This is an intriguing and surprising book, of deep and current importance. Tom Griffiths, one of Australia’s very best historians, tells readers in his Prologue that, aged fourteen, he found a book in his school library, by Alice Duncan-Kemp, called Where Strange Paths Go Down. Of course he did and of course he read it. What were the rest of us doing?
In the first part of the book, ‘Alice in Wonderland’, we meet the person who carries the whole story. Alice Duncan, as she was before her marriage, was born in Charleville, Queensland, on 3 June 1901. Her father, William, and mother, Laura, had bought the lease for Mooraberrie, where, on the large property in the Channel Country, they ran cattle. Her elder brother, David, died in 1903 and her father, William, died in 1907, leaving her mother to run the property and to raise her three daughters.
Also in 1903, while the family were crossing the flooded Bulloo River in a buggy, a tree branch fell across the sleeping Alice who, remarkably, survived unharmed. Two Indigenous property workers, travelling with the family, believed that Alice, a young white girl, was the reincarnation of Yammacoona, the Earth Mother. Hence, Alice had a revered place in the lives of the local Indigenous population.
Alice, even as a little girl, was a careful observer who clearly remembered the many lessons Indigenous women gave her in Aboriginal lore, stories, law and meanings. She had access to Aboriginal culture that few others, outside that world, have ever enjoyed. It is intriguing that the reader knows the names and the personalities of all the Indigenous people in Alice’s life.
Have readers ever before been introduced not only to the complexity of the way of life of Aboriginal people but come to know some of them intimately? Moses Yoolpee is an outstanding person in the book. Educated, possibly at Scotch College, Melbourne, he spoke impeccable English, knew white ways from close indoctrination and observation, but walked 1600 kilometres home, so that he could be on his own Country.
Moses explicitly rejected the supposed superiority of European civilisation, courteously telling James Warby, manager of Mooraberrie: 'We don’t want your civilisation, we have a very ancient culture of our own.' This is the major theme of this book and its most important statement.
The numbers of people on Country at the time of white invasion were substantial. Alice told Dr LP Winterbotham, honorary curator of anthropology at the University of Queensland, that the ‘old hands’, that is, the white pioneers, claimed that there were upwards of 12 000-15 000 people ‘living and hunting off six hundred square miles of country and living well’. As Tom Griffiths writes, ‘two shires today [Barcoo and Diamantina] have a few hundred people in each. The Mithaka had thousands.'
Alice was an unusual young girl, writing down, in detail, the Indigenous knowledge she had received. This formed the basis of her first book, Our Channel Country (1933). Published, enthusiastically, by Angus and Robertson, the book did moderately well for such a book, selling 5500 copies. It gave Alice Duncan-Kemp a recognised name, acceptance as someone who had rare insights into Aboriginal life, and a lifetime interest in writing. Three further books followed, all drawing on her substantial archive. Tom Griffiths follows the development of this archive, first organised and curated by Alice’s daughter-in-law, Dawn Duncan-Kemp, a librarian-archivist and subsequently by Lorraine (‘Rainy’) McKellar and Will Kemp. The archive is of real significance to Australian anthropology.
Then we turn to the next section, ‘War and Peace’ (note that the titles of all four sections of this book are book titles). No surprises here. The Native Mounted Police take centre stage as they rampage, murderously, among Alice’s beloved people who told her the story: ‘hundreds were shot down miss . . . [they] said we were polluting water and spearing cattle, and shot us down like unwanted dogs’. Readers who are acquainted with David Marr's remarkable Killing for Country, which Griffiths describes as ‘[Marr’s] saga of relentless colonial violence’, will know what to expect. It is, again, heartbreaking.
But here there is hope. In an exciting and unexpected chapter, ‘Treaty’, Griffiths writes of a peace ceremony, held in May 1889, performed close to Mooraberrie’s borders, encouraged by George Debney, which brought about the end of the frontier war in Mithaka country. It was a traditional Indigenous ceremony with few, if any, European features, without documents, signatures or gifts. Because of this, the colonial government could ignore it. To accept a treaty as a means of ending a war would have been to admit the existence of the frontier war which, to this day, is still a contested concept. So, while the treaty put an end to the slaughter of native peoples, truth-telling lost out. This chapter shows how it might have been with greater honesty and greater awareness from the invaders.
The peace ceremony took place twelve years before Alice’s birth, but she heard tell of it often enough to be able to write a chapter on it in Our Channel Country. The extraordinary aspect of this is that the peace largely held. The ‘Debney Peace’ showed a path that was not taken up generally.
Like Alice, George Debney had studied and understood Aboriginal culture so that, in the ceremony when 200 warriors from a neighbouring tribe arrived to join in, Debney had enough knowledge to arrange the spears that they had laid down, ‘in order of tribal precedence, each in its correct totemic group’. Debney, whom Tom Griffiths describes as a man of ‘personal charisma and a dignified bearing’, knew several Aboriginal languages and was deeply immersed in Aboriginal culture. This chapter leaves the reader thinking, if only.
There is so much to learn from this book, most of it surprising. Griffiths does not hector or preach, he writes simple prose for complicated ideas, carrying the reader with him. Some of the descriptions of country are magical. Griffiths has been on Country many times, though always maintaining the historian's reserve.
Alice Duncan-Kemp was not a trained historian or anthropologist. This leads her into trouble with her publishers, who fear plagiarism, in a tangle that Griffiths, for lack of evidence, is unable to completely resolve. Duncan-Kemp’s value lies in the knowledge she acquired, her openness to that knowledge, her recording of it, and her persistence in living with it all her long life. Crucially, she made it available to readers across time. Tragic ignorance of the creativity and depth of culture, so recently displayed by Pauline Hanson, has held our nation back far too long. This book shows, so clearly, the extent of that ignorance, the shame of it, the tragedy of it.
A sense of spirituality pervades this book for the sacred is everywhere in the story. A culture of such antiquity gives meaning to every feature of the landscape which is carefully taught to young people as they move towards maturity, as we see very clearly in the education of Alice Duncan. A spirituality that makes sense of the world is a key to a good and happy life. While the arrival of the white invaders mystified these people of the spirit, there is nothing in this book to indicate that the people began to question their understanding of their world. Some may hope that the spirituality on display here becomes more general in Australian life.
Tom Griffiths also invites the reader to think more deeply, and more broadly, about the means, uses and purposes of history. There is an archive presented in this book with which historians would be comfortable. But history in Alice’s Dreaming emerges elsewhere. In an important way, history and spirituality coalesce to leave me, at least, breathless and astonished. This book so enriches the history that we know and refreshes it so well that it could be a new starting point just as Mark McKenna’s The Shortest History of Australia is.
Imagine if my school library and many other school libraries had stocked the books of Alice Duncan-Kemp. Tom Griffiths was a very lucky young man.
Dr Michael McKernan is a distinguished Australian writer who over 50 years has published over thirty books on Australian military, social, environmental, sporting and religious history. He was formerly at UNSW and Deputy Director of the Australian War Memorial.
Picture credit: book cover detail
Queensland historian Ray Kerkhove writes about Alice Duncan-Kemp.
Another review in Inside Story by Anne-Marie Condé.
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