An academic project to chronicle one of Australia's great 'songlines' has run into trouble from an unexpected source. A front-page story in The Weekend Australian quoted Yankunytjajara elder Yami Lester damning an Australian National University and National Museum of Australia project as a 'Trojan horse into forbidden ground'.
'Saying they want to preserve our culture is rubbish,' said Lester. 'White do-gooders ... need their boundaries defined.' Lester, it should be emphasised, is widely respected for the quiet dignity of his lifelong campaigning on behalf of his people.
Anthropology and its relatives certainly have form. For many decades any desire to do the right thing by Aboriginal people ran a distant second to a lust for loot and kudos, to which the desert peoples of South Australia and the Northern Territory, including the Yankunytjajara, were particularly vulnerable.
On land of marginal use to the Europeans, they survived long enough for the emerging discipline of anthropology to arrive on the scene. And they were so accessible. The Overland Telegraph Line, and therefore a track, and then a railway line, ran right through their country. Central Australia became a happy hunting ground for anthropologists.
Among the first to get there were Frank Gillen and Baldwin Spencer, neither the kind of man you would want to have looking after your sacred knowledge. Gillen travelled north in 1874 as an uncomprehending rather than malicious 19-year-old telegraph operator who gawked at the young Aboriginal women and sent reports back to his mates in Adelaide marvelling at a diet of 'snakes and lizards and herbage'.
Spencer turned up 20 years later, a young academic star, and member of the Horn scientific expedition. He had attended as a student the first-ever lectures on anthropology at Oxford in 1882, and therefore knew all about the Aborigines. 'Just as the platypus laying its eggs and feebly suckling its young, reveals a mammal in the making,' he wrote, 'so does the Aboriginal show us, at least in broad outline, what early man must have been like ...'
When Spencer and his fellow expeditioners arrived at the Alice Springs telegraph station in July 1894 they were greeted by the officer-in-charge, Gillen. Spencer and Gillen got on famously, not least because both were fascinated by the Aborigines. After 20 years in central Australia Gillen knew a great deal about them, and Spencer knew that what Gillen knew was pure academic gold.
They agreed to write a book. Their