Customer Reviews

Down among the wild men: The narrative journal of fifteen years pursuing the old stone age Aborigines of Australia's Western Desert

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The author, John Greenway, was my professor. This book is without doubt his masterpiece, his magnum opus. It takes the reader on a profound journey into the heart of Australia, explaining and teaching about Culture itself, the great driving engine of all human social organization. His chapter on religion is succinct and potent, and perceptive students will be indelibly changed by its insights. Dr. Greenway spent 15 years in the desert among the aborigines. His amusing tales of the characters he met and studied are almost mythic as described, a testimony to Greenway's powerful literary style (he was a student of Anglo-Saxon literature and folksongs, and studied under the great MacEdward Leach at the University of Pennsylvania). His storytelling ability is his strongest asset. But more important, the reader will be lifted above his own culture to see why people act as they do. I predict that this book will be republished some day and become a recognized text in cultural anthropology. Dr. Greeenway was a pioneer, and far ahead of his time.

I read this book a couple of times long many moons ago but still must concur with those who say it's a great book. The author, John Greenway, enflamed the passions of students at his university and he claimed he was, by their lights, the campus reactionary. Alack! The students did not know that in a review of one of his early books, American Folksongs of Protest, he was described by the Soviet Appartchik reviewer as "America's most progressive folklorist." Gotta love the dichotomy! Greenway was also chummy with Woody Guthrie, Aunt Molly Jackson and a folksinger in his own right. In fine, Dylan himself even pilfered one of his songs.

The first thing that grips me is that Greenway is a true master of English style, on every level, a melding of H.L. Mencken and an enraged bulldozer. Second is the insights he gives (sometime too freely) into himself.

He displays a wonderful and commendable arrogance because he probably does know what he's talking about better than almost anyone else. At times that can be wearing - his utmost certainty that he's right about the world and its functioning. But under the hardheadedness is a love for even those he castigates among both the aborigines and the white Aussies.

A romantic pragmatist-conservative, if you can imagine such a thing, he goes far, far beyond the usual academic study to probe the personal and cultural reasons that motivate both individuals and groups. There's a certain sadness, too, in his search for a home, which he has found in the Australian bush, but which can never be truly his.

Greenway has an immense, almost frightening intellect combined with a tough-love humanity that he hides under a roiling run of billingsgate. There was no one else like him that I'm aware of, and not likely there will be.

I agree with the earlier positive reviews of this book. This is travelogue from a master story teller, and a folklorist to boot.

Greenway worked with Norman Tindale in his later decades. Tindale was probably Australia's first archaeologist, but he had polymath interests. Tindale during World War Two played a major role in detecting the origin point of the Japanese Fu-Gu firebomb balloons used as part of a vain attempt to saboutage the US / Canadian war effort in the Pacific North West. Tindale, then a RAAF intelligence officer, analysed the sand used for the ballast and thus helped locate their point of origin. Greenway tells us what it was like to work with thinkers like this. Another of Tindale's many accomplishments was mapping the tribal areas of virtually all the Australian Aboriginal tribal groups.

Greenway gives us a feel for pioneering work in anthropology in outback Australia during the final decades of the close of the Australian frontier. The last tribal group to have 'first contact' with Europeans was contacted about 1967.

Greenway's style is anecdotal but displays the depth of his specialist knowledge, down to earth common sense and impatience with the pretentious and fraudulent.

A combination travelogue, biography and history.

In addition to my own copy, I have through the years procured three used copies of DAtWM as gifts to friends who I thought might "get" this unusual and protean polymath. Greater praise I cannot bestow.

One friend was also a colleague about to emigrate to Australia. He ended up returning to the USA after a disastrous love-affair, but said he carried the book with him most everywhere in AU. Another is a hyper-literate brother-in-law who devours good non-fiction the way secretaries devour harlequin romances. The third is an undergrad friend who eventually made her way into Anthropology. She laughs whenever the subject of John Greenway arises - says she would probably have dismissed him as a crypto-fascist MCP in her undergrad days and is glad she didn't make his acquaintance until she was older & wiser. She has also turned-on a few people to DAtWM and has, incredibly, managed to scrounge copies of a few college textbooks he wrote or edited.

