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This paper contains a discussion of an unpublished essay by TGH Strehlow concerning the historic wax cylinder recordings of songs from Central Australia made by Walter Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen in 1901. The manuscript, written by Strehlow in 1968, begins with an explanation of the historical context of the song recordings, and the distribution of song and dance traditions across the Australian inland. Strehlow elucidates the content via information imparted to him by a number of Arrernte and Luritja men, who first heard these recordings over 50 years after they were made, in 1960. Their explanation of these songs reveals further information on the diffusion of song verses across vast regions in Central Australia (including Warumungu, Anmatyerr, Arrernte, and Warlpiri country), and the incorporation of European words and themes within altharte (public) songs in which men sing and dance. I have expanded Strehlow's information on Spencer's recordings further with additional information from other ethno-historical sources and my own contemporary fieldwork. Combined, this research deepens the anthropological understanding of some of the earliest ethnographic sound recordings ever made in Australia.

This paper discusses the background to and consequences of a collecting expedition into the Darling River area of western New South Wales, Australia. The expedition was funded by the Museum of Victoria and was undertaken to expand the Museum’s collections from this significant area of Aborigil occupation that had only recently been supplanted by European settlement. The paper focuses on the practices and attitudes of a local pastoralist, Hubert Murray, whose activities provide a window onto the world of early twentieth century antiquarianism in Australia.

Abstract What was the nature of the ‘revelation’ and of the appreciation of William Robertson Smith that, in 1907, Émile Durkheim dated to 1895? This article tracks new developments in his thought after 1895, including an emphasis on creative effervescence. But there was also continuity, involving a search for origins that used the ethnology of a living culture to identify early human socioreligious life with totemism in Australia. It is this continuity, at the core of his thought after 1895, which helps to bring out the nature of his ‘revelation’ and of his homage to Robertson Smith. It also highlights a problem with his start from an already complex Australian world, yet without a suitable evolutionary perspective available to him. However, a modern re-reading can reinstate Durkheim's interest in origins, in a story of hominin/human evolution over millions of years.

Warlpiri fire ceremonies, including Jardiwanpa, have been documented in various ethnographies and films for over 100 years. Focused on the documented history of these rituals in Yuendumu, and through ethnographic observations from recent decades, I analyse the transforming meanings of fire ceremonies in contemporary Warlpiri lives. I demonstrate that there have been post-settlement shifts in ritual purpose due to sedentarisation and the increased connections that Warlpiri people have made to a broader world. I note in particular that, when monetary payment for performing Jardiwanpa for filmic representation became standard practice in the 1990s, the intricacies of the Dreaming were no longer central, nor were the original purposes of conflict resolution and the opening up of marriage restrictions. Several films have been made of fire ceremonies, resulting in fixed representations of what otherwise are emergent practices. This has impacted the ways in which these rituals can be held today, and Warlpiri people have had to creatively re-negotiate a space for Jardiwanpa and similar fire ceremonies.

In the mid-1990s, staff at Museum Victoria planned the new Melbourne Museum. The Indigenous gallery was a major focus at a time when many museums around the world forged new ways of displaying Indigenous heritage. Named Bunjilaka (a Woiwurrung word meaning ‘place of Bunjil', referring to the ancestral eaglehawk), the permanent Indigenous exhibit was a bold expression of community consultation and reflexive museum practice. At its heart was a life-size model of Baldwin Spencer, co-author of the classic anthropological monograph The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899). When Bunjilaka was replaced with a wholly Indigenous-designed exhibit of Aboriginal Victoria in 2011, the model was informally retained by museum staff. Initially sitting awkwardly on a trolley in a narrow room where objects were processed for accession, Spencer himself remained unrecorded in any database. With no official existence but considerable gravity, he ended up housed in the secret/sacred room, surrounded by restricted objects that Spencer the man had collected. This article traces Spencer's journey from a post-colonial pedagogical tool to a transgressive pseudo-sacred object in an emerging era of decolonial museology. I argue that Spencer's fate indicates a distinct period of post-colonial museology (c.1990–2010) that has ended, and illustrates how the shifting historical legacies of science operate in the present.

This paper explores how the appeal of the imagery of the Arnhem Land bark painting and its powerful connection to land provided critical, though subtle messaging, during the post-war Australian government’s tourism promotions in the USA.

