buying into film’s popularity, Spencer and Gillen made a concerted effort to distance their work from those shown in other places of popular entertainment such as penny arcades and the like. In contrast, their films of Aboriginal people attempted to shift their representations toward a more scientific and educational appraisal. The opening night at Melbourne’s Town Hall was a spectacular affair, attended by a capacity ←26 | 27→crowd of about 2,000 people, including Victoria’s governor Sir George Sydenham Clarke and other dignitaries. The multi-media event comprised phonograph recordings, cinematographs (moving films), and lantern slides of still photographs, and a lecture authored and delivered by Spencer, a respected and popular academic figure.
The lectures were so popular that subsequent presentations were held in the Athenaeum Theatre in Collins Street and other regional areas such as Castlemaine. Using lecture notes prepared by Spencer, Gillen presented the films, lantern slides and sound recordings to an equally auspicious audience in Adelaide’s Town Hall and to the Royal Geographic Society rooms in Adelaide and in numerous venues in regional South Australia. In all, at least sixty-three lectures are known to have been delivered in the two years after their return, underlining the popularity of their work and the fascination with the Aboriginal image.36 The importance of presenting the films at premier venues, with state dignitaries in attendance, along with Spencer’s intellectually authoritative lecture gave the lectures the credentials of being serious science, laying the foundations of visual anthropology in Australia.
Both men were adept showmen in the sense that they excelled at self-promotion; Spencer regularly presented lectures at various gentlemen’s clubs in Melbourne such as the Savage Club.37 His ability to ←27 | 28→organise meetings and promote attention to his eclectic interests, ranging from cricket to nature clubs, is well documented by his biographer John Mulvaney. While treading a fine line between vulgarity and popularising science, Spencer and Gillen’s films opened a new media source for viewing images of Aboriginal peoples.
Popularising science using film, lantern slides and sound recordings held risks and advantages for Spencer and Gillen which they had to balance within the context of the novelty of film and serious scientific practice and teaching. Like the side-show entrepreneurs, they charged a fee for admission and advertised their lectures in newspapers and on flyers. They also produced vast quantities of still photographs which were sold to their audiences to take home as mementos. Although they employed these commonplace commercial practices, they relied heavily on Spencer’s international academic reputation to make their films respectable by heavily promoting their scientific value. The funds raised were used to buy equipment for the science laboratories at the University of Melbourne; demonstrating that their form of commercialism provided a more philanthropic flavour to their presentation in comparison to their side show alley counterparts.
Spencer held concerns about offending Victorian era sensibilities and was acutely concerned about the attraction of naked bodies, which could act as a drawcard for unseemly scopophilic voyeurism. This was tempered by his desire to show the real native, underlining his ethnographic incentive. In many respects the presentation of their films mirrored the tension experienced by anthropologists for at least another two decades. It explains in part why ethnographic film did not make a significant presence until after the 1930s. Their audiences were eager to experience the uniqueness of seeing for the first time, “natives” who appeared as if they had been transplanted from some distant stone-age past. Combined with the novelty of the relatively new technology of moving film, the presentation of the films was doubly appealing to urban audiences. According to the Melbourne dailies, The Argus, “Australian Aborigines”38 and The Age, “Australian Aborigines”39 both published the day after the lecture, on 8 July 1902, enthusiastically reported how the audience responded after ←28 | 29→viewing the films, photographs and hearing the phonograph recordings with awe and wonder at the exotic images and sounds displayed; Spencer and Gillen had transported these remote desert dwellers into the urban theatres of Australia. In creating this new media environment, Spencer and Gillen also paved the way for urban audiences to develop a new type of visual relationship with Aboriginal people. At this point it appears their entertainment value far outweighed any concerns about their conditions and future. How the audience responded to the images had much to do with pre-existing ideologies about race and the contemporary historical context of black and white relations in Australia and the British Empire.
The exposure of the films to a relatively non-academic audience enabled a wider audience to connect primitiveness to Aboriginal peoples as a semiotic signifier (a visual cue). It was reported in one newspaper review, The Age, when Spencer introduced the lecture he announced that:
It must always be remembered that though the native ceremonies reveal, to a certain extent, what has been described as an “elaborate ritual”, they are eminently crude and savage. They are performed by naked, howling savages, who have no permanent abodes, no clothing, no knowledge of any implements, save those fashioned out of wood, bone or stone.40
Images of Aboriginal people on moving film were rare in 1902.41 In the social, political and scientific context of the time, this statement would ←29 | 30→have carried a very strong message to the audience that exemplified the constructed binary oppositions of civilised and uncivilised that intentionally separated Anglo Australians from Aboriginal people. This separation is implicated in contributing to, not only the psychological but also the physical marginalisation of Aboriginal people. In the service of a dominant doctrine predicated on a racialised evolutionary theory, the images of Aboriginal people were a spectacle. They provided a distraction from addressing the reality of Aboriginal lives in the wake of massacres and dispossession that were destroying their social and cultural networks.
In the search for the authentic Aborigine, Spencer and Gillen travelled vast distances only to be frustrated by increasing evidence that Aboriginal people were appropriating Western technology, such as replacing stone axe heads for metal. By 1901, the Arrernte community living near Charlotte Waters had already been impacted by the expansion of the pastoral industry. It is uncertain how well Spencer and Gillen understood the everyday effects these changes had on the social structures of the Arrernte. They certainly did not reflect these changes in the film. However, Gillen’s diary entry 24 March 1901 reflects on the pressures between Aboriginal people and pastoralists equally affected by the current drought, he decidedly supports the pastoralists’ interests because he identifies with the pastoral industry rather than legitimate the concerns of the Arrernte.42 Even so, Spencer and Gillen were afforded many opportunities to film the Arrernte performing ceremonies. Gillen regularly makes references in his diary to the occasions ←30 | 31→they were summoned by the Arrernte to record events.43 It is a reminder that the Arrernte managed to exercise considerable agency with the eager filmmakers and in turn have bestowed a rich legacy of visual records on present generations of Arrernte people. Making recordings of the ceremonies was not always welcomed unanimously by everyone in the community, however. To present-day audiences, the films demonstrate the Arrernte as lively, vibrant people. The films depict a robust community who appear to demonstrate a clear understanding of the visual representation of their ceremonies and culture; arguably more than what Spencer and Gillen may have understood at the time.
The influence of science, in particular anthropology via ethnographic films, was thus legitimated and professionalised, inadvertently becoming a significant influence in the development of popular culture understandings of Aboriginal people that in many instances reinforced their social and economic marginalisation within Australian society. By the 1920s the fascination with the “primitive”
