When young, Joseph Schumpeter had three ambitions.
To be the greatest economist in the world.
To be the best horseman in Austria.
To be the best lover in Vienna.
I don’t know how the second ambition went, but take it from me, he didn’t succeed in the first ambition, and as for the third … well my grandma was there — and she was quite a looker. And I think somehow the Australian Statistician and I would have heard if Joseph had hit KPI #3. But it never pays to be arrogant about such matters. Who knows?
More seriously, Schumpeter outed himself as a Marxist in the early 1940s in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, a right wing Marxist mind you, but a Marxist nevertheless. How so? Well Joseph argued that every economic structure is built on the culture and mores that were built by its predecessor and which the new order subverts and eventually destroys.
And destruction generally, is much easier than building. As it’s turned out, in the last few decades, we’ve been munching through our cultural and organisational inheritance. And state incapacity is emerging as an obstacle to Britain’s dragging itself out of the mire. Austerity can probably take a fair bit of the blame — at the local government level. As in the US, lack of faith in government is, to some degree a self fulfilling prophecy. Robert Shrimsley takes up the story.
[Key to Starmer’s] administration will be the belief in an active state, capable of seeing the bigger picture and intervening as a force for good. Ministers are already returning most of the railways to state control, further regulating work and placing government at the centre of green investment and industrial policy.
But … [c]onversations with the new Labour ministers leave little doubt that the British state is not actually fit for Starmer’s purpose.
Much is made of failings at the centre and the current shortcomings of the Downing Street operation: key posts are filled by lame ducks, there are issues over who speaks for Starmer. … And the focus on the centre risks missing a wider picture. Across Whitehall, new ministers have found themselves taken aback by the weakness of the overall machine. From systemically poor public procurement to hopeless IT, to the hollowing out of core services and expertise at both central and local government, this newly active state stands on atrophying limbs.
Stories abound. Officials grappling with the early release of prisoners due to overcrowding found there was no way to process this digitally. Sifting the potential names was a paper exercise involving multiple files. The lack of digital transformation is routinely cited as one of the reasons for low NHS productivity. Ministers talk in heroic terms about the promise of artificial intelligence and yet even a unified database is beyond some public services. …
The goal of 1.5mn new homes demands the country train a new cohort of construction workers. So progress on housebuilding requires reform of further education. Skills, health, work and welfare — all depend on separate departments already struggling with existing targets. …
The crisis in social care, which bleeds into NHS capacity, is a direct consequence of the erosion of capacity in local authorities, who were underfunded and then encouraged to privatise provision so that it now rests in the hands of companies, which cut staff ratios and underpay care workers just to break even. The regulator, the Care Quality Commission, has been denounced by the health secretary as not fit for purpose. Other regulators are also under scrutiny.
Then there is the lack of expertise. Having legislated on rail ownership, the Department for Transport is now having to recruit people who can oversee the system. Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, wants much less spending on outside consultants. But this ambition also demands building up in-house knowledge.
Ministers need to recognise and address the fact that the capacity of both central and local government has been disempowered by austerity, loss of experienced people and failure to reform. …
It’s come to this. Mild-mannered Republican Mitt Romney ponders the safety of his family in a Trump second term.
For two years, we’d talked almost every week as I worked on a biography that would cement his reputation as a Republican apostate. Since the book’s publication last year … we hadn’t spoken in much depth. … I noted a change in his countenance. … Now, at 77, he couldn’t wait to leave. He seemed lighter in a way, but also more restless. Mormon missionaries have a term for the feeling of distraction and homesickness that sometimes settles in as they approach the end of their service: trunky. I asked if the term applied to him now, and he smirked: “Oh yeah.” …
When I asked Romney why his colleagues seemed so miserable, he surprised me by launching into an uninterrupted, seven-minute diatribe about everything that was wrong with Washington. He talked about growing polarization, and the radicalizing effects of the primary process, and the institutional dysfunction of the House. …
Romney was mostly amused by Trump’s reaction [to the biography when published] (“Hahaha!” he texted me at the time. “He’s such a whack job!”), but the book’s chilly reception among Republicans on Capitol Hill must have been upsetting. Some of his colleagues made known their disapproval in private. Others, including Senator J. D. Vance, lashed out in the press. “If he has a problem with me,” Vance told a reporter, “I kind of wish he just acted like a man and spoke to me directly, not whining to a reporter about it.” Romney wasn’t exactly surprised by the attacks from people he’d criticized in such withering fashion. (“I don’t know that I can disrespect someone more than J. D. Vance,” he had told me.) …
Romney knew that he was likely to appear on any enemies list kept by the former president, and he’d privately mused to friends that it might be time for him and his wife, Ann, to consider moving abroad. (A spokesperson for the senator told me he was not serious about this.) … What about his sons? I asked. Might they be targeted? … “You might need to expand your imagination,” I suggested. Romney grew irritated. … “How am I going to protect 25 grandkids, two great-grandkids? I’ve got five sons, five daughters-in-law—it’s like, we’re a big group.” This was clearly a problem to which he’d given serious thought, and realized there was no solution. In the weeks after January 6, he’d spent thousands of dollars a day to protect his family from red-capped vigilantes. But how do you hide a family of 40 from a president hell-bent on revenge?
