Ich reiste wie ein Buschmann: Zum Leben und Wirken des Australienforschers Erhard Eylmann.

Merlan, Francesca

Ich reiste wie ein Buschmann: Zum Leben und Wirken des Australienforschers Erhard Eylmann

[I travelled as a man of the bush: on the life and activity of the Australianist researcher Erhard Eylmann]

Wilfried Schroeder

Science Edition, Bremen, 2002, 273pp, ISSN 16152824

Of all the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Aboriginalist ethnographic work of merit, that of Erhard Eylmann remains least known to the Australian scholarly community. His major work, Die Eingeborenen der Kolonie Suedaustralien [The natives of the colony of South Australia] (Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1908) has been partially translated, (1) but there is still no complete English version of it.

Wilfried Schroeder has written a biography of Eylmann that focuses on aspects of his personal life, his travels in Australia and his scholarly works. This contribution to Australianist studies is timely, but unfortunately, like the work of the subject it celebrates, unlikely to become well known in the English-speaking scholarly community unless it is translated.

Paul Erhard Andreas Eylmann (his work is published under the name Erhard) was born 3 September 1860 to a well-to-do farming family. The family property was on the island of Krautsand in the Elbe (near Hamburg). Following his high school matriculation at Osnabrueck in 1883, Eylmann studied natural sciences at Leipzig and Freiburg, where he completed a doctoral thesis on the systematics of European Daphnia, small 'water fleas', in 1886. He undertook further studies at Freiburg, Wuerzburg and Heidelberg, also qualifying as a doctor of medicine in 1889.

While a student at Freiburg, Eylmann met his future wife, Bertha Maria Ruh. Schroeder dwells on the confessional issues that loomed large at the time for two young Germans of different faiths: he was Lutheran, she Catholic. The two travelled to Helgoland, a sort of German wedding capital where nuptials could be concluded with minimum waiting time and fuss about interdenominational marriage. The young pair then embarked from Hamburg for Cairo--how this destination was chosen is not recounted--where Eylmann practised medicine from 1891 to 1894.

Schroeder narrates with considerable pathos the lingering death of Bertha in Cairo from a wasting disease in 1894. He considers this the first of several personal blows which mounted up to constitute what Schroeder sees as a tragic life-course: the death of Eylmann's brother Klaus on the Somme in 1916; the rapid dwindling of the family wealth in the inflationary period after World War I which reduced Eylmann to penury; the death of his second wife; and, especially in the last few years of his life, a lack of close human and professional contact, which ensured that his work remained relatively obscure.

After the death of his first wife, Eylmann returned to Germany and for two years (1894-96) studied natural sciences (especially geography, a subject for which he had shown an early predilection), language and literature in Berlin. He also prepared himself in astronomy, cartography, meteorology and drawing, for he had developed a project: to conduct scientific exploration in Australia. According to Schroeder, he had considered a number of other possibilities--northern and southern America, Africa--but thought there was little opportunity for new work there. As it turned out, Eylmann's work was roughly contemporaneous with the Australian work of the much better known zoologist and ethnographer Baldwin Spencer. From his position as Professor of Biology at Melbourne, Spencer conducted naturalist research in Central Australia from 1894, and is the author of the best-known ethnographies of the period (one of them, The tribes of Central Australia, 1899, with JF Gillen). Eylmann, by contrast, held no university post. After the death of his first wife, he also determined not to practise medicine. He had sufficient family wealth to fund his expeditions himself. He mainly travelled alone, or with temporary companions of the way, though taking advantage of German-speaking contacts in Adelaide, and at mission stations such as Hermannsburg in Central Australia, and elsewhere, to assist him in making further acquaintance and advancing his research.

Eylmann made a first solo expedition of over two years' duration, 1896 to 1899, during which he crossed Australia south to north from Adelaide to Darwin, with a shorter side-trip to Lake Albert and the Grampians; another trip in 1900 to Point Macleay, Kopperamana and other nearby destinations, and a third and final expedition in 1912-13. Between the second and third trips, back in Germany, he completed his major work of 1908. Eylmann always harboured the hope of visiting other parts of Australia but, in the end, his research concentrated on the north-south swathe between Adelaide and Darwin, his principal contacts with Indigenous peoples (so far as these can be reduced to known tribal identities) having been with Ngarrindjeri, Diyari, Luritja, Arrernte, Warumungu, Kaititja, Wagaj and Tjingili.

