Endemic science fosters hope for Australia

James Waghorne, Ross Jones and Marcia Langton

University of Melbourne. 

When HMS Endeavour, under Lieutenant James Cook, sailed down the east coast of Australia in 1770, Cook, the botanist Joseph Banks, and the whole crew were amazed by the landscape they surveyed.

All commented on the lack of wild bush, the artist Sydney Parkinson writing: ‘The country looked very pleasant and fertile, and the trees, free from underwood, appeared like plantations in a gentleman’s park.’

Explorers and chroniclers who followed them repeated the same theme. This huge continent had been expertly managed for tens of thousands of years by its Indigenous population. Furthermore, at the time of European settlement, the evidence pointed to the Indigenous inhabitants enjoying better health and life expectancy than the interlopers.

By the 1930s, anatomist, ecologist and social critic Frederic Wood Jones, in his regular broadcast on early ABC radio, complained bitterly of the disappearance of native flora and fauna and the degradation of the landscape. He proclaimed that the colonists had singularly failed to adopt Australian native plants and animals: ‘All that can be said for the white colonist is that by a thoroughly vandalistic policy’ they have ‘made a profit out of the destruction of native fauna and flora.’ In this, Wood Jones represented significant concerns held by many in the community.

So what went wrong? Why did the colonists disregard successful Indigenous ways of caring for the land? Put simply, it was a sense of racial superiority, fostered and spread by the intellectual leaders of the new colonies, including university professors. We discuss this issue at length in Dhoombak Goobgoowana: a History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne. (A second volume of this study will be published in August.)

Indigenous knowledge offered a striking alternative way of understanding the Australian environment. Premised on ‘deep time thinking’, Indigenous knowledge takes a long-term perspective of people and their environment. Managing the land, responding to its seasons and climatic variation, was central to identity, religion, law and the understanding of the world of Indigenous peoples.

This ensured not only the future prosperity of generations of descendants, but also the preservation of the landscape and the creatures that lived there. Indigenous ways of living actively intervened in natural systems to foster harmony. Too often, colonists thought in shorter time frames, seeking to extract the resources offered up by the land, and destroying native plants and animals to cultivate introduced species. 

Western scientists built international careers from the unacknowledged support of Indigenous knowledge holders. However, recent scholarship is recovering these contributions across multiple fields, including early western scientific research. 

Among these famous scientists was Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer, Professor of Biology at the University of Melbourne in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Spencer led a series of expeditions to central and northern Australia, amassing internationally significant museum collections on Indigenous life and Australian flora and fauna, and publishing formative ethnographic books still referred to today. 

Spencer was supported in this by a series of Indigenous knowledge holders. In a talk to students at the University of Melbourne in 1895, he admitted that he would not have collected any specimens other than insects without the expertise of Indigenous guides. Similarly, his notebooks from a later expedition were filled with the contributions of his guide Erlikilyika, who explained the cultures of the peoples they met. Spencer and Erlikilyika feature on the cover of Dhoombak Goobgoowana, asking us to reflect how Spencer was feted with international recognition, while Erlikilyika was quickly forgotten.

In some areas of academia, there remains a residual sense of superiority and a dogmatic insistence that Indigenous knowledge has no place in western science. Yet elsewhere, Indigenous knowledge is contributing tangibly, as scientists and Indigenous knowledge holders move away from the old extractive practices and find ways of sharing knowledge. 

There are parallels between western scientific practice and Indigenous Knowledge in that both are founded on knowing through doing and experimentation, and an empirical understanding of the world as it is. Indigenous knowledge practices are founded on a holistic view of society and environment, while many western scientific achievements have been conceived in narrow terms, leading to unforeseen environmental degradation. 

Australia faces great environmental and social challenges. There is so much we still do not understand, but with more curiosity, and scientific humility, we have resources to overcome them.

The second volume of their study Dhoombak Goobgoowana: a History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne will be published in August.

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[1] Gammage, B. (2011), The Biggest Estate on Earth: how Aborigines made Australia, Sydney: Allen & Unwin p. 34 (online)

[2] Blyton, G. (2009), Revisiting Indigenous Australian health history, Health and History, 11: (2) 116–35; from Abbie, A.A., (1970) The Original Australians, Sydney: Reed, p. 95.

[3] Wood Jones, F., (1934) Australia’s Vanishing Race, Sydney: Angus & Robertson: pp. 16-17.

[4] Jones, R.L.et al. (eds), (2024) Dhoombak Goobgoowana: a History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne, volume 1: Truth (Melbourne University Press), a free copy is available at https://www.unimelb.edu.au/dhoombak-goobgoowana

[5] Griffiths, B. (2018) Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia Melbourne: Black Ink.

[6] Olsen, P. and Russell, L., (2019) Australia’s First Naturalists: Indigenous Peoples’ Contribution to Early Zoology, Canberra: NLA Publishing; Cumpston, Z. et al., (2022) Plants: Past Present and Future in First Knowledges, (ed) Margo Neale, Thames and Hudson Australia.

[7] Science Club Notes, Alma Mater, 3 September 1895, p. 14.

[8] Gibson, J. M. (2022) ‘Factotum and Friend’: Anthropologists, Informants and Ethnographic Exchange in Central Australia. History and Anthropology 33 (2): 214–42; Mulvaney, J., (2001) ‘Erlikilyika: Arrernte Ethnographer and Artist,’ in Histories of Old Ages: Essays in Honour of Rhys Jones, (ed) Anderson, A. et al., Canberra: Pandanus Books.

[9] Pawu, W.J. et al.(2024) Being and Knowing, in Langton, M. et al. (eds), Indigenous Knowledge: Australian Perspectives, Carlton: Miegunyah.

[10] Banner image: Joesph Lycett Aborigines using Fire to Hunt Kangaroos c1820 – National Library of Australia

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