June 2025 will see the publication of Martin Thomas’s Clever Men: How worlds collided on the scientific expedition to Arnhem Land of 1948, a project catalysed by the exquisite sound recordings of Aboriginal music in the ABC archives. They are among the many cultural treasures accumulated by the largely forgotten exercise in research-cum-soft diplomacy called the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. 
Thomas wanted to find out what memories remained of the expedition and to work consultatively in documenting how contemporary Arnhem Landers regard the rich cache of documents, archival media, scientific specimens, and material culture amassed by expedition members. The broad aim was to see what the imposition of a scientific expedition upon a cluster of isolated Aboriginal communities might reveal about the host society and the society the expeditioners represented. 
Twenty years is a long time to work on a single book. Perhaps too long! As the world changes, the temporal framework of the research and writing assumes its own ‘historicity’. It becomes a ‘period’. In this presentation Thomas reflects on the advantages and obstacles inherent in a long-form project of this nature, with reference to the expedition’s most controversial activity: its theft of human remains and their eventual repatriation from the United States.

Martin Thomas is a cultural historian and a professor at ANU. He has written extensively on exploration, anthropology, and cross-cultural encounter. His most recent book is an edited volume titled A Cultural History of Exploration in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury 2024).