Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia

PAUL TURNBULL Palgrave Studies in Pacifc History

Series Editors Matt Matsuda Department of History Rutgers University New Brunswick NJ, USA

Bronwen Douglas College of Arts and Social Sciences Australian National University Acton, ACT, Australia Palgrave Studies in Pacifc History emphasizes the importance of histories of connection and interaction, with titles underscoring local cases with transnational reach. In dialogue with studies of the Pacifc Rim focused on North American and East Asian relations, the series invites a rethinking of a Pacifc globalized over many centuries through trans- regional encounters, networks, and exchanges. This “Oceanic” approach engages the Pacifc Islands, Australia, maritime Southeast Asia, western Latin America, and parts of the Indian Ocean.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14605 Paul Turnbull Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia Paul Turnbull University of Tasmania Launceston, TAS, Australia

Palgrave Studies in Pacifc History ISBN 978-3-319-51873-2 ISBN 978-3-319-51874-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51874-9

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Cover credit: Graham Gore, Burial Reach, Flinders River, Queensland, 1841, National Library of Australia, nla.obj-134323016

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgements

This book has been longer in the making than is comfortable to admit. My serving in various administrative roles through diffcult times in the academy has stolen time. So too has my love of teaching and using digital technologies to share the outcomes of historical research with the wider public. But there has also been my inability to resist opening just one more bundle of forgotten documents in the hope of discovering the community of origin, or perhaps the identity of another Old Person—as my Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander friends and colleagues respectfully call those among their ancestors whose mortal remains are now being returning to their care for burial in country by museums and other scientifc institutions. As it is, this book is a pared-down version of a manuscript that would have continued to grow had colleagues and friends not fnally persuaded me to call a halt. My intellectual debts are too many to adequately acknowledge all who have contributed to the research on which this book draws. However, there are some who must be thanked. As a Harold White Fellow at the National Library of Australia in 1994, I enjoyed the incredible privilege of being allowed freely to explore the library’s stacks. My discoveries during that fellowship have been the source of many fruitful lines of inquiry since. I particularly want to thank Margy Burn, Jan Fullerton, Michelle and Paul Hetherington, Graeme Powell and, of course, the legendary Bill Tully for their assistance and support.

v vi Acknowledgements

The years 1999–2001 were spent at the Centre for Cross-cultural Research at the Australian National University, where I was tasked with developing new web-based modes of communicating scholarly research. I was nonetheless able to fnd some time to continue the research on which this book draws, and was encouraged to do so by Bronwen Douglas, a colleague who shares my interests in racial science and has been ever ready to give valuable advice when it was most needed. My thanks to Bronwen for many a stimulating conversation and our continuing friendship. I must also thank Kirsty Douglas, Tom Griffths, Rebe Taylor and Pat Jalland, who during my time at ANU provided me with perspectives on shared historical interests which I would not have gained otherwise. A guest professorship in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna in 2013 provided an opportunity to begin exploring the interests of German-speaking medico-scientifc communities in the bodies of Australian and other indigenous peoples, which hopefully will be the focus of a study of the development of physical anthropology during the long nineteenth century. My thanks especially to Dr. Gabriele Weichart and Prof. Hermann Mückler for their generosity in sharing ideas, giving me fresh interdisciplinary perspectives on Australian anthropology. I also want to thank the students of my Vienna seminar on the history of Australian anthropology. They have helped me understand key aspects of settler colonialism with greater clarity than I could have managed alone. The award in 2015 of a Fellowship by the Morphomata Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Cologne provided time for refection and writing when it was most needed. The Centre’s weekly seminars and conversations with colleagues provided rich food for thought about the connections between nineteenth century imaginings of indigeneity and the fguration of humanity’s deep past. I am enormously grateful to Professors Dietrich Boschung and Günter Blamberger for making my time in Cologne so intellectually rewarding. I have debts to many colleagues. My thanks go especially to Paul Lawrence Rose, who frst stimulated my interest in racial science. And Henry Reynolds, who persuaded me that there much yet to learn about anthropological collecting in colonial Australia during the long nineteenth century. Over many years, Russell McGregor and Cressida Fforde have been unfailing in their friendship, intellectual generosity and shared commitment to understanding our colonial past. I also owe much to Acknowledgements vii

Jonathan Richards, whose unrivalled knowledge of Queensland frontier history has provided answers to many questions that I would never have otherwise found. Geoff Gray and Christine Winter have taught me much about the conceptual development of anthropology in Oceania; and I must thank Michael Pickering for his enriching my thinking about museums past and present. My thanks also to Amber Aranui, Michael Aird, Michaela Appel, Bruce Buchan, Renfrew Christie, Peter Cryle, Kay Ferres, Mark Finnane, Larissa Förster, Steve Hemming, Mark Kornbluh, Gareth Knapman, Gavan McCarthy, Clive Moore, Michael Powell, Ciraj Rassool, Michael Richards, Alex Roginski, Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Paul Tapsell, Chris Wilson and Andreas Winkelmann. What wonderfully supportive colleagues and friends! I must also acknowledge the Community Reference Groups of the Museums of Queensland and Victoria for kindly granting me access to documents held in both institutions. My greatest debts are, of course, to my family: Pamela, Hugh and Tim for their unfailing love, understanding and support; my father Bill and dear siblings, Martin and Linda; and Gabriele, whose love and intellectual companionship do ever inspire and delight. Several chapters of this book incorporate revised extracts from writings that have appeared elsewhere: ‘“Outlawed Subjects”: The procurement and Scientifc Uses of Australian Aboriginal Heads, ca. 1803–1835’, Eighteenth Century Life, 22 (1), 1998: 156–171. With permission, Duke University Press. ‘Enlightenment Anthropology and the Ancestral Remains of Australian Aboriginal People’, in Alex Calder et al., eds., Voyages and Beaches: Pacifc Encounters, 1769–1840 (202–225). University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1999. With permission of the Press. ‘Rare Work for the Professors: The Entanglement of Aboriginal Remains in Phrenological Knowledge in Early Colonial Australia’, in Jeanette Hoorn and Barbara Creed, eds., Body Trade: Cannibalism, Captivity and Colonialism in the Pacifc (3–23). Routledge, New York, 2002. Reproduced by permission of Taylor and Francis Group, LLC, a division of Informa, plc. ‘Indigenous Australian People, Their Defence of the Dead and Native Title’, in Cressida Fforde, Jane Hubert and Paul Turnbull, eds., The Dead and Their Possessions: Repatriation in Principle, Policy and Practice (63–86). Routledge, London, 2002. With permission from Taylor & Francis. viii Acknowledgements

‘British Anatomists, Phrenologists and the Construction of the Aboriginal Race, c.1790–1830’, in History Compass, Wiley and Sons, 2006: DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2006.00367.x. ‘British Anthropological Thought in Colonial Practice: The Appropriation of Indigenous Australian Bodies, 1860–1880’, in Bronwen Douglas and Chris Ballard, Eds., Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940 (205–228). ANU Press, Canberra, 2008. ‘A Judicious Collector: Edward Stirling and the Evolutionary Genealogy of Aboriginality’, in Sarah Ferber and Sally Wild, eds., The Body Divided: Human Beings and Human Material in the History of the Medical Sciences (180–203). Routledge, London, 2012. With permission from Taylor and Francis. Research in museum and government archives in Australia and Britain on which this book draws was made possible by periods of study leave granted by James Cook University and Griffth University. Some recent fndings that have made their way into this book were made possible by funding from the Australian Research Council through its Linkage Scheme (LP130100131: Return, Reconcile, Renew: Understanding the History, Effects and Opportunities of Repatriation). Contents

1 Introduction: ‘To What Strange Uses’ 1

2 European Anatomists and Indigenous Australian Bodily Remains, c. 1788–1820 33

3 Skeletal Collecting Before Darwin 71

4 Indigenous Remains in British Anatomical and Ethnographic Discourse, 1810–1850 97

5 British Polygenists and the Indigenous Body, 1820–1880 121

6 ‘Rare Work for the Professors’: Phrenologists and the Australian Skull, c. 1815–1860 151

7 Colonial Museums and the Indigenous Dead, c. 1830–1874 195

8 ‘Judicious Collectors’, 1870–1914 223

9 ‘Tales of Blood and Mummies’: The Queensland Museum, 1870–1914 257

ix x Contents

10 Murdered for Science? Anthropological Collecting and Colonial Violence in Late Nineteenth Century Australia 279

11 Indigenous Australians’ Defence of the Ancestral Dead 299

12 Repatriation and Its Critics 329

13 Conclusion 357

Bibliography 365

Index 403 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 John Hunter. Line engraving by W. Sharp, 1788, after Sir J. Reynolds, 1786, Wellcome Library, London 35 Fig. 2.2 Detail of John Hunter. Line engraving by W. Sharp, 1788, after Sir J. Reynolds, 1786, Wellcome Library, London 37 Fig. 4.1 Craniometry, Plate CCXVIII, Edinburgh Encyclopaedia conducted by David Brewster … Edinburgh, 1830 102 Fig. 10.1 A Skirmish with Aborigines at Creen Creek, Queensland, Illustrated Sydney News, 12 October 1876 289 Fig. 11.1 Samuel Thomas Gill (c. 1845), ‘Mode of burial on parts of the Murray River, S. Australia’. PIC Solander Box A44 #T242 NK6897/F, National Library of Australia, Canberra 316 Fig. 11.2 Gustav Doré’s reworking of Samuel Gill’s depiction of burial on the Lower Murray River for Figuier’s Primitive Man (1870) 318

xi CHAPTER 1

Introduction: ‘To What Strange Uses’

White man took their bones. Played around with them and brought them back. Now we will bury them. Home. What is the message? We put them home —Jacob Nayinggu, Bininj Elder, 2011 (Thomas 2015, 163).

The large shelf was drawn out to reveal a glass display case trimmed with Australian hardwood. In the case lay a body carefully prepared for burial. I was with Dr. Michaela Appel, the curator of Oceanic ethnology at Munich’s Five Continents Museum. We had gone to see the body, kept in one of the museum’s storerooms, which the Australian Government had requested the state of Bavaria to release to the care of the National Museum of Australia, in the hope that further research might identify the man’s community of origin and enable his reburial in his ancestral country. We viewed the body to compare it with the description of one similarly prepared for burial that I had found in newspapers of the early 1880s. This latter body had been offered for sale by one Ludwig Bruck, a German- born Sydney-based dealer in homeopathic medicines, who also bought and sold natural history specimens and Indigenous Australian artefacts. I knew that this body had been taken in 1876 by a European survey party

© The Author(s) 2017 1 P. Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia, Palgrave Studies in Pacifc History, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51874-9_1 2 P. Turnbull from a clearing within dense rainforest some twenty or so kilometres to the northeast of the present-day Far North Queensland city of Cairns; it was one of two in the process of being prepared for burial when the party found it. Several years later the body was exhibited in Sydney and Melbourne, after which Ludwig Bruck was commissioned by one of the party who had carried it away to sell it to an Australian or European museum. Too high a price was put on the body, the seller had got into fnancial diffculties, and Bruck claimed the remains in lieu of his commission. This was not a wholly unusual occurrence, incidentally: Tambo, a Manbara man from Palm Island, whose reburial I was invited to attend in 1994 by Walter Palm Island, his direct descendant, had died 110 years before while touring the dime-show circuit in the United States with a group of men and women from Far North Queensland billed as ‘Cannibal Boomerang Throwers’. His body had been kept by an undertaker in Cleveland, Ohio, when the entrepreneur who arranged the tour could not afford the embalming bill (Palm Island 2002; Poignant 1997). Michaela Appel strongly suspected that the man whose body had come to Munich was from Far North Queensland, and had probably died sometime in the 1870s or early 1880s. She knew that the body had been acquired by Maximilian Buchner (1846–1912), the director of Munich’s ethnology museum from 1887 to 1907. She had also found out that Ludwig Bruck had given the man’s remains to Buchner when he visited Sydney in 1884, and that Buchner had thanked Bruck for gener- ously giving the museum so rare and anthropologically interesting a relic by nominating him as a corresponding member of the Royal Bavarian Academy of Sciences. However, Michaela had not yet discovered how Bruck had come by the body. Comparing the body with our respective research fndings, we were able to confrm that it was indeed that taken from rainforest in the Cairns region in 1876. As the Bavarian State was willing to allow the body to be repatriated, the Australian Government’s International Repatriation Program could now seek advice from Elders of the region’s traditional owners about arranging for the man’s eventual return for the burial in ancestral country that he had been denied. Few weeks have gone by over the past three decades without similar instances where museum curators, biological anthropologists and historians—working in collaboration with ancestral communities—have sought to establish the origins of Indigenous Australian skulls and skeletal remains lying in scientifc collections throughout the world. Within 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘TO WHAT STRANGE USES’ 3 the next ten years the bones of around 6,000 Indigenous Australians will have been returned from Australian and overseas museums and other scientifc institutions to the care of communities with whom they have kin or clear cultural ties. Of these, the bones of probably around 1,500 people will have been surrendered by British, continental European and North American museums and medical schools. Most of these relics came into scientifc hands between 1860 and the early 1920s. This was due to the importance that they were then thought to have as sources of insight into humankind’s evolutionary genealogy. Some, however, have lain in museum collections for as long as two hundred years, having been acquired in the pursuit of other, earlier avenues of scientifc curiosity. Once returned to community care, the remains will be reburied in ancestral country at a time and place in accordance with customary law, but only after careful refection on what museum and other historical records disclose about the circumstances in which they were acquired. Where there is uncertainty about where the dead should be reburied, they may be placed in secure keeping places on ancestral land, or trusted to the care of Australia’s national museum. As for those remains about which nothing is known beyond what forensic analysis confrms as a high probability of Indigenous ancestry, they may be, at some future time, should there be the political will, placed in a specially built national keeping place. Two questions much asked in recent times are how and why should it be that natural history museums and medical schools in Australia, Britain and continental Europe amassed collections of skulls, but also other skeletal structures and, in several instances, soft organs and even genitalia of Australia’s frst peoples. This book attempts to answer these and related questions. It explores in contextual detail the collecting and scientifc analysis of the bodily remains of Indigenous Australians from the early years of British settlement of the continent to the late 1920s, by which time interest in comparative morphological studies of the Indigenous dead had waned in favour of anthropometric and blood- based genealogical research on their living descendants. The idea for this book was born out of curiosity as to why Indigenous Australian bodily remains became the focus of European scientifc interest and how they were acquired; but the book also refects my concern to offer a more historically contextualised account of the motivation for collecting and studying these relics than that which, since the 1980s, has fgured prominently in media coverage of the efforts of Indigenous people to gain 4 P. Turnbull their ancestors’ remains, and the responses of scientists and museum curators who have opposed their repatriation. To explain by way of historical illustration: one of the stimuli for my embarking on this research was fnding a letter by Archibald Meston (1851–1924) in the papers of Edward Pierson Ramsay (1842–1916), the frst Australian-born curator of Sydney’s Australian Museum, the oldest and at that time the largest museum in Britain’s antipodean settler colonies. Meston was a man of many parts: journalist, entrepreneur, politician, amateur ethnographer, and one of the architects of Queensland’s notorious ‘Aboriginal protection’ regime established in 1898. In 1887, he managed a sugar plantation on the coastal plains of the Barron River in Far North Queensland, not far from where the ritually prepared body that Maximilian Buchner secured in Sydney for Munich’s ethnology museum was stolen. In March that year, Meston received a letter from Ramsay asking for his help in obtaining skeletal remains of the traditional owners of Far North Queensland’s coastal rainforests. Meston ebulliently responded, ‘Re: skulls and skeletons of the festive myall! To what strange uses are our noble primeval inhabitants to be put’ (Meston 1887). This was typical of Meston, whose outlandish rhetoric was the hall- mark of his journalism and political oratory. Ramsay had come to know him through newspaper articles wherein Meston had written of his encounters with Far North Queensland’s ‘festive myalls’—the term myalls was settler slang for Indigenous people still living traditionally and thus, in European eyes, given to wild and unpredictably violent behaviour. Rarely would Meston let slip an opportunity to boast of having unrivalled frsthand knowledge of the language and lifeways of the Indigenous peoples of northern Queensland. Confdent of his expertise, he had little interest in contemporary anthropological scholarship (Thorpe 1984). Even so, he was suffciently well-read in contemporary anthropology to see nothing strange in Ramsay’s eagerness to secure the skulls and skeletons of northern Australia’s frst peoples. He had a reasonably well informed understanding of the scientifc uses to which these bones were likely to be put. Since gaining the resources to campaign for the return of ancestral remains in the mid-1970s, Indigenous Australians have condemned the collecting and scientifc investigation of their Old People, as they as they respectfully call these relics, believing in the continuing presence of the spirits of those whose bones they once were. Oftentimes they have 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘TO WHAT STRANGE USES’ 5 maintained that their Old Peoples’ bones were taken because European scientists wanted to fabricate proof of their biological inferiority, thus providing pseudo-scientifc grounds on which to justifying the violent conquest of their ancestral lands and the removal of those who survived dispossession to reserves and mission stations, where they struggled to resist white efforts to suppress their language, lifeways and culture (FAIRA 1989). Securing the return of the dead has been a diffcult and stressful spiritual burden, falling especially on senior men and women who are obli- gated to ensure that the dead are reburied as their customary law and cultural traditions demand. They believe that unless the dead are laid to rest in the right place in the traditional country of their ancestors, with the correct ceremonies and rituals, they will wander in torment. In many communities, the removal of remains is thought to have contributed to the spiritual and environmental degradation and suffering of the country in which they were originally buried. As the late Tom Treverrow, Elder of the Ngarrindjeri people, observed when reburying the bones of his ancestors returned from the Anatomy Department of the University of Edinburgh,

all those Old People and the people we got here, [they are] all our family. We know where they were taken from, illegally taken from their burial grounds: their resting places and we know that they are our ancestors, we are connected to them … We know that their spirit has been at unrest. We believe that the things that happen around us—our lands and waters—is all connected. It’s part of it, and what’s happening here is part of the healing process, when we bring our Old People home. (Hemming and Wilson 2010, p. 183)

Indigenous Australians speak of repatriation rather than of the return of the bones or remains of their ancestors: they believe that the spirits as well as the bones of their Old People are making the journey home to the care of the land. It is not hard to understand why many Indigenous people should think that the collecting of remains was motivated by the same aggressive colonialist ambitions that saw them violently dispossessed of their land and its sustenance of their traditional way of life. Reburying the remains of their ancestors is an obligation for communities for whom the psychic and material legacies of colonial oppression have yet to be overcome. 6 P. Turnbull

Many of the men and women who have been involved in repatriation since the late 1970s were deeply affected by successive generations of children being forcibly removed from their parents. No small number was among those who suffered physical and mental abuse in state or church run institutions. Continuities are easily drawn between the fate of these children and the remains of the Old People they now reclaim, who were ‘torn from their country and resting places in much the same way as Indigenous children were stolen from their families’ (Hemming and Wilson 2010). What has also disposed many of those involved in repatriation to charge science with having served colonialist ambitions has been media commentary suggesting that Indigenous Australians have exploited the presence of remains in scientifc collections for political ends. Stuart Piggott (1910–1996), the eminent British archaeologist, for example, wrote to London’s Times newspaper in 1990 decrying the Yorta Yorta people’s demand for the reburial of ancient remains from Kow Swamp in northern Victoria as emotion mixed with political objectives (Piggott 1990). The following year, Sydney’s Bulletin magazine reported the eminent Australian prehistorian, John Mulvaney (1925–2016), warning that favouring ‘strident claims by radical Aboriginal leaders’ for the return of remains risked the wrongs of the colonial past being replaced by a ‘black intellectual totalitarianism’ (Monaghan 1991). Similarly, in refusing to consider repatriation claims, Robert Foley, the director of the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies at Cambridge University, warned readers of the Sydney Morning Herald in 2004 that Australian remains were ‘global human heritage, not the preserve of any one culture’, and asked, ‘[Would] future generations of Western and Aboriginal cultures be more grateful that the past was preserved rather than lost or intentionally destroyed because of current political fashion?’ (Fray 2003). Until the early 1990s, communities seeking the return of their dead also encountered unsympathetic museum personnel. As Michael Pickering and Phil Gordon, two museum professionals long involved in repatriation processes, have pointed out,

there was majority opposition by heritage professionals, many of whom worked in, or were associated with, Australian museums. They believed that repatriation was the wrong thing to do. Any repatriation was considered to be a surrender to Indigenous political activism. (2011) 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘TO WHAT STRANGE USES’ 7

It continues to be alleged that Indigenous Australians had no interest in securing the return of remains before in the late 1970s Native Americans began to demand that museums and universities surrender remains and grave goods for reburial, thereby generating public interest in and wider support for their efforts to regain ownership of tribal lands (Jenkins 2016, p. 312). In short, Indigenous campaigning for the return of their dead has commonly been portrayed by opponents of repatriation as orchestrated by a handful of activists in radical Indigenous organisations for whom it has been a means of gaining support for their demands for recognition of their rights to land within the wider Australian community. Repatriation has been represented as more informed by the politics of decolonisation than by any abiding connection between contemporary indigeneity and ancestral spiritual beliefs. It is true that well organised and resourced campaigning for the return of the dead only began in the mid-1970s. However, agitation by Australia’s frst peoples for the return of their ancestral dead has not been a politically opportunistic stratagem. On the contrary, the plundering of burial places has long been remembered in many communities and, as several chapters of this book show, there is a wealth of evidence dating back to the early years of white settlement confrming that Indigenous communities sought forcefully to protect burial places and the taking of remains for scientifc or other ends. What was new in the mid-1970s was that regional, state-based and national representative organisations now existed with the resources to represent and support communities to campaign systematically for the return of remains. One can appreciate, then, Indigenous Australians’ responding angrily to suggestions that they have exploited their dead by replying that, on the contrary, those who collected remains during the colonial era did so for what were political ends: to provide a pseudoscientifc rationale for Indigenous dispossession and colonial subjugation. Little wonder, moreover, that claimants of remains have at times been quick to accuse scientists and museum curators, who have sought to persuade them to allow remains to be retained for scientifc research, of denying the complicity of science in frontier terror. Many Indigenous Australians involved in repatriation share the view expressed by one Tasmanian on bringing home remains from London’s Natural History Museum in 2009: ‘We know’, she told reporters, ‘that some of our people were murdered just so the prized skulls of what settlers hypocritically called savages could 8 P. Turnbull be donated to scientists … There was a massive trade in Tasmanian Aboriginal remains in the mid-1880s’ (Mundy 2009). For their part, scientists and museum personnel caught up in repatriation claims have inadvertently helped foster the idea that the remains of Indigenous people were collected from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries to fabricate pseudo-scientifc grounds for their dispossession and colonial subjugation. They have conceded that these relics were commonly acquired in ways that would now be condemned as immoral and cruel. Scrutiny of institutional records confrms that graves were plundered, and that sometimes skulls, skeletons and other bodily structures were secured by postmortem dissection of Indigenous men, women and children who died while under white medical care. Evidence has also come to light that during the settlement of northern Australia through the second half of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century, museums occasionally received the bones of Indigenous men and women killed in frontier regions by police or armed settlers. Evidence of the entanglement of collecting and colonial violence was a signifcant factor in Australian-based anthropologists, archaeologists and museum professionals conceding by the mid-1980s that Indigenous communities with ancestral ties or clear cultural connections to remains in scientifc collections had the right freely to decide whether they should be reburied. By the early 1990s, Australian museums, universities and research communities with interests in human remains had endorsed a national policy recognising that the remains of Indigenous Australians in their possession who had died since contact with Europeans were to be dealt with according to the wishes of the surviving family or relevant community. Remains predating European contact were to be returned when requested to communities having a clear historical or cultural affnity to them. Despite objections by some archaeologists and human palaeontologists, it was agreed that Indigenous people who were recognised as the traditional owners of country wherein remains of great antiquity had been discovered had the right to decide their fate (see Mulvaney 1991). The situation in respect of British, continental European and other overseas museums and universities has been slower to resolve, but generally speaking, scientists and museum professionals outside of Australia have also recognised the depth of cultural and spiritual obligations on Indigenous people to rebury their dead, and acknowledge that remains 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘TO WHAT STRANGE USES’ 9 were generally acquired in ways that would now be condemned as morally abhorrent. Even so, museum professionals and scientists who have tried to negotiate the continued availability of Australian remains for research have inadvertently given the appearance of substance to Indigenous charges against nineteenth and early twentieth anatomists and anthropologists. Understandably and rightly they have accentuated the intellectual and ethical distance between their ideas and activities and those of current-day researchers. They have stressed that remains were collected to answer questions largely arising from scientifc communities of the nineteenth century era erroneously investing in explanations of human variation that gave cognitive strength to the idea that humankind comprised biologically distinctive racial types, each with greater or lesser powers of intellect. While emphasising the false and dangerous nature of this investment, contemporary scientists have argued that we are now able to see this because subsequent generations of scientists have been free to research human remains, and have further argued that this research now proceeds by self-correctively framing hypotheses purely on the basis of empirical and measurable evidence. And they have emphasised that there are now clear ethical guidelines for research on human remains, the formulation of which also owe much to knowing the terrible consequences of the construal by nineteenth and early twentieth century scientists of our species as comprising a hierarchy of distinct racial types, each with its own supposed psychological strengths and weaknesses. It is incon- ceivable, they have argued, hoping to convince to Australian and other Indigenous peoples, that scientifc research on remains could ever again validate the kinds of culturally ingrained racialist assumptions and prejudices that many peoples throughout the world suffered on falling victim to European colonial rule. One can only agree that comparative research on human remains of different ethnic origins has played an invaluable part in our realising that ‘race’ has no reality in biology. It has provided evidence confrming the impossibility of categorising geographically located populations into ‘races’ on the basis of any meaningful genetic similarities. While there are populations with high frequencies of covariance in characteristics such as skin colour and hair type, there is still immense genetic variation between individuals in these populations. Indeed, there is as much variation among people of similar European ancestry as there is between peoples of European and African ancestry (Lowentin 1972). 10 P. Turnbull

We owe much to research on human remains. However, in highlighting the discontinuities between contemporary research and the practices and intellectual products of nineteenth and early twentieth-century racial science, scientists and museum personnel have encouraged the likes of Edward Pierson Ramsay and his scientifc contemporaries to be popularly seen as wanting the remains of Indigenous Australians in order to scientifcally prove their innate inferiority to Europeans. We have seen the caricaturing of collectors and investigators of Indigenous cranial and bodily morphology during the long nineteenth century by liberal use of gothic clichés in widely read feature articles in leading Australian national newspapers and magazines, as well as in British and Australian television documentaries, so that they appear to have been no more than pseudoscientists, obsessively bent on justifying Indigenous dispossession on bogus racial grounds (Glover and Langsam 1990; Monaghan 1991; Oxley 1991). This book challenges this popular assessment of the history of scientifc interest in Indigenous Australian anatomy and morphology by means of historically contextualised investigation of how and why it was that the remains of around 6,000 Indigenous Australians came to be in western museums and other scientifc institutions. By the time that Ramsay sought Meston’s help in acquiring skulls and skeletons from Far North Queensland, bones of Indigenous Australians had been collected for nearly a hundred years. A small number of skulls came into the hands of leading European anatomists soon after British colonisation of southeastern Australia began in the late 1780s. The scale of collecting thereafter was numerically small, compared to the extent to which anthropological collecting of the bones of people of European, Asian or African ethnic origin occurred over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but from the time of frst contact with Europeans until Indigenous Australians were able to prevent unrestricted archaeological excavation of their traditional burial places in the 1980s, their bodily remains—and skulls in particular—were regarded as extremely valuable objects within European scientifc and intellectual circles. The intellectual value of Australian remains, moreover, changed over time. Since Nancy Stepan’s pioneering 1982 study of the development of British racial science, numerous scholars have discussed how the scientifc consensus during the frst half of the nineteenth century was that human variation was primarily due to environmentally induced degenerative 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘TO WHAT STRANGE USES’ 11 embranchment from one original ancestral type (Stepan 1982; Stocking 1987). As will be shown in Chapter 3 of this study, Indigenous Australian skulls were thought to illustrate with striking clarity the plas- ticity and susceptibility to environmental modifcation of the human cranium and facial bones. By the same token, they seemed to some investigators to suggest that human agency in the form of reproductive selectivity was likely an equal, or more powerful, determinant of variation. Australian skulls and skeletons also played an infuential part in the emergence of more biologically determinist interpretations of human variation during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Recently it has been argued by Kay Anderson that the correlation of Australian cranial morphology with ethnographic reportage by British anatomists and phrenologists was instrumental in giving evidential strength to the notion that humankind comprised distinctive, separately originating racial types, each with own unchanging innate physical and psychological characteristics. The shape and internal volume of crania were interpreted as confrming that Indigenous Australians were near bereft of mental attributes and qualities clearly distinguishing them from higher primates. So much so, Anderson argues, that racialist readings of Indigenous Australian cranial morphology provoked a ‘crisis of humanism’ which strengthened pessimism in early Victorian intellectual and political circles as to whether Indigenous people were capable of any signifcant degree of mental improvement under European tutelage (Anderson 2007). Whether Australian bodily remains were so signifcant in the formulation of mid-nineteenth century polygenetic racialism, as opposed to studies of the skulls of peoples of sub-Saharan ancestry, is questionable; but as will be discussed in Chapter 3, the cranial morphology of Indigenous Australians was seen by a number of the most infuential anatomists and early ethnologists of the frst half of the nineteenth century as indicating that they were a race that had interestingly experienced such a degree of ‘degeneration’ from humankind’s original form as to have become irreversibly trapped in a state of savagery. Where Australian remains assumed an importance beyond other ethnically distinctive human remains collected by or on behalf of anatomists and anthropologists was in the conceptual development of European thinking about the deep human past human during the last third of the nineteenth century. In the early 1860s, Darwin’s argument for evolution by speciation rapidly gained assent and support, especially among younger British scientists and intellectuals. Darwinian evolutionism also gained 12 P. Turnbull

German and French converts despite the scepticism of some leading continental medico-scientifc authorities. As will be discussed in Chapters 5 and 7 of this study, Darwinian anatomists excitedly imagined that the Australian skull confrmed humanity’s pithecoid ancestry. Comparing its shape to the Neanderthal cranial fragments unearthed in 1856, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) and other leading Darwinians unhesitatingly proclaimed Australia’s frst peoples to be ‘living fossils’, whose fate had been to experience environmental conditions freezing them physically and mentally at ‘ground zero’ of human evolutionary development (Bennett 2004, v. 9, p. 136–158). What is more, Darwin’s critics in British anthropological circles also saw Indigenous skulls as extremely valuable because they allegedly exhibited morphological features that refuted the notion that humankind had evolved from some long extinct pithecoid ancestor. So it was until the late 1920s, when morphologically based investigation of human evolutionary history came to be overshadowed by social anthropology. Living Indigenous peoples, their lifeways and culture, then became the prime focus of European intellectual curiosity, although there continued to be anatomists, physical anthropologists and human palaeontologists who employed craniology and other anthropometric techniques to investigate what seemed to them to be evolutionarily signifcant traits, or other biological typicalities, in Australian and other indigenous populations that might shed new light on prehistoric patterns of human migration and settlement. And while by the 1980s Australia’s frst peoples were empowered to the point of stopping unrestricted excavation and investigation of ancestral remains, these years witnessed the development of new computer-based anthropometric techniques and modes of genetic analysis that gave Indigenous Australian skulls and skeletons renewed value as scientifc material that might yield new knowledge of humanity’s evolutionary development and prehistory. Recalling, momentarily, Archibald Meston’s ebullient response to Edward Ramsay’s request that he secure skulls and skeletons for Sydney’s Australian Museum (‘To what strange uses are our noble primeval inhabitants to be put!’), there was nothing strange about the uses to which Ramsay intended putting the remains that Meston agreed to try and fnd. The Indigenous Australian body excited the curiosity and imagination of many of the most intellectually gifted and infuential European- and Australian-based anatomists, ethnologists and museum curators of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As this book shows, 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘TO WHAT STRANGE USES’ 13

Darwinian anatomists and anthropologists saw Australian remains as opening a scientifc window onto the deep past of humanity. Ramsay and other Australian-based museum curators and scientists of the last third of the nineteenth century understandably responded by trying to obtain remains with the help of settlers in rural and remote parts of Australia. Despite their reliance on insecure and parsimonious funding by local leg- islatures, they set out to create anthropometric collections that would enable research by colonially-located scientists and, in time, they hoped, visiting metropolitan authorities. For by the 1880s, the near monopoly on the production of scientifc knowledge enjoyed since the scientifc revolution of the late seventeenth century by researchers located in metropolitan centres had given way to a more ‘federative’ outlook. Australian-based museum curators and scientists were no longer mere suppliers of ‘raw material’ in the form of specimens and factual reportage for theorising within metropolitan scientifc circles (Macleod 1982): They now aspired to produce knowledge locally, while generally still deferring to the ideas and expertise of metropolitan authorities. While this book focuses on the acquisition and interpretation of the bodily remains of Australia’s frst peoples, it does so while exploring the signifcance of these activities within the wider intellectual landscape of European scientifc interest in the nature and origins of human diversity, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. The book thereby aims to contribute more generally to our knowledge of the conceptual development of racial science over the course of the long nineteenth century. It also attends to the history of the collecting of Australian remains, with a view to extending our understanding of how the sciences of comparative human anatomy and physical anthropology evolved through changing modes of interaction and exchange between colonially-based and metropolitan scientists. The book further aims to contribute to recent discussions among of historians of colonial Australia and comparable settler colonies about the cultural suasiveness of racial thought during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Australia have shown that, arguably more than in other contemporaneous settler societies, material and moral progress to nationhood was envisaged as dependent on safeguarding the biological integrity and potential of an evolutionarily advanced white social body (Anderson 2002; Bashford 1998; Bennett 2004; McGregor 1997). They have also shown how the 14 P. Turnbull concept of race, and the belief in the fundamentality of cultivating and protecting white biological vigour, gained much of its existential concreteness through the history of Indigenous Australians since European invasion supposedly exemplifying the dreadful consequences of racial decay (McGregor 1997). The connections that have been drawn to date between the cultural suasiveness of racialist perceptions of indigeneity and scientifc investigation of bodily remains, rest on limited contextual appraisals of what scientists made of Indigenous skulls and other bodily structures. More often than not, historians of colonial Australia have spoken briefy and with little specifcity about connections between the collecting of these relics and ‘social Darwinism’ within settler society. By exploring in detail the aims and outcomes of research on Indigenous Australian remains as they developed through the ‘long nineteenth century’, this book aims to show how this scientifc work infuenced the construal of the biological and psychic dimensions of indigeneity within Australian settler culture. While the research on which this book draws has found nothing to substantiate claims that Indigenous Australians were murdered to secure their remains, what has come to light is disturbing evidence of connections between Australian anthropological collecting and frontier violence. I was to discover, for example, that Archibald Meston, of whom I have spoken above, when agreeing to collect skeletal remains for the Australian Museum in the late 1880s, not only spoke playfully about the ‘strange uses’ to which they would be put but also joked ghoul- ishly about the prices that the museum was willing to pay for them. He told Ramsay, the museum’s curator, ‘I could have procured about £2000 worth in the last six years’. And he did so adding, ‘I shall start on the warpath again! Hope to succeed in slaughtering some stray skeleton for you’ (Meston 1887). Meston rarely let pass an opportunity to boast of his exploits on Queensland’s tropical north. Shortly after writing to Ramsay, he let it be known via the Cairns Post that he intended to assist the Australian Museum by travelling in ‘to the neighbourhood of the Russell River in the hope of obtaining some skeletons and mummies of Aboriginals’. This prompted the Post’s editor to cynically observe that the Russell River was a good place for Meston to go looking for bones, because of bloody clashes between Aboriginal men and miners of tin and silver on streams in the region (News 1887). Did Meston really mean that he hoped to ‘succeed in slaughtering a stray skeleton’? It seems to me that the best explanation is that 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘TO WHAT STRANGE USES’ 15 he was crassly alluding to the scale of frontier confict in far North Queensland during the 1880s. For by this time he had gained a reputation as an outspoken critic of the Native Police in his journalism and political campaigning. This paramilitary force of Indigenous men led by white offcers was, as Jonathan Richards has shown, responsible for numerous atrocities committed in the name of pacifying the Queensland frontier (Richards 2008). Meston had publicly called for the force’s disbandment, condemning its killing ‘for sport or slaughter gins and picaninnies’—though he nonetheless held to the consensual view of the time, that securing Australia’s tropical north for white settlement inevitably meant the violent suppression of Indigenous resistance (Meston 1884). Indigenous people seeking the repatriation of their dead have attention to argued that the terrors of frontier violence in colonial Australia included the murder of men, women and children to supply scientists with their bodily remains. In 1989, for example, representatives of Brisbane’s Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action (FAIRA) claimed at a meeting of the World Archaeological Congress in South Dakota that a number of individuals were so murdered, and argued, moreover, that disturbing parallels existed between the continued scientifc preservation of Indigenous Australian remains in museums and those of Jewish and other victims of the Nazi holocaust in Austrian and German medical schools (FAIRA 1989). Other repatriation cam- paigners and sympathisers have since charged that Indigenous people were murdered in the name of science, some following FAIRA in evok- ing parallels with the Holocaust. In 1999, for example, Indigenous artist Fiona Foley wrote of going on a feld trip during an academic symposium in Berlin:

From West Berlin further into the east, on a train threading its way through a scene resembling one from Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, the destination was the Leipzig Museum and the collection of the renowned German naturalist, Amalie Dietrich. It became apparent that there was another dire narrative that was seeking its brand new day. For the two Indigenous people in the guided tour, there were fashbacks to a feature article on the front page of the Bulletin, November 12, 1991, in which Dietrich was named the ‘Angel of Black Death’. (Foley 1999, p. 46) 16 P. Turnbull