As Schroeder notes (p.236), Eylmann was not motivated by a particular hypothesis or theoretical position (such as the evolutionist and comparative ethnological questions that informed a great deal of the work of Spencer); he wanted to record the life he encountered 'as it was'. In some ways, Eylmann's relatively open approach resulted in his emphasising some aspects of the social scene in ways that distinguish his work from that of Spencer (and Gillen), and allowed him to make a distinctive contribution. It is beyond the scope of this review--which is essentially a notice of Schroeder's biography of Eylmann--to undertake a comparison of Eylmann's ethnography with the work of other ethnographers of the period. Yet some brief indications can be given of the distinctive character of Eylmann's work.

Eylmann collected information of several different kinds during his Australian expeditions. Besides his major, 500-page work on the 'natives' of Australia, he published a 1902 paper on fire-making, his extensive observations of bird life in articles of 1911 and 1914, and in a 1922 volume of contributions of the Geographical Society of Hamburg, a work on the practices of 'begging' which he had observed with interest during his Australian travels, that is the movements and habits of (mainly Irish and English, but also German and other) tramps and vagrants 'humping the bluey' around the continent. (2) In the overlapping of natural science interests and human ethnography he was like Baldwin Spencer. But Eylmann was unlike Spencer in taking non-Indigenous subjects to be of interest, and also in having a much less purist view of what he might report in his scientific writing about the contemporary situation of Aborigines.

Shaped by his training in the natural sciences, but also as a medical doctor and an observer of people, spurred by the feeling that it was important to document native life before it was altered too greatly, but unconstrained by any particular sense that he had to collect information only about the indigenes, Eylmann displayed great interest in the character of relations between Aborigines and settlers (both European and Chinese), and in the relations of Aborigines with missionaries, miners, and other outsiders who dealt directly with them. Thus, in his 1908 work he writes about many topics that Spencer, for example, and others like him who made their scholarly texts conform more narrowly to contemporary ethnological preoccupations, either neglected, or relegated to their 'travelogue' volumes (such as Spencer's Wanderings in wild Australia, 1928). Thus, Eylmann is a much more modern-seeming ethnographer, not restricting himself to observations or even an especial focus on traditional Aboriginal practices. Like Spencer, he records not only ceremonies, the making of fire, rock-paintings and sorcery beliefs, but also the ordinary dealings between Aborigines and various categories of settlers. Some examples that are reproduced in Schroeder's text give the flavour.

Eylmann made a special point of visiting mission stations: Hermannsburg, Point Macleay, and Daly River. He appreciated that missionaries were more benign towards Aborigines gathered there than some other categories of settlers, but also was sceptical of the missionary effort in general. Schroeder puts Eylmann's view this way (p.119): 'The meeting of European Christianity with nature-religions was impossible, not realisable, because two irreconcilable points of view clashed with each other, and could not be brought together'. The missionaries made no secret of their disregard for Aborigines' beliefs; they assumed the superiority of their own. Aborigines were bound to withhold confidence from them. But Eylmann not only makes clear this abstract view of the situation. With some humour, without being overly heavy, he recounts episodes of life, as he understood it, for example, at Hermannsburg. Schroeder quotes from Eylmann (pp. 96-7):

 Towards nine o'clock a loud ringing sounds. It signals
 the beginning of religious service for the natives. Now
 from their houses and huts come simply dressed men,
 lubras who are a bit ostentatiously adorned, and
 children who are mostly only clad in a shirt, and make
 their way laughing and chatting into the church where,
 according to sex, they take their places in two rows of
 erected benches. As soon as missionary Strehlow, the
 teacher and tender of souls, has ascended the pulpit,
 deep silence reigns, and all the adults seem to listen
 with interest to the sermon, which is held in the
 Arrernte language. Some of the babies--the children
 are always taken along to service--leave their mothers'
 laps and begin to creep with satisfied faces between the
 two rows of benches. Suddenly one lubra springs up
 excitedly, grabs one of these little ones, and leaves the
 church with him as quickly as possible. All shortly
 perceive the cause of this disruption olfactorily. After
 the service the seriousness of the church attenders
 quickly dissipates. As soon as they reach the outdoors,
 they make jokes with great merriment about the
 mistakes of which Missionary Strehlow was culpable. I
 would like to take this opportunity to observe the
 indiscretion that the missionaries commit, when after a
 relatively short stay in a foreign country they are
 emboldened to preach to their charges in their own
 language. It is then inevitable that they make mistake
 after mistake and as a result provoke their audience to
 laughter, but make not the slightest impression on their
 hearts.

