Video: Anthropology, Colonialism, and the Exploration of Indigenous Australia
In 1938–1939, Harvard University funded an expedition to Australia aimed at understanding how colonization had affected Indigenous peoples and their physiology, and at informing government policy as it shifted from segregation to assimilation. Led by anthropologists Norman B. Tindale and Joseph Birdsell, the expedition gathered more than 6,000 individual records from Indigenous people on missions and settlements—records that have since inspired community-based research projects and land claims. Philip Jones will set the expedition within the context of anthropological history and explore its complicated legacy.
Philip Jones
Senior Curator in Anthropology, South Australian Museum, and Affiliate Lecturer, Department of History, University of Adelaide
Presented by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology on 10/29/19.
Transcript
Anthropology, Colonialism, and the Exploration of Indigenous Australia
[00:00:05.76] I'm really delighted at this moment to be able to share with you all some of the highlights from Philip's career before he dives in. Philip Jones has been a curator in the South Australian Museum's Department of Anthropology since the 1980s. Apparently, he was a volunteer there when he first started out in 1981. His doctoral thesis concerns the history of Australian ethnographic collections, based on an analysis of 1,300 collectors and their collections, which is an impressive feat for a doctoral student.
[00:00:39.24] He's worked with several other anthropologists and linguists. He's undertaken fieldwork in southern South Australia, the Simpson Desert in Central Australia. And as a museum curator who is expected to produce exhibitions and publications, he came to realize at one point in his career that research should not be open-ended but should result in a clear contribution to knowledge, and ideally, that this contribution should be accessible and useful to descendant communities.
[00:01:08.55] His fieldwork with Aboriginal people has resulted in a large number of publications on history, art, and ethnography. He has five books and about 30 articles and chapters, and more than 30 exhibitions curated from his base at the South Australian Museum. That museum is the one that holds the largest and most representative collection of Aboriginal material culture.
[00:01:30.36] In Australia, he pioneered a new approach to museum ethnography, where he uses history of particular objects and their biographies as entry points into new examinations of the frontier of the zone of encounter, characterized by mutual curiosity engagement just as much as a zone of violence and exploitation. He used this approach in his 2000 book, Ocher and Rust, Artifacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers, an amazing book which you should all check out, which also won the inaugural Prime Minister's Award for Literary Non-fiction in 2008. In recent years, his field of interest has widened further beyond the borders of the Australian continent to include scientific expeditions and ethnography from further on in the field. And during 2001, Philip began intensive investigations on Australian Aboriginal collections outside of Australia, so in European museums. And his placement here at the Peabody Museum has really enabled him to extend this investigation to North American museums, and particularly through the fortunate partnership between the universities both at Harvard and at Adelaide in South Australia during the 1930s, which has resulted in a collection that, as you heard, he'll talk about today.
[00:02:45.07] And while he studies these intriguing historical figures, Philip is a fascinating man in his own right. I recently found out that in his spare time, Philip retreats to a cottage in the bush in Adelaide in Australia and distills eucalyptus oil. I personally have watched him studying a singular object for hours and days. Well, I haven't watched him for hours or days, but I go back and he's still studying the same object.
[00:03:11.65] And he's carefully sketching every single detail, and the results are truly kind of amazing works of art in their own right. And I've no doubt that they will one day also be present in a museum collection or museum archive. He's also a joy to watch working in the back storage collections, especially when we have other guests.
[00:03:29.31] I am not an expert in Australian collections, so it's been really an amazing thing to have him here with us. Just recently, we had some Indigenous or Aboriginal Australian visitors, and as we walked the shelves where dozens and dozens of 19th and 20th century unpainted wooden boomerangs lie, boomerangs that really do look quite similar, if not identical to the untrained eye, Phillip can pick one up, and with incredible accuracy, he can estimate its geographical and cultural origin. And so I can't emphasize enough what a huge benefit Philip has been to this museum, and what a treat he's been to work with. And it's truly an honor to introduce you now to Dr. Philip Jones.