The feature article in question, a sensationally inaccurate piece by an Australian journalist based in London, drew a crude parallel between Amelie Dietrich (1821–1891) and the sadistic concentration camp guard Irma Grese (1923–1945), the so-called ‘Blonde Angel of Auschwitz’, on the basis of unsubstantiated allegations that Dietrich, when collecting in central and northern Queensland for Hamburg’s Museum Godeffroy in the 1860s, supposedly had tried on two occasions to have Indigenous men shot to obtain their skeletons (Monaghan 1991). Given the murderous violence that occurred in many frontier regions of Australia during the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even scholarly books have endorsed claims that massacres were committed to enable ‘tens of thousands of body parts’ to be shipped to European museums and medical schools (Fesl 1993, p. 30). However, as I discuss in Chapter 10 of this study, there is no conclusive evidence that Indigenous people were killed to supply scientists with anatomical material. But this said, there were, nonetheless, disturbing connections between anthropological science, racialised perceptions of Indigenous Australians, and frontier confict, notably from the late 1860s to the early years of the twentieth century—the era in which pastoralism and mining ventures were often established by the violent pacifcation of Indigenous communities across northern Australia. In the early years of colonising Far North Queensland, for example, Archibald Meston amassed an impressive personal collection of weapons and many other kinds of object. Two years before collecting for the Australian Museum, an anonymous northern settler who clearly knew him accused him in the Brisbane press of taking part in armed raids on native camps during which he not only secured artefacts but also, on one occasion, tried but failed to shoot a man (Smith 1885). By the turn of the twentieth century, natural history museums existed in every Australian state capital city. Then as now, museums rarely had the funding to match their ambitions. Curators could sometimes afford to employ professional collectors, but they relied heavily on public donations of specimens. With the exception of the Western Australian Museum, founded in 1897, these institutions had for forty or so years cultivated and jealously maintained separate yet invariably overlapping networks of amateur naturalists and collectors, extending across much of Australia. It was largely through these networks that museums secured skeletal material. Their contributors pursued a variety of occupations. Medical 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘TO WHAT STRANGE USES’ 17 practitioners were the most active donors, followed by surveyors, police and other public employees willing to plunder graves for the beneft of science. There were also missionaries and superintendents of Aboriginal reserves who judged the sanctity of burial to be outweighed by the benefts to be gained from scientifc investigation of the Indigenous body. Bones (mostly skulls) were also supplied by settlers in rural and frontier regions who had interest in various aspects of natural history or the lifeways and cultural practices of local Indigenous communities. These benefactors of colonial anthropology were overwhelmingly but not exclusively men. Women were sometimes directly involved or otherwise implicated in plundering Indigenous graves, or in donating or selling bones and other bodily structures to museums and medical schools. Collectors were not always motivated by scientifc curiosity. Museum records disclose that there were suffcient government employees, pastoral workers and miners in rural and frontier regions willing to plunder Indigenous burials for money so that from the late 1860s until the late 1920s there was a steady market in remains, with the price that museums were prepared to pay for a well-preserved skull with mandible fxed at around ten shillings. The price for more or less complete skeletons ranged between £10 and £15. These may not seem high prices today, but in the second half of the nineteenth century sending three or four skulls to a museum would have earned a bush worker the equivalent of a week’s wages. What we know of the interactions of these collectors with museum curators provides no evidence that remains were murderously acquired, but it is apparent that museum personnel and colonially-based scientists with anthropological interests were aware of the profound distress and anger that the disturbance of burial places caused Indigenous people, and that a number were knowing benefciaries of their deaths at the hands of colonial military, police and armed parties of settlers. Surviving letters between museum curators and collectors also provide insights into the nature and causes of late nineteenth century Australian frontier violence. Among other things they challenge the adequacy of recent revisionist claims that, in the Australian colonial context, frontier violence occurred sporadically and was never systematic. While there are evidential and methodological grounds for chal- lenging, as Keith Windschuttle notably has done, the explanatory validity of conceptualising frontier violence as genocide (Windschuttle 2002), the sum of the evidence illustrative of the collecting of 18 P. Turnbull

Indigenous remains highlights the inadequacy of revisionist arguments to the effect that British colonial governance was principally animated by humanitarian concern for the welfare of both settlers and Indigenous people. The history of the collecting and scientifc use of remains furnishes persuasive evidence that from the early decades of the nineteenth century onwards, colonial humanitarianism was grounded in typological thinking about human diversity. Categorising people on the basis of supposed varietal typicalities of bodily form and psychology was to infuence in obvious and also in subtle ways how settlers perceived and interacted with Australia’s frst peoples. While one can have little argument with the claim that violence in frontier districts was sporadic, it was still systematic in the sense that typological thinking about human diversity ontologically structured the actions of settlers and agents of colonial governance so that they easily resorted to and condoned violence out of the conviction that it was a necessary and just means to secure peaceful co-existence between Indigenous peoples and settlers. Museum records and related documentary materials illustrative of the collecting of remains in northern Australia between 1860 and 1914 disclose that museum curators and scientists either shared or never questioned collectors’ beliefs in Indigenous racial inferiority and incapacity for absorption within settler society. They lent scientifc authority to long-standing and deeply ingrained prejudices, such, for example, the belief that Indigenous Australians were by nature prone to unpredictably violent behaviour. At best, they spoke with condescension about Indigenous culture and religious beliefs. Some were critical of the disastrous effects of northern colonisation on Indigenous communities; and even though they were often aware that they risked moral danger in desecrating burial places, or acquiring remains in the aftermath of frontier killings, few allowed conventional sensibilities in respect of the dead to constrain their efforts to acquire remains. And in impressing upon collectors how important the acquisition of remains was, they represented the Indigenous dead as a rare and rapidly diminishing source of scientifc material, giving weight to the idea that the fate of Australia’s natives races was extinction. Structurally this book comprises 12 largely chronologically arranged chapters. They draw on methodological insights provided by the research 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘TO WHAT STRANGE USES’ 19 of a number of historians of comparative human anatomy and racial science. The work of Michael Sappol and Anne Fabian on anatomy, racial science and skull collecting in nineteenth century North America has been particularly infuential in sensitising me to the ways in which the collection and analysis of Indigenous Australian remains was like other scientifc activities in that its assumptions, practice and reception were infuenced, in obvious and also in subtle ways, by the cultural geography in which it occurred. Inspired by Foucault’s writing on governance and self-identity in modern liberal polities, Sappol (2004) has explored the role of anatomy in the development of medicine as an authoritative profession in nineteenth-century America. He has argued that the teaching of anatomy by dissection generated intellectual resources that enabled medical men and aspiring bourgeois in society at large to cultivate a general ethos of modernising self-improvement. Sappol sees the dissection of the bodies of Native American and African Americans, together with those of poor whites, as integral to this project by highlighting the superiority of white professional men in knowledge-making contributing to social and moral progress. Anne Fabian has focused more directly on the entanglement of race and science in America during the middle decades of the nineteenth century (Fabian 2010). She has explored in particular depth the collecting and analysis of ethnic crania by Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton (1799–1851), and his seminal infuence on the development of American physical anthropology. Fabian has shown how this anthropological work was infuenced by and in turn contributed to contemporary discourse on the destiny of Native and African Americans. In this book I similarly seek to understand how the investigation of the bodily remains of Indigenous Australians was subject to the play of historically prevailing cultural assumptions affecting the personal idiosyncrasies and scientifc ambitions of individual practitioners. My hope is to thereby contribute to the historiography of racial science by close investigation of the aims and activities of anatomists and anthropologists in a different yet comparable settler society. While exploring the infuence of wider social and cultural values in the generation of medico-scientifc knowledge, this book particularly focuses on explaining in contextual detail what actual investigations of Indigenous Australian remains took place between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. It shows how these analyses occurred in particular medico-scientifc contexts wherein there were generally shared 20 P. Turnbull cognitive goals and agreed conventions governing evidence, reasoning and argument. In this respect, the book complements studies such as Ricardo Roque’s recent work and methodological refections on how Timorese skulls contributed to the epistemic and institutional coalescence of Portuguese anthropology (Roque 2010). I have also drawn upon and beneftted from the work of Bronwen Douglas (2008), R. H. Drayton (2000), Jim Endersby (2008), Sandra Sheets-Pyenson (1988) and other historians of imperial science who have studied the relations between exploration and collecting in spheres of European colonial ambition and metropolitan-based medico-scientifc activities. Importantly, I have further sought to balance the intellectual history of scientifc interest in Indigenous Australian bodily remains with telling how they were obtained by museum and medical school collections. Doing so has not been easy, and it could be argued that it would have been better to have written two books, dealing respectively with the collecting of remains and the attributes and meanings they acquired as objects of scientifc inquiry. However, I have opted to com- bine the two tasks; for as will soon become evident, scientifc ambitions in respect of Indigenous skulls and other remains more often than not infuenced institutional and individual collecting practices, while the exigencies of collecting remains often shaped, in obvious and in subtle ways, the nature and outcomes of the research that occurred. The reader will also fnd that I focus primarily (though not exclusively) on exploring Anglophone networks and especially the fows of ideas and remains between the British and Australian scientifc and wider intellectual communities. I aim to explore French and German scientifc collecting and analysis of Australian Indigenous remains in a future volume of essays. Chapter 2 explores the meanings and values that Indigenous Australian skulls and skeletons took on in the hands of leading European anatomists during the last third of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth century. Particular attention is paid to how Indigenous cranial morphology was interpreted by two of the most infuential comparative anatomists of the time. One was John Hunter (1728–1793), whose surgical teaching and comparative anatomical research during the last three decades of the century assured him posthumous fame as the founder of the modern ‘art and science’ of surgery in Britain. The other was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), who held chairs in medicine and anatomy at the University of Göttingen from 1776 until 1835. 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘TO WHAT STRANGE USES’ 21

Hunter and Blumenbach came to regard Australia’s native tribes as strikingly demonstrating the susceptibility of humankind to environmentally induced variations in body features, and possibly also varietally peculiar qualities and attributes of mind. Drawing on the ideas and arguments of Linnaeus (1707–1778), Buffon (1707–1788) and other earlier Enlightenment naturalists, Hunter and Blumenbach both imagined the history of humanity as essentially the story of our ‘degeneration’ from one original ancestral form into four or fve distinctive, geographically peculiar varietal types. They attributed this degenerative branching to an agonistic struggle within the bone and soft tissue structures making up the human bodily economy. The struggle was between a universally operating, subtle, non-material vital force—sustaining life and reproduction not just in humanity but in all living organisms—and the physiological effects of environmental factors. This vital force animated bodily structures to grow so as to express a pre-determined essential form, while the effects of climate and nutrition determined that this form was modifed in its shape or confguration. They further reasoned that largely endogamous populations had migrated from the site of their origination in a single ancestral pair—thought by Blumenbach to be located in the Caucasus—to colonise different parts of the world. To both men it followed logically that the differing environmental conditions where peoples settled would gradually effect their transformation into varietal types that were quite distinct in bodily form and possibly psychology from their original, Caucasian form. When Hunter, Blumenbach and their peers spoke of humanity as having naturally branched into varietal types, they interchangeably used the terms nations, tribes and races. They meant no more when speaking of race than to use it as a convenient shorthand, denoting human and animal populations that they saw as exhibiting distinctive varietal differences induced by the environmental peculiarities of the tropical, temperate or cold regions they had long inhabited (Douglas 2014, pp. 10–13). The majority of European scientists and intellectuals actively interested in the phenomenon of human variation prior to the 1860s believed that this mono-genetically grounded synthesis of vitalist physiology and environmentalism was the most coherent, and empirically demon- strable, explanation of the causes of human varietal diversity. They also concurred with Blumenbach that the shape of the human head was particularly susceptible to environmentally induced modifcation, and that the history of varietal diversifcation in humankind could be 22 P. Turnbull reconstructed by comparative examination of skulls, if suffcient racially typical examples could be acquired. This was the intellectual context that led Hunter, Blumenbach, and the many contemporary anatomists and naturalists whom the latter convinced to take an interest in comparative craniometry to acquire Indigenous Australian skulls. As to how the frst skulls came into the hands of European anatomists, the chapter draws attention to the role played in their acquisition by Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820), Britain’s most infuential patron of science in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The chapter also shows that from the outset, the procurement of Indigenous crania was entangled in colonial violence. Chapter 3 surveys how British comparative anatomists and surgeons actively interested in human variation during the frst half of the nineteenth century acquired Australian skulls and other skeletal material. Their collecting of these and other non-European human remains was in some respects little different from how metropolitan scientists obtained other kinds of botanical, geological and zoological specimens. Most were gifts to anatomy teachers from past pupils who had developed interests in various branches of natural history in the course of their medical studies. Indigenous remains were often sent together with specimens of marsupial species and fossils by those who, as surgeons or physicians, travelled or settled in the Australian colonies. Some collected skulls and other skeletal material for their old teachers while serving as surgeons aboard Royal Naval vessels assigned to Australasian waters, or with army regiments guarding convict settlements or strategic outposts. Others provided skulls and skeletons they discovered when working as colonial medical offcers, or after establishing private practices in rural regions of the colonies. In most instances, the remains they presented their old teachers or potentially new metropolitan patrons were taken from burial places they or their acquaintances had discovered. While medical professionals were the main suppliers, this chapter also documents how men in many other walks of life—from itinerant bush workers to colonial governors—were also involved in collecting Indigenous remains for metropolitan anatomists and medical museums. Beyond these similarities between how human remains and other zoological specimens were acquired by metropolitan scientists, there was an obvious fundamental difference: it was the mortal remains of fellow humans that were collected, in the majority of cases by removing them 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘TO WHAT STRANGE USES’ 23 from burial places where they had been ritually laid to rest by grieving relatives. And here the chapter attends to the dangers in which would-be collectors placed themselves while plundering traditional burial places. Metropolitan scientists were inspired by Blumenbach to build extensive, varietally comprehensive cranial collections. They did so believing that opportunities to collect skulls and other skeletal material would diminish at an accelerating pace. As Blumenbach himself warned, the gathering pace of colonial trade and exchange of goods, ideas and people meant that rates of reproduction between previously endogamous populations would rapidly increase. Hence what were presumed to have been until this time relatively stable markers of racial distinctiveness in crania were now seen as likely to be lost as populations in places affected by European economic ambitions reproductively merged with each other, leaving European science unable to reconstruct the history of racial divergence within the human species with any assured degree of accuracy. Yet it proved frustratingly impossible for scientists and the institutions with which they were associated to procure skulls and skeletons in any methodical or systematic way. This was especially so in the case of Indigenous Australian remains, where, as I show in Chapter 11, Indigenous communities across Australia did their best to protect the dead from plundering. Chapter 4 assesses how Australian skulls and other skeletal specimens fgured in the development of British thinking about the nature of variation in humankind from the 1820s until around the mid- 1850s. Since the early 1980s, historians have assumed that by the mid- nineteenth century, environmentalist explanations of human variation were challenged by the notion that racial typicalities of bodily form and psychology were so biologically ingrained and historically stable as to prompt the conclusion that humanity was descended from two, or possibly more, separately created ancestral types (Stepan 1982). It has been argued that this polygenetic vision of human natural history owed much to European perceptions of the ‘apparently unimproved, and hence extremely savage, condition of the Australian Aborigine [precipitating] a crisis in existing ideas of what it meant to be human’ (Anderson and Perrin 2008). However, as this fourth chapter suggests, investigations of Australian cranial morphology played little part in in cognitively strengthening this polygenist vision of humanity. The interpretation of Australian remains by anatomists and early ethnologists associated with London’s Royal College of Surgeons, and other prominent 24 P. Turnbull metropolitan medico-scientifc institutions, such as the medical schools of the Universities of Edinburgh, Oxford and Cambridge, unanimously continued to endorse the monogenetic environmentalism of Hunter and Blumenbach. Dissenters existed by the 1840s, but made they relatively little headway in British scientifc and intellectual circles. This said, Indigenous remains appear to have been instrumental in prominent monogenists becoming more biologically determinist in their understanding of varietal branching within the human species, from as early as the mid-1820s. Notably in the writings of Alexander Monro (1773–1859), the infuential Edinburgh anatomist, and in the encyclopaedic histories of human diversity produced by James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848), we fnd the Indigenous skull interpreted so as to pro- voke doubts whether Australia’s frst peoples were capable of integration within colonial society. This biologically determinist turn, which the chapter suggests owed much to the infuence of Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), the great French comparative anatomist, had signifcant consequences for the destiny of Indigenous Australians. There was no necessity for polygenetic theorising to categorise Europeans and Indigenous Australian peoples as biologically unequal. Polygenism, nonetheless, had its British exponents, who are the focus of Chapter 5. The chapter frst briefy surveys the writings of Charles White (1728–1813), a Manchester anatomist and obstetrician who has been widely credited as the frst to undertake anthropometric investigations of men and women of African origin. The focus then shifts to Robert Knox (1791–1862), the Scots anatomist and controversial racial theorist. Knox’s racial recasting of human history is examined, drawing particular attention to his belief that race fundamentally structured human cognition, affect and intellect. The chapter explains how Knox’s racial determinism made him a ferce critic of colonial endeavour, drawing attention to his pessimistic conviction that the racial inheritance of Indigenous Australians guaranteed that their fate would be extermination at the hands of European settlers. The second half of the chapter is devoted to Joseph Barnard Davis (1800–1881), a provincial industrial medical offcer and the creator of the largest private collection of racial skulls in nineteenth century Europe. Davis was a prominent analyst of crania by the 1860s. He was an admirer of Knox and also of Samuel Morton, the Edinburgh- trained Philadelphian craniologist and polygenist. Tracing the development of Davis’s interest in racial craniometry, the chapter shows how he 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘TO WHAT STRANGE USES’ 25 cultivated a network of contacts in Britain and the Australian colonies to put together over three decades a collection of Australian crania that rivalled those of London’s Royal College of Surgeons and the anatomy school of the University of Edinburgh. The chapter concludes by surveying Davis’s use of Indigenous Australian skulls to challenge early Darwinian attempts to reconstruct humankind’s evolutionary genealogy. Chapter 6 returns to the early nineteenth century to trace the entanglement of Indigenous Australian crania in the unorthodox cerebral science of phrenology. Since the mid-1970s, historians of racial discourse in colonial Australia have maintained that phrenology enjoyed widespread credence in the Australian colonies, not least because of its appearing to confrm that Australia’s frst peoples were naturally defcient in powers of reasoning and moral judgement (McGregor 1997; Reece 1974; Reynolds 1974, 1989). From its initial formulation by the anatomist Franz-Joseph Gall (1758–1828) in the last years of the eighteenth century, phrenology taught that the cranial shapes of African and Oceanic peoples were among the most compelling proofs of its foundational premise: that the human brain was in reality a collection of organs, each of which was the material basis of specifc faculties of cognition, intellect and emotion. As historians have argued, British and Australian-based phrenologists attributed the supposed ‘savagery’ of Australia’s native peoples to what they believed were relatively undersized specifc regions of their brains. However, this chapter questions whether phrenology was so infuential in the concrescence of racial perceptions of Indigenous inferiority as has generally been assumed. Phrenology had practitioners and followers in Australian colonial cities and numerous regional centres from the early 1820s onwards. Convinced phrenologists, and colonists who were curious enough about this unconventional cerebral science to acquire Indigenous Australian skulls on their behalf, were responsible for probably the majority of instances where remains were stolen from burial sites during the frst half of the century. However, as this chapter shows, the infuence of phrenology has been over-estimated. The science’s correlation of mental faculties with specifc regions of the brain played a far less infuential part in racial- izing indigeneity than mainstream scientifc thinking about the material structure of the brain and human psychology. Moreover, settlers did not need phrenology’s complex and problematic schema of cerebral localisation to convince themselves of their mental superiority. If phrenology did infuence their thinking, it was in reinforcing the erroneous belief that 26 P. Turnbull

Australia’s native race typically possessed crania much thicker than those of people of other ethnic ancestry, and that their smaller internal volume diminished their capacity for mental improvement. Chapter 7 explores early attempts at anthropological collecting by Australian museum personnel before turning to examine the meanings and values that Indigenous bodily remains accrued as Darwin’s theory of evolution rapidly gained assent, especially among younger British scientists, during the 1860s. Darwinian evolutionary discourse construed Indigenous Australian morphology as furnishing important clues as to the evolutionary genealogy of the human species. Metropolitan anatomists and anthropologists consequently sought the help of Australian- based scientists and other colonial contacts in securing remains. As the chapter shows, the construal of Indigenous Australians as ‘living fossils’ inspired local museum curators and scientists to attempt systematically to build their own collections of Indigenous bodily remains seeking to transcend what had hitherto largely been their status as collectors of raw scientifc facts for export to metropolitan institutions. They aspired to be producers of knowledge active in metropolitan theorising and debate, although while still deferring to leading fgures in British scientifc circles. They looked to the networks of collectors they had cultivated, and also sought the assistance of police and other governments agents in rural and remote Australia, to collect remains for their own collections as well as those of metropolitan scientists with whom they enjoyed intellectual and, often, personal ties. From the 1860s the combined impetus of metropolitan interest and colonial scientifc ambition led to the collecting of remains on a scale that dwarfed that which had occurred since the last years of the eighteenth century. Chapter 8 comprises studies of three Australian museum curators and their anthropological collecting during the last third of the nineteenth and frst two decades of the twentieth centuries. The chapter frst examines the activities and ambitions of Edward Pierson Ramsay, whose connection with Sydney’s Australian Museum began in 1860 and was to last until several years before his death in 1916. Ramsay was curator of the museum between 1874 and 1894, during which time he sought to create collections of Australian crania and other remains by donation, museum feld collectors and selective purchases. The second fgure studied is Edward Charles Stirling (1848–1919). Stirling was professor of physiology at the University of Adelaide but devoted his energies to directing the South Australian Museum between 1884 and 1912. He took an 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘TO WHAT STRANGE USES’ 27 active interest in anthropology and the evolutionary history of humanity, and during his long tenure as head of the museum capitalised on South Australia’s governance of Australia’s vast Northern Territory to create one of Australia’s richest ethnological collections (Jones 2007). By the early years of the twentieth century, the museum housed what was then the world’s largest collection of Indigenous Australian crania. The third curator studied here Walter Baldwin Spencer (1860–1929), who assumed the directorship of Melbourne’s National Museum in 1899. Spencer was one of a number of British biologists appointed to Australian universities in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Today he is widely regarded as the founder of Australian anthropology on the basis of his extensive feldwork in central Australia. Until his gradual withdrawal from active involvement in the museum during the mid-1920s, Spencer took a strong personal interest in the development of its ethnological collections, and sought to collect skeletal material whenever opportunities arose. Focusing on these three scientists’ collecting, the chapter offers contextualised insights into the development of anthropological and comparative anatomical interest in the Indigenous Australian body in the half-century or so after Darwinian evolutionism rapidly gained assent in British scientifc and intellectual circles. Chapter 9 explores the collecting of remains by the Queensland Museum and its relations with locally-based and visiting European anthropologists during the second half of the nineteenth century. Early collecting of Indigenous artefacts and bodily remains by the museum refected Queensland’s dependence, from its foundation in 1859, on the successful development of pastoralism and mining industries. This saw the forceful dispossession of the colony’s traditional owners, and in its early years the museum exhibited artefacts and bones of the Indigenous dead in ways that unashamedly celebrated the progress of settler society in spite of ‘savage’ resistance by the colony’s traditional owners. From the 1870s the museum’s collecting grew more refective of the infuence of contemporary ethnological and anthropological discourse. Staff and trustees took a special interest in securing items that were unique to Indigenous societies of the remote northern regions of the colony, notably bodies prepared for burial by complex funerary practices that included smoke drying. Here too, however, the museum’s display of these ritually prepared bodies—popularly known as ‘Queensland Mummies’—served to reinforce notions of European superiority and sanctioned Indigenous dispossession. 28 P. Turnbull

This ninth chapter also investigates the anthropological interests of Walter Roth (1861–1933), one of the Queensland Museum’s most active collectors of human remains during the last third of the nineteenth century. Roth was a medical practitioner who developed a passionate interest in anthropology during his studies at Oxford University (Reynolds 2008). He secured skeletal material for the museum before and during his appointment as the administrator of the protective regime under which the colony’s dispossessed traditional owners were forced to live in virtual slavery on mission and government-run reserves, from the late 1890s until the 1960s. The chapter also examines the museum’s relations with other visiting scientists who sought assistance to obtain remains, notably Hermann Klaatsch (1863–1917), the Heidelberg-based comparative anatomist, whose collecting during his travels in Queensland in the early years of the twentieth century are the focus of the fnal part of the chapter. Chapter 10 assesses the charge that the last third of the nineteenth century saw remains procured by the murder of Indigenous men and women in frontier clashes. As previously mentioned, my concern is to show that while there is no credible evidence that Indigenous people were killed to obtain their skulls or other body parts, there were disturbing connections between the anthropological ambitions of Australian-based museum personnel and frontier violence across northern regions of the continent from the 1860s until the early years of the twentieth century. Chapter 11 explores the wealth of surviving evidence documenting that, from the foundation of the penal settlement of New South Wales in 1788, colonists were so aware of the profound importance in Indigenous society of death ceremonies and the sacredness of burial places that by the late 1830s the British government had explicitly recognised the common law rights of Indigenous Australians to continuing ownership and use of land for burial. However, this recognition of native title did nothing to deter collectors, with the result that there is a remarkable neglected record of Indigenous communities’ efforts to prevent the taking of remains from ancestral burial places dating from the beginning of European settlement of Australia until well into the second half of the twentieth century. This penultimate chapter also challenges the belief held by many involved in repatriation since the 1980s that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientists and collectors had no qualms about obtaining remains through the plundering of burial places, or by fouting the law 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘TO WHAT STRANGE USES’ 29 in respect of postmortem treatment of the dead, believing that it did not apply to Indigenous bodies. The chapter shows that the procurement of remains did not occur in a moral vacuum; on the contrary, many of those who engaged in, or encouraged, grave-robbing or fouted the laws governing postmortem examinations were conscious they risked moral censure. Some were also aware that plundering Indigenous burials was illegal. What is more, we fnd instances where collecting was hindered by settlers opposing the desecration of graves, or by fear of public condemnation for removing bodily structures from the corpses of Indigenous men and women who died while under European medical care. The closing chapter of this book arises out of my employing my expertise as a historian for many years to assist families and communities wanting to locate ancestral remains in scientifc collections, or to know what can be discovered about the circumstances in which items known to be in collections were acquired. Not long after beginning the research on which this book draws, I found myself involved in efforts by Elders of the Birri-Gubba people of North Queensland to secure the return from anatomical collections in London and Edinburgh of ancestors’ remains taken from burial places in the Bowen region in the late nineteenth century. At one point I agreed to look after remains in my university offce until a keeping place could be established on campus, after the suicide of a young Birri-Gubba man led senior lawmen to feel that they could not keep the bones in their immediate possession. This experience, combined with what historical research disclosed about how these remains were collected, led to my working with a number of Indigenous communities to establish the provenance of remains held in British and continental European anatomical collections. In the early 1990s I acted as a consultant for the Brisbane-based Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action (FAIRA), which took a leading role in repatriation campaigning in the 1980s and 1990s. On the basis of my work in establishing the provenance of remains in scientifc collections, I was invited to serve in an advisory capacity on the Queensland Government’s Community Reference Group on (Indigenous) Moveable Cultural Property in 1994–1995. My contribution was to provide advice on research strategies for establishing the current whereabouts and origins of remains and sacred artefacts in scientifc collections. Since that time my research on the collecting of remains in colonial Australia has led some commentators to dismiss me as an activist rather 30 P. Turnbull than a historian. In the early 1990s, my access to records in the universities of Oxford and Edinburgh was blocked on the grounds that there were doubts as to whether I was a bona fde scholar. The fact is that I have never agitated, demonstrated, or participated in repatriation negotiations, but I have no problem with being styled an activist, if what is meant is simply that my research and writing refects my belief that the case for the unconditional return of ancestral remains to claimant communities ethically outweighs the value of continuing to preserve them for future research, even though new techniques for genetic and morphological analysis might render them valuable sources of new knowledge of our evolutionary genealogy and prehistory. There are inherent tensions between the historian and the activist when writing about the collection and scientifc use of Indigenous remains. Every historian is mindful of the risks implicit in subjecting facts of past human experience to present-day ethical judgement. However, as I discuss in the fnal chapter of this book, the argument commonly put by scientists and social commentators opposed to repatriation is that the matter of how artefacts were collected has little or no relevance to the question of whether they should be returned for reburial: in short, that the past has no relevance to the present. While personally attracted to Kant’s transcen- dental ethics, my efforts to understand how and why people acted as they did in past times has long been grounded in awareness that what we agree to be moral norms and ethically acceptable behaviour is, to a signifcant degree, historically contingent. It would be absurd to equate nineteenth century collecting of remains and the interpretation of their morphology with the aims and practices of modern scientifc disciplines with interests in human remains. However, as I suggest in this fnal chapter, the motivation and means by which the collecting and analysis of Australian remains by anatomists and anthropologists occurred during the nineteenth century is more relevant to now deciding their fate than critics of repatriation imagine; for close study of this disturbing aspect of the colonial past shows that the moral and ethical norms prevailing when the remains were collected did not differ so greatly from those that medico-scientifc communities today would subscribe to when conducting research on the bodily remains of the world’s indigenous peoples. Australia’s colonial past is not a world we have lost. There are continuities in terms of moral sensibilities and law in respect of the dead with implications for the present that we are obliged to consider seriously in deciding whether it is best we agree with our Indigenous fellow citizens that these are their Old People 1 INTRODUCTION: ‘TO WHAT STRANGE USES’ 31 who must be buried, or continue to regard their ancestors as specimens that should be kept available for future scientifc beneft. In researching and writing this study, I have benefted greatly from recent contributions to our understanding of the salience of race in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia, and in other contexts of cross-cultural interactions and colonial ambition. I have learnt much from Bronwyn Douglas’s studies of the cultural effects of Indigenous agency in eighteenth and nineteenth century Oceania, and its infuence within the conceptual evolution of European racial thought (Douglas 2008, 2009, 2010, 2014). Douglas’s work has alerted me to how Indigenous bodily remains could have a presence, capable of eliciting desire for intellectual and affective communion with these material traces of humanity’s deep past. Historians of racial thought in Australia have generally assumed that once in scientifc hands, skulls and other bodily remains of Indigenous origin were transformed into objects sheared of human qualities; however, in the course of this study I draw attention to various instances where the bones of Australia’s frst peoples provoked more empathetic imaginings of human natural history than we have realised. The work of Warwick Anderson (2002) and Alison Bashford (1998) has proved invaluable in illuminating how material and moral progress towards Australian nationhood was seen as dependent on safeguarding the biological integrity and evolutionary potential of a white, predominantly Anglo-Saxon population. I am also indebted to Russell McGregor for explaining how the concept of race, and belief in the fundamentality of cultivating and protecting the supposed evolutionary vigour of a white social body, gained existential concreteness by perceiving Indigenous Australians as doomed to experience a natural, seemingly inevitable, process of biological degeneration that would almost certainly see their extinction as a distinct race within the human species (McGregor 1997). I have also drawn extensively on the research of Cressida Fforde, notably her pioneering study of the scientifc collection of the bodily remains of the world’s indigenous peoples during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Fforde 2004). This study will be found to provide further contextualised depth to Fforde’s history of the procurement of remains, with the differences between us largely being my concern to explain in greater contextual detail the scientifc assumptions, practices and outcomes of the investigations of Indigenous human remains by anatomists and anthropologists of the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century. I have also learnt much from Helen McDonald, who has shown how racialist perceptions 32 P. Turnbull of Indigenous lifeways and culture gained strength through the scientifc mutilation of the corpses of Indigenous people in mid-Victorian Tasmania. McDonald has also provided insights into how remains sent to British metropolitan anatomists by Adelaide-based colleagues fgured in the intellectual development of British evolutionary science around the turn of the twentieth century (MacDonald 2009, 2010). Finally, in the course of the research on which this study draws, I have beneftted from the knowledge, advice and assistance of those whose who have tirelessly sought to bring their Old People home to country. I would especially like to thank Michael Aird, Professor Henry Atkinson, Neil Carter, Ned Davis, Henrietta Fourmile, Phil Gordon, Dr. Ernest Grant, Phil Risk, Major Sumner, Bob Weatherall, Lyndon Ormond Parker, Renata Pryor, Daryl Rigney, and Chris Wilson. I do not expect them to agree with my assessments of this diffcult feature of our colonial past, but my hope is that there will be further good conversation about where and why we see things differently. I also fondly recall and acknowledge the encouragement and support of Uncles Monty and Peter Pryor, Mrs. Ysola Best and Mr. David Mowaljarlai. CHAPTER 2

European Anatomists and Indigenous Australian Bodily Remains, c. 1788–1820

The frst thirty or so years of colonial occupation stimulated curiosity in European intellectual circles about Australia’s Indigenous peoples, and not only about their lifeways and culture. European anatomists were keen to examine and compare their skulls and other bodily structures with those of people from other parts of the world, in the hope of gaining new insights into the nature and causes of variations among humankind. My concern in this chapter is to show what these medico-scientifc authorities made of the remains of Indigenous Australians that they acquired. Particular attention is paid to how the cranial morphology of Australia’s frst peoples was interpreted by two of the most infuential comparative anatomists at the turn of the nineteenth century: John Hunter and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Both men believed that the bodily form of Australians and other indigenous peoples strikingly demonstrated the susceptibility of humankind to environmentally induced ‘degeneration’ from one original ancestral form into distinctive, geographically peculiar varietal types. As we will see, the two anatomists similarly hypothesised that this degenerative branching of humankind was the product of agonistic struggles the human bodily economy between an immaterial vital force sustaining life, and environmental forces, the outcomes of which signifcantly affected the growth of bone and soft tissue structures. My concern in this chapter is also to document how Hunter, Blumenbach and other anatomists of the time came to possess Australian skulls. Here, attention is drawn to the key role played in their acquisition

© The Author(s) 2017 33 P. Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia, Palgrave Studies in Pacifc History, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51874-9_2 34 P. Turnbull by Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820) Britain’s most infuential patron of science in the late eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth century. I also draw attention to anatomical collecting having occurred in the aftermath of violent encounters between European and Indigenous men from the frst years of British colonisation of Australia.

The Hunterian Portrait Many fne portraits hang in England’s Royal College of Surgeons yet one painting has had pride of place since the college was founded at the turn of the nineteenth century. It is the portrait of John Hunter by Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) (Fig. 2.1). Hunter was one of eighteenth century London’s most successful surgeons and private anatomy teachers. His patients included many infuential and wealthy members of Britain’s aristocracy, landed gentry and commercial elite. His diagnostic and operational skills were greatly admired, but he was liked by few of his peers. Partly it was his ancestry. He was the son of a Scottish lowland yeoman farmer. There were also rumours that, like his countryman the philosopher and historian David Hume (1711–1776), he was a sceptic and agnostic as to the truth or otherwise of Christianity. But the main reason he was disliked seems to have been his quickness to anger and refusal to be tactfully oblique, as a true gentleman was expected to be, when discussing money. By his early sixties, Hunter suffered from arteriosclerosis, and when he suffered a fatal stroke in 1793, it was commonly believed that it had occurred after his heatedly disputing the distribution of student fees with embarrassed fellow surgeons at London’s St George’s Hospital (Qvist 1981, pp. 193–194). Even so, Hunter’s peers could not deny his surgical expertise, nor the value of how he spent his time when not attending to patients or teaching in comparative anatomical research. Hunter was fascinated by how life was sustained and reproduced within Earth’s myriad kinds of animals and plants. Few individual scientists then or since have matched the scale and diversity of his collecting and examination of comparative anatomical specimens. So avid a collector was he that contemporaries were unsurprised by rumours that he had risked the fnancial security of his family several times to put together what, when he died, was a collection of over 13,600 physiological, pathological and natural history specimens (Dobson 1969, p. 190). A decade after Hunter’s death, memories of his ill-governed temper and possible religious infdelity were eclipsed by England’s College of Surgeons representing him as the founder of scientifc surgery and 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 35

Fig. 2.1 John Hunter. Line engraving by W. Sharp, 1788, after Sir J. Reynolds, 1786, Wellcome Library, London a pioneer of comparative anatomical research. This apotheosis was achieved in large part by the astute uses to which the leading surgeons who founded the college put Hunter’s unparalleled collections of 36 P. Turnbull specimens when establishing themselves by Royal charter as the sole professional body governing the practice of the ‘science and art’ of surgery in England. In 1799 they persuaded parliament to purchase and give them perpetual care of Hunter’s collections, which were valued at the remarkable sum of £15,000 (Rupke 1994, p. 15). The leadership of the college envisaged these specimens forming the nucleus of Europe’s most comprehensive repository of medical and natural history specimens. They pledged, moreover, that each year a college fellow would deliver two courses of public lectures on comparative anatomy illustrated by Hunter’s specimens. In 1813 the college also inaugurated an oration to be given each year by a distinguished fellow celebrating Hunter and other eminent contributors’ advances in comparative anatomy, physiology and surgery. Hunter and his specimens were pressed into the service of the professional and intellectual ambitions of England’s predominantly Anglican and politically conservative medico-surgical elite (see Desmond 1989). Shorn of his complexities as a man and scientist, he was now represented as personifying the college’s communal self-image as a select company of gentlemen devoted to understanding with due humil- ity the divinely originating processes sustaining and reproducing living organisms. Reynolds’s portrait was to play a key part in Hunter’s refashioning as a foundational icon. Acquired by the college in 1817, the portrait was hung above the president’s chair in the College Council’s chamber (Graves et al. 1899, p. 498; Taylor 1993, p. 3). Here, counsellors met to decide who among the growing number of medically-trained young men would be licensed to pursue surgical careers in England and its expanding overseas possessions. Looking at the painting today, one is struck that, unlike many of Reynolds’s subjects, the surgeon is painted in infor- mal dress. He sits turned from his writing table, pen still in hand, lost in thought. One can imagine him mentally preparing one of his admired clinical demonstrations, or captured at the precise moment of being struck by new insight into the workings of animate nature. But there is a nice ambiguity here. Hunter we know to have been a resolute empiricist, who regarded religion or abstract metaphysical speculation as having no place in investigation of the natural world. Yet so oblivious to his surrounds does Reynolds’s Hunter seem that one could think him awed by the divine perfection of animate nature. 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 37

Fig. 2.2 Detail of John Hunter. Line engraving by W. Sharp, 1788, after Sir J. Reynolds, 1786, Wellcome Library, London

His unpowered hair and plain dress is similarly open to interpretation. We can see him as a man dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge with neither time nor concern for fashion or social trivia; however, we can also imagine that such informality of appearance was seen by the leadership of the College of Surgeons as exemplifying the dislike of frippery and sensible conservatism on questions of religion and politics of a true English gentleman (see Langford 1991). Within the context of this study, Reynold’s portrait is noteworthy in one further respect. This is the presence in the painting of an Australian Indigenous skull (Fig. 2.2). Joshua Reynolds attended dissections of animal and human corpses by both Hunter and his brother, the surgeon and obstetrician William Hunter (1718–1783). He did so to gain deeper understanding of the anatomy and physiology of emotion; but he also shared the surgeons’ fascination with the form and function of bodily structures in men and animals. In his dissections, John Hunter frequently made a point of showing onlookers how bodily structures that performed the same function in different types of animal could be arranged into what he called ‘descending series’ (Abernethy 1817, p. 85). He believed that soft tissue and bone structures were commonly, though not exclusively, most complex in humankind and other primates, and became progressively less so within other mammals, reptiles and fsh. 38 P. Turnbull

Reynolds was taken with the idea of portraying Hunter seated next to a folio sketchbook in which he had drawn two of these ‘descending series’: one comprising three upper limb bones and hands; the other made up of two human skulls, said to be those of a European and an Indigenous Australian, and the skulls of a young chimpanzee, a Macaque monkey, a dog and, fnally, a crocodile. In 1928 Arthur Keith (1866–1955) was then at the height of his reputation as an evolutionary anatomist and physical anthropologist (Clark and Ellis 2004). He was also the Conservator of the Hunterian Museum. Keith put together a small exhibition that year to commemorate the 140th anniversary of Reynolds’s portrait. His idea was to display a small enamel copy of the painting together with the actual specimens appearing in Hunter’s notebook (Keith 1928, p. 205). His search of college records confrmed that the book containing the drawings was almost certainly among those of Hunter’s manuscripts that should have gone to the College of Surgeons as part of the parliamentary purchase of his specimens, but were kept by Everard Home (1756– 1832), his brother-in-law and executor. After plagiarising what he could, Home destroyed the bulk of Hunter’s drawings and papers sometime in the early 1820s. It was rumoured that had used some as toilet paper (Dobson 1954, pp. 59–62; Oppenheimer 1946, p. 39). Keith was nonetheless able to reconstruct the two series appearing in the Hunterian portrait using the same or other specimens collected by Hunter. He could not absolutely identify the exact Australian skull fguring in Reynolds’s portrait (Keith 1928, p. 205). But he was able to exhibit one of around a hundred skulls that the college had acquired by the late 1920s. The presence of the skull in the portrait marks the beginning of the scientifc collecting and investigation of the bodily remains of Indigenous Australians. And my concern in this chapter is to explain how and why scientifc interest in the bodily form of Australian and other indigenous peoples developed in the later eighteenth century. I examine how the morphology of the Indigenous Australian skull was interpreted by John Hunter and also by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the Göttingen University-based naturalist and comparative anatomist whose explanation of the causes of human variation gained widespread assent in European scientifc and intellectual circles in the frst half of the nineteenth century. As we will see, Hunter and Blumenbach both believed that the morphological peculiarities they saw in Australian crania confrmed that variation 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 39 in humankind occurred through the modifcation of a subtle, immaterial force that sustained life and its reproduction in all living organisms, by external environmental factors, notably climate and diet. I then address the question of how Hunter, Blumenbach and other anatomists active in the early years of the nineteenth century obtained Australian skulls: and here attention is drawn to the prominent part played in their acquisition by Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society until just before his death in 1820.