Recognizing that I’d hit a nerve, I said it was possible, of course, that Trump’s “retribution” rhetoric was all bluster. But Romney didn’t seem comforted. “I think he has shown by his prior actions that you can take him at his word,” he told me, his voice suddenly subdued. “So I would take him at his word.” …
[L]istening to him talk that day in his office, I was struck by just how much trust he was placing in younger Americans to fix Washington, if only because he’d lost confidence in the supposed adults running the town now. “I have hope in the rising generation,” Romney told me—hope “that they’re watching what’s going on, and they’re going to say, Enough.”
Ruth Krauss’s kids’ books and why houses have roofs.
When I was in my early to mid 20s I spent some time in Queensland on a farm with a cousin of mine — from the Banjo Patterson side of the family ;) and his three year old son. He was extremely cute, and I began something that I now do instinctively. I ask little kids questions that are philosophical or philosophicalish. I remember asking him “why do houses have roofs?” And I’ll always remember the answer. “Because they need something that wants to keep the rain off.” Indeed they do. And who doesn’t need something that wants to keep the rain off?
Anyway, until last night I’d never heard of Ruth Krauss, but she seems to have cooked up a similar habit rather before me.
In 1952, a book appeared that redefined children’s literature. “A lap is so you don’t get crumbs on the floor,” it proclaimed. “A mustache is to wear on Halloween. A hat is to wear on a train.” The book didn’t even try to tell a story. Instead, it spoke in associative logic and whimsical spot illustrations, leapfrogging from definition to definition, explaining how the world works. Its author, Ruth Krauss, had gathered many of the definitions from actual children—including the book’s title, “A Hole Is to Dig”—and worked with a little-known twenty-three-year-old artist named Maurice Sendak to draw the squirmy, cheeky kids on each page. As Krauss told her editor, the Harper & Row legend Ursula Nordstrom, “I’m afraid I’ll have a good book in spite of myself.” …
Krauss was born in Baltimore in 1901. Her paternal grandfather, Leopold, had emigrated from Hungary in the eighteen-sixties and started a successful furrier business, which her father, Julius, joined. Julius, who harbored artistic dreams, made sure that young Ruth was encouraged creatively. She was a sickly child—“I nearly died a lot,” she later recalled—but was nevertheless filled with energy, merrily lifting her dress in front of the neighbors or walking on her hands in the back yard. …
The Great Depression came into full force, and Krauss struggled to find work as an illustrator. In 1939, she joined a friend on an anthropology trip to Montana to live with the Blackfeet Nation, sparking an interest in language and how children absorb culture. Deciding that she would write books for young people, she soon marched into Ursula Nordstrom’s office and slapped a manuscript down on her desk. Nordstrom became Krauss’s primary editor for the next several years.
It’s impossible to discuss Krauss without mentioning her partner, the equally renowned children’s-book author Crockett Johnson. They met at a party in 1939, possibly in Greenwich Village; Johnson was tall and reserved, Krauss small and ebullient. (“We met and that was it!” she later declared.) As Philip Nel observes in “Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss,” his richly detailed 2012 biography, the couple completely reshaped the arc of children’s literature. Johnson, a cartoonist and a political activist who created classic works such as “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” championed the power of children’s imagination over the lure of bourgeois rationalism. Though husband and wife mostly published independently, in 1945 they collaborated to produce “The Carrot Seed,” which portrays one boy’s unwillingness to conform to the logic of others. In the book, the protagonist’s parents are afraid that a carrot seed won’t grow. His older brother declares, “It won’t come up.” But the boy, clad in coveralls and a cap, remains steadfast, watering and weeding with determination. Is his care an act of defiance? Optimism? His perspective carries an almost existential force: if you plant a carrot seed, he believes, a carrot must come up. And so it does. …
The psychologist Arnold Gesell observed that children are, essentially, pragmatists, and Krauss’s great achievement was to take this logic to its extreme, conjuring a concrete vision of the world using the child’s imagination: “Toes are to dance on; eyebrows are to go over your eyes.” She collected the phrases from kindergartners in Rowayton, Connecticut, where she lived, and from four- and five-year-olds at the Bank Street School, in New York City. … In a mode that melded Wittgenstein and Merriam-Webster, Krauss was evoking consciousness itself, as found in the way a specific group of people deployed language. … Krauss’s books were never didactic, and her interest was less in moralistic instruction than in the texture of imagination. She explored the world from the bottom up, tending to seeds that are still bearing fruit. ♦
When I grab supreme power, I will legislate the Mandy Rice Davies rule. If “they would say that wouldn’t they”, it’s not news. This isn’t a particularly brilliant application of the principle, but nevertheless I like it when politicians have the nous to question the premise of the farce they’re expected to play along with — as here.
