Where the Ancestors Walked: Australia as an Aboriginal Landscape

By Philip Clarke, Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2003, 282 pages, paperback, $29.95. Reviewed by Penny van Toorn in the July 2004 issue.

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Colonial poets and cartoonists often personified Australia as a virgin, a young, untouched (white) female, waiting to be claimed and made fertile by British manhood. Such images have now largely disappeared from literature and the media, yet their ghost lives quietly on in the idea of wilderness. It is only recently that cultural geographers and ecological historians have publicly revealed the secret that Australia was not a virgin when claimed by Cook for Britain in 1770. As Philip Clarke explains in Where the Ancestors Walked, 'wilderness as a natural system did not exist when Europeans first settled here. The land was humanised by Aboriginal people both culturally and physically, even if that was not at all obvious to the newcomers' (p 219-20). Areas that non-Aboriginal Australians might think of as 'wilderness' were not pristine and untouched, but already 'walked', already shaped by human use, already part of human culture, not virginal nature.

The fourteen chapters of Where the Ancestors Walked take readers all over Australia, as Clarke comprehensively examines the ways 'natural' environments have been made by Indigenous cultural practices. The book is divided into four broad sections: Origins of Aboriginal Australia, Materials of Culture, Regional Differences, and Cultural Change. Throughout, Clarke offers a coherent, concise consideration of his subject matter, and for those who seek further information, the footnotes and extensive bibliography offer a network of paths to travel. The twenty-six page bibliography contains all the well known names, from the early English journal keepers such as Dampier, Cook, and Tench, through the classic 19th and 20th century ethnographers and anthropologists, to today's theoretically informed, politically committed, historians, anthropologists, interdisciplinary researchers and public intellectuals. Clarke's own considerable original research findings are scattered discretely throughout the chapters, rather than amassed and elevated to a privileged position at centre stage.

The great strength of Where the Ancestors Walked is that it brings together a vast body of cultural and historical knowledge, and presents it coherently in a form accessible to both academic and non-academic readers. The book is a mine of information about everything from food and medicine, to religious beliefs, social customs, trade, the visual and performing arts, tools and implements, and the central and northern calendars that divide the year into four, six or eight seasons. This is a useful book. I know I'll use it a lot, and I find its central argument entirely convincing.

Where the Ancestors Walked occupies an interesting position in the market-place. Like Inga Clendinnen's Dancing With Strangers, it straddles the distance between the airport bookshop and the university research library, as many scholarly publications are required to do these days. Clarke's book displays neither the seductive narrative speculations of Clendinnen, nor the theoretical virtuosity of Paul Carter. Yet the writing is down to earth, patient, modest, and lucid, and it certainly highlights the diversity of Aboriginal cultures that have humanised the so-called 'wilderness' in different parts of the Australian continent.

Where the Ancestors Walked is a resolutely conciliatory book. It neither embroils itself in political debate, nor worries about the politics of its own role as a processor and disseminator of Indigenous knowledge. The traditional Indigenous religious truth that the Ancestors travelled over the land and water, shaping the world and giving it meaning, sits calmly beside the Western academic truth that the biological ancestors of present-day Aboriginal Australians inhabited all of Australia when the ancestors of present day Anglo-Celtic Australians first arrived. The title, like the country itself, is a textual space where different ancestors meet without necessarily merging.

Despite Clarke's careful attention to the diversity of Indigenous Australian cultures, he makes some alarmingly essentialistic generalisations, such as '[I]t is the essential nature of all cultures to absorb change.... All cultures undergo change over time' (p 210). Considering what Clarke must know of white Australia's black history, the word change is euphemistic to say the least. This is a book that stresses continuity rather than rupture, and it foregrounds the fact that many Aboriginal people today continue, figuratively and literally, to walk where the Ancestors walked. Even though this walking may not be apparent to many non-Indigenous people, Clarke rightly insists, on the final page of the book, that 'Aboriginal identity survives if the self-identifying group believes that continuity has taken place' (p 226).

Citation

• Penny van Toorn. 'Review: Where the Ancestors Walked: Australia as an Aboriginal Landscape by Philip Clarke' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), July 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 30 July 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• 'Philip Clarke has penned an insightful and wide-ranging account of Australia's Aboriginal cultures from a perspective of great learning and insider privilege. It's an immensely significant work, revealing the extraordinary richness of one of the world's oldest continuous cultures.'
  
  Tim Flannery, author of The Future Eaters
  
  Since their arrival many thousands of years ago, Australia's Aboriginal people have developed a unique, rich and elaborate way of life. With a deep spiritual attachment to land and a strong sense of community, they have drawn on tradition to respond to new situations. In this way, they have thrived in Australia's changing and often harsh landscape.
  
  Early European settlers in Australia judged Aboriginal culture as 'primitive'. Yet the Aboriginal people they encountered had, in fact, a highly sophisticated understanding of their environment and complex strategies for finding food and medicines, and for making tools and art objects.
  
  Philip Clarke paints a picture of the culture and traditions of Aboriginal Australia. Drawing on research from anthropology, cultural geography and environmental studies as well as his own fieldwork, he explains the diverse ways in which Aboriginal people relate to the land across the continent. Heavily illustrated, Where the Ancestors Walked will appeal to anyone interested in understanding the traditional lifestyle of Aboriginal people.

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