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century the American rainbow trout ('Oncorhynchus mykiss') was successfully introduced to Victoria amidst concerns that it would cause the extinction of the native river blackfish ('Gadopsis marmoratus'). These concerns provoked attempts to protect the river blackfish from extinction. Previous colonial attempts to protect native species, such as the black swan in Tasmania and game birds in New South Wales, revealed a lack of knowledge about specific threats to the species or they attributed declining numbers to human hunting (Bonyhady 134; Stubbs 23-56). The protection of river blackfish from the introduction of rainbow trout was the first attempt in Victoria, and possibly Australia, to protect a native species from an invasive non-Indigenous species. It was neither a total success, nor a total failure. Rainbow trout continued to be introduced to Victorian rivers throughout the twentieth century, and are in fact stocked in Victorian waterways today. However, concerns about declining river blackfish numbers did not go completely unnoticed; attempts were made to breed blackfish artificially and to extend their legal protection. By studying this case in detail it will be possible to build upon the most recent acclimatisation historiography and enrich our understanding of the complexities and contradictions of environmental attitudes in colonial Victoria. This detailed case study focuses on Victoria where there is a good survival rate of records of the period, and to provide a useful microcosm of how broader Australia-wide, and indeed global, studies of salmonid acclimatisation and understanding of invasive species could be conducted.

Alexander Morton was a collector and the Curator and later Director of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (hereafter TMAG) from 1884 to 1907.2 Daisy Bates was an ethnographer, Travelling Protector of Aborigines, journalist and novelist.3 The history of photography in Western Australia and elsewhere has been closely aligned with that of anthropology and colonialism, and these links are clearly discernible in the discursive, disciplinary and representational practices of both Morton and Bates.4 Yamaji as constructs of anthropological and other forms of Aboriginalist discourse weave in and out of Western Australian government documents, colonial records, popular cultural texts, newspapers, scientific publications and photographs. The shocking nature of the case received international attention, and became known as 'the Bendhu atrocities'.13 Morton became a willing participant in the ongoing controversy over the cruelty and slavery inflicted on Yamaji, and as a scientist contributed his own 'expert' views in support of the pastoralists.14 Before commencing the expedition, Morton had written from Hobart to Bernard Woodward, Curator of the Western Australian Museum, and, in a tone of some urgency, suggested, 'my idea is we should pay particular attention to the [e]thnology of your country as every year the natives are getting lesser and lesser'.15 Morton's collecting activities occurred in a context in which Aboriginal bodies and artefacts were seen as increasingly valuable to an international market, and were procured by questionable means. The Royal Society of Tasmania and Trustees of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery met to farewell Morton and to wish him every success in the collection of 'general natural history, geological and ethnological specimens'.16 At this meeting the Speaker jokingly commented that he was 'inclined to think that if Mr Morton had to revise the Ten Commandments, he would modify the one \"Thou shalt not steal\" by adding \"except for the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery\"'. At this time, Aboriginal skulls were still considered as crucial material evidence for anthropological and evolutionary theories and, despite public protests, the plunder of Aboriginal graves for scientific purposes took place out of public view.18 Morton's assistant, John Tunney, had been taking instructions from Woodward on the collection of Aboriginal skulls and skeletons before Morton's visit to Western Australia.19 For Morton, who was to later send the skeletal remains of Truganina to Baldwin Spencer in Melbourne for articulation, the interests of science and the TMAG collection were paramount.20 His actions regarding Truganina's skeleton, and the exhumation of graves on the Murchison for Yamaji remains, suggest that Morton pressed the boundaries between zealous collecting and stealing in his ambitions to expand the TMAG's collections.

Neste artigo, o autor discute a obra de Durkheim dedicada às formas de religiosidade, analisando o contexto histórico de sua produção, sua influência hoje no campo da sociologia da religião e as perspectivas futuras diante das atuais tendências culturais no contexto global. Na primeira parte, tratando do passado, discute o complexo contexto cultural de As Formas, como um complemento à abordagem metodológica para o entendimento dessa obra proposta por Roberto Alun Jones. Na segunda parte, explora o posicionamento atual de As Formas no campo da sociologia da religião, argumentando que a obra padece de um 'descaso deliberado' por boa parte dos sociólogos. Na terceira parte, volta-se para o futuro, buscando explorar o potencial de As Formas como fonte de teorização na sociologia da religião e, talvez, no pensamento social de modo geral. Apoiado em trabalhos recentes de Christian Smith, aponta diversas linhas de investigação que poderiam valer-se das análises de Durkheim e desenvolvê-las para o contexto atual.

This article does not set out to forge an impervious argument but to juxtapose a series of impressions, like so many flashes of light, from which to intimate a shift in the history of European reading. This coheres, at the turn of the twentieth century, around perceptions of Australian Aboriginality. My impressions have three sources: (a) high-profile British novels of the 1850s and 1860s with settings in, or significant references to, the Australian colonies; (b) 'discoveries' made by scientists of reading after 1878; and (c) the work of deeply influential European modernists James Frazer, Sigmund Freud and Emile Durkheim, whose theories of the evolution of religious belief made extensive use of Francis Gillen's and Baldwin Spencer's work on the Arrernte people, notably 'The Native Tribes of Central Australia' (1899). In the interests of space I will here form impressions principally from sources (b) and (c), while my assertions about set (a) must, for the most part, be taken on trust. Within set (c), moreover, I will focus on Freud's 'Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics', a work first published in German in the journal Imago in 1912-1913.