Exploiting the timing and territorial scope of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), this paper examines how privacy regulation shaped firm performance in a large sample of companies across 61 countries and 34 industries. Controlling for firm and country-industry-year unobserved characteristics, we compare the outcomes of firms at different levels of exposure to EU markets, before and after the enforcement of the GDPR in 2018. We find that enhanced data protection had the unintended consequence of reducing the financial performance of companies targeting European consumers. Across our full sample, firms exposed to the regulation experienced a 8% decline in profits, and a 2% reduction in sales. An exception is large technology companies, which were relatively unaffected by the regulation on both performance measures. Meanwhile, we find the negative impact on profits among small technology companies to be almost double the average effect across our full sample. [W]e conclude that the GDPR has had significant negative impacts on firm performance in general, and on small companies in particular.
Good Vid: Good Song: and yes I know I’m late to the scene
Another great song — I missed Blues Brothers II in the cinemas
Here comes the sun
I love these videos about Beatles songs. I love their perfectionist tinkering. And, unlike some of our perfectionist tinkering, it pays off in wonderful things.
Good Gags
It’s become clear that this newsletter needs a new section thusly titled.
0.86 percent of women meet your standards
Keeper.ai standards calculator
Nothing like objective advice from a website. More on this post if you’re interested in that kind of thing.
Alison W. Baulos, Jorge Luis García, and James J. Heckman #32972
The Perry Preschool Project, the longest-running experimental study of an early childhood education program, demonstrates how such interventions can yield long-term personal, societal, and intergenerational benefits for disadvantaged populations. The evidence is clear: investments in high-quality early childhood education and parental engagement can deliver returns even 50 years later. The program’s findings remain scientifically robust, particularly when analyzed through rigorous small-sample inference methods. The program’s findings also contradict common criticisms of preschool, as, when measured correctly, treatment effects on IQ do not fadeout. This paper draws insights from both the original founders and recent empirical studies, emphasizing the critical role of parental involvement in early education. The authors advocate for a scientific agenda focused on understanding the mechanisms behind treatment effects, rather than replicating specific programs. The analysi! s also underscores the broader implications of early childhood interventions for social mobility and human capital formation. Analysts of early childhood education should recognize that although credentials and formal curricula contribute to successful programs, the true measure of quality lies in adult-child interactions, which play an essential role.
YIMBY steps up
Andrew Jackson: plus ça change
“Whether democracy in America, or anyplace else, can flourish, either as a historically conditioned set of political institutions or as a moral vision, must remain, by the very logic of democracy, an open question.”
James Miller, Can Democracy Work?
As an inveterate browser in the slowly declining Book Grocer chain I buy quite a few of their remaindered books. Admittedly I often discover why they’re remaindered. But occasionally I come upon something really good, like Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond your Head. And to that I can add the book I’m reading now. Can Democracy Work: A short history of a radical idea, from Athens to Today by James Miller.
What’s so good about it? Our own political discourse is saturated with sentimentality towards ‘we the people’. We’re always the good guys, forever being lied to by ‘elites’. Well, being ripped off by elites is defs a problem. Always has been. But then if political elites didn’t lie to us, we wouldn’t vote for them — so they wouldn’t be political elites any more, now would they?
With the word ‘democracy’ saturated with positive valence — even Kim Jong Un reckons he’s in charge of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — Miller’s representation of democracy is historically rich. So, for this reader who is trying to purge himself of the wishful thinking that James Burnham tells us is more than nine tenths of political thought, its immensely valuable to get up close and personal with the concrete political drivers behind democracy. With how little the coming of democracy reflects political idealism, and how much it was done to advantage one faction over another. Not to mention democracy’s emergence was associated with violence — not to mention a complete lack of culottes. And how much of democracy’s early value to the powerful cashes out as military power — in 5th century Athens, post-revolutionary France and the US.
The book really lets you dwell on what Churchill’s great line really means as lived out in the concrete circumstances of history. Democracy is the worst form of government except for the others that have been tried. Here’s Miller on the transformation of the United States, from the republic of propertied and labouring self-betterment — the ‘natural aristocracy’ * its founding fathers intended, to the ‘Jeffersonian’ democracy it became.
* Both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson used the term.
FOR THE FIRST TWO GENERATIONS of the American Republic, “all the presidents had been statesmen in the European sense of the word,” the British scholar James Bryce remarked in his landmark study, The American Commonwealth, first published in 1888; they were “men of education, of administrative experience, of a certain largeness of view and dignity of character.” Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison—these were just the sort of public-spirited “natural aristocrats” the founders had hoped would become the new republic’s leaders and serve as a moderating influence on popular passions. Defending the powers of the presidency in the new American Constitution, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.”
But as Bryce ruefully acknowledged in a chapter titled “Why Great Men Are Not Chosen Presidents,” all this changed with Andrew Jackson. To contemporary admirers, Jackson was “at the head of the Democracy of the world, fighting its battles, and stemming the tide of selfish interest combined with unprincipled ambition.” To critics, he was a classic demagogue, a boorish commoner who pandered to the rabble and epitomized “the democracy of numbers.”