[00:04:10.29] [APPLAUSE]
[00:04:19.34] Well, this is too kind. Thank you very much, and welcome everyone. I'm honored to be here. And I do want to thank the Peabody, and particularly, Jane and staff, for hosting me during this period.
[00:04:36.44] And also, I want to thank David Hague and the Australian Studies Committee for enabling this placement here at the Peabody. And I particularly want to thank the people he staffed for locating and retrieving the Australian object for me-- I can see Diana in front of me-- for me to study, sketch, and ponder over, and for organizing this lecture. Thanks to Diana.
[00:05:10.53] So to begin, the broader context for my work, Ingrid has mentioned, lies in my interest in what you might call the distributed collection of Aboriginal objects in museums in North America and Europe. And I'm very interested in understanding this phenomenon partly from the perspective of a curator fascinated by material culture, but also to understand how it was that objects from remote corners of a distant continent found their way to Warsaw, or Budapest, Chicago, St. Petersburg, or Cambridge, Massachusetts. This process of collection has applied to every colonized country, but that tells you little beyond reinforcing a rather easily formed, rather simplistic conclusion that ethnographic collecting has been integral to colonialism, and must, therefore, be subject to the same critique.
[00:06:25.20] Now, this seems reasonable on the surface, until we begin to recognize and differentiate between the different forms of collecting and the actual biographies of objects in collections and begin to understand that these differ widely. Couple of years ago, I attended a conference in Berlin, which was examining the detailed history of collecting events occurring during the sacking of Benin City in West Africa during 1897, The sacking of Beijing Summer Palace during the Opium Wars, the Namibian massacres of 1904, and other instances of violent colonial acquisitions of treasured heritage. These collecting events, you might say, were little more than looting. Spectacular examples, undoubtedly, but looting or theft can occur on any scale on any frontier.
[00:07:26.27] And that certainly happened in Australia. Facing those realities is part of a curator's brief these days, so that a historian's skill set has to be added to anthropological knowledge and awareness of contemporary issues and sensibilities. These are challenging times for museums, but the interrogation of objects and their context has always been central to the task, to their task, one way or the other.
[00:07:56.01] I've been fortunate to have the opportunity to pursue that research both in Australia, and here at the Peabody and elsewhere. I suppose I would say that the results of my research in the case of the South Australian Museum, which holds the largest collection of its kind, could be surprising. For I estimate that at least 90%, or perhaps closer to 95% of the objects, in the Australian objects in the South Australian Museum were acquired through open exchange or barter during the colonial period.
[00:08:35.88] So in Australia's case, at least, it's possible to focus in a different way upon the bulk of the collections, rather than looking at this idea of conflict and polarities of intentions and actions, these collections arising through the various frontier encounters from first contact in the Sydney region-- Sydney being there, more or less-- of Southeastern Australia, to the more recent encounters in Central Australia during the early to mid-20th century. Unlike the circumstances of collection being discussed at the Berlin Conference, these encounters were not characterized by violence or intimidation, generally, even if those factors were present during the colonial period and should never be dismissed. But if those factors are diminished or put to one side, another factor emerges as the dominant force in those encounters, and that is reciprocity, a principle of reciprocity. It's the common trait characterizing human encounters across and within cultures, and it's impossible without agency on both sides.
[00:10:11.48] Until recently, we've tended to recognize agency only in the actions of European collectors rather than the Indigenous makers and owners of cultural material. What may appear as a lopsided exchange of objects, a beautifully crafted shield or a basket bartered for a stick of tobacco, for example, can also be understood as a transaction entered into by each party, each with their own motives and expectations. These transactions occurred on uneven ground, uneven colonial ground, but that should not diminish the fact that colonialism would enable less and less agency on the part of Aboriginal people in these encounters.
