Anthropological Myths and European Perceptions of Aboriginal Violence

In his 2013 Whitlam Oration, Noel Pearson quoted John Cleese and Michael Palin’s Jewish insurgents ranting against the despotic rule of Rome: “What have the Romans done for us anyway?” The reference provided Pearson with a pretext to list the achievements of the Whitlam government, and specifically what it had achieved for indigenous Australians. Among the benefits Pearson listed were the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, needs-based schools funding, student financial assistance and Aboriginal land rights. He singled out the Whitlam government’s educational reforms for particular praise, for without them, Pearson suggested, he would not have become the man he is. And in this there is no doubt: he is a man of exceptional erudition who may not have emerged as the important national figure he is without the reforms implemented under Whitlam. Consequently, Pearson averred that Whitlam is “Australia’s greatest white elder and friend without peer of Indigenous Australians”. It was a moving speech, and given the often acrimonious nature of debate in Aboriginal politics, it signalled a level of diplomatic maturity and dignity rarely seen in Australian political life.

I concur with Pearson: these reforms and particularly the legislative acknowledgment of Aboriginal cultural attachment to country represent a noble gesture of largesse on the part of the Australian community that should not be downplayed. Yet there is a disturbing presence lurking at the margins of Pearson’s speech, something salient by virtue of its absence. It is this simple fact: since the Whitlam government’s reforms, the quality of life for Aboriginal people, particularly of those living on the more remote repatriated traditional lands, has dramatically declined. Consequently, we are faced with the following paradox: during a period of dramatically increased funding, political representation and the attainment of formerly denied proprietary rights, Aboriginal people’s quality of life decreased in profound and disturbing ways.

Rosemary Neill addresses this paradox, by which benevolent reforms could produce catastrophic outcomes, in her 2002 book White Out: How Politics is Killing Black Australia. Neill notes that apart from an increase in indigenous university graduates, the political reforms of the 1970s have failed to deliver on their promises, with increased funding and political representation developing in tandem with increasing rates of homicide, suicide, domestic violence and child abuse. Pearson has elsewhere offered his own diagnosis for this situation in his Our Right to Take Responsibility (2000). It was the “poison” of welfare and the consequent abdication of personal responsibility, Pearson argues, that has produced the statistics we find discussed in Neill’s book.

Pearson’s is a forceful diagnosis and no doubt valid, to an extent. The anthropologist David Martin, in his 2001 paper “Is Welfare Dependency “Welfare Poison’?”, suggests that Pearson had failed to take into account pre-contact values surrounding kin loyalty and protocols that sanctioned the use of violence to advance individual and group ends. In other words, in the absence of welfare dependency, there would still remain intractable cultural factors preventing the successful implementation of Pearson’s program of social and economic reform.

As a consequence of these developments, the Aboriginal political debate moved into a deeper and more controversial realm of analysis. If one of the causal factors producing the statistics Neill notes was traditional culture and its post-1970s rejuvenation, then the long-valorised virtues of pre-contact Aboriginal society many had been led to believe in would prove to be phantasms, creations of white fantasy and ethnographic ignorance. Peter Sutton argues a similar line to Martin in his 2001 paper “The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Policy in Australia since the 1970s”, the paper which formed the basis of his 2009 book, The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus. Sutton holds to account not only the broader community but also the discipline of anthropology, which he claims has sanitised accounts of traditional violence. As he stated in an interview with Marcia Langton at the launch of his book in Melbourne: “the jig is up”.

Predictably, Sutton’s essay and book garnered a number of negative reviews from anthropologists, particularly those whose worldview was under attack. Most notably was Gillian Cowlishaw, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Sutton’s argument—that there is a sense of continuity between ancient forms of violence and current problems in remote Australia—became for her anathema. She published her views in an article titled “Euphemism, Banality, Propaganda: Anthropology, Public Debate and Indigenous Communities” (Australian Aborig­inal Studies, 2003). Her response is telling: “I found the reasoning and the scholarship behind Sutton’s allegations of an unbroken tradition of Indigenous violence profoundly disturbing.” She also wrote that in Sutton’s work “cultural factors are presented as a negative moral force that condemns the whole population to remaining outside its only chance for redemption”.

