R. H. Mathews
Encyclopedia
Robert Hamilton Mathews was an Australian surveyor and self-taught anthropologist who studied the Aboriginal cultures of Australia
, especially those of Victoria
, New South Wales
and southern Queensland. He was a member of the Royal Society of New South Wales
and a corresponding member of the Anthropological Institute of London (later the Royal Anthropological Institute).
Mathews had no academic qualifications and received no university backing for his research. Mathews supported himself and his family from investments made during his lucrative career as a licensed surveyor. He was in his early fifties when he began the investigations of Aboriginal society that would dominate the last 25 years of his life. During this period he published 171 works of anthropology
running to approximately 2200 pages. Mathews enjoyed friendly relations with Aboriginal communities in many parts of south-east Australia.
Marginalia in a book owned by Mathews suggest that Aboriginal people gave him the nickname Birrarak, a term used in the Gippsland
region of Victoria to describe persons who communicated with the spirits of the deceased, from whom they learned dances and songs.
Mathews won some support for his studies outside Australia. Edwin Sidney Hartland
, Arnold van Gennep
and Andrew Lang
were among his admirers. Lang regarded him as the most lucid and ‘well informed writer on the various divisions which regulate the marriages of the Australian tribes.' Despite endorsement abroad, Mathews was an isolated and maligned figure in his own country. Within the small and competitive anthropological scene in Australia his work was disputed and he fell into conflict with some prominent contemporaries, particularly Walter Baldwin Spencer
and Alfred William Howitt
. This affected Mathews’ reputation and his contribution as a founder of Australian anthropology has until recently been recognised only among specialists in Aboriginal studies. In 1987 Mathews’ notebooks and original papers were donated to the National Library of Australia by his granddaughter-in-law Janet Mathews. The availability of the Robert Hamilton Mathews papers has allowed greater understanding of his working methods and opened access to significant data that were never published. Mathews’ work is now used as a resource by anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, linguists, heritage consultants and by members of descendant Aboriginal communities.
in County Londonderry
. The other partners were his three brothers, Robert, Hamilton and Samuel Mathews. When first established by Robert’s grandfather (also named William Mathews), Lettermuck was a successful business. Changes in papermaking
technology, combined with the introduction of the Paper Excise
to Ireland in 1798, adversely affected profitability. Many Irish papermakers made efforts to evade the tax on paper and the Mathews family became ‘notorious for crimes against the Excise’. They were regularly summoned before the Court of the Exchequer to answer charges of avoidance. Between 1820 and 1826 penalties of £3,300 were imposed on William Mathews, none of which he paid.
Hostile relations developed between the Mathewses and the Excise officers who regularly inspected their business. In 1833 an Excise officer named James Lampen disappeared, having last been seen entering the Lettermuck premises. A witness heard the discharge of a firearm according to a newspaper report. In March 1833 Robert’s father, William Mathews, his three uncles and a journeyman employed in the mill were arrested for Lampen’s murder. They were incarcerated until May that year when the charges were dropped, reportedly because of the disappearance of a key witness and the failure to find a body, despite a substantial search. It was believed within and outside the Excise office that the Mathewses were guilty of murder. From the time of the brothers’ release, Excise officers, protected by an armed guard, monitored the mill around the clock. Prevented from trading illegally, the business collapsed and eventually all the brothers emigrated to various destinations. In later years, bodies were exhumed from bog near the mill, thought to belong to Lampen and an itinerant worker in the paper industry. This raises the possibility that R. H. Mathews’ father and uncles were involved in a double homicide.
Penniless after the collapse of the business, William Mathews and his wife Jane (nee Holmes) falsified their ages so as to qualify for assisted migration to New South Wales. In the company of R. H. Mathews’ two elder siblings, they arrived in Sydney
on the Westminster in early 1840. William Mathews found labouring work for the family of John Macarthur (wool pioneer)
at Camden, New South Wales
and shepherded at another of their properties, Richlands near Taralga. They seem to have been itinerant for some years. R. H. Mathews was born at Narellan, southwest of Sydney, on 21 April 1841. The family’s fortunes improved when they acquired a farm of 220 acres at Mutbilly near the present village of Breadalbane, New South Wales
in the Southern Tablelands. Goulburn is the nearest city.
Occasional visits by large survey teams inspired Mathews’ interest in his future profession. After his father’s death in 1866, he became an assistant to surveyor John W. Deering in 1866-67. He later trained with surveyors Thomas Kennedy and George Jamieson and in 1870 he passed the government-run examination to become a licensed surveyor.
, Goondiwindi and Biamble. In 1880 he was posted to Singleton, New South Wales
in the Hunter Valley
. As a surveyor he had many opportunities to meet Aboriginal people and he employed at least one, the Kamilaroi
man Jimmy Nerang, in his survey team. Mathews joined the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1875 but never published in the society’s journal until he took up anthropology in 1893. Private correspondence shows that he collected some linguistic data and artefacts during his early days as a surveyor.
Mathews married Mary Sylvester Bartlett of Tamworth
in 1872. They had seven children, two of whom became prominent later in life. Their first-born Hamilton Bartlett Mathews (1873-1959) served as Surveyor-General of New South Wales. Gregory Macalister Mathews CBE (1876-1849), their third child, won international renown as an ornithologist. He donated his outstanding collection of Australian books to the National Library of Australia. His collection of bird skins, sold to Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild
in the 1920s, is in the American Museum of Natural History
, New York City
.
After two years in Singleton Mathews resigned from his post as a licensed surveyor. From that time his surveying was confined to a part-time practice. From May 1882 until March 1883 Robert and Mary made a world tour, visiting the United States, Britain and possibly Europe. In Ireland, Mathews visited his parents’ village of Claudy, seemingly unaware that his father had been suspected of involvement in the murder of James Lampen.
When Mathews became interested in anthropology, he found his status as a magistrate advantageous. Contacts in the police force supplied information on Aboriginal ceremonies while others informed him about the location of potential informants or collected data on his behalf.
Mathews’ coronial work exposed him to the sufferings of Aboriginal people in the districts around Singleton. He officiated at the magisterial inquiry into the death of a Singleton Aborigine known as Dick who died of malnutrition and exposure in 1886. James S. White, the minister of the Singleton Presbyterian Church where Mathews worshipped, was an active campaigner for Aboriginal rights. Mathews was friendly with White, but never became a political agitator, preferring instead to document the complexity of Aboriginal culture. In 1889 the Mathews family moved from Singleton to Parramatta in western Sydney where his sons attended The King’s School, Parramatta.
. A worker on the property pointed out a rock shelter where a large man-like figure had been painted by Aboriginal artists. Mathews measured and drew the painting and documented hand stencils in other caves in the vicinity. From these observations he prepared a paper that he read before the Royal Society of New South Wales and subsequently published in the 1893 volume of the Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales. . He identified the human figure as a depiction of the ancestral being, Baiame
(also spelled Baiamai and Baiami). The encounter with the Baiame site, and the favourable reception of Mathews’ paper by the Royal Society of New South Wales, marked a turning point in his career. His biographer, the Australian historian Martin Thomas, describes it as the onset of his ‘ethnomania’. Mathews was further encouraged when he prepared a long paper on Sydney rock art which was awarded the Royal Society’s Bronze Medal essay prize for 1894.
