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 Ethnographer and Contrarian Biographical and anthropological
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Ethnographer and Contrarian
Biographical and Anthropological Essays
in Honour of Peter Sutton

Edited by Julie D. Finlayson and Frances Morphy

 Wakefield Press

Ethnographer and Contrarian

Intentionally blank
Ethnographer and Contrarian
Biographical and Anthropological Essays
in Honour of Peter Sutton

Edited by
Julie D. Finlayson and Frances Morphy
Wakefield Press
16 Rose Street
Mile End
South Australia 5031
www.wakefieldpress.com.au

First published 2020

This edition published 2020

Copyright © the individual authors, and the editors

in the collection as a whole, 2020

All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from

any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research,
criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act,
no part may be reproduced without written permission.
Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Edited by Frances Morphy

Indexed by Sherrey Quinn
Designed and typeset by Michael Deves, Wakefield Press

ISBN 978 1 74305 792 6

Wakefield Press thanks

Coriole Vineyards for
continued support
 Contents
List of Figures, Maps and Tables vii
Preface ix

PART 1: Reflections on a life

1 Introduction: A contrarian life 3
Nicolas Rothwell
2 Outside the square: From Christian Scientist to social scientist 17
Julie Finlayson
3 Living Larrimah: A reminiscence 29
Francesca Merlan
4 What is a social anthropologist doing in a museum? 41
J. Chris Anderson

PART 2: On the politics of suffering

5 Suttonalia: A revealing moment in public anthropology 53
John Morton
6 Suffering and silence: Sutton’s challenge 66
Gaynor Macdonald and Suzanne Ingram
7 Speaking to others:
Anthropology’s languages, audiences and engagements 87
David F. Martin
8 Personal challenges and professional research in Aboriginal Australia:
Reading ‘The Politics of Suffering’ 108
David Trigger
9 Culture, development and the future of remote Aboriginal communities 120
Nicolas Peterson
10 The politics of suffering: Some contrarian reflections 133
Jeffrey Stead, Mary Laughren and Robert Graham

PART 3: On classical and post-classical societies

11 Marriage networks in Arnhem Land and beyond 155
Ian Keen
12 The resilience of Lakes societies: From classical systems to
‘families of polity’ and the endurance of ‘underlying title’ 180
Deane Fergie and Rod Lucas
13 Sutton’s model of underlying and proximate customary title
and the Lander Warlpiri region 213
Petronella Vaarzon-Morel
14 Géza Róheim’s Australian dreams 232
Philip Jones

Appendix: Peter Sutton: A complete bibliography 249

Contributors 266
Index 272
List of Figures, Maps and Tables

Figures
Figure 2.1 Huntingtower School, Malvern, 1920s 19
Figure 2.2 Aerial view of Huntingtower in Mt Waverley, 1950s 22
Figure 2.3 Peter Sutton and his classmates, the Huntingtower
matriculation class of 1963 23
Figure 7.1 Priority Indigenous outcomes,
Productivity Commission, 2003 96
Figure 7.2 The translation space between Aboriginal lifeworlds
and policy frameworks 97
Figure 8.1 Researching Waanyi native title rights,
north-west Queensland, 3 August 2016 112
Figure 9.1 Aboriginal employment at the Granites,
Central Australia, 1986–2009 124
Figure 11.1 Marriages of four Gu-jingarliya patrigroups
(late 1950s, early 1960s) 159
Figure 11.2 Yolngu marriage network from 1976 genealogies
of patrigroups centred mainly at Milingimbi
Figure 11.3 Yolngu marriage network between lineages 162
Figure 11.4 Worrorran marriage network 162
Figure 11.5 Garnai marriage network 174
Figure 12.1: Pintara and maduka relations in a classical
Lakes system 186
Figure 12.2: Pintara and maduka relations over time 188
Figure 12.3: The articulation of social and territorial relations
through madu, pintara and maduka 188
Figure 12.4 Naming changes in the northern Lakes area
from the 1850s 191
Figure 12.5 Chart of ‘promised’ marriages 192
Figure 12.6 Approximating the transition from the classical
to the post-classical system of marriage 193

v ii
Figure 12.7 Truncated family tree of the waterhole family c. 1930s 196
Figure 12.8 The family of Matilda Abbott at Mundowdna
(late 1940s) and Marree (1950s and 1960s) 198
Figure 12.9 The development of the Bennett family of
polity over time 200
Figure 12.10 The Abbotts, an Arabana family of polity, and their
relationship to the Bennetts 201
Figure 12.11 The relationship between the Abbotts, Bennetts
and the Daltons 202
Figure 12.12 The development of four families of polity amongst
a group of cousins born around the turn of the 20th century

