In the year he left Papua to join the Australian Flying Corp in England, Chinnery published with Haddon a paper on ‘religious cults’.[34] He had shown himself to be capable of writing ethnographic reports and articles; when he was demobilised in 1919 he enrolled at Cambridge ‘to undertake two years academic study in anthropology under the tutelage of A.C. Haddon and W.H.R. Rivers’.[35] Haddon had requested the Australian government assist Chinnery: he informed them that Chinnery wanted to further his theoretical and general knowledge and in particular to study the distribution and migration of cultures of Oceania.[36] His request was granted.
Critical to understanding Chinnery’s enthusiastic embrace of applied anthropology is Rivers’ argument as laid out in his paper on ‘The government of subject peoples’.[37] This was published in a volume, edited by A.C. Seward, whose purpose was ‘to demonstrate the fallacy of [the] distinction that technical education stands for efficiency and prosperity, but pure science is regarded as something apart—a purely academic subject’.[38] Hoping that ‘our rulers will recognise the value of those sciences which will make our possessions more healthy and more productive’, Rivers set out to show how ‘anthropology can point the way to the better Government’ of peoples ruled by Britain.[39] There were according to Rivers three possible lines of action when one people ‘assumes the management of another’: destruction, preservation or compromise. Whatever the degree of interference, ‘knowledge of the culture to be modified is absolutely necessary if changes are to be made without serious injury to the moral and material welfare of the people’.[40]
Of the several tasks of the anthropologist, Rivers considered that only the collection, description and classification of the ethnographic facts had any practical value.[41] Against the stereotype of anthropologist as head-measurer and museum collector, he saw a movement away ‘from physical and material towards the psychological and social aspects of the life of Mankind. [The anthropologist’s] chief interest today is in just those regions of human activity with which the art of government is daily and intimately concerned’.[42] The gap between rulers’ and subjects’ knowledge of each other did not, according to Rivers, promote good government, nor did it ‘foster a healthy sentiment of respect towards rulers’.[43] One misunderstood feature of ‘lowly cultures’ Rivers saw as ‘the close dependence of one department of social life upon another [which] is so great that interference with any department has consequences more immediate and far reaching than in the more developed and specialized varieties of culture’.[44]
Rivers recommended that colonial governments should either employ anthropologists or sponsor research, as well as require anthropological training of their recruits.[45] Such training, however, should be concerned, not with facts, but with ‘the principles which underlie the vast variety of social institutions and belief of mankind’. Nor should training be in the hands of former administrators, for this would be ‘especially futile’, leading only to the perpetuation of false knowledge. Finally, Rivers attempted to counter two objections: that anthropological training would lead to ‘weakness and indecision on the executive side’ and that time was too short. The first he saw answered by a separation of policy-makers from executives, with the latter simply feeding facts to the former; the second in that facts were collected in the normal course of administration. In short, Rivers looked to the formulation of ‘policies which will reconcile the general needs of the Empire with a due regard for the moral and material welfare of the peoples to whom the Empire has so great a responsibility’.[46] This was a call which Chinnery certainly heeded once he returned to Papua in 1921. But Rivers’ continued influence over Chinnery is harder to determine, not least because of his death in 1922; it was with Haddon that Chinnery maintained a correspondence until Haddon’s death in 1940.
While in England Chinnery lectured to audiences of government, academic and amateur associations on colonial rule and the life and work of a colonial field officer in Papua (better known as British New Guinea). [47] It was clear that Chinnery had been cogitating on the value of anthropology as a civilising method. He gave two addresses which reflect this, the first to the Royal Geographic Society, and the other to the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI).
To the Royal Geographic Society, Chinnery was reported as describing a clash with tribesmen in the Rigo district in 1914. The influence of Murray is apparent:
[A] village was raided and some of its inhabitants were murdered by a hitherto unknown tribe. [Chinnery] was despatched to explore the district and capture the people responsible for the raid. He found them among the headstreams of a river draining the principal southerly spur of Mount O’Bree, one of the peaks of the central chain over 10,000 ft in height, situated to the east of Port Moresby. The valleys of these streams were inhabited by fierce peoples who had never before seen a white man or a Government party. Their villages were built on the summits or pinnacles of razor-backed ridges, generally over 4000 ft above sea level, and protected by one or two lines of stockades. The approach of Mr Chinnery’s was detected at almost every case from look-out houses or platforms built on tops from within the villages. When the natives learned the purpose of his mission two or three hundred of them attacked three of the police and Mr Chinnery with spears and large stones and in the fighting which ensued six of the ringleaders of the massacre which had given rise to the expedition were shot. The remainder fled, but afterwards accepted Mr Chinnery’s offer of friendship on condition that he went into the next valley and pacified the people there, in order that inter-tribal warfare might cease. This he did under native guidance, and achieved his objective without further fighting. As a proof of their appreciation of Government intervention a good many of the natives accompanied him to the Government Station and for the first time in the history of their tribe saw the sea. Subsequently when his successor visited the district he found the native peaceful and contented under the new conditions.[48]
His address to the RAI laid out how greater efficiency could be achieved by colonial administrations when dealing with their ‘responsibility to civilize’ backward peoples, which resonated with the idea of a ‘trusteeship’, a sort of partnership between the colonised and the coloniser to uplift and advance the colonised on the ladder of civilisation, which was being discussed in such circles.[49] He pointed out that he had learnt to apply himself to the needs of primitive cultures through his work as an Assistant Resident Magistrate. His experience had given him ‘a knowledge of the psychology of numerous tribes, and the application of such knowledge to general methods of administration enabled me to assist my [sic] people through their many stages of transition’. He considered the key to good government in the colonies was knowing how the minds of indigenous people work (this resonates with Murray’s notion of encouraging his officers to ‘think black’).[50] He discussed how modifications were being made to various unacceptable elements of Papuan societies, and concluded by making the following recommendations: first, that ‘general training in anthropological subjects be [given to all] District Officers and other persons holding positions of responsibility over natives’; and second, that ‘publication and circulation of all existing and subsequent records of New Guinea ethnography [be provided to District Officers] for their guidance’.[51]
This progressive view of anthropology was in direct contrast to the course-work and instruction he undertook while at Cambridge. His thesis, as part of the requirement for the diploma in anthropology, was on stonework and gold mining in New Guinea.[52] In keeping with the diffusionist thrust of anthropology taught at the time, it contained many speculations and inaccuracies and shows the influence of the heliocentric school of ethnology of W.J. Perry and Grafton Elliot Smith at University College, London.[53] In fact, Perry used Chinnery’s Papuan map in his Children of the Sun (1923).[54] Chinnery never lost his interest in such speculative ideas, and in 1956 and 1957 made a series of broadcasts on the ABC, in which he returned to the topics of stonework and gold mining.[55] Chinnery had opined in 1920 that ‘the New Guinea objects (mortars, pestles, stone clubs, stone circles and incised stone work) appear to be similar in many aspects to objects associated with megalithic cultures in other parts of the world’.[56] These musings about origins and diffusion were elided in the practical application of anthropological knowledge to the problems of colonial government. In his work as an anthropologist we find little or no mention of these matters, nor do such theoretical interests appear to create a tension in his practical work. Certainly, he held a view that New Guineans were backward, and most likely unable to achieve their colonisers’ level of civilisation. Yet, as alluded to earlier, Chinnery argued that they should be assisted to advance, and treated fairly and with due process.