RAHS Day Lecture – In Arnhem Land with the ‘Clever Men’

On researching the story of the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land of 1948

Event Date & Time: Wednesday, 1 July 2026 @ 1.00 pm – 2.00 pm

Event Location: History House, 133 Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000 (hybrid)

Cost: Free

Event Description:

In this richly illustrated presentation, Martin Thomas tells the story of how he came to write about one of Australia’s most controversial research ventures, the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. Thomas will talk about his own response to some of the deeply unethical practices of the original expedition and the ways in which he worked collaboratively with Indigenous communities to understand how they regarded an expedition that collected thousands of ethnographic objects, natural history specimens, and human remains.

About the speaker:

Martin Thomas is Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University and a scholar of cross-cultural interaction and exchange. He is a broadcaster, occasional filmmaker, essayist, and oral historian. His books include The Artificial Horizon: Imagining the Blue Mountains, The Many Worlds of R.H. Mathews: In search of an Australian anthropologist, and Clever Men: How worlds collided on the Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land of 1948, winner of the 2025 Mark and Evette Moran Nib Literary Award.