Maps
Map 11.1 Yolngu dialects and their western neighbours 157
Map 11.2 Burarra regional identities (‘communities’) 164
Map 12.1 A broad geographic orientation to the location of
Lakes societies 182
Map 12.2 The northern Lakes area 194
Map 12.3 Mud map of the movements of the Abbots and
Bennetts, 1920s and 1930s 197
Map 12.4 Movements of the Abbott-Bennett family from the 1920s
(leaving Cannuwalkaninna bore) to the 1960s (Marree) 199
Map 12.5 The route of the Cleaver family from Killalpaninna to
Broken Hill (1960s) via Murnpeowie (1940s), and Tibooburra
(1950s) 203

Tables
Table 11.1 Burarra/Gu-jingarliya kin terminology 158
Table 11.2 Yolngu kin terminology 161
Table 11.3 Yolngu and Burarra patrigroups compared 166
Table 11.4 Yolngu dialect groups 167
Table 11.5 Worrorran (Ngarinyin) kin terminology 169
Table 11.6 Garnai kin terminology 172

v iii
 Preface

On a wet winter weekend in August 2016, in a University of Adelaide meeting

room, a group of 70 colleagues and friends gathered to celebrate Peter
Sutton’s 70th birthday. A special treat for Peter was the presence of Bruce
Rigsby, former Professor of Anthropology at the University of Queensland.
Coming from the American tradition, Bruce combined linguistics with
anthropology in his academic practice, and it was this that had attracted
Peter to undertake his PhD research in Bruce’s department. These dual
interests have persisted through Peter’s subsequent research, as these
volumes demonstrate.
LocuSAR – an Adelaide based consultancy and research consortium
comprised of Deane Fergie, Rod Lucas, Mandy Paul and Paul Monaghan –
invited speakers to present papers in his honour, covering a wide range of
themes. Clara Stockigt was a co-conspirator in the surprise event. LocuSAR
engaged Bronya Magovern to sketch proceedings, and several research
students were asked to take photographs of the occasion.
The symposium resulted in 27 contributions for a festschrift that
responds to the full breadth of Peter Sutton’s varied career and interests.
Peter has been at various times, and sometimes simultaneously, a museum-
based anthropologist with a foundational role in raising the profile of
Australian Indigenous art, an anthropologist and linguist who has made
significant ethnographic, analytical and theoretical contributions to both
fields, and to the intersection between them, an expert on native title, and
a public intellectual – one of the first to draw back the curtain on the social
catastrophe that was unfolding on Cape York. Both the breadth of the
topics covered, and the sheer number of chapters, led us to decide to divide

ix
the contributions into two companion volumes. The editorial work was
begun by Paul Monaghan, taken further by Michael Walsh, collated by Julie
Finlayson and completed by Frances Morphy, who also prepared the two
manuscripts for submission to the publisher. The editors acknowledge with
gratitude the funding generously donated for the production of these books
by Aak Puul Ngatham (APN) Cape York, a community-based organisation
in Aurukun. This funding was given in recognition of Peter’s deep and
long-term connection to Wik people. We also thank the individual donors,
both named and anonymous, who contributed funds to cover aspects of the
publication costs.
The first of these, titled Ethnographer and Contrarian, begins with a set of
biographical essays that provide an overview of Peter’s life and aspects of his
career, including a fascinating account of his early years. The second section
is focused on his important book The Politics of Suffering, and contains essays
reflecting on the reactions to its publication, or on its resonances with
contributors’ own experiences in the field. The third part addresses Peter’s
ground-breaking analysis of social change and of the transition between
‘classical’ and ‘post-classical’ social formations in Aboriginal Australia, and
the emergence of ‘families of polity’. The volume concludes with a complete
bibliography of Peter’s published works.
The second volume, titled More than Mere Words, focuses on Australian
Indigenous languages in place and through time, and on aspects of the
history of language study in Australia. The book begins with two chapters
that give a historical perspective on the study of language. There follows a
section on language as a reflection of connection to place, and then a set
of essays on language in its socio-cultural contexts, spanning prehistory
to the present. The final part of the book reflects on the consequences of
the colonial encounter through a consideration of language endangerment.
In the title of this volume we hope to have captured both the complexity
of languages as systems embedded in their social contexts through space
and time, and a sense that this celebration of Peter’s life and career cannot
simply be read as ‘mere words’.