From this time, Mathews became a fanatical student of Aboriginal society. He familiarised himself with the fledgling discipline of anthropology by studying in the library of the Royal Society of New South Wales which exchanged publications with 400 other scholarly and scientific institutes around the world. He also studied at the Public Library in Sydney (now the State Library of New South Wales
). Mathews’ work would now be classified as social or cultural anthropology. He did not practise physical anthropology
or collect human remains.
In addition to documentation of rock art, which appears in 23 published papers, Mathews published on the following themes: kinship and marriage rules; male initiation; mythology; and linguistics. He capitalised on the considerable international interest in Aboriginal Australians in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. His reports were read and cited by major social scientists including Émile Durkheim
and van Gennep. Apart from a few short books and booklets, Mathews published almost entirely in learned journals, including Journal of the Anthropological Institute, American Anthropologist
, American Antiquarian, Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, and Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft. In addition to these specialist anthropological journals, he published in general scientific periodicals including Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
and the journals of various Australian royal societies including the Royal Australasian Geographical Society (Queensland Branch).
Mathews gathered information by forging links with Aboriginal communities that he visited in person. This was his preferred method of data collection, and he criticised Howitt and Lorimer Fison
for ‘not having gone out among the blacks themselves in all cases.’ However, Mathews’ personal investigations were confined to southeast Australia while his publications concerned all Australian colonies (states from 1901) except Tasmania
. . When writing about areas he could not personally visit, he used data supplied by rural settlers whom he persuaded to collect information according to his instructions. The R. H. Mathews Papers contain many examples of this incoming correspondence.
people of New South Wales whose country he knew from his surveying. Mathews noted that the Kamiliaroi community was divided into two cardinal groups, these days known as moieties (although Mathews more often called them ‘phratries’ or less often ‘cycles’). Each moiety was divided into a further two sections. Particular sections (from opposite moieties) were expected to intermarry. The community was also divided into totems, which were also taken into consideration when marriages were being arranged. Particular totemic groups were expected to intermarry.
Mathews noted that marriage rules similar to those of the Kamilaroi occurred across much of Australia. Some communities had intermarrying moieties without further divisions within the moiety groups. Others had moieties divided into four sections (now known as sub-sections). He plotted the distribution of marriage rules and other cultural traits in his ‘Map Showing Boundaries of the Several Nations of Australia’, published by the American Philosophical Society in 1900.
Throughout his studies of Aboriginal kinship, Mathews claimed that some marriages occurred that were outside the standard marriage rules as generally understood by the community, although they were nonetheless accepted. He called them ‘irregular’ marriages and argued that a further set of rules governed these relationships. Despite these departures from the standard rules, it remained a highly ordered social system. Mathews pointed out that in Kamilaroi society there were some marriages, such as those between people of the same totem, that were never deemed acceptable. Mathews’ rival Howitt denounced these findings, arguing that this information was imparted by ‘degraded’ tribes, corrupted by European influence. However, later anthropologists, including Adolphus Peter Elkin, endorsed Mathews’ interpretation.
Mathews’ approach to kinship was very different to that of Howitt who, as John Mulvaney has written, sought ‘to lay bare the essentials of primeval society, on the assumption that Australia was a storehouse of fossil customs.’ Mathews reacted against this approach, which was based on the social evolutionary ideas of Lewis Henry Morgan, a patron of both Howitt and his collaborator Fison. Howitt and Fison argued that the vestiges of a primitive form of social organisation, called ‘group marriage
’, were evident in Aboriginal marriage rules. Group marriage, as defined by Morgan, presupposed that groups of men who called each other ‘brother’ had collective conjugal rights over groups of women who called each other ‘sister’. Thomas argues that Mathews found the idea of group marriage in Aboriginal society ‘counterintuitive’ because ‘the requirements of totems and sections made marriage a highly restrictive business.’ The idea that group marriage exists in Aboriginal Australia is now dismissed by anthropological authorities as ‘one of the most notable fantasies in the history of anthropology.’
In the intervening years, Mathews wrote extensively on ceremonial life, mostly in southeast Australia. More limited descriptions of ceremonies in South Australia and the Northern Territory were developed from data supplied by correspondents. Of his 171 anthropological publications, 50 are partly or wholly concerned with ceremony. The majority consist of a detailed description of the initiation ritual practised by a particular community. By 1897, Mathews could claim to have documented the male initiation ceremonies of about three quarters of the land mass of New South Wales.
Mathews wrote primarily about the early stages of male initiation. However, he published some data on female initiation in Victoria and he was attentive to the activities that occurred in the women’s camps while neophytes were out in the bush being inducted into rituals by the men. Mathews documented initiation at a time when the ceremonies were endangered by colonisation and the consequent loss of access to sacred ceremonial sites. Many of the performers in ceremony who were known to Mathews were employed in the pastoral industry. Mathews’ reports show that these historical changes found expression in ceremonial life. Motifs of cattle, locomotives, horses and white people were carved into the ground at ceremonial sites in New South Wales. Mathews’ work on Kamilaroi initiation was cited extensively in a famous debate between Lang and Hartland about whether Aborigines ‘possessed the conception of a moral Being’.
Much of Mathews’ research on ceremony was conducted during preparatory and rehearsal periods, rather than during the initiation rituals themselves. Thomas suggests that this may have been intentional on the part of Mathews’ informants, since it allowed them to control what secret-sacred information was revealed to an outsider. That Mathews was permitted even this degree of access is evidence of the degree to which he was trusted. He was given a number of sacred instruments relating to initiation ceremonies, now in the collection of the Australian Museum. Information documented by Janet Mathews, originating from Aboriginal elders on the South Coast of New South Wales in the 1960s, indicates that Mathews was himself initiated. Thomas argues that Mathews’ refusal to write directly about these experiences shows that his loyalty to the secret culture was ‘more important than whatever kudos he might have won as an anthropologist in revealing these secrets to the world.’
Mathews’ interest in mythology connected with the British interest in folklore
study that was a serious branch of inquiry during his lifetime. The Folklore Society
, formed in 1878, was dedicated to the study of traditional music, customs, folk art, fairy tales and other vernacular traditions. The society published Folk-Lore, an internationally distributed journal, to which Mathews contributed five articles.
In keeping with the Folk-Lore style, Mathews tended to rephrase Aboriginal narratives into respectable English. This was acceptable to his allies Hartland and Lang, both prominent in folklore studies. However, Mathews’ rephrasing was queried by Moritz von Leonhardi
, the German editor and publisher, with whom he corresponded. .
Despite these limitations, Mathews’ publications and unpublished notes preserve significant examples of Aboriginal folklore that might otherwise have been lost. Mathews’ most substantial documentation of Aboriginal mythology can be found in his account of the creation of the Blue Mountains, as told by Gundangara (or Gundungurra) people. The story involves an epic chase between the quoll Mirragan and the great fish Gurangatch who tore up the ground to create rivers and valleys. Mathews’ surveying background and his interest in topography made him attentive to the route of the journey.
