Anthropology is today more `relevant' than ever before to public affairs in Australia and probably plays a greater part there than in any other country. The reason lies in legal changes of the past quarter century which, by recognizing traditionally defined Aboriginal rights to land, have created a demand for the services of anthropologists and made their opinions consequential. The story began with the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976, which enables land in the Northern Territory to be claimed by `traditional owners', and has culminated for the time being in the Native Title Act 1993, extensively and controversially amended in July this year, which enables Aboriginal groups, communities or individuals to assert rights and interests in land arising from their traditional laws and customs.

Under the 1976 Act, more than half the thinly settled Northern Territory, which is five times larger than the British Isles, has or will become accepted as Aboriginal. The 1993 Act is proving far more controversial, for not only does it apply throughout Australia, including more densely populated regions, but its application is not confined to Aboriginal reserves and `vacant Crown land'. Many hundreds of native title claims have now been lodged to land in all parts of the country. Some claims overlap or conflict with others. A few are now before the Federal Court, but none has yet been decided, so everyone is still in the dark as to the threshold of success. In addition to laws allowing land claims, there are laws to protect `sacred sites'. Although their enforcement would not normally lead to a transfer of title, the practical effect can be greatly diminished use and enjoyment by the legal owners of land found to be imbued with sanctity.

The anthropological profession in Australia can take some credit for these developments. Since the last century it has been usual for anthropologists analysing local organization to assert that Aborigines own land. This opinion became more acceptable in the 1960s, when such leaders of the discipline as the prolific Ronald Berndt and the more subtle and difficult W.E.H. Stanner, succeeded in conveying to a wider public an awareness of what land generally and `sacred sites' in particular could mean to Aborigines. But the profession would be blind if it failed to see that scepticism and even hostility are among the reactions to the role it is playing. The Coronation Hill and Hindmarsh Island affairs show that when Aboriginal claims become embroiled in public controversy the accuracy and integrity of anthropological work can be questioned. In particular, the use to which anthropologists put information can, with some justification, be cynically regarded if they appear to be blurring the boundary between the anthropologist as expert and the anthropologist as partisan or advocate. Yet there are real problems for anthropologists in knowing where to draw the line. It is neither surprising nor discreditable that anthropologists act as advocates. For reasons which are entirely understandable given the history of Aborigines in Australia and the discipline's involvement with them, claimants have enjoyed a near monopoly of anthropological advice. But neither the judicial process nor the process of scientific inquiry can be driven by advocacy alone; there must also be impartiality, which requires at least some participants in the process to distance themselves from those who have stakes in the outcome. In proceedings in which expert testimony plays a critical part, the inability to obtain expert advice can be as prejudicial as inability to obtain legal representation.

The value of the Hindmarsh Island controversy is that at one level it has helped bring hidden tensions into the open, while at another it helps provoke reflections on anthropology as a vocation. The notion that building a bridge to the adjoining mainland would violate a Dreamtime injunction and would cause the women of the local Ngarrindjeri tribe to become barren is a particular example of connectedness between society and the cosmos. Belief that disaster is likely to overtake those who incur divine displeasure is not, of course, peculiar to Aborigines: an earthquake struck Lisbon in 1755 because of sin and impiety among the people of the city; a pitiless drought afflicted the squatters of New South Wales last century because of the murder of Aborigines; and Aids is God's myxomatosis. Few would dispute that the job of anthropologists includes trying to make such beliefs intelligible. What is more, even if anthropology is a child of the Enlightenment, many of its practitioners are disinclined to dismiss believers out of hand or to ridicule their beliefs. But there is then a problem for anthropologists when the reality of such beliefs is asserted, not just for the distant Zande half a century ago, but in their own society, and not only for argument's sake but as a serious basis on which to form public policy. The example points to a difference between anthropological research abroad and at home. Distance may lend charm to controversies over conservation or creationist doctrine or the consequences of impiety, but when they erupt in one's own country they cannot so easily be romanticized as `exotica' or sidelined as `history' or `foreign affairs'. Thus in Australia anthropologists have found themselves in the sometimes tense position of doing business as usual by trying to describe and explain diverse cultural forms, which includes portraying them sympathetically, while functioning as members of the wider society in which these forms are in a state of at best uneasy, at worst hostile co-existence.

A less dramatic duality is to be found in the particular arena of land rights. It has become common for anthropologists to work with lawyers in preparing claims, while later being called by the same lawyers to give expert evidence when the claims go to a hearing. Quite apart from the obvious difficulties with this combination of roles, the fact that claims create an ever widening ripple of effects on other persons, including persons who may be far removed from the locality immediately affected, means that what is anthropologists' business shows an embarrassing tendency to become everyone's business. Once again the Hindmarsh Island case has something to teach us about the pains and pitfalls awaiting those who try to find their way through the labyrinths of practical relevance.

Graham Richardson, until recently one of the most powerful figures in the Australian Labor Party and a member of the government which determinedly backed some Aboriginal women who appealed to apocalyptic secret beliefs to stop the Hindmarsh bridge being built, has now admitted in his weekly column for The Bulletin that it passes understanding how governments could have squandered time, money and effort on a `dodgy' and `spurious' claim. Anthropologists may wonder why a number of them strove to give it professional respectability and why so few were willing, in public, to question it, in spite of the difficulty that other Ngarrindjeri women regarded the `secret women's business' (i.e. beliefs) as a fabrication.

If Richardson, a politician turned newspaper columnist, can state that `plenty of claims ... have little or no basis', and if Father Frank Brennan, a lawyer and Jesuit who has made his name through support for Aboriginal rights, can state that there are `too many spurious claims', anthropologists cannot simply turn a blind eye to uncomfortable possibilities. To do so would be tantamount to admitting that in their field of expertise what is genuine cannot be distinguished from what is spurious. Once this admission is made how can the public be asked to accept that anthropology is a branch of knowledge, that anthropologists have something worthwhile to say on contentious public issues or that anthropological evidence in land claims and other legal proceedings deserves to carry weight?

The problems which anthropologists face because of their elective affinities with Aborigines and Aboriginal causes have been exacerbated by the crisis which changes in higher education and the economy have created for liberal and academic professions since the 1970s. For anthropologists, however, these unwelcome developments coincided with and may have seemed offset by opportunities arising from changes in the law and public opinion relating to Aborigines. The result of these broader social movements is a welter of conflicting strains within the discipline. Some anthropologists view themselves as members of a dispersed community of scholars. Others see the discipline as a profession as on a par with architecture or the law. According to a third view, anthropologists should look upon themselves as a `ginger group', comparable perhaps to the Society of Labor Lawyers or the Doctors' Reform Society, pursuing a reform agenda. Of course, these divisions are not watertight and the same individual may move between two or all three positions and may or may not see any inconsistency in so doing. But even when inconsistencies are recognized it is not obvious that they can be resolved in a final harmony. Perhaps the only realistic conclusion to be arrived at, after contemplating the recent ordeals and vicissitudes of Australian anthropology, is that discord and confusion will continue within the discipline and outside it.

Kenneth Maddock

Macquarie University, Sydney

Readers interested in the Hindmarsh Island affair may wish to consult the exchange in A.T. between James Weiner (October 1995, August 1997) and Ron Brunton (August 1996, October 1997). Editor.

Return to editorials and articles