Clever Men

In this latest episode of Biographers in Conversation, Dr Martin Thomas chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about Clever Men: How Worlds Collided on the Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land of 1948.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: 

• Martin Thomas’s research began in the ABC’s sound archive, where he stumbled upon recordings made during the 1948 American Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land, an expedition he had never heard of.


• Martin chose the group biography form to capture the expedition’s internal tensions.


• Frank Setzler led the collection of human remains from Indigenous mortuary sites, shipping them to the Smithsonian. Martin describes this as a kind of kidnapping: displaced spirits in a foreign land.


• Martin made repeated research trips to Arnhem Land, showing digitised expedition films and recordings to community elders. Old men wept with joy at seeing ancestors and ceremonies on film.


• Clever Men ends in the early 21st century with the repatriation of the human remains, led by the late elder Jacob Nayinggull, a man Martin describes as one of the true clever men of the story, and one of his most important mentors.


• The title’s double meaning Clever Men is an Aboriginal English term for a shaman or spiritual healer. Martin explains how the title emerged from an incident in which local Arnhem Land people watched a mammalogist shoot, skin and stuff animals, concluding this westerner must be a powerful clever man from another world. The irony is intentional.


• Biography assumes a Western sense of self: names, birth dates, individual identity. In Bininj and Yolŋu culture, the dead aren’t named during mourning, numerical dates aren’t used, and the self is understood through a spirit that belongs to country and returns to it.