Most of Mathews’ linguistic research was conducted in person during visits to Aboriginal camps or settlements. He wrote in his study of Kurnu (spoken in western New South Wales): ‘I personally collected the following elements of the language in Kurnu territory, from reliable and intelligent elders of both sexes.’ A few of his linguistic studies were carried out with aid of correspondents. A 210 word vocabulary of the Jingili language was prepared with the aid of a Northern Territory grazier. The Lutheran missionary and anthropologist Carl Strehlow
supplied information for a paper on Luritja, spoken in Central Australia. Mathews’ publications seldom name the Aboriginal people who tutored him in language, but this information can often be found in notebooks or offprints of articles among the R. H. Mathews Papers.
A consistent template was used throughout Mathews’ linguistic writings. First, the grammar was explained. This was followed by vocabulary, first with the word in English and then its equivalent in the Aboriginal language. Words are grouped in categories which were loosely replicated in each article: ‘The Family’, ‘The Human Body’, ‘Natural Surroundings’, ‘Mammals’, ‘Birds’, ‘Fishes’, ‘Reptiles’, ‘Invertebrates’, ‘Adjectives’ and ‘Verbs’. Mathews’ vocabularies typically number about 300 words, rising on occasion to 460. Mathews studied language in this manner because he believed that comparative linguistic study would provide evidence of the successive waves of migration into Australia when the continent was originally populated. .
Mathews used a system of orthography developed from advice on the elicitation of native terms, circulated by the Royal Geographical Society. Mathews’ documentation was not sufficiently extensive so as to allow someone to learn or speak the language. Even so, his work constitutes an important historical record of many tongues that are no longer spoken. It has been used extensively in more recent historical investigations of Aboriginal linguistics.
, Walter Baldwin Spencer
said of Mathews that ‘I don’t know whether to admire most his impudence his boldness or his mendacity—they are all of a very high order and seldom combined to so high a degree in one mortal man.’ Spencer said of Mathews’ writings that they merely ‘corroborate or make use of’ other scholarship ‘without adding any matter of importance’.
Spencer provided little explanation of why he objected to Mathews so strongly. Theoretical differences are thought to have been a factor. Spencer believed in social evolution
and group marriage
, whereas Mathews’ was sympathetic to ideas of cultural diffusion
. Mathews corresponded with W. H. R. Rivers
, who became a major proponent of diffusionist theories. Early in their anthropological careers, Mathews and the Melbourne-based Spencer themselves corresponded, and they were sufficiently close in 1896 for Spencer to be listed as having communicated Mathews’ article ‘The Bora of the Kamilaroi Tribes’ to the Royal Society of Victoria. By 1898 they had completely fallen out and Spencer commenced a behind-the-scenes campaign against Mathews. Spencer wrote to British anthropologists, among them Sir James George Frazer, urging them never to quote him. Frazer agreed, promising Spencer that ‘I shall not even mention him [Mathews] or any of his multitudinous writings.’
Spencer was closely allied to A. W. Howitt who was also hostile to Mathews. Mathews had initially assumed a collegial attitude to Howitt, describing him in 1896 as a ‘friend and co-worker’. Until 1898, Mathews’ references to Howitt’s work were invariably respectful, even when their opinions differed. Howitt, however, consistently refused to acknowledge Mathews’ scholarship, possibly because Mathews had queried his reports that the kinship systems of south Queensland descended through the paternal line. Mathews was enraged when Howitt’s magnum opus The Native Tribes of South-East Australia was published in 1904. By that time Mathews had published more than 100 works of anthropology, but he received not a footnote in Howitt’s book. The extent to which Mathews was being overlooked by his Australian contemporaries became apparent to British anthropologists. Northcote W. Thomas observed in 1906 that Mathews had written ‘numerous articles’, all of which had ‘either been ignored or dismissed in a footnote by experts such as Dr. Howitt and Prof. Baldwin Spencer’.
In 1907 Mathews published a critique of Howitt and Spencer in Nature (journal) in which he complained that Howitt had consistently overlooked his own work. Considering it too prominent a forum to ignore, Howitt wrote a rejoinder and thus engaged in dialogue with Mathews for the first time. Howitt made the unlikely claim that he had only ever seen two publications by Mathews ‘neither of which recommended itself to me by its accuracy’. Mathews replied, questioning the veracity of this assertion.
Mathews and Howitt subsequently debated each other at greater length in American Antiquarian. Howitt was by this time mortally ill. His final contribution to anthropology, written on his death bed, was a denunciation of Mathews titled ‘A Message to Anthropologists’. It was posthumously printed as a circular letter by members of the Howitt family and posted to a list of anthropological luminaries that included Henri Hubert
, Émile Durkheim
, Marcel Mauss
, Arnold van Gennep
, Franz Boas
, Prince Roland Bonaparte and Carl Lumholtz. It was also published in Revue des Études Ethnographiques et Sociologiques. Martin Thomas argues that ‘A Message to Anthropologists’ did significant damage to Mathews’ reputation.
became interested in his work. In an obituary of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown
dated 1956, Elkin declared that Mathews’ work on Australian kinship marked a significant intellectual breakthrough. He listed eleven key achievements in the field of kinship study, including Mathews’ realisation that the totemic heroes ‘were related to one another in the same kinship manner as human beings were related: in other words, that they were part of the same social order.’ More controversially, Elkin argued that anyone ‘familiar with Radcliffe-Brown’s writings on this subject since 1913 will realize the extent to which he used Mathews’s concepts and generalizations.’ Elkin claimed Radcliffe-Brown was familiar with Mathews’s writings but, regarding him as an amateur, ‘underestimated his ability for careful recording and sound generalization. This, however, did not prevent him adopting the results of much which Mathews had accomplished.’ Twenty years later, Elkin built substantially on his earlier argument for Mathews’ importance. This was published as a three-part journal article titled ‘R. H. Mathews: His Contribution to Aboriginal Studies’. A draft ‘Part IV’ in the University of Sydney Archives indicates that Elkin was planning further writings on Mathews before his death in 1979.
Another early champion was Norman Tindale
who found Mathews’ understanding of topography and cartography invaluable to his project of mapping tribal boundaries. The bibliography of Tindale’s Aboriginal Tribes of Australia reveals the extensive use he made Mathews’ writings. Tindale wrote in 1958 that in ‘going through Mathews’ papers for the purpose of checking the second edition of my tribal map and its data, I have been more than ever impressed with the vast scope and general accuracy of this work. Despite earlier critics I am coming to believe that he was our greatest recorder of primary anthropological data.’
Disagreement about the value of Mathews’ work has continued. In a 1984 article the historian Diane E. Barwick, made a damning appraisal of Mathews, criticising his Victorian research for perpetrating a ‘sometimes ignorant and sometimes deliberate distortion [that] has so muddled the ethnographic record …’. Barwick claimed that from 1898 Mathews ‘contradicted, ridiculed or ignored’ the ‘careful ethnographic reports’ of Howitt for whom he had an ‘almost pathological jealousy’. The contemporary anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose and colleagues take the opposite view, describing Mathews as ‘a more sober and thorough researcher’ than Howitt. They claim that ‘Mathews did not share Howitt’s penchant for suppressing the particular in favour of the grand theory, or for suppressing women in favour of men.’ Unusually for a male anthropologist, he acknowledged ‘the existence of women’s law and ritual.’
The enactment of Native Title legislation in Australia has created new interest in Mathews’ work. His writings are now routinely cited in Native Title claims put forward by Aboriginal claimants.