Foreign Bodies from Distant Lands By the late eighteenth century, educated Europeans understood the world as having been profoundly changed since the late ffteenth century by exploration, trade and colonial conquest. Spain had conquered the agrarian societies of central and southwest South America, while the Atlantic kingdoms of Portugal, France, Holland and England had colonised other parts of the Americas occupied by peoples who lived by small-scale agriculture or hunting and foraging. Under royal patronage, Europeans merchants and traders had forcefully established themselves in African and Asian markets. By the mid-eighteenth century Europe had gone from being on the periphery of intercontinental networks of exchange of goods, people and ideas to being the dynamic centre of a capitalist world system, the accelerating scale and complexity of which had left virtually no society on earth unchanged (Wallerstein 1974). Britain and the Netherlands were especially powerful driv- ers of change in world history, having economies powered by consumerism that revolutionised the nature, fnancial basis and scale of manufacturing, created new markets for colonial produce, and caused the restructuring of agricultural production to feed growing urban populations (Israel 1989; Ormrod 2002). Socio-economic change saw the emergence by the mid-seventeenth century of new religious, political and scientifc ideas, many of which unsettled or openly questioned traditional conceptions of the natural world, human nature and the ordering of society. It seemed to many within Europe’s ruling aristocracies, landed elites and leaders of the Catholic and Protestant churches that commercialism gave strength to ideas of individual autonomy and the effcacy of human reason to discern truth that threatened to undermine faith in Christianity and the established social order; although even those who continued to believe in the fallibility of human reason and the necessity of obedi- ence to the teachings of the Church and royal absolutism conceded that there was much to be gained in terms of social progress and moral improvement 40 P. Turnbull through systematic, scientifc study of the natural world and the nature of its special microcosm: humanity (Gaukroger 2010). By the later seventeenth century, there was broad agreement among Britain’s intelligentsia that the application of the experimental methods that proved so powerful in identifying regularities in the physical universe could be adapted to the study of humankind. The successes of Newton in particular in disclosing the workings of matter inspired faith in the capacity of humans to achieve material and moral improvement through empirical study of human behaviour (Jacob 1976). Within this blending of theology, natural philosophy and social observation, human understanding was imagined to develop mechanistically as the mind processed ideas derived from sensory experience. There was debate as to whether children came into the world with powers of reasoning but without ideas, or were born with ideas of themselves and the existence of God. However, it was agreed that human understanding developed as ideas derived from sensory experiences were combined to form more complex ideas. The infuence that a simple or complex idea might have on a person’s understanding or moral judgement was thought to be determined by the force with which the external world had impressed that idea on the mind, and also how strongly an individual’s self-consciousness and powers of reasoning might infuence how ideas were combined and understood. This was a developmental psychology that not only stressed the importance of the individual being taught ‘right reasoning’ through structured social interaction, but also proved a stimulus for historical and ethnographic curiosity. For while the consensus within European intellectual circles was that all humanity possessed the same basic, innate powers of forming, associating and judging ideas, men and women were thought to differ in their qualities and strengths of understanding. It also seemed evident that there were marked psychological differences between Europeans living in different parts of the continent, and more so between Europeans and peoples indigenous to distant parts of Eurasia, Africa, the Americas and what was then known of Oceania. These perceived differences were thought to warrant the conclusion that if human understanding developed primarily through sensory encounters with the external world, then psychological differences existed between peoples indigenous to different parts of the world had developed because the environment in which they had lived for successive generations had peculiarities serving to stimulate or starve the mind of complex ideas. 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 41

By the mid-eighteenth century, educated Europeans could immerse themselves in a wealth of writings by philosophers and historians comparing ancient texts with contemporary accounts of non-European lifeways and institutions. These discourses identifed what were thought to be universal regularities, or more localised contingencies, in the history of humankind. Notably in the writings of the French political philosopher Montesquieu (1689–1755), and the works of the Scots ‘conjectural’ historians, Adam Smith (1723–1790), Adam Ferguson (1710–1776) and John Millar (1735–1801), humanity as a whole was deemed to possess the capacity to develop similar, increasingly sophisticated and benefcial forms of social organisation, although some peoples might fnd themselves historically constrained, by climate or other material factors, from exploiting the natural resources of their environment. Later eighteenth century European intellectuals generally presumed that no fundamental contradictions existed between what appeared in ancient texts, in modern reportage of the lifeways and culture of peoples beyond Europe, and in the sacred ethnography of Scripture. The earliest books of the Bible appeared to confrm that peoples of one ancestral stock who lived by herding sheep and cattle had dispersed in search of new grazing lands. Some found themselves in environmental conditions that led them to adopt agriculture. The fate of others was to migrate far beyond the world known to the writers of the Old Testament, with some of their descendants eventually coming to inhabit country so inhos- pitable as to force them to abandon pastoralism and live by foraging and hunting (Marshall and Williams 1982; Pocock 1981). There were intellectuals who questioned whether the essential truths of the biblical account of humankind’s origin could be reconciled with what they took to be Europeans’ mental superiority to sub-Saharan African peoples. Since late medieval times, sacred ethnography had identifed Africans as the descendants of the biblically accursed ‘sons of Ham’—thereby providing the basis for European rulers and commercial elites justifying the enslavement of these people as providentially ordained (Whitford 2009). There was also a long tradition of reasoning that the physical and intellectual differences between Africans and Europeans were supposedly so marked as to render the likelihood of their separate creation more credible than the Scriptural account of their descent from one ancestral pair. Probably the most infuential English-speaking exponent of polygenism in the later eighteenth century was Edward Long (1734–1813), a sugar planter and magistrate, in his History of Jamaica (1774). The 42 P. Turnbull general consensus, however, was that humankind was descended from one divinely created pair, and that the causes of physical, cognitive and intellectual diversity in humankind were environmentally based (see Kidd 2006). As to the physiological processes by which this diversifcation occurred, there were doubts as to whether they could ever be reliably determined. Adam Ferguson, one of the most infuential conjectural historians of societal development, held that while traditions of nations living as shepherds or simple agriculturalists might contain ‘some resemblance of truth’, the fact that these traditions had been orally transmitted to successive generations meant that they had varied ‘with the imagination of those by whom they [were] transmitted, and in every generation [received] a different form’ (Ferguson 1966, p. 116). Even so, Ferguson believed that oral traditions could furnish insights into the ‘national character’ of a people when they took the form of sagas or other genres of poetry and folk drama; and he reasoned that they pointed to a ‘gradation of temperament and spirit’ in humanity which, following Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), the great contemporary French naturalist, he believed was environmentally induced. Even so, Ferguson was sceptical as to whether empirical inquiry would ever disclose the biological causes of this apparent diversity in ‘national character’. As he observed in his infuential 1767 Essay on the History of Civil Society,

That the temper of the heart, and the intellectual operations of the mind, is, in some measure, dependent on the state of animal organs, is well known from experience. Men differ from themselves in sickness and in health; under a change of diet, of air, and of exercise: but we are, even in these familiar instances, at a loss to connect the cause with its supposed effect: and though climate, by including a variety of such causes, may, by some regular infuence, affect the characters of men, we can never hope to explain the manner of those infuences till we have understood what probably we shall never understand, the structure of those fner organs with which the operations of the soul are connected. (Ferguson 1966, pp. 117–118)

John Hunter and Human Diversity Ferguson may have doubted whether science could ever satisfactorily explain the processes by which diversity had occurred in the human bodily economy; but his fellow Scot, John Hunter, was more optimistic. 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 43

A focal point of Hunter’s investigations was the nature and extent of variation in humankind. Soon after he established himself teaching anatomy in London in the mid-1760s, Hunter acquired a series of portraits by Linnaeus (1707–1778) representing the division of humanity into varietal types. They had belonged to William Cheselden (1688–1752), under whom for a time Hunter had studied surgery and anatomy (Cope 1953; Dobson 1969). Hunter also took a keen interest in observing frst-hand Africans and other non-European peoples brought to London. In 1773, for example, he was able to physically examine members of two Inuit families brought to England by George Cartwright (1739–1819), a merchant and Labrador fur trader. After examining several of the travellers, Hunter gave them dinner at his London residence. There, Attuiock, the most senior man in the two families, left the table to relieve himself, only to accidentally fnd himself among the anatomist’s specimens. Cartwright later recalled that Attuiock returned terrifed, and on his asking…

the cause of his emotion … could get nothing more from him than ‘Come along with me’, and he hastily led me into a room in the yard, in which stood a glass case containing many human bones. ‘Look there’, says he, with more horror and consternation in his countenance than I had ever beheld in that man before, ‘are those the bones of Esquimaux whom Mr. Hunter has killed and eaten? Are we to be killed? Will he eat us, and put our bones there?’ As the whole company followed us, the other Indians had also taken the alarm before the old priest had fnished his interrogato- ries; nor did any of them seem more at ease, by the rest of us breaking out into a sudden and hearty laugh, till I explained to them that these were the bones of our own people, who had been executed for certain crimes committed by them, and were preserved there, that Mr. Hunter might better know how to set those of the living, in case any of them should chance to be broken; which often happened in so populous a country. (Cartwright 1792, v. 1, p. 271)

Cartwright claimed that the Inuit travellers were ‘perfectly satisfed’ by this explanation and approved of Hunter’s dissecting the bodies of executed felons, although he conceded that Attuiock had ‘received too great a shock to enable him to resume his usual tranquility, till he found himself safe in my house again’. 44 P. Turnbull

We also have brief observations by Hunter on the susceptibility of African people to disease when moved from tropical to cold and wet climates (Hunter 1861, p. 295), and we know that he commissioned or bought plaster casts of African men (Dobson 1969, p. 236). We further know that he was in the habit of demonstrating the varietal differences he saw in the shape of the human with skulls from different parts of the world; and he is said to have held that there was nothing in the morphology of African skulls that justifed their treatment as intellectually inferior to Europeans (Meijer 1999, p. 115). However, the few of Hunter’s notebooks and papers that Everard Home did not destroy provide no direct insights into his thinking about the nature and causes of diversity in humankind. We are left to infer what he thought from observations and refections he made on variation in other animal species; and there we fnd that Hunter generally focused on describing what he saw when dissecting plants and animals, rather than giving himself to hypothesising or abstractly refecting on the nature of the processes by which life was sustained and reproduced. As he cau- tioned his many students, ‘Too much attention cannot be paid to facts (Hunter 1835, v. 1, p. 208). Even so, one can, in Hunter’s surviving writings, discern similarities and likely indebtedness to Buffon. In his monumental Histoire naturelle (1749–1767), Buffon held that the long history of human intervention in the sexual reproduction of domestic animals proved that remarkable variations could be produced within a single species over several generations through environmental manipulation. This led Buffon to think that from the earliest stage of an individual organism’s embryonic development, some divinely bestowed interior moulding force caused minus- cule organic particles derived from food to be fashioned into organs and other bodily structures. Hence it seemed reasonable to Buffon to assume that variations between individuals within a particular species occurred when the qualities of the particles they ingested differed, or when the operation of this moulding force was affected by climatic or other environmental conditions. As for humanity, Buffon was inclined to think that sustained exposure to similar environmental conditions caused the expression of the same bodily and psychological variations in different populations. Life in arctic conditions, for example, seemed to him to have rendered Inuit and Sami peoples near identical in terms of hair and eye colouring, as well 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 45 as physically smaller than peoples inhabiting more temperate parts of northern America and Eurasia. He also strongly suspected that comparable environments were productive of psychological similarities, for it seemed to him that Sami and other peoples long inhabiting the world’s Arctic regions, for example, were typically ‘savage’, ‘stunted’ and ‘stupid’ (Buffon 1749, v. 3, pp. 527–528), whereas the most intelligent of humanity were—or so he believed—to be found in temperate climates. Even so, Buffon was cautious in his speculations, conceding that a sat- isfactory account of the causes of human variation required exhaustive collation and evaluation of historical testimony, along with critical assessment of the reports of contemporary scientifc travellers. Only then would it be possible to say confdently what were enduring and unchanging traits of body and mind, and what were localised, environmentally induced morphological or mental variations. He was, moreover, cautiously optimistic that what environmentally induced variations in cognitive or intellectual powers had occurred in humankind were trivial and potentially reversible bodily and psychological peculiarities. Like Buffon, Hunter believed that life was in all probability sustained and reproduced by some vital, moulding force or principle that had been ‘superadded’ to matter. This life force he saw as inherent in all organic matter, even when the matter in question might initially strike an observer as so simple as to lack any organisation. It appeared responsible for peculiar powers of action inhering in specifc organs and other bodily structures, and for the susceptibility of different bodily structures to particular forms of stimulation that produced localised reactions. By this means, the complexities and interdependencies enabling the normal functioning of specifc bodily structures were guaranteed, thus enabling the successful reproduction of individuals. Hunter appears to have concurred with Buffon that variation occurred only in ‘less essential’ aspects of body and mind. He was similarly cautious in specifying the causes of varietal diversity among the peoples of the world. As he wrote in one surviving manuscript, attempting to ‘trace any natural production to its origin, or its production, [is] ridiculous; for it goes back to that period, if ever such existed, of which we can form no idea, viz. the beginning of time’ (1861, p. 4). Nonetheless he thought it reasonable to assume that ‘there was a period of time in which every species of natural production was the same; there then being no variety in any species’, and it seemed to him that variation from what he termed 46 P. Turnbull the original ‘Natural Animal’ could result from ‘geological and climatic changes, migration, and above all domestication’ (Cross 1981, p. 86). Returning to the Hunterian portrait we can see its Australian skull as illustrating the surgeon’s belief that gradations of complexity existed at the level of specifc bodily structures. ‘What we call “perfection” in animals’, Hunter observed, ‘does not increase in regular progression in every part, but as animals are complicated; and each complication has its degrees of perfection; [they are not] regularly progressive in every part from the most imperfect [animals]’ (Hunter 1861, pp. 36–37). So, while some of the most complex bodily structures in nature were to be found in the bodies of humans and apes, Hunter stressed that these bodies also possessed structures that were relatively primitive in terms of function when compared with organisms possessing a bodily economy that was generally less sophisticated (Rolfe 1985, pp. 317–318). Yet we can also read Hunter’s comparative positioning of an Indigenous Australian skull beside one of European ancestry as illustrative of his belief in the susceptibility of human bodily structures to exhibit marked, even if biologically trivial, variation as a consequence of sustained exposure to particular environmental forces. We can also see that Hunter appears to have rejected the infuential varietal taxonomy of Carl von Linné (1707–1778), the Swedish physician and naturalist better known by his Latinised name, Linnaeus. Linnaeus held that the key to determining what were universally human traits or localised variations was to study humanity employing the same taxonomic procedures that he had devised to investigate and hierarchi- cally classify all other species of fora and fauna. Linnaeus believed that when this was done, humanity would be seen to comprise six distinctive varietal types: Amerindians, Asians, Africans, Europeans, Wild Men, and Monsters (Linnaeus 1758, pp. 20–24). Today this typology strikes us as a stark illustration of the chauvinism and prejudices that eighteenth- century European intellectuals held about peoples beyond the temperate regions of their own continent; but Linnaeus’s contemporaries regarded his account of human variation as more scientifc than we can now easily imagine it to have been. Linnaeus’s thinking about the causes of variation owed much to Herman Boerhaave (1688–1738), a contemporary Dutch physician whose infuence on European medico-scientifc thought during the frst two thirds of the eighteenth century is hard to over-estimate (see Knoeff 2002). He shared Boerhaave’s conviction that human growth 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 47 and reproduction occurred through a process in which individuals developed from microscopic but fully ‘pre-formed’ animals. Refecting the patriarchal nature of eighteenth century society, these tiny forms of the adult organism were imagined to be contained within sperm. Boerhaave believed that these miniatures of the mature organism would grow during gestation and after birth so as to assume the essential form of its species, which it would in turn bequeath to its offspring. He did not, however, rule out this typical form being modifed by external forces infuencing the fow and qualities of matter and nutrients to bodily structures by the blood and other vital fuids. In this way, Boerhaave’s account of the growth and reproduction of bodily structures was, as the late Roy Porter observed, a striking and at that time widely persuasive application of the fndings of Newtonian physics to medicine (Porter 1998, p. 246). It was also a blending of Newtonian physics with the theory—enjoying wide currency since its articulation over two millennia earlier by Hippocrates—that human bodily and mental capabilities were profoundly shaped by the relative causal strength and interplay of four distinctive fuids or ‘humours’ within the bodily economy: blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile. Linnaeus reasoned that environmental factors such as climate and dietary peculiarities determined the relative infuence of these humours, with the result that six seemingly distinctive varietal types of human were to be found in different parts of the world. Europe’s temperate climate produced a type that he termed Homo europaeus, with typical features such as white skin, a muscular physique and long straight hair. These traits were due to a supposed predominance of blood, which Linnaeus, falling back on Graeco-Roman humoural theory, was responsible for the European varietal type being typically hopeful, amorous and courageous. By way of contrast, the peoples of Eastern Asia, whom he termed Homo asiaticus, were to his mind typically sallow in complexion, with dark eyes and a wiry frame. In them he saw black bile to be the ruling humour, and responsible for making this variant characteristically melancholy, proud and avaricious. Linnaeus believed that a dominant humour not only determined the psychology of each varietal type, but also greatly infuenced its customs, habits and modes of social organisation. As he saw it, the sanguine European typically preferred closely ftting clothes and was accustomed to being governed by laws. The melancholic Asiatic type was happiest in loose clothing and living under despotic rule. 48 P. Turnbull

What now seems bizarre about Linnaeus’s varietal typology is that it included the categories of ‘Wild Men’ and ‘Monsters’. The frst refects the credence he gave to historical and contemporary accounts of children having been found in various parts of France and Germany who supposedly could not speak, were covered with hair and could only move on all fours (see Douthwaite 1997). Linnaeus’s Homo monstrosus was something of a catch-all category, into which he placed peoples whom travellers and voyagers claimed were extraordinarily big or small. Thus the Khoi and San hunter-gatherer peoples of southern Africa were consigned to this varietal niche on the strength of colonialist reportage that they were ‘pygmies’ with unique genitalia (Khoi and San men were said to have only one testicle; the women extraordinarily long labia). Likewise, the Selk’nam and Haush peoples of Tierra del Fuego owed their classifcation as monstrosus to British and other European voyagers en route to the Pacifc claiming that they were ‘giants’ (Sturtevant 1980). Linnaeus’s mode of distinguishing humans and simians differed from that which Hunter subsequently employed. By the late 1750s, Linnaeus had come to the view that the human genus should be expanded to include two new species that he called Homo sylvestris and troglodytes (Linnaeus 1758, pp. 23–24). His did this in response to several anatomists reporting that they had found remarkable morphological similarities between humans and apes shipped to Europe from Africa, and also apes living in Borneo and the Maluku Islands of present-day Indonesia who were said to use tools, live in well organised tribal groups and to desire local women (see Feagin 2006, p. 92). Linnaeus’s account of the nature and origins of human varietal diversity was by no means universally accepted. His strongest critics were prepared to concede that when foral and faunal species were arranged according to his classifcatory principles, animate nature could be seen to be governed by laws and processes as universally operative as the forces that Newton had discovered acting on matter. However, what troubled many fellow naturalists and caused Linnaeus to be censured by both Protestant and Catholic theologians was his appearing to accentuate humanity’s similarities with other quadruped species to near the point of denying the uniqueness of humans within creation by virtue of possessing a divinely bestowed immortal soul and unique gifts of reasoning and moral judgement. The naturalist met this criticism by pointing out in successive editions of Systema Naturae (frst published in 1735), the treatise in which he represented animate nature arranged by his taxonomic principles, that 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 49 he had prefaced his description of the human genus with the Latin rendering of the injunction said to have been inscribed above the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi: ‘Homo nosce Te ipsum’—‘Man know Thyself’. He also replied to his critics that it was because of humanity’s capacity for reasoning and judgement that he had named our species Homo sapiens—Man, wise, all knowing. Even so, Linnaeus believed that impartial scientifc inquiry invited the conclusion that in terms of cognition, affect and intellect, the ‘inner nature’ of humankind was quantitatively rather than qualitatively different from that of other sentient beings. What psychological differences there were between humanity and apes was a question of degree: reason and judgement were attributes that humankind possessed, Linnaeus wrote, ‘to a most surprising extent [above] all other animals’ (Slotkin 1965, p. 178). This, together with Linnaeus’s dividing humanity into varietal types on the basis of supposedly possessing distinctive humoural makeups giving rise to different qualities and attributes of mind, appeared to confrm the fears of Buffon and other critics who reasoned that if, as Linnaeus believed, individual organisms were pre-formed, this invited the conclusion that varietal types within the human species had originated by separate acts of creation. Hunter had no interest in the metaphysical implications of Linnaeus’s system. What he took issue with was what he believed to be its artifcial- ity and thus erroneously simplistic mapping of animate nature. The main source of the problem, to his mind, was the system’s grounding in preformist biology, which he saw as having led Linnaeus wrongly to assume that there was a straightforward, progressive gradation of living organisms within nature. Hunter, as we have noted, believed that the value of the concept of gradation was confned to its providing a means of charting the relative complexity of specifc bodily structures as they appeared in different species. Again returning to the Hunterian portrait we can see the presence of the Australian skull as giving visual expression to the anatomist’s belief that human varietal types were far more susceptible to environmentally induced modifcations than Linnaeus’s preformist biology allowed. As Hunter saw it, structural variation in the human bodily economy most probably occurred when particles within food were turned into ‘animal matter’ and imbued with the life-principle within the stomach. The greater part of this matter infused the blood, and on arriving in organs and other bodily structures via the circulatory system, was extruded in 50 P. Turnbull lymphatic fuid to become part of an organ or other structure through a process of coagulation. Similarly, decline and decay occurred when animal matter was no longer added, or coagulated at a rate less than that at which matter became bereft of life. Thus, in the case of bone, Hunter reasoned,

granulations arise, which push up the dead piece [of bone] against the upper sides of the cavity, and in consequence of this pressure against the newly formed bone, the absorbents are set to work to remove it and in proportion as this absorbed, the piece is pushed out, the granulations flling the space behind it. (Hunter 1835, v. 1, p. 526)

Dead matter was then broken down by absorbents and eventually dis- charged from the body. In Hunter’s hands, then, what may well have been the frst Indigenous Australian skull to be examined by a European anatomist was interpreted as strikingly confrming not only the existence of a vital force animating all of Earth’s life-forms, but also its susceptibility to modifcation by the effects of environmental factors such as climate, nutrition or exposure to decaying matter. The morphology of this skull was thus taken to illustrate how this susceptibility had affected the developmental and mature forms of Indigenous Australian cranial bones, resulting in these people exhibiting a distinctive typical head shape.

Joseph Banks’s Anatomical Patronage How was it Hunter came by the skull? If he possessed it before Reynolds fnished his portrait in 1788–1789 (Dobson 1969, p. 262) there are several ways he might have acquired it. It might have been given to him by a member of either James Cook’s momentous frst Pacifc voyage of 1768–1771 or his third and fnal expedition. Neither Cook, nor Joseph Banks, nor any other member of the two expeditions is known to have collected skulls or other Australian human remains, although this does not rule out the possibility that Hunter got the skull after Cook returned from his frst voyage. It may have been found during his survey of Botany Bay or when he was forced to careen his ship for near seven weeks at Endeavour River. Nor can we discount the possibility that the skull was acquired on Cook’s third voyage, during several days in early 1777 spent ashore on Bruny Island just off the southeastern coast of 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 51

Tasmania. Indeed, there is reason to suspect that it could have been brought to England by James King (1750–1784), second lieutenant aboard HMS Resolution. We know that King arrived home with a small collection of cranial material from various parts of the Pacifc, including a skull from Nootka Sound on the Northwest Pacifc Coast, and the lower jaw bone of a Tahitian. Either King or Joseph Banks, whose patronage he enjoyed, gave these relics to the anatomy school at Christ Church, Oxford (Camper 1794, p. 22). If King also obtained a Tasmanian skull he may have given it to Hunter or to Banks, who then gave it to the anatomist. It is also possible that Hunter acquired the skull a year or so after the New South Wales penal settlement was established early in 1788. Again, it could have come to him through Banks, who might have obtained it from Captain Arthur Phillip (1738–1814), the settlement’s frst governor. For as will be shown later in this chapter, Phillip proved willing in the early 1790s to obtain skulls for Banks on behalf of the Göttingen-based anatomist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. A talented naturalist with a passion for botany, Banks had sailed as a young man with Cook, returning to England with important collections of plants, land animals and fsh. By 1778 he was President of the Royal Society, the most important scientifc institution of the eighteenth century world, and was an infuential trustee and donor of natural history and ethnographic specimens to the British Museum. Banks’s biographers have written at length about his passion for botany, drawing attention to his embracing Linnaeus’s classifcatory system. As is well known, he arranged for Daniel Solander, a talented protégé of the Swedish naturalist, to accompany him on Cook’s frst voyage during which time the two men led the collecting and identifcation of more than 3,500 new plant species. What is also evident is that Banks returned from the voyage fascinated by the extent and origins of diversity among the peoples of the Earth. In the journal he kept during his voyaging, Banks recorded his impressions of the physical features, supposedly typical behavioural traits and distinguishing aspects of social organisation and customs of the peoples he encountered in the Pacifc and archipelagic South-East Asia. And he did so much as Linnaeus had done when exploring Sweden’s remote north and Baltic lands. Banks was certainly an exemplary Linnaean in his describing the many specimens of fora and fauna discovered during Cook’s frst voyage; but shelved alongside the twelfth edition of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae in 52 P. Turnbull

Banks’s working library on board the Endeavour were the frst ffteen volumes of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (1749–1767). And while he followed Linnaeus’s example in the form of his anthropological reportage, nothing that Banks wrote during or after his voyaging with Cook suggests that he subscribed to the naturalist’s ideas about the nature and causes of human variation. On the contrary, there are numerous observations Banks made in the journal he kept concerning the effects of climate and nutrition on human bodily structures (Banks 1962). They inform his refections on the rigours of voyaging and Cook’s determination to maintain a regime protecting the expedition from scurvy and hyperther- mia. And we fnd what he wrote about the peoples he encountered in Tierra del Fuego, Oceania and South East Asia parallels Buffon in attributing seeming peculiarities of their physique and psychology to sustained exposure to environmental forces differing from those infuencing the physiology of their ancestral stock. For example, Banks’s encountering close similarities in physical appearance, language and cultural practices between the peoples of the Society Islands and Maori encountered during Cook’s survey of coastal New Zealand left him in ‘little doubt that they came originally from the same source’. What he learnt from Tupaia, a priest from the island of Raiatea and an expert navigator who joined Cook’s expedition at Tahiti, about prevailing winds and current direc- tions, convinced him that the inhabitants of the Society Islands must have sailed from a place ‘Westward and by no means the East’ (Banks 1962, v. 2, p. 37). However, the vocabularies Banks had compiled by the time of reaching Java during the homeward leg of the voyage raised nice questions. There was clearly ‘a similitude of language between the inhabitants of the Eastern Indies and the Islands of the South Seas’. At Jakarta, inter- viewing a slave born in Madagascar seemed to confrm further similarities, especially in words used for numerals, between Tahitian and the Malagasy. This left Banks perplexed as to ‘how any Communication can ever have been carried between Madagascar and Java to make the Brown haird [sic] people of the latter speak a language similar to that the Black wooly hair’d natives of the other’. This led him to speculate whether ‘the Egyptian learning running in two courses, one through Africa the other through Asia, might introduce the same words, and what is more probable Numerical terms, into the languages of people who never had any communication with each other. But this point requiring a depth of 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 53 knowledge in Antiquities I must leave to Antiquarians to discuss’ (Banks 1962, v. 2, p. 234). By ‘Egyptian learning’ Banks was referring to the consensus in his day among scholars of antiquity that the sciences of astronomy and mathematics originated either among ancient Egyptians or developed among them from knowledge obtained from the early Grecian philosophers or Hebrew patriarchs. Understandably, Church historians and most antiquarian scholars considered that the Egyptians had derived their knowledge from the descendants of Noah. Typical in this respect was Francis Wise, the Oxford scholar and prominent member of the Society of Antiquaries who held that the Egyptians were ‘not the frst authors of science’ but the benefciaries of Noachian knowledge learnt from the Phoenicians, to whom it most likely came via successive ancient peoples from the Ægean Isles, ‘which were the seats of the frst civiliz- ers of mankind’. Similarly, the journalist and popular historian William Guthrie, in his best-selling General History of the World (1764–1769) dismissed the idea that the Egyptians were the source of science, arguing that little could be known about the transmission of knowledge or any other aspect of early antiquity beyond what could be construed from studying the Scriptures. Banks’s refections on the genealogy of the Polynesians remind us how salient the Judeo-Christian cosmogony continued to be in eighteenth-century European thinking about humanity’s deep past. One suspects that personally he did not take the Mosaic account of the creation literally but, like many within his intellectual circle, interpreted the books of the Old Testament fguratively, as a source of sublime poetry, moral inspiration and historical insight. As such the Pentateuch (the earliest books of the Old Testament) were seen as confrming the conjectural reconstruction of humanity’s earliest history as one of dispersal and varietal embranchment of one ancestral stock. And while there may be a touch of irony in Banks’s styling the question of the origins of the language of the South Sea Islands as best left to learned antiquarians, he was clearly with Buffon in believing that progress in understanding the course of human natural history required the synthesis of what could reasonably be deduced from Scripture and other surviving ancients texts with ethnographic investigations such as those he personally undertook when voyaging with Cook (Turnbull 2012). Buffon, incidentally, was to revise his account of human variation in the Histoire naturelle in the late 1770s to incorporate Banks’s observations of the Gweagal people of Botany Bay and Guugu Yimithirr clans 54 P. Turnbull of the Endeavour River estuary as they appeared in the offcial published account of Cook’s voyage (Gascoigne 1994, p. 38). Botany was Banks’s life-long passion; but after his triumphal return from voyaging with Cook he also took an active interest in human anatomy and physiology. In January 1775, for example, he joined three other members of the Royal Society in an ‘audacious experiment’ devised by the Scots physician and chemist, George Fordyce (1736–1802), to record the effects of extreme heat on the human body. Over the course of an afternoon Banks and his fellow subjects braved set periods of time within a small chamber said to have been heated at one point to just under a hundred degrees Celsius (Coley 2001). Until late in life Banks frequently attended Hunter’s and other leading anatomists’ dissections of human and animal corpses; and during his forty-two-year presidency of the Royal Society, he encouraged fellows to agree to their bodies undergoing postmortem dissection, and the results read before the Society. On the death in 1792 of his beloved uncle, the antiquary Robert Banks-Hodgkinson (1721–1792), Banks arranged for the old man’s corpse to examined, and kept a stone found in the bladder. Over the following two months he carefully recorded the loss of moisture from the stone, then gave it together with his measurements to Everard Home, Hunter’s brother-in-law and at the time the anatomist’s assistant at London’s St George’s Hospital (Carter 1988, p. 22). Pieter Camper (1722–1789), the celebrated Dutch anatomist, was among the medico-scientifc authorities to beneft from Banks’s support. When Camper visited London in late 1785, Banks and John Hunter presided over his induction as a fellow of the Royal Society. As is well known, Camper was a skilled artist who devised a new geometrically- based technique for producing accurate drawings of variations in human and animal head shapes (see Meijer 1999, pp. 96–100). As Camper’s son and posthumous editor explained, his father’s ‘grand object’ had been to provide artists with a series of rules preventing them ‘from blending the features of different nations in the same individual’ so as to enable them ‘to give … true character to national fgures’. He had discovered that geometrical regularities could be discerned on comparing the bodily forms of all animals, particularly in the shapes of the head and face. This enabled the recording of these differences as variations in a number of angles. The most important of these angles, Camper argued, was that discernible on placing the head of an animal or human subject at right angles to the observer. The position of common head and facial features, 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 55 such as the end of the lower jaw and the ridge about the eyes, could then also be reduced to angles deviating from a base line drawn through the centre of the opening of the auditory canal and the lower part of the nasal septum. Thus, Camper maintained, even the most subtle differences between the heads and facial shapes of peoples of different ethnic origin could be accurately reproduced, regardless of whether they were drawn at leisure in the anatomy theatre or sketched in the course of voyaging and exploration. Camper was invited to demonstrate his invention to John Hunter and other fellows of the Royal Society at the home of the anatomist John Sheldon (1752–1808), a past pupil of Hunter who in 1781 had published a catalogue of Camper’s works (Camper 1939, p. 205). Banks also drew Camper’s technique to the attention of leading fellows of the Society, including Joshua Reynolds. He also arranged for Camper to examine and draw non-European crania in several British anatomy collections, including the anatomy school at Christ Church; and the items Camper sketched included the Polynesian cranial bones collected by James King on Cook’s third voyage (Camper 1794, p. 22; Guthrie 1948, p. 352).

Banks and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach In the late 1780s Banks became an active supporter of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the most infuential investigator of human diversity in Europe during the frst half of the nineteenth century. Blumenbach studied at Jena and then Göttingen, where he was employed to catalogue and arrange natural history specimens acquired by the university’s librarian and professor of classics, Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812). Heyne, an avid collector and reader of voyaging and travel narratives, and Christoph Wilhelm Büttner (1716–1801), the university’s professor of chemistry and natural history, who encouraged Blumenbach to write his doctoral dissertation on the causes of diversity among the peoples of the Earth (Zammito 2006, p. 44). Blumenbach gained a full professorship in medicine at the University of Göttingen within three years of gaining his doctorate in 1775, and was to hold the chair until his death in 1840. In his doctoral thesis, Blumenbach reasoned as did Buffon and Hunter that varietal branching occurred through human bands migrat- ing and settling parts of the Earth where climate, food and other necessary resources differed signifcantly from the site of humanity’s divine 56 P. Turnbull origination—which Blumenbach was prepared to hypothesise lay in the Caucasus region between the Black and Caspian seas. It seemed to him, as it had to Linnaeus and Buffon, that the material conditions prevailing in Africa, Eastern Asia, the Americas, Southeast Asia and the Pacifc Islands were suffciently different to have caused the diversifcation of humanity into distinctive varietal types. He at frst believed that humankind had branched into four types: Caucasians, Africans, Asians and Americans; but by the late 1770s he was convinced that there was also a ffth variety, the Malay, in which he placed Australians and Pacifc peoples. While actively researching many different topics in medicine, anatomy and natural history over his long career, Blumenbach never ceased to be intrigued by human variation. His efforts to explain its causes in his dissertation were grounded in an uneasy synthesis of the work of Buffon, Linnaeus and Albrecht von Haller (1708–1777), the great Swiss anatomist. He followed Buffon in attributing variation primarily to the effects of climate and nutrition; however, he was persuaded by Haller and Linnaeus that individual organisms were preformed—that is, they inherited and gave expression to an original, fully developed form—and consequently he was sceptical about Buffon’s defning species on the basis of consistently fertile reproduction, preferring to follow Linnaeus in classifying species on the basis of a range of morphological similarities. Some time during the late 1770s, however, Blumenbach’s thinking underwent an important shift. He rejected preformationism, now believing that the weight of empirical evidence favoured Buffon’s view that the form an organism took was at least in part determined by some sort of interior moulding force operating on matter absorbed into the body. What caused this change of mind, he subsequently recalled, was his replicating a well-known experiment devised some ffty years previously by the Swiss naturalist, Abraham Trembley (1710–1784). Trembly had cut off the ten- tacles of fresh-water hydra and observed their regeneration. Refecting on the hydras’ re-growing the severed extremities, and how new tissue grew in human wounds, Blumenbach was led to think that all living creatures possessed a ‘particular inborn, life long active drive’ that was ‘completely different from the common features of the body … and other special forces of organised bodies’. This formative drive, or Bildungstrieb as he called it, he saw as responsible for ensuring that the essential form of each species of plant and animal found expression through successive generations. By the time he began revising the second edition of the published 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 57 version of his dissertation on human variation, which he sent to the printer in 1781, Blumenbach had come to think that humanity, in common with all other life forms, had ‘degenerated’ from its originally created form through the infuence of climate and other environmental forces, including cultural practices centred on changing the form of the head and limbs, having proved suffciently powerful to ‘defect’ this Bildungstrieb ‘from its usual path’. This process was ‘the generous origin of degeneration and the mother, properly speaking, of varieties’. Blumenbach wrote, ‘there seems to be so great a difference between the Ethiopian, the white and the red American, that it is not wonderful, if men even of great reputation have considered them as forming different species of mankind’. However, he held that all discernible points of anatomical similarity and difference, and the wealth of testimony in reliable accounts of exploration and travel, confrmed that humanity was one species and that what variations were to be seen in humankind had been caused by environmental defection of the Bildungstrieb. By the same token, he reasoned that given the susceptibility of the Bildungstrieb to the infuence of environmental forces, comparing the functional adaptation of bodily organs and structures was likely to be a more accurate way of classifying species than Buffon’s simple criterion of reproductive fertility. Even so, Blumenbach agreed with Buffon that Linnaeus had erred in classifying humanity as a quadruped possessing greater intellectual powers than all other animals, yet anatomically indistinguishable from the ape or the sloth. Examining the bodies of apes and humans of different varietal ancestry had left him convinced that humans had various unique anatomical features. When this was considered in the light of accounts of human and ape behaviour in narratives of voyaging and exploration, it seemed to him evident that humanity’s uniqueness within nature war- ranted its inhabiting its own order, which Blumenbach termed ‘bimana’, mindful of humankind’s unique ability to walk upright without employing the hands. Blumenbach’s investigations of bone growth and pathology led him to think that the human frame was more susceptible to environmentally induced modifcation than generally realised, and that this was especially true of the bones comprising the head. Hence it was logical to assume that as a consequence of their ‘mode of life and art’, ‘singular shapes of the head … belonged to particular nations’. Moreover, he believed that ‘an intimate relationship [existed] between the external face and its osseous substratum’. Should heads be ‘stripped of the soft and changeable 58 P. Turnbull parts they would ‘exhibit [a] frm and stable foundation’ which could ‘be conveniently handled and examined, and considered under different aspects and compared together’. Hence ‘a more careful anatomical investigation of genuine skulls of different nations would throw a good deal of light upon the study of mankind’. Blumenbach regarded the investigation of varietal differences in human cranial morphology as ‘a vast and agreeable feld’ of inquiry; but he was equally aware that his yet possessing few skulls ‘forbad [him] to wander in that direction’. This he sought to remedy however by approaching leading fgures in universities and scientifc societies throughout Europe with the aim of acquiring the skulls of peoples from different parts of the world, in the hope that it might eventually be possible for him to attempt to systematically map human diversity. Not skulls but a mutual interest in plant physiology frst brought Blumenbach to Joseph Banks’s attention; but by mid-1787 he was telling Banks of his long-standing interest in cataloguing national variations in cranial form, and how he had recently received a skeleton and four skulls of the ‘Tatar nation’ from Georg Thomas, Baron von Asch (1729–1807), a prominent surgeon residing in St Petersburg who had maintained links with Göttingen since his studies there in the late 1740s. Blumenbach also told Banks of his having been promised skulls from the Society Islands by a mutual acquaintance, the botanist John Sibthorp (1758–1796). Sibthorp spent the winter of 1784–1785 in Göttingen, and one suspects that he told Blumenbach he would seek Banks’s help in securing the skulls, and as he had not made good on his promise, Blumenbach directly sought Banks’s aid in obtaining at least an accurate drawing of a native of the Society Islands. Banks agreed to help him secure actual skulls, making inquiries on his behalf, only to inform Blumenbach that ‘since Mr. Hunter here & … Camper in Holland have written so much on that subject those who have possession of the Crania of the South Seas set a high value on them’. Banks assured Blumenbach however that he had asked a captain soon to depart for the Pacifc to arrange for the vessel’s surgeon to procure him ‘good specimens’ from the ‘South Seas Isles’ and if possible one from the eastern coast of Australia. But given that the voyage in question would likely take up to two years, Banks had asked John Hunter to provide Blumenbach with a drawing and a plaster cast of a Tahitian skull that he had helped Hunter acquire. This was just as well, as the captain whom Banks had approached was William Bligh (1754–1817), and the ship being readied for sail was the Bounty. 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 59