Apart from misrepresenting Sutton’s argument—his point is that “redemption’ requires acknowledging and attempting to change culturally sanctioned patterns of violent behaviour—Cowlishaw has unwittingly succumbed to a subtle form of racism. It is only possible to find cultural protocols that sanction violent behaviour “profoundly disturbing” if you view such behaviour in negative terms. The ethnographic record indicates that stateless hunter-gatherer societies use violence as a means of maintaining order and control—for example, in the absence of an impartial judiciary that could enforce punitive measures, violence provided a means by which grievances could be settled or contraventions of law punished. The problem highlighted by Martin and Sutton is that such protocols, which may be functional in a small-band society where groups are spread out over vast distances, become disastrous when transposed into the context of sedentary communities where a large number of families may live in close proximity. In this different context, such protocols can become explosive and highly destructive. In having her political pieties affronted by Sutton’s assertions, in addition to demonstrating her ignorance of the ethnographic record, Cowlishaw has unwittingly exposed her ethnocentric disdain for the people she believes she is defending.

The issues Sutton raised have divided the anthropological community. They also have profound practical ramifications, for what is at issue are the causes of high levels of violence and high mortality rates in remote Australia—so if we are to formulate effective solutions it is imperative that we are right about what is causing such phenomena. At the level of ethnographic debate, how do we go about resolving this issue one way or the other?

First, it requires an open and impartial approach to the data—with a corresponding abandonment of the ethnocentric prejudice that acknowledging traditional forms of violence is somehow a reproach against Aboriginal people. The intertribal blood-feuds that Aboriginal men engaged in to defend their land, resources and families evoke a familiar human impulse. We may even venture to consider such behaviour noble. After all, the centrepiece of Western literature, Homer’s Iliad, is about the heroism of men defending their dignity, honour and families through violent combat.

Second, it requires an honest and objective assessment of the historical record—particularly written accounts by Europeans who witnessed and recorded traditional culture as it existed before the disruption of its social fabric brought about by the incursion of pastoral activity into Aboriginal lands.

Third, we should acknowledge contemporary accounts, particularly from Aboriginal women, that highlight the destructiveness of these ancient violent protocols, particularly in the context of sedentarism, substance abuse and welfare dependency. These women are now advocating cultural change, given that their people are living in different social and demographic circumstances from those in which such protocols evolved.

John Strehlow’s The Tale of Frieda Keysser is an important contribution to the historical record regarding pre-contact violence. John is the son of T.G.H. Strehlow, author of that magisterial masterpiece of anthropology and linguistics, Songs of Central Australia, and grandson of Carl and Frieda Strehlow (née Keysser), the couple who worked for over thirty years with the Aranda people at the Hermannsburg mission at the turn of the twentieth century. John spent fifteen years researching and writing this sprawling piece of iconoclastic scholarship which comes in at over 1100 pages. What is more, the second volume is still to come.

What makes The Tale of Frieda Keysser a seminal contribution to current debates about pre-contact Aboriginal society and the relationship between missionaries and their charges is that John had access to his grandmother’s letters, written to German relatives from the 1890s to the 1920s. He has painstakingly translated them, as well as innumerable other documents from the original German. The fashionable and ideologically fuelled construction of a peaceful pre-contact society, of mission life and the early period of initial contact in the central deserts are disposed of throughout the book with dismissive contempt. He marshals a staggering array of early accounts of Aboriginal violence: of men against women, men against men, women against women and group against group.

John also has little time for the kneejerk rejection of missionaries as racist accomplices of colonial expansion and cultural genocide. Carl and Frieda assisted the Aranda to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to make the transition from a nomadic hunter-gatherer society to that of sedentary living, enabling them to survive during a period of profound change and destabilisation. Yet this process of cultural transformation was not a one-way street. As Carl Strehlow began collecting information on traditional Aranda life for his Die Aranda-und Loritja-Stamme in Zentral-Australien (1907–20), he became deeply entwined in the religious world of the old Aranda men. As a consequence, his European consciousness was irretrievably changed and enriched by the encounter.

