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By the time Spencer and Gillen returned to Melbourne the articles in the The Leader, had achieved their objective. The films were highly anticipated for their promise of conveying images of primitive and exotic people and for the novelty of the new technology of film.

In the new century, moving films became a popular form of entertainment for the masses, generating the production of short films. Known at the time as actualities, many portrayed scenes from everyday Western life but a large number contained images of exotic and primitive peoples that drew voyeuristic interest. Considered by some at the time as a cheap and vulgar form of entertainment, images of exotic peoples were shown in nickelodeon arcades, circus side-shows and Coney Island-like venues around the Western world; titillating a mainly working-class audience. At numerous venues, still photographs could be purchased to take home as a souvenir. Under the guise of anthropological science, Spencer and Gillen’s films similarly permitted this transgression for their patrons. Although their films were shot with a scientific lens, the unfamiliar customs established the Aboriginal people in the film as the “exotic” Other to the audience. Screening these “stone age” people confirmed for Western audiences that they were far more civilised and scientifically advanced; the films presented this stark contrast. The humanity of the Aboriginal people in the film was subsumed as they became objects to be observed, studied, watched, or to provide titillating entertainment. Presented by an authoritative and popular scientist to the general public, the films depict the subjects of the films who have little say in how and where the films could be presented – as objects they are what is being shown rather than the ones doing the showing, or being shown to. These images and the ideas surrounding them also became commodities.

While buying into film’s popularity, Spencer and Gillen made a concerted effort to distance their work from those shown in other places of popular entertainment such as penny arcades and the like. In contrast, their films of Aboriginal people attempted to shift their representations toward a more scientific and educational appraisal. The opening night at Melbourne’s Town Hall was a spectacular affair, attended by a capacity ←26 | 27→crowd of about 2,000 people, including Victoria’s governor Sir George Sydenham Clarke and other dignitaries. The multi-media event comprised phonograph recordings, cinematographs (moving films), and lantern slides of still photographs, and a lecture authored and delivered by Spencer, a respected and popular academic figure.

The lectures were so popular that subsequent presentations were held in the Athenaeum Theatre in Collins Street and other regional areas such as Castlemaine. Using lecture notes prepared by Spencer, Gillen presented the films, lantern slides and sound recordings to an equally auspicious audience in Adelaide’s Town Hall and to the Royal Geographic Society rooms in Adelaide and in numerous venues in regional South Australia. In all, at least sixty-three lectures are known to have been delivered in the two years after their return, underlining the popularity of their work and the fascination with the Aboriginal image.³⁶ The importance of presenting the films at premier venues, with state dignitaries in attendance, along with Spencer’s intellectually authoritative lecture gave the lectures the credentials of being serious science, laying the foundations of visual anthropology in Australia.

Both men were adept showmen in the sense that they excelled at self-promotion; Spencer regularly presented lectures at various gentlemen’s clubs in Melbourne such as the Savage Club.³⁷ His ability to ←27 | 28→organise meetings and promote attention to his eclectic interests, ranging from cricket to nature clubs, is well documented by his biographer John Mulvaney. While treading a fine line between vulgarity and popularising science, Spencer and Gillen’s films opened a new media source for viewing images of Aboriginal peoples.

Popularising science using film, lantern slides and sound recordings held risks and advantages for Spencer and Gillen which they had to balance within the context of the novelty of film and serious scientific practice and teaching. Like the side-show entrepreneurs, they charged a fee for admission and advertised their lectures in newspapers and on flyers. They also produced vast quantities of still photographs which were sold to their audiences to take home as mementos. Although they employed these commonplace commercial practices, they relied heavily on Spencer’s international academic reputation to make their films respectable by heavily promoting their scientific value. The funds raised were used to buy equipment for the science laboratories at the University of Melbourne; demonstrating that their form of commercialism provided a more philanthropic flavour to their presentation in comparison to their side show alley counterparts.

Spencer held concerns about offending Victorian era sensibilities and was acutely concerned about the attraction of naked bodies, which could act as a drawcard for unseemly scopophilic voyeurism. This was tempered by his desire to show the real native, underlining his ethnographic incentive. In many respects the presentation of their films mirrored the tension experienced by anthropologists for at least another two decades. It explains in part why ethnographic film did not make a significant presence until after the 1930s. Their audiences were eager to experience the uniqueness of seeing for the first time, “natives” who appeared as if they had been transplanted from some distant stone-age past. Combined with the novelty of the relatively new technology of moving film, the presentation of the films was doubly appealing to urban audiences. According to the Melbourne dailies, The Argus, “Australian Aborigines”³⁸ and The Age, “Australian Aborigines”³⁹ both published the day after the lecture, on 8 July 1902, enthusiastically reported how the audience responded after ←28 | 29→viewing the films, photographs and hearing the phonograph recordings with awe and wonder at the exotic images and sounds displayed; Spencer and Gillen had transported these remote desert dwellers into the urban theatres of Australia. In creating this new media environment, Spencer and Gillen also paved the way for urban audiences to develop a new type of visual relationship with Aboriginal people. At this point it appears their entertainment value far outweighed any concerns about their conditions and future. How the audience responded to the images had much to do with pre-existing ideologies about race and the contemporary historical context of black and white relations in Australia and the British Empire.

