In 1894, the Professor, whom Gillen would come to call the ‘Subdued’, and Gillen, whom the Oxford-educated Englishman would call the ‘Pontiff’, hit it off famously. Both liked talk as much as whisky. Spencer always said the meeting changed his life: from Gillen he caught the bug of Australian anthropology. And Gillen, as these letters reveal, found an erudite, intellectually generous friend he preferred to camp with rather than his wife. The result was, by 1899 and after two more visits to the Centre by Spencer, the very famous foundation text in Australian anthropology, Native Tribes of Central Australia.

These seminal, immaculately edited letters can be read in several ways. First of all, they offer a grainy insight into Centralian life at the turn of the century. Native offences, gold rushes, droughts, the royal visit, the stoical endeavour of the mission station at Hermannsburg – many instructive and amusing details light up in Gillen’s brightly effusive letters. Gillen was a family man – he had married Amelia, ‘the little wife’, in 1871 and they proceeded to have children at regular intervals. Mulvaney tells us that Amelia’s grasp of the Arrernte was probably as good as Gillen’s, and that she may well have been crucial in getting the cooperation of the anthropological informants (whom Spencer and Gillen seldom named).

Their housekeeper was an Aboriginal woman called Polly. Something of the idiom of life between the lines might be gained from Gillen’s letter to Spencer about getting the photograph he wanted of Polly – au naturel:

but when after handing her your tobacco, I approached her on the subject with exceeding delicacy, she gave me a look which I shall never forget and scathingly remarked, ‘You all the same Euro, you canta shame! You no big fellow master! You piccaninny master.’ The emphasis on the piccaninny was something to remember for one’s lifetime. Since then she reverted to the subject to tell me that, ‘That one big fellow master Puff fessa no yabba like it that him no poto – grafum, poto-grafu, poto – grafum lubra all day. Very good longa bushie lubra, no good longa station lubra, ‘and in a final burst of indignation she wound up by saying, ‘No good no good photografum lubra cock!’ Since then I have thought it wise to treat her with the utmost civility.

Whatever we might now like to think of Gillen’s delicacy and civility in domestic politics, he had those virtues – as well as a dogged intelligence – in the anthropological field. That is the main raison d’être of this historically central and important volume. They give us some of the live evidence of Australian anthropology shaping itself as Gillen, often prompted by Spencer’s theoretical interests, (and behind Spencer in Oxford were Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough speculations) wrestled with all the information coming to him from the Aborigines he knew ‘in the field’.

What we find then, are all manner of speculations that beset the Darwinian colonialists of the times. Most of these pertain to thoughts about Aboriginal promiscuity and marriage systems, and the quest for primitive origins. We see Gillen’s admirable ability to wrestle with the material he had before him, rather than fall foul of European prejudice about ‘savages’. At the same time, we see Gillen’s importance to academics like Spencer in refining so many of the ideas that still shape the agenda of Australian anthropology. These concepts include the network of ancestral tracks, the distribution of rights in sacred knowledge, locality-based rites, the complex relationship between totems and social groups, and perhaps most important (as Howard Morphy points out in his part of the introduction) the concept of the Dreamtime.

Gillen excitedly wrote to Spencer:

It was a happy inspiration that caused you to start me working out the wanderings of the various totems and much of the information now going to you is the outcome of that work, if we had possessed this information before the Engwura (final initiation ceremonies) it would have helped us to a better understanding of the various ceremonies but even now it throws a flood of light upon them and will help you to write definitely as to their import.

Spencer and Gillen were cautious with their terms. They did not want our language to obscure cultural difference. They used Alcheringa rather than Dreamtime. As for the ‘sacred’, Gillen did not like its translation either, since it was more ‘a blending of the sacred and the miraculous’. When it came to the sacred objects, the carved stones and wood boards called Churinga, no other word would do. There are many exciting (and excitable) letters here about the Churinga and their place in the culture. One of Gillen’s most thoughtful outbursts would please a modern relativist: ‘Men sprung from Churinga, that is from something sacred in the animal or man, just as the Virgin Mary appears at Lourdes, though unless you want to bring down upon me the anathema of the Holy Church don’t quote me as saying so.’

Eventually, Gillen had to recognise that his own energetic collecting of Churinga could be sacrilege. For years he had shipped crates of the things to Stirling in Adelaide, and Spencer at the Museum of Victoria. Many, admittedly, had been given to him by the old men. But others came from plunder of the secret sacred storehouses. When Gillen got news of the death of an Aboriginal man after such a raid, he was deeply ashamed, and vowed to Spencer to steer clear of such transgressions in the future. In this and other ways Gillen came to a modern kind of sense.

In the end, Gillen was hardly rewarded for his labours. He was never even elected to the full Fellowship of the Royal Anthropological Institute – perhaps, Mulvaney suggests, because of the sectarian fevers of the times; perhaps because he had so offended the pastoralists with the arrest of Willshire.

Gillen died on a poor Government pension in 1912, after years of painful decline with a motor neurone disease. His wife Amelia had nursed him to the end; and Spencer, the prestigious, wealthy Professor who had asked so much of her husband, wrote to her about his love and admiration for her Gillen. But that was not enough for the ‘little wife’ in her bitterness. It seems she destroyed all the Spencer letters to which Gillen had replied, thus suggesting a profane domain for further study when the ethnology of the ethnology of Centralia is eventually written.

Still, even without Spencer, this book is a great production. It has many of Spencer and Gillen’s superb photographs, and a glossary of Arrernte terms that does more good work for the general reader than most anthropology books. The footnotes are marvellous in their thoroughness, and the introductions by Mulvaney and Morphy open up the important academic discussions we now have to have. In a word, Hyland House is to be congratulated for this production, albeit with the help of private funds, including some from the Gillen family. I also hope that the academic publishing houses, M.U.P. included, who found the manuscript uneconomic, might drop their gaze with at least a touch of embarrassment.