The Self-Made Anthropologist by Tigger Wise

Author:Tigger Wise
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 1984-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

11

With your questionnaire or on it

I did not suggest the calling in the aid of a scientist—God forbid.

Letter to Sydney Morning Herald, 1940.

On Sunday evening, 3 September 1939, Australians heard over the 9.15 broadcast that they were at war with Germany. The news generated instant productivity. Making the goods and then blowing them up is a guaranteed recipe for economic growth. The Depression was finally dead. Young men enlisted by the hundreds as a welcome alternative to finding a sense of personal direction. Young women gladly poured out of the kitchens into the friendly cheerfulness of the munitions factories and red-cross canteens. Children found a new street life free from parental supervision. Even the elderly felt needed again: grandfathers joined the Home Guard and spent their evenings behind a torch beam, door-knocking householders who displayed a chink of light through the thick black paper thumb-tacked to the windows, while their wives knitted socks in thick Australian merino for the boys in the trenches.

For Elkin, the timing could not have been worse. At the very moment of triumph, the work of years was snatched away and Aborigines plummetted to their customary position at the bottom of the pecking order. There were those who would have put Elkin’s priorities as 1. Aborigines, 2. Church, 3. perhaps Family. They would have been wrong. Elkin’s priorities were crystal clear: 1. Science, 2. Country, 3. Truth. The Aborigines came a poor fourth. Packing a large suitcase with important anthropological research papers and sending them up to the country to be guarded by his cousin Vic at Goorangoola for the duration, Elkin set about getting the Department organised for an all-out war effort.

Oceania had to survive. That was the first priority. Now that the Rockefeller grant had petered out, Elkin depended largely on his overseas subscription list to keep the journal afloat, and the war meant an abrupt end to that. Audaciously, he decided to write to the Carnegie Corporation of New York for funds to carry him through. To his undying amazement, they sent back a personal cheque made out to A. P. Elkin for $10 000 and Oceania never missed an issue, merely coming out in 10-point type rather than 12-point in deference to the paper restrictions. That done, Elkin cast about for the best way for anthropology to help the war effort.

Elkin had come to believe that his country possessed in him one of its finest scientific minds. The conviction was reinforced by his election, in 1940, to presidency for one year of the Royal Society of New South Wales, one of the oldest scientific bodies in the country. Mindful of the grave responsibility of this new role as the voice of Science, he first cancelled the annual dinner—‘I formed the opinion that our society should refrain from any function the purpose of which was purely pleasurable’—1 then delivered the members (in his presidential address) something of a Scientist’s Code of Ethics in War:

Scientists, as citizens, are bound to do their utmost to press their knowledge on both government and people .

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.