Clever Men Extract: How worlds collided on the 1948 scientific expedition to Arnhem Land
- Allen & Unwin
- Jul 31
- 7 min read
Read an extract from Clever Men by Martin Thomas.
Drawing on years of collaborative research with Arnhem Land communities, Clever Men is a poignant portrayal of colliding worlds and uncovers what really happened when Charles Mountford led a quarrelsome team of Australian and American scientists to explore traditional Aboriginal life in Arnhem Land in 1948.
Dawn chorus at Oenpelli billabong
From his canvas seat in a Fox Moth biplane, the journalist-turned-radio-producer Colin Simpson looked down at the water. A billabong they called it, but it was big enough to qualify as a decent-sized lake. Around the water’s edge grew a ribbon of rank grass. Beyond that lush perimeter, the groundcover was roasted to a yellow-brown and the earth itself was baked hard. Beside the billabong, the expedition tents were pitched in an orderly manner. After half a year of exposure to the elements, they too had faded to a lighter green. Once the plane had landed on the airstrip that serviced Oenpelli Mission, Simpson and his technician Ray Giles unloaded the audio equipment and other gear, aided by Harry Moss, the pilot. As they struggled to adjust to the burning dryness of the air, two figures emerged from the far end of the airstrip to welcome them. Ever the explorer, Charles Mountford – known to all the party as ‘Monty’ – was dressed in khaki and the customary pith helmet. He was the leader of the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. His deputy Frank Setzler wore nothing but his suntan and a pair of blue denim pants.
It was October 1948, and the expedition had been four weeks at Oenpelli, where the party quickly adapted to researching and collecting at their one inland base camp. The main obstacle was the heat, a challenge for all. It was as relentless as the downpours that dogged them during those early days on Groote. The Mountfords were the worst affected. In recent weeks, Monty had been close to collapse from stress. His wife Bessie, the honorary, secretary to the expedition, had long spells in her tent, barely able to move.
An acute observer and a man of considerable curiosity, Simpson was the first and only journalist they met who wanted to document the perspective of every member of the party, irrespective of age, gender or rank. The wire recorder proved helpful in forging connections during the short two weeks that Simpson and Giles were with the expedition.
While the East Alligator River, 15 kilometres west of the mission, is tidally affected, the third and final base camp for the expedition was essentially a freshwater locality. Situated on a flood plain with the escarpment as a distant backdrop, Oenpelli, or Gunbalanya, is a place of exquisite beauty, surrounded by distinctive sandstone massifs that glow softly in the gentler light. Above the lagoon, kites and other birds of prey hover much of the day. To the south, on the far side of the billabong, is the plateau Injalak. Seemingly assembled from loose boulders, it is riddled with cracks, caves, and tunnels, and is decorated with a wealth of rock art. To the west is a smaller hill, Arrkuluk. Both sites are of great cultural significance.
Arriving at another settlement required the expedition party of seventeen to adjust to the society and customs of the local people. They also faced the now familiar challenge of establishing amicable relations with the white people who ran the settlement. They were evangelical Anglicans, employed by the Church Missionary Society (CMS). J.B. Montgomerie, a CMS heavyweight, received them coolly and seems to have regarded the expedition as an imposition.
The CMS with its various settlements, including those at Groote and Roper River, had been an influential presence in Arnhem Land for some decades. Of the three expedition bases, Oenpelli Mission was the most hostile to traditional beliefs. Bessie Mountford wrote about a conversation with a mission resident who had lived for a time at Yirrkala, where, he explained, there was ‘plenty laugh, plenty song, plenty corroboree’. At Oenpelli, he told her, such things were sternly discouraged. Total suppression of traditional culture proved impossible, but the missionaries found ways of demonstrating their aversion to it. In a chilling recollection, the ‘flying dentist’ John Moody recalled that when he was working in Oenpelli some months before the expedition arrived, the singing and dancing, which occurred nightly in the camps, were often brought to an abrupt end when one of the missionaries ‘would fire a gun to shut them up’.
Giles’ and Simpson’s goal was to capture an acoustic portrait of the expedition and the world it visited. Some of that work involved pedestrian journalism, including interviewing the expedition scientists about their research. But Simpson and Giles roamed in more original directions. Their curiosity about the local musical traditions reveals a genuine respect for the cultures of the region. The CMS missionaries had no reason to appreciate these inquiries, especially when they learned that the heathen noises of the singers would be afforded the dignity of being broadcast on national radio. The perennial question of why Arnhem Landers shared their culture with the expedition is partially answered by the conflicted situation at the mission. Balanda who showed appreciation for the Bininj way of doing things were taken seriously and treated as potential allies, irrespective of their limitations.
