Quotes of the Day

Of Australia's many untamed expanses, Arnhem Land, the vast spread of savannah, swamps and crocodile-infested rivers on the northeastern tip of the Northern Territory, remains one of the wildest. A handful of settlements dot its 95,000-sq.-km area, and the unsealed 750-km road that crosses it is passable only in the dry season. When anthropologist Donald Thomson, whose writings on this enigmatic region will be republished this month in Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land (Miegunyah Press; 264 pages), arrived there just 70 years ago, it was also feared by many whites, who had heard stories of its ferocious nomadic tribes.

Thomson was born in Melbourne in 1901, the year in which the new nation decided not to include indigenous people in its population counts. Thirty years later, a white man who liked them was, he wrote, "regarded as an eccentric." By then the young anthropologist was seeing official attitudes to Aborigines up close on Cape York. In 1932 he photographed three Aboriginal men chained neck to neck, sentenced without trial by a mission superintendent to lifelong exile on Palm Island. The image, reproduced in Thomson, shows them beginning a 380-km walk with police riding behind them. As desolate as the image is, Thomson wrote, "it gives no idea of the misery of the scene."

Thomson was so affected by what he saw on Cape York that the following year, when the killing of five Japanese fishermen and three whites at Caledon Bay in Arnhem Land prompted plans for a punitive police expedition, he lobbied the Federal Government to send him as peace broker. Despite officials' fears that he'd be killed - and a request, which he refused, to collect skulls while there - Thomson set off in 1935 to calm tensions and, he hoped, document for policymakers the needs and culture of a people about whom almost nothing was known: "I was to show them that a European was prepared to trust them."

Drawn from his official reports and private papers, Thomson depicts in matter-of-fact prose arduous months of roaming harsh northeastern Arnhem Land with indigenous guides. Unlike in other areas, where Aborigines had already been dispersed, regular interracial contact was new there, and traditional life intact. Thomson's determination to live as the locals did - learning the language, eating bush food and attending sacred ceremonies - makes for a compelling insider's view. The objects of study soon became companions, as he realized when he left to write his final report: "I knew and loved the Arnhem Land people … I had more in common with them than with my own kind. I knew I would be lonely for them always." Thomson's writings, compiled by Australian National University anthropologist Nicolas Peterson, at times leave one wanting more detail of the growth of such bonds. But elsewhere Thomson deftly steps between the roles of reflective friend and sharply observant scientist, sometimes with melancholic effect, as when he writes of the hunters who "are so much a part of the landscape; they fit in without a single note of discord, and I for one cannot bear to think of their passing, these lithe, splendid, unspoiled men, from their last stronghold in the oldest continent."

To this edition Peterson has added a jewel - 80 extra images from Thomson's trove of 10,500 negatives from Arnhem Land and Cape York. (These, along with 5,700 artefacts and 4,500 pages of field notes, form a priceless ethnographic collection at Museum Victoria.) They document the vanished world of a self-sufficient and proud nomadic society: a solemn young widow receiving a ceremonial staff topped with a bundle of string and her husband's finger bone; hunters gliding stealthily on canoes through the giant Arafura Swamp. Particularly powerful are the portraits, so different from the era's stiff poses‚ of Aborigines like clan leader Wonggu: lively, strong people, clearly at ease with the photographer. Back in Melbourne, Thomson urged segregation for the region - to no avail, despite his warnings about European and Japanese fishermen bringing alcohol and encouraging prostitution. In 1942 he returned north to set up a secret reconnaissance unit to watch for Japanese troops. Warriors who had once been punished for killing Japanese now learned how to throw Molotov cocktails in the name of a government Thomson, who died in 1970, believed had failed them. His fears for Arnhem Land's people are obvious, and the authority of his account makes it impossible to dismiss them as the mere sentiments of a friend.

• Lisa Clausen
• The writings of doughty anthropologist Donald Thomson revive a lost, pre-European Arnhem Land