Sutton entered Australian anthropology via linguistics, beginning with a 1969 honours project that aimed to document a distinctive form of English spoken by inhabitants of Cape Barren Island in the Bass Strait descended from Tasmanian Aboriginal people. In 1970, he carried out a field survey of fast-disappearing Aboriginal languages across Northern Queensland, documenting Gugu Badhun with some of the language’s last speakers. On Palm Island in 1970, he met long-term informant Johnny Flinders, one of the last speakers of the Flinders Island language, the first of several Aboriginal languages in which Sutton achieved fluency.

Linguist Alan Rumsey describes Sutton’s later doctoral research in Cape York as ‘by far the most detailed study of relations among land, language and social identity which had ever been carried out in Australia’. It involved intensive site mapping with senior Aboriginal authorities, blending anthropological techniques with an intimate knowledge of local languages, and established a benchmark for the anthropological fieldwork methodology that was to provide the evidentiary basis for land claims and native title claims over the coming decades.

In the wake of the 1992 Mabo decision, less ‘traditional’ Aboriginal groups on the mainland suffered a disastrous setback when the Yorta Yorta claim in northern Victoria was dismissed in 1998 on the basis that the ‘tide of history’ had ‘washed away’ any real observance of traditional customs by the claimants. It now seemed that the legal bar for Aboriginal groups outside more ‘traditional’ areas of Australia had been set too high for any of their native title claims to succeed. Sutton then began addressing the key problem of cultural transformation within Aboriginal land-holding systems. He argued that ‘classical’ and ‘post-classical’ traditions must be seen as ‘different phases of a single broad cultural history’. These arguments have persuaded Federal Court judges in many subsequent native title cases, and Sutton’s landmark Native Title: An ethnographic perspective (2003) has since become the standard work on native title anthropology.

Anthropologist Chris Anderson highlights Sutton’s contribution as director of the South Australian Museum to revitalising a moribund institution by re-establishing links between the museum and the living Aboriginal communities from which its collections had originated, especially through the Aboriginal Family History Project and the Tindale archival collections, which have played a significant role in assisting Aboriginal people to establish native title connections to many parts of the Australian continent.

Sutton was also senior curator of the ground-breaking exhibition Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia in Adelaide and New York in 1988. For Nicolas Rothwell, Sutton’s catalogue essay Dreamings ‘remains the foundation document of the contemporary Aboriginal art movement’.

Sutton’s excursion into ‘public anthropology’ in the ‘Politics of Suffering’ episode was to put him on a collision course with many in his own profession. A harrowing visit in September 2000 for a double funeral in Aurukun (a Cape York community he had been closely involved with for thirty years) provoked a major personal and professional crisis. He calculated that since the opening of a ‘wet canteen’ selling alcohol in 1985, ‘eight people he knew closely had committed suicide, 13 had been victims of homicide and 12 others had committed homicide’. This ‘once liveable and vibrant community’ had become a disaster zone, referred to by neighbouring Aboriginal people as ‘Beirut’.

During an emotionally charged Berndt Memorial Lecture that many of us witnessed three months later at the Australian Anthropological Society conference in Perth, Sutton broke down as he began outlining a new critique of the ‘liberal consensus’ that he felt had comprehensively failed Aboriginal people over several decades:

The living standards of Aboriginal people in Australia, particularly those living in remote areas, had declined dramatically since the 1970s, yet this coincided with a period of ‘progressivist public rhetoric about empowerment and self-determination’ … It was time to loudly question this rhetoric and raise difficult problems about the real causes of this decline.

The Berndt lecture was expanded into a lengthy 2001 essay and later the 2009 book The Politics of Suffering. Anthropologist Gaynor Macdonald recalls the backlash from Sutton’s own academic community:

his depiction of life in an Aboriginal community was all too familiar. Among various reasons for the mixed reception of his work, however, was that he had broken the code of silence to which I, among others, had adhered. He had joined the few courageous anthropologists prepared to ‘tell it like it is’.

Sutton’s critics seemed to feel that he was ‘letting the side down’ by giving ideological succour to advocates of ‘neo-assimilationism’ within the Howard government who had launched the Northern Territory Intervention in 2007. Others felt the book was simply ‘bad anthropology’. In a mordant account of the academic controversy ten years on, John Morton describes how:

the repeatedly alleged assertion of failing to address the role of the state in reproducing structural violence was rather like telling Peter that he had failed Post Colonialism 101 ... [R]eleasing his plain speaking counter-story into the public domain was seen as an allied dereliction of duty.

Some of Sutton’s most vitriolic detractors were armchair proponents of ‘postcolonial cultural critique’ who, ironically, had made negligible material contributions to the Australian decolonisation project compared to Sutton’s major input into Aboriginal people’s long struggle for land rights.

In 1968, Australian academic anthropology had made another memorable intervention into the public sphere in Professor William Stanner’s Boyer lecture series After the Dreaming. Whatever the merits or demerits of The Politics of Suffering, it perhaps marked a comparable watershed in terms of wider public perception of contemporary Aboriginal Australia.

With Indigenous academic Professor Marcia Langton, Peter Sutton is arguably the most significant Australian anthropologist of his generation. His reflection on a lifetime of engagement with Aboriginal people is distilled in the following passage of The Politics of Suffering:

But where deep cultural differences are involved, it can be a tribute to the humanity of both parties that their efforts to connect can actually work, and so often have worked, to contribute to the rich fabric of understanding and appreciation of Australia’s cultures. This is the kind of reconciliation that matters most.