anthropologists-from-australia

"Every one of the natives whom I encountered on the east-west line had partaken of human meat, with the exception of Nyerdain, who told me it made him sick. They freely admitted their sharing of these repasts and enumerated those killed and eaten by naming the waters, and drawing a line with the big toe on the sand as they told over in gruesome memory the names they dared not mention. My first words to them were always “No more man-meat.” From the weekly supply train, I would procure part of a bullock or sheep and show them the game food areas, mallee-hen’s eggs, rabbits and so on, that must be their meats now, with as many dampers as I could provide, and a drink of sweetened tea. One morning very early, the news came that Nyan-ngauera had left the camp, taking a fire-stick and accompanied by her little girl. No one would follow her or help to track her. For twelve miles I followed the track unsuccessfully, but Nyan-ngauera doubled many times and gave birth to a child a mile west of my camp, where she killed and ate the baby, sharing the food with the little daughter. Later, with the help of her sons and grandsons, the spot was found, nothing to be seen there save the ashes of a fire. "The bones are under the fire", the boys told me, and digging with the digging-stick we came upon the broken skull, and one or two charred bones, which I later sent to the Adelaide Museum."

"A glorious thing it is to live in a tent in the infinite—to waken in the grey of dawn, a good hour before the sun outlines the low ridges of the horizon, and to come out into the bright cool air, and scent the wind blowing across the mulga plains. My first thought would be to probe the ashes of my open fireplace, where hung my primitive cooking-vessels, in the hope that some embers had remained alight. Before I retired at night, I invariably made a good fire and covered the glowing coals with the soft ash of the jilyeli, having watched my compatriots so cover their turf fires in Ireland. I would next readjust the stones of the hob to leeward of the morning wind, and set the old Australian billy to boil, while I tidied my tent, and transformed it from bedroom to breakfast-room. As the sun came up, it changed that plain white room into the most exquisitely-frescoed pergola, with a patterning far surpassing the best of Grinling Gibbon’s handiwork. In a constant play of leafy light and shadow, I would eat my tea and toast in absolute content, while outside the blue smoke of the fire changed to grey in the bright sunlight. The mornings were spent in wandering from camp to camp, attending to the bodily needs of the scattered flock. I knew every bush, every pool, every granite boulder, by its age-old prehistoric name, with its legends and dream-time secrets, and its gradual inevitable change. There was no loneliness."

"By this time I was a confirmed wanderer, a nomad even as the aborigines. So close had I been in contact with them, that it was now impossible for me to relinquish the work. I realized that they were passing from us. I must make their passing easier. Moreover, all that I knew was little in comparison with all there was yet to learn. I made the decision to dedicate the rest of my life to this fascinating study."

"Surely the world we live in is but the world that lives in us?"

"The Australian native can withstand all the reverses of nature, fiendish droughts and sweeping floods, horrors of thirst and enforced starvation—but he cannot withstand civilization."

"No man or woman, who tries to pursue an ideal in his or her own way, is without enemies."

"There are a few fortunate races that have been endowed with cheerfulness as their main characteristic, the Australian Aborigine and the Irish being among these."

"Our road is the Road of Yesterday and the Road of Today, for Yesterday and Today are still the same."

"Your true gentlewoman does not sit down and weep and say "I've never done such things"—she simply "does" and no more about it."

"I invariably rose at sunrise, when the days are at their most glorious, and the whole world is full of beauty and music and dreaming, waking from its slumbers under the mists. I made my toilet to a chorus of impatient twittering. It was a fastidious toilet, for throughout my life I have adhered to the simple but exact dictates of fashion as I left it, when Victoria was queen—a neat white blouse, stiff collar and ribbon tie, a dark skirt and coat, stout and serviceable, trim shoes and neat black stockings, a sailor hat and a fly-veil, and, for my excursions to the camps, always a dust-coat and a sunshade. Not until I was in meticulous order would I emerge from my tent, dressed for the day. My first greeting was for the birds."

"Taxonomy has a well-defined role, which is much more than simply stamp-collecting and pigeon-holing. are the units of classification, and ; as such they must be defined as objectively as possible. The biological species concept, still widely used in biology, though predominantly by non-taxonomists and all too often misunderstood, is a process-based concept, which offers no criterion for the classification of beyond and hypothesis. The phylogenetic species concept—a pattern-based concept—is as nearly objective as we are likely to get. Amount of difference is not a criterion for recognizing species. It is not possible to insist on at the specific level, but it is mandatory for the higher categories (, , etc.). The rank we assign to a given supraspecific category should be determined by its time depth."

"The place of origin of the is unknown, but both and ', today neatly separated by the Sahara, found their earliest ancestors in the , while a Potamochoerine, ', survived in into the ."

