The World Of The Yaraldi
The Age
Saturday December 4, 1993
Anthropologist Catherine Berndt has kept her promise to document the songs, spirits, magic, healing and the food of the Yraldi.
CATHERINE Berndt lies on a lambskin before a picture window. She watches for shags perching on the little boats bobbing in the placid Swan River. Shags mean a change in the weather. That's what her husband Ron used to say when they walked, studied and worked as one, did everything together.
Emeritus Professor Ron Berndt, once Australia's foremost anthropologist and certainly its most prolific, died in 1990 aged 74.
Dr Catherine Berndt, now 75, co-authored most of their books. They wrote ``about 50 or 60", including the much-reprinted standard text, `The World of the First Australians'.
She is now in a Perth hospital, unable to walk. But her mind is still sharp and she remains as argumentative and quizzical as ever, recalling events and personalities with ease. Even those at the start of her career.
Berndt's latest book, `A World That Was', is published by Melbourne University Press. It is based on fieldwork and research carried out when the couple first met more than 50 years ago, he an aspiring young man from Adelaide trying to escape a career in accountancy or opera, she a brilliant Latin student from New Zealand.
At Murray Bridge, they met Albert Karloan, the last fully initiated member of the Yaraldi. Photographs and drawings show him as white- bearded and bald headed, sucking a pipe, confident of his place in time, alert and concerned.
``Ron regarded Albert as an intellectual of the highest calibre," said Dr Berndt. ``He inspired Prof to become an anthropologist. It was a once-in-a-lifetime encounter." The import of the statement impacted. ``But that's not to put down any of the thousands of other people we met and who inspired us."
After six months Mr Karloan said he was happy with progress of the field work. ``Now you know how to ask the questions a lot better it makes it easier for me to talk," he said. The path ahead for the Berndts was clear and a formidable research team was created.
The couple promised to tell the Yaraldi's story. Through Mr Karloan and a Yaraldi woman, Pinkie Mack, they gathered every conceivable piece of information on living and dying, initiation and song, spirits, magic, healing, foods and ritual. The coming into this world, the leaving and every action between was recorded with precision and wonder.
The Berndts wrote longhand, then transcribed, then typed and exchanged their texts for review. They asked people to draw pictures of how people dressed and hunted. She spoke to the women, he the men. Both had a gift for languages and rapport with individuals. European Australians could not understand this curious couple who camped with the Yaraldi, respected their rights, thought them worthy people.
South Australian Government authorities charged with the ``protection" of Aborigines objected to the Berndt's work. ``They said we were encouraging them (the Yaraldi) to think of themselves as Aborigines, and reminding them of the old ways," said Dr Berndt.
``It was the time of assimilation. Others thought I should be at home making babies."
But before the book could be written the now married Berndts were sent to the Northern Territory to study the way the pastoral industry was treating Aboriginal people, then to New Guinea for more research and London for higher degrees.
Back in Australia they launched the Department of Anthropology at the University of Western Australia while researching and writing and building anthropology as a serious discipline. They didn't have children. ``No time," said Dr Berndt.
In 1986 Professor Berndt started writing `A World That Was' to fulfil the pledge made to Albert Karloan. The anthropologists' notebooks were intact, their pencilled comments still legible. The Berndts' dedication to precise note-taking, accurate recording, indexing, cross referencing, storing and retrieval methods are the international measure for all sociological research.
In his later years ``Prof" spent the mornings with his colleagues on the campus, his afternoons and nights writing, producing 3000 to 4000 words a day.
``We all recall the absolute joy he expressed at rediscovering things in his notebooks," said Dr John Stanton, curator of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology at the UWA.
``He could still remember enough of the language. The value of their work is enormous."
Dr Stanton helped prepare the text for publication after Professor Berndt died and is listed as a co-author. It was originally expected that the Canberra-based Aboriginal Studies Press would publish the work, but the task proved too daunting. A grant of $20,000 from the South Australian Government was used to put thousands of pages on computer. MUP has printed only 1000 copies of the 624-page book.
The authors' insistence that translations of songs and stories should be interlinear with the original language caused considerable technical difficulties, but the effect makes the book easier to appreciate.
The Berndts have translated the songs poetically rather than literally, exposing a cultural richness obliterated by the Creole and basic English that has displaced the ancient languages: ``Where is that Piltindjeri? It is only a track.
Along the shore! You look down there at Lilekang There they are, dancing with shaking breasts Shaking in happiness.
There, where it is only an old man's track.
Along the shore!" Professor Bob Tonkinson, head of the UWA's Department of Anthropology, described `A World That Was' as ``a work of major anthropological importance ... the last of its genre in the anthropological literature on Aboriginal Australia."
The book is a work of powerful scholarship revealing the extraordinary complexity of traditional Aboriginal culture and the rules that kept it intact, a world hardly recognised or understood by most Australians.
Said Dr Berndt, waiting for the shags to sail into the foreshore: ``I hope it will lead to a cultural revival of the Yaraldi."
`A World That Was' is published by Melbourne University Press, $69.95.
© 1993 The Age