Jackson was born in South Carolina in 1767 in a log cabin on the state’s western frontier. Raised by God-fearing Scots and Irish kinsmen, he served as an adolescent soldier in the Continental Army, and barely survived imprisonment by the British in 1781. After studying law and qualifying for the bar in 1787, he moved to Tennessee, where his fortunes changed dramatically. (By then all of his immediate family members were dead, victims of the war, or cholera, or smallpox.)
He married into a prominent local clan and became a protégé of the territorial governor, serving as attorney general in 1791. After Tennessee won statehood in 1796, he became the state’s first representative in the U.S. Congress, and then, briefly, an interim U.S. senator. In these years, he was an outspoken Francophile and ardent champion of the Rights of Man. But his most indomitable political passion was hatred: for monarchy, for aristocracy, for privileged elites, and, above all, for Indians.
Returning to Tennessee, he worked as a circuit-riding justice of the state’s superior court and also began to angle for a post in the state militia, hoping to make his mark as a military man. At the same time, he started to build a personal fortune, eventually becoming the slaveholding master of one of the largest cotton-growing plantations in Tennessee.
Jackson is sometimes celebrated for his rural roots and unvarnished manners—but in many ways, he better embodies the upwardly mobile ethos of “the planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer” who form, in one of Jackson’s more lyrical formulations, “the bone and sinew of the country.” Like Tom Paine, Jackson hymned the virtues of commerce and worried that an unresponsive federal government was a major threat to the full fruits of free labor.
The War of 1812 turned Jackson, almost overnight, into a national hero. At the Battle of New Orleans, he led the American forces that turned back a far larger British army—a victory achieved, ironically, two weeks after the war had formally ended with a peace treaty signed in Ghent, Belgium.
In the following generation, as the country added new states to the West, many states abolished or lowered property qualifications that had restricted the right to vote. But the process was uneven. And in some states, old barriers remained and new barriers were erected, as public officials tried to channel the democratic currents sweeping through politics.
Jackson was now the most renowned American general since George Washington—and an archetypal self-made man. Given command of the U.S. Army in the South, Jackson and his troops defeated a wing of the Creek nation at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. Between 1816 and 1820, Jackson helped force treaties on the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws; in 1817, acting on his conviction that whites and Native Americans could never coexist peacefully, Jackson arranged for the Cherokees to surrender two million acres of land in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, and to move west of the Mississippi. He became a leading proponent of a national policy of Indian resettlement, America’s unique contribution to the art of “ethnic cleansing.” After serving several months as the military governor of the Florida Territory, Jackson retired briefly to Tennessee, before winning a seat in the federal Senate in 1822.
Two years later, in a five-way presidential contest, Jackson won a plurality (42 percent) of the popular vote but lost the presidency in a subsequent election in the House of Representatives to his rival John Quincy Adams. The defeat piqued his ambition—and helped to crystallize the positive meaning of democracy in America.
Like his father and other distinguished members of the founding generation—and unlike Andrew Jackson—John Quincy Adams held that while “democracy is the oxygen or vital air” of a government, it is “too pure in itself for human respiration.” In 1828, Adams ran for reelection as a “National Republican,” while Jackson ran as a “Democrat.” By splitting Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party in two, Jackson confirmed that “democracy” from now on would be an unambiguously honorific term in the American political lexicon—and also would define the aspirations of one of America’s two major parties (alongside the resurrected Republican Party that Abraham Lincoln led to victory in 1860).
In those days it was considered crass for a candidate himself to hold rallies and address huge crowds of noisy supporters. But Jackson turned his quest for the White House into a true “campaign”—a military term of art for a coordinated attack on an objective, introduced into politics by a military man. Marches and coordinated media and fund-raising were all elements of Jackson’s presidential campaign of 1828—and so was the marshaling of outrageous lies and various forms of character assassination, disseminated through the mass media of the day, the daily newspapers. A certain image of the candidate was conveyed in the popular press: the hero of New Orleans as an outsider able to clean up political corruption and champion the interests of the little man, not the entrenched elites. Jackson became an icon of democracy. Casting a vote for him was turned into a kind of civic sacrament, reaffirming the sovereignty of the people.
One result of this quasi-liturgical marshaling of votes was a notable increase in the number of citizens voting, more than four times the number who had voted in 1824. Despite this uptick in turnout, a golden age of perceived self-rule could, as in ancient Athens, be built on a surprisingly narrow conception of who counted as a member of the putatively sovereign people. The overall number of eligible voters in America was growing—but in a nation of nearly thirteen million people, only about one million white men cast votes in the 1828 presidential election.
Americans at the time nevertheless perceived the outcome as a great victory for democracy. And subsequent historians have tended to agree. One has called the election a “mighty democratic uprising,” while another has observed that “soaring turnouts among white men reinforced the impression of the People governing.” In the years that followed, democracy became “so crucial to America’s nation-building process that rhetorically America and democracy became inseparable, almost interchangeable.”