[00:11:02.01] But this, I would say, did not necessarily apply during the peak period of ethnographic collecting in Australia, when Europeans were meeting Aboriginal people on distant frontiers, and Europeans were in a minority compared to, let's say, 50 or 60 Aboriginal people camped together encountering two or three Europeans, and under those conditions, exchanges are taking place. The power that we've come to think of as colonial power residing only with Europeans in those circumstances for a very long period of Australian history was not necessarily so clear-cut. European collectors on the frontier could be greatly outnumbered by Aboriginal people, who at that stage, had little inkling of the impending fragmentation of their cultural lives and material existence.
[00:12:07.95] And there's a lot more to say about this, but with that introduction, I want to turn to the particular collecting event, which has been the focus of my research here at the Peabody, and this was the expedition known by the rather cumbersome title of the Harvard-Adelaide University's Expedition of 1938 to '39, henceforth, the expedition. The main protagonists were the Harvard physical anthropologist, Joseph Birdsell-- he's shown here in his pajamas-- who was really one of Earnest Hooton's star graduates here in Harvard and at the Peabody. And he would go on to an outstanding career as a geneticist based at UCLA.
[00:13:06.75] And his colleague, the South Australian Museum's Norman Tindale, whose 50-year career in Adelaide was hugely influential in the development of Australian anthropology. Tindale deserves a book on his own. And that's on my list.
[00:13:25.23] But his most obvious contribution is right in front of you here, and that's the Tindale map, the first comprehensive map of Aboriginal language groups to be compiled in Australia. And really, it was his life's work. This is the 1974 version. And I opened with the 1940 version. And if you look at them closely, you'll see the gaps and what he did in between 1940 and 1974.
[00:14:03.30] The story of that map and how Tindale put the jigsaw together during the course of his lifetime cannot be told without understanding this expedition and its productions, which include not only the objects, which are partly here and partly in the South Australian Museum, but also maps, photographs, cine film, genealogies, and thousands of data cards, and a range of other observations. Several of those objects in the Peabody and the South Australian Museum have been displayed over the years, both here and in Adelaide, usually within the apparently straightforward context of use and function, and usually with a simplified caption of a dozen words, if that. Our tendency in museums is to bring objects back to the ethnographic present, or that has been the tendency, the timeless ethnographic present, to paper over the discontinuities or inconsistencies that objects might represent. And often, this seems to be the only course where the threat of provenance has been broken.
[00:15:22.61] And in the case of this expedition, though, we have the extraordinary resource of Tindale's journal. And you will see that cropping up in the slides that we'll move to. And even more significantly, the testimony of Aboriginal people whom the expedition encountered at the various stations along the route. And I've sort of mapped those out here, or at least marked them. Every green dot is one of the stations that Tindale and Birdsell visited on their 16,000-mile journey in 1938, '39.
[00:16:07.85] So the background to the expedition, how did it happen? By the early 1920s, Australian anthropology had emerged from an earlier semi-professional base in museum ethnography, informed by the central paradigm of natural history, part of the British scientific legacy. in. Adelaide, this amalgam of interests had led to the formation of a distinct group of naturalists and medical men who, personified by the South Australian Museum's director, Edward Sterling, developed a coterie of interest focused on physical anthropology, a number of individuals.
[00:16:55.80] And under his directorship from 1888 until 1913, he'd seeded a particular brand of physical anthropology, which gradually broadened into social anthropology during the 1920s. But it retained a strong empirical basis focused on defining the physical types of Aboriginal people and investigating their physical, social, and material culture trace. By the early 20s, these successors to Sterling, and particularly, the zoologist and anatomist Frederic Wood Jones-- no relation-- had begun to focus their efforts on salvage ethnography in Central Australia, where Aboriginal communities had only recently experienced the effects of European contact.
