Gillen, Francis James (1855 - 1912)

Summary

Frank Gillen was a postal and telegraph worker from 1867. Initially working for the South Australian postal service, between 1875 and 1892 he worked for the Australian Overseas telegraph Service, stationed at Charlotte Waters. It was during this time that he became interested in Aboriginal culture and started recording Aboriginal words. He was posted to Alice Springs as post and telegraph stationmaster in 1892, later moving to Moonta and Port Pirie. In 1894 Gillen met Baldwin Spencer, then engaged on the Horn Scientific Exploring Expedition, and they forged a fruitful collaboration in pioneering anthropological studies. Their ground-breaking work The native tribes of Central Australia was published in 1899. The pair were in the field together on subsequent occasions, notably in 1901 when they made an expedition to the Gulf of Carpentaria. This resulted in the publication of The northern tribes of Central Australia (1904). Financial difficulties from failed investments caused Gillen to sell his ethnographic collection to the National Museum of Victoria in 1899. His ethnographic photographs are in the South Australian Museum.

Details

Chronology

1867

Career event - Joined the South Australian postal service

1875 - 1892

Career position - Employed by the Australian Overland Telegraph Service at Charlotte Waters

1892 - 1899

Career position - Post and telegraph stationmaster at Alice Springs

1899 - 1908

Career position - Post and telegraph stationmaster at Moonta

1900

Career position - President, Section F (Ethnology and Anthropology), Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science

1901

Life event - Accompanied Baldwin Spencer on expedition to the Gulf of Carpentaria

1908 - 1912

Career position - Postmaster, Port Pirie, South Australia

1926

Taxonomy event - Eucalyptus gillenii Ewart & L.R.Kerr was named in his honour

Related entries

Archival resources

Mitchell and Dixson Libraries Manuscripts Collection, State Library of New South Wales

• Baldwin Spencer - Records, 1880 - 1929, ML MSS 29; Mitchell and Dixson Libraries Manuscripts Collection, State Library of New South Wales. Details
• Francis James Gillen - Records, 1901 - 1902; Mitchell and Dixson Libraries Manuscripts Collection, State Library of New South Wales. Details

State Library of South Australia, Mortlock Library of South Australiana

• Francis James Gillen - Records, 1901 - 1902, PRG 54; State Library of South Australia, Mortlock Library of South Australiana. Details

Published resources

Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation Exhibitions

• McCarthy, Gavan; Smith, Ailie; Moje, Christine; Rigby, Rebecca, The Study of Australian Eucalypts, eScholarship Research Centre, 2013, http://www.eoas.info/eucalypts/index.html. Details

Books

• Ashenden, Dean, Telling Tennant's story: the strange career of the great Australian silence (Collingwood, Vic.: Black Inc., 2022), 338 pp. Details
• Gillen, F. J., Gillen's diary: the camp jottings of F. J. Gillen on the Spencer and Gillen expedition across Australia 1901 - 1902 (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1968), 367 pp. Details
• Gillen, F. J., Gillen's modest record: his journal of the Spencer-Gillen anthropological expedition across Australia, 1901-02 (Adelaide: Friends of the State Library of South Australia, 2017), 538 pp. Details
• Spencer, Baldwin and Gillen, F. J., The northern tribes of Central Australia (London: Macmillan, 1904), 784 pp. Details
• Spencer, W. B.; and Gillen, F. J., The native tribes of Central Australia (London: Macmillan, 1899), 671 pp, https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/2093212. Details
• Spencer, W. B.; and Gillen, F. J., Across Australia, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1912). Details

