At a time when petty theft and grave robbery were rife in anthropology, Donald Thomson was distinctly respectful. His UNESCO inscribed collection is the result.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.At a climate-controlled storage facility in Melbourne’s outer suburbs, stringybark spears rest in white corflute boxes. On a bench in front of us, a fishing hook from West Cape York made from turtle carapace sits next to a stack of notes with illustrations, and a photograph of the man who wrote them: Donald Thomson, nonchalantly handling a taipan on the Cape York Peninsula in 1928.
In 1973, the family donated the first component of the collection, about 7500 artworks, weavings and cultural objects. Now, they’ve donated the rest – the UNESCO-inscribed Donald Thomson Ethnohistory Collection, an archive of thousands of pages of field notes, photographs and 7.6 kilometres of colour film, the detailed record of his work understanding and documenting Australia’s Indigenous cultures.
Not only was he a witness to the depth of Indigenous culture and economic life, he saw firsthand their destruction and mistreatment. He documented violence, abuse and imprisonment, and dedicated himself to exposing and ending these practices. In Victoria, he was involved in the Aboriginal Welfare Board, and sat on the board of the Lake Tyers Victorian Aboriginal Reserve in Gippsland. Lake Tyers was described by Thomson’s biographer Robert Macklin as “more like a prison than a home”, and Thomson fought hard to get conditions approved. He was ignored, and he duly resigned.Downstairs in the university’s storage facility, there’s a collective intake of breath. We’re looking at century-old bark paintings, carefully preserved.
Professor Marcia Langton, an anthropologist and geographer from the University of Melbourne, says the collection is a link to millennia of cultural practices that were interrupted by colonisation.
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