form of commercialism provided a more philanthropic flavour to their presentation in comparison to their side show alley counterparts.
Spencer held concerns about offending Victorian era sensibilities and was acutely concerned about the attraction of naked bodies, which could act as a drawcard for unseemly scopophilic voyeurism. This was tempered by his desire to show the real native, underlining his ethnographic incentive. In many respects the presentation of their films mirrored the tension experienced by anthropologists for at least another two decades. It explains in part why ethnographic film did not make a significant presence until after the 1930s. Their audiences were eager to experience the uniqueness of seeing for the first time, “natives” who appeared as if they had been transplanted from some distant stone-age past. Combined with the novelty of the relatively new technology of moving film, the presentation of the films was doubly appealing to urban audiences. According to the Melbourne dailies, The Argus, “Australian Aborigines”38 and The Age, “Australian Aborigines”39 both published the day after the lecture, on 8 July 1902, enthusiastically reported how the audience responded after ←28 | 29→viewing the films, photographs and hearing the phonograph recordings with awe and wonder at the exotic images and sounds displayed; Spencer and Gillen had transported these remote desert dwellers into the urban theatres of Australia. In creating this new media environment, Spencer and Gillen also paved the way for urban audiences to develop a new type of visual relationship with Aboriginal people. At this point it appears their entertainment value far outweighed any concerns about their conditions and future. How the audience responded to the images had much to do with pre-existing ideologies about race and the contemporary historical context of black and white relations in Australia and the British Empire.
The exposure of the films to a relatively non-academic audience enabled a wider audience to connect primitiveness to Aboriginal peoples as a semiotic signifier (a visual cue). It was reported in one newspaper review, The Age, when Spencer introduced the lecture he announced that:
It must always be remembered that though the native ceremonies reveal, to a certain extent, what has been described as an “elaborate ritual”, they are eminently crude and savage. They are performed by naked, howling savages, who have no permanent abodes, no clothing, no knowledge of any implements, save those fashioned out of wood, bone or stone.40
Images of Aboriginal people on moving film were rare in 1902.41 In the social, political and scientific context of the time, this statement would ←29 | 30→have carried a very strong message to the audience that exemplified the constructed binary oppositions of civilised and uncivilised that intentionally separated Anglo Australians from Aboriginal people. This separation is implicated in contributing to, not only the psychological but also the physical marginalisation of Aboriginal people. In the service of a dominant doctrine predicated on a racialised evolutionary theory, the images of Aboriginal people were a spectacle. They provided a distraction from addressing the reality of Aboriginal lives in the wake of massacres and dispossession that were destroying their social and cultural networks.
In the search for the authentic Aborigine, Spencer and Gillen travelled vast distances only to be frustrated by increasing evidence that Aboriginal people were appropriating Western technology, such as replacing stone axe heads for metal. By 1901, the Arrernte community living near Charlotte Waters had already been impacted by the expansion of the pastoral industry. It is uncertain how well Spencer and Gillen understood the everyday effects these changes had on the social structures of the Arrernte. They certainly did not reflect these changes in the film. However, Gillen’s diary entry 24 March 1901 reflects on the pressures between Aboriginal people and pastoralists equally affected by the current drought, he decidedly supports the pastoralists’ interests because he identifies with the pastoral industry rather than legitimate the concerns of the Arrernte.42 Even so, Spencer and Gillen were afforded many opportunities to film the Arrernte performing ceremonies. Gillen regularly makes references in his diary to the occasions ←30 | 31→they were summoned by the Arrernte to record events.43 It is a reminder that the Arrernte managed to exercise considerable agency with the eager filmmakers and in turn have bestowed a rich legacy of visual records on present generations of Arrernte people. Making recordings of the ceremonies was not always welcomed unanimously by everyone in the community, however. To present-day audiences, the films demonstrate the Arrernte as lively, vibrant people. The films depict a robust community who appear to demonstrate a clear understanding of the visual representation of their ceremonies and culture; arguably more than what Spencer and Gillen may have understood at the time.
The influence of science, in particular anthropology via ethnographic films, was thus legitimated and professionalised, inadvertently becoming a significant influence in the development of popular culture understandings of Aboriginal people that in many instances reinforced their social and economic marginalisation within Australian society. By the 1920s the fascination with the “primitive” continued to be driven by the search for the origin of the modern Caucasian and why “races” had seemingly developed at differing rates of technical sophistication. The film sequences Spencer and Gillen produced in 1901 reflected the belief in the ideology of the “dying race” and the urgency to capture possibly the last images of the “authentic” Aboriginal on film for posterity. Contemporary evolutionary concepts of Social Darwinism meant they were destined to soon become extinct.
←31 | 32→
1 Films had been made in 1898 of Tiwi Islanders by Anthony Wilkin, a member of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait Islands. The leader of the expedition was Alfred Haddon. The films made on the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait Islands are intentionally excluded from this survey because they were made by British cultural institution; the films were screened “on no more than a handful of occasions” and only in England. See Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology and Turn of the Century Visual Culture, New York: Columbia University Press (2002), 145 and 148. The films have since been used as evidence of long term occupancy of the Tiwi Islands in the Mabo Case in 1992.
2 Mulvaney and Calaby (eds), So Much That Is New: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–1929, A Biography, Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press (1985), 116–35.
3 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 118.
4 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 120.
5 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 123.
6 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 121.
7 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 122.
8 Mulvaney, et al., My Dear Spencer, 334.
9 Ian Dunlop, “Ethnographic Film-making in Australia: The First Seventy Years (1898–1968)”. Aboriginal History 3 (1979): 111–12.
10 Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, Aboriginal Life in Central Australia,