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
, especially those of Victoria
Victoria (Australia)
Victoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Geographically the smallest mainland state, Victoria is bordered by New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania on Boundary Islet to the north, west and south respectively....
, New South Wales
New South Wales
New South Wales is a state of :Australia, located in the east of the country. It is bordered by Queensland, Victoria and South Australia to the north, south and west respectively. To the east, the state is bordered by the Tasman Sea, which forms part of the Pacific Ocean. New South Wales...
and southern Queensland. He was a member of the Royal Society of New South Wales
Royal Society of New South Wales
The Royal Society of New South Wales is a learned society based in Sydney, Australia. It was established as the Philosophical Society of Australasia on 27 June 1821...
and a corresponding member of the Anthropological Institute of London (later the Royal Anthropological Institute).
Mathews had no academic qualifications and received no university backing for his research. Mathews supported himself and his family from investments made during his lucrative career as a licensed surveyor. He was in his early fifties when he began the investigations of Aboriginal society that would dominate the last 25 years of his life. During this period he published 171 works of anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
running to approximately 2200 pages. Mathews enjoyed friendly relations with Aboriginal communities in many parts of south-east Australia.
Marginalia in a book owned by Mathews suggest that Aboriginal people gave him the nickname Birrarak, a term used in the Gippsland
Gippsland
Gippsland is a large rural region in Victoria, Australia. It begins immediately east of the suburbs of Melbourne and stretches to the New South Wales border, lying between the Great Dividing Range to the north and Bass Strait to the south...
region of Victoria to describe persons who communicated with the spirits of the deceased, from whom they learned dances and songs.
Mathews won some support for his studies outside Australia. Edwin Sidney Hartland
Edwin Sidney Hartland
Edwin Sidney Hartland was an author of works on folklore.His works include anthologies of tales, and theories on anthropology and mythology with an ethnological perspective. He believed that the assembling and study of persistent and widespread folklore provided a scientific insight into custom...
, Arnold van Gennep
Arnold van Gennep
Arnold van Gennep was a noted French ethnographer and folklorist.-Biography:He was born in Ludwigsburg, Kingdom of Württemberg...
and Andrew Lang
Andrew Lang
Andrew Lang was a Scots poet, novelist, literary critic, and contributor to the field of anthropology. He is best known as a collector of folk and fairy tales. The Andrew Lang lectures at the University of St Andrews are named after him.- Biography :Lang was born in Selkirk...
were among his admirers. Lang regarded him as the most lucid and ‘well informed writer on the various divisions which regulate the marriages of the Australian tribes.' Despite endorsement abroad, Mathews was an isolated and maligned figure in his own country. Within the small and competitive anthropological scene in Australia his work was disputed and he fell into conflict with some prominent contemporaries, particularly Walter Baldwin Spencer
Walter Baldwin Spencer
Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer KCMG was a British-Australian biologist and anthropologist.Baldwin was born in Stretford, Lancashire. His father, Reuben Spencer, who had come from Derbyshire in his youth, obtained a position with Rylands and Sons, cotton manufacturers, and rose to be chairman of its...
and Alfred William Howitt
Alfred William Howitt
Alfred William Howitt was an Australian anthropologist and naturalist.-Background:Howitt was born in Nottingham, England, the son of authors William Howitt and Mary Botham. He came to the Victorian gold fields in 1852 with his father and brother to visit his uncle, Godfrey Howitt...
. This affected Mathews’ reputation and his contribution as a founder of Australian anthropology has until recently been recognised only among specialists in Aboriginal studies. In 1987 Mathews’ notebooks and original papers were donated to the National Library of Australia by his granddaughter-in-law Janet Mathews. The availability of the Robert Hamilton Mathews papers has allowed greater understanding of his working methods and opened access to significant data that were never published. Mathews’ work is now used as a resource by anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, linguists, heritage consultants and by members of descendant Aboriginal communities.
Family Background
Robert Hamilton Mathews was the third of five children in a family of Irish Protestants. His elder siblings Jane and William were born in Ulster prior to the family’s flight from Ireland in 1839. Robert and his younger sisters Matilda and Annie were born in New South Wales. Before they emigrated, Mathews’ father, William Mathews (1798-1866), was the principal co-proprietor of Lettermuck Mill, a small papermaking business near the village of ClaudyClaudy
Claudy is a village in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. It lies southeast of Derry, where the River Glenrandal joins the River Faughan. Claudy is located in the Faughan Valley....
in County Londonderry
County Londonderry
The place name Derry is an anglicisation of the old Irish Daire meaning oak-grove or oak-wood. As with the city, its name is subject to the Derry/Londonderry name dispute, with the form Derry preferred by nationalists and Londonderry preferred by unionists...
. The other partners were his three brothers, Robert, Hamilton and Samuel Mathews. When first established by Robert’s grandfather (also named William Mathews), Lettermuck was a successful business. Changes in papermaking
Papermaking
Papermaking is the process of making paper, a substance which is used universally today for writing and packaging.In papermaking a dilute suspension of fibres in water is drained through a screen, so that a mat of randomly interwoven fibres is laid down. Water is removed from this mat of fibres by...
technology, combined with the introduction of the Paper Excise
Excise
Excise tax in the United States is a indirect tax on listed items. Excise taxes can be and are made by federal, state and local governments and are far from uniform throughout the United States...
to Ireland in 1798, adversely affected profitability. Many Irish papermakers made efforts to evade the tax on paper and the Mathews family became ‘notorious for crimes against the Excise’. They were regularly summoned before the Court of the Exchequer to answer charges of avoidance. Between 1820 and 1826 penalties of £3,300 were imposed on William Mathews, none of which he paid.
Hostile relations developed between the Mathewses and the Excise officers who regularly inspected their business. In 1833 an Excise officer named James Lampen disappeared, having last been seen entering the Lettermuck premises. A witness heard the discharge of a firearm according to a newspaper report. In March 1833 Robert’s father, William Mathews, his three uncles and a journeyman employed in the mill were arrested for Lampen’s murder. They were incarcerated until May that year when the charges were dropped, reportedly because of the disappearance of a key witness and the failure to find a body, despite a substantial search. It was believed within and outside the Excise office that the Mathewses were guilty of murder. From the time of the brothers’ release, Excise officers, protected by an armed guard, monitored the mill around the clock. Prevented from trading illegally, the business collapsed and eventually all the brothers emigrated to various destinations. In later years, bodies were exhumed from bog near the mill, thought to belong to Lampen and an itinerant worker in the paper industry. This raises the possibility that R. H. Mathews’ father and uncles were involved in a double homicide.
Penniless after the collapse of the business, William Mathews and his wife Jane (nee Holmes) falsified their ages so as to qualify for assisted migration to New South Wales. In the company of R. H. Mathews’ two elder siblings, they arrived in Sydney
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
on the Westminster in early 1840. William Mathews found labouring work for the family of John Macarthur (wool pioneer)
John Macarthur (wool pioneer)
John Macarthur was a British army officer, entrepreneur, politician, architect and pioneer of settlement in Australia. Macarthur is recognised as the pioneer of the wool industry that was to boom in Australia in the early 19th century and become a trademark of the nation...
at Camden, New South Wales
Camden, New South Wales
-Education:Camden is the location of research facilities for the veterinary and agricultural schools of the University of Sydney. The local government area has two public high schools, Camden High School and Elderslie High School, as well as eight Catholic and three Anglican schools.-Culture:The...
and shepherded at another of their properties, Richlands near Taralga. They seem to have been itinerant for some years. R. H. Mathews was born at Narellan, southwest of Sydney, on 21 April 1841. The family’s fortunes improved when they acquired a farm of 220 acres at Mutbilly near the present village of Breadalbane, New South Wales
Breadalbane, New South Wales
Breadalbane is a small village located in the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales, Australia in Upper Lachlan Shire. It is located on the Lachlan River headwaters and not far from Goulburn. This little town is also located nearby and adjacent to the major Hume Highway which links Sydney to...
in the Southern Tablelands. Goulburn is the nearest city.
