(1860-1929)
The
Australian Dictionary of Biography tells us that the University’s foundation
Professor of Biology was ‘an approachable, enthusiastic teacher, a brilliant
lecturer (in 1902 he packed Melbourne’s town hall), a capable and firm
administrator, an entrepreneur for national science, one of Victoria’s
first conservationists (Wilson’s Promontory National Park is his monument)
and an advocate for Australian artists’.
Baldwin Spencer came from Manchester to take up his appointment in
1887. As well as designing and raising the funds for the biology building,
Spencer inaugurated undergraduate field excursions, founded a student
science society and inspired the foundation of the Sports Union. He
secured the University team’s admission to the Victorian Football League
in 1908 and was president of the VFL from 1919 to 1926.
Spencer headed the first Australian university department to appoint
female academic staff and when he retired in 1919 all his departmental
colleagues were women. He sponsored the Princess Ida club for women
and chaired the Professorial Board from 1903 to 1911. He was heavily
involved with the National Museum and the National Gallery of Victoria,
both of which benefitted from his philanthropy as well as from his administrative
talents.
It is, however, as an anthropologist and ethnographer that Baldwin
Spencer is most remembered. He made several expeditions to central and
northern Australia between 1894 and 1926, making representations on
Aboriginal welfare to the Australian parliament in 1913. In 1912 he
collected more than 200 bark paintings which he presented to the National
Museum of Victoria, together with his ethnographic collection, in 1917.
Spencer’s interpretation of Aranda society came under criticism at
the time and his paternalistic conclusions are unacceptable to later
scholars. His writings and pictorial records constitute, however, a
unique and valuable archive of Aboriginal society. Spencer returned
to England in 1927, embarking two years later on an anthropological
expedition to Tierra del Fuego. He died on Navarin Island on Bastille
Day 1929.
