Calculating Colour: Whiteness, Anthropological Research and the Cummeragunja Aboriginal Reserve, May and June 1938

[Extract] On a sunny afternoon in late May 1938, two anthropologists, Joseph Birdsell and Norman Tindale, and their wives, Dorothy Tindale and Bee Birdsell, arrived for a short stay at the Cummeragunja Aboriginal Reserve, situated on the banks of the Murray River in southern New South Wales. Through what appeared to be good luck rather than good management, the group drove through the reserve’s gates just after the Aborigines Protection Board chief inspector Ernest Smithers who had come from Sydney for what was a big day for the reserve’s inhabitants: the commemoration of Empire Day. Their participation, though ironic, appeared at least superficially voluntary. Given indications of some contemporary Aboriginal faith in the residual goodwill of the British Crown, the Cummeragunja people perhaps nurtured some hope that the royal head of the empire would one day prevail over the Australian settler government and offer them rights as Indigenous people.1 Either way, on this day and, apparently, on every 24 May since the late 1880s, residents young and old had donned costumes, decorated their cars and bikes, and paraded through the streets in cheerful spirits. A returned Anzac soldier in full uniform led a colourful parade that included ‘Decorated motor floats with streamers and gaily dressed children, black minstrels playing in a gum leaf band and decorated bicycles’.2 Tindale and Birdsell quickly set up their motion picture camera to capture the event.