Most government officials in the late nineteenth century were under the spell of social Darwinism, assuming that Aboriginal people would eventuality become extinct. The assumption was that Aboriginal people were on a lower rung of the evolutionary ladder and that this innate inferiority condemned them to inevitable extinction—the “doomed race” theory. The idea was given the stamp of academic approval in Spencer and Gillen’s seminal work The Native Tribes of Central Australia, which provided the intellectual context for both the anthropological and broader community’s attitude towards Aboriginal people. Carl Strehlow was a rare exception in a society that seemed more interested in collecting the artefacts and the cultural practices of Aranda culture for posterity than in preserving the people themselves. He knew the people intimately and realised that, in the changing conditions, tradition needed to be transformed if the Aranda had any kind of future in the modern world. As John writes when discussing the destructive effects of intergroup violence in the context of sedentarism:

Neither side could be seen to come off worse in an exchange. Honour was all. Under traditional conditions, the violence was normally (though not always) kept within certain limits largely because of the time-lag involved … However, once the separate clan groups started living together, or lived close enough together for payback to take place quickly, the process rapidly escalated. Violence became more frequent and more extreme. Here the role of the Mission became keeping the peace between two groups. This was only possible if the missionary was, firstly, respected and, secondly, seen to be acting impartially towards both parties, each with its grievance against the other. The missions, therefore, can be seen to be crucial in damping down violence levels as white settlement spread. Needless to say, the missions were the first target of the changes which took place in the 1990s, with experienced personnel sent packing and replaced by inexperienced new people with no understanding of these matters. The result was predictable: steadily rising levels of social breakdown and the collapse of all organisation not directly related to the selfish interests of the clan.

John argues that the neglect of this dimension of Aboriginal social organisation—that it was essentially a society divided against itself—became institutionalised in the academy, a form of intellectual myopia that began with the foundational texts of Australian anthropology. In The Native Tribes of Central Australia, Spencer argued that the collapse of tradition resulting from interaction with colonial culture was causing the breakdown of Aboriginal society. A correlate of this attitude was neglect of the role of traditional violence itself as an important contributing factor to such breakdown. In the chapter titled “The Social Organisation of the Tribes”, the whole issue of intergroup conflict is glossed over. John argues that a similar elision became institutionalised in anthropology for the next hundred years or so. While such an assessment of the entire profession is difficult to sustain, his point is well taken in regards to more recent developments in anthropology that seek to downplay the persistence of ancient forms of violent behaviour in the present.

The international anthropological community is aware of the high levels of homicide and intergroup violence evident in stateless hunter-gatherer societies. The standard reference in the field is by Bruce Knauft, Professor of Anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Knauft’s paper, “Reconsidering Violence in Simple Societies: Homicide among the Gebusi of New Guinea” (Current Anthropology, 1987) presents cross-cultural data indicating that small-scale hunting societies have between 100 and 200 times more lethal violence than modern state-based urban centres. Recognising this fact is not a problem for the international anthropological profession more generally. It seems to be a problem only for local theorists who have replaced empirically-based research with mirages of ideological fantasy.

Cowlishaw objects to Sutton’s use of what she dismissively calls “selected colonial records of Aboriginal violence”. Sutton actually uses over forty-seven sources, including a large data-set on spousal relations collated by Manilowski (see Sutton’s response, “Rage, Reason and the Honourable Cause: A Reply to Cowlishaw”, Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2005). In arguing against the notion of continuity between ancient and present forms of violence, Cowlishaw suggests we need to examine how “community relations have been affected by the burdensome, confusing and changing policies of successive governments if we are to understand the prevalence of destructive violence”.

There is no doubt that ancient patterns of violence have been triggered and exacerbated by the interaction with colonial society. But it is another thing to remove completely the locus of causality from Aboriginal culture itself, placing it solely in external factors such as government policy or lack of funding. In order to better understand the prevalence of violence, Cowlishaw might consult the ethnographic record more carefully.

If any doubt persists, The Tale of Frieda Keysser contains an enormous body of extracts from journals and letters written by Carl Strehlow. Strehlow lived with the Aranda for over thirty years, developing a deep and enduring affection for them as fellow human beings, affection which was reciprocated, earning him the Aranda appellation inkata (which roughly translates as chief, tribal elder or custodian over a specific area of country). He was not racist, nor was he trying to portray the culture in negative terms for his own gain or ideological satisfaction. He was trying to help the Aranda change acculturated patterns of violent behaviour that he believed would prevent them from adjusting to the world that was rapidly encroaching upon theirs.

