Seeing Gamilaraay

Abstract

Fison and his family arrived in Newtown, Sydney in early 1871 during a surge of important publications on human origin and development. Lubbock’s Origin of Civilisation (1870) came off the press in the Fisons’ final year in Rewa. Two weeks after the family disembarked in Sydney, Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871) was published and extensively reviewed in Australian newspapers within two months.¹ In April, the first copies of Morgan’s Systems (1871) were printed, though the proofs had been completed the year before.² While the debates around the sin-gle or multiple origins of the races of man had been laid to rest, much was still in question. Based on the endpoint of the civilised European, the task for anthropology was to classify the stages towards that point, and to determine the mechanism by which human society evolved from one stage to the next. But as evolutionism sought to explain the success of European man and therefore the place of all humanity on the ladder toward that state, the glimmer of a new idea emerged that would eventually challenge the speculation and conjecture by which European superiority had become a science. Edward Burnett Tylor, who became Fison’s new correspondent in the final years of the decade, traced his intellectual genealogy to an earlier stage of anthropology that predated the Darwinists