From the Frontier: Outback letters to Baldwin Spencer

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In the 19th century, the centre of the Australian continent was, to whit Australians, a vast forbidding emptiness. the completion of the Overland Telegraph Line in the 1870s brought with it a new knowledge of the area, as well as a number of intruders to a landscape familiar to Aboriginal people for 30 millennia. Among the newcomers were a policeman, Ernest Cowle, and a telegraph offical, Paddy Byrne, living in frontier settlements hundreds of kilometres from the nearest Europeans. From 1894 to 1925, Cowle and Byrne wrote letters to pioneering anthropologist and biologist, Baldwin Spencer, whom they had met during the 1894 Horn Scientific Expedition to central Australia. Neither expected his letters to be read by anyone other than Spencer, and both made observations which they would never voice to each other, including reflections upon Spencer's anthropology partner, Frank Gillen. Yet through their letters, and the Spencer and Gillen books, they became linked to such giants of intellectual history as James Frazer, Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud. Both became figures, however minute, on the frontier of discovery, of new ways looking at human experience in all its diversity. The subjects of their letters were the Aboriginal people, the landscape in which they lived and the unusual flora and fauna of their habitat. The men offered an extended report from the frontier of the relations between white and black Australians, a place then characterized by mutual incomprehension, outbreaks of violence and the vast distance between two seemingly incompatible ways of responding to an extreme environment. A moment in time, a place on the edge, two men writing to a third; the book combines local history, race relations and scientific discovery.

Author Bio

JOHN MULVANEY is the founder of Australian archaeology, and a frequent media commentator on current issues. After 40 years of university teaching and advising governments, he remains a highly respected yet controversial activist. He is the co-author of Prehistory of Australia.