In late 1787 Banks also wrote on Blumenbach’s behalf to Alexander Anderson (c. 1748–1811), a Scots botanist who had secured the position of superintendent of the botanic garden on the Caribbean sugar- growing island of St Vincent through Banks’s connections in the war offce. Banks asked Anderson to procure several Indigenous Carib Indian skulls, and some eighteenth months later Banks received the ‘Cranium of a Carribe Chief’. Advising Blumenbach in July 1789 that he would soon have the skull, Banks wrote that Anderson had

found it … a very diffcult thing to get the Crania of the Yellow Carribes or aborigines [as] the greater part of them have been extirpated by the black Carribes [and] at present there are only 2 Families of them & these are in the most remote part of the island [.] their burial places are not easily Found & an attempt to disturb them is look’d upon as the greatest of crimes[.] (Blumenbach 1787, p. 30v)

It was only because this ‘Chief’ had died about three years previously in an inhabited part of the island that Anderson had been able to locate the grave and remove the skull. Banks had no doubt that it was an authentic Carib skull, having compared its shape and the ‘hair still adhering to one side of it’ with drawings of Africans he had been given by Pieter Camper (Blumenbach 1787, p. 31). Banks’s account of how he had secured Blumenbach this skull is one of the earliest records of the means by which Indigenous human remains were commonly acquired for Western scientists until well into the twentieth century. Metropolitan authorities (Banks in this instance) approached benefciaries of their patronage in spheres of colonial interest to secure human remains, often emphasising their scientifc value. Out of motives ranging from the desire to aid the progress of science to furthering personal ambitions, these client collectors would try to secure remains, often stressing the diffculties or dangers they risked in the process. In the summer of 1790 Blumenbach was greatly disappointed by Banks’s news of the Bounty mutiny and the loss of his long-awaited specimens. Banks nonetheless sought to make good his promise; and in late December 1790 he was to tell Blumenbach that a new expedition was being sent to the Society Islands for breadfruit, and ‘I hope she will bring to you Crania of the S. see [sic] Isles’ (Blumenbach 1787, p. 33). What was more, Banks added, another vessel was soon ‘to go to New Holland so that you may expect the head of new holland also’. However, 60 P. Turnbull within a month Banks wrote again: ‘I fear I shall not soon have the pleasure of sending you Crania from the South see [sic] the busy preparations for a war with Spain stop all ships bound on voyages of curiosity so that none have sail’d since the loss of the … Bounty.’ (Blumenbach 1787, pp. 34–35). By contrast, Blumenbach’s chances of securing an Indigenous Australian skull improved, for as Banks explained, the British government planned to send a supply feet to the newly established New South Wales penal settlement, and with it would go a request to Arthur Phillip, the colony’s frst governor, for skulls. Yet it was to be nearly three more years, in November 1793, before an Australian skull fnally arrived in Göttingen via royal courier from London. Governor Phillip had been ready to put peaceful relations with local Eora clans at risk by desecrating burial places; but, as he told Banks, fnding skulls had proved diffcult as the Darug, Dharawal and other peoples whose ancestral lands the penal colony occupied commonly cremated their dead. William Bradley (1758–1833), a naval lieutenant under Philip’s command, observed, ‘We have every reason to suppose that they burn the dead, from the number of graves we have open’d … & seen in those which were opened … ashes with many pieces of bone not quite consumed’ (Bradley 1969, p. 142). Some under Phillip’s command refused to be involved in anatomical collecting. Ralph Clark (c. 1755–1794), for example, a lieutenant in the settlement’s marine detachment, recorded in his journal having encountered a skeleton in the upper reaches of Sydney Harbour in February 1790. Returning with the skull, he left it at the settlement’s hospital to determine whether it was that of an escaped convict or Indigenous man or woman. ‘The Surgeons’, he wrote, ‘wanted for me to give them the skull but I would not—I told them that I should carry it back and collect the rest of the Bons [sic] and Bury them and the Head’ (Clark 1981, p. 110). The skull that Blumenbach received in 1793 was, he learnt from Banks, that of ‘a male native of New Holland who died in our settlement of Sydney Cove’. He had been killed by a convict gang (Spengel 1880, p. 77). This did not detract from Blumenbach’s delight in receiving the skull, especially as it seemed to him to provide invaluable evidence of how specifc cultural practices could over time produce modifcations to bodily structures. For he saw the skull as ‘conspicuous above all 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 61 others for the singular smoothness of the upper jaw, where the upper and canines are inserted’. This, he reasoned, could be explained by it being

now known that those barbarians have a paradoxical custom of perforat- ing the septum of the nose with a piece of wood inserted crosswise, and of so stopping up their nostrils with a sort of peg that they cannot breathe except through the open mouth. It seems credible, therefore, that this smoothness may have been gradually effected by the perpetual pressure of this transverse insertion. (Blumenbach 1865, p. 240)

But the skull also provoked new questions when compared with drawings Blumenbach had acquired of mainland and Indigenous Tasmanians, and of people encountered in the southern coast of Papua. How accurate, he wondered, was the engraved portrait of a Tasmanian man derived from a drawing by John Webber (1751–1793) and reproduced in engraved form in the offcial account of Cook’s third voyage? (Cook and King 1784). For if it accurately depicted the man’s head, then this appeared to contradict Buffon’s assumption that different peoples experiencing the same climatic conditions would have the same physical appearance and psychology. Whereas reportage of peoples so far encountered on the coasts of the Australian mainland and Tasmania suggested they were identical in terms of bodily form and ‘agree so wonderful, even in the minutiae of manners (Blumenbach 1793, f. 116). Blumenbach could not help but think that ‘Mr. Webber has embellished a little his savages’. Also, was the full-length portrait of a ‘south seas inhabitant’ appearing in the account of his travels to the East Indies (1718) by the Dutch traveller and painter Cornelius de Bruin (1652– 1726) a Papuan or possibly a New Hollander? The skull now in his possession suggested that it was ‘at least not improbable’ he was the latter. Blumenbach also learnt that two Indigenous Australian men had arrived in England with Governor Phillip. Perhaps, he asked Banks, he had seen them and was able to determine for him the ancestry of the ‘south seas’ man that De Bruin—whom he considered generally an accurate draughtsman—had painted. Banks replied to Blumenbach that he had asked to meet the men—Bennelong and Yemmerrawanyea Kebberah—but to his irritation they had not yet come to London; they were living with Phillip at his home in Bath, denying him the ‘opportunity of viewing them at leisure [and being] probably amused by some of their natural exercises’. He was to meet them briefy late in 1793, and 62 P. Turnbull wrote soon afterwards to Blumenbach that they did ‘not all resemble’ Webber’s drawing of a Tasmanian man, nor his drawing of a Tasmanian woman, an engraved version of which also appeared in the offcial account of Cook’s third voyage. As he confded to Blumenbach, he had warned Pieter Camper that Webber ‘was by profession a landscape painter & what he has done in the portrait line I have given little credit’ (Blumenbach 1787, p. 40v; Camper 1794, p. 27). This news served to underscore for Blumenbach how far he was from securing a suffcient number of skulls to begin accurately charting the nature and extent of human variation. And we can well understand his delight at receiving a letter from Banks in late 1798 offering a second Australian skull and assuring him he would not be offended should Blumenbach choose to exchange the skull for a specimen of more value to his research. Blumenbach was quick to accept the gift—‘By no means … to exchange it!’ he reassured Banks. His intention was ‘to keep it for Comparison with the former & to show thereby … what is perhaps merely individual & accidental, & what on the contrary is truly national & characteristical’ (Blumenbach 1798, p. 343). From an early age, Blumenbach possessed an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of travel and exploration. As one past pupil and friend at Göttingen recalled,

in one branch of learning he had scarce his like, I mean his familiarity with voyages and travels. All the books in the library of this place he … read over and over again … and for his researches in natural history and ethnography it was a most solid foundation. (Blumenbach 1865, p. 21)

These researches left Blumenbach anxious that opportunities to study variation would diminish as European colonial ambitions accelerated fows of goods, ideas and people. Since early antiquity networks of trade and exchange had led to interbreeding between continentally indigenous humankind populations, causing the emergence of peoples exhibiting mixed varietal characteristics. The growing pace and scale of change now seemed certain to make the collecting of varietally typical crania increasingly diffcult. Added to this was general reluctance beyond the medico-scientifc world to acquire skulls by exhuming burial places, or to condone their acquisition by dissecting corpses. Blumenbach rarely missed an opportunity to stress that the knowledge of human natural history that collecting and comparative examination of ‘national crania’ 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 63 would produce morally outweighed allowing them to turn to dust. He conceded the diffculties that skull collecting presented but denied that they were ‘insuperable when the collector shows zeal and perseverance, and can obtain the active co-operation of men who have opportunities of helping him in his object’: he could point for example to his own ‘zeal and perseverance’ in collecting ‘national skulls’. By 1800 he had built a collection of some eighty-two specimens, and by the time of his death in 1840, the collection had grown to around 245 skulls and cranial fragments. Even so, he was never satisfed by its size, its representativeness, and its failure to provide answers to many questions in respect of human variation raised by contemporary European encounters with peoples in Asia and the Pacifc.

Banks and the Royal College of Surgeons Banks concurred with Blumenbach that comparative examination of human cranial morphology would ‘throw a good deal of light upon the study of mankind’. Until his death in 1820, he used his patronage of naval and military offcers, government offcials, surveyors and naturalists in virtually every sphere of British colonialism to secure racially typical crania. After its foundation in 1800, England’s Royal College of Surgeons was a prime benefciary of his infuence. Among the specimens that Banks acquired for the college’s Hunterian Museum were the heads of two Indigenous men killed during the early years of settlement and exploration of Australia’s eastern coast. One was the head of Pemulwye, a man of the Darug people whose ancestral lands lie in what are now the western suburbs of the city of Sydney. Pemulwye fgured prominently among men of the Darug and neighbouring Dharawal people who resisted European incursions into their country. In the 1790s he took a leading role in attacking convict work gangs and raiding livestock and maize felds crucial to the colony’s survival. After various clashes with military parties in which he received superfcial wounds, in late 1797 Pemulwye was captured after being shot during a confrontation on the western outskirts of the colony. Held at the colony’s hospital in irons, he nonetheless managed to escape. David Collins (1756–1810), Judge Advocate of the Colony, noted that by March the following year,

A strange idea was found to prevail among the natives respect the savage Pe-mul-wy, which was very likely to prove fatal to him in the end. Both 64 P. Turnbull

he and they entertained an opinion, that, from his having been frequently wounded, he could not be killed by our frearms. Through this fancied security, he was said to be at the head of every party that attacked the maize grounds; and it certainly became evident to convince them that he was not endowed with any such extraordinary exemption. (Collins 1975, v. 2, p. 70)

Given the inaccuracy of smooth bore muskets beyond ranges at which Darug men could throw spears with relative accuracy, it is little surprise that Pemulwye evaded death or capture for a further four years, becoming so feared a threat that the colony’s third governor, Philip Gidley King (1758–1808), outlawed him, issuing instructions ‘for every person doing their utmost, to bring Pemulwye in either dead or alive’. Within several months King was presented with his head, Pemulwye having been ambushed and killed in circumstances suggesting that he no longer enjoyed support beyond his immediate clan, and that neighbouring Darug and Dharawal communities believed that his death was the only means of stopping military parties indiscriminately killing whomever they encountered when searching for Pemulwye and his supporters. An experienced naval offcer, King confessed he was ‘not without admiration’ for the ‘brave and independent character’ of Pemulwye, but what was uppermost in his mind was the security of the colony. King was also mindful of his debt to Banks for securing him the position of Superintendent and Commandant of the secondary convict station and naval supply base built in 1788 on Norfolk Island, some 1600 kilometres east of New South Wales. A keen amateur naturalist, he had sent Banks a wide variety of botanical and animal specimens in the twelve years that he spent on the island. Most likely knowing of Banks’s interest in procuring skulls, he had Pemulwye’s head put into spirits of wine and dispatched to Banks aboard a returning supply ship in early 1803, together with specimens of dye-yielding wood. Banks was delighted by the head:

The manifold packages you have had the goodness to forward to me have always, owing to your friendly care in addressing and invoicing them, come safe and in good condition to my hands. Among the last was the head of one of your subjects, which is said to have caused some comical consequences when opened at the Customs House, but when brought home was very acceptable to our anthropological collectors, and makes a fgure in the museum of the late Mr. Hunter. (Bladen 1896, pp. 834–835) 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 65

Descendants of the Darug and Dharawal peoples have sought unsuccessfully to locate Pemulwye’s head for reburial in his ancestral country. How long it remained on display in the Hunterian Museum is unknown. Neither the archives of the College of Surgeons nor other sources provide any clue as to its fate, beyond two entries in the diaries of William Clift (1775–1849), who served as conservator of the museum from its foundation until his retirement in the early 1840s. Clift’s diary for 1818 notes that the painter James Ward (1769–1859) had come to the museum and sketched ‘two Human heads from New South Wales’. Possibly these heads were deteriorating and a visual record was commissioned in case it proved impossible to arrest their decay to the point that only the skulls were worth preserving. Clift was exceptionally skilled in preserving soft tissue structures which at this time involved their partial dissection and immersion in spirits of wine but this was an imprecise procedure. The spirit used had to be suffciently strong to halt putrefac- tion, but weak enough to prevent tissues greatly changing in shape and texture. Assuming that one of the two heads of Indigenous Australians sketched by Ward was that of Pemulwye, the question then is: whose was the other head then in the college’s possession? Here the evidence is equally inconclusive, but worth reviewing for what it reveals about two other occasions on which early nineteenth anatomists were the benefciaries of Indigenous deaths in the early years of Australian colonisation. In September 1803 the British government, fearing French ambitions in the Pacifc, sought to protect its claim to sovereignty over the island of Tasmania by establishing a settlement on the upper estuary of the Derwent River. The site initially chosen, on the eastern bank of the river at Risdon Cove, proved inferior to the country some ten kilometres to the south on the western side of the Derwent, and the settlement was relocated in early 1804. In May of that year a violent incident occurred at Risdon Cove that continues to be a source of controversy. It would appear that clans of the region were accustomed to gather on the upper slopes of the hills behind Risdon Cove to drive kangaroos and wallabies down to the shore, where they could be easily taken. As Edward White, an assigned convict at Risdon, recalled before a commission of inquiry held in 1830, he had been hoeing ground near a creek running down to the cove when he found himself in the path of frightened game, followed by what he estimated to be some three hundred men, women and children loudly shouting and waving as they came down from the hills. White maintained that they were the frst Tasmanians ever to 66 P. Turnbull approach the settlement. He stood still while the people ‘looked at me with all their eyes’ while hurrying in pursuit of their quarry. What happened next is unclear, but it seems that as the hunting party came into the cove two men were killed or wounded by panicked soldiers. The settlement’s surgeon, Jacob Mountgarret (c. 1773–1828), persuaded William Moore (n. d.), the acting commandant, that the men in the party would now attack them in force. Moore ordered a carron- ade to be loaded with grapeshot and hurried near to where most of the Tasmanians had gathered, and fred. Mountgarret is said to have then led a charge against the Tasmanians as they fed into the hills. The following evening, William Moore crossed the Derwent River to report personally to David Collins, the colony’s Lieutenant Governor. He carried with him a letter from Mountgarret to the settlement’s chaplain, Robert Knopwood (1763–1838), confrming Moore’s account of having encountered possibly as many as fve or six hundred people. ‘I beg to refer you to Mr. Moore’, Mountgarret wrote, ‘for the particulars of an attack the natives made on the camp to-day; and I have every reason to think it was premeditated, as their number farr [sic] exceeded any that we ever heard of’. Edward White, interviewed nearly three decades later, refuted suggestions that the people he had encountered that day had meant to attack the settlement. On the day of the incident, Mountgarret allegedly examined the bodies of at least three or four Tasmanians. In his letter to the Reverend Knopwood he also wrote:

As you express a wish to be acquainted with some of the natives, if you will dine with me tomorrow, you will obliged me by christening a fne native boy that I have. Unfortunately, poor boy, his father and mother were both killed; he is about two years old. I have likewise the body of a man that was killed. If Mr. Bowden wishes to see him dissected, I would be happy to see him with you tomorrow. (Knopwood 1977, p. 51)

Neither Knopwood nor Matthew Bowden (1779–1814), the settlement’s assistant surgeon, could fnd a boat to cross to Risdon the following day; but several days later Knopwood was to baptise the child with the name Robert Hobart May. In the meantime, Mountgarret is said to have dissected one or possibly more of the dead Tasmanians, and to have dispatched their remains to Sydney. Possibly they were destined for the Royal College of Surgeons. Mountgarret had joined the Royal Navy as a surgeon 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 67 third rate in 1798, shortly after being licensed by London’s Company of Surgeons (soon thereafter to be Royally incorporated as the College of Surgeons). However, there is no surviving record of these remains having ever been received by the college or any other medical foundation or anatomy school. The other way that one of the two heads was acquired by the college may also have involved Joseph Banks. In early 1801, Banks met Matthew Flinders (1774–1814), a naval lieutenant who had returned to England after distinguishing himself by exploring the southern coast of New South Wales, the Bass Strait and the Tasmanian coast. Flinders sought to enlist Banks’s infuence with the leadership of the Admiralty to provide a vessel to survey the whole of the Australian coastline under his command. Impressed by Flinders’ ambition and cartographic skills, Banks approached George Spencer (1758–1834), the First Lord of the Admiralty, who together with the directors of the East India Company needed little persuading of the merits of the expedition, given increasing fear of France’s Pacifc ambitions. Banks moreover was ready to help pay for the scientifc equipment and personnel required by the expedition, which arrived in southern Australian waters late in 1801. On the strength of their respective voyaging, both Flinders and Banks knew that circumnavigation of the Australian continent risked unpredictable encounters with Indigenous coastal communities. So it was that Flinders’ vessel, the Investigator, not only carried a large store of trade goods including several hundred pocket knives, hatchets, beads and mirrors, but was assigned a detachment of marines and provided with defensive weaponry. Relations between Flinders’s party and the peoples they met were generally peaceful until, coming ashore at Blue Mud Bay in Eastern Arnhem Land early in 1803, a meeting with a small group of Yithuwa Madarrpa men ended violently, with one being shot trying to escape to a canoe after stab- bing the master’s mate. Back on ship, Flinders was told that the encounter had been peaceful until the master’s mate had reached out to take one man’s spear ‘which he supposed was offered’ and the man had repeatedly stabbed the mate, perhaps fearing that he was being disarmed. The seaman had then briefy fought with the Yithuwa Madarrpa men before a boat from the Investigator arrived, causing them to fee to their canoes nearby. During their retreat one man had been hit in the chest by a musket ball and was thought to have died shortly after launching his canoe. Flinders suspected ‘that our people must have been the aggressors’ but had no evidence to contradict the testimony of those involved in the 68 P. Turnbull incident. Resigning himself, he agreed to a boat being launched early the following day to search for the body of the man. William Westall (1781– 1850), the landscape artist aboard the Investigator, wanted to sketch the corpse, while Robert Brown (1773–1858), the expedition’s naturalist and surgeon, wanted to dissect it. The body was found lying at the water’s edge, in an attitude suggesting the man had dragged himself from the sea before dying. The body was turned over and sketched by Westall before Brown dissected it; quite possibly he returned to the ship with the head. No conclusive evidence survives that it was the head of this Yithuwa Madarrpa man that was sketched in 1818, or that Banks had a hand in its acquisition. However, Robert Brown owed his posting to the Investigator to Banks, and enjoyed his patronage once back in England. It is not implausible that he brought the head with him when he returned to London in October 1805 with twenty-fve cases of animal and mineral specimens collected in the course of Flinder’s coastal survey. But it is curious that neither the head nor the skeletal material that the expedition is known to have collected when surveying northern Australian waters is mentioned by Brown in the listing of plant and zoological specimens he sent to Banks when the Investigator returned to Port Jackson in March 1803. Nor can we rule out the possibility that the head was among the specimens that accompanied Flinders when he left Port Jackson for England in August 1803, and which were lost when the ship in which he sailed was wrecked off the Queensland coast several days later. *** In this chapter we have seen how John Hunter, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and other anatomists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries interpreted the morphology of the Australian skull. They believed the skull, perhaps more than any other bodily structure, was susceptible to marked variance over successive generations. They attributed its variation between different peoples to an immaterial, moulding life force governing the growth and function of bodily structures being modifed by environmental forces. Cranial diversity was thus seen as epitomizing human history by disclosing how populations a singly created ancestral human stock had gradually migrated to different parts of the earth. As these migratory populations dispersed they were 2 EUROPEAN ANATOMISTS AND INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIAN BODILY … 69 exposed to dissimilar climatic zones and forced to adopt differing diets, with the result that humankind had branched into fve morphologically distinctive races. For the majority of British anatomists and ethnographers active during the frst half of the nineteenth century, the value of Indigenous Australian remains was their use in reconstructing this history of racial variation within the human species, by comparing what they saw as their distinctive typical form to those of skulls and other bodily structures of ancient and modern Europeans, and of other peoples known to have long inhabited particular regions of the old and new worlds. The Dutch anatomist Peter Camper refected the consensus among his peers when he confdently asserted that comparative analysis of skulls promised to disclose new knowledge of the history of variation within the human species; but he warned that this knowledge would only be gained if medico- scientifc researchers were able to build large enough collections

of the craniums of different people, that a discrimination can be made between what is general, from what is merely accidental; what is personal and to be ascribed to the diversities observable in individuals, from that which is national and characteristic of a particular people. (Camper 1794, p. 571)

The number of skulls was the key thing. Those that anatomists managed to secure were seen as helping to statistically confrm humanity’s monogenetic origins, and the environmental causation of human racial diversity. But by the same token this work generated further demand for skulls, as individual anatomists and ethnographers saw comparative cranial analysis as a means of resolving differences among them—on questions, for example, as to whether variation might be caused not only by climate and other natural factors, but also by sexual selection or other cultural practices such as head-binding. As we will see in the third chapter of this book, James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848), Britain’s most infuential ethnographer of the frst half of the nineteenth century, reasoned that in some races of men their characteristic bodily and mental qualities might owe to custom having been as infuential an ‘environmental’ factor in the emergence of human diversity as diet and climate. As Prichard saw it, the history of many nations provided abundant evidence of the selection of sexual partners on the basis of what were perceived to be culturally desirable bodily or intellectual qualities. 70 P. Turnbull

Also, despite the fact that this environmentalist monogenetic ortho- doxy held that all human beings possessed an innate capacity for moral and social progress, its leading adherents came to think that Australians and other so-called savage races had become so degraded from the original, divinely created form of humanity as to be incapable of signifcant improvement under European tutelage. But before examining in greater contextual detail how skulls and other bodily structures fgured in British scientifc thinking about the course of human natural history during the frst half of the nineteenth century, it seems best to devote the next chapter of this study to exploring the means by which these remains were acquired. CHAPTER 3

Skeletal Collecting Before Darwin

In Britain during the frst sixty or so years of the nineteenth century, the development of scientifc interest in the nature and origins of diversity within our species occurred contemporaneously with colonial occupation of Indigenous Australian ancestral lands, resulted in individual scientists and institutional anatomy museums obtaining the remains of slightly more than a hundred people. Most were complete or partial skulls, which were hailed as welcome additions to comparative series of ethnic crania that were gradually being assembled—as systematically as opportunities allowed—by conservators of university and hospital anatomy collections, by the London, Edinburgh and Dublin’s Colleges of Surgeons, and by the Army’s and Royal Navy’s medical departments. Skulls were thought to be the most practical, reliable means of gaining new knowledge of human variation. Of all the bones in the human body, they were the easiest to collect. They could also be arranged without too much diffculty into series, allowing them to be comparatively examined for new clues as to the causes and historical development of varietally specifc morphological traits within populations long indigenous to different parts of the world. The Indigenous Australian skull was especially valued as it was believed to illustrate with particular clarity how environment factors could, over time, signifcantly modify human

© The Author(s) 2017 71 P. Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia, Palgrave Studies in Pacifc History, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51874-9_3 72 P. Turnbull bodily structures, and possibly result in some ‘nations’ or ‘races’ developing varietally peculiar attributes and qualities of mind. But before investigating the uses of the bodily remains of Indigenous Australians in the conceptual development of British medico-scientifc thinking about human variation from the turn of the nineteenth century to the early 1860s, this chapter focuses on the question of how these remains were obtained. It seems best to begin by emphasising that while the bones of Indigenous Australians were seen as especially valuable acquisitions, relatively few came into scientifc hands compared to those of other ethnic populations. Australian crania comprised a numerically small sub-set within the comparative cranial series assembled by European medico-scientifc institutions during the frst half of the nineteenth century. For example, the Hunterian Museum of London’s Royal College of Surgeons had by mid-century the largest comparative collections of human skeletal material of European and non-European origin. It possessed the skulls and individual cranial bones of around 600 people of African origin or ancestry. It also had what was then Europe’s largest collection of Australian skeletal material: just fve complete skeletons and some thirty-two skulls and cranial fragments, including nine Tasmanian items (Williamson 1857). The second and third largest collections after the Hunterian Museum were those of the museums of the medical departments of Britain’s army and Royal Navy. Each possessed just one complete skeleton and around twenty skulls or partial crania. Other British and continental European collections had fewer specimens, often no more than fve or six whole or partial skulls. London’s St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, a major site of medical education during the frst half of the nineteenth century, was typical in terms of the size of its holdings. By the early 1850s its anatomy museum had around thirty ‘national’ skulls, three of which were Australian in origin. One had been donated by George Langstaff (1780–1846), a London-based surgeon who had studied at the hospital at the turn of the nineteenth century and visited New South Wales some time between 1804 and 1813 (Langstaff 1799; Wood 1838). The other two skulls were obtained in northern New South Wales and southern Queensland. All we know about these relics is that one of them was donated by Joseph Hodgson (1788–1869), a Quaker surgeon who had studied at the hospital and became a councillor of London’s Royal College of Surgeons in the late 1840s (News 1869b). 3 SKELETAL COLLECTING BEFORE DARWIN 73

It was much the same story at London’s Guy’s Hospital, where leading surgeons also taught numerous pupils. The Quaker physician Thomas Hodgkin (1798–1866), who had been appointed curator of its anatomy museum in 1825 (Kass 2004; Kass and Kass 1988), was able to add two Australian skulls to what by the early 1850s was a collection of around ffty racial skulls. These were used in conjunction with Blumenbach’s writings on human diversity to demonstrate to students the susceptibility of the human species to environmentally induced change and its branching into distinctive varietal types (Hodgkin 1829). Leading medical fgures often had personal teaching collections that included comparative anatomical as well as pathological specimens. The surgeon John Heaviside (1748–1828), for example, taught at St Bartholomew’s Hospital (Kell 2004; Peachey 1931). Coming into a large fortune on the death of his father, in 1793 the surgeon set up a school of anatomy, with a museum of morbid and comparative anatomy that eventually flled several rooms of a large house he purchased in London’s fashionable Hanover Square. In one room he arranged twenty six skulls ‘showing peculiarities of form’. An Australian skull was one of four that he regarded as so rare and interesting that he displayed them in an elegant ‘glazed cabinet’ (Heaviside 1818, p. 63). Heaviside’s students were not the only ones permitted to see these curiosities. He is said to have opened his house to ‘the scientifc part of the public’ on Friday evenings; and was applauded for doing so. However, this venture into medical enlightenment is said to have failed because, as Heaviside’s obituarist in the Medical Times claimed, ‘the good nature, and the profusion of coffee, tea, and sugar, given by its proprietor on those occasions, attracted a class of beings there that occasioned its being shut up’ (Peachey 1931). London’s most successful private teacher of anatomy in the frst two decades of the nineteenth century was Joshua Brookes (1761–1833), who over a long career put together pathological and comparative anatomical collections that were said to be second in size and com- prehensiveness only to those of the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons by the late 1820s (Kell 2004). Brookes prominently displayed ‘human crania of various nations’ in the salon of his Great Marlborough Street anatomy school. Students teased him about his pride in these skulls, which he took in good humour, as one student later recalled: 74 P. Turnbull

Mr. Brookes happened to come in while a fellow pupil of mine from St. Thomas’s [hospital] was handling a Caribbee skull and regarding it, as Mr. Brookes appeared to suppose, with somewhat too affectionate an eye, he said ‘I would not wish to interrupt you, Sir, but I always tremble when I see a gentleman unknown to me, making too familiar with my preparations. You know that among ourselves we always consider these things fair game’. He uttered these words with the utmost bon hommie, but not without an amusing dash of trepidation. I need not take pains to assert, that my friend ogled the Caribbean Lady’s cranium, without any design of committing the crime of abduction. (Gower 1833, p. 722)

Most of Brookes’s ‘national crania’ were gifts from past students. They included three mainland Australian and four Tasmanian skulls. One of the three mainland skulls he regarded as a particularly ‘fne and remarkable’ specimen, which he claimed had been given him by a past student named Hurst. This skull was said to have belonged to one of two Aboriginal men who had tried to spear Hurst when he was travelling through inland New South Wales. Brookes claimed Hurst shot the man ‘in self-defence’ and, after his companion fed into the bush, unpacked his surgical kit and ‘decapitated his victim’ (Brookes 1830, p. 14). These tales appear to have done more than simply amuse Brookes’s students. In one instance they played a small but signifcant part in the conceptual evolution of British racial science, for among Brookes’s many students was Joseph Barnard Davis. Davis went onto devote his leisure time while working as a medical inspector of Staffordshire pottery fac- tories to building Europe’s largest private comparative collection of human crania, and by the 1860s he was a leading proponent in London anthropological circles of the theory that Africans and other darkly pigmented people had originated separately from Europeans. He was also a prominent critic of Darwin’s monogenetic account of human evolution (Bettany and Hervey 2004). Davis was later to recall that his interest in racial analysis of skull morphology owed much to Brooke’s showing his pupils varietal distinctions in ‘national crania’ while telling then ‘little histories’ associated with particular specimens (Davis 1867, p. v). In Scotland, interest in human variation likewise saw Indigenous Australian remains obtained for anatomical collections. At the University of Edinburgh Alexander Monro received around half a dozen crania and possibly two complete skeletons from past pupils during his long tenure 3 SKELETAL COLLECTING BEFORE DARWIN 75 as professor of anatomy (Monro 1825, v. 1, p. 23). One skeleton was that of a young Darug man from the present-day Sydney region. As will be discussed in the next chapter of this study, Monro used this skeleton to demonstrate what he saw as ‘osseous peculiarities’ in Aboriginal people resulting from successive generations of living by hunting and gathering in the Australian environment (Monro 1825, v. 1, p. 23). Monro got the Darug man’s skeleton from John Jamison (1776–1844), a naval surgeon assigned to the New South Wales settlement, who had studied under him before graduating in medicine from the University of St Andrews in 1808 (Walsh 1967). Several skulls were similarly acquired by John Barclay (1758–1826), Edinburgh’s most successful extramural anatomy teacher, during the frst two decades of the nineteenth century (Rosner 2004). Barclay, like Monro, greatly admired Blumenbach, and also like Monro impressed on his students how different regimes of diet and climate could cause the emergence of varietal traits within largely endogamous populations by showing them a plaster cast of a skull he believed to be that of a ‘chief of New South Wales’. Towards the end of his career he could also show his students the cranium of an Aboriginal man from the region of the upper Brisbane River, which had been procured for him by a past pupil serving as an army surgeon assigned to the Moreton Bay penal settlement in northern New South Wales, soon after its establishment in 1824 (Cathcart 1898, v. 1, p. 62). By the late 1820s it was less common for individual anatomists to keep Australian skulls than to pass them on to one of the growing number of institutional collections to which they had access for research and teaching. This refected the contemporary consensus that the most practical means of making progress in investigating human variation was by attempting to assemble large-scale, comprehensive collections of ‘national crania’. Today we know that far greater variation exists within genetically related human populations than between those that have been separate for many thousands of years. However, the consensus in European medico-scientifc circles during the frst half of the nineteenth century was that Blumenbach had rightly identifed cranial morphology to be the most feasible means of accurately mapping and ultimately explaining the causes of human varietal diversity. Those who collected Australian Indigenous crania and other skeletal structures did so in the belief that they were making important 76 P. Turnbull contribution to scientifc understanding of human diversity by providing the ‘raw material’ needed to establish what morphological traits were truly ‘natural and characteristic’ of peoples inhabiting different parts of the earth.

The Collectors Who were these bone collectors? How did they get the remains they supplied scientifc institutions? A good place to start answering these questions is in London’s Royal College of Surgeons. As previously mentioned, the college manage to acquire the largest number of varietal skulls and skeletons of any European scientifc institution during the frst half of the nineteenth century. Its success in this regard owed much to William Clift, who was appointed as the frst conservator of Hunter’s collections after they came to the college in 1800 (Dobson 1954). Until his retirement in 1842, Clift proved near as determined and resourceful as Hunter in securing new rare and curious items. He rarely missed an opportunity to impress upon college licentiates practising in the colonial sphere the valuable contributions to science they could make by collecting specimens for the Hunterian Museum. The diaries that he kept during his long tenure provide a fascinating window onto the collecting of medical and natural history specimens during the frst half of the nineteenth century. They suggest that the collecting of human remains was in some respects little different to the acquisition of other kinds of botanical, geological and zoological specimens. Those who sent Clift skulls and skeletons did so acknowledging the intellectual authority of leading fellows of the college. What they sent were seen, like specimens of fora and fauna from beyond Europe, as raw factual materials for metropolitan knowledge-making (Macleod 1982, p. 9). Human skulls were often, like other kinds of natural history specimens, presented by collectors to leading medico-scientifc fgures with a view to making or strengthening personal or professional connections with them (Macleod 1982). Many of those who collected Australian remains for the Hunterian Museum had ties to the college. Most were past pupils of prominent fellows who were now college licentiates. The largest group among them comprised surgeons or surgical assistants appointed to Royal Navy vessels, who collected remains while assigned to vessels surveying Australasian waters. They were joined by surgeons serving with army regiments guarding convicts or policing outlying settlements, or who 3 SKELETAL COLLECTING BEFORE DARWIN 77 had gone to the colonies as medical offcers, as hospitals and asylums were established. Many of these men set up private practices, with some using the capital they made from medicine to become agricultural or pastoral entrepreneurs. Beside those supplied by medical men, remains were acquired from members of exploration and survey parties, and from colonial government offcials ranging from local police magistrates to colonial governors. And there were also ordinary settlers in various occupations ready to contribute to the progress of science by enriching metropolitan scientifc collections of human remains. While there were similarities between collecting skulls and other bodily remains of Australian Indigenous peoples and other natural history specimens, there were obvious differences arising from the fact that they were the mortal remains of fellow human beings. Even when decaying remains did not cause visceral distress, would-be collectors were conscious that they were the remains of people buried by grieving family and friends. The funerary rituals of Indigenous Australian and other cultures may have seemed macabre to nineteenth century Britons, but they were nonetheless seen as affrming the universal moral imperative of giving the dead burial; and there were numerous occasions when would-be collectors confessed to moral unease about plundering graves. Also, unlike the collecting of animal and plant specimens, obtaining remains had the risk of discovery and violent punishment by those who had buried the dead, as will be discussed in Chapter 11 of this study. All these considerations rendered the collecting of Australian or other varietally interesting human remains in the systematic fashion that Blumenbach and his many admirers called for an unrealisable dream.