Whether or not Eylmann is correct in judging the results of Strehlow's preaching merely ludicrous, or not (and it must be noted that Strehlow had, at this point, only been at Hermannsburg for a short time, but was to remain much longer), the point to be noted is that he interests himself in the interaction between missionaries and Aborigines. He also notes interactions between himself and Aborigines in a way that shows he is alive to their efforts to make contact with newcomers, outside the circle of established local missionaries and settlers, including sexual advances made to him by a woman at Hermannsburg, on the assumption that he (evidently understood not to be a missionary) might respond to this. He records the sometimes frantic defensive responses of Aborigines set upon by travelling bushmen. Schroeder quotes Eylmann's account of an episode on a waterhole of Lizzie Creek. He found himself in the company of men who were drinking (p.105):

 an horrific brew, the company threw itself upon it and
 slowly ladled it dry. As soon as nothing more potable
 was there, the tipplers who had meanwhile become
 drunk made their way to the Aborigines' camp, in order
 to get the younger women. But these ran away
 immediately, as soon as they saw the drunken and
 squalling men advancing. That in turn made the latter
 so angry, that, in their senseless rage, they lit a number
 of huts on fire. With that, the simple fetching of drink
 had become a serious matter, because the natives didn't
 hesitate and for their part, reached for their weapons. A
 deadly confrontation seemed unavoidable, so aroused
 were tempers.

Eylmann took a similar interest in the relations between Chinese and Aborigines at Pine Creek, the carryings-on of Aborigines and others at Knuckey's Lagoon near Darwin, relations at the goldfield of Arltunga, and elsewhere. All these matters would much later become the subjects of 'history', and only very much later, also legitimate subject matter contributing to the description of social organisation, social relations, and social change.

Eylmann met James Francis Gillen, best known as Spencer's collaborator with respect to The tribes of Central Australia (1899), and the postmaster of the Alice Springs Telegraph Station, on his first trip north, in 1896, on the recommendation of A Zietz of the Adelaide Zoo. Gillen was very helpful to Eylmann, giving him the benefit of his great practical knowledge of the region, and helping him to make contacts with Aborigines and Europeans alike. Eylmann and Gillen had common interests in geology and other natural sciences, and Eylmann was able to share with Gillen his Berlin-period exposure to the work of the German natural and cultural scientists such as Bastian, Haeckel, Virchow and Graebner. According to Schroeder's account, Baldwin Spencer, who first met Gillen in 1894, harboured some concern that Eylmann might get in his way, or be interested in some of the same subjects as himself (p.193). Again, according to Schroeder, Gillen was at some pains to convince Spencer that Eylmann's interests were quite different from his own, and that they were not specifically anthropological--something we may perhaps understand to have been a distinct prevarication of Gillen's understanding of the situation. Eylmann never met Spencer himself.

Following Eylmann's last trip to Australia, he returned to a Germany at war. He was compelled to report in as a Red Cross nurse from 1915, and was deployed as such from May to November 1916, but was never sent to the front. As mentioned above, in November 1916, Eylmann's brother Klaus, the appointed heir to the family property, died in France, and this was as much a body-blow to Eylmann as was to sociologist Emile Durkheim the death of the latter's son in battle in France around the same time. By this time Eylmann had received news of Gillen's death in Australia, and his contacts with Australia were severed.

Reduced in circumstances, his family's former wealth having evaporated in the inflation, from 1921 Eylmann was compelled to take a job in a woolsorting concern that was established on the lower Weser, not far from his childhood home. He was able to buy a small house, and it was here that he completed his work on Australian vagrancy. His mother and second wife died, and he subsisted by walking to work, coming home, and expending any available energy on his writing, withdrawn from human company. Shortly before Christmas of 1922, neighbours came to check on him, found that he was ill, and tended to him until he died. He was buried with little ceremony, and, Schroeder tells us, his extensive ethnological collection of Australian objects was hauled away and dispersed.

