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Francis James Gillen (28 October 1855 – 5 June 1912), also known as Frank Gillen and F. J. Gillen, was an early Australian anthropologist and ethnologist. He is known for his work with W. Baldwin Spencer, including their seminal work The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899).
Spencer & Gillen. Francis James Gillen and Walter Baldwin Spencer amassed what is perhaps the most influential collection of Australian ethnographic material ever assembled. Their work had a decisive influence on the early development of anthropology, particularly in Europe.
Francis James Gillen (1855-1912), ethnologist, was born on 28 October 1855 at Little Para, South Australia, eldest son of Thomas Gillen, agricultural labourer, and his wife Bridget, née McCan. His Irish parents had migrated to Australia in the year of his birth and settled at Clare.
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Jun 1, 2024 · Francis James Gillen (born Oct. 28, 1855, Clare, near Adelaide, S.Aus., Australia—died June 5, 1912) was an Australian anthropologist who did pioneering fieldwork among the Aborigines of central Australia.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
It was later said that Baldwin Spencer’s greatest discovery was Frank Gillen. The converse was also true. When in 1912 Frank Gillen died of a debilitating neurological disorder Spencer wrote to Gillen’s widow the kind of letter we might all hope to write at such a time.
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.
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Gillen garnered enormous respect from Aboriginal people in 1891 after prosecuting a case against Mounted Constable William H. Willshire for the murder of two Aboriginal men. Three years later Gillen hosted the Horn Scientific Expedition to Central Australia whereupon he met the biologist Walter Baldwin Spencer.
