WHAT FUTURE FOR OUR PAST?: Archaeology and society in the eighties

Walter Edmund Roth, the distinguished ethnologist of Queensland, went up to Oxford exactly a century ago, as a classmate of Walter Baldwin Spencer in the biological laboratory. Fortunately for Australian ethnography, their University Museum teachers included H.N. Moseley, a former naturalist and ethnographer on the Challengev expedition, and E.B. Tylor, the anthropological pioneer. By 1888 Spencer held the Biology Chair at Melbourne University, so he attended the inaugural congress of what is now ANZAAS. That was the year in which Roth arrived in South Australia. After a period back in London to complete a medical degree, in 1894 he became surgeon to northwestern Queensland.