Despite President Jackson’s cavalier disregard for the rule of law—he simply ignored the Supreme Court’s 1832 decision (in Worcester v. Georgia) holding that the Cherokee Indians constituted a nation with sovereign rights—his reputation as a great American democrat only grew with the passage of time. By the turn of the twentieth century, in the eyes of the preeminent progressive historian Frederick Jackson Turner, he was the very epitome of an era, designated by the phrase “Jacksonian Democracy,” and associated by Turner with the belief that “the self made man had a right to his success in the free competition which Western life afforded.” (It didn’t hurt that Alexis de Tocqueville had visited America when Jackson was president—he briefly met the great man—so that his famous Democracy in America at first glance supported the idea that “Jacksonian democracy” was somehow central to the American experience.)
Still, if one reads modern biographies, one is struck by the discrepancy between what Jackson, based on the evidence, seems actually to have accomplished in the way of democratizing reforms, and the outsize role he assumes in the national lore (at least the lore I was taught growing up about this putative hero of the common man).
Jackson did advocate term limits on officeholders and rotation in office, and he also urged Americans (without success) to abolish the Electoral College, one of the most flagrantly undemocratic elements in the Constitution. Yet in instituting what he called “rotation,” putting term limits on civil servants, Jackson also made it easy to appoint his own allies and friends instead, creating what critics called a spoils system. And by transforming himself into a cynosure for the explicitly democratic hopes of ordinary citizens in his presidential campaigns, Jackson laid the basis for an imperial presidency.
The result was perverse: by mobilizing commoners against an entrenched elite (just as democratic leaders had done in Athens), and by trying to turn the quadrennial vote for the most powerful figure in the federal government into a national plebiscite (institutions and practices unknown in the polis), this personification of egalitarian aspirations came to wield executive powers that perforce risked overshadowing the political initiatives of the ordinary citizens who had chosen him as their tribune.
Frederick Jackson Turner recognized the essential paradox: “Jacksonian democracy flourished, strong in the faith of the intrinsic excellence of the common man, in his right to make his own place in the world, and in his capacity to share in government. But while Jacksonian democracy demanded these rights, it was also loyal to leadership as the very name implies. It was ready to follow to the uttermost the man in whom it placed its trust, whether the hero were frontier fighter or president.”
Donald Thompson, Australian anthropologist goes native
I happened upon this in a bookshop a month or so ago and enjoyed reading it. I had been struck by how Bill Stanner seemed the first anthropologist in Australia to really appreciate the indigenes as human beings — and to shape his discipline towards that idea. But half a generation earlier, there was Donald Thompson. The book is also enlivened with swashbuckling detail of how Thompson trooped off into the desert to make common cause with his indigenous brothers, including by transforming them into a guerilla unit to fight the Japanese in the event of their invasion. Thompson was passionate in his defence of Australian aborigines, as was Stanner, though Stanner was more circumspect. Thompson was more hot headed and naïve about how much influence he could have. Still no-one managed to achieve much against what Stanner called the Great Australian silence and the wider erasure of aboriginal rights and culture.
I enjoyed and thoroughly recommend the book.
Chapter Sixteen: Reporting
When a fully recuperated Donald Thomson walked down the MV Murker’s gangplank into the open arms of his wife – freshly primped and dressed for the occasion – and the twins transformed from babes to two little boys now actually standing and looking up to him, at least he looked like the hero that all three had been hoping for.
No doubt he felt it too.
He has left no record of that reunion. But adoration is irresistible, and he was as susceptible as any man. He had already felt its obverse – the denigration, even contempt of those to whom the Aboriginals were lesser beings and their proponents’ simpletons or bleeding hearts.
Nevertheless, the meeting would have had its awkward moments, for in one sense they were strangers trying desperately to reintroduce themselves after a period of momentous, unshared events and experiences that had changed them. The task of erecting bridges across those times and tides would not be easily engineered, nor speedily built.
But he was home, and Worlingworth under Gladys’s managerial hand looked a picture. She had made improvements to the poultry shed, and egg sales were now a nice little earner. So too the kennels where they were getting good money for the pups bred from ‘Heather’ and ‘Mack’. She had enclosed part of the veranda to make it safer for the twins to play. Best of all, the property was so attractive they had received several unsolicited offers to buy it for considerably more than it had cost them.
Donald could hardly have been more pleased. The little boys – John in particular – couldn’t get enough of him. ‘I followed him everywhere,’ John says. ‘He couldn’t turn around without tripping over me.’[i]
When he met with solicitor Athol Wilson, he learned that his business and governmental affairs were in good shape. So, in short order he was able to turn his hand to the Interim Report to Interior Minister Paterson and through him to the Lyons Government.
His training as a journalist had some singular advantages for both the academic and the Arnhem Land peacemaker. It meant, as with foreign correspondents the world over, that he could write under the most trying conditions. He could express himself in clear and engaging prose; and he could go directly to the heart of the matter.
