Ebook: German Ethnography in Australia

The contribution of German ethnography to Australian anthropological scholarship on Aboriginal societies and cultures has been limited, primarily because few people working in the field read German. But it has also been neglected because its humanistic concerns with language, religion and mythology contrasted with the mainstream British social anthropological tradition that prevailed in Australia until the late 1960s. The advent of native title claims, which require drawing on the earliest ethnography for any area, together with an increase in research on rock art of the Kimberley region, has stimulated interest in this German ethnography, as have some recent book translations. Even so, several major bodies of ethnography, such as the 13 volumes on the cultures of northeastern South Australia and the seven volumes on the Aranda of the Alice Springs region, remain inaccessible, along with many ethnographically rich articles and reports in mission archives. In 18 chapters, this book introduces and reviews the significance of this neglected work, much of it by missionaries who first wrote on Australian Aboriginal cultures in the 1840s. Almost all of these German speakers, in particular the missionaries, learnt an Aboriginal language in order to be able to document religious beliefs, mythology and songs as a first step to conversion. As a result, they produced an enormously valuable body of work that will greatly enrich regional ethnographies.

Nicolas Peterson is Professor of Anthropology in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at The Australian National University. His main areas of research have been with Yolngu people in northeast Arnhem Land and Warlpiri people in the Tanami desert. His research interests include economic anthropology, social change, land and marine tenure, fourth world people and the state, the anthropology of photography and the history of the discipline in Australia. Some publications in this latter area include, Studying Man and Man’s Nature: The History of Institutionalisation of Aboriginal Anthropology (Australian Aboriginal Institute of Studies, 1990); Donald Thomson: The Man and Scholar (Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, 2005) edited with Bruce Rigsby; and The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections (Melbourne University Press, 2008) edited with Lindy Allen and Louise Hamby.

Anna Kenny is a consultant anthropologist who has been based in Alice Springs for over 24 years and was an Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellow in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at The Australian National University between 2012 and 2016. She has conducted field research with Indigenous people in the Northern Territory since 1991, as well as in Queensland and Western Australia. She has written a number of connection reports for native title claims and is the author of a book on Carl Strehlow’s ethnography, The Aranda’s Pepa: An Introduction to Carl Strehlow’s Masterpiece Die Aranda und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien (1907–1920). Currently, she is working on a book on T.G.H. Strehlow and Arandic ethnography, and is finalising the translation from German to English of Carl Strehlow’s Aranda-German-Loritja-Dieri dictionary.