Both doctrines placed Aboriginal people at the “nadir of evolutionary development”, deemed to inhabit the position on the evolutionary ladder as the missing link between apes and humans.4 The discourses guided the imperative for scientists in the early twentieth century to produce films about Aboriginal people based on their concerns about race and the progress of humankind. They had lasting implications for the representation of Aboriginal people in documentary films.5 Together, their understandings of scientific racism offer an important intellectual, social and political context for the production of early documentary films about Aboriginal people.
Growing evidence of the rapid demise of Aboriginal people gave an urgency to collect as much knowledge about them as possible.6 Indeed, Gillen’s ←14 | 15→observation about the lack of children on their travels to Oodnadatta, recorded in his diary on 3 April 1901, led him to conclude that in a “very few years the race will be extinct over a wide area”.7 Framed by contemporary discourses, his observations were firmly embedded in the ideology of scientific racism and biological determinism, providing a scintillating rationale for the investigation of the “Other”. It made the collection of artefacts and importantly the recording of Aboriginal people on film an urgent matter for those studying the diversity of human races in the first half of the twentieth century.
The importance of procuring the display of primitivism on film reveals ethnographic film’s close allegiance with Western knowledge production processes in the search for the “authentic” Aborigine. Capturing the tangible visual evidence of primitivism on documentary film enabled Western scientists to demonstrate the clear separation between “primitive” Aboriginal people and a Westernised modern and technologically progressive Australia. This visual “evidence” made it much easier for Anglo Australians to be ambivalent about dispossessing and marginalising Aboriginal people across the continent. Together with their impending extinction, the importance of maintaining their ancient cultures was relegated to the lowest priority in the national imagination.
But for a number of scientists, the quest to study and record the authentic Aborigine, unsullied by Western influences, was for most of the twentieth century, the “holy grail” of anthropology. Discovering “early peoples” was all about confirming how far Europeans had progressed from their ancient and humble beginnings. The films made the contrast more apparent to urban audiences and the scientists of the day made the most of displaying the “primitivity” of Aboriginal peoples, implying their cultures had remained static for thousands of years. The Eurocentric proclivity to view the “native” as an ahistorical figure, held them in a mythic ethnographic present or “deep history” where “inauthenticity” was the only escape. The appropriation by Aboriginal people of Western modes of dress, the incorporation of different tools for hunting such as metal axes in place ←15 | 16→of stone, denied the anthropologist the study of a “pure” form of culture. Finding and recording traditional Aboriginal social practices provided filmmakers of the early twentieth century with the popularity, notoriety and fame of this achievement.8
The perceived primitivity of Aboriginal people led early filmmakers to believe they were unable to comprehend the significance of the new visual recording technology. However, it is clear even in the earliest examples, they showed more than a passing interest in the filmmaking process. Gillen recorded in his diary from 23 April until the 12 May 1901 (just over two weeks) how the community, located near Charlotte Waters and another he called the “Ilpirra” a little further north, daily summoned Spencer and Gillen to film and photograph a number of their ceremonies; for example on 2 May they filmed the “Quabara Earitja (Irrunturinya) of Kampilya” and on the afternoon of 4 May they filmed the “Quabara Udnirringila ceremony of Unthurqua, the sacred ceremomy of the Udnirringgila totem”.9 There is evidence of active negotiation between filmmakers and the film’s subjects.10 Although these negotiations took place in situations of uneven power relations, Aboriginal people exercised considerably more agency than they were given credit. For example, the “Arunta” [Arrernte] initiated Spencer and Gillen into their community at Alice Springs;11 and for each of the films discussed in this first part, goods such as tobacco, boiled sweets, flour and tea were important barter items (most likely understood as payment by the Arrernte).12 Making a film also afforded some Aboriginal communities the opportunity to express aspects of their culture. In some areas, the suppression of ceremonial business by missionaries together with acts of dispossession and fragmentation of family groups caused the performance ←16 | 17→of many ceremonies to lapse. According to cultural protocols, ownership of a ceremony gave the community the right to gift the ceremony to another visiting group. Documenting it on film suggests the Arrernte’s sophisticated understanding of the filming process as a form of “message stick”.
For the scientists from the South Australian Board for Anthropological Research (SABAR), “authenticity” provided a biologically determined reference point from which they believed they could predict the degree of racial variance of mixed race progeny. In the films made by Charles Mountford in Arnhem Land in 1948 and Ian Dunlop in the Western Desert in 1965, similar concerns with the authenticity of the subjects plays an important role, both in how the films were valued as artefacts and how audiences responded to them. Each film’s conception of Aboriginal people was based on the hierarchical framework of Social Darwinism. As documentary evidence, they endorsed a Eurocentric construction of Aboriginal primitivity, influencing the way in which attitudes towards Aboriginal peoples developed at all levels of Australian society.13
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1 “Australian Aborigines”, The Argus (Melbourne), 8 July 1902, 7.
2 Peter J. Bowler, The Invention of Progress: the Victorians and the Past Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell Ltd (1989).
3 Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory 1800–1939. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press (1997), 13.
4 Russell McGregor, “The Concept of Primitivity in the Early Anthropological Writings of A.P. Elkin”. Aboriginal History 17, no. 2 (1993): 95.
5 D.J. Mulvaney, Howard Morphy, and Alison Petch (eds), My Dear Spencer: the Letters of F.J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer. Melbourne: Hyland House (1997), 14.
6 McGregor, Imagined Destinies, 111.
7 Gillen, Francis J., Gillen’s Diary: the camp jottings of F. J. Gillen on the Spencer and Gillen expedition across Australia, 1901–1902. Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia (1968), 18.
8 “Australian Aborigines”, The Argus (Melbourne), Tuesday, 8 July 1902, 7.
