Alfred William Howitt, explorer, natural scientist, anthropologist, geologist and public servant. He was born in Nottingham, England in 1830 and died in 1908, Victoria, Australia.

The following is an abridged extract from the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol 4 1972.

In 1852, he went with his father and brother Charlton to Melbourne and on to the Victorian goldfields. Over the next few years Howitt became an experienced bushman and ardent naturalist and while a drover on the route from the Murray to Melbourne made the passing acquaintance of Lorimer Fison.

In 1859  Howitt was sent by a Melbourne syndicate to examine the pastoral potential of the Lake Eyre region on which Peter Warburton had reported rosily. He led a party with skill and speed from Adelaide through the Flinders Ranges into the Davenport Range country but found it desolated by drought and returned to warn his sponsors.

At the request of the Royal Society of Victoria he led expeditions in search of Burke & Wills in 1860-61 and 1861-62. For his services Howitt was appointed police magistrate and warden of the Omeo goldfields, and in 1863 began a distinguished career of thirty-eight years as a public official, twenty-six of them as magistrate.

In 1873 Howitt joined Dr Lorimer Fison in investigating the classificatory system of relationships amongst Aboriginal people.

Howitt as anthropologist developed through four phases. The first in 1861-71 was one of unwitting preparation. In the second in 1872-80, after induction by Fison into the viewpoint and methods of Morgan's Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, he immersed himself in systematic study. He gave all his leisure to direct inquiries in the field, the development of elaborate questionnaires, their circulation to possible informants, to voluminous correspondence and to writing. In 1873-78 he published twelve brief but informative memoirs, some of which drew on the data collected in the 1860s. In 1879 he completed his part of Kamilaroi and Kurnai, which appeared under his and Fison's names in 1880. Howitt's clear account of social organization was, when based on fact, rightly praised, but its reliability was later questioned.

In 1881-90, his third phase, Howitt wrote eighteen substantial papers, some of them of permanent value if their substance is rid of adherence to Morgan's evolutionist hypotheses, by which Howitt was progressively captivated. Such contemporaries as Lubbock, McLennan and Lang, with rival theories about the development of particular institutions, and successors like Robert Mathews, Thomas, Malinowski and Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, some of whom revolted against 'conjectural history', did not readily see that his work had importance independently of the overriding obsession that the stratified evidences of pristine family, sexual and marriage forms were visible like fossils in a living society. More appreciative eyes, disregarding such outmoded views, now recognize that Howitt greatly widened the base, improved the methods and deepened the insights of a nascent science. He wrote in a careful, informed way on a wealth of empirical topics—boomerangs, canoes, name-giving, cannibalism, migrations, wizardry, songs, message-sticks, sign-language—but most valuably on the kinship structures and intergroup relations of social life.

In two productive years, 1883 and 1884, Howitt showed his growing span and competence in seven papers, two of them with Fison. One, on initiation, was praised for its lucidity and detail by Tylor, who read it for Howitt to the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, on 11 December 1883. It set a new standard of ethnographic description and analysis and, with a second paper on the same subject, made possible the first comprehension of the form, management and significance of initiations as ceremonious disciplines shaping personality under social, moral and religious sanctions. Other papers made serviceable if now superseded distinctions between 'local' (geographical or territorial groups) and 'social' (marriage, descent and kinship categories) organization which in cross-relationship give Aboriginal society its characteristic structure.

As early as 1878, in his schematic presentation of Brabrolong kinship and his first sketch of Kurnai initiation, he showed some grasp of the anatomy of Aboriginal society. Its emergence in the papers of the third phase is a fascinating anticipation of insights that did not mature fully for another half century. By 1890 he wrote so explicitly, in comparative contexts, of the 'social structure' or the 'organic structure' of Aboriginal society that he must be credited with Fison as the first to adumbrate the essence of the 'structural-functional' perspective in modern social anthropology. No one before him could have written from empirical knowledge that 'aboriginal society as it exists in Australia is organized in a comparatively complete manner', and that 'the whole of the customs which form the foundation and the superstructure of aboriginal society ramify so much that in order to understand any part it becomes necessary to study the whole'. These insights were far removed from the imaginary stratigraphy of fossil customs.

In his last phase, 1891-1907,  Howitt wrote two dozen papers and The Native Tribes of South-East Australia (1904). He died on 7 March 1908 and was buried at Bairnsdale.