But these were not necessarily virtues when composing a report designed for a readership of vacillating politicians and timorous public servants. This was no better illustrated than in the first recommendation of ‘The Interim General Report of Preliminary Expedition to Arnhem Land 1935-36:
‘Absolute segregation with the Arnhem Land reserve. The social structure in toto should be preserved as an essential factor in the life of the Aboriginal people.’
If that were not challenging enough to the political establishment, the second hammered it home:
‘The “nomadic” habits of these people must be regarded as an integral part of their culture. As they live extensively, rather than intensively, their seasonal movements enable them to draw fully upon the resources of their territories. The collecting of Aboriginals, not detribalised, into compounds or institutions should be prohibited. If it is desired to teach christianity to these people, it should be insisted that the christian teacher or missionary be prepared to visit the people in their own territory, and not to gather them about a station or mission school.’ [1]
In those 117 words, Thomson had challenged not only the political leadership and the settled policy of the bureaucratic establishment in every State and Territory, but the massive power and influence of the Christian Church and its most dedicated apostles. Moreover, he struck at a time when the great majority of Australians were not only religiously active but were passionately sectarian in the division between Protestant and Roman Catholic.
The London Missionary Society (LMS) had initially bypassed the Aboriginals from their endeavours in favour of the ‘heathens’ of both
China and the South Sea Islands. The Aboriginal people were regarded as too ‘primitive’ to appreciate the great gift being offered them.
Indeed, neither the Anglican Chaplain, Richard Johnson who arrived with the First Fleet – nor Arthur Phillip himself – had showed any interest in ‘gospelising’ the Aboriginals. Johnson’s successor, Samuel Marsden, the leading proselytiser for the LMS, wrote in 1814, ‘The want of reflection upon their past, present and future, which is so apparent in the whole of the conduct of the Aborigines, opposes in my mind the strongest barrier to the work of a Missionary.’ [ii]And so saying, he directed his attentions to the Polynesian islanders.
However, as settlers spread across the continent, in 1877 the LMS pioneered the North with a mission school in the Torres Strait. In 1912 an Interdenominational Committee of churches was formed in Melbourne to negotiate with the Federal Government to allocate spheres of influence in the Northern Territory. The Methodists took Arnhem Land and in 1915 established their beachhead on Goulburn Island off the North Coast. Others spread themselves across other islands of the Territory.
Historian Noel Loos says, ‘It was the aim of all invading Europeans to control the Aborigines they came in contact with. The missions aimed at probably the most total control, for the belief that Christianity was the only true faith produced the imperative to convert; that is, to change how Aborigines thought, felt and acted. [They] believed literally that they were confronted by the devil.’ [iii]
Resistance to Thomson’s proposal would become an article of faith.[iv] His notion of ‘segregation’ did not have the same malign overtone it would later acquire in South Africa and the United States. Nor did he expect that it would remain ad infinitum. It was an emergency measure to save a culture and a population from extinction. But either way, it was deeply offensive to the majority who considered that white Australians should have an untrammelled right of access to the entire continent.
In hindsight, Thomson was anticipating the 1992 Mabo decision and the Land Rights legislation that followed. But in the post-colonial Australia of 1936 such a concept was virtually unthinkable. And it was practically unenforceable over such a large and geographically diverse area.
However, the other recommendations, 3 to 7 were more practical. They proposed the abolition ‘of the present anomalous system under which Police Constables act as “Protectors” of the Aboriginals’ and set out the exceptions to the general rule of prohibition from the reserve. These comprised a new grouping of ‘patrols’ to move among the tribes to protect them from intruders and ‘to maintain a state of domestic peace’.
They should include ‘only men who are fitted temperamentally as well as by their special qualifications for the work. They should receive at least a thorough elementary training in anthropology and its application. They should be “protectors” in the true sense of the word.’
As well, a qualified medical officer should be employed in ‘a systematic attempt to eliminate leprosy, yaws, and acquired diseases introduced since alien occupation of the country’. Finally, he called for the immediate establishment of a ‘Department of Native Affairs staffed by men selected solely for their special qualifications and sympathies for dealing with the people, and for controlling the organisation outlined above.’
The background material supporting the recommendations provided an acute insight into Thomson’s experiences and observations. Some aspects of his proposal, he wrote, were ‘obvious even to the most casual observer’.
‘The Interim General Report of Preliminary Expedition to Arnhem Land 1935-36:
At every point where the Australian Aboriginal has come into prolonged contact with a European or Asiatic population, his culture has commenced to decay, and degradation and racial extinction have followed [he wrote]. ‘There is abundant evidence that the Roper River valley supported, until quite recent years, a very dense population. But in 1936 there remains only a few completely detribalised Aborigines who live as hangers-on of the Europeans renting their territory from the Government. They live as outcasts in the territory that all their traditional lore tells them to be the birthright of their ancestors.
It is generally assumed that north-east Arnhem Land carried a very large population. Yet [from] the patrols in which I made contact with the great majority of the population in the area, I concluded that including Groote and nearby Bickerton Islands, there were no more than one thousand five hundred men, women and children in the entire area.
