GILLEN, FRANCIS JAMES, AND BALDWIN SPENCER. Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen both came to Australia in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Gillen arrived in Adelaide from Ireland, still in his mother's womb, in 1855 and was born later that year, while Spencer, born in England in 1860, migrated to Melbourne as a young man in 1887. Their backgrounds and careers were very different, yet they formed a remarkable ethnological partnership after first meeting in 1894. Gillen, the son of a laborer, received minimal formal education and chose a career in the postal service, eventually going to work on the Overland Telegraph Line that connected Adelaide and Darwin after 1872. Spencer, the son of bourgeois parents, was educated at a private school and at the University of Oxford, where he later became a fellow.

Spencer came to Australia to take up a...