"This useful book surveys endangered species (and subspecies), stating where each lives and why it is endangered. ... The non-Australian conservationist will find much of interest here. The devastation wreaked by introduced species has been astounding: so many formerly widespread species have been swept off their entire mainland ranges by competition from the introductions, survivng only if their ranges happened to include offshore islands which were not reached by rabbits, hares, foxes, feral cats, introduced rats and mice, goats, donkeys, horses, camels, buffaloes, sparrows, starlings, blackbirds."

"The first of the 'complete theories' of evolution developed in modern times was the of (1969; translation of work published in 1922). While badly hampered by an ignorance of genetics, slow to reach the Russia of the early twentieth century, Berg's consideration of the Darwinian model led him to the conclusion that it was incompatible, at least as the major mechanism, with what he knew of the pattern of living organisms and their evolution."

"As new methods of investigation become available to us, levels of analysis can be conducted: nuances undreamed of by , , , even . Science had advanced, but human behavior has not. People still hunt gorillas for food or trophies, and still cut down their forests; but now those same advances in science also enable forests to be cut down more efficiently, gorillas to be hunted more efficiently, human populations to increase ever faster and press in on the remaining habitat, so that our second-closest relative is threatened with disappearing for ever. More and more, the work of taxonomists and other biologists must be put into the service of conservation."

"This article reviews changes in , especially those pertaining to the meaning of the term species, since its inception two and a half centuries ago. Despite continuing discoveries and the involvement of competent practitioners, the adoption of the polytypic species concept, especially underpinned by the biological species concept, ensured that primate taxonomy was in a sorry state by the middle of the twentieth century. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a gradual rethinking of the nature of species took place, and many different species concepts were proposed. The phylogenetic species concept has been widely adopted over the past ∼20 years, sustained by a gradual realization that species are evolutionary lineages. This review provides examples of how the old way of thinking about species hampered our understanding of primate biodiversity and of how the phylogenetic species concept (or the diagnosability criterion under the general lineage concept) has clarified matters, opening them up for discussion. The adoption of this evolutionary view of species has implications for conservation, particularly because it increases recognition of biodiversity."

"There has been a lot of discussion about ‘the species question’ over the past 20–30 years, and several surveys have converged on the essence of what we mean by species: they are evolutionary lineages ... Species thus have a real existence. This settles the ontological status of the species concept, but it does not necessarily solve the question of how to recognise them; the most logical way of defining species operationally is by the so-called Phylogenetic Species Concept: ‘A species is the smallest population or aggregation of populations which has fixed heritable differences from other such populations or aggregations’ ..."

"While studying under the supervision of , he had the good fortune to meet , , and , all of them famous researchers in the field of Anthropology and Primatology. Equally important to Colin, as he recalled in Groves (2008), was his meeting with − then at ."

"Acts—usually violent and secret—that have been carried out by people who were not officially commissioned to carry them out ... have generally occurred behind the screen of the frontier, in the wake of which, once the dust has settled, the irregular acts that took place have been regularized and the boundaries of White settlement extended. Characteristically, officials express regret at the lawlessness of this process while resigning themselves to its inevitability."

"Natives have been subjected to a recurrent cycle of inducements – allotment (held out as personal endowment), citizenship, tribal enrolment, termination (held out as individual freedom), and self-determination – each of which has sought to present domination as empowerment and thereby assert Natives’ consent to their own dispossession."

"With no external threat to necessitate maintaining the formalities of international diplomacy, settler discourse seeks to shift Native Affairs out of the realm of international relations and reconstitute it internally as a depoliticised branch of the welfare bureaucracy. To this end, post-frontier settler policy typically favours assimilation, a range of strategies intended to separate individual Natives from their collective sovereignties and merge them irrecoverably into the settler mainstream."

"When invasion is recognized as a structure rather than an event, its history does not stop—or, more to the point, become relatively trivial—when it moves on from the era of frontier homicide. Rather, narrating that history involves charting the continuities, discontinuities, adjustments, and departures whereby a logic that initially informed frontier killing transmutes into different modalities, discourses and institutional formations as it undergirds the historical development and complexification of settler society."

"Settler colonialism is an inclusive, land-centred project that coordinates a comprehensive range of agencies, from the metropolitan centre to the frontier encampment, with a view to eliminating Indigenous societies."

"The tide of history canonizes the fait accompli, harnessing the diplomatic niceties of the law of nations to the maverick rapine of the squatters’ posse."

"Rather than something separate from or running counter to the colonial state, the murderous activities of the frontier rabble constitute its principal means of expansion."

"Why should ostensibly sovereign nations, residing in territory solemnly guaranteed to them by treaties, decide that they are willing, after all, to surrender their ancestral homelands? More often than not (and nearly always up to the wars with the Plains Indians, which did not take place until after the civil war), the agency which reduced Indian peoples to this abjection was not some state instrumentality but irregular, greed-crazed invaders who had no intention of allowing the formalities of federal law to impede their access to the riches available in, under, and on Indian soil."

"Settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event."