Martin Thomas is a multi-award-winning researcher, essayist, documentary maker and oral historian who records regularly for the National Library of Australia. He teaches at the Australian National University where he holds a chair in the School of History. His deep interest in cultural landscapes and cross-cultural encounter led him to the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land of 1948, the subject of Clever Men. After learning about the films, sound recordings, and photographic records created during the expedition, he began taking copies of audiovisual material to Arnhem Land communities. This consultative research process triggered all sorts of memories from senior elders, and it provided a wholly new perspective on the expedition’s most controversial activity: its theft of Indigenous human remains from traditional mortuary sites and their removal to the United States.

Jon Altman is an economic anthropologist who has undertaken grounded research in western and central Arnhem Land since 1979. He has been associated with the ANU since 1978, where he established the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research in 1990 and was its foundation director until 2010. He is currently with the School of Regulation and Global Governance. His abiding focus is on the articulations between customary and contemporary economic arrangements that sustain Indigenous livelihoods throughout remote Australia. Some of his earliest ethnographic research engaged with empirical findings from the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. Since 2010 he has been a non-executive director of the Karrkad-Kanjdji Trust, an environmental philanthropy organisation working closely with ranger groups in Arnhem Land to maintain the globally-significant biodiversity and cultural values of their lands.