Naval Surgeons Royal Naval surgeons were the most active and successful collectors of the remains of Indigenous people for much of the nineteenth century. A remarkable number of medical students who served as sea-going surgeons or surgical assistants after they fnished their studies devoted what time they had beyond their medical duties to one or more felds of scientifc inquiry. In many cases their curiosity about the natural world had been sparked by attending lectures on physics, geology, chemistry and comparative anatomy during the course of their studies. Contributing to 78 P. Turnbull the progress of science also helped reconcile them to their lowly place in the navy’s feudal-like hierarchy. Despite gaining the status of commissioned offcers in 1805, naval surgeons commonly suffered in both obvious and in subtle ways from the ingrained snobbery within what was an ‘almost aristocratic profession, until the second half of the nineteenth century’ (Cook 2005; Lloyd and Coulter 1963, 12). Assistant surgeons, who made up the greatest number of sea-going medical personnel, fared worst. Generally they were quartered with midshipmen, and they were not formally granted wardroom status until 1855 (Lloyd and Coulter 1963, p. 18). Being active in scientifc inquiry nurtured these men’s sense of belonging to a gentlemanly vocation contributing to the expansion of knowledge about the natural world. Often they actively encouraged their less intellectually engaged peers and their assistants to take up one or more felds of scientifc inquiry. They championed the practical virtues of investigating the natural world, such as the discovery of new plants and other ‘natural products’ that might improve seamen’s health. But many also aspired to contribute to the expansion of knowledge beyond the sphere of naval medicine. Charles Dunne, a senior naval surgeon and licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons, for example, spoke for many fellow naval practitioners when he argued that the sea-going surgeon should be not only an expert practitioner of naval medicine but a gentleman skilled in ‘true reasoning’ with a sound ‘knowledge of mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, natural history, botany, chemistry, and logic’ (Dunne 1808, p. 41). Similarly, when Fitzwilliam Mansell (n. d.), assistant to Thomas Scott, second surgeon at the principal naval hospital at Haslar on Portsmouth Harbour, was ordered to sea in 1835, the highest praise Scott could give was to describe him as ‘a gentleman of distinguished talents, and great literary and scientifc achievements’ (Scott 1828). Social origin and the privileges of rank continued to infect naval culture for much of the nineteenth century. However, after the fnal defeat of Napoleon in 1815 ended two decades of British involvement in global confict, the Royal Navy was obliged to greatly reduce the number of its medical personnel. This gave senior feet physicians the opportunity to improve the quality of those surgeons and assistants still required for the vessels protecting British imperial interests in Africa, India and the Pacifc. They could exploit what by the second decade of the nineteenth century was a growing pool of newly and well qualifed young men, many of whom had attended Scottish hospitals and private anatomy schools where 3 SKELETAL COLLECTING BEFORE DARWIN 79 they had received tuition in comparative anatomy, and who on gradua- tion found themselves competing for limited employment opportunities in Britain’s medical economy. Especially for those of lower-middle class origins, who lacked capital and social connections, serving as an assistant naval or army surgeon seemed a better option than what might prove to be years of low-paid occasional work in poorhouses and public hospital wards (Lankford 1980). For some, the prospect of travel and perhaps adventure may have seemed worth enduring the hardships of life at sea. The Napoleonic Wars convinced the Admiralty that offcers trained in accurate surveying of ocean and coastal waters were vital to Britain’s expanding overseas trade and colonial possessions. By 1815 there existed a small but infuential cadre of executive offcers with specialised knowledge of hydrography and meteorology (Fleming 1998). Many were members of one or more London scientifc societies and actively encouraged medical personnel under their command to collect and describe the geology, plant and animal life they encountered when voyaging. Indeed, it was largely due to the infuence of these offcers that the Admiralty came to routinely assign medically trained men with interests and expertise in felds such as botany and zoology to hydrographic surveys, in the dual role of surgeon and naturalist. William Clift’s diaries document the collecting of these surgeon–naturalists for London’s College of Surgeons. Rarely a week passed during Clift’s forty-two years as conservator of the Hunterian Museum without the arrival from Portsmouth or other naval dockyards of boxes of natural history specimens from distant parts of the world. Often these boxes contained one or two human skulls. Occasionally Clift took receipt of a more or less complete skeleton and, on several occasions, the whole head of a man or woman preserved in strong spirits of wine. Heads and other ‘wet’ bodily structures were welcomed as precious rarities. They were usually obtained after violent encounters between shore parties and local men, such as we saw in the previous chapter when Matthew Flinders’s expedition landed in eastern Arnhem Land. In 1830, Clift received parts of a man shot at Cape Desolation during a clash with seamen from HMS Beagle who were surveying off the coastal waters of Tierra del Fuego. The Beagle’s surgeon dissected the body on the spot, but as the shooting occurred ‘many miles from the ship, from the incon- venience of carriage the head, one leg and arm only were brought back to the ship’ (Clift 1830). Naturally voyagers did their utmost to avoid such violent incidents. 80 P. Turnbull

When soft tissue structures were procured, preserving them was extremely diffcult. Heads needed to be partially dissected to ensure spirit of just the right strength fooded all the cavities. A further diffculty was to ensure that wet structures were not destroyed in transit. This required their careful suspension in an air-tight container by cords of a material the spirit would not weaken. When spirit evaporated, specimens were ft only to be boiled down for the bones. In the mid-1840s, an ex-naval surgeon sent Dublin’s College of Surgeons the head of an Aboriginal Tasmanian man known to Europeans as Shiny. The container in which it was sealed was not completely air-tight, and unusually dry conditions during the voyage caused the spirits slowly to evaporate. As a result, the head dried, macabrely preserving the man’s facial features. It was kept intact as a curiosity until its return to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community for burial in 1990. According to college tradition, students about to undergo examination would pat the head for good luck. The earliest known instance of a naval surgeon sending remains to London’s College of Surgeons is probably the head of the man shot at Blue Mud Bay during the voyage of HMS Investigator. By the time the expedition left northern waters in 1803 it had also taken at least two skulls taken from coastal burial places. In 1817, Lieutenant Phillip Parker King was given command of HMS Mermaid to complete Flinders’s survey. The vessel left England carrying specimen boxes supplied by Clift. In April the following year, Mermaid dropped anchor in a natural harbour on the Coburg Peninsula on Australia’s northern tropical coast. King wrote in his published account of the voyage that on going ashore ‘one of our people found the skeleton of a human body; and the skull and some of the bones were brought on board, but they were too imperfect to be worth preserving’ (King 1827, v. 1, p. 86). When the voyagers visited Goulburn Island off northern Arnhem Land in August 1819, a party sent to hunt turtle ‘found disinterred some of the bones of a human body that had been buried in a grave close by, not longer than two or three months since’. The body was assumed to be that of a Malay fsherman, which King suspected that local Indigenous men had dug up ‘from a motive of curiosity or revenge’ (1827, v. 1, p. 265). These remains were also judged not worth collecting. The only skeletal material we know that King was to present the college on returning to England was the cranium of a man that his party obtained at King George Sound in Western Australia, late in 1821 (Flower 1869). 3 SKELETAL COLLECTING BEFORE DARWIN 81

Better luck was had on the survey voyages of Australian and Torres Strait waters during the late 1830s and 1840s. In 1838 a party from HMS Beagle went ashore for water at Cygnet Bay on the Dampier Peninsula in Western Australia. On a sandy spit they discovered a des- iccated body carefully wrapped in paperbark. The commander of the expedition, John Lort Stokes (1812–1885), agreed that Benjamin Bynoe (1803–1865), the Beagle’s surgeon, might take the body, even though they knew they had been seen examining it by local people (Fisher 2009; Keevil 1949; Stokes 1846, v. 2, p. 116). Stokes wondered why they had not been prevented from getting the remains. In his published account of Beagle’s voyages he offered two possible reasons: one was that the clan of the deceased assumed that they ‘took away the dry bones in order to rebuild the frame of which they before formed the support, and to clothe the hideous nakedness of death with the white man’s fesh’; the other was that they might have believed they would be punished by the spirit of the man, or some more powerful entity, for desecrating the burial place (Stokes 1846, v. 2, p. 116). Whatever the true reason, Bynoe took the body which he gave to George Grey (1812–1898), the explorer of Western Australia and future colonial governor, who presented it to the College of Surgeons on his return to London in 1840 (Clift 1840a). Shore parties during the survey voyages of HMS Bramble and Fly between 1842 and 1846 also found and carried off remains. When the vessels visited Port Essington in 1844 to replenish supplies, the country’s Iwaidja clan were forced to protect their dead. As John Sweatman (b. 1825), clerk aboard Bramble, wrote in his private journal, they proved ‘tenacious about the remains of their friends being meddled with’. Even so, Lieutenant George Lambrick (n.d.), Bramble’s quartermaster, managed to obtain a skull, which Sweatman recalled ‘he very kindly gave to me’ (1977, p. 146). And there were other successes. On returning to England, Joseph Beete Jukes (1811–1869), the expedition’s naturalist, presented the comparative anatomist Richard Owen (1804–1892), William Clift’s successor as conservator of the Hunterian Museum, with a partial female skeleton and four skulls taken from platform burials on the Coburg Peninsula (Owen 1853, p. 824). Francis Blackwood (1809– 1854), commander of Fly, gave the Museum the partial skeleton of a man ‘from the neighbourhood of Port Essington’ and two skulls from the Torres Strait (Flower 1907a, p. 314). The skulls came with a letter 82 P. Turnbull from Blackwood asking Owen that he might be permitted to ‘renew an intercourse which must always be so proftable and agreeable to myself’ (1846). By this time Owen’s growing infuence in scientifc and government circles would possibly have been proftable to Blackwood in ways beyond affording him intellectual stimulation (Owen 1853, v. 2, p. 806). When Fly and Bramble surveyed the Torres Strait and south eastern coast of New Guinea, local communities were likewise forced to protect their dead (Owen 1853, v. 2, pp. 828–829). John Sweatman again looked to plunder burials. On discovering two earth graves on Muralug (Prince of Wales) Island, he returned with a shipmate and spades ‘for the express purpose of obtaining the skulls of their inmates’. He was prevented from doing so by Bramble’s lieutenant, Charles Yule (1806– 1878), who appears to have held that disturbing the graves was morally wrong as well as fearing the Islanders would kill the desecrators. Sweatman boasted (implausibly) in his journal of having indignantly told Yule that his fears were baseless: ‘as I told him, they’d sell their mother’s skulls for an axe’; and that on Erub Island he’d been able to buy one ‘for a stick of tobacco’ (Sweatman 1977, p. 158). Sweatman may well have bought the skull for tobacco. This was how Francis Blackwood obtained at least one of those from Mer (Murray) Island that he presented to the Hunterian Museum (Mullins 1994, p. 29). Similarly, John MacGillivray (1821–1867), naturalist on the Rattlesnake survey voyage of 1846–1850, claimed that Darnley Island men were ready to trade skulls (MacGillivray 1862), which seems to be confrmed by Oswald Brierly (1817–1894), one of Rattlesnake’s surveyors, who sketched men of the island wading out to barter with the vessel’s crew, with one offering a skull (Brierly 1849). Quite likely the skulls on offer were inter-island war casualties, although MacGillivray claimed that on one occasion he had been offered the mummifed remains of a child (MacGillivray 1852, p. 48). This too may have occurred if, on completion of funerary ceremonies, the remains were believed to no longer have any connection with the child’s spirit. Trading remains also appears to have occurred during encounters with some Indigenous communities on the Australian mainland. Iwaidja clan owners on the Coburg Peninsula, for example, may have prevented John Sweatman robbing burial places, but one Iwaidja man was ready to trade skulls for knives and other European goods with George Windsor Earl (1813–1865), who was based at Port Essington between 1838 and 1845 as a draughtsman and linguist on the British government’s mission to 3 SKELETAL COLLECTING BEFORE DARWIN 83 develop the settlement as a northern trading entrepot (Reece 1992, pp. 7–8). However, there were other instances where skulls were assumed to have been traded, but most likely were stolen. By 1853, for example, London’s College of Surgeons possessed four crania of Ngarrindjeri people from South Australia (Owen 1853, 828). After the observance of funerary rituals, these skulls had been fashioned into water vessels. However, they were cherished objects that were ritually used by the family in memory of the deceased, who almost certainly would not have traded them. Even when it appears that skulls could be secured by trade, getting them could easily prove fatal. Owen Stanley (1811–1850), commander of Rattlesnake during its surveying of northern Australia waters between 1846 and 1850, thought the risk too great, having undoubtedly heard from John MacGillivray, who served on both Fly and Rattlesnake, what had happened when a party from Fly had attempted to land on the coast of Papua New Guinea to collect natural history specimens and artefacts in early 1845. As MacGillivray explained in a letter to John Edward Gray (1800–1875), Keeper of Zoology of the British Museum,

The hostility of the Natives was the chief obstacle to collecting, and was productive of the most disastrous results to these misguided savages. In three severe conficts lasting from 1/4 to 1/2 an hour each, not less than 100 must have been killed and wounded. (MacGillivray 1845)

Owen Stanley knew that John Thomson (d. 1892), Rattlesnake’s chief surgeon, was not just ‘fond of botanical pursuits’ but eager to procure Aboriginal Australian and Melanesian skulls (Raby 1996, p. 33). So too was his assistant, Thomas Henry Huxley, whose work as a naturalist on the voyage contributed greatly to the intellectual development of this highly infuential scientist of the Victorian era. As is well known, Huxley was to champion of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution; and as will be discussed in Chapter 7 of this study, he actively sought racially typical Australian skulls through the 1860s and early 1870s, believing that their comparison with fossilised hominid crania would yield important clues about the evolutionary genealogy of the human species (see esp. Huxley 1864). Huxley, incidentally, was also to champion the use of the new technology of photography as a mechanical means of objectively studying the bodily form of Australian and other Indigenous peoples (Huxley 1862). 84 P. Turnbull

Anchored off the island of Vanatinai in the south east end of Louisiade Archipelago in June 1849, Owen Stanley tried to make light of his fears, writing in his journal of standing between the head-hunters ashore and those under his command. For the men of the Louisiade islands, he mused, ‘a white man’s skull would be the most precious thing that they could possess’. But equally, he wrote, Thomson and Huxley ‘would … be just as glad to get hold of one of theirs’ (Keppel 1853, v. 2, p. 222). ‘I can fancy’, he continued,

the Doctor and Mr. Huxly [sic] superintending the boiling down and subsequent steps to prepare a skull should we by misfortune become possessed of one—I say misfortune, because I hope to be able to continue the survey as we have commenced, without getting into any row with the natives who, from what we have seen, appear to be superior to those on the eastern coast of Australia, but are not to be trusted one inch. (Keppel 1853, v. 2, p. 222)

Stanley’s nervousness further heated Thomson and Huxley’s already sim- mering anger at his cautiously restricting the collecting of natural history and anthropological specimens on the coasts and offshore islands of Northern Australia and New Guinea to when parties went ashore to replenish water stocks and barter for food. Both surgeon–naturalists ended the voyage estranged from Stanley, and ready to condemn his ‘fear and cowardice’ for causing them to leave the region, as Thomson told his wife near the end of their voyaging in late 1849, ‘without knowing anything more or being able to communicate to the world anything more than was known of it before our visit’ (Goodman 2005, p. 64).

The Haslar Collection Prior to his appointment as assistant surgeon about HMS Rattlesnake, Huxley spent nearly six months assigned to the Royal Navy’s principal hospital at Haslar on Portsmouth Harbour. There he made good use of its library and anatomy museum (Desmond 1994, pp. 38–41), which by the end of the nineteenth century was widely known to have amassed one of Europe’s best collections of racially typical human skulls. In the early 1820s the Admiralty was convinced by leading naval physician Sir William Burnett (1779–1861) to establish a library and museum at Haslar for naval medical personnel to learn about the causation and 3 SKELETAL COLLECTING BEFORE DARWIN 85 treatment of diseases commonly encountered at sea (Bettany and Herrick 2004). Burnett, however, envisaged these facilities as contributing more generally to the education of naval medical offcers by enriching their knowledge of comparative anatomy and natural history (Admiralty 1834, p. 3). Appointed the feet’s Physician General in 1832, Burnett ensured Haslar’s museum acquired a range of specimens enabling staff to demonstrate ‘the effects of climate and of habit, and … explain the infuence they produce both on the minds and bodies of seamen’ (Scott 1828). Thereafter the museum grew into one of Britain’s largest collections of comparative anatomical specimens, in large part due to the energy of John Richardson (1787–1865), who was appointed Haslar’s chief physician in 1838. From 1819 to 1822 Richardson had been principal surgeon and naturalist on the frst and second Arctic voyages led by Sir John Franklin (1786–1847), during which time he took a great interest in the life-ways and culture of the Inuit peoples of northern Canada. At Haslar Richardson encouraged the collection of skulls, skeletons and artefacts illustrative of humankind’s physical and cultural diversity. Exactly how many Australian skulls and skeletons the Haslar museum acquired is impossible to say. No catalogue of the collection was published, and what documentation might have existed is said to have been destroyed along with the collection by German aerial bombardment in 1941. All that survives is a page of measurements of nineteen skulls and a complete male skeleton in papers of the anatomist William Henry Flower (1831–1899) at London’s Natural History Museum. Flower took the measurements in 1879, and in doing so noted the locations where these bones were acquired and who had donated them (Flower 1879). Unsurprisingly, the donors were surgeons on active service in the Pacifc and Australian waters from the mid-1830s until the mid-1850s. Three of the skulls and the skeleton were obtained at King George Sound in south Western Australia; two were obtained by Benjamin Bynoe, the surgeon aboard Beagle when it visited the sound in March 1836 (Fisher 2009; Keevil 1949). Eight of the remaining skulls were taken from burial places or possibly acquired by trade in the neighbourhood of the Port Essington settlement and one came from the Swan River in Western Australia. Of the remaining skulls, Flower knew only that they came from New South Wales or some unknown Australian location. By the late 1840s, public admiration for the achievements of naval personnel in exploring and scientifcally investigating the world beyond Europe was such that the Lords of the Admiralty needed no persuading 86 P. Turnbull that it was ‘to the honour and advantage of the Navy, that it encourage and support offcers contributing to the advancement of science’ (Admiralty 1851, p. iii). They took special pride in Haslar becoming known throughout Europe for its collections of medical specimens and resources for the study of comparative anatomy. By the mid-nineteenth century, Haslar’s comparative human osteological collection was said to be second in size and diversity only to London’s College of Surgeons, even though some naval surgeons’ membership of the college led them to favour the Hunterian Museum over Haslar. George Busk (1807– 1886), for example, was a naval surgeon for twenty-fve years, during which time he became well known in London scientifc circles for his research in the felds of zoology and palaeontology. He was a licentiate of the College of Surgeons who became a councillor and was elected Hunterian Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology in the late 1850s. Busk used his many naval contacts to procure for the Hunterian Museum many kinds of specimen, including Australian skulls (Flower 1907b). Rivalry between Haslar and the college occasionally caused friction. William Clift was obliged to sooth a ‘little bit of college Jealousy’, for example, on the arrival of the bodies of a female Thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) and two of her pups. John Franklin was happy for the college to have pups, but requested the body of the mother be sent on to Sir John Richardson for the Haslar museum (Clift 1841). The diffculties of acquiring human remains, however, ensured that the leadership of both institutions encouraged their collection regardless of who gained possession of them. When the Lords of the Admiralty agreed in 1848 to commission the astronomer John Herschel (1792– 1871) to prepare a manual assisting naval offcers to pursue various lines of scientifc inquiry, they had no hesitation in commissioning Richard Owen, who by this time had succeeded Clift as conservator of the Hunterian Museum, to write the manual’s chapter on zoological collecting. Owen readily agreed, and wrote the chapter emphasising the importance of naval personnel not only documenting the physical appearance and cultural practices of peoples they encountered, but also doing their best to collect ‘skeletons, both human and of other animals, that may be buried or preserved with man: with any works of art or implements’. Also, Owen encouraged the training of naval personnel in taking plaster casts of heads, hands and feet, and stressed that ‘wherever the opportunity may occur the brain should be preserved in strong alcohol’ (1851, p. 398). 3 SKELETAL COLLECTING BEFORE DARWIN 87

Army Surgeons There is a similar story to tell of army surgeons, who were the second largest source of skeletal material acquired by metropolitan scientifc collections during the frst two thirds of the nineteenth century. As with the Royal Navy, the Napoleonic Wars were the stimulus for medical mod- ernisation and reform of the army’s medical department. Senior military medical offcers capitalised on the reduction of the army’s size after 1815 by restricting new commissions to the large pool of well qualifed graduates for whom armed service was the only practical means of starting a medical career (Lankford 1980). Like many of their naval counterparts, army medical offcers cultivated a sense of self and professional identity grounded in the gentlemanly pursuit of scientifc inquiries beyond the day-to-day practice of military medicine. Until the late 1830s military surgeons who collected human remains sent those they acquired to London, Edinburgh or Ireland’s College of Surgeons; but after this date many favoured the anatomy museum that had been established by the Army medical department in 1814 at Fort Pitt, the army’s main hospital at Chatham in Northern Kent. By the mid- 1840s, the scale of natural history and comparative anatomical collecting by army surgeons was such that naval medical chief John Richardson was to appeal to the traditional rivalry between the ‘senior service’ and the army. Encouraging naval ‘Offcers in foreign stations [to] embrace every opportunity of sending … specimens’, he warned that the fame of the army’s museum in Fort Pitt, at Chatham in Northern Kent, was ‘daily augmenting’ (Richardson 1846, p. 72). When George Williamson, curator of Fort Pitt’s museum, catalogued its human crania in the mid- 1850s, the collection comprised just over 600 skulls, fve complete skeletons and twenty-seven cranial casts (Davis 1867, p. xi). Ready access to the corpses of ordinary enlistment men ensured that British and Irish skulls were well represented in the collection. There was also a series of around 160 skulls from various parts of Southern Africa at Fort Pitt. The size of its African holdings owed much to Dr. Andrew Smith (1797–1872), Fort Pitt’s principal medical offcer from 1841 to 1845 (Harrison 2004; Morris 1996, p. 14). Smith had himself collected skeletal material while serving in the Cape Colony from 1820 to 1836. Many of the skulls that he and other surgeons acquired were of Khoi, San and Xhosa peoples whose bones bore signs of their having been killed or captured during military operations—as was also 88 P. Turnbull true of a number of the skulls from Southern Africa acquired prior to the 1860s by London’s College of Surgeons and Edinburgh University’s anatomy museum (Harrison 2008; Morris 1996; Wells 1971). Among Smith’s donations to Fort Pitt’s museum was the ‘stuffed fgure’ of a Khoi woman that Smith had prepared, along with the dried heads of three Khoi men, all of which he ftted with glass eyes. How Smith procured these items is unknown, but as Alan Morris, a South African anatomist, wrote after agitation began to secure the return of these remains for burial in the mid-1980s, ‘it is diffcult to imagine how these specimens could have been collected except in a situation of military action or execution of criminals’ (1987, p. 14). By the late 1850s Fort Pitt had acquired a skeleton and twelve skulls from mainland Australia and Tasmania. Like many other items in the collection, these relics came with little information supplied by the donors beyond a brief report of where and how they had been obtained. What was probably the frst skull acquired by the museum has the most detailed provenance. It came from an assistant surgeon named Lister during his service with the 57th Foot Regiment at the Moreton Bay penal settlement. Lister claimed the skull was that of an Aboriginal man known as ‘Raubon Ton’—supposedly a ‘native of one of the most savage tribes in New South Wales’. He reported that the man had been ‘shot in the neighbourhood of Moreton Bay, in 1829, while trying to ambush a mounted constable close to where a man had recently been murdered’ (Williamson 1857, p. 51). Five more Australian skulls were presented around 1833 by an assistant surgeon named Gibson, about whom nothing is known, and who appears to have provided no more information about the skulls than that one had been obtained in the Sydney region and the others had belonged to ‘natives of New South Wales’ (Williamson 1857, pp. 51–52). All but two of the remaining six skulls were presented to the museum during the 1840s and 1850s. Most have no provenance beyond being listed in the museum’s catalogue as having been acquired in Tasmania, New South Wales or Western Australia. Of the two remaining items, the right side of the face of one had been destroyed. It was said to be the skull of a ‘native … belonging to a tribe occupying a portion of the Darling Downs’(Williamson 1857, p. 81). The other was donated by a staff offcer named Shanks in the mid-1850s and said to be the skull of an ‘Aboriginal native of New South Wales district, New England’, who had ‘committed murder, and was afterwards murdered by another of his tribe’ (Williamson 1857, p. 81). 3 SKELETAL COLLECTING BEFORE DARWIN 89

As to what use was made of these skulls, all we know is that they were arranged in the museum to illustrate the main points of morphological diversity between peoples inhabiting different continents. We also know that they were displayed with Khoisan and other skulls procured in the Cape Colony by George Williamson (n.d.), the museum’s curator, who appears to have agreed with Georges Cuvier, the great French comparative anatomist, that Blumenbach had mistakenly classifed Melanesian and Aboriginal peoples as ‘Malay’ varietal type. Cuvier believed that morphological similarities were to be found between the native races of Australia and Southern Africa that pointed to their having a shared ancestry.

Colonial Physicians and Surgeons A third signifcant group of collectors were medically trained men who visited or settled in the Australian colonies. In most cases we know little about these men beyond sketchy biographical details. Rarely has evidence survived concerning how they procured the remains they sent to metropolitan collections, or which sheds light on their motivation in collecting. However, there were several collectors about whom something more can be said. One was Edmund Charles Hobson (1814– 1848), who began his career apprenticed to James Scott (1790–1837), Hobart’s Colonial Surgeon from 1820 to 1835 (Stancombe 1967). Scott, incidentally, was one of many medical practitioners who at that time was intrigued by the unorthodox cerebral science of phrenology, which will be explored in the ffth chapter of this study. He phrenologically assessed the heads of numerous dead convicts, keeping their skulls for future reference. In the context of increasing violence between settlers and Tasmania’s frst peoples through the 1820s, Scott investigated Indigenous heads and made death masks of Indigenous Tasmanian men tried for murder and executed at Hobart. Copies of the death mask that Scott made in 1825 of a man known as ‘Black Jack’ survive in the collections of the State Library of New South Wales and the Hobart Museum and Art Gallery. There is no way of knowing if Hobson shared Scott’s phrenological interests or anything else about his studies before he sailed for London in 1836, where he attended lectures by Robert Edmond Grant (1793– 1874) on comparative anatomy at University College, London, before pursuing further medical studies at the University of Erlangen in Bavaria. 90 P. Turnbull

We also know little about Hobson’s time in London or what he thought of Grant, who by this time had gained notoriety in British scientifc circles by his championing the transmutationist arguments of the French comparative anatomists, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) and Étienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire (1772–1844): that all animal and plant species had evolved from less complex kinds of organisms. Like other British admirers of these two Parisian physiologists, Grant made no secret of the radical social implications of their evolutionary vision of nature. Nor do we know what Hobson thought about Grant’s critics, among whom Richard Owen was the most intellectually formidable. Owen took Grant to task for what he charged was his ignoring that the fossil record confrmed that the essential form of every species was fxed. Owen was frmly of the view that what changes in the typical form of an organism might be disclosed by paleontological evidence were merely superfcial variations perfecting its ability to live successfully and reproduce within its native environment. Owen’s hostility to Grant, however, did not prevent Hobson from making his acquaintance before he left London for Bavaria. Both Grant and Owen encouraged Hobson’s interest in the anatomy of living and fossil marsupial species (see McCallum 1966), impressing on him that the Australian continent’s curious fauna were as yet barely known to science and their investigation promised to yield new and important knowledge of diversity in animate nature. Grant may also have sought to rouse Hobson’s patriotism: he made a point when lecturing of stressing that ‘No country ever possessed such opportunities of cultivating and advancing this study, equal to those so long enjoyed by Gt. Britain’ because of its expanding colonial possessions and interests. And yet, as he warned his students—many of whom would fnd employment in the colonial sphere—Britain, in his opinion, lagged far behind France in contributing to the progress of natural science. Before he left London, Hobson had his younger brother Edward, who had taken up a pastoral lease near present-day Rosebud on the southeastern shore of Port Phillip Bay, send Grant marsupial skeletons that were as yet taxonomically unexamined by British anatomists (Grant 1833). Hobson also sent fossilised marsupial bones to Owen, and assured both he and Grant that they would receive further specimens on his re-settling in Tasmania. Grant repaid the favour by providing Hobson with a letter of introduction to the Arctic explorer John Franklin, who had recently been appointed Tasmania’s Lieutenant-Governor (Fitzpatrick 1949). After 3 SKELETAL COLLECTING BEFORE DARWIN 91 returning from Europe in 1839, Hobson enjoyed the support of both John and his talented wife Jane Franklin (1786–1847), who unsuccessfully petitioned the colony’s Legislative Council to employ him as a naturalist and curator of the natural history museum that the Franklins wished to see established in the colony (Fitzpatrick 1949; Woodward 1966). They were more successful in securing Hobson’s appointment as a visiting physician to the Hobart hospital where, like his initial teacher John Scott, he exploited the opportunities the post gave him to procure varietally interesting skulls. It was by this means that Owen got for the Hunterian Museum the skulls of several Polynesian seaman who died in Hobart. Hobson also sent Owen two Tasmanian skulls, and was probably the source of another four that Jane Franklin donated to the Museum in 1854 (Flower 1907b). Hobson moved to Melbourne in 1840. Suffering from tuberculosis, he lived eight more years, during which time he immersed himself in studying local fauna and fossils, created his own anatomical museum, and continued to send Grant and Owen specimens. Such was the value of Hobson’s gifts that Grant threatened legal action when four boxes of specimens meant for him were mistakenly delivered to Owen at the College of Surgeons (Clift 1829). Among the specimens Hobson sent Owen were four Indigenous skulls that he found when collecting marsupial bones while staying with his brother at Rosebud. In early 1844 he wrote to Owen, telling him that he was sending him the ‘Scull of an Aborigine from Western Port’ and would be glad if Owen could agree to nominate him for membership of London’s Zoological and Geological Societies. This, he hastened to assure Owen, he asked for no motive other than to enable him to exchange comparative specimens with other naturalists and so further his researches (Smith 1885). Another medically-trained naturalist whose collecting activities we know something about was George Bennett (1804–1893). He was a licentiate of London’s College of Surgeons who settled in Sydney in the mid-1830s and became actively involved in the creation and development of the Australian Museum in its early years (Chisholm 1966). Bennett took an interest in the origins, lifeways and culture of Indigenous Australians during two visits to New South Wales between 1829 and 1832. As to their origin he rejected Blumenbach’s reasoning that they and the peoples of present-day Papua New Guinea were ‘Malay’ varietal types. Physically examining Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal men when travelling the Southern Highlands of New South Wales led him to agree with Georges Cuvier, that mainland and Tasmanian 92 P. Turnbull

Aboriginal people were more likely descendants of an ‘African negro race’ which at some time in deep antiquity had left that continent, possibly by way of Madagascar (Bennett 1834, v. 1, p. 170). Bennett disagreed, however, with Cuvier’s student, the French naval surgeon René-Primevère Lesson (1794–1849), whose account of his Pacifc voyaging Bennett had read during his travels. Lesson had described Aboriginal Australians as so ‘degraded from the true rank of man [as] to approach the nature of the brute’. Bennett was of the view that Lesson had based his assessment purely on the basis of encountering Darug and other peoples of the Sydney region, who lived in fringe camps on the edges of white settlements. He had not met peoples further inland, who Bennett’s saw as still ‘uncontaminated by European vices, [and] in full native independence’ (Bennett 1834, v. 1, p. 126). In 1832 Bennett had been a guest on a pastoral station on the Cudgegong River in the New South Wales central highlands, where a large number of Wiradjuri people had gathered to perform funerary ceremonies. He was later to write that they seemed to him ‘intelligent, but not so fne a race as the Polynesians’, although possibly inferior to ‘the Papuan or Oceanic race, to which they are closely allied’. Travelling southwest to the Riverina district, Bennett encountered a group of Wiradjuri men with impressive physiques and striking initiation scars. He persuaded one man to be physically examined. Understandably, the man was equally curious, asking fellow Wiradjuri who worked as stockmen on the property if he wanted to examine him because he had never seen a black man before. He became nervous, however, when Bennett ran his hands over his skull, which led the naturalist to think that the man feared he was working some kind of magic (Bennett 1834, v. 1, p. 242). Bennett felt compassion for the plight of Indigenous Australians who had suffered, or were likely to suffer, dispossession of their ancestral lands. But several of the pastoralists whose hospitality he enjoyed had run sheep and cattle onto land before the colony’s government authorised its settlement by free land grants. And he sided with them in decrying the imperial government’s decision in 1831 to end the practice of freely granting land, believing that without this incentive ‘no great increase of settlers for agricultural purposes [would] take place’, and that the progress of the Australian colonies would be put at moral risk by the majority of its population being emancipists and convicts (Bennett 1834, v. 1, pp. 56–57). He was also of the view that the rate of Indigenous population decline in settled districts suggested that the 3 SKELETAL COLLECTING BEFORE DARWIN 93 extinction of the original owners of the land was inevitable; hence, it seemed to him, there was a scientifc imperative to make strenuous efforts to collect the ‘weapons, utensils, and other specimens of the arts … as well as the skulls of the different tribes and accurate drawings of their peculiar cast of features’ (Bennett 1834, v. 1, p. 69). Convinced that New South Wales’s frst peoples would ‘at no distant period’ be ‘known but by name’, Bennett was among the frst to express what would become the prevailing sentiment in medico-scientifc discourse until well into the early twentieth century: that the new owners of the lands of Australia’s frst peoples had a moral duty to memorialise their passing by collecting not only artefacts illustrative of how they had lived, but also their bodily remains. On this score, Bennett led by example. He acquired skulls for London’s College of Surgeons from several locations, including burial caves on the Murrumbidgee River in the region of Australia’s present-day federal capital of Canberra. (Owen 1853, p. 824) The names of other Australian-based medical men appear as donors of Australian skulls in early and mid-nineteenth century catalogues of British comparative anatomical collections. John Blundell (n.d.), for example, was a physician with pastoral interests in Southern Victoria, from whom the Hunterian Museum acquired a skull found near Port Fairy of a man ‘killed by musket shot’ (Flower 1907b). The most active Tasmanian-based collector was Joseph Milligan (1807–1884), an Edinburgh-trained surgeon who acquired Tasmanian Indigenous skulls while superintendent and medical offcer to the Aboriginal settlement on Flinders Island between 1843 and 1855. He took skulls with him to England when he retired from government service in 1860, where he quietly sold several and donated the rest to the Hunterian Museum, which in later years acquired most of the other skulls he had collected. George Fordyce Story (1800–1885) was another Edinburgh-trained Tasmanian collector. Settling on the eastern coast of Tasmania in 1829, he worked as a convict surgeon and spent his leisure time studying botany and geology; and he became an active member of the Tasmanian Royal Society. Arriving in the last years of the so-called ‘Black War’ of the 1820s and early 1830s, he was among those who out of humanitarian concern endorsed the colony’s governor seeking to end the confict by forcibly removing the island’s Indigenous to government reserves. Story’s curiosity about traditional lifeways and beliefs led him to collect artefacts and the remains of local tribespeople he came across when collecting plants and geological specimens. 94 P. Turnbull

Explorers and Amateur Naturalists Medically-trained men were not the only collectors of Indigenous bodily remains. Members of inland survey expeditions also fgure signifcantly among donors to metropolitan anatomy collections. In 1829, for example, London’s College of Surgeons received a basket woven from rushes containing the dried skin of an initiated man. It had been obtained by surveyor and botanist Allan Cunningham (1791–1839) when exploring the Moreton Bay region. Cunningham had learnt that the funerary rituals practised by local clans included the removal and drying of the outer layers of the deceased’s skin. With the help of Patrick Logan (1791– 1830), commandant of the Bay’s penal settlement, he got such a skin, which had been found in a bark shelter by soldiers of the settlement’s garrison. In a memorandum to William Clift accompanying the donation, Cunningham showed no moral qualms about acquiring it despite believing:

It is highly probable that these relicts [sic], which these Savages are exceedingly careful to keep from the sight of the Whites serve as a memento to awaken their recollections of an individual who was in life eminent for his bravery or was endeared for the kindness of his Heart or other esteemed qualifcations, since with this view evidently these Indians carry about them in their bags, the thigh or other bones of departed friends, which it has been observed they occasionally look at, and shed tears. (Cunningham 1829)

Colonial offcials in various employments also fgured among donors of remains. Ronald Campbell Gunn (1808–1881), for example, settled in Tasmania in 1830 where he was appointed as a police magistrate and local convict superintendent. He was a keen botanist who sent specimens of local fora to William Jackson Hooker (1785–1865), then Regius Professor of Botany at Glasgow and, from 1841, Director of Kew Gardens (Burns and Skemp 1966; FitzGerald 2004). Gunn began collecting when all but a few families of the island’s western coastal tribe had been removed to the government settlement on Flinders Island. He frequently came across deserted camp sites near where remains were buried in hollow trees. Six of the skulls he discovered he gave to Richard Owen for the Hunterian Museum (Owen 1853, pp. 826–827, p. 887). He also became friendly Jules Verreaux (1807–1873) a French 3 SKELETAL COLLECTING BEFORE DARWIN 95 professional naturalist who spent nearly two years collecting fora and fauna in Tasmania in the early 1840s. The remains of three Tasmanian Old People now in the collections of France’s national museum of natural history were given to Verreaux by Gunn (Verreaux 1843). Higher fgures in the colonial establishment also fgure among collectors. Thomas Hobbes Scott (1783–1860), for example, rose to become Archdeacon of New South Wales and an ex offcio member of the colony’s legislative council. His collecting appears to have been largely confned to the two years he served as secretary to John Thomas Bigge (1780–1843), who had been commissioned in 1819 by the British imperial government to investigate the effectiveness of convict transporta- tion. Scott returned to England with Bigge in 1821, bringing with him two toi moko (tattooed Maori heads), two Tasmanian skulls, and the skull of an Aboriginal man from New South Wales. Scott acquired the toi moko in Sydney, where they could be openly bought from seamen returning from New Zealand until 1832, when Governor Darling came under pressure from churchmen and humanitarians to outlaw this ‘loathsome trade’ after allegations surfaced that Maori chiefs were having men killed so their heads could be sold to buy muskets (Britain 1966, 1, v. 2, p. 15). Scott gave one of the heads and the two Tasmanian skulls to London’s College of Surgeons. The other head and the New South Wales skull he presented to the anatomy school at Christ Church, the Oxford College where he had studied arts and divinity. We even fnd two colonial governors among collectors of remains. John Franklin, as previously noted, took a keen interest in the natural history of Tasmania during his term as lieutenant-governor of the colony between 1837 and 1843, sending marsupial specimens to the anatomy museum of the Haslar naval hospital and the Hunterian Museum (Clift 1840b). He also put together his own collection of natural history and anthropological specimens during his time in offce, in which were a number of skulls from Tasmania and other parts of Australia, including skullcaps of Ngarrindjeri people of South Australia fashioned into water carriers after the conclusion of funerary ceremonies. In 1854, eight years after Franklin perished ‘a martyr to science and geographical discovery’ in the Artic, his widow Jane Franklin gave this skeletal material to the Hunterian Museum, where it was shelved with items donated by George Grey, the governor of South Australia between 1840 and 1844. 96 P. Turnbull

Grey donated a range of natural history specimens to several institutions, which he collected during his Royal Geographical Society- sponsored exploration of northwestern Australia in the late 1830s. Among the items he gave London’s College of Surgeons was a skeleton ‘found enveloped in three pieces of papyrus bark on a small sandy point in Cygnet Bay’ (Flower 1907b). On his appointment to govern South Australia in 1840, Grey began a private collection of local ‘natural history and curios’ while also sending various items to London, including several Ngarrindjeri skullcap water containers and, in 1845, the smoke- dried remains of a man and a child removed from burial platforms close to Adelaide (Flower 1907a). In the late 1870s William Flower (1831– 1899), then conservator of the Hunterian Museum, cleaned the adult male skeleton of dried and decaying integuments after photographing the body (Flower 1879, pp. 393–394). *** This chapter has documented how the skulls and other bodily remains of Indigenous Australians were acquired by British metropolitan anatomy museums during the frst half of the nineteenth century. We have seen how many of these remains were collected when medically-trained men were presented with opportunities to plunder burials, but there were also residents and visitors to the colonies from various walks of life who looked on the collecting of remains as a means of helping to advance knowledge of the natural history of humanity. Even so, the collecting of Australian remains was sporadic and opportunistic. Nothing like systematic collection of varietally distinct human crania or other bodily structures occurred prior to the 1860s. In the case of Australian remains, it proved impossible to create series of crania allowing statistically signifcant conclusions to be drawn about racially peculiarities in the morphology of Indigenous Australians. On the eve of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, there were little more than the remains of around a hundred Indigenous Australians in British anatomy and natural history collections. Even so, as we will see in the next chapter, these bones were regarded as particularly valuable scientifc resources for all that they were small in number compared to contemporary collections of human remains of African, American and Asian ethnic origin. They were to fgure signifcantly in the writings of the most infuential British investigators of varietal diversity in the half century or so before the 1860s and the momentous re-casting of human natural history provoked by Darwin’s argument for evolution by speciation. CHAPTER 4

Indigenous Remains in British Anatomical and Ethnographic Discourse, 1810–1850

Having inquired into how the skulls and other remains of Indigenous Australian skulls were obtained by British scientists during the frst half of the nineteenth century, we turn now to the question of what they made of these bones. As is well known, Darwin’s argument for evolutionary speciation caused human natural history to be radically reimagined, especially by younger British scientists, many of whom held positions in what by mid-century was a growing number of newly established university departments of medicine and the natural sciences. However, prior to the conceptual revolution triggered by the reception of The Origin of Species (1859), the consensus in British medico-scientifc circles was that variation in all living organisms—including humanity—was the result of an agonistic struggle between what was believed to be an immaterial force sustaining life, and the effects of external environmental conditions such as climate and diet. Since the publication of Nancy Stepan’s infuential 1982 study of the conceptual development of British racial science, historians have generally seen this intellectual consensus as having been challenged by the late 1840s by medico-scientifc fgures who explained how and why variation occurred, drawing on the ideas and arguments of the French comparative anatomists Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Lamarck and Geoffroy argued that nature was a dynamic continuum wherein the gradual transmutation of organisms into more complex life forms occurred through physiological processes that were largely immune to environmental infuence

(Stepan 1982). By the 1840s a number of infuential British anatomists— most of whom had studied medicine and natural science in Paris during the late 1820s and 1830s—were convinced that those of their peers who accepted Hunter and Blumenbach’s monogenetic environmentalist reasoning about the causes of human diversity were wrong in thinking that humanity was a single species that had branched into distinctive varietal types. They believed it far more likely that varietal differences such as head shape and skin colour were innate features, which the earliest known historical records suggested were biologically fxed. In fact, it seemed to them that Blumenbach’s varietal types were separately originating species. What is more, whereas many of those who endorsed Blumenbach’s account of human variation agreed with him that all humankind possessed the same powers of intellect and emotion, those who now explained human diversity in innatist, polygenetic terms represented humankind as comprised of racial types not only exhibiting distinctive bodily characteristics, but also possessing distinctive repertoires of cognitive, emotional and intellectual strengths and weaknesses. These opponents of monogenetic environmentalism imbued the term race with new meaning. Hitherto ‘race’ had been used in British medico- scientifc discourse loosely and interchangeably with ‘tribe’ and ‘nation’ to describe groups of people with a common ancestry. Those who now came to see human diversity as refective of immutable biological differences employed ‘race’ as an analytical category by which to classify human populations on the basis of the attributes and qualities of body and mind that they presumed were peculiar to their original ancestral form. Historian Nancy Stepan attributed this ‘racial turn’ in British medico- scientifc circles to its agreement ‘with Europeans’ sense of themselves in the world’, ‘based on a wider set of data, more sophisticated measurements, and a deeper knowledge of biological processes and functions than previous work on human race’ (1982, p. 46). However, Stepan did not explore in contextual depth how this biologically determinist con- ception of race gained cognitive strength through anthropometric techniques nor how the data that scientists produced was interpreted. Nor did George Stocking, to whom we are indebted for numerous important insights into the conceptual development of racial thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stocking was inclined to confne himself to describing the more salient features of this movement, without suggesting what might have caused the shift from monogenetic environmentalism to envisaging humanity as separately originating racial types (1968, p. 36). 4 INDIGENOUS REMAINS IN BRITISH ANATOMICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC … 99

Recently Kay Anderson has addressed the question of what caused this racial turn in a close reading of a range of contemporary texts (Anderson and Perrin 2008). Noting that predictions of indigenous racial extinction were a staple of both scientifc and popular British colonial discourses by the late 1830s, Anderson concurs with Russell McGregor’s assessment that belief in the likelihood of Indigenous Australian extinction ‘was primarily … a manifestation of ultimate pessimism … arising out of the repeated failures to civilise and convert [them]’ (McGregor 1997, p. 18). Anderson draws attention to a range of widely circulating scientifc and ethnographic writings of the frst half of the nineteenth century that explained the failure of these humanitarian endeavours as stemming from Indigenous Australians supposedly being so bereft of the natural qualities and virtues distinguishing humankind from other animal species as to unsettle belief in their humanity. As Anderson sees it, the morphology of the Australian skull was widely interpreted as proving that the continent’s frst peoples were so naturally defcient in terms of intellectual powers as to be incapable of improvement, even under dedicated European supervision. Indeed, Anderson further suggests that Indigenous crania became the focus of innatist, polygenetic racial theorising that provoked a general crisis of humanism which perniciously strengthened the belief in metropolitan European and the Australian colonies, that Indigenous Australians and other peoples living by hunting and foraging were biologically incapable of transcending savagery (Anderson and Perrin 2008, p. 984). My frst concern in this chapter is to show that while it became commonplace in scientifc and popular discourses of the early Victorian era to represent Australia’s ‘native races’ as possessing animal-like attributes of body and mind, this was less refective of the growing infuence in medico-scientifc circles of polygenetic racialism than a more general pessimism about the capacity of Indigenous peoples to improve. This was particularly felt and expressed by anatomists and ethnologists who continued to believe in humanity’s monogenetic origins and subsequent environmentally induced varietal branching. Monogenetic environmentalism construed variation as a process in which the bodily and mental attributes of largely endogamous populations had degenerated from their divinely created original attributes and qualities; but Blumenbach remained optimistic that nations or races with histories of experiencing environmental conditions causing a gradual degeneration of their powers of reasoning and moral judgement could 100 P. Turnbull reverse these effects by living for several successive generations in an environment providing sustained intellectual stimulation. However, as will be shown in this chapter, the most infuential British anatomists and ethnologists of the frst half of the nineteenth century had no such optimism. They either doubted, or were ambivalent as to whether Australians and other hunter-gatherer peoples indigenous to spheres of British colonial ambition (such as the Cape Colony) had the biological capacity to transcend their long exposure to the supposedly deleterious effects of living by foraging and hunting—‘the life of the chase’—by conversion to Christianity and education in civilised (European) lifeways.