Other conclusions, he said, could only have been reached by his having lived so intimately with them. ‘Most of the projects that have been so far advanced aim vaguely at “betterment” of the people and largely upon setting them up in agricultural communities,’ he wrote. ‘It is also assumed that their food supplies are inadequate.
But as I now know from my patrols, there is an abundance of food available throughout Arnhem Land, sufficient to support a population much larger than the one now in occupation. Moreover, it has been proved conclusively that they cannot be converted into gardeners.
He confronted the slanted publicity that invariably blamed the Aboriginal people for any conflict with the white community. ‘Much has been recorded of the savage and treacherous disposition of the natives of this coast of Arnhem Land,’ he wrote, ‘but I wish to stress the fact that although I made long journeys inland, where the natives must have considered I was the most vulnerable, I did not carry, and in fact do not possess, a revolver. At no time during my patrols did I have occasion to use or threaten a native with firearms, and when I was short of food and suffering severely from the hardships of long patrols on foot, the natives brought food, and showed the most friendly concern for my welfare.’
He said he fulfilled his ordained task of driving home the official attitudes toward crimes of violence. ‘The elements of the white man’s code, and the gravity of homicide and theft were explained, as far as practicable, to these people,’ he said. But whether they accepted it as it applied to their own cultural imperatives is notably absent in the report.
He charged that the Aboriginals and their birthright were being exploited at sea as well as on land. He took deadly aim at the Japanese and the former bodyguard and pearler turned trepanger, Fred Gray who was seeking respectability by associating with the missionaries:
It is well known that the alien crews of these vessels have been exploiting the natives without any control or supervision. The presence of Mr Gray on the Reserve at this time is not in the best interests of the Aboriginals. Mr Gray has assumed an unwarranted authority over the native camps at which he has worked; friction has recently taken place and a serious situation may arise at any time..
In the inland, charges of cattle killing were common. Thomson says, ‘Just prior to my return to the Roper River area, the Aboriginals informed me that a number of their fellows had been sent to Fanny Bay Gaol on charges in connection with cattle. They appealed to me for help. They did not understand anything of what really had taken place.
I was able to obtain definite information. Though the alleged offences committed had been directly connected with the business of the cattlemen, they were tried before local “justices” who were themselves cattlemen. The local “Protector” of the Aboriginals was also prosecutor. That was a travesty of justice so grave that it appeared to be merely fantastic.
I assumed that the fullest evidence relating to the case must have been sent to Darwin and must have been sufficient to satisfy the Crown Law Department. In Darwin, I was informed that no evidence whatever had reached either the Crown Law Department or the Superintendent of Police, although the Aboriginals had been for some time in the Darwin Gaol.
I had been unable, at the outset, to believe that it was possible for an Aboriginal charged with an alleged offence in connection with cattle to be tried by cattlemen who work these natives on their properties, and who appear to them, therefore, to have power of life and death over them, with no possibility of appeal. I submit that there appears to have been the gravest miscarriage of justice and an investigation may provide valuable evidence upon which to base new legislation.
Finally, while on the subject of Darwin Gaol, Thomson sought the Minister’s authority to release Wonggu’s three sons and on his return to Darwin they be placed in his custody for transport home to Caledon Bay. ‘I feel that the opportunity presented here of rewarding these people by sending back their prisoners with me is a peculiarly happy way of showing them the Government’s approval at a critical stage and of retaining their confidence. It appears to be the logical culmination of the mission with which I have been entrusted by the Government.’
Little wonder that this Interim Report, presented to the Minister in April would remain confidential within government. Thomson might well have shared his opinions with university colleagues – and very likely his draft recommendations with close confidants – but for the moment the document was tightly restricted.
He followed it with two journeys to Canberra – the first a meeting with the new Secretary of the Interior Department, ‘Joe’ Carrodus to discuss financial aspects of the commission; the second to show a silent film he had coupled together of his journey among the East Arnhem Landers including some unique footage of ceremonies. It was well received, as indeed was his request to return the sons to Wonggu the father figure of the Balamumu.
His travelling equipment and collections of Aboriginal artefacts from the first mission – some six tons in all – had arrived separately by coastal steamer. The collection had to be properly identified, catalogued and stored, the photographic plates replaced, and camera equipment repaired.
Thereafter, his principal concern was preparing for the return journey. He secured government backing for a workman to assist at Worlingworth during his absence and arranged to have the St Nicholas re-equipped and waiting for him in Cairns with Kapiu properly compensated for his service.
But there was also time for family and to re-acquaint himself with the wider world of the globe and Australia’s place within it. He accompanied Gladys (and their two formidable dogs) to a meeting with the Colemans at their Walsham property, no doubt as a gesture of thanks for their assistance when John was injured. The little boy was indeed fully recovered, and they had been quick to respond to Gladys’s cry for help.
Of the globe, 1936 was in many ways a turning point from the exigencies of the Depression to the preparation for a far more destructive event. In the United States, President Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ of massive public expenditure had set the course for economic recovery and he was re-elected that year to continue the journey. But in Germany, with the additional handicap of massive reparations from ‘the war to end all wars’, the change of fortunes came too late to prevent the rise of Hitler’s murderous Nazi extremism, and in the Soviet Union the similarly despotic rule of Stalin’s communist regime.