[00:17:43.20] By 1925, when representatives of the Rockefeller Foundation had visited Australia with the plan to fund Australia's first chair of anthropology, Wood Jones considered that Adelaide had a good chance of securing it along the lines being pursued by his group of researchers. When this bid failed, the Adelaide group formed their own Board for Anthropological Research and mounted an extraordinary series of short, intensive field expeditions to Central Australia each August in the university vacation from 1926 until the Second World War. And Tindale was the social anthropologist on those expeditions. And these are the-- not these, but these are the destinations of those expeditions during the 1930s, which gathered an extraordinary amount of material.
[00:18:46.86] The board was based at the University of Adelaide, but Tindale, as mentioned, was at the South Australian Museum, and that's where the material gathered on these expeditions ended up. And by 1938, he'd developed a remarkable capacity for correlating the variations he was observing in Aboriginal cultures across the country. And here, you can see-- I mean, all of these dots are basically representing where Tindale was in this period from 1921, and that's his first expedition, through until 1938.
[00:19:26.76] In 1936, he was awarded a Carnegie fellowship to examine Aboriginal collections in Europe and North America. And by the time he reached America, he was already inclining towards the emerging cultural relativism of Franz Boas. But his key references remained with the empirically-grounded physical anthropology of the Adelaide group. And that's why and how he found common ground with Earnest Hooton here at the Peabody.
[00:19:57.15] As many of you will be aware, Hooton's career was built upon the knowledge, or the notion, rather, that it was possible, indeed, desirable to investigate and document the physiological differences between human cultures. If only, as his defenders might say, to demonstrate how those differences do not extend to the shared commonalities of social and intellectual culture. And that point is arguable, of course. And we need to be aware that Hooton was continually courted, largely unsuccessfully, by eugenics groups at this time, whose views were contributing worldwide to forms of scientific racism during the late 1930s.
[00:20:44.59] By the mid-1930s, Hooton's students were measuring and documenting Indigenous peoples from the Caucasus to South America. Tindale's visit to Harvard reminded Hooton of an entire overlooked continent. Tindale's record of intense fieldwork among a series of Aboriginal groups and his knowledge of the field provoked an entirely new project. And Hooton encouraged Tindale to apply for Carnegie money for a collaborative expedition between Adelaide and Harvard aimed specifically at what Hooton considered to be a key research problem for the time.
[00:21:26.67] There are various ways of describing that problem or characterizing it, but essentially, it was the question of whether what had occurred physiologically, as well as socially, to an isolated people, the Australian Aboriginal people who had developed their own unique characteristics over the course of millennia, when suddenly confronted with European culture and European physiology, what happened to physiology and culture under these circumstances? Put that way, it sounds innocent enough. During the 1930s, with a plethora of theories regarding race, miscegenation, degeneration, and extinction, it was an extremely loaded question.
[00:22:17.88] In most regions of the globe, contact between Europeans and Indigenous people, as in North America, had occurred too far back to analyze. But in Australia, the meeting of peoples was quite recent, less than a century, and often within living memory. Hooton played a key role in obtaining the funding.
[00:22:40.23] The money was awarded, and Hooton allocated his most outstanding student to the task, Joseph Birdsell, 33 years old, graduate of Columbia, who had already shown great promise in genetics, and had experience in Native American archeology. Tindale and Birdsell would become lifelong friends and colleagues. Both of them lived into their 90s.
[00:23:05.55] The Carnegie funds enabled the purchase of two brand new Ford pickups and the infrastructure required for a 14-month expedition, lasting from May, 1938, until June, 1939. So that's your last look at the large map. And now we'll move into some slides, which will rotate. So I'll let them do their thing in the background.
[00:23:40.15] The Carnegie funds essentially set the whole thing up. Tindale and Birdsell were accompanied by their wives, Dorothy and Bea, Dorothy Tindale and Bea. Normally, one might expect they would either be along for the ride, or would be conscripted as sort of camp labor, but they had a lot more to do than that, a lot more responsibility. In their own right, carried out our observations and measurements on more than 1,500 individuals during this expedition, more than 30 field stations from Queensland's Cape York to Southwestern Australia.