Early Life
In explaining his success in working with Aboriginal people, Mathews claimed that ‘black children were among my earliest playmates’. This could refer to the family’s time at Richlands where William Mathews worked as a shepherd, as did several Aboriginal men from the area. At Mutbilly the family lived on territory that R. H. Mathews later identified as the traditional country of the Gandangara people (also spelled Gundungurra). Mathews’ father was, according to his grandson William Washington Mathews, a ‘broken man’ by the time they settled at Mutbilly. He had sectarian disputes with Roman Catholic neighbours and was several times prosecuted for minor assaults against them. R. H. Mathews and his younger siblings were educated by his father and at times by a private tutor.Occasional visits by large survey teams inspired Mathews’ interest in his future profession. After his father’s death in 1866, he became an assistant to surveyor John W. Deering in 1866-67. He later trained with surveyors Thomas Kennedy and George Jamieson and in 1870 he passed the government-run examination to become a licensed surveyor.
Career as a Surveyor
As a licensed surveyor in colonial New South Wales, Mathews was entitled to do government work that fell within his assigned district while also maintaining a private practice. His earnings were considerable, and rapidly eclipsed the salary of the colony’s Surveyor-General. In the 1870s Mathews was posted successively to the districts of Deepwater, New South WalesDeepwater, New South Wales
Deepwater is a parish and village 40 kilometres north of Glen Innes on the Northern Tablelands, New South Wales, Australia. At the 2006 census, Deepwater had a population of 323, with 489 people in the area....
, Goondiwindi and Biamble. In 1880 he was posted to Singleton, New South Wales
Singleton, New South Wales
-Industry & Commerce:Major industries near Singleton include coal mining, energy generation, light industry, vineyards, horse breeding and cattle production. Dairying was once a mainstay in the area, but has declined....
in the Hunter Valley
Hunter Valley
The Hunter Region, more commonly known as the Hunter Valley, is a region of New South Wales, Australia, extending from approximately to north of Sydney with an approximate population of 645,395 people. Most of the population of the Hunter Region lives within of the coast, with 55% of the entire...
. As a surveyor he had many opportunities to meet Aboriginal people and he employed at least one, the Kamilaroi
Kamilaroi
The Kamilaroi or Gamilaraay are an Indigenous Australian people who are from the area between Tamworth and Goondiwindi, and west to Narrabri, Walgett and Lightning Ridge, in northern New South Wales...
man Jimmy Nerang, in his survey team. Mathews joined the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1875 but never published in the society’s journal until he took up anthropology in 1893. Private correspondence shows that he collected some linguistic data and artefacts during his early days as a surveyor.
Mathews married Mary Sylvester Bartlett of Tamworth
Tamworth, New South Wales
Tamworth is a city in the New England region of New South Wales, Australia. Straddling the Peel River, Tamworth, which contains an estimated population of 47,595 people, is the major regional centre for southern New England and in the local government area of Tamworth Regional Council. The city...
in 1872. They had seven children, two of whom became prominent later in life. Their first-born Hamilton Bartlett Mathews (1873-1959) served as Surveyor-General of New South Wales. Gregory Macalister Mathews CBE (1876-1849), their third child, won international renown as an ornithologist. He donated his outstanding collection of Australian books to the National Library of Australia. His collection of bird skins, sold to Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild
Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild
Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, Baron de Rothschild FRS , a scion of the Rothschild family, was a British banker, politician, and zoologist.-Biography:...
in the 1920s, is in the American Museum of Natural History
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...
, New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
.
After two years in Singleton Mathews resigned from his post as a licensed surveyor. From that time his surveying was confined to a part-time practice. From May 1882 until March 1883 Robert and Mary made a world tour, visiting the United States, Britain and possibly Europe. In Ireland, Mathews visited his parents’ village of Claudy, seemingly unaware that his father had been suspected of involvement in the murder of James Lampen.
Legal Career
Mathews was appointed a justice of the peace for the colonies of Queensland and South Australia in 1875 and for New South Wales in 1883. This allowed him to serve as a magistrate in local courts. He did this regularly after he moved to Singleton where he also served as district coroner. This experience inspired his first publication, Handbook to Magisterial Inquiries in New South Wales: Being a Practical Guide for Justices of the Peace in Holding Inquiries in Lieu of Inquests (1888).When Mathews became interested in anthropology, he found his status as a magistrate advantageous. Contacts in the police force supplied information on Aboriginal ceremonies while others informed him about the location of potential informants or collected data on his behalf.
Mathews’ coronial work exposed him to the sufferings of Aboriginal people in the districts around Singleton. He officiated at the magisterial inquiry into the death of a Singleton Aborigine known as Dick who died of malnutrition and exposure in 1886. James S. White, the minister of the Singleton Presbyterian Church where Mathews worshipped, was an active campaigner for Aboriginal rights. Mathews was friendly with White, but never became a political agitator, preferring instead to document the complexity of Aboriginal culture. In 1889 the Mathews family moved from Singleton to Parramatta in western Sydney where his sons attended The King’s School, Parramatta.
Contribution to Anthropology
In early 1892 Mathews returned to the Hunter Valley to survey a pastoral property near the hamlet of Milbrodale, New South WalesMilbrodale, New South Wales
Milbrodale is a village in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, Australia. It is located in the Local Government Area of Singleton Shire Council.-Description:...
. A worker on the property pointed out a rock shelter where a large man-like figure had been painted by Aboriginal artists. Mathews measured and drew the painting and documented hand stencils in other caves in the vicinity. From these observations he prepared a paper that he read before the Royal Society of New South Wales and subsequently published in the 1893 volume of the Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales. . He identified the human figure as a depiction of the ancestral being, Baiame
Baiame
In Australian Aboriginal mythology Baiame was the Creator God and Sky Father in the dreaming of several language groups , of Indigenous Australians of South-East Australia....
(also spelled Baiamai and Baiami). The encounter with the Baiame site, and the favourable reception of Mathews’ paper by the Royal Society of New South Wales, marked a turning point in his career. His biographer, the Australian historian Martin Thomas, describes it as the onset of his ‘ethnomania’. Mathews was further encouraged when he prepared a long paper on Sydney rock art which was awarded the Royal Society’s Bronze Medal essay prize for 1894.
From this time, Mathews became a fanatical student of Aboriginal society. He familiarised himself with the fledgling discipline of anthropology by studying in the library of the Royal Society of New South Wales which exchanged publications with 400 other scholarly and scientific institutes around the world. He also studied at the Public Library in Sydney (now the State Library of New South Wales
State Library of New South Wales
The State Library of New South Wales is a large public library owned by the state of New South Wales, Australia. It is located in Macquarie Street, Sydney near Shakespeare Place...