Alexander Monro and the Indigenous Australian Body Fatalism about the reversibility of degeneration in Indigenous Australians was evident by the early 1820s. Many of the medical practitioners who settled in or visited the Australian colonies during the frst half of the nineteenth century graduated from the University of Edinburgh where they had attended lectures and demonstrations by Alexander Monro (1773–1859), professor of anatomy and surgery between 1808 and 1846. Monro was one of the most infuential teachers of Hunter’s and Blumenbach’s views on human diversity. He took a particular interest in comparative craniometry, concurring with Blumenbach that comparison of the shape and texture of cranial bone demonstrated with particular clarity how sustained exposure to climatic, dietary and other environmental factors could noticeably alter the typical morphology of a ‘nation’ or ‘tribe’. However, he was more cautious about the potential of comparative craniometry to generate data to determine the racial ancestry of particular peoples. He warned his students not to underestimate the diffculties of establishing the ‘distinctive character’ of a ‘tribe’ or ‘nation’ without having large numbers of representative skulls to work with. It was crucial, for example, that they not be misled by specimens in which cranial bones were deformed by disease, or by cultural practices such as tightly binding the heads of infants, as was known to be the practice of certain Native American tribes. And there was the question of what ways of measuring cranial bones produced the most reliable comparative data. John Barclay, Monro’s fellow Edinburgh anatomy teacher, also gave the problem of how best to measure skulls considerable thought, and with the aid of William Leach, a fellow Edinburgh surgeon, he had 4 INDIGENOUS REMAINS IN BRITISH ANATOMICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC … 101 two instruments built. One differed little from a device then used by shoemakers to estimate foot sizes; it enabled the user to easily follow Blumenbach in measuring the front-to-back and side-to-side diameters of a skull (Brewster 1830, v. 7, pp. 319–320; Monro 1825, v. 1, p. 201). The other was a calliper-like instrument that exploited the discovery of the late eighteenth century Dutch anatomist Pieter Camper, that, as was discussed in the frst chapter of this study, enabled peculiarities in the facial form of different ‘nations’ or ‘tribes’ to be identifed by means of imagining vertical lines through the ear canal and most prominent part of the forehead forming a ‘facial angle’ (1794). Barclay and Leach believed their instruments produced reliable comparative angular measurements of human facial bones. However, Barclay felt that Camper had failed to see that the position of the ear canal could vary signifcantly with age, and between individuals with the same racial ancestry, so he designed one of his instruments to record two further angles (Fig. 4.1). The frst was that formed by imagining a line running parallel with the surface of the base of the horizontal plates of the upper jaw bone forming the front of the roof of the mouth. This line would intersect with the line Camper drew from the forehead above the nose to the front edge of the roof of the mouth. The horizontal line along the base of the plates of the upper jaw would be interrupted by the ridges on each side of the jaws; Barclay’s solution was to draw this line along the horizontal part of the palatine bone. When this part of the bone was concave or convex, the line was to be drawn so as to pass through the parts closest to the prominence on the outer surface of the occipital bone and the most forward projecting part of the forehead. The second angle was to be found by measuring along the base of the lower jaw to where cross Camper’s facial line (Brewster 1830, p. 319). Monro, however, felt that the rigidities of any wooden or metal device made it diffcult to map the relative shapes and sizes of cranial structures. The size of the frontal sinuses, for example, needed to be taken into account when making geometric comparisons of varietally signifcant features such as the prominence of the forehead. As Monro saw it, the best solution was to create an instrument made from four pieces of wood or metal, with one piece free to be moved in a horizontal or perpendicu- lar direction. One could then add to one of the sides a device consisting of either a short moveable scale or a series of concentric arcs, much like those built into marine quadrants. Further, it seemed to Monro, if threads 102 P. Turnbull

Fig. 4.1 Craniometry, Plate CCXVIII, Edinburgh Encyclopaedia conducted by David Brewster … Edinburgh, 1830 4 INDIGENOUS REMAINS IN BRITISH ANATOMICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC … 103 were stretched across the sides of the instrument at half-inch intervals, a grid would be created, conveniently enabling the shape of the skull to be accurately drawn (Monro 1825, v. 1, p. 202). Monro’s thinking about craniometric instrumentation refects a tension that can be seen in many projects entailing comparative analysis of ‘racial’ skulls that were undertaken by anatomists and anthropologists through the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the one hand there was the investment in designing and using autonomous, self- regulating instruments intended to supply comparative data undistorted by human subjectivities. On the other there was continued privileging of the eye of the individual expert. In Monro’s case, we fnd many of his judgements of the shape and texture of cranial and other bones were based on what he saw, not what he read off the instruments at his disposal. In any case, Monro had no doubt that the Indigenous Australian skull illustrated how environmentally-induced variation could affect the shape of the head. As noted in the previous chapter, Monro had acquired a number of Indigenous skulls and the skeleton of a young Darug man of the Sydney region from past pupils. He used these relics to illustrate to his students the ‘osseous peculiarities’ that he believed had resulted from successive generations living in the Australian environment. Monro held that the skulls of the people encountered in the region of the Port Jackson settlement were typically ‘thicker than in most Europeans’, and along with other parts the skeleton were ‘composed of hard, compact, dense and heavy materials’. The outer surfaces of these skulls, he told his students, also appeared more uneven than in Europeans, which he attributed to the impact of ‘clubs, or waddeis [sic], with which they often fght each other’ (Monro 1825, v. 1, p. 224). Monro also drew his students’ attention to the size and shape of the frontal sinuses and nasal cavity, and the size of jaws and teeth. Overall, as he saw it, these remains confrmed that Blumenbach had been right to conclude that the Indigenous tribes of ‘New Holland’ were probably not of African descent but were a ‘Malay’ people in whom the play of environmental factors and the vital force sustaining life within the bodily economy had over time caused their degeneration to the point that they now lived in a state of extreme savagery. Monro’s assessment of Indigenous Australian morphology was fxed in the imagination of Edinburgh medical students by his theatrically correlating in his lectures cranial shape with contemporary reportage by travellers and colonial offcials of Indigenous lifeways and culture. He professed to be presenting anatomical evidence that accounted for why 104 P. Turnbull the British Crown’s new subjects had ‘neither houses nor clothing; were totally ignorant of agriculture, and did not practice in any one of the arts of civil life’ (1825, v. 1, p. 226). The shape and texture of their bones also to his mind explained Indigenous resistance to integration within the emerging agrarian economy of New South Wales, which in turn he took to be strongly suggestive that the degeneration of the Australian ‘Malay’ type had gone beyond the point of being capable of arrest or reversal. Successive generations of Monro’s students, many of whom were to visit or settle in the Australian colonies, left his lectures having had impressed on them that civilising initiatives—such as the removal of Indigenous children from their families and training them as pastoral workers or domestic servants—were destined to failure because of how naturally degraded they had become. ‘Though much pain has, for thirty years, been taken to instruct them’, Monro lamented, ‘not one of them has been induced to avail himself of his education; and, indeed, those who have had the advantage of education, generally fee to the woods, when they arrive at manhood’ (1825, v. 1, p. 226).

The Influence of Georges Cuvier Scrutiny of Monro’s writings suggests his pessimism about the capacity of Indigenous Australians to overcome the effects of their supposed degradation in body and mind owed much to his study of the works of Georges Cuvier, the leading French comparative anatomist of the post- revolutionary era (see Outram 1984). Cuvier’s scientifc achievements were many, but among his contributions to nineteenth-century biology was his breaking with Linnaeus and Buffon to re-conceptualise the animal kingdom as divided into four ‘branches’, each conforming to what he believed was a divinely conceived, distinctive plan of organisation. Cuvier held that within each plan the nervous system was the fundamental element, responsible for determining the structural arrangements and functionality of all other major bodily systems. He further held that, within each plan, the form and functional interrelationships of these fundamental systems were eternally fxed; although he also thought that divine intention allowed some variations to occur in those parts of an animal that contributed to or aided its bodily processes or activities, so as to perfect its ability to live and reproduce within its customary environment. 4 INDIGENOUS REMAINS IN BRITISH ANATOMICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC … 105

Cuvier was less confdent when it came to explaining how these variations occurred. He felt that his comparative study of many different kinds of organism had not enabled him to discern the mechanism by which variations of form were inherited. He did not rule out the possibility that factors such as climate and diet played a role in variation, but he diverged from Buffon, Camper and Blumenbach in thinking that they were possibly infuential only early in the history of a species. Thereafter, he believed, changes generally occurred as a result of sexual preferences for particular characteristics, which he saw as clearly evidenced by humanity’s long history of creating marked diversity in domesticated animal species. However, he was adamant that such variations were trivial, impermanent changes to only the superfcial characters of an organism. He was convinced by exhaustive study of fossils and his refections on geological change that when a species—or, more accurately, a specifc population within a species—encountered environmental forces powerful enough to produce profound, inherent functional change in the essential organs of its nervous, digestive or reproductive systems, this would so destabilise the harmonic functioning of the bodily economy of individuals within the population that in time its extinction was inevitable. In respect of human variation, Cuvier accepted, with some cave- ats, Blumenbach’s division of the peoples of the earth into geographically located varieties. He similarly divided humanity into ‘three great races of the old world’: the ‘Caucasian’ (white), ‘Mongol’ (yellow) and ‘Ethiopian’ (black), but proposed that the remainder of humankind were more likely to be three derivative races: the American Indians (red), the nomadic peoples of the polar regions (brown) and a race extending through the Pacifc to Australia (varying from yellow to black). Cuvier also concurred with Blumenbach that skull shape seemed the most reliable practical indicator of racial divergence and inter-varietal breeding. Cuvier was well acquainted with contemporary research on the physiology of brain and spinal cord, notably that of the contemporary Austrian anatomist, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828). As will be discussed in Chapter 6 of this study, Gall held that the brain comprised multiple organs, each the locus of a specifc ‘faculty’ of emotion or intellect. He was convinced that the relative size of each organ, and hence the magnitude of its corresponding inherent mental power, could be accurately gauged by noting the degree of impression it made on the shape of the overlying cranial bone as a person grew to maturity. Moreover, 106 P. Turnbull comparing skulls in reproductively related populations would disclose shared psychological characteristics. Cuvier was scathing in his assessment of Gall’s account of cerebral location, but tentatively accepted that physiological processes in the brain gave rise to consciousness. It seemed to him that human capacity for reasoning and moral judgement, as far it could be gauged through behavioural observation, was ‘consistently proportional to the relative size of the brain’. He further reasoned that as the human brain, like that of all other mammals, was ‘moulded in the cavity of the cranium, which it flls exactly’, it followed that the volume of the cavity was an indicator of intellectual power (Cuvier 1800, v. 2, p. 13). Thus as different races exhibited differences in cranial volume, it was the case, or so he believed, that they typically possessed greater or lesser mental capabilities. In recent times scholars have drawn attention to Cuvier’s describing Africans in his infuential Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes as ‘the most degraded of human races, whose form approaches most closely that of brutes’ (1812, v. 1, p. 105). Much has also been written about his dissection in 1817 of the body of Saartje Bartmann (c. 1790– 1815), a young Khoisan woman popularly exhibited in European cities as the ‘Hottentot Venus’, and his concluding that Bartmann’s head and other bodily structures exhibited ape-like features. Yet Cuvier regarded Bartmann’s body as presenting only superfcial variations from humankind’s ancestral form: within his functionalist vision of animate nature, humans and other primates shared the same general plan of organisation. Cuvier held that there were fundamental anatomical and physiological differences between humans and apes, which he believed refuted the notion that animate nature comprised a great ‘chain’ of progressively greater biological perfection, in which Africans, Australians or any other race exhibiting supposedly ape-like features occupied a niche between the rest of humanity and the higher apes in terms of organic perfection. He also believed that the human species was susceptible to variations in the size and power of the brain and sensory organs, and that while this served to enhance the success of races in living and reproducing within particular environments, the price of successful environmental adaptation could be the weakening of intellectual powers to substantially below those of other races. History, as Cuvier saw it, had shown variation to be a cruel law, ‘which seems to have doomed to eternal inferiority all the tribes of our species which are unfortunate enough to have a depressed 4 INDIGENOUS REMAINS IN BRITISH ANATOMICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC … 107 and compressed cranium’ (Cuvier 1817, p. 273). In the case of African peoples, he believed that their ‘intelligence has nowhere risen to the point of reaching a regular form of government or the least appearance of sustained knowledge, has nowhere preserved either annals or traditions’ (Cuvier and Rudwick 1997, p. 246).

William Lawrence and the Materiality of Human Diversity Cuvier was not alone in concluding that Africans, Melanesians and Australia’s frst peoples were biologically incapable of improvement because of the historical infuence of environmental forces and behavioural factors such as their favouring particular qualities and attributes of body and mind in sexual selection. His conclusions were shared by William Lawrence (1783–1867), whose lectures in 1816–1817 on the natural history of man, at London’s Royal College of Surgeons were the basis of one of the most infuential accounts of the nature and causes of human variation published in Britain during the frst half of the nineteenth century. Lawrence’s interest in human diversity developed early in his career. He was still apprenticed to leading London surgeon John Abernethy (1764–1831) when he frst wrote on the subject, in a paper delivered in 1803 to the medical society founded by Abernethy at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (Cooper 1843, v. 1, p. 107). In this early discourse, Lawrence did little more than rehearse Blumenbach’s account of the nature and causes of variation in humankind; but by the time he was appointed (in 1815, through Abernethy’s patronage) to lecture on comparative anatomy at London’s College of Surgeons, he had been persuaded by his reading of Cuvier that environmental forces were less signifcant a cause of variation than sexual selection and intergenerational transmission of modifed characteristics. Lawrence endorsed Cuvier’s naturalistic, anatomically grounded classifcation of the animal kingdom into four branches, within each of which the forms of all organisms had a distinctive and eternally fxed plan of organisation. Like Cuvier, he believed that the essential bodily systems of species within each branch of the animal kingdom were sim- pler or more complex expressions of the same plan, with variation occurring only in ancillary parts, so as generally to make the organism better 108 P. Turnbull able to live and reproduce in its customary environment. He also agreed that external forces such climate and nutrition could modify these ancillary parts in an individual organism so that it deviated from its parental form, but was sceptical that it could transmit these changes to its offspring, as Buffon and Blumenbach had supposed—a notion he found ‘so fanciful and so unphilosophic, that it hardly deserves serious attention’ (Lawrence 1822, p. 337). Indeed, he saw it as licensing absurdities such as attributing the typical shape of Indigenous Australians’ facial bones to the irritant effects of constant exposure to ‘numerous gnats’ (337). For if environmentally induced changes were transmitted to their offspring, Lawrence reasoned, then inter-varietal breeding in humankind would see the relatively rapid emergence of a population displaying the characteristics of whatever race had longest inhabited a particular geographic locality. One had only to consider the example of Britons in India to see that this had not occurred. As Lawrence observed,

a fair Englishman, if exposed to the sun, becomes dark and swarthy in Bengal; but his offspring, if from an Englishwoman, are born just as fair as he himself was originally: and the children, after any number of generations that we have yet observed, are still born equally fair, provided there has been no intermixture of dark blood. (1822, pp. 84–85)

The implication was that variation occurred when sexual reproduction— causing the ‘intermixture of dark blood’ in this instance—led to offspring exhibiting markedly different characters to those of their parents, which were then transmitted to their descendants. Lawrence agreed with Cuvier that investigation of animal physiology had yet to discover the means by which variations became hereditary, and why it was that parents could produce some offspring with markedly variant features and others without. It seemed to him that variation in domesticated animals provided some clues, for there human intervention had led to the ‘formation of new varieties, by breeding from individuals in whom … desirable properties exist in the greatest degree’ (1822, p. 396). There were numerous cases reported by medical men that Lawrence could think of, where—much like unusual domestic breeds of dogs and sheep—strange variations had been exhibited by individual men and women, which had become defning characteristics through familial intra-breeding or reproduction occurring in small, geographically isolated populations. The most striking example to his mind was that of 4 INDIGENOUS REMAINS IN BRITISH ANATOMICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC … 109 the so-called ‘porcupine men’: members of a Suffolk family well known to London medical practitioners who since the 1730s had inherited a genetic disorder causing massive thickening of the skin into bristle-like calluses. Lawrence argued that were members of this family ‘more different from us in appearance than the Negro’, and were they to be ‘exiled from human society’ and then ‘discovered at some remote period’, there would be a strong yet false presumption ‘that they must have sprung from an originally different race’ (p. 390). However, Lawrence was doubtful how far the analogy between variation in humankind and in domestic animals held. Clearly, humanity had not engaged in ‘selections and exclusions similar to those so successfully employed in rearing our more valuable animals’. History, he pointed out, provided overwhelming evidence that even in the most civilised of European societies, purposeful selectivity had been

almost entirely overlooked. Hence all the native deformities of mind and body, which spring up so plentifully in our artifcial mode of life, are handed down to posterity and tend by their multiplication and extension to degrade the race. (Lawrence 1822, p. 396)

If this neglect characterised nations ‘so conspicuous in arts, sciences, literature, and all that can strengthen and adorn society’, then it seemed impossible, Lawrence reasoned, that peoples such as ‘naked, shivering and starved New Hollanders’ could ever be raised from their supposed state of savagery by human agency promoting progressively benefcial sexual selection. What disposed Lawrence to think it was impossible to achieve the improvement of Australian and other indigenous peoples supposedly living ‘in the most natural state of man’ was his conviction that variation was a wholly material phenomenon. For all that he could agree with Cuvier on many points, he disagreed fundamentally with the great French anatomist’s holding that that life was a force divinely superadded to matter. Cuvier believed that the laws of biology operated in harmony with the essential mysteries of Christianity. Lawrence denied metaphysics any place in scientifc reasoning, regarding questions such as whether humankind originated from a single or several related species as beyond experiential investigation, whereas there were suffcient empirical grounds for concluding that it was on balance more probable ‘that the various races of human beings are only to be regarded as varieties of a single species’ 110 P. Turnbull

(1822, v. 2, p. 234). Thus Lawrence could agree with Cuvier that life was sustained by bodily structures being empowered to resist, ‘for a certain period of time, the laws governing inorganic bodies, and even to act in ways entirely contrary to those laws’ (Cuvier 1800, v. 1, p. 2). But he rejected the idea that a supernatural force animated matter, reasoning that experiential inquiry suggested it was far more probable that life was no more than matter in motion, and as such it seemed impossible to imagine how the effects of variation could be reversed. His declaring life to be a purely material phenomenon in his 1816 series of comparative anatomy lectures at the College of Surgeons outraged leading fellows. So too did his brash argument that British medical science risked being overshadowed by French advances in research and teaching. What also caused anger was his intimating that John Hunter, the ‘founding genius’ of the college, had been agnostic on the question of whether life was a supernatural force, having ‘no taste for immaterial agents, or for subtle matters’ in explaining the nature of life (Lawrence 1822, p. 73). Lawrence’s celebration of Parisian science and posthumously enlist- ing Hunter in support of his materialist vision of nature was too much for his old mentor Abernethy, who at the time held the college’s prestigious Hunterian Professorship of Anatomy and Surgery. Abernethy openly chastised Lawrence. He declared that there was doubt that Hunter was a vitalist, and that Lawrence’s slander of the anatomist’s memory served to show that he was oblivious to the morally ‘pernicious tendency’ of Parisian materialism—which, as Abernethy had little need to convince his audience, was a prime cause of the revolutionary overthrow of church and state in France (Abernethy 1817, p. 52). To the dismay of many college’s fellows, Lawrence would not be silenced by Abernethy’s censure. He again argued the case for life being a purely material phenomenon in his 1817 lectures. Nor did it help that he did so in the context of addressing the nature and likely causes of variation in humanity. When his Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man were published in 1819, Lawrence found himself publicly denounced for blasphemy and suspended by the College Council, which demanded that he withdraw the work from sale. Lawrence complied, but the text was pirated and serialised by the radical journalist, Richard Carlile (1790–1843). Republished and widely read in various editions until the late 1840s, Lawrence’s lectures were to infuence British thinking about human variation in several ways. They proved an important source of inspiration for later British evolutionists, notably Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) (Wells 1971). They were probably also infuential in later nineteenth century British 4 INDIGENOUS REMAINS IN BRITISH ANATOMICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC … 111 anthropologists being drawn to explain varietal differences in human psychology in biologically determinist terms. As for Lawrence himself, he remained at odds with the college’s leadership until 1827, when, curiously, and to the dismay of reformist colleagues, he disavowed his earlier radicalism, and successfully sought election to its council. Georges Cuvier, as we have seen, was of the opinion that irrespective of the active presence of the soul in human sensory and intellectual activity, the size and organisational complexity of the brain determined intellectual prowess. Races with typically smaller brains would always, he believed, remain inferior, although he conceded that missionary endeavour and humanitarian governance might help them achieve some minor degree of improvement. Lawrence, in contrast, held that ‘all the manifestations called mental or intellectual’ were ‘animal functions’ of the brain; what distinguished the cerebral structures in man was only the ‘more perfect exhibition of mental phenomena which the more complete development of the brain would lead us to expect’ (Lawrence 1822, p. 96). While Lawrence conceded that science was ‘entirely ignorant’ as to how ‘medullary substance can perceive, remember, judge, [or] reason’, he provocatively argued that insisting that it did so with the aid of a superadded vital force was to forsake the experiential mode of reasoning that had proved so explanatorily powerful since the time of Newton (Lawrence 1822, p. 91). He was openly sympathetic to fellow anatomist’s Franz Joseph Gall’s attempt ‘to particularize, in the brains of animals and of man, the organ or residence of each propensity, feeling and intellectual power’ (Lawrence 1822, p. 206). Cuvier, as we have seen, thought Gall a self-promoting charlatan (Outram 1984, pp. 118–140); but Lawrence regarded Gall’s project of determining the exact parts of the brain in which emotions or intellectual powers were located as empirically well grounded. Whether or not Gall’s followers ultimately succeeded in accurately mapping the mind, it seemed to Lawrence certain that they would generate new insights into the organic basis of mental activity. It would also, he argued, lead to greater understanding of the material basis of varietal differences in cognition, emotion and volition in the human species. In preparing his 1816–1817 lectures on human natural history Lawrence closely examined and compared European and various other skulls in the possession of the Hunterian Museum and other London collections. He was to refer on several occasions during his lectures to sub-Saharan African skulls as typically having a smaller internal cranial 112 P. Turnbull volume than those of Europeans, and exhibiting in their a shape frontal region a shape that suggested to him an ‘inferiority of organization’ causing an inferiority of mental faculties (Lawrence 1822, p. 328). He also studied the Hunterian’s Australian specimens, which seemed to him to possess something of the form of African skulls while exhibiting other, distinctive features. In size and shape, Australian skulls appeared to Lawrence to confrm that the Tasmanians and native inhabitants of New South Wales suffered from greater paucity of intellectual powers than he and Cuvier saw in sub-Saharan peoples. Drawing on colonial reportage, Lawrence was to rehearse what by this time were for the most part commonplace misinterpretations and cruelly ethnocentric judgements on Indigenous Australians’ lifeways and cultural practices. The persuasiveness of Lawrence’s portrayal of Australia’s frst peoples in the eyes of his scientifc peers, and doubtless many of those who subsequently read the published version of his lectures, owed much to his representing the cranial morphology of Australia’s frst peoples as supposedly disclosing a material basis for their allegedly being sunk into ‘hideous savagery’ and offering science ‘examples of the rudest barba- rism’. It seemed to Lawrence that the Aboriginal people of New South Wales had supposedly ‘degenerated’ to the point that were incapable of exploiting the colony’s ‘fne climate and productive soil’. The inescapable conclusion as he saw it was that while they might be improved to some degree by progressively interbreeding with cerebrally stronger races, their having come to offer the ‘most disgusting moral as well as physical portrait of man’ rendered it unlikely this would ever occur.

James Cowles Prichard and the Physical History of Humanity Pessimism about the capacity of Indigenous Australians to beneft from colonial humanitarianism was also to colour the writings James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848), generally regarded in British medico-scientifc and wider intellectual circles of the early Victorian era as Europe’s premier ethnologist (Augstein 1999). Prichard earned his reputation by his Researches into the Physical History of Mankind, an encyclopaedic inquiry into the nature of human diversity which he frst published in 1813 and republished the next thirty years in much expanded and revised versions. 4 INDIGENOUS REMAINS IN BRITISH ANATOMICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC … 113

Thomas Hodgkin, curator of Guy’s Hospital’s anatomy museum, was a close friend of Prichard. He dated the beginning of Prichard’s life- long interest in human diversity to 1807, when they were both studying medicine at Edinburgh University. It was, Hodgkin wrote, ‘the continual preoccupation of his mind. In our daily walks it was always uppermost: a shade of complexion—a singularity of physiognomy—a peculiarity of form—would always introduce the one absorbing subject’ (1849, p. 204). Prichard several times nominated human variation as the discussion topic in a debating club that he formed with fellow students. He was also one of thirteen authors of papers presenting historical and comparative anatomical evidence for the unity of the human species read before Edinburgh’s Royal Medical Society in its sessions between 1785 and 1786 as well as 1811 and 1812 (Kidd 2003, p. 879). Prichard shared his Quaker family’s long-standing opposition to slavery. On arriving in Edinburgh, he found that intellectuals of the stature of Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) had tentatively questioned whether humanity originated in one divinely willed act of creation. As George Stocking has argued, it was the polygenetic implications of Kames’s drawing attention to seemingly implausible and contradictory Biblical assertions in respect to the origins and early history of humanity that provoked Prichard to write a doctoral thesis in which he sought to reconcile Scripture with the fndings of Buffon, Blumenbach and other naturalists on the question of human diversity. In much revised form, he published the thesis as what was to be the frst edition of his Physical History of Mankind (1813). This frst version of History was refective of Prichard’s converting to Anglican evangelicalism while pursuing studies at Oxford during 1810 (Prichard 1973, p. ii). He was to remain within the Anglican Church thereafter, although his personal faith grew less infuential in motivat- ing what was to be a life-long quest to synthesise evidence derived from Scripture, ancient history and comparative anatomy to prove the unitary origin of the human species. As George Stocking observed, his ‘commitment to human unity became, as it were, the functionally autonomous motivation of his ethnology’ (1987, p. 49). Prichard’s admiration for Blumenbach never diminished, but by the time the frst edition of History was published he had come to regard the Göttingen anatomist’s account of the causes of human variation as ‘in great part hypothetical and irreconcilable with facts that cannot be disputed’ (Prichard 1973, p. ii). This change of mind owed much to 114 P. Turnbull his reading of Georges Cuvier, who, as previously discussed, believed that variations might initially be environmentally induced, but thereafter became fxed characteristics of populations through sexual selection. Prichard was similarly inclined to think that reproductive selectivity was principally responsible for human diversity, believing that this would be in ontological harmony with the essential truths of Revelation. It seemed to him that God could only have created an original human pair that were perfectly suited to the environmental conditions prevailing at the time and place of their creation. Moreover, possessing reason and free will, humans had been given the capacity to act and to vary their physical form and mental attributes—within divinely predetermined limits— in order to assume dominion over the earth. Thus, Prichard argued, the history of those races inhabiting northern Europe exemplifed how the emergence through sexual selection of aesthetically refned bodily characteristics and greater intellectual powers resulted in more sophisticated lifeways and social institutions. This he saw as encouraging greater, socially and morally benefcial, reproductive selectivity. Prichard believed that darkly pigmented peoples, whom he took to have suffered bodily and psychological degradation from humanity’s original ancestral form to the point of exhibiting animal-like physical and mental characteristics, nonetheless possessed ‘the same principles of action, and … same internal nature … as are recognised in other divi- sions of mankind’. Hence he believed that Christian humanitarian endeavour had the potential to enable even the ‘rudest savages’ gradually to experience material and mental improvement so as eventually enjoy ‘all the blessings of civilisation’ (Prichard 1836, p. 184). In the twenty years that followed the publication frst edition of History, Prichard devoted what time he had beside practising medicine to methodically collecting historical, comparative linguistic, and anatomical evidence to present an unassailable and avowedly Christian case for humankind’s monogenetic origin. However, by the early 1830s he had come to think that the case had to be made on scientifc grounds alone, and that it was not possible to ‘give precisely the same species of assent to those parts of the Sacred Writings which relate to subjects open to the ordinary methods of investigation; such as matters of fact and of historical testimony’. He now doubted whether ‘suffcient and conclusive evidence [could] be obtained … from researches merely historical’ (1836, pp. 6–9). Braving moral censure by his more conservative peers, he chose to address the question of human origins ‘as if the testimony 4 INDIGENOUS REMAINS IN BRITISH ANATOMICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC … 115 of the Sacred Scripture were altogether indifferent’ (1836, p. 8). In the frst and second editions of History, he had in part sought to convince his readers of our species’ unitary origin by drawing analogies between variations in animals and humankind. However, the frst volume of the third edition of History (1836) offered a more sustained and factually detailed ‘analogical’ argument. He again presented historical and comparative linguistic evidence pointing to humanity’s unitary origin, but his principal focus was now on presenting observations made on variation in plants, animals and men by naturalists and comparative anatomists since the mid-eighteenth century, which he saw as leading inescapably to the conclusion that the differences of form produced by human action in domestic animals, or by ‘external agencies’ in wild creatures, were ‘strictly analogous to the varieties which distinguish from each other the several races of men’ (Prichard 1836, pp. 6–9). Prichard’s analogical inquiry won him many new admirers. However, while it was hailed as proving scientifcally the unitary origins of humanity, it served—contrary to what Prichard intended—to give greater strength to the perception of non-European peoples’ as biologically unable to escape their state of savagery. Prichard, as much as Lawrence and Monro, believed that comparison of cranial morphology was the most reliable means of mapping the history and contemporary state of racial divergence within the human species. The importance he attached to documenting the main points of varietal difference and similarity in ‘national’ skulls is evident from the detailed descriptions of their morphological peculiarities provided in successive editions of his History, and also from his including in the work, at no small expense, specially commissioned engraved illustrations of skulls. Prichard also came to appreciate the importance of varietally characteristic skulls in proving the unitary origin of humankind. He encouraged collecting in distant parts of the world, and impressed on medical colleagues and members of the numerous British provincial scientifc societies established since the late eighteenth century the importance of excavating burial mounds and Anglo-Saxon churchyards to obtain crania illustrative of the varietal characteristics of Britain’s population prior to the Norman Conquest (Davis 1867, p. v). When he died, he had just completed a draft chapter on ethnology for the manual that, as mentioned in the previous chapter, John Herschel was commissioned to prepare to assist naval offcers in pursuing various branches of scientifc research. In his chapter, Prichard stressed the importance of naval 116 P. Turnbull personnel investigating the ‘shape and relative size of the head, since this forms one of the principal characters distinguishing the several tribes of the human family from each other’; and that the ‘most authentic testimony in regard to this particular, and one which will be very acceptable to scientifc men in this country, will be … bringing home a collection of skulls if they can be procured’ (Herschel 1851, p. 441). Prichard’s descriptions of Australian and other skulls in the 1836– 1847 edition of his History were based on his examination of specimens at Guy’s Hospital and London’s College of Surgeons It appears that he may also have studied Australian skulls sent by colonial contacts. For instance, George Windsor Earl, draughtsman and linguist to the expedition founding Port Essington on the coast of Northern Arnhem Land, was one of several expedition members who sought to collect skulls and skeletons of the local Iwaidja people: an Iwaidja man had been found who was willing to trade such remains for steel axes and knives. In June 1840 Earl wrote to John Washington (1800–1863), the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society saying he was then bargaining for a skull, having secured two which he was sending him to give to Prichard (Flower 1907; Reece 1992, p. 51). In examining crania, Prichard initially employed Blumenbach’s mode of determining their racial ancestry. This entailed placing the specimen to be examined with a number of racially different skulls in a row with the cheekbones in the same horizontal line, resting on the lower jaw, to enable an ‘ample and accurate view of the diversities of the cranium’ (Prichard 1973, 55). After this he took side-to-side and longitudinal measurements of the cranium as Blumenbach had done, and followed Cuvier in measuring the height and internal volume of the cranium. It seemed to Prichard, as to Cuvier, that racially specifc differences could be discerned on comparing ‘the area of the head as occupied by the brain with that of the face which is the seat of the organs of sense’ (Prichard 1973, p. 52). However, by the mid-1830s Prichard was supplement- ing Blumenbach’s and Cuvier’s procedures with a technique devised by Richard Owen in the course of his research on the osteology of higher apes. This entailed comparatively examining the base of skulls. Employing all three anatomists’ craniometric procedures convinced Prichard that varietal differences in the human skull exhibited three forms. One was a symmetrical or oval form characteristic of Europeans and the peoples of Western Asia; the second was a narrow and elongated form that he took to be typical of African and other dark-skinned races; 4 INDIGENOUS REMAINS IN BRITISH ANATOMICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC … 117 the third was a broad, square face which appeared to be typical in East Asian and American peoples. By time he adopted this tripartite cranial classifcation, Prichard was convinced, as Cuvier had been, that the relative sizes of the cranium and facial bones not only differed between human varieties but were also refective of differences in the organisation of the brain and sensory organs. At the time of writing the frst edition of History in 1812–13, Prichard appears to have been persuaded by Cuvier that the organic basis of intellectual and sensory functioning was subject to variations resulting in racially characteristic differences in intellectual powers. Now, examining sub-Saharan African skulls confrmed to his mind that Cuvier correctly assumed that they exhibited ‘a greater provision … in the confrmation of the head for the perfection of the senses, and less propor- tionally for the evolution of the intellectual organ, than in Europeans’ (Prichard 1973, p. 55). As a medical practitioner specialising in the treatment of psychological disorders, Prichard took a keen interest in contemporary theorising and debates on the nature of the brain and nervous system, and this very likely helped persuade him that there should be varietal differences in human powers of cognition emotion and intellect. Hence, on comparing the differences in form between the three basic human cranial types he saw within the human species, it seemed to him, as to Cuvier, that there was

nothing more probable than the supposition, that the average parts of perfection in the development of the brain as of other parts of the system, dif- fers in different nations with the diversities of climate and other elements of the external condition, and with the degrees of social culture. (Prichard 1836, p. 216)

Prichard disagreed with Blumenbach’s explanation of the cause of variation but lauded his humanitarianism and conviction that every race was naturally endowed with the same powers of reasoning and moral judgement. He did not accept, as Cuvier maintained, that European tutelage would affect little or no improvement in the intelligence of Africans, Australians or other so-called savage races. His faith in Providence disposed him to believe that missionary and humanitarian endeavours in the African and Australian contexts would produce ‘some modifcation’ in the intellectual powers of races ‘living by the chase’ to embrace a more civilised existence. 118 P. Turnbull

