In 1927, Donald and Gladys moved to Sydney, where Donald studied for a diploma in anthropology. Gladys became the household breadwinner, writing a regular nature column, ‘Little Glimpses of Wildlife’, for the Sydney Mail. She wrote one 600-word article every week for seven years up until 1934.
‘You can imagine the trial a weekly article would be!’ said Edith.
In April of 1928, Gladys was awarded a research grant of £50 for botanical work by Melbourne University and Donald was awarded £600 by the Australian National Research Council for anthropological and zoological work on Cape York Peninsula. It seems that Donald went on his first trip to Lockhart, in 1928, on his own. But he returned the following year, this time with Gladys. Her arrival, where no white women had been seen before, caused much excitement.
‘As soon as the cutter crossed the bar of the river, a great shout went up. “Thomson come!”’ recalled Donald. ‘And then “Two fella missus belong him.” i.e. to him and his wife. They had seen my wife: I had promised Tommy to bring her back with me. How were they going to like her? What would be her reaction to life in a native camp?’
Despite his promise to answer these questions in the next article, Donald does not discuss Gladys in any detail. His focus is on the people of Cape York and his goal is to disabuse the public of their mistaken beliefs about Aboriginal people generally.
‘Almost anyone will tell you at least one “fact” about the Australian aborigine – that he is “the lowest type of the human race,” a creature half child and half beast – a libel that is known all over the world among those who have never seen an aborigine,’ Thomson writes. His intention is clearly to reverse this false impression of ‘a people who were not only my friends, but with whom I had more sympathy than I had with my own kind’.
Gladys herself has left no record, as far as I know, about her experiences on Cape York. But the locals remembered her.
‘Flo Kennedy, then a girl, remembers that Gladys was a kind person, who gave wheatmeal biscuits to her and her siblings and that she dressed like Donald in shorts and shirts which distinguished her from other white women,’ Nonie Sharp said.
According to Athol Chase, ‘the old people at Lockhart in the early 1970s also recalled that Gladys danced “naked breast” in customary fashion with the women in shake-a-leg and Island-style dances’.
This would certainly have set Gladys apart from many of the other white women who later came to the area, particularly in missionary work, and it may help explain the large collection of women’s ceremonial body adornment in the Donald Thomson collection held at Museum Victoria, mostly relating to mourning. As Diane Bell originally noted, in Aboriginal communities, as in other places, women are much less likely to share their stories and artefacts with a man, just as men would not share their stories with a woman. How often have male anthropologists and historians presented a one-sided view of the world, assuming that it stood for the whole?
It is around the time that Gladys and Donald commence their work up north, or perhaps shortly after her return, that Edith writes about her trip to Western Australia. It is the first time she mentions Indigenous people in her writing.
‘A few natives made their appearance at some of the stations,’ Edith says, ‘but most of them appeared to belong to degenerate groups. One would have preferred them unclothed. Ugly and dirty, and clad in clothes that seemed to accentuate their degradation, they begged for “silver” money. Offer them coppers, and, with an expressive shrug of the shoulders, they will disdain “black” money. Huge bones from the cooks’ quarters were borne off with an animal-like avidity.’
It’s not a very flattering observation and it doesn’t suggest much sympathy. And I’m puzzled by that reference to ‘unclothed’. It rings a bell. I think she’s used it before. I find it in a reference to Donald Thomson’s photographs of the Cape York people.
‘They are almost unbelievably wonderful, I think, and show the natives of that corner as a finely built race of men,’ Edith said of these images. ‘All perfectly unclothed. (No contact with whites.)’
I think she is seeing these people by the train through the lens of Donald’s camera. His photos reveal the northern people as astonishing and beautiful. They are long and lean, gleaming with health and vitality. Their physical beauty is apparent even in the grainy reproductions of the newspapers.
The contrast with the people Edith sees from the train to Perth is dramatic. And she has no doubt about the cause.
‘One felt a sense of shame, almost of responsibility, that they had fallen so low,’ she continued. ‘Here and there one stood out from the rest with something of grace in his or her movements. In others we detected a suggestion of the bold and fearless manner of their forefathers before civilisation had laid its mark on them. One woman at least bore herself with a queenly grace that many a white woman may have envied.’
It would be easy to dismiss Edith as just another naturalist seeing Australian Aboriginals as part of nature, some kind of romantic legacy of the ‘noble savage’, but I think this would be an overly simplistic and anachronistic view. A naturalist of her times would consider all humans as being part of nature, whites included.
I think she is looking past the coverings in which we cloak ourselves, the claddings of civilisation, attempting to see what lies beneath.
Donald often mentioned in his articles that, at the approach of white people, the natives rushed to hide their possessions and put on bits of European clothing. Experience had taught them that Europeans took their artefacts and expected them to wear clothes.
When Gladys danced bare-breasted with the women of Lockhart River, she was immersing herself in their culture on their terms. I look