Schroeder has written this biography in the conviction that Eylmann deserves to be recognised as an Australian pioneer ethnographer of merit. That Eylmann has remained little known, he attributes to the circumstances under which he did his work-immediately before a world war in which Germany became the enemy--and to the fact that the work was written in German, and remained untranslated. He also correctly observes that Eylmann did not sufficiently cultivate professional contacts: he worked largely alone, and trusted that the quality of the work would speak for itself. It may yet do so: Eylmann would undoubtedly be read by the Australianist scholarly community if translation of his work were completed. As indicated above, I believe that he will be found to be a person with a distinctive and valuable perspective to offer.

Schroeder's biography is useful as a first account of Eylmann's life, but has its limitations. It is not everywhere aptly ordered, so that many subjects (such as Eylmann's acquaintance with Gillen) are addressed in a number of places. Such disparate discussions could benefit from being brought together, and fully treated both historically and interpretively. Who is speaking and thinking in Schroeder's text is mysterious throughout long passages. There are many places in the work where ideas are attributed to Eylmann--such as his conviction that it was not worth while undertaking work on other continents, but scientific study in Australia was likely to produce something new--which are not referenced. We have little idea whose thoughts are being reproduced. There are also many parts that linger upon episodes of Eylmann's life--the death of his first wife, for example--and then later, we suddenly find he has married again, without there having been any intervening reference to the second wife. The text, in short, is choppy and the biographic treatment incomplete. The account of Eylmann's scientific work is partly accomplished by lengthy direct quotation from his 1908 work, in a way that is not entirely satisfactory.

But the present work is a beginning for published Eylmann scholarship. Much remains to be said about the style of his work, the influences upon it, compared with that of the other major Australianist ethnographers. Further documentation of the relationship between Eylmann and Gillen might produce useful insights. More consistent biographical treatment of Eylmann may also be possible, and would contribute to the understanding of a man who, I contend, strikes the reader in many ways as having greater ethnographic sensitivity for his contemporaries, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, than do the more formulaic, better known ethnographers.

It seems worth noting, since the work would otherwise be difficult to find, that Schroeder's book is available from Science Edition, Hechelstrasse 8, D28777, Bremen, Germany, for 20 Euros.

NOTES

(1.) The AIATSIS library has the following references to partial translations into English of Eylmann's major work: by Kevin Sherlock, of chapters XIV, XIX and XX (call number: SF 57.5/1), held in the same library; selected chapters compiled by Robin Hodgson translated by Renate Hubel 1994, MS 3369. Further, written at the Australian National University, Canberra, (at what is now the) School of Archaeology and Anthropology, and also available at the AIATSIS library, is to be found Courto, V[ivienne] 1990, 'The tragical history of Dr Eylmann', BA(Hons) thesis. This thesis gives an account of Eylmann's life and his studies in Australia. Courto has also produced some preliminary, unpublished English translations of portions of Eylmann's journals. I am grateful to Nicolas Peterson for referring me to these, and for his customary helpfulness in assisting with references and computer access to these resources, I would like to thank David Nash.

(2.) References to Eylmann's other writings (from Schroeder, p.239) are as follows:

1902, 'Das Feuermachen der Eingeborenen der Colonie SuedAustralien', Zeitschrifi fur Ethnologie 34:89-94.

1911, 'Die Vogelwelt der Kolonie Suedaustralien', Journal flit Ornithologie 59:93-148, 259-99.

1914, Die Vogelwelt des suedoestlichen Teiles vom Staate Suedaustralien, Ebd., 62:1-35.

1922, Das Bettelwesen in dem Staate Suedaustralien und dem Nordterritorium vor dem Weltkriege, Mitteilungen Geographischer Gesellschaft in Hamburg, pp. 57-98.

A partial republication of a section (pp. 103-7) of the original 1908 work on sign language is Die Zeichensprache: DJ Umiker-Sebeok & TA Sebeok 1978, Aboriginal sign languages of the Americas and Australia, Plenum Press, New York (vol. 2:325-9).

Francesca Merlan, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Australian National University, Canberra, <francesca.merlan@anu.edu.au>