Frederic Slater (c. 1880–10 March 1947[1]) was an Australian journalist, poet, researcher and "authority on aboriginal folk lore".[2]
In the 1930s, Slater was founder and president of the short-lived Australian Archaeological and Education Research Society, also known as the Australian Archaeological Society. He married Katherine Elizabeth Plowman, who survived him and was executor of his will.[3] They had one son, Ederic Charles James Sutherland Slater, born in January 1923.
Slater studied Aboriginal place names and archaeological sites and provided information on Aboriginal languages including, for example, the meaning of Canberra[4] and Queanbeyan.[5]
His best known contribution, which has been described as pseudoarchaeology,[6] is the claim that Aboriginal Australians came from Egypt, based on carvings at Devil's Rock, Wollombi, in the Royal National Park, Brunswick Heads,[7] and other locations. In 1939, he called the mound south of Brunswick Heads an ancient Aboriginal place of worship before European colonisation.[8]
In an address at Sydney, to the Anthropological Society of New South Wales, he claimed the carvings were especially significant ...totems, symbols and ideographs, which show that the ancestors of original Australians migrated from Egypt in the late paleolithic and the neolithic ages.[9][10]
Slater's observations and theories have been supported in recent years by other pseudoarchaeologists such as Steven Strong.[11]
^"ABORIGINES WORSHIP MOUND-A mound 35ft. long and 15ft. high, which has been discovered about three miles from Brunswick Heads, is believed to have been an aborigines' religious mound, which was a centre of worship for aborigines from all parts of Australia before the coming of the white race. Access to the mound is gained by a sloping pathway on one side. It appears to have been untouched for a great many years. The president of the Archaeological Society of Australia (Mr. Frederick Slater) has deciphered many of the carvings on the sandstone, which must have been brought a considerable distance. There is none of it in the district. Another such mound is known to exist in North Australia. A Fraser Island aborigine when told of the discovery said that his tribe had been searching for the mound for years. Mr. Slater said that the attitude of silence of the aborigine after saying that was similar to that shown by other aborigines since they first came in contact with white men" (Daily Advertiser (Wagga Wagga), Wednesday 2 August 1939, page 4)
^Gojak, D. 2017, 'the Resurrection of Frederick Slater: Tales of a Pseudo-archaeologist in the 1930s and 2010s, in Defining the Fringe of Contemporary Australian Archaeology, Pyramidiots, Paranoia and the Paradormal, ed Darran Jordan & Rocco Bosco, Cambridge Scholars, 2017
