ABSTRACT
In January 1947 Bill Onus, President of the Australian Aborigines’ League, wrote to the two best known Australian anthropologists of the day, one in Sydney, the other in Melbourne, asking for their help. Bill Onus had been prompted to seek Donald Thomson’s help by a series of feature articles Thomson had written for the Melbourne Herald in December 1946, which were reprinted shortly afterwards as a pamphlet, ‘Justice’ for Aborigines. In 1922 Thomson enrolled at the University of Melbourne to study botany and zoology but his interests were not really academic. Thomson projected onto aboriginal culture an image of the world he wanted, an idyll where man was free and man and nature were at one. Thomson’s commitment to segregation of Aborigines in remote Australia probably ran deeper than any other advocate for it, past or present. Thomson implicitly rejected this framework of equal rights in the course of advocating ‘a real charter of liberty’.