[00:24:33.23] Hooton's project was the core of the expedition, but within Australia, it served another purpose, with social implications aimed partly at informing Australian policy towards an issue which had become the principal topic of discussion in Aboriginal affairs since the early 1920s, when the phrase "half-caste problem" began to recur frequently in public discussions and in newspapers. It was exactly this problem which had attracted Hooton's attention here in the US, for it had risen through the collision and entanglement of two starkly contrasting cultures in Australia, European culture, and the culture of Australian hunter-gatherer peoples, who had perfected their way of life, one might say, during the course of 50,000 years in a continent without domesticable animals or cereal crops, and therefore, without village life, writing, the wheel, or social hierarchy.
[00:25:41.33] In the popular view, and the view held by many scientists, the yawning gulf between these cultures meant that the growing numbers of people born of unions between Aboriginal people and Europeans were by definition degraded and problematic. The genie could not be put back in the bottle. But with eugenics and institutions of social control on the rise during the 1930s, perhaps solutions could be found and imposed. There was little thought that Aboriginal people themselves had already found the only possible answer.
[00:26:21.95] Reading from a typical newspaper column published just a few months before the expedition departed, and I quote, "half-caste problem, should they merge with whites?" That was the subheading. And, "with official statistics revealing a gradual decline of the Aboriginal population and an increase of so-called half-caste Aboriginals, the Protection Authorities today" and this is the quote, "agreed with one exception that the half-caste population must merge with the white. Queensland delegates disagreed and made the suggestion that a native community should develop on self-supporting lines with the aid of a government grant."
[00:27:11.51] So you have this division, this debate, which is ongoing in Australia during the 1930s, and is going to lead to a shift in policy. Along come Tindale and Birdsell, feeding into this debate. While they each had their own private research agenda, there's little doubt that the expedition was sanctioned and supported in Australia partly because their insights were germane to this so-called half-caste problem.
[00:27:42.15] Not surprisingly, the surrounding discourse was replete with racial epithets, half-caste, quadroon, octoroon, and both Tindale and Birdsell's journals are full of these epithets. Birdsell's much more so because it was the currency of his scientific work at the time. They were terms of art, necessary, in his view-- although he didn't use them much after the Second World War-- for understanding the basis of the so-called problem. Before the advent of DNA, he was employing the full repertoire of racial science to determine which particular trace had made their way from Europeans to the mixed heritage descendants of what he called the first cross, the initial cross.
[00:28:42.25] His principal task, in a way, was to determine whether this mixing would result necessarily in any form of degeneration. Seems extraordinary to us today, but it was the nature of the discourse. It's clear enough that the answer was no, and that both Tindale and Birdsell saw reason for great optimism in a new hybrid population which might contain the best qualities of both lineages, even if the institutionalization of these populations as second-class citizens, sequestered in missions and government settlements with substandard housing, lack of employment, and poor education had greatly reduced opportunities for these people to express themselves in that way.
[00:29:32.54] One of the expedition's paradoxical aspects was that while on the surface, the data gathered by Tindale and Birdsell seems totally infused by the racialism of the early 20th century, it's clear that theirs was a humanistic inquiry, running like a red line through the anthropological project until the present day. This was particularly the case on Tindale's part, for he went to lengths to understand the so-called problem through the perspective of Aboriginal people themselves, whom he came to know briefly enough during the expedition.
[00:30:13.04] His journal-- and you may have seen an extract or two from it-- makes it clear that he trusted the testimony of those individuals, those Aboriginal individuals caught between cultures on these missions and settlements, often more than he trusted the advice received from the missionaries and the bureaucrats who were directing their lives. While we have no direct indication of how Tindale and Birdsell explained their project to Aboriginal people at their 30 odd field stations, the journals confirm that they did present their research as collaborative and as a means of proving to that population on those missions and settlements-- which often may have ranged from 40 individuals, to 200, to a 300 maximum. The journals confirm that they presented their research as collaborative and a means of proving to those populations that there was nothing to fear from miscegenation scientifically. As an aside, when I interviewed Tindale during the 1980s when he was in his late 80s, he estimated that by the end of the 21st century, most of rural South Australia would have some component of Aboriginal blood. It was, he thought, not only inevitable, but something to be celebrated.