A more balanced but still flawed critical response to Sutton’s work came from Diane Austin-Broos, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Sydney University, outlined in her “Review Article—Making a Difference; The Politics of Writing about Suffering” (Oceania, 2010). She is also critical of the work of Martin and Sutton in her book A Different Inequality: The Politics of Debate about Remote Aboriginal Australia (2011). Like Cowlishaw, Austin-Broos skirts the issue of ancient forms of violence contributing to current problems. Instead, she focuses on “encapsulation” in the state economy and the difficulty Aboriginal people have of adapting to the modern world due to issues such as remoteness, lack of employment opportunities and cultural difference. She does refer to pre-contact “revenge and warfare” in her introductory chapter. However, throughout the rest of the book she does not follow up her own observation, constantly arguing contra Sutton and Martin that high rates of violence and high mortality rates are due to economic and social marginalisation and “cultural difference”.

Throughout the book, Austin-Broos rejects the idea that there is continuity between violence in the deep Aboriginal past and that evident in contemporary remote communities. Her reason for doing so is an aversion to “pathologising” communities. She argues that what is missing from the “nightmare of pathology” portrayed by Sutton and Martin is a more tangible grasp of today’s “lived experience in remote communities”. But this is mere semantics that avoids the central issues. If, as Stephanie Jarrett and Bess Price argue in Liberating Aboriginal People from Violence (2013), many remote communities are in a state of crisis because of the perpetuation of ancient cultural norms surrounding the sanctioning of violence towards women and between individuals and groups, then this is an important component of “lived experience” that needs to be thoroughly understood.

To resist the ideas in Sutton’s book because they are politically unpalatable, that they portray communities in a “negative” light, or are an affront to tradition, is a position not shared by Bess Price, who has vocally argued that her community of Yuendumu, and the town camps in Alice Springs, are in a state of crisis. Of course intergenerational welfare dependency and substance abuse are contributing factors to this situation. However, ignoring the contribution of the ancient roots of violent behaviour to such dysfunction is intellectually and morally irresponsible. The mere fact that such behaviours existed before the current epidemic of substance abuse and welfare dependency, in fact prior to colonisation, means that a great deal more is going on here than mere “encapsulation” by the state and economic “marginalisation”. More positive or “emplaced” portrayals of remote people’s lives will not alleviate these problems. In effect, such approaches add to them by averting our attention from what it is going on in many communities and the degree to which violent behaviours have roots in the deep Aboriginal past.

One of the reasons I have made this excursion into current debates in anthropology is that John Strehlow makes quite serious claims about the profession in The Tale of Frieda Keysser. Yet he does not quote one contemporary anthropologist throughout the entire text. This is one of the book’s flaws. He claims, for example, that the Hermannsburg missionaries are derided as puritans by “more or less every anthropologist who has ever written on the subject”. In fact, Hermannsburg has been acknowledged by anthropologists and historians as an important site of cultural exchange and sanctuary against the encroaching world that the Aranda had to negotiate.

Austin-Broos herself has written a sympathetic account of the contributions of Lutheran scholarship and the value of the intimacy of the relationship Lutherans established with the Aranda (see her book Arrente Present, Arrente Past, 2009). Admittedly this study was published only a year before the publication of The Tale of Frieda Keysser, but Austin-Broos has been writing about the Aranda for the last two decades and is probably one of the most prominent writers on Aranda life. Also, one of her PhD students, Anna Kenny, has recently written an excellent account of Carl Strehlow’s linguistic achievements in her book The Aranda’s Pepa: An Introduction to Carl Strehlow’s Masterpiece, Die Aranda-und Loritja-Stamme in Zentral-Australien (2013), a work of the highest quality that puts paid to the idea that Carl Strehlow is anathematised by the anthropological community. This may have been the case in the work of Spencer and Gillen and those that followed after them, but it certainly is not the case now.

Where John’s polemic against the anthropological community has more bite is in his accusation that it has avoided the issue of how traditional culture has been a destructive component of Aboriginal society in the postcolonial world. In discussing the work of an early writer on the subject, Erhard Eylman, he claims that by omitting violence from his narrative, Eylman helped lay the foundation for this process of avoidance:

… ensuring that on the all-important subjects of infant mortality, blood-feuds, violence and so on—the burning topics of today—anthropology would have nothing to offer, becoming instead an escapist exercise for its white adherents. As far as offering guidelines for the future was concerned, it was bankrupt even before opening for business. And this was a pity. It could have been and should have been so much more.