Yet despite believing so, Prichard’s defence of human unity solely on scientifc grounds obliged him to concede that Australian and other indigenous peoples living by foraging and hunting had suffered such severe degradation that, as he wrote in his History, when comparing ‘human races with respect to mental endowments, anyone unaware of the diversities in ‘complexion, form and habits, which distinguish … the several races of men’ could be forgiven ‘if he were carried into the midst of an Australian forest, where the squalid companions of kanguroos [sic] [crawl] in procession’ for refusing to believe the races of man were one species (Prichard 1843, p. 488). Prichard’s aim was to adduce such a wealth of indisputable, scientifcally derived evidence that any impartial reader would have to conclude that humankind was one singly originating human species. However, his rhetorical accentuation of the animality of races ‘living by the chase’, combined with his maintaining that varietal differences in the shape and size of the human skull rendered ‘nothing more probable’ than that there were differences in human powers of cognition, affect, emotion and intellect, left it open to readers to draw the opposite conclusion. This was not lost on critics of Prichard. Joseph Barnard Davis, whose collection and polygenetic interpretation of Australian skulls will be examined in the next chapter, praised Prichard’s third edition of his History, on its reprinting in 1851, as ‘an admirable work, a complete Encyclopaedia on the subject on which it treats—it displays vast learning and research and surprising candour’; but he was also to observe that

Notwithstanding it does not appear to me to support the author’s hypothesis, in favour of which he takes pains to appropriate every scrap of evidence. I think the book tends to weaken the hypothesis. At all events it contains abundant materials to refute it. (Davis 1851)

In this chapter we have seen what the three most infuential British fgures in the mainstream of medico-scientifc discourse on human variation made of Indigenous Australian bodily remains. Intellectually, Alexander Monro, William Lawrence and James Cowles Prichard worked within a tradition of monogenetic environmentalism established by Buffon and refned by Hunter and Blumenbach—although it has been claimed that Lawrence in his last years may have become ‘quite decided’ in favour of polygenism (Davis 1857). Monro and Lawrence doubted whether the ‘degeneration’ they (mistakenly) believed affected the Indigenous 4 INDIGENOUS REMAINS IN BRITISH ANATOMICAL AND ETHNOGRAPHIC … 119 peoples of Australia as a result of successive generations of indigenous Australians living by foraging and hunting was reversible. Prichard believed it was, but his believing that cranial shape was refective of racially characteristic qualities and attributes of mind invited the conclusion reached by Monro and Lawrence. And in seeking to understand the persuasiveness of racialised perceptions of Indigenous Australians in the course of the nineteenth century, we would do well to take into account of the shift towards biological determinism evident in the writings of these infuential fgures in British medico-scientifc discourse on human variation. CHAPTER 5

British Polygenists and the Indigenous Body, 1820–1880

So far this book has focused on the collection and scientifc interpretation of the bodily remains of Indigenous Australians during the half century or so after European colonisation began in 1788. We have seen that leading British anatomists and ethnographers saw the shape and texture of their bones as confrming the susceptibility of the human species to bodily and psychological diversifcation. Whatever the respective weight they attributed to natural phenomena or human agency in producing racial diversity, the general consensus in British scientifc and intellectual circles was that humankind was one singly originating species. The notion that all peoples were variants of a single ancestral form continued to command majority assent beyond the 1860s. So much so that it was a signifcant factor in Darwinian scientists’, intellectuals’ and even numerous churchmen’s believing that they could reconcile evolution with the biblical account of creation (Desmond 1982). A minority view still held, however: there were some in British medico-scientifc circles who held that the degree and seeming historical stability of varietal differences in physical appearance, cognition and intellectual powers between peoples long inhabiting different parts of the world rather suggested that humankind was actually a genus of separate, regionally

© The Author(s) 2017 121 P. Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia, Palgrave Studies in Pacifc History, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51874-9_5 122 P. Turnbull originating species. Two of the most signifcant critics of monogenetic environmentalism are the subject of this chapter: the Scottish anatomist and champion of racial determinism, Robert Knox and Joseph Barnard Davis, a physician and anthropologist who, over thirty years, assembled the largest private collection of ethnically diverse skulls in nineteenth- century Europe. Before tracing the development of Knox’s racial anthropology it seems best to point out that polygenetic explanations of human diversity were nothing new. They had origins in antiquity. Catholic and in time Protestant churchmen and intellectuals sought to refute and condemn the idea that bodily and behavioural diversity pointed to humans being made up of separately created populations; but polygenism continued to attract a minority of philosophers, naturalists and even some theologians. By the late eighteenth century, those who were inclined to think that multiple, separate creations of different races had occurred did not see this as incompatible with Scripture, if the Mosaic account of creation was interpreted as the story of the creation and fortunes only of the tribes of Israel. Hence it was not uncommon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for slavery in the Americas to be justifed on the grounds that Africans had been singularly created with bodily and mental qualities and attributes ftting them to be ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ in the service of European colonial ambitions. Among the most infuential British polygenists of the second half of the eighteenth century, for example, was, as previously mentioned, Edward Long, the Jamaican planter, magistrate and apologist for the enslavement of African peoples. Probably the most infuential eighteenth-century British polygenist, however, detested slavery. This was the Scottish jurist and man of letters, Henry Home, Lord Kames. Kames troubled mainstream intelligentsia because of his intellectual subtlety and literary artistry. He gently introduced readers to inconsistencies in received religious and scientifc arguments for human unity, in much the same manner as his contemporary the historian and philosopher, David Hume, whose sceptical treatment of religious subjects was said by his critics to prove true the Shakespearian conceit that the fairest fower can conceal the deadliest of poisons. It was felt that eighteenth-century polygenist apologists for slavery, like Edward Long, who did little more than disparagingly represent Africans as an innately inferior species of being, could safely be ignored. So too could a number of contemporary British and French savants who went so far as to suggest that different species of men might have come 5 BRITISH POLYGENISTS AND THE INDIGENOUS BODY, 1820–1880 123 into being through transmutation from different regionally located primates (Blancke 2014; Wokler 2012). In the decades on each side of the nineteenth century, Kames was the stimulus for race becoming ‘a common topic of discussion in a number of felds’, notably within the Scottish ‘medical profession [which] became obsessed with the physiology of colour and the mechanics underlying manifestations of racial distinctiveness’ (Kidd 2003, p. 879). Indeed, as shown in the previous chapter, it was the persuasiveness of Kames that provoked James Cowles Prichard to marshal anatomical evidence and ethnographic reportage in defence of the unitary origins of humankind. Some of Prichard’s contemporaries were inclined to think that Kames was right in questioning whether the variations to be seen between Europeans and darkly pigmented peoples such as sub-Saharan- sub-Saharan Africans and Indigenous Australians were so biologically ingrained as to invite the conclusion that they had been separately created. One was Charles White (1728–1813), a Manchester-based surgeon and obstetrician. In 1799 he published a slim treatise, An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, in which he reported on his comparing frst-hand the bodily characteristics of his fellow Britons and men of sub- Saharan African origins whom he had encountered in his home town and the rapidly expanding port of Liverpool. White’s use of anthropometric evidence refected his subscription to the Aristotelian notion that animate nature was divinely organised so that plant and animal species occupied successive and eternally fxed niches. Within this ‘great chain of being’, as White saw it, Europeans, Africans, Asians and Native Americans were adjoining ‘species’, with Europeans displaying the highest degree of physical and mental perfection while Africans were closer in form to the great apes. It followed logically, White believed, that as this hierarchi- cal ordering of nature was unchanging, each ‘species’ of man must have been separately created. White was no supporter of slavery, and stressed that his account of gradation in humanity was in no way meant to be read as scientifcally justifying its continuation. He claimed to have sought ‘simply to investigate a proposition in natural history’, adding that he believed

the negroes are at least, equal to thousands of Europeans, in capacity and responsibility; and ought, therefore, to be equally entitled to freedom and protection. Laws ought not to allow greater freedom to a Shakespear 124 P. Turnbull

[sic] or a Milton, a Locke or a Newton, than to men of inferior capacities. (White 1799, 137–138)

Even so, White believed that Africans and other darkly pigmented people were in general intellectually inferior to Europeans. He and his son Thomas were prominent members of Manchester’s Tory elite who feared that industrialisation and imperial commerce had the potential to cause social instabilities threatening the established church and state (Pickstone and Butler 1984, p. 243). The elder White appears to have been particularly concerned that peoples of non-European ancestry would be drawn to Manchester and other towns which were attracting many new inhabitants seeking industrial work. In his Gradations of Man, he wrote of the threat to social order by ‘alien’ races, such as the Romany, whom he spoke of as a ‘numerous swarm of banditti spread over the face of the earth’ (White 1799, p. 105). It would seem that while he may have loathed slavery, he regarded its abolition as posing the risk of creating racially inferior underclasses in British towns and cities. Historians have regarded White’s Gradation as the frst scientifc work to attempt to prove African inferiority on the basis of ‘ostensibly irrefutable facts of comparative anatomy which became ‘a standard reference point for British racism’ that infuentially celebrated ‘European superiority, both intellectual and aesthetic’ (Jordan 1974, pp. 199– 200; Blackburn 1988, p. 156; Meyer 1996, p. 89). Henry Reynolds, Australia’s leading historian of frontier confict, has additionally argued that White’s treatise was infuential in strengthening colonial perceptions of Indigenous Australian inferiority during the frst half of the nineteenth century (1974, pp. 48–49). All of these commentators overestimate White’s infuence. He certainly took advantage of the opportunities that Britain’s industrialising imperial economy provided to physically examine men and women of Afro-Caribbean ancestry. As his friend the writer Thomas De Quincey (1774–1843) recalled, he ‘had by one whole generation run before the phrenologists and craniologists—having already measured innumerable skulls among the omnigenous [sic] seafaring population of Liverpool illustrating all the races of men’ (De Quincey 1889, pp. 33; 383). Yet his pioneering anthropometry and polygenist conclusions appear to have had no discernible infuence on British scientifc or intellectual circles. Curiously, apart from incurring criticism by several American admirers of Blumenbach in the early years of the nineteenth century (Jordan 5 BRITISH POLYGENISTS AND THE INDIGENOUS BODY, 1820–1880 125

1974, pp. 199–200), White’s Gradations was overlooked by pro-slavery racial theorists in the southern United States; and there is no evidence of anyone having read White in the Australian colonies. Indeed, his work appears to have been forgotten until anthropology’s coalescence as a discipline within British universities during the last third of the nineteenth century saw its leading practitioners accord White a place in its intellectual genealogy as a pioneer of anthropometry (see Cunningham 1908, pp. 20–21).

The Racial Science of Robert Knox It was not until the 1840s that polygenetic theorising began gaining attention and converts in British scientifc and intellectual circles. This was due largely to the Scottish anatomist Robert Knox. In the British context, polygenetic explanations of human origins were rehearsals and, in some cases, crude simplifcations of Knox’s ideas and arguments about the nature and origins of racial variation, which lost much of what credence they had by his followers’ failure to refute Darwinian evolutionary interpretations of human natural history during the 1860s. This said, it is not entirely accurate nor helpful to describe Knox, and those who subscribed to his biologically innatist explanation of varietal differences between human populations, as polygenist. Bronwen Douglas has argued that Charles White was the ‘last British savant for nearly half a century to profess openly a belief in plural human species’ (Douglas 2008, p. 49). However, those who by the 1860s, thought the degree of racial variation pointed to humans being a genus comprising several species generally regarded the question of how each species had originated as incapable of being answered. As Charles Carter Blake (1840–1887), one of Knox’s admirers prominent in mid-century London anthropological circles, observed of the anatomist, he

never pledged himself to either monogeny or polygeny. Hints he dropped in some of his later writings rather seemed to indicate that his creed might be formulated as digenism, the light and dark races of man being con- trasted. (Blake 1868, p. 389)

It is not easy to trace the development and infuence of Knox’s racial thought from its foundation in 1863. The main sources we possess that bear on the development of his interest in human variation are several 126 P. Turnbull articles he wrote for scientifc journals during the 1820s: one on racial differences between the peoples of southern Africa; the others discussing specifc variations in a number of animal species. Beyond this, all we have are published versions of popular lectures on the nature and implications of racial variation in humankind that he delivered in London and British provincial cities during the late 1840s, and brief observations in a biography written by his admiring pupil and colleague, the surgeon Henry Lonsdale (1816–1876). The sum of this evidence tends to confrm, however, that Knox became interested in human variation while serving in his mid-twen- ties as an assistant surgeon with the 72nd Highland Regiment in South Africa’s Cape Province between 1817 and 1820. His biographer Lonsdale tells us that during these years

Natural history pursuits engaged his spare time [with] man his chief study, and as war brought its usual contingencies, he took every opportunity thus afforded of dissecting the Caffre and Bosjeman, not without regard to those differences of organisation supposed to exist between these savage tribes and the European settler. (1870, p. 12)

Returning to Scotland on half pay, Knox wrote a number of articles drawing on his experiences in the Cape that he read before Edinburgh scientifc societies. He then studied in Paris during 1821–1822 under several leading French anatomists. Soon after his return, a paper he had written on the origins and varietal differences of the peoples he had encountered in the Cape was published by Edinburgh’s Wernerian Society for natural history (Knox 1823). Therein Knox endorsed Blumenbach’s environmentally grounded explanation of humanity’s branching into fve distinctive varietal types. He did so depicting the Cape as the scene of tense relations and frequent violence between ‘Caucasian’ Anglo-Dutch colonists, the region’s indigenous Khoi and San peoples, whom he speculated might be the descendants of an Asian (Mongol) type, and those peoples living by herding cattle whom Knox believed were ‘Negroes changed by inhabiting an extra-tropical climate’ (Knox 1823, p. 212). The only point on which he differed from Blumenbach was in doubting that there was a distinctive ‘Malay’ type (within which the German anatomist had grouped Indigenous 5 BRITISH POLYGENISTS AND THE INDIGENOUS BODY, 1820–1880 127

Australians and most other Southeast Asian and Oceanic peoples). Knox was inclined to think that on the basis of his own observations and colonial reportage of the physical appearance and behaviour of these peoples, they were all modifed forms of Blumenbach’s American type. This paper may have been written before Knox left for Paris, for in the published text of the popular lectures on race that he toured England giving in the late 1840s he was to claim that about the time he was studying in Paris he had come to think that ‘[neither] time nor climate seem to have any effect on a race’ (Knox 1850, p. 123). Whatever the case, by the early 1830s, Knox’s thinking about the form of living organisms and their structural relations refected the infuence of Étienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire, whose controversial materialist evolutionary biology he may have frst encountered while in Paris in 1822. We also fnd that after partnering John Barclay in his successful Edinburgh extramural Anatomy School in 1826, Knox lectured on racial variation in humankind in his courses on general anatomy. His biographer Henry Lonsdale tells us that previously

little or nothing was heard about Race in the medical schools; he changed all this … Race became as familiar as household words to his students, through whom some of his novel ideas became disseminated far and wide, both at home and abroad. (Lonsdale 1870, pp. 292–293)

Knox embraced not only Geoffroy’s biology but also the radical religious and political implications of the French anatomist’s argument that new and increasingly more complex forms of life arose through trans- mutational processes; and Knox’s readiness to voice his conviction that Britain’s established churches and parliamentary system were stifing the natural emergence of more sophisticated and morally benefcial forms of social organisation did much to ruin his career as an anatomy teacher by the mid-1830s. But Knox differed from Geoffroy in one signifcant respect: the French anatomist believed that each species of living organism had its own unique developmental trajectory of progressive transmutation into new species (Richards 1989, p. 396), whereas Knox reasoned that organisms belonged to genii or ‘natural families’, each of which had a fxed generic form from which morphologically similar species pre-existing in an embryonic state might develop in favourable material conditions. 128 P. Turnbull

In this sense there was ‘no new creation, but merely the development of forms already existing in every natural family’ (Knox 1855, p. 627). Knox thought it impossible that heritable adaptive changes could occur in any species, let alone result in its transmutation into a new species. After a species emerged from its corresponding generic form, he believed that it was biologically incapable of further change. Knox thus saw humanity as a genus of essentially unchanging racial types, or more accurately species, each with its peculiar anatomical, physiological and cognitive differences. In respect of Khoisan and Indigenous Australians he was convinced that

it is not [just] in comparative length of the nasal or maxillary bones that the cranium of the Bosjieman and the Australian differ from the other races of men, although these differences are no doubt as constant and as real as the differences between any two species; they differ in every respect, and especially do they display a physiognomical distinction, which the experienced eye detects at once. (1855, p. 626)

To Knox, racial differences in mental powers were equally ‘fxed, permanent and unalterable’. And he regarded Australians and other hunter- gather peoples as exemplifying that when it came to anthropologically investigating racial types, peculiarities in respect of intellect were ‘much more important than the physical characters of the race’ (1862, p. 588). Knox presented an unremittingly pessimistic vision of the human condition in which race, he declared, was ‘everything: literature, science, art—in a word, civilisation depends on it’ (1850, p. 7). He held that no race was capable of improving on its innately determined powers of intelligence to the extent of achieving any lasting great advance in material or moral progress. Knox publicly condemned the killing of indigenous peoples in South Africa, mainland Australia and Tasmania by colonial military forces and armed settlers, but he did so believing that settler colonialism was doomed to failure. In his view, no white race was physiologically capable of successfully living for more than a generation or two in parts of the world where climatic and environmental conditions differed markedly from those in Europe. ‘Under the infuence of climate’, he maintained, ‘the Saxon decays in northern America and in Australia, and he rears 5 BRITISH POLYGENISTS AND THE INDIGENOUS BODY, 1820–1880 129 his offspring with diffculty’ (1850, p. 44). He believed that Europeans could not escape this fate by selective cross-racial breeding: this would only produce infertile hybrids. What is more, efforts to transplant European societies to lands populated by other races would inevitably cause violent, futile conficts. Knox ridiculed Christian humanitarians for believing that violence could be prevented, and that the Indigenous peoples of the Cape Colony and Australia possessed the same natural powers of intellect as Europeans and were thus capable of gradual improvement and integration into colonial society. Of Australian colonialism, Knox observed

the Anglo-Saxon has already cleared out Tasmania. It was a cruel, cold blooded, heartless deed. Australia is too large to attempt the same plan there; but by shooting the natives as freely as we do crows in other countries, the population must become thin and scarce in time. (1850, p. 99)

As to the Australian reception of Knox’s lectures, next to nothing is known. He was read in the early 1870s by R.E. Johns (1834–1910), a Victorian public servant, amateur anthropologist and skeletal collector (Griffths 1996, p. 45). Otherwise the lectures appear to have met with little interest and provoked no comment. However, Knox’s racialism was infuential in one respect. This was its contributing to the marked increase in scientifc collecting of Indigenous Australian remains that began in the 1860s onwards. Knox’s prime contribution to the conceptual evolution of British racial science actually occurred after his death in late 1862. His racialist vision inspired a number of men active in scientifc and intellectual circles of the 1860s, who sought to develop a more scientifcally credible account of human variation than those of their peers who were convinced by Darwin that racially specifc attributes of body and mind were dominant traits that had come to characterise largely endogamous populations descended from the same ancestral form. In their challenge to early Darwinians, Knox’s admirers saw the Indigenous Australian body as providing substantial evidence refuting the idea that new species arose through evolutionary speciation; while at the same time, Darwinians sought to acquire Australian remains believing, as we will shortly see, that they confrmed the evolutionary descent of humanity. 130 P. Turnbull

The Cabinets of Dr. Barnard Davis Among those who subscribed to Knox’s racialist visions of human natural history in mid-century British anthropological circles was Joseph Barnard Davis. Davis was a surgeon who in the late 1820s established a practice at Shelton in Staffordshire, where he also worked as a medical offcer for the region’s numerous potteries. From the early 1850s he devoted much of his leisure time to the comparative examination of skulls and skeletons of peoples from many parts of the world that he acquired through a network of local and overseas contacts. By the mid- 1860s he had a collection of around 1500 skulls and eight complete skeletons, including a series of Tasmanian and mainland Aboriginal remains with only slightly fewer items than London’s College of Surgeons. Davis, as mentioned in Chapter 3, took lessons in the 1820s with London extra-mural anatomy teacher Joshua Brookes, who entertained students with ‘little histories’ of the individuals to whom skulls in his collection belonged, and who possibly sparked Davis’s life-long interest in racial craniometry (Davis 1867b, p. v). But it was not until the late 1840s that Davis began seriously collecting and mapping racial peculiarities in the shape of the human skull. Davis was inspired to begin systematically collecting racial crania by the investigations of racial peculiarities in human crania by Samuel Morton, an American physician and prominent fgure in Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences. By the late 1840s Morton had achieved an international reputation among scientists and intellectuals interested in human variation for his craniometric-based reconstructions of Native American and ancient Egyptian racial genealogies. Like Davis, he had been exposed to phrenology in the early 1820s; in his case it was while studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh where the unorthodox science was then the subject of lively debate (Smithers 2009, pp. 54–56). Like Knox, Morton had become dissatisfed with the dominant view in medico-scientifc circles that environmental factors caused human varietal diversity. Unlike Knox, however, Morton was uninfuenced by Geoffroy’s evolutionary vision of nature. He was inclined to think that environmental factors such as climate and diet, and cultural preferences in sexual selection, might all play some part in causing intergenerational change in human morphology; but he believed that Blumenbach had failed to appreciate the degree to which skeletal material and 5 BRITISH POLYGENISTS AND THE INDIGENOUS BODY, 1820–1880 131 representations of the human form in ancient Egypt showed that the human bodily economy was susceptible to only trivial modifcation by external forces. The defning characters of different races seemed to him so morphologically stable as to strongly suggest that humanity was a genus of biologically distinctive species with polygenetic origins. Morton was for many years cautious in openly pressing this conclusion. In 1839 he published what, at that time, was the most detailed comparative study of human crania: Crania Americana, in which he reported comparative measurements of the shape and internal capacity of some eighty skulls ‘of more than forty Indian nations’. He believed his fndings confrmed Blumenbach’s reasoning that the forms of Native American skulls pointed to the frst peoples of the Americas being descendants of one race. It seemed to Morton that this ancestral race had diversifed over time into at least twenty-two morphologically distinctive ‘families’. Moreover he believed that this history of diversifcation was not incompatible with this ancestral race having been singularly created in a form ‘adapted from the beginning to its peculiar destination’ (Morton and Combe 1839, p. 6). He could see no morphological basis for thinking that the American race might have originated in Asia (Morton and Combe 1839, p. 1). By 1844 Morton had completed a second large-scale project. This was a comparative examination of sub-Saharan African skulls and around 137 crania taken from ancient Egyptian burial sites. His readers were presented with a wealth of craniometric evidence that seemed to confrm the primordial nature of African racial characteristics. Correlating the results of his cranial analyses with Egyptian wall paintings, Morton held that they proved that the ‘physical or organic characters which distinguish the several races of men [were] as old as the oldest records of our species’ (1844, p. 66). However, it was not until four years before he died unexpectedly, in 1851, that Morton directly addressed the question of whether humanity was one or several species, tentatively suggesting that Blumenbach’s fve varietal types of man could well be separately originating species (Morton 1847). Phrenology infuenced both Morton’s and Davis’s intellectual development. Both were convinced that racially typical attributes and qualities of cognition, will and intellect could be inferred from measuring what they took to be racially typical skulls. They believed the volume and geometry of the cranial cavity to be reliable proxies for the relative size and infuence of particular regions of the brain and thus of racially typical attributes and 132 P. Turnbull qualities of mind. Morton saw his craniometric investigation of American skulls as confrming that there was ‘a singular harmony between the mental character of the Indian, and his cranial developments as explained by Phrenology’ (Morton and Combe 1839, pp. 31–32). However, it was the opportunity to examine male and female Indigenous Australian skull crania in the mid-1840s that led him to make one of his most forthright judgements on the relation between skull shape and intellectual capacity. The skulls in question were received from Australian Museum trustee, Charles Nicholson (1808–1903), in exchange for North American natural history specimens (Meigs and Morton 1857, pp. 96–97). Morton spoke about these two skulls before Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, explaining that he had found them ‘in general analogous’ to the many African specimens he had examined over the years, in all but the facial bones. Not only this, he told members of the Society that on examining their shape, they should be little surprised to fnd that the male skull had wounds which could ‘readily [be] accounted for in the pugnacious and irascible character of the Australian savages’ (Morton 1845, p. 292). Davis was more tentative in the conclusions that he drew from his examinations of racial skulls. He regarded the science of racial craniometry as nowhere near the point where anything could be said with certainty about what the psychological or wider social implications of racially typical features of cranial morphology might be. At the time of Morton’s early death in 1851, it was well known in Anglo-American scientifc circles that he envisaged his studies of American and ancient Egyptian skulls as preliminary instalments of a comprehensive craniometric mapping of human racial diversity. Davis had by this time been collecting ethnological items and skeletal material for several years. Among his frst purchases, incidentally, were two skullcaps of Kaurna people, the traditional owners of present-day Adelaide, which had been fashioned into water-vessels after the completion of funerary ceremonies. He had obtained these relics from Matthew Moorhouse (1813–1876), who had served as the frst permanent protector of Aborigines in South Australia from 1839 to 1857 (Davis 1867b, p. vi). While Davis never explicitly said so, he was clearly inspired to take up Morton’s ambitious project of globally mapping human cranial variation. He embarked on an ambitious craniometric survey of ancient British remains, which he undertook in collaboration with fellow medical practitioner and pioneer archaeologist, John Thurnam (1810–1873). By the mid-1860s Davis had also begun preparing a catalogue of his racial 5 BRITISH POLYGENISTS AND THE INDIGENOUS BODY, 1820–1880 133 skulls. He was to publish his survey of British crania, co-authored with Thurnham, in 1856; but lacking suffcient leisure time, institutional connections, or the fnancial backing enjoyed by Morton, a further eleven years passed before he could publish the catalogue of his global collection, which he grandly entitled Thesaurus Craniorum. What is remarkable is that Davis could collect so many skulls, given the demands of his medical employment and lack of institutional support. But as his friend John Beddoe (1826–1911), a fellow medical practitioner and founding member of the Ethnological Society, observed of Davis, his ‘enthusiasm for his subject was wonderful, but sometimes it verged on the ghoulish. [He] looked on heads simply as potential skulls’ (Beddoe 1910, p. 205). Beddoe recalled in particular Davis visiting him when he was working at the British military hospital at Renkioi during the Crimean War of 1853–1856:

I took [Davis] to the infrmary, and showed him a Morlachian sailor from near Ragusa, whom I was trying to cure of gangrene of the lung, resulting from having been half-drowned—a fne, handsome fellow, but desperately ill. ‘Now, said my friend, ‘you know that man can’t recover; do take care to secure his head for me when he dies, for I have no cranium from that neighbourhood’. After all, the poor Morlach made a wonderful recovery, and carried his head on his own shoulders back to Herzegovina. (Beddoe 1910, p. 205)

The scale of Davis’s success in collecting racial crania becomes apparent on comparing the catalogue of his skulls with those of contemporary institutional collections. Thesaurus Craniorum contains details of 1540 skulls while the posthumously prepared catalogue of Morton’s collection in Philadelphia, published in 1857, described just over a thousand. Richard Owen’s 1853 catalogue of the holdings of the Royal College of Surgeons described only 266 specimens, while the catalogue of the Army Medical Department, also published in 1857, listed measurements of 601 skulls (Blake 1868, p. 388).

Davis and Tasmania’s ‘Black War’ From the outset of his cranial research, Davis was particularly keen to acquire Indigenous Tasmanian skulls. Like many mid-century Britons he was convinced that the island’s tribes were on the verge of extinction. 134 P. Turnbull

Davis appears to have had a remarkable ability to make the acquaintance of men in various offces and occupations throughout the world, and to persuade them to secure him racially interesting skulls. Among those whom he came to know was Alfred Bock (1835–1920), a Hobart- based photographer and stepson of Thomas Bock (1795–1855), whose paintings of Tasmanian Aborigines were much admired, and which Davis knew from copies possessed by London’s Ethnological Society. In 1856, Davis asked the younger Bock whether he could get him copies of his father’s works and also put him in contact with a doctor in Tasmania who might be able to get him skulls from Indigenous bodies subjected to postmortem examination. Possibly anticipating that Bock might have qualms about doing so, he assured him that ‘Were I myself in the colony, I could with very little trouble abstract skulls from dead bodies without defacing them at all, and could instruct any medical gentleman to do this’ (Ellis 1981, p. 133). The younger Bock appears to have been unable or unwilling to help. But by the late 1860s Davis had acquired no fewer than twelve Tasmanian crania and the complete skeleton of a man estimated to be around thirty-years old at the time of his death (Davis 1875, pp. 63–65). Several he obtained on the break-up and sale of older British anatomy collections including that of his old teacher, Joshua Brookes (Davis 1867b, p. v). One skull he bought from the artist John Skinner Prout (1805–1876), who had spent several years in Tasmania during the mid- 1840s (Davis 1867a, v. 1, item 1048). Three he purchased from Joseph Milligan, who had been the superintendent and medical offcer of both the Flinders Island and Oyster Cove Aboriginal settlements between 1843 and 1855 (Hoddinott 1967). Having retired to England by the early 1860s on a modest pension, Milligan was well aware of the value Tasmanian remains had in metropolitan anatomical and anthropological circles, but did want it known that he had acquired and sold them (Davis 1867a, v. 1, p. 1). Davis regarded one of the skulls he bought from Milligan as ‘perhaps the fnest and most perfect specimen in any Museum. Of great rarity and value’ (Davis 1867a, v. 1, p. 1129). It had belonged to a man aged about twenty-four who had been killed in 1831 when attacking a shepherd’s hut in the Surrey Hills. Milligan provided Davis with the following account of how the man died: 5 BRITISH POLYGENISTS AND THE INDIGENOUS BODY, 1820–1880 135

depredations having been committed … by the aborigines considerable alarm was felt. The Shepherd in his log hut one day observed this Native approach stealthily. He immediately seized his gun and pointed it out of a small loophole. The native dodged behind an outbuilding turning his head round the corner to look towards the hut. He then exposed his chest round the corner as he himself turned round to wave his arm as a signal to the natives behind him to come on. At this moment the shepherd fred and shot him through the thorax. He sprang up, made a loud yell and fell down dead. The tribe was few in number, and they ran away alarmed without looking after their wounded comrade. (Davis 1867a)

Another of Davis’s acquisitions via Milligan was the skull of a woman, which the surgeon had obtained on the east coast of Tasmania. Davis wrote when describing the skull for his catalogue that

An Aboriginal lad told Dr. MILLIGAN that his party, some years before, had been fred into by a white man, when a woman was injured, had her head chopped off, and was buried. Years afterwards Dr. M took the boy to the spot and found the body in the bush. There are marks of the cutting off of the head. (Davis 1867b, p. 269)

The third specimen-comprised frontal and parietal bones thought to be those of a woman who had been found ‘on the north coast of the island, at a spot at which, long before, [again] a white man had fred into an encampment and wounded a woman’, after which ‘her head had been chopped off and she was buried in sand’ (Davis 1867b, p. 269).

Davis, the Darwinians and the Neanderthal Skull Davis’s prime objective was, as Samuel Morton’s had been, to create the means of enabling the precise delineation of ‘race characters’ in humankind. Like Morton and Knox, he believed that while there was likely to be a ‘play of diversities round these race characters’ they were essentially immutable (Davis 1867b, p. xiii). He praised, as both Morton had Knox had done, Blumenbach’s pioneering efforts to document human cranial variation, but rejected the idea that environmental conditions or human agency was responsible for the diversity to be found on comparing skulls from different parts of the world. Moreover, although, as noted in the previous chapter, Davis paid tribute to James Cowles Prichard’s ‘vast learning and research’, he did so convinced that comparative 136 P. Turnbull craniometry, while still conceptually and technically underdeveloped, had generated suffcient evidence to confrm the immutability of racial distinctions in the shape of the human skull, thereby fatally weakening Prichard’s project of scientifcally confrming that racial distinctions were trivial differences of bodily form, cognition and intellect in populations descended from one singly originating pair. By the early 1860s the focus of Davis’s critical attention was no longer Prichard’s theologically grounded ethnology but the anthropological implications of Darwin’s ‘long argument’ for evolutionary speciation. Davis was a founding member of the London Anthropological Society, formed in early 1863 by a dozen or so dissident members of the Ethnological Society. These men shared Robert Knox’s belief that race was the only true foundational principle of anthropological research, and like the anatomist they had grown increasingly frustrated by leading members of the Ethnological Society’s Christian humanitarianism and intellectual investment in Blumenbach and Prichard’s monogenetic environmentalism; although what triggered their departure appears to have been the credence that Darwinian interpretations of human natural history were gaining within the society (Ellingson 2001, pp. 263–289). On the basis of papers contrasting cranial morphology in light and darkly pigmented populations, Davis quickly gained a reputation with fellow ‘London Anthropologicals’ ‘as a strong collector of evidence in favour of the plurality of the human race, and in powerful antagonism to the Darwinian monogenists’ (Blake 1868, p. 389). Davis, incidentally, may be said to have anticipated biographers of Darwin in our own time by drawing attention to continuities between Prichard’s and Darwin’s monogenism, notably in observing that both men came to think that variation owed much to the sexual selection of favoured bodily and behavioural traits— although Davis drew attention to this believing that Prichard and Darwin were mistaken (Desmond and Moore 2009, pp. 282–284). Davis’s Tasmanian and other Australian skulls played an infuential part in the contest between leading fgures of the London Anthropological Society and their Darwinian opponents centered on Thomas Henry Huxley’s use of Neanderthal and Australian skulls in hypothetically reconstructing humankind’s evolutionary genealogy. In 1856 workers discovered a human skull cap and a small number of related post-cranial bones while quarrying limestone in a small cave in the Neander Valley, near Düsseldorf, in Germany’s western Rhineland. The bones, placed in the care of Johann Fuhlrott (1803–1877), a local 5 BRITISH POLYGENISTS AND THE INDIGENOUS BODY, 1820–1880 137 school teacher and amateur naturalist, came to the attention of Hermann Schaaffhausen (1816–1893), professor of anatomy at Bonn University. On examining the remains and the site of their discovery, Schaaffhausen concluded that they had to be of the same age as extinct Pleistocene animals whose remains had been found in the same geological strata, and even though morphologically they exhibited some ape-like features, they must have possessed a large brain. The discovery came at a time when several leading Darwinians were hopeful that it might not be too long before the remains of a transitional primate species were discovered. The Neander Valley discovery thus sparked excited questioning: was this the skullcap of a species intermediate between the great apes and man? Schaaffhausen concluded that it was certainly evidence of a very primitive race that inhabited northern Western Europe before the settlement of Celtic and Germanic peoples. It seemed to him that this race, to whom he gave the name ‘Neanderthalers’, was quite possibly one of the so-called ‘wild races’ described by Graeco-Roman writers. In a paper he published a year or so after frst examining the remains, Schaaffhausen conceded that the antiquity of the Neanderthal bones would likely be questioned, for there were ‘living savages’ who were thought to possess crania exhibiting similar ape-like cranial attributes. He also acknowledged that there was no way of scientifcally determining if the skullcap was that of a person who had suffered from a disease or inherited abnormality causing osteological abnormalities (Schaaffhausen 1858), although he was convinced that it showed no signs of pathology. Rather, it seemed to him that ‘faint vestiges’ of the Neanderthal were discernible in not only in Indigenous Australian and American skulls but also those of northern European ‘aboriginal populations’ (Schaaffhausen 1858). Schaaffhausen’s assessment of the Neander discovery became known in British scientifc circles through the surgeon and Darwinist George Busk (1807–1886), who translated Schaaffhausen’s 1858 paper (Busk 1861). The geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875), who was then researching what became his infuential, cautiously pro-Darwinian book surveying the fossil evidence of humankind’s deep past, had read Schaaffhausen’s paper in German and obtained a plaster cast of the Neanderthal cranium, which he lent to Busk when he was working on its translation. On examining the cast, Busk was left in ‘no doubt’ of the ‘enormous antiquity’ of the bones. He was particularly struck by what 138 P. Turnbull appeared to be the enlarged superciliary region of the forehead, which seemed to him closely to approach the form typically found in the gorilla and chimpanzee. If the size and shape of this individual’s forehead was typical of this ancient race, Busk reasoned, then Schaaffhausen was right in concluding that this had to be a remarkably early form of man (Busk 1861, pp. 172–173). Thomas Huxley, Busk’s friend and colleague, had little doubt that this was the case. He too examined the cast obtained by Lyell, who had asked him to supply a diagram for his book illustrating the ‘special peculiarities’ of the Neanderthal skull in comparison with other human skulls. Lyell also contacted Fuhlrott, in whose keeping the Neanderthal bones were, asking if he could help Huxley answer several morphological questions. This Fuhlrott did, sending three ‘excellent photographs’ of the skullcap (Huxley 1863, pp. 140–141). The cast and photographs struck Huxley as confrming that there were remarkable similarities between the Neander discovery and Australian cranial remains from South Australia and Western Port in Victoria, then in the collection of the Royal College of Surgeons. The skull from Western Port had been donated to the college by Edmund Hobson, who, as noted in Chapter 3 of this study, sent British anatomists several skulls found in the vicinity of present-day Melbourne. The two from South Australia were skullcaps, probably of Kaurna people, which, as also previously noted, had come to the college via Governor George Grey (Owen 1853, p. 823). The Western Port skull, incidentally, had previously caught the eye of Richard Owen, who thought that morphologically it presented, ‘irrespective of any artifcial distortion, the lowest character of any Human skull’ in the Hunterian Museum but was nonetheless quite distinct in form from the skulls of gorillas and chimpanzees (Owen 1853, p. 828). By contrast, Huxley was convinced that the Neander fnd was the ‘extreme term of a series leading gradually from it to the highest and best developed of human crania’; likewise, the skullcap from South Australia had features that seemed to him very similar to this ‘most pithecoid [ape- like] of known human skulls’ (Huxley 1863, p. 157). In short, Huxley saw these modern Australian skulls as convincing proof of humanity’s evolution from an extinct primate species: here was a race, or possibly several closely related races, seemingly fated by long geographical isolation in harsh environmental conditions to have advanced little in evolutionary terms beyond the Neanderthal. 5 BRITISH POLYGENISTS AND THE INDIGENOUS BODY, 1820–1880 139

Huxley’s positive and widely publicised comparison of Neanderthal and Australian cranial morphology was to have profound consequences. By this time Indigenous Australians, apart from those whose ancestral country lay in remote central and northern regions of the continent, lived as best they could on mission stations or pastoral properties, or in squalid camps on the fringes of white settlement. As we have seen, their dead had been the subject of European scientifc curiosity about the nature and extent of human variation since the late eighteenth century. Now they were to be plundered for museums and anatomy schools as specimens of ‘living fossils’, supposedly confrming that, corporeally and psychologically, Australia’s frst inhabitants were trapped at ‘ground zero’ of evolutionary development (Bennett 2004, p. 6). By being so construed, the bones of the Indigenous dead became resources aiding the formation of civic identity in the settler society. As Tony Bennett has persuasively argued, they served discursively to heighten Europeans’ consciousness of possessing the capacity for self- refective action, and awareness of the self as archaeologically constituted. They did this in large part by appearing to affrm that the likely extinction of Australia’s original inhabitants was due to their consciousness of self being ‘fat, lacking in historical depth and complexity, and thereby, not affording the inner space in which a progressive dynamic might emerge from the work of the self on self’ (Bennett 2004, p. 96). With humanity imagined to comprise distinctive races, each with its own peculiar evolutionary biography and inheritance, the Indigenous dead were seen to exemplify that white Australia’s future hinged on its capacity for intergenerational cultivation and the transmission of its evolutionarily advanced capacity for self-enlightenment. By the same token, the construal by Darwinian scientists and museum personnel of Indigenous Australians as prehistoric beings bereft of the potential to cultivate the self gave cognitive strength to what Johannes Fabian has termed a ‘denial of coevalness’ (1983, pp. 31–35): imagined to be living Palaeolithic beings, Indigenous Australians were easily presumed to have not developed the psychological capacity to negotiate the social and political complexities of the modern world. This easy and perniciously fanciful presumption in turn served to legitimate their ‘protection’ from modernity through the creation and administration of apartheid-like regimes under which most Indigenous Australians were forced to live by the turn of the twentieth century (see Haebich 2000; Kidd 1997; Markus 1990). 140 P. Turnbull

