Eaglehawk and Crow: Aboriginal knowledges, imperial networks and the evolution of religion

Abstract

In March 1974, a group of Aboriginal leaders presented an open letter to the then Australian Institute for Aboriginal Studies. Demanding Aboriginal ownership of Aboriginal knowledge from the anthropologists and other "experts," they titled their letter, "Eaglehawk and Crow."1 In doing so, they alluded to an 1899 book. In his Eaglehawk and Crow, ethnographer and Presbyterian minister John Mathew made the unusual move of taking Aboriginal stories (he called them "myths") and transforming them into historical source material, buttressing his theories about Aboriginal history in deep time. His peculiar use of Aboriginal knowledge was possible because of a particular conception of the nature of "myth" and "religion" and their relation to "history," based on new ideas in the new field of comparative religion, originating in debates within Protestantism as well as encounters with diverse ritual and cultural practices born of expanding imperial networks.