[00:31:39.81] I mentioned Dorothy Tindale and Bea Birdsell. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, they were responsible for managing the clerical aspect of the expedition, completing and filing the data cards with more than 100 physiological measurements for each individual, labeling hair and blood samples, and probably keeping the camp running. But they contributed far more than that. They developed a rapport with women and children in the field stations, and certainly played a crucial role-- played a crucial role in humanizing the expedition's work and explaining it to the people.
[00:32:16.71] The Carnegie Corporation had just funded the opening of a children's museum at the South Australia Museum, which opened a few days before the expedition departed. But they also, in the Carnegie Corporation-- I wish they were still as active. They also funded the establishment of a regime for testing Australian schoolchildren for their abilities and achievements in English, mathematics, and other subjects known as the ACER tests, which is still going today.
[00:32:50.65] The scheme had barely been implemented in Australian schools, but Dorothy and Bea arranged with mission schools for the tests to be part of the expedition's work. Once again, it was found that Aboriginal children performed as well as European children, despite their fundamental social and economic disadvantage. Neither Dorothy nor Bea would have been surprised by the testimony relayed to Tindale by the community leaders wherever the expedition went that their key concern for their people was the education of their children. And I'll quote-- well, I'll give you an example.
[00:33:31.29] At Swan Reach Mission, on the 14th of May, 1938, where Tindale noted the tribal breakdown, as he put it, had begun to occur almost 100 years earlier in 1845, and where the community of 75 to 80 people lived in weatherboard houses with leaky roofs, dirt floors, and poor sanitation, the community leader, Malcolm Cook, told him that, and I quote from Tindale's journal, "the community must become just like the white one. And he wants equal education advantages for them. His people were not inclined towards the religious teaching of the missionaries, but were grateful to them for getting help for them. The men all have the vote. Malcolm is proud to pay 1 pound for his fishing license."
[00:34:29.78] At Walgett in central New South Wales a few weeks later, the expedition encountered a group living apart from the local mission in even poorer circumstances-- and I think there has been an image of that camp-- having to carry water a long distance from the town. And Tindale noted that their children attend school with white children. Objections are sometimes raised, but so far they have maintained their right to attend.
[00:34:58.91] When he asked why they did not opt for an easier life on a nearby mission, he was told, and I quote, "the people have decided to live away from the mission, where there are rations, but no work, for as independent people, they can earn up to 150 pounds annually. And this gives them meat, bread, and butter and fruit, whereas on stations, they only get soda damper and poor meat." Soda damper is a sort of flour-based bread.
[00:35:31.06] "Our water supplies are very poor, but we cannot go away from the town, for our children's education would suffer. We don't want charity, but a chance to live decently." This sentiment was repeated over and over, and it was not a sentiment that had penetrated to the broader Australian community. Perhaps it still hasn't.
[00:35:56.69] Excuse me. But Tindale wove this sentiment into his final report, which did ultimately contribute to a major shift in government policy away from segregation and towards assimilation, which was, he noted, happening in any event. These were people of mixed ancestry, unsure of whether they and their children would find a place in white society, but well aware that the old ways and the ancient cosmologies, integral and familiar to their parents and grandparents, would not be available in anything like the same form to their children and grandchildren. Their uncertain future rested partly with unsympathetic governments who shared the apprehension regularly aired in newspapers of the period concerning this expanding-- and it was a rapidly expanding population of half-castes, as the term went-- while simultaneously, those newspapers were promoting the idea of reserves with buffer zones to protect the remaining populations of uncontacted Aboriginal groups in central Australia, as though there was no connection between the two populations. This combination of policies and actions is difficult to unravel, but it lies at the heart of understanding the Harvard-Adelaide expedition. How a hybrid population forming just two or three generations after first contact could and should relate to the dominant European population, and how, or even whether it should, be regulated or controlled.
