Author(s): Robert Macklin

History

Donald Thomson at 10 years old was a lone figure in Melbourne’s Bayside with its billabongs and creeks meandering to the sea. In his ‘Naturalist’s Diary’, he recorded his collection of wildflowers to wattles, seabirds to tiny blue wrens, mammals to reptiles to fish and to insects of every shape and hue. By 16 he was part-time editor of a national nature magazine.   At 28, as Australia’s first home-grown anthropologist, he met the only people who truly shared his worldview: the First Nations of northern and central Australia. He wrote, ‘We learned much about their language, social life, and customs, and of their elaborate rituals and tabus…and we grew to love these people.’   It was this love for a world threatened with extinction that drove Donald Thomson for the rest of his life, fighting for justice through a threated invasion and the reality of a hostile and unrepentant occupation.