These comments may be pertinent to Eylman, Spencer and Gillen and contemporary theorists such as Cowlishaw and Austin-Broos. However, the profession has long studied these phenomena; two studies which come to mind are Fred Myers’s Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self (1986), in which Myers is quite open about violent conflict among the Pintupi, and Isobel White’s research on sexual violence in the Western Desert (see her “Sexual Conquest and Submission in the Myths of Central Australia”, in Australian Aboriginal Mythology, ed. Hiatt, 1975). While the profession has not been as open about these things as it could have been, the situation is more complex than John would have his reader believe. His book would have been better if he had looked more closely at recent anthropological literature.

At the time that Spencer and Gillen published The Native Tribes of Central Australia, prophesying the imminent extinction of Aboriginal people and the Aranda themselves, Carl and Frieda were quietly and tirelessly working to halt that process. They battled against traditional ignorance regarding disease transmission, administered medical care and dissuaded the Aranda from engaging in culturally sanctioned promiscuity, practices that were killing people through the spread of venereal disease. Frieda worked tirelessly to improve infant health and help young Aranda mothers raise their babies. John’s claim is that culturally sanctioned infanticide and neglect of infants, not conquest or frontier violence, was causing the population decline among the Aranda, and that his grandmother, through the provision of medical care and advice to young mothers, was instrumental in halting this process. In her Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000, Anna Haebich acknowledges that the Hermannsburg mission provided sanctuary from frontier violence, but she makes no mention of the provision of medical care, mentioning merely that the children were locked in dormitories at night because of their unruly nature. If John is correct in The Tale of Frieda Keysser—and future scholarship will no doubt decide one way or the other—then the mission’s role will be seen as providing cultural stabilisation and facilitating population growth by providing medical advice and care during a period of rapid and potentially catastrophic change.

As Carl was offering the Aranda the fruits of Western civilisation, they were teaching him about their world. Given that the result of this process was one of the masterpieces of Australian linguistics and anthropology, it is hard to decide who was actually doing the teaching and who was doing the learning. Carl’s ability to assimilate this knowledge required a unique kind of sensitivity towards a culture profoundly different from his own. To quote:

For when all the criticism about other aspects of their lives had been made, and all the generalisations about other aspects of their lives coaxed into uneasy truce with the facts, it was undeniable they knew certain things which lay well outside the knowledge systems of the white men. Maybe this was the real basis of Carl’s empathy with the Aranda; he experienced them on a different level from his contemporaries … as people with a different way of experiencing life which in some mysterious way interconnected with his own. How else could he have been so sure they would survive, be almost the only person of his era to reject the doomed race theory?

Carl was undertaking his research at the time Freud and Jung were publishing their work on dream theory. The idea that there were other modes of knowing in addition to the intellect was gaining favour in Europe, the rational subject of Enlightenment discourse being questioned as never before. And it is in this context that John suggests receptivity to traditional religious thought may have developed in Carl’s mind. Traditional Aboriginal religious thought and social sentiment are anchored in dream-life, and over millennia it is out of dream-life that their mytho-poetic riches have grown. Much of Carl’s research, which resulted in his rejection of Spencer and Gillen’s less linguistically informed theories, focused on the Aranda word Altjira or “supreme being” and its associated verb form altjirerama, which means “to dream”. The implication is that like the ancient Romans and Greeks, the Aranda developed a cultural system in which religious experience and dream-life were inextricably linked.

While conservative critiques have rightly bemoaned the failings of the 1970s reforms, and the Coombsian delusion that traditional culture would somehow provide a basis for Aboriginal people to flourish in the modern world, there has also been a marked insensitivity to traditional religious and artistic life in such accounts. As Peter Howson points out in his essay “Reality and Fantasy: The Abject Failure of Aboriginal Policy” (Quadrant, April 2000), traditional culture, far from providing solutions to remote people’s problems, is actually a major component in the causal nexus underlying them. Howson then quotes Hobbes’s construction of tribal life as “poore, nasty and brutish”, going on to assert that Aboriginal religion can longer mean “anything but nostalgia for a romanticised past”. Similarly, Gary Johns, in his Aboriginal Self-Determination: The White Man’s Dream, sees no redeeming features in traditional culture. Johns has provided some of the most rigorous and astute analyses of remote life and the causes of illiteracy on remote communities that we have. But, like Howson, his approach evinces a reluctance to consider traditional society as little more than an anachronistic form of cultural pathology.

