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Life of Sir George Grey: Governor, High commissioner, and Premier. An Historical Biography.

The Anthropologist

page 16

The Anthropologist.

While he was still resident at Albany he must have commenced the record of his travels that was published in 1841 under the title of Journals of Discovery and Exploration in Western and North-Western Australia. It forms two substantial octavo volumes that rise much above ordinary works of travel in literary merit and still further transcend them in scientific importance. There are passages in it, such as the description of the flight of the albatross, that remain in the memory after twenty years. The style is at once simple and rhythmical, revealing a vein of poetry that lay deep in him. There is also much incidental matter that must have been novel. There is an account of a class new in history—the overlanders, or capitalist drovers, who took great herds of cattle across the Australian continent, founding settlements as they passed, their adventurous lives, the magnitude of their operations, and the fortunes they risked. There are striking reflections, that are almost in advance of his age, on "the laws of the progress of civilisation." This young man of twenty-nine, so long ago as 1841, had arrived at the conclusion that these sociological laws, as we now term them, are "as certain and as definite as those controlling the movements of the heavenly bodies," and can equally "be stated and reduced to order.'' He makes no attempt to state them, saying that the limits of his inquiry confine him to the conditions of a particular savage race.

In the second volume of the work he addresses himself largely to the theme. One-half of the volume (chs. ix-xviii) is occupied with the natural history of Western Australia and the social structure of the blacks. He describes the cave-paintings he discovered in the far north. He resumes and completes the inquiry into the identity of the various dialects. But by far the most remarkable part is that where he describes the marriage laws of the natives and their consequent complicated relationships. With no help from books, and only naked savages to question, the sagacity of the young explorer seized, as it were, instinctively the two main characteristics of the page 17primitive family on which McLennan has built up the one department of Sociology that has attained scientific rank:—1. Children take the family name of their mother. 2. A man cannot marry a woman of his own family name. He very justly compares these marriage laws with those in use among the North American Indians and among the ancient Hebrews. Grey seems to have been the first, in England at all events, to signalise these two great laws. They were nothing less than discoveries, and they deserve to rank with discoveries in the physical sciences. He himself claimed that they were the beginning of all the speculation and research that has since been lavished on these problems. Those interesting volumes may have been little read by the sociologists who as yet hardly existed. But these prime features of savage life were doubtless singled out by the reviewers who then, like Southey, threw themselves upon every fresh work of importance, and they may have dropped their seed into the minds of inquirers. The theme was, at all events, taken up by John McLennan, whose speculations can be directly connected with the lines so clearly and precisely laid down by Grey. All subsequent research on this subject descends from McLennan. Grey is therefore, as he claimed, the originator of the inquiry.

The chief results of his explorations in Western Australia and his official residence in South-Western Australia were personal to himself. There he served his apprenticeship to a long and distinguished career. There he first gave promise of the high qualities—courage, resource, endurance—he was afterwards to display on a wider field. There he learnt to manipulate a native race, and showed himself to be exactly what such a race wants—at once sympathetic and despotic. There, in the toils and dangers of exploring a savage country, was fashioned the indomitable will that was to be his surest ally. There, too, he commended himself to the great department of State which was to employ him for thirty years almost without a break, and which was to prove more faithful to him than he ever was to it. The Colonial Office had found its man.