AustLit

William Edward Hanley Stanner (1905–81) came to anthropology as a mature-age student having first worked as a bank clerk and journalist. He was twenty-three when he attended his first anthropology lectures at the University of Sydney, given by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Camilla Wedgwood and Raymond Firth. On completion of his degree—in both economics and anthropology—he was sent to Daly River, NT, where he conducted research for his MA, awarded in May 1934. Returning to Daly River in 1934–35, he spent a brief period at the newly founded Catholic mission at Port Keats (now Wadeye), which became his primary field site until he ceased fieldwork in 1959. For the second half of 1935, he tutored at the University of Sydney (as part of his research fellowship obligations). In between completing his degree and leaving for London, he worked also in the NSW Premier’s office advising on economic matters and writing speeches. In 1937 and 1938 he attended the London School of Economics (LSE), at his own expense. Raymond Firth assisted him by employing him as his amanuensis for Human Types, a general volume on anthropology. Stanner acknowledged this was ‘of great assistance to his own [work and]…closely allied with the thesis I am preparing…it has been a great stimulus to me and also a discipline for some of the methods I have been applying to my own work.’  He was awarded his doctorate, ‘Economic Change in North Australian Tribes’, in 1938.  As there were no positions for anthropologists in Australian universities, he remained in Britain, finding work with the Oxford Social Studies Research Committee, which saw him in Kenya when war was declared.'  (Introduction)