I came by my copy less honorably. I was a night-shift janitor at the University of Colorado while desultorily finishing a master's degree. I cleaned John Greenway's office for a time, and being habitually nosey, read a great many of the many student hand-outs & misc writings he had produced & kept neatly stacked around his office. The man seemed to write like most people breathe, that is if most people were to breathe profanity much of the time. Wow - strong personality, I thought. And then there were the several boxes of copies of DAtWM stacked in a corner, which to my (barely) post-adolescent know-it-all eye, looked like an academic's self-published vanity project waiting to be foisted on hapless undergrads (I was at least partly right - it was required reading, but had I checked the publisher I might have been disabused of the self-published notion). So with a "vanity project" sneer on my mental lips, I filched a copy.

Little did I know how much that act of petty thievery would change me. Between getting that masters degree & getting married I didn't actually read it for a good 18 months, but when I did it shook me like a small tornado. I believe it actually put me in a quasi-depression for several months: I had never been exposed to cultural anthropology, and Greenway's unblinking view of culture and its primacy in human affairs was deeply unsettling (I can just picture Greenway with a small, tight grin saying "Serves you bloody well right, you little two-bit crook."). I was already easing my way out of a 3-year semi-infatuation with new-age spirituality, but Greenway just swatted it like a fly. Once I recovered from the initial shock I never looked back, so I can at least thank Greenway for that quick knock to the head.

It's been a little over 30 years and I still have my stolen copy, and I still open it every few years, if only to dip in & out and enjoy Greenway's fluid prose. Also, the book itself is a thing of beauty - heavy cream-colored stock and a gorgeous font that I've never been able to place. Well, maybe that's the best praise I have to give.

Down Among the Wild Men has been well-summarised by several other reviewers here, so I don't think I need to re-state anything. I will just add two thoughts: In his obituary, Tristram Potter Coffin noted that reading John Greenway is pure pleasure, and I heartily concur. With his muscular, musical prose and encyclopedic erudition, Greenway was easily among the top-ten non-fiction writers of the Twentieth Century. But reader beware: Greenway moved fast and didn't waste words explaining or justifying himself. Suspend judgment until you've read the entire thing and given yourself time to ponder, and you will be well rewarded.

My first exposure to the grandiose and ecletic mind of John Greenway was as a Junior at the University of Colorado in Boulder, taking an Anthropology Course called, "The Anthropology of Australia". Little did I know that first day of class in an auditorium that my life would be changed forever. That was back in 1972 and John Greenway was requiring his book, Down Among the Wild Men" as the hallmark text of our learning. His lectures added to the tales of Australian Aborigines from their knowing the song lyrics of "Daby, Daby Crockett.." without having supposedly had any or intensely little contact with the outside world at that juncture in time. Greenway was a man for the times, and yet, he was a polarizing voice and persona back in the days of hippies, students for a democratic society, the black panthers, anti-war protests and marches, the sexual revolution, and all the peace activists havig their 15 minutes of fame. Greenway thought they were all.. darest I say.. Whimps! He exposed us to the culture and the beliefs of the Wild Men Down Under. The fifteen years of his journal from the heart of his truest passion, as a musicologist, his second passion being his wife Joan, and his third passion.. being an Irish man who loved his tea and soda bread, all thrust together in a true snapshot of the times and culture of his studies. Reading about the rites of passage for manhood, or the place that women held in the Australian Aborigine culture compared to the quests of women in America's 1960's, and the true exposure to.. MAN!

I learned more about myself, more about my country, more about my stand on what is important to me, more about the world around me, and more about the true root values of life vs. the cacophony of rhetorical theories being touted by the popular voices of that day, or even this day.

This is a book I have read and then read again throughout my life. It is a 'walk' of life.. read the book, treasure it, and know that the man who wrote it was a wild man himself in many ways and although he wasn't a big burly man, but more of a "average Joe", he was never afraid to stand up to the mass of the times with a tire iron and defend his right to think and speak, thusly defending our rights to hear and attain knowledge.

To this day, if I were going to invite someone to my home for dinner, John Greenway would be on the list! His book will take you to places your mind never imagined exsisted before.. it will take you to.. yourself. Clearly and simply put, it is an awesome book.