In early 1892 Mathews returned to the Hunter Valley to survey a pastoral property near the hamlet of
Milbrodale, New South Wales. A worker on the property pointed out a rock shelter where a large man-like figure had been painted by Aboriginal artists. Mathews measured and drew the painting and documented
hand stencils in other caves in the vicinity. From these observations he prepared a paper that he read before the Royal Society of New South Wales and subsequently published in the 1893 volume of the Journal and
Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales. He identified the human figure as a depiction of the ancestral being,
Baiame (also spelled Baiamai and Baiami). The encounter with the Baiame site, and the favourable reception of Mathews' paper by the Royal Society of New South Wales, marked a turning point in his career. His biographer, the Australian historian Martin Thomas, describes it as the onset of his "ethnomania". Mathews was further encouraged when he prepared a long paper on Sydney rock art which was awarded the Royal Society's Bronze Medal essay prize for 1894. From this time, Mathews became a fanatical student of Aboriginal society. He familiarised himself with the fledgling discipline of anthropology by studying in the library of the Royal Society of New South Wales which exchanged publications with 400 other scholarly and scientific institutes around the world. He also studied at the Public Library in Sydney (now the
State Library of New South Wales). Mathews' work would now be classified as social or cultural anthropology. He did not practise
physical anthropology or collect human remains. In addition to documentation of rock art, which appears in 23 published papers, Mathews published on the following themes:
kinship and marriage rules; male
initiation;
mythology; and
linguistics. He capitalised on the considerable international interest in Aboriginal Australians in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. His reports were read and cited by major social scientists including
Émile Durkheim and van Gennep. Apart from a few short books and booklets, Mathews published almost entirely in learned journals, including
Journal of the Anthropological Institute,
American Anthropologist,
American Antiquarian, ''Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris
, and Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft''. In addition to these specialist anthropological journals, he published in general scientific periodicals including
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society and the journals of various Australian royal societies including the Royal Australasian Geographical Society (Queensland Branch). Mathews gathered information by forging links with Aboriginal communities that he visited in person. This was his preferred method of data collection, and he criticised Howitt and
Lorimer Fison for "not having gone out among the blacks themselves in all cases." However, Mathews' personal investigations were confined to southeast Australia while his publications concerned all Australian colonies (states from 1901) except
Tasmania. When writing about areas he could not personally visit, he used data supplied by rural settlers whom he persuaded to collect information according to his instructions. The R. H. Mathews Papers contain many examples of this incoming correspondence.
Kinship and marriage rules Of Mathews' 171 publications, 71 are to do with Aboriginal kinship, totems or the rules of marriage. His first publication on kinship was read before the Queensland branch of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia in 1894. It concerns the
Kamilaroi people of New South Wales whose country he knew from his surveying. Mathews noted that the Kamiliaroi community was divided into two cardinal groups, these days known as moieties (although Mathews more often called them "phratries" or less often "cycles"). Each moiety was divided into a further two sections. Particular sections (from opposite moieties) were expected to intermarry. The community was also divided into totems, which were also taken into consideration when marriages were being arranged. Particular totemic groups were expected to intermarry. Mathews noted that marriage rules similar to those of the Kamilaroi occurred across much of Australia. Some communities had intermarrying moieties without further divisions within the moiety groups. Others had moieties divided into four sections (now known as sub-sections). He plotted the distribution of marriage rules and other cultural traits in his "Map Showing Boundaries of the Several Nations of Australia", published by the American Philosophical Society in 1900. Throughout his studies of Aboriginal kinship, Mathews claimed that some marriages occurred that were outside the standard marriage rules as generally understood by the community, although they were nonetheless accepted. He called them "irregular" marriages and argued that a further set of rules governed these relationships. Despite these departures from the standard rules, it remained a highly ordered social system. Mathews pointed out that in Kamilaroi society there were some marriages, such as those between people of the same totem, that were never deemed acceptable. Mathews' rival Howitt denounced these findings, arguing that this information was imparted by "degraded" tribes, corrupted by European influence. However, later anthropologists, including
Adolphus Peter Elkin, endorsed Mathews' interpretation. Mathews' approach to kinship was very different from that of Howitt who, as John Mulvaney has written, sought "to lay bare the essentials of primeval society, on the assumption that Australia was a storehouse of fossil customs." Mathews reacted against this approach, which was based on the social evolutionary ideas of
Lewis Henry Morgan, a patron of both Howitt and his collaborator Fison. Howitt and Fison argued that the vestiges of a primitive form of social organisation, called "
group marriage", were evident in Aboriginal marriage rules. Group marriage, as defined by Morgan, presupposed that groups of men who called each other "brother" had collective conjugal rights over groups of women who called each other "sister". Thomas argues that Mathews found the idea of group marriage in Aboriginal society "counterintuitive" because "the requirements of totems and sections made marriage a highly restrictive business." The idea that group marriage exists in Aboriginal Australia is now dismissed by anthropological authorities as "one of the most notable fantasies in the history of anthropology."