[00:37:34.33] In many ways, Tindale and Birdsell were practicing empirically-based forms of anthropology founded on the fiction of a timeless ethnographic present, which could be conjured up in publications and museum exhibitions as the appropriate context for presenting the other. The expedition marked a shift in Tindale's own practice, though, partly through his exposure to the personal and deeply corrosive effects of colonialism which he and his expedition partners observed during 1938, '39, but also because the cataclysm of World War II precipitated enormous change across Aboriginal Australia.
[00:38:18.13] Many aboriginal people from the missions and settlements visited during the expedition joined that war effort on behalf of a country which had barely recognized their humanity until that point. In some sense, the war was a catalyst for social action on behalf of Aboriginal people who had gone out and seen the world, with social reform movements gathering pace during the 1940s and 1950s, leading both to the Land Rights Movement, and for the 1967 referendum, which was overwhelmingly passed, bestowing full citizenship rights on Aboriginal people, and the beginnings of a broader appreciation in European Society of the damage caused to Aboriginal culture and society.
[00:39:11.16] I'm hoping that my research will cast light on the role that the Adelaide-Harvard expedition played in that history, but one of its legacies is already clear. In 1987, with the full support of Tindale and Birdsell, by then approaching their 90s, the South Australia Museum founded the Aboriginal Family History Project, now running for more than 30 years, principally upon the genealogies and portrait photographs gathered during the expedition and its sequel, which was another expedition across Australia between Tindale and Birdsell, undertaken by Tindale and Birdsell, the 1952 to '54 UCLA-Adelaide expedition, which revisited some of the '38, '39 stations, but concentrated on the missions and cattle stations of Northwestern Australia, filling in the map and enabling Tindale to pursue his mapping project as well. And this family history project is staffed by descendants of individuals encountered by Tindale and Birdsell during the '38, '39 expedition, and has recently resulted in a partnership with the University of Adelaide's ancient DNA laboratory, working with descendants who have almost unanimously-- and these decisions are made at essentially, town hall meetings, where all views are expressed.
[00:40:53.58] But overwhelmingly, there's been support for and approval for the research, which is based on the hair samples that Tindale and Birdsell obtained during the '38, '39 expedition. These samples were snipped off and put into envelopes and labeled by Dorothy or Bea, I would imagine, and correlated with the photographs, the portrait photographs and the genealogies. So it's possible now to take these hair samples back to Aboriginal people and to let them know that this hair was taken from their grandfather, or their great uncle, or grandmother, and to let them know what could be achieved through the research.
[00:41:49.62] And I think everyone was surprised to find that rather than the outright rejection of such a intrusive research project, overwhelmingly, there's been support for what these relics or records can-- what light they can cast upon the contemporary scene, but also the idea of deep history, given that every Aboriginal person in Australia is well aware of the extension of the date of occupation of the country. By the time Tindale and Birdsell were there in 1938 and '39, it was thought that Aboriginal people may have been in Australia for 12,000 years. The figure now is between 50,000 and 60,000 years.
[00:42:51.84] So this database, which contains 7,000 samples, is the largest in the world for an Indigenous population. And only a very small number of these samples have been part of the program so far. But by analyzing the frequencies in paternal and mitochondrial DNA, the potential is there to construct an ancestral map of internal migration and settlement in the Australian continent over that span of 50,000 years. That's another complicated story, but perhaps it gives an example of how what might seem to be an antique and forgotten anthropological project can become relevant once more, and relevant in particular to the descendant communities, who during the course of the past 200 years, have been solving their own problems with patience, ingenuity, and solidarity.
[00:43:57.65] So that's where I'll leave it. Thank you very much. And maybe some questions.
[00:44:02.39] [APPLAUSE]