As important for the development of my subsequent career as any of the ordinary course-work, was an event that occurred in my second year, 1934, a year when the students spent most of their time dissecting human cadavers. Wood Jones had been Professor of Anatomy in Adelaide from 1919 until 1926. One of his last official acts, before he resigned in 1926 to take up the Rockefeller Chair of Physical Anthropology at the University of Hawai'i, was to successfully recommend that the University Council establish the Board for Anthropological Research, for which Professor J. B. Cleland, the Professor of Pathology, had long lobbied, as a permanent committee of the University (Jones, 1987). The Board organized regular trips to different parts of Central Australia during the August vacations to study Australian Aborigines. Norman Tindale, of the South Australian Museum, always participated in these expeditions. Because of Wood Jones’s interests, anthropometric observations were an important component of their work. In 1933, the Lecturer in Anatomy at the University, Hugo Gray, had made these measurements, but he taken a position in England and no-one was available for the August 1934 expedition to Pandi Pandi, on the Diamantina River, near Birdsville. Probably because of my father's acquaintance with some of the academics involved, notably Dr T. D. Campbell, the head of the Dental School and organizer of the expeditions, I was offered the job.
This was the beginning of a long association with physical anthropology and university and museum staff interested in various aspects of Australian Aborigines and Aboriginal life: Norman B. Tindale, in the Museum, C. P. Mountford, Frederic Wood Jones, Professors T. D. Campbell (Dental School), T. H. Johnston (Zoology) and J. B. Cleland (Pathology), and later an American anthropologist, J. B. Birdsell. The trip to Pandi Pandi was a revelation to me: travelling along the ‘Birdsville Track’ from Maree to Birdsville; contact with Aborigines of several Central Australian tribes; and the production (with Tindale) of a movie film (16 mm, black and white), an article—‘Sandhills and Gibber Plains’—in the Adelaide newspaper, The Advertiser, to raise funds for the Board, and my first substantial scientific paper (Fenner, 1934). I went on two subsequent trips: to Nepabunna in the northern Flinders ranges in 1937, and to Eucla in 1939. In 1938, Dr Grenfell Price (then Master of St Mark's College, University of Adelaide), with the support of the State government, organized an expedition to central Australia to examine what were reported to be ‘Leichhardt remains’. I was asked to go in case there were any skeletal remains and, although it was August of my final year, I very much looked forward to the prospect of travelling by camel to a remote part of Australia. However, three days before the expedition left I was playing inter-varsity hockey and suffered from a fractured patella, an event that evoked commiserations from The Bulletin, August 24, 1938. Nothing of significance was found.
Frederic Wood Jones
Born in London in 1879, Frederic Wood Jones came to Australia as Professor of Anatomy at the University of Adelaide in 1919. He was a highly original scientist, interested in many aspects of biology, and carried out ground-breaking research summarized in his Mammals of South Australia, illustrated with his excellent drawings. He was elected a Fellow of The Royal Society in 1925. In 1927 he moved to Hawai'i as Rockefeller Professor of Physical Anthropology and while there wrote his first paper on the non-metrical morphological features of human skulls. He moved to the University of Melbourne in 1929, and from 1936 until 1942, he and I conducted a prolonged correspondence. He attempted, unsuccessfully, to have my long paper (Fenner, 1939) published in the Philosophical Proceedings of The Royal Society. He was a charismatic man, of great mental energy, an outstanding lecturer, with a very facile pen; he published 15 books and over 100 scientific papers (see W. E. Le Gros Clark, 1955).
Contact with Tindale led to other activities associated with the Museum. In December 1934, I was asked to join him on an expedition to Flinders Chase, the major nature reserve on Kangaroo Island, to make insect collections. While there we also discovered and dug out some diprotodon bones, and Tindale included me as a co-author of a short paper on these. During 1935, I developed an interest in Aboriginal skulls, of which the South Australian Museum had an excellent collection. Rather than making formal measurements, as specified by an international agreement (Hrdlicka, 1920), I was attracted to a paper written by Wood Jones on ‘non-metrical morphological characters’ of skulls (Wood Jones, 1931), and I wrote to him in March 1936 suggesting that I should make a similar study of Australian Aboriginal skulls. He wrote back supporting the idea. Over the period 1936 to 1938, I spent most lunchtimes in the basement of the South Australian Museum, and in the long vacations obtained funds from the David Murray Scholarship Fund of the University of Adelaide to visit museums in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra to examine Aboriginal skulls in their collections. In 1937, I stayed in Beauchamp House in Canberra, opposite the Institute of Anatomy, where the skulls were located. Beauchamp House is now the Ian Potter House of the Australian Academy of Science. I was appointed ‘Honorary Craniologist’ at the Museum (I believe a unique designation, not politically correct these days) and published one major paper (Fenner, 1939) and several minor papers on these skulls. When I was in Palestine in 1941 (see Chapter 3), I arranged to have these papers submitted for the degree of Doctor of Medicine at the University of Adelaide. After I had submitted evidence from Brigadier Neil Hamilton Fairley, the Director of Medicine in the Australian Army, to the Dean of the Medical School, Sir Trent de Crespigny, that I had ‘an advanced knowledge in the principles and practice of medicine’, I was awarded the degree of Doctor of Medicine (MD) (in absentia) in 1942. The examiners were Professors F. Goldby, of the University of Adelaide, and A. N. Burkitt, of the University of Sydney.