golden Bough—resolutely refused to quote Mathews in his major work on totemism even though the latter had published dozens of articles on the subject. When Mathews belatedly endeavoured to publish a major book, he sent it to Macmillan for consideration. This was the publisher of Spencer and Frazer and the manuscript was quickly rejected. Quite possibly it was sent to Frazer for his opinion.

Mathews is fascinating because he took an interest in Aboriginal culture at a time when it was anything but fashionable. He left a legacy that is both invaluable and laced with ironies. Today his work is read closely by a great variety of researchers including Aboriginal people investigating their heritage. With his work being cited in land claims and other attempts at cultural rejuvenation, the people whom he imagined to be a ‘dying race’ have become some of his most attentive readers.

MARTIN THOMAS was a Harold White Fellow at the National Library in 2002. He now works in the History Department at the University of Sydney as a research fellow.

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