The exposure of the films to a relatively non-academic audience enabled a wider audience to connect primitiveness to Aboriginal peoples as a semiotic signifier (a visual cue). It was reported in one newspaper review, The Age, when Spencer introduced the lecture he announced that:

It must always be remembered that though the native ceremonies reveal, to a certain extent, what has been described as an “elaborate ritual”, they are eminently crude and savage. They are performed by naked, howling savages, who have no permanent abodes, no clothing, no knowledge of any implements, save those fashioned out of wood, bone or stone.⁴⁰

Images of Aboriginal people on moving film were rare in 1902.⁴¹ In the social, political and scientific context of the time, this statement would ←29 | 30→have carried a very strong message to the audience that exemplified the constructed binary oppositions of civilised and uncivilised that intentionally separated Anglo Australians from Aboriginal people. This separation is implicated in contributing to, not only the psychological but also the physical marginalisation of Aboriginal people. In the service of a dominant doctrine predicated on a racialised evolutionary theory, the images of Aboriginal people were a spectacle. They provided a distraction from addressing the reality of Aboriginal lives in the wake of massacres and dispossession that were destroying their social and cultural networks.

In the search for the authentic Aborigine, Spencer and Gillen travelled vast distances only to be frustrated by increasing evidence that Aboriginal people were appropriating Western technology, such as replacing stone axe heads for metal. By 1901, the Arrernte community living near Charlotte Waters had already been impacted by the expansion of the pastoral industry. It is uncertain how well Spencer and Gillen understood the everyday effects these changes had on the social structures of the Arrernte. They certainly did not reflect these changes in the film. However, Gillen’s diary entry 24 March 1901 reflects on the pressures between Aboriginal people and pastoralists equally affected by the current drought, he decidedly supports the pastoralists’ interests because he identifies with the pastoral industry rather than legitimate the concerns of the Arrernte.⁴² Even so, Spencer and Gillen were afforded many opportunities to film the Arrernte performing ceremonies. Gillen regularly makes references in his diary to the occasions ←30 | 31→they were summoned by the Arrernte to record events.⁴³ It is a reminder that the Arrernte managed to exercise considerable agency with the eager filmmakers and in turn have bestowed a rich legacy of visual records on present generations of Arrernte people. Making recordings of the ceremonies was not always welcomed unanimously by everyone in the community, however. To present-day audiences, the films demonstrate the Arrernte as lively, vibrant people. The films depict a robust community who appear to demonstrate a clear understanding of the visual representation of their ceremonies and culture; arguably more than what Spencer and Gillen may have understood at the time.

The influence of science, in particular anthropology via ethnographic films, was thus legitimated and professionalised, inadvertently becoming a significant influence in the development of popular culture understandings of Aboriginal people that in many instances reinforced their social and economic marginalisation within Australian society. By the 1920s the fascination with the “primitive” continued to be driven by the search for the origin of the modern Caucasian and why “races” had seemingly developed at differing rates of technical sophistication. The film sequences Spencer and Gillen produced in 1901 reflected the belief in the ideology of the “dying race” and the urgency to capture possibly the last images of the “authentic” Aboriginal on film for posterity. Contemporary evolutionary concepts of Social Darwinism meant they were destined to soon become extinct.

←31 | 32→

1 Films had been made in 1898 of Tiwi Islanders by Anthony Wilkin, a member of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait Islands. The leader of the expedition was Alfred Haddon. The films made on the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait Islands are intentionally excluded from this survey because they were made by British cultural institution; the films were screened “on no more than a handful of occasions” and only in England. See Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology and Turn of the Century Visual Culture, New York: Columbia University Press (2002), 145 and 148. The films have since been used as evidence of long term occupancy of the Tiwi Islands in the Mabo Case in 1992.

2 Mulvaney and Calaby (eds), So Much That Is New: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–1929, A Biography, Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press (1985), 116–35.

3 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 118.

4 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 120.

5 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 123.

6 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 121.

7 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 122.

8 Mulvaney, et al., My Dear Spencer, 334.

9 Ian Dunlop, “Ethnographic Film-making in Australia: The First Seventy Years (1898–1968)”. Aboriginal History 3 (1979): 111–12.

10 Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, Aboriginal Life in Central Australia, “Baldwin Spencer Collection – Title: 246515” (Canberra: National Film and Sound Archive, 1901).

