had seemingly developed at differing rates of technical sophistication. The film sequences Spencer and Gillen produced in 1901 reflected the belief in the ideology of the “dying race” and the urgency to capture possibly the last images of the “authentic” Aboriginal on film for posterity. Contemporary evolutionary concepts of Social Darwinism meant they were destined to soon become extinct.
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1 Films had been made in 1898 of Tiwi Islanders by Anthony Wilkin, a member of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait Islands. The leader of the expedition was Alfred Haddon. The films made on the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait Islands are intentionally excluded from this survey because they were made by British cultural institution; the films were screened “on no more than a handful of occasions” and only in England. See Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology and Turn of the Century Visual Culture, New York: Columbia University Press (2002), 145 and 148. The films have since been used as evidence of long term occupancy of the Tiwi Islands in the Mabo Case in 1992.
2 Mulvaney and Calaby (eds), So Much That Is New: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–1929, A Biography, Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press (1985), 116–35.
3 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 118.
4 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 120.
5 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 123.
6 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 121.
7 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 122.
8 Mulvaney, et al., My Dear Spencer, 334.
9 Ian Dunlop, “Ethnographic Film-making in Australia: The First Seventy Years (1898–1968)”. Aboriginal History 3 (1979): 111–12.
10 Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, Aboriginal Life in Central Australia, “Baldwin Spencer Collection – Title: 246515” (Canberra: National Film and Sound Archive, 1901).
11 Gillen, Gillen’s Diary, 18.
12 Gillen, Gillen’s Diary, 18–19.
13 Gillen, Gillen’s Diary, 22.
14 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 197–8; Arthur Cantrill and Corinne Cantrill, “The 1901 Cinematography of Walter Baldwin Spencer”, Cantrill’s Filmnotes 37/38 (1982): 31.
15 Mulvaney, et al., My Dear Spencer, 327–8.
16 Cantrill and Cantrill, “The 1901 Cinematography of Walter Baldwin Spencer”, 31.
17 Gillen, Gillen’s Diary, 72.
18 Gillen, Gillen’s Diary, 60.
19 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 359.
20 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 359.
21 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 374.
22 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 374.
23 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 374.
24 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 374.
25 Dunlop, “Ethnographic Film-making”, 113.
26 Dunlop, “Ethnographic Film-making”, 113.
27 Dunlop, “Ethnographic Film-making”, 113.
28 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 194.
29 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 191–2.
30 Mulvaney, et al., My Dear Spencer, 309.
31 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 193–4. Spencer produced 670 column inches almost 50,000 words and numerous photographs enough for twenty-six instalments in The Leader.
32 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 349.
33 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 348.
34 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 351; Gillen claims that they were accompanied by three Aboriginal people. Purunda (Warwick), engaged by M.T. Chance, the other “two gaol birds are named Sambo and Billy and the former is an unmigitagated scoundrel”. Gillen’s Diary (1968), 1.
35 Mulvaney, et al., My Dear Spencer, 323.
36 Letter to Ian Dunlop from Spencer’s daughter, Mrs Rowan in 1967. Personal Communication. Dunlop, 5 September 2011.
37 The Melbourne Savage Club is a private gentleman’s club founded in 1894. Like the London based Savage Club established in 1857, it was named after English poet Richard Savage (1697–1743). Bohemian in spirit, the club was to bring together literary men, and those immediately connected or sympathising with literature, the arts, sport or science. Its membership is particularly secretive with a strong code of silence; members are traditionally the elite or “savages” in the arts, business and politics. Travelling Savages enjoy good fellowship through reciprocal arrangements with other private clubs throughout the world. In 1915, Hans Heysen donated a painting to the club. Sir Robert Menzies,