). Mathews’ work would now be classified as social or cultural anthropology. He did not practise physical anthropology
Physical anthropology
Biological anthropology is that branch of anthropology that studies the physical development of the human species. It plays an important part in paleoanthropology and in forensic anthropology...
or collect human remains.
In addition to documentation of rock art, which appears in 23 published papers, Mathews published on the following themes: kinship and marriage rules; male initiation; mythology; and linguistics. He capitalised on the considerable international interest in Aboriginal Australians in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. His reports were read and cited by major social scientists including Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain...
and van Gennep. Apart from a few short books and booklets, Mathews published almost entirely in learned journals, including Journal of the Anthropological Institute, American Anthropologist
American Anthropologist
American Anthropologist is the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association . It is known for publishing a wide range of work in anthropology, including articles on cultural, biological and linguistic anthropology and archeology...
, American Antiquarian, Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, and Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft. In addition to these specialist anthropological journals, he published in general scientific periodicals including Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society is a quarterly philosophy peer-reviewed journal published by the American Philosophical Society since 1838.-External links:* , Biodiversity Heritage Library...
and the journals of various Australian royal societies including the Royal Australasian Geographical Society (Queensland Branch).
Mathews gathered information by forging links with Aboriginal communities that he visited in person. This was his preferred method of data collection, and he criticised Howitt and Lorimer Fison
Lorimer Fison
Lorimer Fison was an Australian anthropologist, Methodist minister and journalist.-Early life:Fison was born at Barningham, Suffolk, England, the son of Thomas Fison, a prosperous landowner, and his wife Charlotte, a daughter of the Rev. John Reynolds, who was a translator of seventeenth-century...
for ‘not having gone out among the blacks themselves in all cases.’ However, Mathews’ personal investigations were confined to southeast Australia while his publications concerned all Australian colonies (states from 1901) except Tasmania
Tasmania
Tasmania is an Australian island and state. It is south of the continent, separated by Bass Strait. The state includes the island of Tasmania—the 26th largest island in the world—and the surrounding islands. The state has a population of 507,626 , of whom almost half reside in the greater Hobart...
. . When writing about areas he could not personally visit, he used data supplied by rural settlers whom he persuaded to collect information according to his instructions. The R. H. Mathews Papers contain many examples of this incoming correspondence.
Kinship and marriage rules
Of Mathews’ 171 publications, 71 are to do with Aboriginal kinship, totems or the rules of marriage. His first publication on kinship was read before the Queensland branch of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia in 1894. It concerns the KamilaroiKamilaroi
The Kamilaroi or Gamilaraay are an Indigenous Australian people who are from the area between Tamworth and Goondiwindi, and west to Narrabri, Walgett and Lightning Ridge, in northern New South Wales...
people of New South Wales whose country he knew from his surveying. Mathews noted that the Kamiliaroi community was divided into two cardinal groups, these days known as moieties (although Mathews more often called them ‘phratries’ or less often ‘cycles’). Each moiety was divided into a further two sections. Particular sections (from opposite moieties) were expected to intermarry. The community was also divided into totems, which were also taken into consideration when marriages were being arranged. Particular totemic groups were expected to intermarry.
Mathews noted that marriage rules similar to those of the Kamilaroi occurred across much of Australia. Some communities had intermarrying moieties without further divisions within the moiety groups. Others had moieties divided into four sections (now known as sub-sections). He plotted the distribution of marriage rules and other cultural traits in his ‘Map Showing Boundaries of the Several Nations of Australia’, published by the American Philosophical Society in 1900.
Throughout his studies of Aboriginal kinship, Mathews claimed that some marriages occurred that were outside the standard marriage rules as generally understood by the community, although they were nonetheless accepted. He called them ‘irregular’ marriages and argued that a further set of rules governed these relationships. Despite these departures from the standard rules, it remained a highly ordered social system. Mathews pointed out that in Kamilaroi society there were some marriages, such as those between people of the same totem, that were never deemed acceptable. Mathews’ rival Howitt denounced these findings, arguing that this information was imparted by ‘degraded’ tribes, corrupted by European influence. However, later anthropologists, including Adolphus Peter Elkin, endorsed Mathews’ interpretation.
Mathews’ approach to kinship was very different to that of Howitt who, as John Mulvaney has written, sought ‘to lay bare the essentials of primeval society, on the assumption that Australia was a storehouse of fossil customs.’ Mathews reacted against this approach, which was based on the social evolutionary ideas of Lewis Henry Morgan, a patron of both Howitt and his collaborator Fison. Howitt and Fison argued that the vestiges of a primitive form of social organisation, called ‘group marriage
Group marriage
Group marriage, also known as multi-lateral marriage, is a form of polyamory in which more than two persons form a family unit, with all the members of the group marriage being considered to be married to all the other members of the group marriage, and all members of the marriage share parental...
’, were evident in Aboriginal marriage rules. Group marriage, as defined by Morgan, presupposed that groups of men who called each other ‘brother’ had collective conjugal rights over groups of women who called each other ‘sister’. Thomas argues that Mathews found the idea of group marriage in Aboriginal society ‘counterintuitive’ because ‘the requirements of totems and sections made marriage a highly restrictive business.’ The idea that group marriage exists in Aboriginal Australia is now dismissed by anthropological authorities as ‘one of the most notable fantasies in the history of anthropology.’
Male initiation
Mathews believed that ceremonial life was integral to the social cohesion of Aboriginal communities. Initiation, he explained, was ‘a great educational institution’ intended to strengthen the civil authority of the elders of the tribe. Mathews’ first publication on initiation was a description of a Bora ceremony, held by Kamilaroi people at Gundabloui in 1894. He returned to the subject of Kamilaroi initiation in his last paper, ‘Description of Two Bora Grounds of the Kamilaroi Tribe’ (1917), published the year before his death.In the intervening years, Mathews wrote extensively on ceremonial life, mostly in southeast Australia. More limited descriptions of ceremonies in South Australia and the Northern Territory were developed from data supplied by correspondents. Of his 171 anthropological publications, 50 are partly or wholly concerned with ceremony. The majority consist of a detailed description of the initiation ritual practised by a particular community. By 1897, Mathews could claim to have documented the male initiation ceremonies of about three quarters of the land mass of New South Wales.
Mathews wrote primarily about the early stages of male initiation. However, he published some data on female initiation in Victoria and he was attentive to the activities that occurred in the women’s camps while neophytes were out in the bush being inducted into rituals by the men. Mathews documented initiation at a time when the ceremonies were endangered by colonisation and the consequent loss of access to sacred ceremonial sites. Many of the performers in ceremony who were known to Mathews were employed in the pastoral industry. Mathews’ reports show that these historical changes found expression in ceremonial life. Motifs of cattle, locomotives, horses and white people were carved into the ground at ceremonial sites in New South Wales. Mathews’ work on Kamilaroi initiation was cited extensively in a famous debate between Lang and Hartland about whether Aborigines ‘possessed the conception of a moral Being’.
