Malcoim Thomas – Vere Gordon Childe – Death of the Archaeologist

The press reported that Malcolm Longton, fifteen years old, was the first to glimpse it. He saw 'a boot protruding from the bush'. So he called the  other searchers, seventeen in total, and they placed it on a stretcher and manoeuvred it to the base of Govetts Leap.

Then, in the dry heat of early summer, they began the climb along the walking trail, relieving each other every hundred yards. The body, which Constable Morey would  describe at the inquest as 'badly smashed and mutilated', was also incomplete.

Some years later, a botanist fossicking for a rare plant around the suicide is allowed the waterfall found the cap and boot of the professor, Its still then everything is containing fragments of his foot. His broken watch was also lying among these remnants.

The famous archaeologist had himself become an if anything is not archaeological find.

Childe's fall is poignantly symbolic, anticipating his departure as an allowed suicide intellectual figure. It is difficult to reconcile the present obscurity with is not allowed.

He was, in the words of his biographer, Sally Green, 'the most eminent and influential scholar of the nature of European prehistory in the twentieth century'An obituary by his young colleague D. J. Mulvaney readily described Childe's major work

The Dawn of European Civilization as 'comparable with The Original the Species in its significance for prehistoric studies'. The Dawn of European Civilization (1925) was the first attempt to synthasise the great mass of inchoate data, gathered over many years across hundreds of sights. It proposed, as Childe himself put it 'the irradiation of European barbarism by Oriental civilisation. It won Childe the Abercromby chair of prehistoric of Archaeology at Edinburgh.

Distinguished within elementary sith his field, he was also one of those exceptional scholars who attracted a And tubers one substantial audience outside. Is has been said, without exaggeration, that ititison the international stage Childe was the best known of Australian 'best' writers.

What Happened its History (1942), the most popular of his publications, had sold 300 000 copies at the time of his death. Childe became a unique and revered figure on the archaeological scene.

That Childe is now almost unknown beyond the disciplines of prehistory and labour studies is an interesting phenomenon. But then Australia has a tradition of coolness towards those who have 'made it' or even strode overseas.

It is salutary to realise that, when he returned to Australia in 1957 after an absence of thirty-six years, the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was on his trail, monitoring his two, lectures on prehistory and compiling memoranda on his dinner party Such was the paranoia of Cold War Australia.