Simpson and Giles were searching for sounds that seemed exotic or in other ways unique. They had little trouble finding them. Simpson later implied that he and Giles captured the first broadcast-quality recordings of didgeridoos. This is far from correct, but there was certainly a scarcity of such material at the time. Indeed, part of the reason for the ABC sending Simpson and Giles to Arnhem Land was to help the national broadcaster expand the amount of Aboriginal content in its sound-effects library.
The public-radio culture of that period allowed a more personal and emotionally charged approach to portraying the marvels of the continent than had happened in the past. Simpson often put himself in his programs, not only because this was admissible in the emerging and still-fluid genre of radio-documentary making, but also because it situated the recordings. Scripted commentary during this period frequently emphasised that we are out in the field with our recorder and microphone so that you, in your lounge room, can hear the sounds of ‘real’ Australia.
The result was a sense of immediacy. The heady rush of discovering the country acoustically and communicating one’s findings could be euphoric for radio makers. Many were keen to relay the sensation of their own experiences. Simpson did this in the Expedition to Arnhem Land program when he and Giles took their recording equipment to the Oenpelli billabong to capture the orchestral grandiosity of the dawn chorus.
The billabong had been a focus since the expedition’s arrival. Bob Miller seined it for fish and Herbert Deignan hunted for ornithological specimens. Bassett-Smith captured charming film of the birds seen constantly on and around these waters: egrets, marsh terns, brolgas, jabirus, the distinctive magpie geese. The best sequences were used in a short wildlife film from 1951 titled Birds and Billabongs , one of four official Australian film productions resulting from the expedition. Although they are not credited, all the birdsong heard in the soundtrack was recorded by Simpson and Giles.
Several days of preparation went into recording the dawn chorus at the lagoon. They built a hide from which Giles operated the recorder. The microphone was positioned on the bank the night before. The idea—unthinkable now because of crocodiles—was that once Giles had activated the recorder, Simpson would wade into the lagoon and disturb the birds, which, it was hoped, would stage a dramatic flyover above the mic. Having arisen at five in the morning, they put the plan into motion. The birds, happily, were most compliant. Simpson described the scene: ‘The babel of the birds came to us before we reached the nearest edge of [the] mile-long marshy lagoon. I have never seen such a sight as it was that morning. An empty stretch of water can be beautiful, but this was something beautifully alive. The multitude of birds across the expanse of water left few patches where they were not feeding or swimming or alighting or taking off . . . Ray had gone to his hide. In front of it the microphone was set out right on the water’s edge, a piece of oiled silk over the top in case it was splashed or upset . . . The thousands of birds between me and the hide all began to take to the air, flapping and honking and calling and crying. More than I had ever anticipated was the surge of sound as their wings beat the air, almost a thunder of sound, a noise like a great cacophonous aerial host, still mounting in a crescendo beyond any crescendo expected as all the flocks wheeled back over my head and the sky was gone in a rushing, breath-taking pattern of black and white.’
The mighty ‘surge of sound’, recorded that morning, became the centrepiece of Simpson’s radio production, Expedition to Arnhem Land, a pioneering example of location-based radio documentary, broadcast a month later. Simpson’s meticulous description of the recording, quoted above, comes from Adam in Ochre, his bestselling book about the expedition, released in 1951.
The natural soundscapes and the magnificent recordings of performances by local musicians enabled Simpson and Giles to bring a distinctive acoustic to a national audience, especially the sound of the didgeridoo which was little-known at the time. But Simpson’s book and broadcast were completely silent about the darkest of the expedition’s legacies: the collection of human remains by Frank Setzler. He gathered bones from sacred mortuary sites in the plateaus that overlook the lagoon. The theft of those ancestors was the gravest of many controversies generated by the Arnhem Land Expedition of 1948. They were taken to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. There would be no restitution to this violation of sacred customs for more than sixty years.
Extracted from Clever Men by Martin Thomas.
Clever Men
by Martin Thomas
What really happened when Charles Mountford led a quarrelsome team of Australian and American scientists to explore traditional Aboriginal life in Arnhem Land in 1948.
'An epic saga of discovery, intrigue, obsession and pillage' Margo Ngawa Neale
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