R. H. Mathews - Contribution To Anthropology

Contribution To Anthropology

In early 1892 Mathews returned to the Hunter Valley to survey a pastoral property near the hamlet of Milbrodale, New South Wales. A worker on the property pointed out a rock shelter where a large man-like figure had been painted by Aboriginal artists. Mathews measured and drew the painting and documented hand stencils in other caves in the vicinity. From these observations he prepared a paper that he read before the Royal Society of New South Wales and subsequently published in the 1893 volume of the Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales. He identified the human figure as a depiction of the ancestral being, Baiame (also spelled Baiamai and Baiami). The encounter with the Baiame site, and the favourable reception of Mathews’ paper by the Royal Society of New South Wales, marked a turning point in his career. His biographer, the Australian historian Martin Thomas, describes it as the onset of his ‘ethnomania’. Mathews was further encouraged when he prepared a long paper on Sydney rock art which was awarded the Royal Society’s Bronze Medal essay prize for 1894.

From this time, Mathews became a fanatical student of Aboriginal society. He familiarised himself with the fledgling discipline of anthropology by studying in the library of the Royal Society of New South Wales which exchanged publications with 400 other scholarly and scientific institutes around the world. He also studied at the Public Library in Sydney (now the State Library of New South Wales). Mathews’ work would now be classified as social or cultural anthropology. He did not practise physical anthropology or collect human remains.

In addition to documentation of rock art, which appears in 23 published papers, Mathews published on the following themes: kinship and marriage rules; male initiation; mythology; and linguistics. He capitalised on the considerable international interest in Aboriginal Australians in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. His reports were read and cited by major social scientists including Émile Durkheim and van Gennep. Apart from a few short books and booklets, Mathews published almost entirely in learned journals, including Journal of the Anthropological Institute, American Anthropologist, American Antiquarian, Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, and Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft. In addition to these specialist anthropological journals, he published in general scientific periodicals including Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society and the journals of various Australian royal societies including the Royal Australasian Geographical Society (Queensland Branch).

Mathews gathered information by forging links with Aboriginal communities that he visited in person. This was his preferred method of data collection, and he criticised Howitt and Lorimer Fison for ‘not having gone out among the blacks themselves in all cases.’ However, Mathews’ personal investigations were confined to southeast Australia while his publications concerned all Australian colonies (states from 1901) except Tasmania. When writing about areas he could not personally visit, he used data supplied by rural settlers whom he persuaded to collect information according to his instructions. The R. H. Mathews Papers contain many examples of this incoming correspondence.