Much of Mathews’ research on ceremony was conducted during preparatory and rehearsal periods, rather than during the initiation rituals themselves. Thomas suggests that this may have been intentional on the part of Mathews’ informants, since it allowed them to control what secret-sacred information was revealed to an outsider. That Mathews was permitted even this degree of access is evidence of the degree to which he was trusted. He was given a number of sacred instruments relating to initiation ceremonies, now in the collection of the Australian Museum. Information documented by Janet Mathews, originating from Aboriginal elders on the South Coast of New South Wales in the 1960s, indicates that Mathews was himself initiated. Thomas argues that Mathews’ refusal to write directly about these experiences shows that his loyalty to the secret culture was ‘more important than whatever kudos he might have won as an anthropologist in revealing these secrets to the world.’
Mythology
Mathews’ first contribution to the study of myth was a series of seven legends from various parts of New South Wales, published in 1898 as ‘Folklore of the Australian Aborigines’ by the anthropological magazine Science of Man. He republished them as a short book the following year. Over the next decade, Mathews published another dozen articles describing Aboriginal myths. While a few legends from Western Australia were documented by a correspondent, the great bulk of Mathews’ folklore research was done in person.Mathews’ interest in mythology connected with the British interest in folklore
Folklore
Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...
study that was a serious branch of inquiry during his lifetime. The Folklore Society
Folklore Society
The Folklore Society was founded in England in 1878 to study traditional vernacular culture, including traditional music, song, dance and drama, narrative, arts and crafts, customs and belief...
, formed in 1878, was dedicated to the study of traditional music, customs, folk art, fairy tales and other vernacular traditions. The society published Folk-Lore, an internationally distributed journal, to which Mathews contributed five articles.
In keeping with the Folk-Lore style, Mathews tended to rephrase Aboriginal narratives into respectable English. This was acceptable to his allies Hartland and Lang, both prominent in folklore studies. However, Mathews’ rephrasing was queried by Moritz von Leonhardi
Moritz von Leonhardi
Moritz Freiherr von Leonhardi was a German anthropologist.-Life and work:Leonhardi was the son of the Minister Plenipotentiary Ludwig Freiherr von Leonhardi and Luise, née Bennigsen. He grew up in Karben and Darmstadt. He studied law in Heidelberg until he had to cancel due to sickness. Since...
, the German editor and publisher, with whom he corresponded. .
Despite these limitations, Mathews’ publications and unpublished notes preserve significant examples of Aboriginal folklore that might otherwise have been lost. Mathews’ most substantial documentation of Aboriginal mythology can be found in his account of the creation of the Blue Mountains, as told by Gundangara (or Gundungurra) people. The story involves an epic chase between the quoll Mirragan and the great fish Gurangatch who tore up the ground to create rivers and valleys. Mathews’ surveying background and his interest in topography made him attentive to the route of the journey.
Linguistics
The first language documented by R. H. Mathews was Gundungurra in a paper co-authored with Mary Everitt, a Sydney school teacher, dated 1900 From that time, linguistic study was a major part of his research. Language elicitation can be found in 36 of his 171 works of anthropology. His linguistic writings describe a total of 53 Australian languages or dialects.Most of Mathews’ linguistic research was conducted in person during visits to Aboriginal camps or settlements. He wrote in his study of Kurnu (spoken in western New South Wales): ‘I personally collected the following elements of the language in Kurnu territory, from reliable and intelligent elders of both sexes.’ A few of his linguistic studies were carried out with aid of correspondents. A 210 word vocabulary of the Jingili language was prepared with the aid of a Northern Territory grazier. The Lutheran missionary and anthropologist Carl Strehlow
Carl Strehlow
Carl Friedrich Strehlow was a German Lutheran missionary in outback Australia who headed the Finke River Mission in Hermannsburg, Northern Territory from 1894-1922. He learnt and documented the languages of the Arrernte and Luritja people, and published together with Moritz von Leonhardi a...
supplied information for a paper on Luritja, spoken in Central Australia. Mathews’ publications seldom name the Aboriginal people who tutored him in language, but this information can often be found in notebooks or offprints of articles among the R. H. Mathews Papers.
A consistent template was used throughout Mathews’ linguistic writings. First, the grammar was explained. This was followed by vocabulary, first with the word in English and then its equivalent in the Aboriginal language. Words are grouped in categories which were loosely replicated in each article: ‘The Family’, ‘The Human Body’, ‘Natural Surroundings’, ‘Mammals’, ‘Birds’, ‘Fishes’, ‘Reptiles’, ‘Invertebrates’, ‘Adjectives’ and ‘Verbs’. Mathews’ vocabularies typically number about 300 words, rising on occasion to 460. Mathews studied language in this manner because he believed that comparative linguistic study would provide evidence of the successive waves of migration into Australia when the continent was originally populated. .
Mathews used a system of orthography developed from advice on the elicitation of native terms, circulated by the Royal Geographical Society. Mathews’ documentation was not sufficiently extensive so as to allow someone to learn or speak the language. Even so, his work constitutes an important historical record of many tongues that are no longer spoken. It has been used extensively in more recent historical investigations of Aboriginal linguistics.
Conflict with rivals
In a letter to Alfred William HowittAlfred William Howitt
Alfred William Howitt was an Australian anthropologist and naturalist.-Background:Howitt was born in Nottingham, England, the son of authors William Howitt and Mary Botham. He came to the Victorian gold fields in 1852 with his father and brother to visit his uncle, Godfrey Howitt...
, Walter Baldwin Spencer
Walter Baldwin Spencer
Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer KCMG was a British-Australian biologist and anthropologist.Baldwin was born in Stretford, Lancashire. His father, Reuben Spencer, who had come from Derbyshire in his youth, obtained a position with Rylands and Sons, cotton manufacturers, and rose to be chairman of its...
said of Mathews that ‘I don’t know whether to admire most his impudence his boldness or his mendacity—they are all of a very high order and seldom combined to so high a degree in one mortal man.’ Spencer said of Mathews’ writings that they merely ‘corroborate or make use of’ other scholarship ‘without adding any matter of importance’.
Spencer provided little explanation of why he objected to Mathews so strongly. Theoretical differences are thought to have been a factor. Spencer believed in social evolution
Social evolution
Social evolution is a subdiscipline of evolutionary biology that is concerned with social behaviors that have fitness consequences for individuals other than the actor...
and group marriage
Group marriage
Group marriage, also known as multi-lateral marriage, is a form of polyamory in which more than two persons form a family unit, with all the members of the group marriage being considered to be married to all the other members of the group marriage, and all members of the marriage share parental...
, whereas Mathews’ was sympathetic to ideas of cultural diffusion
Cultural diffusion
In cultural anthropology and cultural geography, cultural diffusion, as first conceptualized by Alfred L. Kroeber in his influential 1940 paper Stimulus Diffusion, or trans-cultural diffusion in later reformulations, is the spread of cultural items—such as ideas, styles, religions, technologies,...
. Mathews corresponded with W. H. R. Rivers
W. H. R. Rivers
William Halse Rivers Rivers, FRCP, FRS, was an English anthropologist, neurologist, ethnologist and psychiatrist, best known for his work with shell-shocked soldiers during World War I. Rivers' most famous patient was the poet Siegfried Sassoon...