Male initiation Mathews believed that ceremonial life was integral to the social cohesion of Aboriginal communities. Initiation, he explained, was "a great educational institution" intended to strengthen the civil authority of the elders of the tribe. Mathews' first publication on initiation was a description of a Bora ceremony, held by Kamilaroi people at Gundabloui in 1894. He returned to the subject of Kamilaroi initiation in his last paper, "Description of Two Bora Grounds of the Kamilaroi Tribe" (1917), published the year before his death. In the intervening years, Mathews wrote extensively on ceremonial life, mostly in southeast Australia. More limited descriptions of ceremonies in South Australia and the Northern Territory were developed from data supplied by correspondents. Of his 171 anthropological publications, 50 are partly or wholly concerned with ceremony. The majority consist of a detailed description of the initiation ritual practised by a particular community. By 1897, Mathews could claim to have documented the male initiation ceremonies of about three quarters of the land mass of New South Wales. Mathews wrote primarily about the early stages of male initiation. However, he published some data on female initiation in Victoria and he was attentive to the activities that occurred in the women's camps while neophytes were out in the bush being inducted into rituals by the men. Mathews documented initiation at a time when the ceremonies were endangered by colonisation and the consequent loss of access to sacred ceremonial sites. Many of the performers in ceremony who were known to Mathews were employed in the pastoral industry. Mathews' reports show that these historical changes found expression in ceremonial life. Motifs of cattle, locomotives, horses and white people were carved into the ground at ceremonial sites in New South Wales. Mathews' work on Kamilaroi initiation was cited extensively in a famous debate between Lang and Hartland about whether Aborigines "possessed the conception of a moral Being". Much of Mathews' research on ceremony was conducted during preparatory and rehearsal periods, rather than during the initiation rituals themselves. Thomas suggests that this may have been intentional on the part of Mathews' informants, since it allowed them to control what secret-sacred information was revealed to an outsider. That Mathews was permitted even this degree of access is evidence of the degree to which he was trusted. He was given a number of sacred instruments relating to initiation ceremonies, now in the collection of the Australian Museum. Information documented by Janet Mathews, originating from Aboriginal elders on the South Coast of New South Wales in the 1960s, indicates that Mathews was himself initiated. Thomas argues that Mathews' refusal to write directly about these experiences shows that his loyalty to the secret culture was "more important than whatever kudos he might have won as an anthropologist in revealing these secrets to the world."
Mythology Mathews' first contribution to the study of myth was a series of seven legends from various parts of New South Wales, published in 1898 as "Folklore of the Australian Aborigines" by the anthropological magazine
Science of Man. He republished them as a short book the following year. Over the next decade, Mathews published another dozen articles describing Aboriginal myths. While a few legends from Western Australia were documented by a correspondent, the great bulk of Mathews' folklore research was done in person. Mathews' interest in mythology connected with the British interest in
folklore study that was a serious branch of inquiry during his lifetime. The
Folklore Society, formed in 1878, was dedicated to the study of traditional music, customs, folk art, fairy tales and other vernacular traditions. The society published
Folk-Lore, an internationally distributed journal, to which Mathews contributed five articles. In keeping with the
Folk-Lore style, Mathews tended to rephrase Aboriginal narratives into respectable English. This was acceptable to his allies Hartland and Lang, both prominent in folklore studies. However, Mathews' rephrasing was queried by
Moritz von Leonhardi, the German editor and publisher, with whom he corresponded. Despite these limitations, Mathews' publications and unpublished notes preserve significant examples of Aboriginal folklore that might otherwise have been lost. Mathews' most substantial documentation of Aboriginal mythology can be found in his account of the creation of the Blue Mountains, as told by Gundangara (or Gundungurra) people. The story involves an epic chase between the quoll Mirragan and the great fish Gurangatch who tore up the ground to create rivers and valleys. Mathews' surveying background and his interest in topography made him attentive to the route of the journey.
Linguistics The first language documented by R. H. Mathews was Gundungurra in a paper co-authored with Mary Everitt, a Sydney school teacher, dated 1900. From that time, linguistic study was a major part of his research. Language elicitation can be found in 36 of his 171 works of anthropology. His linguistic writings describe a total of 53 Australian languages or dialects. Most of Mathews' linguistic research was conducted in person during visits to Aboriginal camps or settlements. He wrote in his study of Kurnu (a major dialect of the
Paakantji language, spoken in western New South Wales): "I personally collected the following elements of the language in Kurnu territory, from reliable and intelligent elders of both sexes." A few of his linguistic studies were carried out with aid of correspondents. A 210 word vocabulary of the Jingili language was prepared with the aid of a Northern Territory grazier. The Lutheran missionary and anthropologist
Carl Strehlow supplied information for a paper on Luritja, spoken in Central Australia. Mathews' publications seldom name the Aboriginal people who tutored him in language, but this information can often be found in notebooks or offprints of articles among the R. H. Mathews Papers. A consistent template was used throughout Mathews' linguistic writings. First, the grammar was explained. This was followed by vocabulary, first with the word in English and then its equivalent in the Aboriginal language. Words are grouped in categories which were loosely replicated in each article: "The Family", "The Human Body", "Natural Surroundings", "Mammals", "Birds", "Fishes", "Reptiles", "Invertebrates", "Adjectives" and "Verbs". Mathews' vocabularies typically number about 300 words, rising on occasion to 460. Mathews studied language in this manner because he believed that comparative linguistic study would provide evidence of the successive waves of migration into Australia when the continent was originally populated. Mathews used a system of orthography developed from advice on the elicitation of native terms, circulated by the Royal Geographical Society. Mathews' documentation was not sufficiently extensive so as to allow someone to learn or speak the language. Even so, his work constitutes an important historical record of many tongues that are no longer spoken. It has been used extensively in more recent historical investigations of Aboriginal linguistics. ==Conflict with rivals==