I remember the cheerful snapshot of Edith swimming in the rock pool, hair loose and unconstrained. It’s not easy to look beyond the clothes and conventions with which we cover ourselves.
After returning to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Gladys and Donald made a second trip north in 1932–1933.
Not all of the newspapers mentioned Gladys when they reported on Donald’s work. He might have been travelling entirely on his own – unaided and unassisted. But the Sydney Mail did. Sydney Mail readers were already very familiar with their weekly nature columnist. The newspaper captioned their pictorial essay in plural ‘Scientists in Australia’s Far North: Adventures of Mr. and Mrs. Donald Thomson’. The centrepiece is a photo of Gladys, in white shorts and shirt, standing among the people of Cape Keerweer, women seated in a circle to each side, and men standing alongside with long spears.
Gladys with the Wik-Mungkan and Wik-Alkan people at Cape Keerweer, 1933
‘It seems strange to see a little slip of a white girl among them,’ Edith commented. She bought extra copies of the Sydney Mail, and sent it to her friends.
The only insights we have into Gladys’s relationship with the people she met on her journeys are second-hand.
‘They are scrupulously honest, and have a wonderful sense of humour,’ a newspaper records Gladys as saying, ‘and they are great companions.’
Edith reported to Rica on a letter from her daughter, written near Coen, on her second expedition.
‘They had walked 120 miles in 6 days through the ranges. The most desolate country she had seen, walking from early morning until dark – to get horses. She said they were lean, and brown, but well. They had even animals and birds new to even them, for already they are familiar with much that is new to us from their previous expeditions. There were wild pigs and horses, as well, all through the ranges (brumbies they call these horses that have gone wild) and on one occasion she had to be put up a tree while a wounded boar was despatched as they were on foot. By the time the tree – in a land where big enough ones were scarce – was found, the danger was not so great. She says she thinks she must be a tough citizen for she never felt better,’ reported Edith. ‘She writes of shimmering heat and an appalling absence of vegetation round Coen. The cries of crows worried her. But her letters would delight you – in spite of it all. It is fine to be young and full of enthusiasm. I am proud of her part in it all, but shall be glad to have her safe home.’
Gladys in camp on Cape York
Gladys continued with her work, meeting her regular weekly newspaper column while also photographing, sketching and note taking. As Edith had feared, Donald came down with a fever.
‘His wife and the tribal medicine man pulled him through,’ reported the paper.
He had fallen out with the Australian National Research Council and returned his grant. Now their only income came from their journalism and publications. Donald took the photographs for his papers and Gladys did all the illustrations.
‘The illustrations depict smoking pipes, a snake, a spear, a harpoon head, an awl, a fish hook, camp and house types, methods of tying, a bark canoe, a bark baler and the fruit of the mangrove.’ She also drew animals – brown bandicoots, sugar gliders, wallabies, possums and quolls.
‘Gladys was always acknowledged in print,’ reports Moira Playne, ‘for her assistance and the illustrations in these publications and proposed publications.’
In his lectures, too, Edith commented that Donald always recognised Gladys’s contribution, particularly to his botanical work and in preserving specimens and illustrating his publications.
In 1934, Gladys’s days of field work came to an end when she gave birth to twin boys, John and Peter.
The family spent time in England from 1938, but by 1942 Gladys and Donald’s marriage was in difficulty. The couple separated in 1946 and, following a long and publicly acrimonious court case, a divorce was finally granted in 1954. To all intents and purposes, Gladys’s public life, her career, came to a close. With Donald based at the university, and academic friends taking sides, there was never a prospect for Gladys to return to her own research.
A curtain falls over Gladys’s life after her divorce. In part it has been drawn by her and in part by her sons. In her later years Gladys became an intensely private person. She moved back to Blackburn, and then to Blairgowrie, close to Dorothy. She is buried there in the Sorrento Cemetery, with her sister and mother.
Gladys Thomson with Donald, John and Peter and Irish wolfhounds
There is no call to intrude any further. Whatever the difficulty of her personal life, Gladys was a talented writer and artist, and an adventurous and tireless field worker whose contributions to the work of her mother, husband and colleagues could well have been all the greater had she had the opportunity and support to pursue a career of her own. And she raised two generous sons who have gone on to make their own contributions in their own fields of study. It is enough to let those achievements speak for her.
I don’t know what inspired Dorothy to travel to Hermannsburg mission in the 1930s. Perhaps she was inspired by her sister and brother-in-law’s adventures. Perhaps it was part of the school’s activities, or just part of her normal interest in
