HADDON'S 'CANNIBAL TOURS' AND IDRIESS ADVENTURES IN OCEANIA

Alfred Cort Haddon spent eight months in Torres Strait in 1888-9. Ten years later, in 1898, he returned with colleagues W. H. R . Rivers, C. G. Seligman and Anthony Wilkin to spend a month on Mabuiag. Sensitive to how short a time he had spent in the field, Haddon acknowledged the fundamental contribution of his Islander informants: ‘for the special work we had to do it was necessary to visit a people who were amenable and with whom communication was easy’.7 Although edited and partly written by Haddon and his specialist colleagues, the Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (1904—1935) draw extensively on interviews with Islander informants, and on transcribed ‘folk tales’ written down by mission-educated Islanders.

Because it was not yet the kind of professional ethnography that would emerge in the 1920s after Malinowski,8 the Reports is a heterogenous text which makes little attempt to submerge these other voices beneath an authoritative ethnographic discourse. A good example is the episode which opens volume five, an account of a trip by Haddon and Wilkin to a cave on the tiny island of Pulu near Mabuiag. The cave, called the Augudalkula, was associated with the legendary hero Kwoiam, whose decapitation of his enemies was reenacted in the so-called ‘dance of death’. Haddon’s account of the legend and its associated rituals is partly comprised of his own ethnographic reporting and description, illustrated by Anthony Wilkin’s photographs, but the material is heavily derived from Haddon’s Islander informants, including Waria, the chief of Mabuiag in the 1890s, and his predecessor Nomoa. Haddon explains that the ‘folk tales’ have been taken down ‘as told to me [or written down] in broken English’.9 This same material was later drawn on repeatedly and in detail by Idriess, providing the bulk of information about ritual decapitation that informs both Drums of Mer and The Wild White Man of Badu.

Haddon’s account of his visit to Pulu is motivated by a transparent fascination with head-hunting as the defining trope of the primitive. Although the writing purports to reconstruct what happened in traditional times, it is also an account of Haddon’s own fascination with the site, his pilgrimage to the heart of darkness, which becomes a kind of adventure story. It is the discrepancy between these two modes that prevents Haddon from giving a suitably disinterested account of traditional society that is untainted by his own presence. One photograph, for example, shows the small bay where canoes landed from Mabuiag carrying the warriors who were to take part in the dance of death. Despite the text’s attempt to recreate traditional times, we are struck by the presence in the photograph of Haddon’s own sailing boat and one of the Cambridge team standing beneath Kwoiam’s rock.

Ethnography’s capacity to capture or subdue the ‘other’ for its own purposes is caught poignantly in a photograph of one of Haddon’s informants posing, at his insistence, as the dying Kwoiam. Haddon remarks that ‘when we visited Kwoiam’s cairn I wished a man to be photographed in the attitude of the dying Kwoiam, there were no women about, but it was with the greatest difficulty we could get a man to strip, and then he behaved in a ridiculously prudish manner, but we were able to get the photograph’.10 Despite its ethnographic intentions, Haddon’s Reports began the process of kidnapping Islander legends from the sphere of ritual to the unstable realm of textuality, where ritual meanings were easily displaced by readers’ fantasies about the primitive. In the 1930s, that process of transformation was completed in the books of Ion Idriess.

Idriess went to Thursday Island in January 1927 and used it as a base until early 1930, when he moved to Sydney. For three years, he worked as a labourer on the Thursday Island docks, and on ships which took him around the Islands. He also formed a lifelong friendship with William MacFarlane, Mission Priest of Torres Strait and Administrator of the Diocese of Carpentaria. MacFarlane was something of an amateur anthropologist who had systematically interviewed Islanders about their traditional culture. In the foreword he wrote for Drums of Mer, MacFarlane spoke of the ‘rich store’ of ‘records and documents placed at [Idriess’s] disposal’.11 Idriess drew not only on MacFarlane’s research, but made cruises with him around the Islands, where he spoke directly with MacFarlane’s informants. Idriess explains in his Author’s Note to Drums of Mer that:

"...it was only after years of sympathetic friendship that [MacFarlane] gained the inner confidence of the old keepers of secrets...These at last...told much of their secret history to MacFarlane just about the time I came along and reaped the benefit of it."12

Idriess’s field work was later supplemented by extensive archival research. His principal published source was Haddon’s Reports, but he also read most of the other books then available on the history of Torres Strait, including Joseph Beete Jukes’s Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H. M. S. Fly (1847), J. MacGillivray’s Narrative of the Voyage of H. M. S. Rattlesnake (1852), and R . L. (Logan) Jack’s Northernmost Australia (1921). In addition to copying, often verbatim, large slabs of material from these works, Idriess’s books were copiously illustrated with photographs lifted from numerous sources, including Haddon’s Reports and the files of Australian photographers working in Torres Strait, including Colin Simpson and Frank Hurley.