The sand mosaics or maps of country used in ceremonial activity are artistic embodiments of dream-life, and as a dancer moves across them accompanied by song, he or she is re-enacting the travels of ancestral beings during the creative period. The transposition of those ritual forms onto canvas produced the Western Desert art movement, one of the most vibrant and internationally acclaimed art movements in the world. It also gave rise to T.G.H. Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia, one of the masterpieces of Australian writing that stands at the heart of our culture as an important example of the enrichment of a European consciousness resulting from the encounter with the sacred poetry of the central deserts. Aboriginal culture, mythology, religion and song have also influenced many of our writers, from the Jindyworobaks and Judith Wright, to Xavier Herbert and Patrick White. Aboriginal culture has been, and no doubt will continue to be, an important component of our national cultural inheritance.

The writings of Howson and Johns, while some of the best thinking we have in terms of pragmatics, do not give any evidence of thoughtful and impartial engagement with Aboriginal culture. It is here that I sympathise with Austin-Broos, Cowlishaw and other left-leaning authors, who have been persistently critical of how Aboriginal culture has been portrayed by conservative critics. If the debate in Aboriginal politics is to gain any subtlety and maturity then Left and Right are going to have to listen to one another. Each side has grasped one term in a complex equation, the term most amenable to its own political and psychological orientation. Neither side seems capable of a more agile and dialectical approach to these issues in which the antithesis to a proposition may be as valid as the proposition itself.

If we are to make any progress on this issue, we need to replace political polarisation with a more informed and dialectical approach that grasps the complex nature of Aboriginal culture in its entirety—a more subtle critical capacity that has jettisoned the burdensome haze of ideological distortion. Carl Strehlow exuded such a capacity in abundance. And so does his grandson in The Tale of Frieda Keysser. From them, both sides in this debate have a great deal to learn.

What I find most fascinating about The Tale of Frieda Keysser are the little vignettes of frontier life. When the social history of central Australia is written, this book will provide an invaluable guide, overflowing as it is with letters and unduly neglected journals, articles and books. We hear of the sexual relationships between white men and black women, where the white settler would be incorporated into the Aboriginal kinship system. Consequently, having given the man a wife, her kin would settle near his station receiving in exchange meat, flour and tea. This was the rationale underlying the notion of traditional promised marriage. The marriage of a girl to a man from a neighbouring tribe would mitigate conflict between groups and also enable access to that tribe’s country, something that was particularly important in times of drought. A little-noted component of frontier history is the degree to which white men were assimilated into this ancient pattern of exogamous marriage.

We also find that Aboriginal men, far from being dissuaded from killing cattle by prison sentences, actually enjoyed the train ride to Port Augusta into strange and new country. After serving their sentences, they would return to the desert, glad at having met Aboriginal men from other regions and pleased with the six months of good food they had been given. On their return, they would often brag about their experiences to other men, who consequently looked forward to such culturally enriching adventures. Imprisonment was consequently abandoned, as it was an ineffective deterrent. These are serious issues—but they are also humorous in the way that Aboriginal people sidestepped, did not understand, or were merely content to remain outside the law that was being imposed on them. Except for maybe in Xavier Herbert’s Poor Fellow My Country, this exuberant and often comic aspect of frontier history is rarely captured by our writers. It deserves much more attention; it is the carnivalesque par excellence.

The Tale of Frieda Keysser is unique in its excavation of a huge number of ignored and forgotten primary sources, bringing to light unknown historical terrain as vast as the central deserts themselves. This is a good thing, as a great deal of our past is itself a terra incognita, unknown and unexplored. Much of what is written about the history and the present state of the centre seems more like mirages created by the human mind, not the things themselves. This book is a seminal contribution to the difficult task of dispelling such mirages.