Racism and autocracy found heinous expression in both the antisemitic propaganda and the secret gulags of Siberia; and was publicly exposed in the Moscow show trials and at the Berlin Olympic Games with the triumphs of the Black American sprinter Jesse Owens. It burst into the battlefields of Spain and Ethiopia at the hand of the fascists Franco and Italy’s Mussolini respectively.
In Britain, the death of King George V brought Edward VIII to the throne, only to abdicate before the year was out, while the bumbling Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain adopted a weak-kneed appeasement policy that only encouraged the dictators’ voracious appetite for power and territory.
In Japan, the imperialists under Emperor Hirohito had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and established a puppet government; and by 1936 they were preparing to widen the conflict into a full-scale invasion of China. They signed the Anti-Comintern pact with Nazi Germany that November.
In the face of such international discord among the developed nations, Donald Thomson could be forgiven for seeing the occasional ‘payback’ incidents among the Arnhem Landers as a relatively minor challenge to an Australian government’s desire for communal concord. In that light, his proposals might well be seen as just the kind of firm intervention needed to approach the issue anew.
However, that year the conservative Coalition held the reins of government federally, in the two most populist states of NSW and Victoria, as well as South Australia. The other States under Labor rule remained equally intransigent on any issue of Aboriginal advancement. Throughout the nation, the ‘Protector’ era, with its underlying policies of hostility to Aboriginal culture was dominant and as popular as the White Australia policy itself.
Worlingworth and the University of Melbourne became Thomson’s redoubt, his sanctuary, and both the family and his colleagues provided the mental and emotional sustenance that revived him for the next phase of what had now become his personal campaign. But until that came, he revelled in their company; and they in his.
The Vice-Chancellor Dr Raymond Priestly took a special interest in his work. He knew the rising political star Robert Menzies personally and in a note of February 1936 offered to introduce Thomson ‘so that you can discuss the Aboriginal question with him’. He also wrote to Professor Douglas Copland, the Rockefeller Foundation’s representative in Australia and New Zealand, suggesting Thomson for a fellowship to extend his studies in either America or the UK.
The Foundation had been instrumental in establishing the Chair of Anthropology in the 1920s and the decision to locate it at Sydney University. Moreover, it was their insistence that research be directed to Australian Aborigines – as opposed to the people of PNG or the Pacific Islands – that led to Thomson’s attraction to Radcliffe-Brown’s diploma course.
I will talk to him about it when he arrives tomorrow,’ Priestly said, ‘or at any rate before I go away. I am keeping a copy of this letter to remind me to talk with Dr Haddon and other people at Cambridge about you when I get there.’ Thomson responded that he looked forward to meeting Menzies and ‘I should like very much indeed to be able to go overseas – preferably to England – as soon as I return from Arnhem Land.
His formal brief for the second element of the Arnhem Land commission arrived from the Interior Minister on March 4 to ‘carry out the duties herein enumerated:
1. To make contact with and establish, as far as possible, friendly relations with the Aboriginals.
2. To encourage the natives, as far as possible, to realise the gravity of the major offences of murder, robbery and the like, both in respect of fellow natives as well as white men.
3. To report cases coming under notice of serious illness, such as leprosy, tuberculosis, cancer etc.
4. To study and report upon the language, ceremonies, customs, moral codes etc., of the various tribes such report to be forwarded to the Minister for the Interior.
With every good wish for your safety and success in this enterprise.
Yours faithfully,
T. Paterson.
Thomson pocketed his brief and bid a sad farewell to an emotional Gladys and the twins on the Williamstown wharf.
[1] Both Christian and Christianity were written with lower case ‘c’.
[ii] Macklin, Dark Paradise, Hachette, Sydney 2013, p118
[iii] N.A. Loos, A Conflict of Faiths: Aboriginal Reaction to the First Missionaries in North Queensland 1861-1897, Doctoral Thesis excerpt, James Cook University 2018
[iv] Coincidentally, in his dismissal of the energetic efforts of the missionaries to replace the spiritual mythology of the locals with their own derived from the Mediterranean shores of Palestine, Greece and Rome, he was once again, responding a bete noir of his famous journalist-cum-medico predecessor, G.E. Morrison. His rich sarcasm is evident in his experience of Christian missionaries during his many journeys across China. ‘I met large numbers of missionaries of all classes, in many cities from Peking to Canton,’ he wrote, ‘and they unanimously expressed satisfaction at the progress they are making in China…The Wanshien Inland Mission, opened in 1887 and run by Australians was typical. There are, unfortunately [in 1894] no converts, but there are three hopeful “inquirers”. One of the three was shown to me and I do not wish to write unkindly but I am compelled to say that [he] was a poor, wretched, ragged coolie who sells the commonest gritty cakes in a rickety stall round the corner from the mission and belongs to a very humble order of blunted intelligence.