Book Sections

• Batty, Philip, 'Assembling the ethnographic field: the 1901-02 expedition of Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen' in Expeditionary anthropology: teamwork, travel and the ‘science of man', Thomas, Martin; and Harris, Amanda, eds (New York: Bergahn Books, 2018), pp. 37-63. Details
• Morphy, Howard, 'More than mere facts: repositioning Spencer and Gillen in the history of anthropology' in Exploring Central Australia: society, the environment and the 1894 Horn Expedition, Morton, S. R. and Mulvaney, D. J., eds (Chipping Norton, N.S.W.: Surrey Beatty & Sons, 1996), pp. 135-49. Details
• Mulvaney, D. J., 'Gillen, Francis James (1855-1912)' in Australian dictionary of biography, volume 9: 1891 - 1939 Gil-Las, Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle, eds (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1983), pp. 6-7. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A090007b.htm. Details

Edited Books

• Gillen, Robert S. ed., F. J. Gillen's first diary, 1875: Adelaide to Alice Springs, March to June (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1995), 105 pp. Details
• Morton, S. R.; and Mulvaney, D. J. eds, Exploring Central Australia: Society, the Environment and the 1894 Horn Expedition (Sydney: Surrey Beatty & Sons, 1996), 408 pp. Details
• Mulvaney, John; Morphy, Howard; and Petch, Alison eds, 'My dear Spencer': the letters of F.J. Gillen to Baldwin Spencer (South Melbourne: Hyland House, 1997), 554 pp. Details

Journal Articles

• Gibson, Jason, 'Addressing the Arrernte: F. J. Gillen's 1896 Engwura Speech', Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2013 (1) (2013), 57-72. Details
• Gunn, R. G., 'Spencer and Gillen's contribution to Australian rock art studies', Rock art research, 17 (1) (2000), 56-64. Details
• Jones, Philip, 'Aboriginal interactions with the Overland Telegraph Line, 1870 - 1880', Journal of telecommunications and the digital economy, 11 (1) (2023), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.18080/jtde.v11n1.714. Details
• Peterson, N., 'Visual knowledge: Spencer and Gillen's use of photography in The native tribes of Central Australia', Australian Aboriginal studies, 1 (2006), 12-22. Details
• Turnbull, Paul, 'Australian museums, Aboriginal skeletal remains, and the imagining of human evolutionary history', Museum & society, 13 (1) (2015), 72-87. https://doi.org/10.29311/mas.v13i1.318. Pages 81. Details

Resources

• Wikidata, http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q1441570. Details
• VIAF - Virtual International Authority File, OCLC, https://viaf.org/viaf/9929968. Details
• 'Gillen, F J (1855-1912)', Trove, National Library of Australia, 2009, https://nla.gov.au/nla.party-476543. Details

See also

• Hall, Norman, Botanists of the Eucalypts: short biographies of people who have named eucalypts, whose names have been given to species or who have collected type material (Melbourne: CSIRO, 1978), 101 pp. Details
• Jones, Ross L. ; Waghorne, James; and Langton, Marcia, 'Introduction' in Dhoombak goobgoowana: a history of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne - Volume 1: The Truth, Ross L. Jones, James Waghorne and Marcia Langton, eds (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2024), pp. xiii-xxix, https://www.mup.com.au/books/dhoombak-goobgoowana-paperback-softback. Details
• Mulvaney, John, '"Annexing All I Can Lay Hands On": Baldwin Spencer as Ethnographic Collector' in The Makers and Making of Indigenous Australian Museum Collections, Peterson, Nicolas, Allen, Lindy and Hamby, Louise, eds (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2008), pp. 141-59. Details
• Nettelbeck, Amanda (and others), The Overland Telegraph Line: A Transcultural History, [web resource; undated], South Australian Government, South Australia, 2023. https://otlhistory.sa.gov.au/. Details
• Olsen, Penny; and Russell, Lynette, Australia's first naturalists: indigenous peoples' contribution to early zoology (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2019), 223 pp. Details
• Serle, Percival, Dictionary of Australian biography (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1949). Details
• Stanner, W. E. H., The dreaming and other essays (Collingwood, Vic: Black Inc., 2011). Details
• Stehlik, Brigitte, 'Hermann Klaatsch and the Tiwi, 1906', Aboriginal history journal, 10 (1986), 59-77. http://doi.org/10.22459/AH.10.2011.06. Details