AUSTRALIAN
ANTHROPOLOGICAL
SOCIETY

Vale Emeritus Professor Basil Sansom 

The AAS is saddened to hear of the passing of Basil Sansom and pays respects to his family and friends.

Blessed with a brilliant creative mind and a phenomenal memory, Emeritus Professor Basil Sansom devoted his whole life to anthropology. A man of the utmost integrity and committed to social justice, his research began with Pedi migrant labour in South Africa, to fieldwork with Bedouin in Libya and the Druze in Lebanon and in the last five decades of his life to Australian Aboriginal land and sea rights. In fact judges sometimes thanked Basil for his contribution to helping them understand the issues in land rights and native title matters, even taking his words into law. From his seminal ecological adaptations paper on Southern Africa, his “Camp at Wallaby Cross” about the fringe-dwellers of Darwin, to his numerous anthropological reports for the Northern Territory Solicitor General’s Office, Basil made an enormous contribution to anthropology and to human rights. 

Dr. Patricia Baines

Vale Basil Sansom.

AAS Executive Committee

Vale Professor Emeritus Bob Tonkinson

The AAS expresses its sincere condolences for the recent passing of Bob Tonkinson and pays respects to his family and friends.

Bob’s Masters thesis (completed 1966) and PhD (completed 1972) were studies of traditional Mardu culture and patterns of intercultural relations between Aboriginal people and Whitefellas. His publications in both topics of study achieved considerable influence among colleagues in Australia, the USA, the UK and other countries.

Bob’s book ‘The Jigalong Mob’, published in 1974, was influential in Australian Indigenous Studies. Bob was sought after as an examiner known for serious and productive intellectual engagements with the many PhD theses he both supervised and examined throughout his career.  Alongside Bob’s influential academic studies and publications, he undertook important applied research, including Northern Territory land claims and a major project in the mid-1990s with a formal engagement by the Royal Commission Inquiry into what became known as the Hindmarsh Island affair in South Australia. 

In 1999-2001 Bob took on the challenging task of preparing the expert anthropological report for the Mardu native title claim, involving translating Indigenous law and custom relating to rights in land into the language and concepts required by the Australian legal system. 

Bob Tonkinson’s career-long contributions to anthropology will be celebrated into the future for many years.

Vale Bob Tonkinson.

AAS Executive Committee