There can be no doubt that in writing about Torres Strait, Idriess felt a sympathy for Islander people that was unusual, perhaps even remarkable, for the time, nor can we doubt that he believed in the legitimacy of his research from a historical and ethnographic point of view. But it is equally true that travel and travel writing were big business in the 1930s. Walkabout, the magazine of the National Travel Association, was expressly concerned with promoting travel as a means of fostering economic development, and Idriess was a regular, paid contributor. Idriess’s writing was part of this conscious marketing of exotic locations. In conjunction with Walter Cousins, his editor at Angus & Robertson, he developed innovative marketing strategies for his books. He placed extracts from forthcoming books in the popular dailies to whet his public’s appetite, used a radio program on Sydney’s 2KY to market his material, and approached prominent figures to write endorsements for his dust covers. There were even plans to make a feature film of Drums of Mer, though negotiations proved fruitless.13 However much Idriess may have boasted of their historical and ethnographic accuracy, his books were therefore written with at least one eye on the market for popular fiction. As one of his readers noted in a fan letter in February 1940, ‘to me [your books] are ethnological studies; and in the writing of them I note that you have made them also narratives of adventure’.14

In his books about Torres Strait, Idriess was obsessed with decapitation and cannibalism as defining features of a ‘vanishing’ and ‘primitive’ society. They are copiously illustrated with photographs of skulls and their symbolic substitute, masks, and with illustrations of the instruments used for ritual decapitation. The experience of reading Drums of Mer begins with its striking frontispiece, ‘Masks of the Great Au-Gud’. Idriess took the photographs from Haddon’s Reports. Commenting on the use of photographs in anthropological texts, Elizabeth Edwards notes that photographs have no inherent meaning, but are substantially defined by context: ‘material created with ethnographic intent...can be repositioned and reinterpreted outside the anthropological frame’.15 Idriess’s books exemplify this capture of meaning. In the context of Haddon’s Reports the photographs at least have some degree of anthropological ‘legitimacy’ as llustrations of material culture. In Drums of Mer, they are removed from the space of anthropology into the space of adventure and romance, where they are fetishised even further as signs of the primitive.

The first chapter of Drums of Mer describes in a lurid manner the dance of death, with which Haddon had also begun volume five of the Reports. Its immediate literary ancestor, however, is Sir Henry Curtis’s decapitation of the native Chief Twala in King Solomon’s Mines. Idriess’s descriptive set piece is accompanied by detailed drawings showing the instruments of decapitation and the display of a skull on the sarokag pole:

"Grasping the singai handle, Beizam jerked up the head so that the throat strained.. .One quick slash of the knife cut through the neck to the joint of the spinal cord. With a flick of the wrist the head was jerked sideways, so that the back muscles tautened, and the knife without a jar completed the circle. With the left hand stretching the singai and right twisting the head, Beizam pulled strongly but evenly upwards. There was a pronounced ‘click’ and sob, the head parted, and, as Beizam raised it on high, a tapering streak of marrow was drawn out with it".16

The point of this episode is to demonstrate that Idriess’s protagonist, the white captive Jakara, who watches the ritual, can be immersed in a primitive culture without participating in its defining act. Although he has become a warrior of Mer, Jakara is known as ‘Jakara the Strange’ because he resists both ritual cannibalism and the love of native women. Despite twelve years’ captivity, Jakara has ‘done well — preserved his life, his intelligence, and a clean white heart’.17

NOTES

7. A. C. Haddon, Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, Volume V, [1904] Johnson Reprint Company, New York, 1971, p. v.
8. James Clifford, The Predicament o f Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1988, p.21ff.
9. A. C. Haddon, Reports, p.2.
10. A. C. Haddon, p.34.
11. Foreword by Wilham MacFarlane in Ion L. Idriess, Drums of Mer, Angus and Robertson, Sydney 1933, p.v.
12. Authors Note by Ion L. Idriess in Drums o f Mer, pp.ix-x.
13. Beverley Eley, Ion Idriess, E T T Imprint, Sydney, 1995, pp.151,168,188.
14. Cited in Eley, Ion Idriess, p.310.
15. Elizabeth Edwards (ed.), Anthropology and Photography 1860—1920, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1992, p. 13.
16. Ion L. Idriess, Drums of Mer, p. 11.
17. Ion L. Idriess, p. 12.

By Robert Dixon in "Body Trade - Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific", edited by Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn, Routledge, New York, 2013, excerpts from chapter 6 "Cannibalising indigenous texts: headhunting and fantasy in Ion L. Idriess’s Coral Sea adventures", pp.116-120. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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