Robert Hamilton Mathews
Robert Hamilton Mathews was an Australian surveyor and self-taught anthropologist who studied the Aboriginal cultures of Australia, especially those of Victoria, New South Wales and southern Queensland. He was a member of the Royal Society of New South Wales and a corresponding member of the Anthropological Institute of London.
Mathews had no academic qualifications and received no university backing for his research. Mathews supported himself and his family from investments made during his lucrative career as a licensed surveyor. He was in his early fifties when he began the investigations of Aboriginal society that would dominate the last 25 years of his life. During this period he published 171 works of anthropology running to approximately 2200 pages. Mathews enjoyed friendly relations with Aboriginal communities in many parts of south-east Australia.
Marginalia in a book owned by Mathews suggest that Aboriginal people gave him the nickname Birrarak, a term used in the Gippsland region of Victoria to describe persons who communicated with the spirits of the deceased, from whom they learned dances and songs.
Mathews won some support for his studies outside Australia. Edwin Sidney Hartland, Arnold van Gennep and Andrew Lang were among his admirers. Lang regarded him as the most lucid and "well informed writer on the various divisions which regulate the marriages of the Australian tribes." Despite endorsement abroad, Mathews was an isolated and maligned figure in his own country. Within the small and competitive anthropological scene in Australia his work was disputed and he fell into conflict with some prominent contemporaries, particularly Walter Baldwin Spencer and Alfred William Howitt. This affected Mathews' reputation and his contribution as a founder of Australian anthropology has until recently been recognised only among specialists in Aboriginal studies. In 1987 Mathews' notebooks and original papers were donated to the National Library of Australia by his granddaughter-in-law Janet Mathews. The availability of the has allowed greater understanding of his working methods and opened access to significant data that were never published. Mathews' work is now used as a resource by anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, linguists, heritage consultants and by members of descendant Aboriginal communities.
Family background
Robert Hamilton Mathews was the third of five children in a family of Irish Protestants. His elder siblings Jane and William were born in Ulster before the family's flight from Ireland in 1839. Robert and his younger sisters Matilda and Annie were born in New South Wales. Before they emigrated, Mathews' father, William Mathews, was the principal co-proprietor of Lettermuck Mill, a small papermaking business near the village of Claudy in County Londonderry. The other partners were his three brothers, Robert, Hamilton and Samuel Mathews. When first established by Robert's grandfather, Lettermuck was a successful business. Changes in papermaking technology, combined with the introduction of the Paper Excise to Ireland in 1798, adversely affected profitability. Many Irish papermakers made efforts to evade the tax on paper and the Mathews family became "notorious for crimes against the Excise". They were regularly summoned before the Court of the Exchequer to answer charges of avoidance. Between 1820 and 1826 penalties of £3,300 were imposed on William Mathews, none of which he paid.Hostile relations developed between the Mathewses and the Excise officers who regularly inspected their business. In 1833 an Excise officer named James Lampen disappeared, having last been seen entering the Lettermuck premises. A witness heard the discharge of a firearm according to a newspaper report. In March 1833 Robert's father, William Mathews, his three uncles and a journeyman employed in the mill were arrested for Lampen's murder. They were incarcerated until May that year when the charges were dropped, reportedly because of the disappearance of a key witness and the failure to find a body, despite a substantial search. It was believed within and outside the Excise office that the Mathewses were guilty of murder. From the time of the brothers' release, Excise officers, protected by an armed guard, monitored the mill around the clock. Prevented from trading illegally, the business collapsed and eventually all the brothers emigrated to various destinations. In later years, bodies were exhumed from bog near the mill, thought to belong to Lampen and an itinerant worker in the paper industry. This raises the possibility that R. H. Mathews' father and uncles were involved in a double homicide.
Penniless after the collapse of the business, William Mathews and his wife Jane falsified their ages so as to qualify for assisted migration to New South Wales. In the company of R. H. Mathews' two elder siblings, they arrived in Sydney on the Westminster in early 1840. William Mathews found labouring work for the family of John Macarthur at Camden, New South Wales and shepherded at another of their properties, Richlands near Taralga. They seem to have been itinerant for some years. R. H. Mathews was born at Narellan, southwest of Sydney, on 21 April 1841. The family's fortunes improved when they acquired a farm of at Mutbilly near the present village of Breadalbane, New South Wales in the Southern Tablelands. Goulburn is the nearest city.
Early life
In explaining his success in working with Aboriginal people, Mathews claimed that "black children were among my earliest playmates". This could refer to the family's time at Richlands where William Mathews worked as a shepherd, as did several Aboriginal men from the area. At Mutbilly the family lived on territory that R. H. Mathews later identified as the traditional country of the Gandangara people. Mathews' father was, according to his grandson William Washington Mathews, a "broken man" by the time they settled at Mutbilly. He had sectarian disputes with Roman Catholic neighbours and was several times prosecuted for minor assaults against them. R. H. Mathews and his younger siblings were educated by his father and at times by a private tutor.Occasional visits by large survey teams inspired Mathews' interest in his future profession. After his father's death in 1866, he became an assistant to surveyor John W. Deering in 1866–67. He later trained with surveyors Thomas Kennedy and George Jamieson and in 1870 he passed the government-run examination to become a licensed surveyor.
