Charles P. Mountford

This article is about the Australian anthropologist and photographer. For the Canadian poet, see Charles H. Mountford.

Charles P. 'Monty' Mountford c.1950

Charles P. Mountford (3rd from right) at the 1948 Arnhem Expedition

Charles Pearcy Mountford OBE (8 May 1890, Hallett  – 16 November 1976, Adelaide) was an Australian anthropologist and photographer. He is known for his pioneering work on Indigenous Australians and his depictions and descriptions of their art. He also led the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land.

Mountford's written works, along with those by contemporaries, foreshadowed subsequent scholarly investigations like T. G. H. Strehlow's Journey to Horseshoe Bend (1969) and iconic late-20th-century works such as Stephen Muecke, Krim Benterrak, and Paddy Roe's Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology (1984).

Mountford's final book, Nomads of the Australian Desert, was the subject of an important court case due to its inclusion of culturally restricted content.

Early years

Mountford's father Charles married Arabella Windsor and moved into the house on a block farmed by his father at Hallett on the railway line 32 km north from Burra in South Australia. In the house his son Charles was born and was educated in the one-room local school.

The family income was constrained and they moved to Georgetown and then, when Mountford (who adopted the nickname 'Monty') was ten, to Moonta, seeking better circumstances. He took work at the chaff mill managed by his father, laboured at surface jobs in the copper mine, cut scrub and quarried stone, before joining his father in selling stereoscope slides, an enterprise continued after they moved again, to Adelaide. After the business failed, he took work as a stable hand at Kilkenny, then as a striker for a blacksmith before being employed for a longer term as a conductor on the horse tram service, continuing when the line was electrified.

In the meantime he studied at the South Australian School of Mines and Industries and in January 1913 obtained a permanent position in the engineering workshops at the General Post Office in the Engineering Branch of the Post and Telegraph Department. He was continuing studies in mathematics and natural science at the School of Mines and the University of Adelaide, although without prospect or graduating since he had never matriculated.

In 1914 he married Florence Purnell at Thebarton and they had two children, Kenneth and Joyce. In 1920 was promoted to the Darwin Post Office as Mechanic-in-Charge, work that took him to remote outposts in which he become familiar with Aboriginal communities. Suffering poor health from the tropical climate and hard work, Mountford, then thirty-three, was posted back to to the Adelaide GPO workshops.

When Florence died in 1925 Mountford revived his interest in indigenous culture and artworks in particular, and while staying with his father in Dawson they found at nearby Morowie Springs a rock with dozens of carved grooves which he traced and photographed. Ethnologist there, Norman B. Tindale at the South Australian Museum in Adelaide was interested and he and Mountford collaborated on a short paper on the find and it was read to the Royal Society of South Australia in 1926, the first of many which Mountford was to give to learned societies.

Brown Men and Red Sand

Charles Mountford filming on location in the Mann Ranges, South Australia. Mountford used film made on expeditions to Central Australia in 1940 and 1942, to produce his first documentary film 'Brown Men and Red Sand (Walkabout)'. Courtesy State Library of South Australia

Mountford's first book publication was Brown Men and Red Sand (1948), which joined a number of publications, including H. H. Finlayson’s The Red Centre: Man and Beast in the Heart of Australia (1935), and Walkabout travel and geographical magazine (1934–1974), which revised Australians' concept of 'The Centre" from the picture presented in J. W. Gregory's The Dead Heart of Australia (1909).

Mountford's and his wife Bessie's expedition over four months from Ernabella to Uluru in 1940, was undertaken with Lauri Sheard and skilled cameleer Tommy Dodd. This journey culminated in an extensive study of the art and mythology surrounding Uluru and the Kata Tjuta. The results of this endeavor were showcased through photographic exhibitions and a prize-winning colour film created in 1940, which subsequently became the foundation for Mountford's book.

Representative of the era's inclination towards "modular and portable" forms of travel documentation such as writing, film, and lecture tours, Mountford's films capturing Central Australia's essence prompted a lecture tour to the United States in 1945; when colour films Mountford had made, including Brown Men and Red Sands impressed the British Parliamentary Delegation when they were shown them, South Australian Premier Thomas Playford IV took Mountford to Canberra, where he showed the films to diplomats, politicians and the Department of Information, with the result that Mountford was funded by the Commonwealth Government to conduct showings and lectures in America and Britain. This eventually paved the way for the establishment of the American-Australian Arnhem Land Scientific Expedition of 1948.

Nomads of the Australian Desert

Mountford's final book Nomads of the Australian Desert (1976) contained details and pictures of secret ceremonies that had been revealed to Mountford in confidence during his fieldwork in the 1930s and 1940s. Members of the Pitjantjara Council swiftly launched legal action and sought an ex parte injunction preventing the book's publication in the Northern Territory. They argued that the Pitjantjara men who had revealed culturally restricted information with Mountford did so on the understanding that he would not share it with women, children, or uninitiated Aboriginal men.

The plaintiffs were successful, and judge Justice Muirhead agreed to grant the injunction. He concluded that a number of photographs, drawings and descriptions of persons, places and ceremonies featured in the book held deep religious and cultural significance to the plaintiffs, and that their publication could harm the community.

Although this injunction only applied to the Northern Territory, the book's publishers ultimately decided to withdraw the book from sale everywhere.

Foster v Mountford was the first of several Australian court cases dealing with Aboriginal secret information.

Legacy

There is a collection of his photographs, journals, sound recordings and other works created, written and gathered by Mountford in the State Library of South Australia, known as the Mountford-Sheard Collection, which has been inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World. It is of great cultural significance to Aboriginal Australians, particularly those in central Australia, the Flinders Ranges (Adnyamathanha people), Arnhem Land (Yolngu people) and the Tiwi Islands (Tiwi people), and the material is respectful of the people whose lives it documents. Mountford's articles on allied subjects were published in The Bulletin, Walkabout, Pacific Islands Monthly, Australasian Photo-Review and others now digitised and publicly accessible at the National Library of Australia.

Works

• The Art of Albert Namatjira (1944)
• Brown Men and Red Sand (1948)
• Australian tree portraits (1956)
• Records of the American-Australian scientific expedition to Arnhem Land: Vol. 1 Art, myth and symbolism (1956)
• The Tiwi: their art, myth and ceremony (1958)
• Ayers Rock, its people, their beliefs and their art (1965) – his M.A. thesis which became a popular paperback
• The Dreamtime (1965), The Dawn of Time (1969), and The First Sunrise (1971) – in collaboration with artist Ainslie Roberts
• Winbaraku: and the myth of Jarapiri (1967)
• Australian Aboriginal portraits (1967)
• The Aborigines and their country (1969)
• Nomads of the Australian Desert (1976) – withdrawn after sale for cultural reasons

External links

• Bright Sparcs Biographical entry
• Mountford-Sheard Collection of the State Library of South Australia
• State Library of South Australia: SA Memory page