Word: arnhem
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Australia's many untamed expanses, Arnhem Land, the vast spread of savannah, swamps and crocodile-infested rivers on the northeastern tip of the Northern Territory, remains one of the wildest. A handful of settlements dot its 95,000-sq.-km area, and the unsealed 750-km road that crosses it is passable only in the dry season. When anthropologist Donald Thomson, whose writings on this enigmatic region will be republished this month in Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land (Miegunyah Press; 264 pages), arrived there just 70 years ago, it was also feared by many whites, who had heard stories...
Thomson was so affected by what he saw on Cape York that the following year, when the killing of five Japanese fishermen and three whites at Caledon Bay in Arnhem Land prompted plans for a punitive police expedition, he lobbied the Federal Government to send him as peace broker. Despite officials' fears that he'd be killed - and a request, which he refused, to collect skulls while there - Thomson set off in 1935 to calm tensions and, he hoped, document for policymakers the needs and culture of a people about whom almost nothing was known: "I was to show them...
Drawn from his official reports and private papers, Thomson depicts in matter-of-fact prose arduous months of roaming harsh northeastern Arnhem Land with indigenous guides. Unlike in other areas, where Aborigines had already been dispersed, regular interracial contact was new there, and traditional life intact. Thomson's determination to live as the locals did - learning the language, eating bush food and attending sacred ceremonies - makes for a compelling insider's view. The objects of study soon became companions, as he realized when he left to write his final report: "I knew and loved the Arnhem Land people...