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Pygmy people in Australia,

From the 1940s until the 1960s, it was fairly widely known there were pygmies in Australia. They lived in North Queensland and had come in from the wild of the tropical rainforests to live on missions in the region. This was a fact recorded at the time not only in anthropological textbooks and articles but also in popular books about Australian Aborigines. There was even an award-winning children's book tracing their origins. In 1962, the first volume of Manning Clark's History of Australia recorded their presence on its first two pages and repeated the then influential anthropological theory about their origins and their place in the waves of migration of hunter-gatherer peoples from Asia who populated the Australian continent in the millennia before the British arrived in 1788.

The Australian pygmies are vexing for the political interests in Australia who want to claim that all the currently existing Australian Aborigines are descended from 'one people' and as such are the 'First Australians'. It raises the question Does their presence constitute evidence for a population that preceded the basic Aboriginal population in Australia? The problem for those making extensive land claims and claims for special rights for the currently existing Australian Aborigines is that the existence of Negritos and/or an extremely primitive people - Homo erectus at "Lake Mungo" - preceding the present Aboriginal people in Australia and largely eliminated by them - means the Aborigines were not the first possessors of Australia and the land didn't really belong to them, and the whites needn't feel too bad about dispossessing them. Thus in spite of well-documented evidence of their existence, the Australian pygmies are part of a campaign since the 1960s to air-brush them out of history.

The first extended contact between Europeans and Australian pygmies occurred in the 1890s at Yarrabah, an Anglican church mission to Aborigines established in 1892 at Cape Grafton, just south of Cairns. The three main tribes in the region were the Kongkandji (Gungganydji), Indindji and Barbaram, whose territories covered, respectively, the coastal area around Cape Grafton;, the eastern slopes of the Atherton Tableland from Lake Barrine south to Gordonvale, and the Great Dividing Range behind Cairs. All of them shared the same very short physical stature, as well as similar languages and culture.

In the mission's first five years, about 150 Kongkandji periodically visited to receive rations, but only a small number remained there permanently. After the Queensland Government passed its Aboriginal Protection Act in 1897, which forced Aborigines to be legally confined to reserves and missions, Yarrabah grew to a settlement of 150 residents drawn not only from the three local tribes but also from people all over North Queensland who bore no physical or cultural resemblance to the Cape Grafton Aborigines.

An Adelaide researchers, Norman Tindale, an entomologist and anthropogist at the South Australian Museum, was going through a package of old photographs of Aborigines sent him by a friend. One of the photographs of a group of men and women showed a wet weather hut thatched with what Tindale, a keen naturalist, recognized as the broad leaves of the wild banana tree. He could also tell that, if these were banana leaves, the people by comparison were very small. He made some enquiries and soon found that the only remaining stands of this plant were in the tropical rainforests on the eastern slopes of the Atherton Tableland in North Queensland.

At the time, Tindale and the American academic, Joseph Birdsell, were engaged in the most extensive project ever mounted in Australian physical anthropology to measure a large sample of Aborigines according to their weight, stature and a number of other bodily characteristics. They found the prospect of discovering a group in the Queensland rainforests so at variance with the norm irresistible.

They also knew that, since the nineteenth century, there had been a number of theories about the origins of the Aborigines and the migration of ancient peoples to the Australian continent. In 1927, in his book, Environment and Race,, the controversial Sydney geographer, Griffith Taylor, had speculated that several waves of Aboriginal migrants had swept before them an even older "Negrito" race. Maybe these rainforest people held the key to the story.

As soon as they could, Tindale and Birdsell drove from Adelaide to Cairns in search of the people in the photograph. They eventually found six hundred of them from twelve different tribal groups living on and around two missions, Yarrabah at Cape Grafton and Mona Mona at Kuranda on the Atherton Tableland. Some of them had only come in from the rainforest within the previous six years and spoke only their native tongue. They said there was still one family living a completely comadic, hunter-gatherer life in the mountains behind Cardwell.

Tindale and Birdsell examined and measured 52 adults and children at Cape Grafton and 95 at Kuranda. Most adult males were between 140 and 150 centimeters tall (four feet six inches to five feet). The women were shorter by 15 to 30 centimeters (six to twelve inches). Tindale and Birdsell concluded they were not just small but were radically unlike any other Aborigines in Australia. They named them Barrineans, after nearby Lake Barrine.

