Donald F. Thomson: Scholar, Farmer, Advocate .. (Images of Aboriginality‪)‬

In The Savage Mind Claude Levi-Strauss pays tribute to the wide interdisciplinary range of an Australian anthropologist. One 'begins to wish,' he reflects there, 'that every ethnologist was also a mineralogist, a botanist, a zoologist and even an astronomer'. (1) After all, as the influential American anthropologist Paul Radin observed several generations earlier, most anthropologists are only at home with books. The eminent French anthropologist was referring, perhaps wistfully, to Donald Thomson: ethnologist, naturalist, zoologist, photographer and, in the language of today, cultural ecologist--a student of people living within their local environments. That was in 1962, eight years before Thomson's death. Yet, notwithstanding this acclaim by a scholar as revered as Levi-Strauss, only one obituary appeared for Thomson in an Australian anthropological journal. Today things are different. Out of a long silence, the question is being asked: why has it taken so long to rediscover what Donald Thomson understood in the 1930s? A short answer is that his understanding of Aboriginal cultures was so far ahead of the anthropology of his time that it took more than half a century for members of the discipline to catch up. Unlike many of his peers, Thomson did not hold to the widespread assumption that Aboriginal people had no future except as 'assimilees' of a more industrious race.