, who became a major proponent of diffusionist theories. Early in their anthropological careers, Mathews and the Melbourne-based Spencer themselves corresponded, and they were sufficiently close in 1896 for Spencer to be listed as having communicated Mathews’ article ‘The Bora of the Kamilaroi Tribes’ to the Royal Society of Victoria. By 1898 they had completely fallen out and Spencer commenced a behind-the-scenes campaign against Mathews. Spencer wrote to British anthropologists, among them Sir James George Frazer, urging them never to quote him. Frazer agreed, promising Spencer that ‘I shall not even mention him [Mathews] or any of his multitudinous writings.’
Spencer was closely allied to A. W. Howitt who was also hostile to Mathews. Mathews had initially assumed a collegial attitude to Howitt, describing him in 1896 as a ‘friend and co-worker’. Until 1898, Mathews’ references to Howitt’s work were invariably respectful, even when their opinions differed. Howitt, however, consistently refused to acknowledge Mathews’ scholarship, possibly because Mathews had queried his reports that the kinship systems of south Queensland descended through the paternal line. Mathews was enraged when Howitt’s magnum opus The Native Tribes of South-East Australia was published in 1904. By that time Mathews had published more than 100 works of anthropology, but he received not a footnote in Howitt’s book. The extent to which Mathews was being overlooked by his Australian contemporaries became apparent to British anthropologists. Northcote W. Thomas observed in 1906 that Mathews had written ‘numerous articles’, all of which had ‘either been ignored or dismissed in a footnote by experts such as Dr. Howitt and Prof. Baldwin Spencer’.
In 1907 Mathews published a critique of Howitt and Spencer in Nature (journal) in which he complained that Howitt had consistently overlooked his own work. Considering it too prominent a forum to ignore, Howitt wrote a rejoinder and thus engaged in dialogue with Mathews for the first time. Howitt made the unlikely claim that he had only ever seen two publications by Mathews ‘neither of which recommended itself to me by its accuracy’. Mathews replied, questioning the veracity of this assertion.
Mathews and Howitt subsequently debated each other at greater length in American Antiquarian. Howitt was by this time mortally ill. His final contribution to anthropology, written on his death bed, was a denunciation of Mathews titled ‘A Message to Anthropologists’. It was posthumously printed as a circular letter by members of the Howitt family and posted to a list of anthropological luminaries that included Henri Hubert
Henri Hubert
Henri Hubert was an archaeologist and sociologist of comparative religion who is best known for his work on the Celts and his collaboration with Marcel Mauss and other members of the Annee Sociologique....
, Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain...
, Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist. The nephew of Émile Durkheim, Mauss' academic work traversed the boundaries between sociology and anthropology...
, Arnold van Gennep
Arnold van Gennep
Arnold van Gennep was a noted French ethnographer and folklorist.-Biography:He was born in Ludwigsburg, Kingdom of Württemberg...
, Franz Boas
Franz Boas
Franz Boas was a German-American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology" and "the Father of Modern Anthropology." Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did...
, Prince Roland Bonaparte and Carl Lumholtz. It was also published in Revue des Études Ethnographiques et Sociologiques. Martin Thomas argues that ‘A Message to Anthropologists’ did significant damage to Mathews’ reputation.
Impact of R. H. Mathews
Thomas notes that professional anthropologists have often been cautious in acknowledging the contribution of their ‘amateur’ forebears. Mathews had few champions among academic anthropologists until A. P. ElkinA. P. Elkin
Adolphus Peter "A. P." Elkin CMG was an Anglican clergyman, an influential Australian anthropologist during the mid twentieth century and a proponent of the assimilation of Indigenous Australians.-Early life:...
became interested in his work. In an obituary of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown
Alfred Radcliffe-Brown
Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown was an English social anthropologist who developed the theory of Structural Functionalism.- Biography :...
dated 1956, Elkin declared that Mathews’ work on Australian kinship marked a significant intellectual breakthrough. He listed eleven key achievements in the field of kinship study, including Mathews’ realisation that the totemic heroes ‘were related to one another in the same kinship manner as human beings were related: in other words, that they were part of the same social order.’ More controversially, Elkin argued that anyone ‘familiar with Radcliffe-Brown’s writings on this subject since 1913 will realize the extent to which he used Mathews’s concepts and generalizations.’ Elkin claimed Radcliffe-Brown was familiar with Mathews’s writings but, regarding him as an amateur, ‘underestimated his ability for careful recording and sound generalization. This, however, did not prevent him adopting the results of much which Mathews had accomplished.’ Twenty years later, Elkin built substantially on his earlier argument for Mathews’ importance. This was published as a three-part journal article titled ‘R. H. Mathews: His Contribution to Aboriginal Studies’. A draft ‘Part IV’ in the University of Sydney Archives indicates that Elkin was planning further writings on Mathews before his death in 1979.
Another early champion was Norman Tindale
Norman Tindale
Norman Barnett Tindale was an Australian anthropologist, archaeologist and entomologist. Born in Perth, his family moved to Tokyo from 1907 to 1915, where his father worked as an accountant at the Salvation Army mission in Japan. Soon after returning to Australia, Tindale got a job at the South...
who found Mathews’ understanding of topography and cartography invaluable to his project of mapping tribal boundaries. The bibliography of Tindale’s Aboriginal Tribes of Australia reveals the extensive use he made Mathews’ writings. Tindale wrote in 1958 that in ‘going through Mathews’ papers for the purpose of checking the second edition of my tribal map and its data, I have been more than ever impressed with the vast scope and general accuracy of this work. Despite earlier critics I am coming to believe that he was our greatest recorder of primary anthropological data.’
Disagreement about the value of Mathews’ work has continued. In a 1984 article the historian Diane E. Barwick, made a damning appraisal of Mathews, criticising his Victorian research for perpetrating a ‘sometimes ignorant and sometimes deliberate distortion [that] has so muddled the ethnographic record …’. Barwick claimed that from 1898 Mathews ‘contradicted, ridiculed or ignored’ the ‘careful ethnographic reports’ of Howitt for whom he had an ‘almost pathological jealousy’. The contemporary anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose and colleagues take the opposite view, describing Mathews as ‘a more sober and thorough researcher’ than Howitt. They claim that ‘Mathews did not share Howitt’s penchant for suppressing the particular in favour of the grand theory, or for suppressing women in favour of men.’ Unusually for a male anthropologist, he acknowledged ‘the existence of women’s law and ritual.’
The enactment of Native Title legislation in Australia has created new interest in Mathews’ work. His writings are now routinely cited in Native Title claims put forward by Aboriginal claimants.
External links
- Robert Hamilton Mathews papers
- Martin Thomas (ed.) Culture in Translation: The anthropological legacy of R. H. Mathews, (Canberra: Aboriginal History Monographs, 2007), http://epress.anu.edu.au/cit_citation.html.
- Martin Thomas, The Many Worlds of R. H. Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist, https://www.allenandunwin.com/default.aspx?page=511&book=9781741757811. Google Books: https://www.allenandunwin.com/bookpreview/default.aspx?isbn=9781741757811.
- Martin Thomas interviewed by Phillip AdamsPhillip AdamsPhillip Andrew Hedley Adams, AO is an Australian broadcaster, film producer, writer, social commentator, satirist and left-wing pundit. He currently hosts a radio program, Late Night Live, four nights a week on the ABC, and he also writes a weekly column for the News Limited-owned newspaper, The...
on ABC Radio National: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2011/3163695.htm.