11 Gillen, Gillen’s Diary, 18.

12 Gillen, Gillen’s Diary, 18–19.

13 Gillen, Gillen’s Diary, 22.

14 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 197–8; Arthur Cantrill and Corinne Cantrill, “The 1901 Cinematography of Walter Baldwin Spencer”, Cantrill’s Filmnotes 37/38 (1982): 31.

15 Mulvaney, et al., My Dear Spencer, 327–8.

16 Cantrill and Cantrill, “The 1901 Cinematography of Walter Baldwin Spencer”, 31.

17 Gillen, Gillen’s Diary, 72.

18 Gillen, Gillen’s Diary, 60.

19 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 359.

20 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 359.

21 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 374.

22 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 374.

23 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 374.

24 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 374.

25 Dunlop, “Ethnographic Film-making”, 113.

26 Dunlop, “Ethnographic Film-making”, 113.

27 Dunlop, “Ethnographic Film-making”, 113.

28 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 194.

29 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 191–2.

30 Mulvaney, et al., My Dear Spencer, 309.

31 Mulvaney and Calaby, So Much That Is New, 193–4. Spencer produced 670 column inches almost 50,000 words and numerous photographs enough for twenty-six instalments in The Leader.

32 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 349.

33 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 348.

34 Spencer, Wanderings, 1: 351; Gillen claims that they were accompanied by three Aboriginal people. Purunda (Warwick), engaged by M.T. Chance, the other “two gaol birds are named Sambo and Billy and the former is an unmigitagated scoundrel”. Gillen’s Diary (1968), 1.

35 Mulvaney, et al., My Dear Spencer, 323.

36 Letter to Ian Dunlop from Spencer’s daughter, Mrs Rowan in 1967. Personal Communication. Dunlop, 5 September 2011.

37 The Melbourne Savage Club is a private gentleman’s club founded in 1894. Like the London based Savage Club established in 1857, it was named after English poet Richard Savage (1697–1743). Bohemian in spirit, the club was to bring together literary men, and those immediately connected or sympathising with literature, the arts, sport or science. Its membership is particularly secretive with a strong code of silence; members are traditionally the elite or “savages” in the arts, business and politics. Travelling Savages enjoy good fellowship through reciprocal arrangements with other private clubs throughout the world. In 1915, Hans Heysen donated a painting to the club. Sir Robert Menzies, long time Prime Minister of Australia, served as its president from 1947 to 1962. The club incorporated the Yorrick Club (with which it had a long and cordial rivalry, including regular cricket matches) in 1966. Hubert T. Frederico, QC, was president from 1974 to 1977. In 2012, the President was Robert Heathcote. The president as of 2016 is Ian Baillieu. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_Savage_Club>.

38 “Australian Aborigines”. The Argus (Melbourne), 8 July 1902, 7.

39 “Australian Aborigines”. The Age (Melbourne), 8 July 1902, 5.

40 “Australian Aborigines” The Age (Melbourne), 8 July 1902, 5.

41 At this time the only moving film recordings produced in Australia were made by Alfred Haddon’s expedition on Tiwi Island in the Torres Strait in 1898. These films were not presented in Australia “until recent times but excerpts have been used in various documentaries, including Mabo – Life of an Island Man (1997), Dir. Trever Graham” [personal correspondence NFSA Simon Drake – Collection Reference Co-ordinator 23 October 2017]. The films (NFSA Title No. 8879) were given to the National Library of Australia by the British Film Institute (BFI) and cylinder recordings are held at Cambridge University with copies held by AIATSIS. Curator, Liz McNiven notes “three days before the expedition ended, Haddon received his new 35 mm Newman and Gardia movie camera. As a result he only managed to produce a small amount of film material”. Australian Screen <https://aso.gov.au/titles/historical/torres-strait-islanders/notes/> [Accessed 23 October 2017]. This claim appears to be at odds with what other commentators such as Mulvaney and Alison Griffiths who only mention the Warwick Bioscope camera. It was not until 1911 that Spencer again attempted to film in the field. Visiting the Northern Territory in 1911 and 1912 when he was appointed Special Commissioner and Chief Protector of Aborigines, he filmed a Tiwi Pukamani ceremony on Bathurst Island with an improved camera with a tilt and pan on the tripod. Film historian Michael Leigh notes that the only other films made about Aboriginal people between 1912 and 1922 were “Eric Mjöberg’s footage shot in 1913 in Cape York; William Jackson’s Chez les Sauvages Australiens (1917), shot in the Kimberleys; Frank Hurley’s Pearls and Savages (1921); Francis Birtles’s Coorab in the Island of Ghosts (1922); and Brooke Nicholls Native Australia, sponsored by Kodak (also 1922). Leigh emphases these were films shot by adventurers, body snatchers and developers rather than academics”. See Leigh, <https://aso.gov.au/titles/collections/ethnographic-film-in-Australia> [Accessed 23 October 2017].

42 Gillen, Gillen’s Diary, 8.

43 Gillen, Gillen’s Diary, 64.