Tindale later said:

Their small size, tightly curled hair, child-like faces, peculiarities in their tooth dimensions and their blood grouping showed that they were different from other Australian Aborigines and had a strong strain of Negrito in them. Their faces bore unmistakable resemblances to those of the now extinct Tasmanians, as shown by photographs and plaster casts of the last of those people.

By 1963, the Barrinians had become the centrepiece of what was then a widely influential explanation of the origins of human settlement in Australia. Their existence was offered as powerful confirmation of what was known at the "trihybrid theory" of hunter-gather migration to Australia. This is partly endorsed by work on mDNA by one of the world's leading geneticist's, Mark Stoneking, results.

Tindale collected hand aces, cutting and chopping tools, spear points and other stone flakes while in Queensland and classified them according to time, place and culture. He argued both Kartan and Tartangan tools were produced by Negritos and were evidence of at least two distinct waves of Negrito migration to Australia.

Tindale and Birdsell identified Negrito features in at least seven different populations inhabiting a geographic arc from the Bay of Bengal to the eastern islands of Melanesia. They explained these populations as remnants of an ancient migration.

One obvious evolutionary influence could appear to be the dense tropical rainforest environment. There might be the same processes of selection and adaptation at work as those that produced not only pygmy humans in the African Congo but also pygmy elephants and pygmy deer. The problem with this argument in the Australian context is that only one particular region of tropical jungle produced human pygmies. The Aborigine of the equally-dense Daintree rainforest to the north of Cairns, for instance, are not especially short in stature but have a similar range of height to those in the rest of Australia.

Norman Tindale's extensive genealogical records including those of Australian pygmies can be consulted in a special indigenous family history section at the South Australian Museum.

What eventually happened to the Cairns rainforest people? The settlement at Yarrabah still exists at Cape Grafton. After 1897 it was not confined to the local people, but accommodated Aborigines from all over North Queensland. The missionaries deliberately disrupted traditional tribal betrothals so that a fair amount of inter-marriage took place. It ceased to be a mission in 1960 when it was taken over by the Queensland Government. In 1986 it became a self-governing Aboriginal community, but by then a large number of residents had left.

Today, there are 14,700 Aboriginal people living in the Cairns region. We presume a good proportion of them must be descendants of the original Kongkandji, Barbaram, Indindji and Djabuganjdji tribes.

In the process of establishing a better account of the origins of the first Australians, we would hope to see scholarship in the future eschewing political connections, and proceeding unconstrained by the ideology of the current generation of radical Aboriginal activists. No scholar should be party to the cover-up that has prevailed for the past thirty years about the people of the North Queensland rainforests.

References:

1. Keith Windschuttle and Tim Gillin, "The extinction of the Australian pygmies",Quadrant, June, 2002.

2. C.Manning H. Clark, A History of Australia: From the Earliest Times to the Age of Macquarie, Volume 1, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1962, pp 3-4.

3. Norman Tindale and Beryl George, The Australian Aborigines, Golden Press, Sydney, 1971.

4. Norman Tindale and H.A. Lindsay, Aboriginal Australians, Jacaranda Press, Brisbane, 1963.

5. Norman B. Tindale and Joseph B. Birdsell, "Results of the Harvard-Adelaide Universities Anthropological Expedition, 1938-1939: Tasmanoid Tribes in North Queensland", Records of the South Australian Museum, 7(1), 1941-3.

6. Joseph Birdsell, "A preliminary report on the trihybrid origin of the Australian aborigines", American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 28(3), 1941, p 6.

7. Norman Tindale and H.A. Lindsay, The First Walkabout, Longmans Green, London, 1954. (won Best Australian Book of the Year for Children in 1956)

8. Griffith Taylor, Environment and Race: A study of the evolution, migration, settlement and status of the race of man, Oxford University Press, London, 1927.

9. Mark Stoneking and A.C. Wilson, "Mitochondrial DNA", in Adrian V.S. Hill and Susan W. Serjeantson (eds.), The Colonization of the Pacific: A Genetic Trail, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989.

10. Alan J. Redd and mark Stoneking, "Peopling of Sahul: mtDNA variation in Aboriginal Australian and Papua New Guinean Populations", American Journal of Human Genetics, 65, 1999, pp 808-828.

11. Colin Grove, "Australia for the Australians", Australian Humanities Review. In the opening paragraph of this essay, Colin Groves refers to an episode of Ockham's Razor broadcast in April 2002, in which freelance journalist and author David Tribe.