News Release:
Conference celebrates Roth family legacy
| Date 16/1/04 No 008/04 An international conference organised by the University of New England is bringing together for the first time some living members of a family that made pioneering contributions to anthropology while serving British colonial administrations around the world. Walter Roth is known as "the father of ethnology" in both Australia (where he was Queensland's Northern Protector and then Chief Protector of Aborigines between 1898 and 1906) and in Guyana, South America (where he moved in 1906). The conference, titled The Roth Family, Anthropology and Colonial Administration, will discuss the legacy of Walter and four other members of the family whose official positions allowed them to pursue their deep interest in indigenous cultures. Eight descendants of the Roths, from England, Australia and the United States, will be among the delegates to the conference, which will be at the National Marine Science Centre, Coffs Harbour, on February 9 and 10. Walter Roth's granddaughter Audrey, with her husband Michael Bennett and their two children, will travel to Coffs Harbour from England. Mr Bennett will present a paper on the life and work of his father-in-law Vincent Roth, who spent 30 years in the interior of British Guyana working as a surveyor and magistrate, and wrote many books on the history, people and wildlife of Guyana. Mr Bennett is the editor of Vincent's recently-published diaries, which will be available at the conference. Walter Roth's huge collection of artefacts from northern Queensland is housed at the Australian Museum in Sydney, which will publish Volume 4 of the Roth Catalogue just a few days before the conference. Around that time, his living relatives will have the opportunity to visit the museum for a special tour of the collection.
|
One of the conveners of the conference, UNE's Associate Professor Russell McDougall, said there was a growing interest in people such as the Roths, who, during the colonial period, came into contact with indigenous peoples and wrote about "anthropology" before it became established as an academic discipline. "Among these, the Roths were outstanding in the geographic spread and cultural diversity of their work," said Dr McDougall, a specialist in colonial and post-colonial writing (especially travel writing) in English. He has been researching the family for several years. The other convener, Iain Davidson, Professor of Archaeology and Palaeoanthropology at UNE, who has himself done extensive research in northern Queensland, referred to the legacy of Walter and the other Roths as "extraordinary". Papers to be presented at the conference will discuss the work of Walter and Vincent Roth as well as that of Walter's brothers Felix Norman Roth (a British colonial medical officer in West Africa) and Henry Ling Roth (traveller and Keeper of the Bankfield Museum in Halifax, UK), and Henry's son George Kingsley Roth (who became Britain's Secretary for Fijian Affairs after serving the colonial administrations in Fiji and Zanzibar). One of the 20 papers will explain how the Roth brothers' upbringing, in the home of their father Mathias Roth (a Jewish homeopathic doctor who had fled to England from a Continent in political turmoil) prepared them for a life of sympathetic engagement with "aliens". Media contact: Associate Professor Russell McDougall, (02) 6773 2642 or Jim Scanlan, (02) 6773 3049. |