Julie Finlayson, Paul Monaghan, Frances Morphy, Michael Walsh

March, 2020

x
Part 1

Reflections on a life
Intentionally blank
 1

Introduction: A contrarian life

Nicolas Rothwell

The youthful, long-haired scholar trudging the old tracks of the western
Cape; the precise linguist, unravelling not just the links between arcane
dialects and their key features but their social nuances as well; the ardent
seeker, adrift in the Outback, in constant quest for clues to insight; the native
title researcher, armed with his elaborate ethnographic interpretations;
the Land Rover enthusiast, stretched out beneath the chassis of an ailing
vehicle, hands black with oil and grease, eyes gazing up into a broken engine’s
depths – no one can deny it: the images that come to mind when one seeks
to place Peter Sutton in his rightful frame within the world of thought are
vivid, varied and multiplicit. How brightly he shines, how hard he is to keep
in focus, how strongly ideas and feelings contend in him, how much he still
baffles those who think themselves his academic or disciplinary kin! First
serious explorer of contemporary Aboriginal art-making, close, patient
reader of the early 20th century’s radical networks across Australia, natural
aesthete and subtle aesthetician – Sutton is all these things, as those who
chase down his dispersed profusion of books and papers know – but where
is the centre, how to fix his co-ordinates?
This volume and its companion, much like the initial findings from
an underground particle physics experiment or some ambitious deep
space sensor telescope, present a first outline, a guide to the more obvious
features of Sutton’s formally bounded professional life in anthropology
and linguistics. Their essays speak of connections and lines of influence, of

3
 E T HNOGR A P HER A ND C ON T R A R I A N

controversies and rivalries and shared endeavours. They seek to trace out
the course of a career, but end by filling in a portrait of a cast of mind –
the mind of a rather otherworldly being, a mind ineffably light and airy, yet
pulled earthwards by an undertone of dark, grieving heaviness. An image
begins to take form: that of a presiding sensibility, more than a set and rigid
intellectual persona. It is the image of an outsider, a well-connected outsider,
but an outsider still, separated by a thin crystal pane from the wider world,
and freed by his station from many of its blindnesses and silences: free to
observe, free to testify.
Just as Sutton himself once longed, and still longs, to write a full biography
of his Cape York predecessor, the bold, high-minded Ursula Hope McConnel,
so doubtless some future biographer would relish the chance to write a well-
sourced account of Sutton’s thoughts and interests and their development –
and perhaps a magic treasure trunk of photos and documents such as the
one of McConnel’s that Sutton came upon in Adelaide may await the ideal
chronicler in future times.
For now, though, to set the scene for these essays, some inescapable
points. As Sutton himself describes in a brief, unpublished account of his
early years, ‘Thinking About Mrs Eddy’ (2011b), he came to his linguistic
field researches in north Queensland bearing unusual baggage. As a boy
he went to Huntingtower School in Melbourne, and was shaped by the
Christian Science religion. For a decade he was steeped in its doctrines,
and uplifted by the strong sense it conveyed of ‘life’s unlimited possibilities’
(Sutton 2011b: 10). By way of evidence he reproduces a rather charming photo
showing ‘the author as supernerd, Blue Mountains, 1966’, and appends a
brief, self-appraising note: ‘I was completely immersed in metaphysics at
this time’ (2011b: 3). In her essay in this volume, Chapter 2, Julie Finlayson,
who attended Huntingtower just a few years after Sutton, explores some
of the implications of this distinctive educational background, with its
emphasis on art, independent thought and self-fashioning: ‘The exposure
to differences of class, aesthetics, lifestyle and language are embedded in
Peter’s anthropological interests. The sense of being the Other was a strong
undertow in our schooling and religious experience’ (Finlayson, this volume,
p. 26). And doubtless this is a useful way into the story, and a way of situating

4
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