Career as a surveyor
As a licensed surveyor in colonial New South Wales, Mathews was entitled to do government work that fell within his assigned district while also maintaining a private practice. His earnings were considerable, and rapidly eclipsed the salary of the colony's Surveyor-General. In the 1870s Mathews was posted successively to the districts of Deepwater, New South Wales, Goondiwindi and Biamble. In 1880 he was posted to Singleton, New South Wales in the Hunter Region. As a surveyor he had many opportunities to meet Aboriginal people and he employed at least one, the Kamilaroi man Jimmy Nerang, in his survey team. Mathews joined the Royal Society of New South Wales in 1875 but never published in the society's journal until he took up anthropology in 1893. Private correspondence shows that he collected some linguistic data and artefacts during his early days as a surveyor.Mathews married Mary Sylvester Bartlett of Tamworth in 1872. They had seven children, two of whom became prominent later in life. Their first-born Hamilton Bartlett Mathews served as Surveyor-General of New South Wales. Gregory Macalister Mathews CBE, FRSE, their third child, won international renown as an ornithologist. He donated his outstanding collection of Australian books to the National Library of Australia. His collection of bird skins, sold to Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild in the 1920s, is in the American Museum of Natural History, New York City.
After two years in Singleton Mathews resigned from his post as a licensed surveyor. From that time his surveying was confined to a part-time practice. From May 1882 until March 1883 Robert and Mary made a world tour, visiting the United States, Britain and possibly Europe. In Ireland, Mathews visited his parents' village of Claudy, seemingly unaware that his father had been suspected of involvement in the murder of James Lampen.
Legal career
Mathews was appointed a justice of the peace for the colonies of Queensland and South Australia in 1875 and for New South Wales in 1883.This allowed him to serve as a magistrate in local courts. He did this regularly after he moved to Singleton where he also served as district coroner. This experience inspired his first publication, Handbook to Magisterial Inquiries in New South Wales: Being a Practical Guide for Justices of the Peace in Holding Inquiries in Lieu of Inquests.
When Mathews became interested in anthropology, he found his status as a magistrate advantageous. Contacts in the police force supplied information on Aboriginal ceremonies while others informed him about the location of potential informants or collected data on his behalf.
Mathews' coronial work exposed him to the sufferings of Aboriginal people in the districts around Singleton. He officiated at the magisterial inquiry into the death of a Singleton Aborigine known as Dick who died of malnutrition and exposure in 1886. James S. White, the minister of the Singleton Presbyterian Church where Mathews worshipped, was an active campaigner for Aboriginal rights. Mathews was friendly with White, but never became a political agitator, preferring instead to document the complexity of Aboriginal culture. In 1889 the Mathews family moved from Singleton to Parramatta in western Sydney where his sons attended The King's School, Parramatta.
Contribution to anthropology
In early 1892 Mathews returned to the Hunter Valley to survey a pastoral property near the hamlet of Milbrodale, New South Wales. A worker on the property pointed out a rock shelter where a large man-like figure had been painted by Aboriginal artists. Mathews measured and drew the painting and documented hand stencils in other caves in the vicinity. From these observations he prepared a paper that he read before the Royal Society of New South Wales and subsequently published in the 1893 volume of the Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales. He identified the human figure as a depiction of the ancestral being, Baiame. The encounter with the Baiame site, and the favourable reception of Mathews' paper by the Royal Society of New South Wales, marked a turning point in his career. His biographer, the Australian historian Martin Thomas, describes it as the onset of his "ethnomania". Mathews was further encouraged when he prepared a long paper on Sydney rock art which was awarded the Royal Society's Bronze Medal essay prize for 1894.From this time, Mathews became a fanatical student of Aboriginal society. He familiarised himself with the fledgling discipline of anthropology by studying in the library of the Royal Society of New South Wales which exchanged publications with 400 other scholarly and scientific institutes around the world. He also studied at the Public Library in Sydney. Mathews' work would now be classified as social or cultural anthropology. He did not practise physical anthropology or collect human remains.
In addition to documentation of rock art, which appears in 23 published papers, Mathews published on the following themes: kinship and marriage rules; male initiation; mythology; and linguistics. He capitalised on the considerable international interest in Aboriginal Australians in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. His reports were read and cited by major social scientists including Émile Durkheim and van Gennep. Apart from a few short books and booklets, Mathews published almost entirely in learned journals, including Journal of the Anthropological Institute, American Anthropologist, American Antiquarian, Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, and Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft. In addition to these specialist anthropological journals, he published in general scientific periodicals including Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society and the journals of various Australian royal societies including the Royal Australasian Geographical Society.
Mathews gathered information by forging links with Aboriginal communities that he visited in person. This was his preferred method of data collection, and he criticised Howitt and Lorimer Fison for "not having gone out among the blacks themselves in all cases." However, Mathews' personal investigations were confined to southeast Australia while his publications concerned all Australian colonies except Tasmania. When writing about areas he could not personally visit, he used data supplied by rural settlers whom he persuaded to collect information according to his instructions. The R. H. Mathews Papers contain many examples of this incoming correspondence.