This said, by no means all of Huxley’s readers accepted that Aboriginal Australians were ‘living fossils’. Christian humanitarians who rejected Darwin’s argument that humankind evolved through a mindless, mechanis- tic process naturally decried the idea. Darwin and his followers also had their secular-minded scientifc critics, notably prominent among whom was Joseph Barnard Davis, who believed that the Australian specimens in his skull collection provided evidence soundly refuting Huxley’s and his fellow Darwinians’ evolutionary interpretation of Neanderthal cranial morphology. Davis drew attention in a pamphlet and several related articles to his being in ‘possession a calvarium … having a great resemblance to this famous specimen’ (Davis 1864, p. 4): the skullcap in question was that of an Englishman who had died aged around seventy that displayed clear signs of cranial synostosis (abnormal, premature fusion of adjacent bones of the skull). Davis wrote that he had asked Huxley to let him see the photographs of the Neanderthal skullcap he had obtained from Fuhlrott (Davis 1864, 283), only to fnd no sign of sutures in the skull’s temporal region. This led him to ask Huxley to examine Lyell’s cast for signs of sutures, which Huxley had done, informing him that there were traces of the coronal suture, but so faint that they could not be discerned in Fuhlrott’s photographs. This prompted Davis to write to Fuhlrott, who confrmed no trace of sutures beyond ‘obscurely perceptible’ signs of the coronal suture (Davis 1864, p. 203). Davis pointed out that all the Australian skulls in his collection had well defned sutures as well as other clear structural differences from the Neanderthal cranium; consequently, he argued, the Neanderthal skull regardless of its age, was anatomically abnormal. It was not, as Huxley claimed, the ‘extreme term’ of an evolutionary series, but the skull of an ‘idiot’ whose pathological features were quite unlike those typically found in individuals belonging ‘to a very inferior race, such as the Australian’ (Davis 1864, p. 294). Davis’s critique of Huxley understandably found favour among those in mid-nineteenth century British scientifc and intellectual circles who opposed Darwin’s evolutionary arguments on purely empirical. His fellow ‘London Anthropological’, Charles Carter Blake, praised Davis for having shown conclusively that the Neanderthal skull was ‘an abnormal instance of an accidental conformation’, and pointedly observed that he ‘thought it very unfortunate that the transmutationists [i.e. Darwinists] should have taken up the case as an illustration of the theory of the genetic derivation of man from beast’ (Davis 1865b, p. xvii). Huxley was at frst inclined to ignore Davis’s interpretation of the Neanderthal skull but the credibility it gained among scientifc critics 5 BRITISH POLYGENISTS AND THE INDIGENOUS BODY, 1820–1880 141 of Darwinian evolution stirred him to publish a vigorous critique of Davis’s anatomical reasoning and investigatory competence, in which he pointed out the grounds for rejecting the existence of shared peculiarities between the Neanderthal cranium and Davis’s synostotic British skull. Huxley indeed left his readers in no doubt that he believed that Davis had wilfully misinterpreted what Fuhlrott had been able to tell him about the skull’s sutures (Laing and Huxley 1866). As Huxley saw it, Davis, for all his supposed craniological expertise, had refused to concede that what was ‘essential about the form of a skull [was] the form of its interior’. Casts of the inner surfaces of the Neanderthal and Australian crania would be found to ‘correspond so closely that their differences [were] insignifcant’ (Laing and Huxley 1866, p. 156). What is more, Huxley argued, if the peculiarities of the internal shape of the Neanderthal skull were attributable to synostosis, as Davis claimed, ‘there ought to be as much, or more, synostosis in the Australian’. Yet the facts, he maintained, were as follows:

In the Australian skull, every suture of the calvaria normally present in an adult skull, viz., the coronal, sagital, lambdoidal, occipito-mastoid squa- mosal, alisphenoidal, is open; not one showing the smallest sign of oblit- eration. (Laing and Huxley 1866, p. 157)

Huxley could not resist concluding his refutation of Davis by pointedly asking whether ‘before he undertook to explain the Neanderthal skull anatomically’, it would have been worth his taking the trouble to examine Australian and primate bones at the Royal College of Surgeons that Huxley had used, to assess the signifcance of the discovery. Davis was understandably angered by having his competence questioned. Privately he dismissed Huxley’s critique of his refutation of the evolutionary signifcance of the Neanderthal skull, telling fellow anthropologist John Beddoe that it was ‘a sour unhandsome attack, with nothing in it’. Huxley had been ‘maddened’, Davis told Beddoe, by his having ‘demolished the frst and only foundation stone of human Darwinianism’ (Davis 1866). But when it came to publicly defending himself against Huxley’s charges of misinterpreting key anatomical evidence—as Beddoe and other colleagues believed he should—Davis declined. ‘The case of the Neanderthal is utterly lost & hopeless’, he told Beddoe; ‘therefore it is needless to trouble myself with the spleen of those who feel they have lost the grand catch’ (Davis 1866). 142 P. Turnbull

Davis and George Augustus Robertson Davis instead focused on continuing to collect racially typical skulls, in the belief that they would ultimately expose the empirical poverty of Huxley and his fellow Darwinians’ case for humankind’s evolutionary origins. His desire to obtain more Australian specimens led him to ingra- tiate himself with the aged George Augustus Robinson, whose ‘friendly mission’ to the Tasmanian tribes between 1829 and 1934 ended with their removal to Flinders Island where most lived in despair and died from diseases to which they had meagre immunity. Robinson had returned to England in 1849, and by the early 1860s was in frail health (Ryan 2004). Davis had learnt that Robinson had brought with him a skeleton and at least six crania of Tasmanians. Some of these he may have acquired when postmortem examinations were conducted by James Allen (d. 1856), the frst medical offcer assigned to the Flinders Island settlement (Davis 1865c; Robinson 1987, p. 950), but it is more likely that they were the remains of relatives carried to Flinders Island by the Tasmanians whom Robinson persuaded to go there. James Bonwick (1817–1906), educator and historian of the fate of Tasmania’s native people, claimed:

So many skulls and limb-bones were taken by the poor natives when they were exiled to the Straits that Captain Bateman [master of the government brig transporting them] told me that, when he had forty with him in his vessel, they had quite a bushel of old bones among them. (Bonwick 1870, p. 10)

Regardless of how he acquired the bones, Robinson was unwilling to sell them. Davis tried to change his mind, praising him as the ‘Saviour of the Tasmanians’, who ‘knew more about the race than any living person’ (Davis 1862). This stratagem succeeded to the extent that Robinson invited Davis to come to Bath and examine the remains. Davis was to pay Robinson several more visits, and returned from Bath in April 1865 with the gift of a skull. Robinson also let Davis examine the detailed journals he had kept when journeying through Tasmania to persuade the island’s surviving tribal bands to put themselves under government protection, as well as his notebooks as Protector of Aborigines in the Port Phillip District during the 1840s. He also confded to Davis that he had planned to use the journals to write the defnitive account of a people 5 BRITISH POLYGENISTS AND THE INDIGENOUS BODY, 1820–1880 143 who by then were generally believed by Europeans to be all but extinct, but now found the task beyond him. On Robinson’s death in 1866, Davis persuaded his family to lend him the Tasmanian journals, to assess whether he could use them to write a book paying tribute to Robinson’s ‘ardent desire to accomplish his benevolent missions’, and from which his widow would receive a generous share of the royalties. Once in possession of the journals, Davis delayed returning them for as long as he could. He told the family that they were of little monetary value, but out of respect and friendship he would buy them for what he assured Robinson’s widow was a very generous price (Davis 1862). The family refused to sell the journals, but did offer him several infant bones and a burial bundle that Robinson had most likely acquired on Flinders Island, which Davis bought (Davis 1875, p. 65). A year or so before his death in 1881, Davis gave these relics, along with the rest of his collection, to London’s Royal College of Surgeons

‘Nothing More Loathsome’: The William Lanne Affair Davis’s efforts to secure more Tasmanian remains were severely hindered by the infamous postmortem mutilation of William Lanne (c.1835– 1869), or ‘King Billy’ as he was patronisingly called by Europeans. Essentially what happened was that Lanne, whom settlers regarded as the last ‘full blooded’ man of the Tasmanian race, died in early March 1869 of a severe gastro-intestinal infection. As Stefan Petrow has shown, his body became the object of an obscene competition between the Hobart surgeon and infuential politician, William Crowther (1817–1885), who sought to procure the skeleton for London’s Royal College of Surgeons, and leading members of the Royal Society of Tasmania (Petrow 1998). Crowther, an honorary medical offcer of the Hobart hospital, secured a coroner’s order to have Lanne’s corpse sent to the hospital morgue. He then approached Richard Dry (1815–1869), the island’s premier and colonial secretary, for permission to secure the skeleton, only to fnd that Morton Allport (1830–1878), a prominent Hobart lawyer and councillor of the colony’s Royal Society, had already requested the skeleton for its museum. Dry needed Crowther’s political support so asked the Society’s council to give Crowther the skeleton, which it refused to do, arguing that it had a claim to the remains that was ‘altogether paramount to that of any scientifc institution in the world’ (Agnew 1869). Dry thought it prudent not to alienate the prominent Hobart citizens making 144 P. Turnbull up the council, and agreed to their retaining the skeleton on the understanding that they would create casts of Lanne’s skull and other bones judged scientifcally interesting, along with large-scale photographs of the skeleton, which they would give to the College of Surgeons and other interested metropolitan scientifc institutions. It was arranged that the society would receive Lanne’s skeleton at a decent interval after he had received Christian burial. To placate Crowther, Dry told him that the colony would put ‘no impediment’ in the way of his securing skeletal material from the graves of other Aboriginal people if it could be done ‘without violating the feelings of individuals or the community’ (News 1869). Dry instructed George Stokell (1846–1878), the hospital’s resident surgeon, to ensure that Lanne’s body went to the grave free of mutilation. What is said to have then happened is that Crowther invited Stokell to visit him at home, while he and his son Bingham Crowther (1850– 1924), a medical student, went to the hospital morgue and hastily removed Lanne’s skull, replacing it with one from a nearby corpse. After nearly an hour of increasingly strained conversation with Crowther’s wife, Stokell realised he had been tricked and rushed to the hospital. His fears confrmed, he hurried to fellow surgeon James Agnew (1815– 1901), the secretary of the Royal Society, who spoke with Morton Allport and a third counsellor, John Graves (1795–1886). They agreed to foil any further theft by rendering the remaining bones scientifcally valueless. Stokell sawed off the hands and feet and they were taken to the society’s museum. He then had the mutilated corpse sealed in a coffn for burial the following Saturday. By the time of the funeral it was widely known that Lanne’s corpse had been mutilated. Embarrassed and angered, Premier Dry placed the grave under police guard and directed there be an inquiry and the body be exhumed on the Monday. However, from late on the Saturday night there was no guard on the grave. By morning the body was gone. Crowther was the prime suspect. A trail of blood stains allegedly led from the cemetery to near the warehouse of a company in which he had a fnancial interest. He was suspended from government medical duties and his son was temporarily banned from studying at the hospital. However, Crowther was determined to prove he was no grave-robber. With several friends he confronted Stokell at the hospital and forced open a room which was found to be strewn with fat and blood. He openly accused Stokell of removing Lanne’s head. Yet when an offcial 5 BRITISH POLYGENISTS AND THE INDIGENOUS BODY, 1820–1880 145 inquiry into the gruesome affair was held, Crowther refused to answer any questions. There is no doubt that Crowther was responsible for the removal of Lanne’s skull, but it seems clear that the Royal Society was behind the grave-robbery, as Fred Seager (n.d.), who at the time was the dispen- sary assistant at the hospital, admitted to J.W. Beattie (1859–1930), the Hobart photographer, in 1893. Beattie wrote that the now elderly Seager told him that

It was he & Dr. Stokell who cut up the body of ‘Billy’ when his carcase was removed from St. David’s Churchyard … Stokell told him one night that he had Billy’s body in one of the storerooms, and asked him if he would assist him to cut him up & get his skeleton. He agreed, and as it was a dirty job they took Sergt. Townley into their confdence & he took charge of several bottles of beer, giving the pair ‘swigs’ from the bottles as the dissection proceeded and when their feelings prompted refreshment. (Beattie 1912)

At the time, nothing could be proved. Furthermore, the Dry government was unwilling to pursue matters too strenuously for fear that its initial agreement to allow the Royal Society Lanne’s bones would become publicly known.

Dr. Davis and Mr. Allport The Lanne affair had its aftermath in public indignation across Tasmania that doctors could so abuse a corpse in their care and that grave-robbing should go unpunished. New anatomy legislation was passed that recognised the rights of the deceased and their relatives to declare that their body would not be subjected to dissected, except when the cause of death needed to be determined. Thereafter, the island’s medical practitioners were loath to risk being implicated in the procurement of Indigenous Tasmanian bodily remains before or after their burial. Davis’s chances of procuring subsequent Tasmanian specimens diminished, although he still found one scientifcally active Hobart resident who was not only willing to help advance his craniometric research, but to do so despite having risked moral censure for his involvement in the ghastly contest over Lanne’s corpse. This was Morton Allport, whose acquaintance Davis made when Allport approached him as secretary 146 P. Turnbull of the Anthropological Society of London, seeking to become a corresponding fellow. Allport had represented his fellow councillors of the Royal Society in arguing that Lanne’s skeleton should be preserved in its museum, imploring the colony’s government not to allow ‘so essential an element of a national collection to be lost to the country’; but within two years of the affair, he arranged ‘with no small amount of diffculty’ for the secret exhumation of two skeletons that he sent the Royal College of Surgeons. One, the skeleton of Pinnanobathac (known to Europeans as Bessie Clarke), Allport stole from the cemetery of the Oyster Cove settlement, to where the handful of men, women and children who had survived the rigours of life on Flinders Island were moved in 1847 (Allport 1871, p. 191). The other came from the graveyard of the Flinders settlement. Allport was able to get the skeleton under the cover of obtaining geological samples, being part owner of an exploration company with leases on the island (Flower 1907; Mines 1869). At the time of his election to the newly formed Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1871, Allport had promised to send its museum a complete skeleton, also exhumed ‘with considerable diffculty’ from the settlement’s cemetery (Allport 1871, p. 11). In April 1872 he presented a second skeleton from the cemetery to Belgium’s Musée royal d’histoire naturelle. It would be mistaken, however, to conclude that Allport used the island’s Indigenous dead to enhance his standing with metropolitan scientifc authorities. It seems more likely that in robbing graves on Flinders Island and Oyster Cove he genuinely sought to contribute to the advancement of anthropology, and to create stronger intellectual ties between the Royal Society of Tasmania and leading European scientifc institutions. His determination to see the Society have William Lanne’s remains, while sending the bones of other Tasmanians to London, needs to be assessed in the light of his regarding Lanne’s bones to be, as he told Richard Dry, an ‘essential an element of a national collection’. In other words, he, and doubtless other executive members of the Royal Society, saw the value of Lanne’s body to lie in its being the remains of the last survivor of the Tasmanian race. Indeed, in 1872 Allport was offer the College of Surgeons a third skeleton that he had taken from Flinders Island, in exchange for it giving William Lanne’s skull to the Society. 5 BRITISH POLYGENISTS AND THE INDIGENOUS BODY, 1820–1880 147

The Society assumed that the college had received Lanne’s skull from Crowther, but Allport was to learn that his skull and neck vertebrae were in the hands of Crowther’s son, Bingham, who had left Hobart to study at London’s Guy’s Hospital. Allport contacted a friend and legal colleague with rooms near the college, asking if he could ‘devise any method of obtaining it’, adding that he ‘would willingly give £10 to recover it & the young fellow daren’t make any disturbance if he loses it as he well knows it does not belong to him’ (Allport 1871, f. 59). Joseph Barnard Davis learnt of Allport’s donating skeletons from Flinders Island and Oyster Cove to the Royal College of Surgeons. Very likely hoping to secure remains for himself, he began corresponding with him, sending him his Thesaurus Craniorum and others publications, and supporting his election to the Anthropological Institute. He also offered to help Allport get Lanne’s skull and neck bones out of Bingham Crowther’s hands, although what actions he may have taken, if any, are unknown. At any rate, by May 1872 Davis had received a skull and bones that Allport had taken ‘no small trouble to see … were disinterred from a spot where none but other Aborigines were buried’—that is, the Flinders Island cemetery. The following January, Allport informed Davis that he had secured ‘a treasure for you in the shape of an adult male Skeleton of Tasmanian native all but absolutely perfect except as to the styloid processes which always seem very fragile’ (Allport 1871, f. 107). These were probably the last bones that Allport was willing to risk removing from the island. As he explained in a letter of May 1874 to Charles Gould (1834–1893), son of the famous ornithologist and a partner in his mineral exploration company, he was unable to procure skeletal material for Professor Wyville Thompson, then visiting the Australian colonies as naturalist on the Challenger expedition: a box being carried from the island, said to contain geological specimens, had broken open when dropped, spilling human bones. ‘There is now a row in the camp’, Allport warned Gould, & and I have had dark hints of a parliamentary enquiry at which I would carry the grave legislators all round if they were to give me such a chance’ (Allport 1871, ff. 56–57). Allport’s renunciation of grave-robbing denied Davis his only viable means of securing more Tasmanian remains. By the mid-1870s, in any case, there was little possibility that what he would have made of these bones could challenge what Darwinians claimed they disclosed about human evolutionary history. Davis’s health had also began to weaken, restricting his participation in anthropological events and debates. On 148 P. Turnbull his death, he was remembered by the few scientists who still shared his belief as to the fxity of species and the unchanging nature of racial characteristics. Leading Darwinians overlooked his anthropological opinions, praising his tenacity as a collector and his generosity in bequeathing his remarkable collection of racial skulls to London’s Royal College of Surgeons. As will be shown in the next chapter, it was the Darwinian George Rolleston (1829–1881), Oxford University’s frst Linacre Professor of Anatomy, who came closest to rivalling Davis as a collector and analyst of racial skulls. And when Rolleston died unexpectedly less than a month after Davis, it was he, not Davis, whom obituarists feted as Britain’s leading craniologist. *** The static, polygenetic interpretation of racial diversity championed by Davis and other active participants in the London Anthropological Society increasingly lost explanatory power against Darwinian explanations of bodily, cognitive and psychological differences among the peoples of the Earth as evolutionary adaptations. While the Anthropological Society of London could boast 700 members at the time of Davis’s exchange with Huxley in the mid-1860s, only a small circle of active members of the society endorsed and actively championed the idea that the comparison of European and Indigenous Australian skulls provided one of the strongest proofs that humankind comprised separately originating species, each exhibiting biologically distinctive and historically immutable ‘race characters’. Moreover, while these critics of Darwin were medically trained, they were amateur researchers who, like Davis, worked outside contemporary medico-scientifc institutions. Their Darwinian opponents on the other hand, were generally younger professional scientists employed in Britain’s growing number of universities, medical colleges and museums, and thus far better placed to convince scientifc colleagues, students and the wider educated public that racial differences among humankind were the product of largely endogamous human populations exhibiting differing adaptive traits. What also undoubtedly also contributed to the suasiveness of the Darwinian account of human history was its potential to alleviate European settler colonialism of responsibility for the destruction of indigenous societies. It enabled their demise to be understood as a natural, irresistible process, in the course of which supposedly evolutionarily primitive races were unable adapt to rapidly changing conditions of material and social life. 5 BRITISH POLYGENISTS AND THE INDIGENOUS BODY, 1820–1880 149

Davis’s static racialism by contrast, offered what at best was an attenuated yet still morally unpalatable version of Knox’s vision of history. Knox, as we have seen, believed racial antipathy to be the prime determinant of historical change. It was inevitable, he reasoned, that the colonial ambitions of the Anglo-Saxon race would result in Australian and other indigenous peoples being killed to extinction (Knox 1850, 99). Davis nonetheless contributed to growing scientifc interest in the Indigenous Australian body from the 1860s onwards, by making its morphology a key issue in his challenge of Huxley’s claim of affnities between the Neanderthal and Australian skulls. This had the effect of convincing Huxley’s fellow Darwinians—and possibly anatomists and anthropologists previously inclined to side with Davis—that Australian remains were likely to yield further important evidence illustrative of humankind’s evolution and more recent racial genealogy. In any case, the apparent correspondence between Darwinian theory and Indigenous Australian morphology established by Huxley was to have disturbing consequences. As we will see in Chapter 7, it was to stimulate widespread plundering of Aboriginal burial places and scientifc traffcking in bodily remains. In addition, the collecting and examinations of crania and other relics of the Indigenous dead had the fateful effect of representing Australia’s frst peoples as survivors of an earlier phase of human evolutionary history whose seeming physical and mental unftness for life in colonial society was imagined to all but assure their extinction. CHAPTER 6

‘Rare Work for the Professors’: Phrenologists and the Australian Skull, c. 1815–1860

The previous chapter explored the ideas and arguments of the two most infuential British exponents of polygenism. I discussed the seminal infuence of Robert Knox, drawing attention to how the Scottish anatomist’s racial determinism logically disposed him to be a trenchant critic of settler colonialism. Knox believed that not only were Australian and other indigenous peoples doomed to suffer extermination at the hands of European settlers, but that efforts to create northern European societies in large parts of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania were doomed to failure because the settlers would have no capacity for biological adaptation to such markedly different environments. My focus was also on Knox’s admirer, Joseph Barnard Davis, whose interest in racial craniometry led to his energetically collecting Indigenous Australian skulls, which he came to see as providing clear disproof of Darwinian evolutionism. By the early 1860s Davis and his Darwinian rivals were in contact with the curators and trustees of museums that had by now been established in the colonial capitals of south-east Australia by various scientifc societies. But before leaving the frst half of the nineteenth century to investigate the personnel of these museums, their anthropological collecting and their relations with infuential fgures in metropolitan British scientifc circles, we would do well to explore the involvement of Indigenous Australian crania in the unorthodox cerebral science of phrenology.

Historians of racial thought in colonial Australia have assumed that phrenology enjoyed widespread credence. However, as I aim to show in this chapter, phrenology was less infuential in the concrescence of racialised perceptions of Indigenous Australian inferiority than has been commonly assumed. Rather its infuence was more indirect, in that it reinforced what, by the early 1820s, had become a staple of mainstream scientifc discourse on human variation. This was, as we saw in Chapter 4, the credence given by George Cuvier and his British admirers to the notion that Australia’s frst peoples typically possessed crania that were thicker than many others of the world’s peoples, and thus had heads with a smaller internal volume which meant that they had a limited capacity for intellectual and moral improvement compared with European and other racial types. Phrenology was nevertheless signifcant in another respect, as we will see. Practitioners of this unconventional cerebral science, and colonists who were curious about its teachings, were active collectors of Indigenous skulls. Indeed, what evidence we have suggests that they were probably responsible for the majority of plunderings of ancestral burial places known to have occurred during the frst half of the nineteenth century. *** In April 1997, cemetery workers in the English port city of Liverpool carefully dug a trench alongside an unmarked common grave. In the grave were the remains of twenty infants who had died in local hospitals before or just after birth. Carefully trying not to disturb their remains, the workers looked for a plywood box, said by council records to contain a Peruvian mummy, a tattooed Maori head (Toi moko), and the smoke dried head of an Indigenous Australian. These items had been de-accessioned by the Liverpool Museum in 1964 and buried on being judged to be in such a poor state of preservation as to have no further scientifc or educational value. This was about four years before the infants were interred above them. On fnding the box, a forensic palaeontologist hired by Australia’s Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander Commission examined the Australian head, concluding that it was that of Yagan, a warrior of the Beeliar people of Western Australia’s Swan River District. As historical testimony predicted, the head was found to have a severe gunshot wound causing radial fracturing to the back of the cranium. The base of the skull and attached vertebrae bore signs of clumsy decapitation. Four months later, a delegation of Noongar Elders arrived in Liverpool to bring Yagan’s head home for burial, 164 years after it had 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 153 left Western Australia in the luggage of Robert Dale (1810–1856), an ensign in a British infantry regiment then garrisoning the colony. Yagan had been killed in July 1833. He was one of numerous casualties of violence between the Noongar peoples (traditional owners) of Western Australia and early British colonists. Sheep and cattle were frst introduced onto Noongar lands in the Swan River region. Colonists were soon competing with local clans for kangaroo and bush foods. Noongar speared cattle, provoking deadly settler retaliation. In 1831 several Beeliar men were shot after they were found butcher- ing a steer. Yagan and his father, Midgegooroo, an Elder of the Beeliar people, took revenge as ancestral law demanded. This caused them to be declared outlaws by the colony’s governor, and a £30 reward was offered for the capture of Yagan ‘dead or alive’ (News 1833a). It was Midgegooroo, however, who was captured; and in May 1833 he was executed after a hastily convened trial by a military fring squad (News 1833b). Yagan swore vengeance; but after two months during which he and men of local clans fought guerrilla-style against settlers and military parties, Yagan was lured into a trap by two young farm workers and shot dead. His head was severed, smoke dried and presented to James Stirling (1791–1865) for the £30 reward (News 1833b; Moore 1884, p. 206). Somehow Ensign Robert Dale managed to secure Yagan’s head. Possibly Stirling gave it to him in the expectation that he would give the head to London’s Royal College of Surgeons when he returned to England; but soon after arriving in England Dale tried to sell it for £20 (Dale 1834b) before striking a deal with Thomas Pettigrew (1791–1865), a surgeon and prominent antiquarian who had studied comparative anatomy at Göttingen under Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Pettigrew paid Dale for exclusive rights to display the head for twelve months (Dale 1834c). Pettigrew was a devotee of phrenology, which at this time commanded widespread interest among middle-class Britons and had won converts among medical practitioners, lawyers and businessmen (see Cooter 1984). It was an unorthodox psychological science that imagined the brain to comprise numerous discrete organs, each the location of a specifc ‘faculty’ of cognition, affect, emotion or reasoning. Followers of the science taught that an individual’s personality was the sum of the relative strengths and weaknesses of individual faculties. They believed the relative power of each faculty could be accurately gauged from judging the relative sizes of the organs in which they were located, which could be done by studying the impression that each organ had made on the overlying cranial bone as a person grew to 154 P. Turnbull maturity—which is why practitioners of the science were commonly ridiculed by their critics as head readers and ‘bumpologists’. Today phrenology is dismissed by scientists as on a par with claims as to the healing qualities of quartz crystals and the predictive power of palm reading, but in the early 1830s it was regarded by many within Britain’s commercial and professional classes as a science, offering a practical means of solving a wide spectrum of social and moral problems caused by the growth of industrial capitalism and urbanisation. The skulls of Australians and other indigenous peoples became entangled in phrenology. Practitioners of the science held that comparison of the skulls of northern European and indigenous peoples in British settler colonies confrmed the former to have well developed organs enabling self-understanding, self-development and self-governance. Many phrenologists pessimistically imagined Australians and the indigenous peoples of the Cape Colony would never be capable of mental improvement. However, as we will see in this chapter, there were leading phrenologists who saw in the science the means of gradually strengthening the indigenous mind to the point of enabling the integration of indigenous hunter-gather peoples within colonial society by adopt- ing phrenologically informed schemes for the management and improvement of their supposed psychological weaknesses. Thomas Pettigrew was among those who believed that phrenology could affect improvement if applied to Indigenous Australians. He displayed Yagan’s head at scientifc gatherings at his Saville Row residence through 1834. It was placed on a table, adorned with a freshly corded headband and blackcockatoo feathers. As one newspaper of the time reported:

the rooms were crowded, and many objects of exceeding interest were exhibited to … scientifc visitors. Among others we noticed a head peculiarly preserved, which was said to be that of Yagan, the celebrated chief of the Swan River settlement … His features are well preserved, his skin is a deep jet black, and the hair on his chin very crisp—that of his head is soft and thick. A very interesting panoramic drawing of the settlement accompanied this curious specimen of the natives of Swan River. (News 1834a, p. 4)

While visitors viewed the head, against the backdrop of a panorama of King George Sound, based on sketches by Dale (1834a), Pettigrew explained its supposed phrenological peculiarities. He claimed that expert practitioners of the science who knew nothing of Yagan’s life 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 155 or the circumstances of his death had agreed with him, on examining the cranial contours of the head, that this ‘celebrated chief of the Swan River settlement’, was a man who had possessed ‘an impatient, irritable and violent temper … a domineering and overbearing character’ (Dale 1834a, p. 19). Even so, Pettigrew held that aspects of the warrior’s skull gave some cause for optimism about future relations between colonists and Indigenous people in Western Australia. Regions of the skull with slight protuberances suggested that the size of the underlying organs in the brain were big enough to indicate that ‘moral education, or good patriarchal legislation’ might improve the mental attributes of the land’s traditional owners, and hopefully put an end to confict with the colony (Dale 1834a, p. 19). Pettigrew concluded his assessment of Yagan’s personality by informing his audience that for a very reasonable price they could share with family and friends a pamphlet containing his phrenological assessment and fne hand-coloured prints of Yagan’s head and Dale’s panorama of King George Sound. Yagan’s head is among the best documented examples of phrenological interest in the Indigenous Australian dead. How many skulls came into the hands of practitioners of the science during the course of the nineteenth century is hard to say. It has been claimed that hundreds of heads were acquired by the decapitation of Indigenous people killed by settlers, colonial military or police (Fesl 1993, p. 27), but what evidence we have suggests that the number of skulls and cranial bones procured for phrenological ends was probably slightly less than the sum of what was acquired by individual anatomists, medical schools and museums seeking to understand the causes and development of racial variation in humankind. In other words, the number was probably no more than two hundred, and quite possibly less. We can also say that most were obtained by plundering traditional burial places, although in several recorded instances, as we will see in this chapter, skulls were acquired after Indigenous deaths in frontier clashes. The theft and use of Indigenous skulls in the production of phrenological knowledge has received some attention from historians in the context of investigating the evolution of racial thought in colonial Australia. R.H.W. Reece, in his pioneering 1974 study of Indigenous settler relations in New South Wales during the 1830s and 1840s, concluded that phrenology was the ‘most popular theory explaining Indigenous “inferiority”’ in the pre-Darwinian era’ (1974, p. 87). Henry Reynolds, writing in 1974, drew attention to colonial interest in phrenology, but thought it was less infuential in contributing to the 156 P. Turnbull development of biologically determinist perceptions of Indigenous people before 1850 than vaguer notions of Indigenous ‘savagery’ (1974, p. 50). However, by the mid-1980s, Reynolds had come to believe that phrenology might have been more infuential than he had originally thought among middle-class readers of local literary and scientifc journals (1989, p. 113). In his 1997 study of discourses of racial extinction in colonial Australia, Russell McGregor observed that phrenology clearly played some part in the development of racialised perceptions of Aboriginality as a result of interest in the science generated by colonial admirers of its leading Scottish exponent, George Combe (1788–1858). Alert to the fact that phrenology in its Combeian formulation taught that all humankind possessed a natural capacity for mental improvement, McGregor, took the view that it nonetheless ‘played a signifcant part in fostering the notions that Indigenous mental powers were limited and their prospects for improvement were slight’ (1997, p. 8). Finally, Kay Anderson and Colin Perrin have recently argued that phrenology gave scientifc credence to colonialist perceptions of Indigenous people as ‘animal-like’ beings by representing this animality as having an innate cerebral basis: the fgure of the Australian Aborigine entered European and American racial discourse as a challenge to the belief in capacity of all humanity for improvement held by British Enlightenment writers on societal development, and which up until this point had underpinned the notion that British colonialism was inherently a ‘civilising mission’ (Anderson and Perrin 2008, p. 982). As will be argued in this chapter, phrenology certainly strengthened racialist perceptions of Indigenous Australians, but closer contextual scrutiny of contemporary observations and pronouncements by adepts of the science suggests that it was less infuential in giving racialised perceptions of indigeneity false and pernicious facticity than more mainstream medico-scientifc discourses on the nature and origins of racial diversity in humanity—which, as we saw in Chapter 4, were by the early 1830s infected by fatalism as to the irreversibility of the environmentally induced degeneration of Indigenous intellectual capacity. This investigation of the entanglement of Indigenous skulls in phrenology begins by returning briefy to the late eighteenth century and the founders of phrenology, anatomists Franz-Joseph Gall (1758–1828) and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776–1832). We will see that they rejected the reasoning of Buffon and Blumenbach that there were only trivial differences in powers of cognition, emotion and volition between human 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 157 varietal types and held, by contrast, that the typical form of skulls of ‘savage nations’ compellingly proved the truth of phrenology’s core premise that the relative size of the ‘organs’ making up the brain determined the strengths or weaknesses of particular attributes and qualities of the mind. Gall and Spurzheim were anatomists; but the science that Gall invented and both men promoted was actually a social psychology grounded in systematic corroborative observation of cranial contours and their correlation with behavioural traits. This approach capitalised on what, by the turn of the nineteenth century, was a wealth of colonialist reportage in which Africans, Australians and other darkly pigmented peoples were represented as typically possessing weak powers of reasoning and moral judgement. They mined this rich vein of chauvinist testimony, seizing on its supposedly offering clear evidence of the intellectual incapacity of these races and correlating it with what they took to be racially typical in the shape of their skulls. This chapter then explores how metropolitan British followers of Gall and Spurzheim imagined the Indigenous Australian mind before it turns to examine how the skulls of Indigenous people were procured and interpreted by colonial followers of the science. My concern here is to show that while phrenology contributed to pessimism within settler society as to the capacity of Indigenous people for improvement, and the belief that they were likely to become extinct, practitioners of the science did not universally presume this to be so, for by the mid-1820s, most British phrenologists were followers of the science as taught by Combe. In its Combeian formulation, phrenology emphasised that inherited mental capabilities could be improved to beneft individuals and society at large by implementing phrenologically informed reforms to virtually every aspect of private and public life. Among the many reformist causes taken up by Combe and his close collaborator George Steuart Mackenzie (1780–1848) was the plight of indigenous peoples under British colonial rule. They championed the development of ‘national phrenology’—a specialised sub-discipline of the science equipping colonial authorities to achieve peaceful race relations and to implement schemes for the welfare, gradual intergenerational mental improvement, and eventual integration, of indigenous peoples within colonial society. This national phrenology was largely ignored by colonial administrators in Australia and other British imperial possessions. It captured the imagination of some within colonial elites, but what little interest there was faded with the general decline of the 158 P. Turnbull credibility of phrenology among British metropolitan and colonial bourgeois from the late 1830s. The last part of this chapter explores the uses of Indigenous crania by those who continued to give phrenology credence from the 1840s onwards, before concluding by offering some general observations on the contribution that this unorthodox cerebral science made to the concrescence of race in Australian settler culture.

Gall, Spurzheim and the ‘Savage’ Skull Phrenological clubs and societies became part of middle-class cultural life in British cities and provincial towns from the early 1820s. Their more active members sought to build collections of skulls and cranial casts which often included one or two skulls of sub-Saharan Africans peoples. Some also managed to procure skulls of Native Americans, Australians and other so-called ‘savage’ peoples beyond Europe believing that these relics illustrated with striking clarity the science’s teaching that head shape was an accurate measure of attributes and qualities of mind. Here they followed phrenology’s founder, Franz Joseph Gall, and his student and sometime collaborator, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim. Both men were convinced that variation in humankind extended to typicalities of brain anatomy, psychology and head shape; and in this they stood at odds with fellow anatomists such as Blumenbach, who held that whatever changes in mental capabilities might have occurred in the varietal branching of the human species, they were trivial peculiarities which were capable of further change; and that there were no substantial differences between the peoples of the Earth in their natural capacities for reasoning and moral judgement. Gall did not believe in the natural equality of humankind. He was convinced that humanity was marked by profound differences in intellectual capability, and nowhere was this more evident to him than on comparing European and sub-Saharan African skulls. He took a particular interest in mapping the shape of African skulls to his faculty psychology, correlating his fndings with derogatory testimony about Africans that had accumulated since the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade. ‘I may get on the bad side of [these] highly esteemed men’, Gall declared, referring to Blumenbach and his many admirers in an article published in the form of a letter to his medical colleague, Joseph von Retzer in 1798, 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 159

But maybe you will come to understand why some of our brothers cannot count over three; why others do not have a notion of private property; why eternal peace among mankind remains an eternal fantasy; etc. (Gall 1994, p. 26)

Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, whose arrival in Britain in 1816 was largely responsible for stimulating British interest in phrenology, placed even greater weight on correlating racial ancestry, qualities of mind and cranial morphology. Breaking with his mentor Gall in 1813, he developed his own map of brain and mind, making extensive use of institutional and private collections of ‘national crania’ to match supposed typicalities of head shape with what voyagers, explorers and colonial offcials described as racially typical behavioural traits. Soon after arriving in Britain, Spurzheim met Joshua Brookes, who, as noted in Chapter 3, was one of London’s most successful extramural anatomy teachers. Whether Brookes became interested in phrenology before or after making Spurzheim’s acquaintance is unclear, but by the time of death in the early 1830s his interest in the science was such that he had created several series of crania ‘exhibiting remarkable instances of phrenological manifestations’, including one comprising the heads of murderers. This latter series included ‘a beautiful specimen of the cranium’ that Brookes claimed had belonged to a one-armed Spaniard who had ‘assassinated a British soldier with a fork at a dinner celebrating Wellington’s victory at the battle of Waterloo’ (Brookes 1828, p. 86). Brookes happily made his crania available to Spurzheim, and helped arrange for an engraving of a Maori skull to be made for inclusion in Spurzheim’s most infuential publication, Observations sur la phraenologie (1818). Spurzheim had compared this skull with several of indigenous Caribbean islanders, concluding that all these people practised cannibalism due to their possessing what he saw as extraordinarily large organs of ‘destructiveness’ (Spurzheim 1818, p. 363). Spurzheim also questioned the scientifc basis of Blumenbach and Camper’s defence of African intellectual equality. He claimed, among other things, that Africans typically had an underdeveloped organ of ‘numeration’, which accounted for the prevalence in pro-slavery writings of claims that African peoples could not solve even relatively simple mathematical problems: ‘their heads’, he declared, were ‘ordinarily recessive in the place where that organ is located’ (Spurzheim 1818, p. 292). He also made much of his personal examination of numerous 160 P. Turnbull collections of crania in, arguing that Blumenbach’s and Camper’s faith in the natural equality of humanity rested solely on personal acquaintance with one or two men of African ancestry. Indeed, Spurzheim was even more contemptuousness than Gall of African intellectual and moral capacity. Writing of the skull of a young, congenitally deformed man he had examined in Amsterdam, for example, he readily credited claims that during his short life the man had proved ‘so stupid that one could be forgiven for thinking that he was an African savage, even though it was well known that he was born in Amsterdam’ (Spurzheim 1818, p. 26).

James Deville, Phrenological Entrepreneur On the basis of examining one or two Australian skulls, Spurzheim readily characterised Australian and other peoples living by foraging and hunting as ‘savage’ races possessing weak organs of intellect and reasoning, and large organs that disposed them to unpredictably violent behaviour. He called for more of their skulls to be collected and added to phrenological collections, so as to enable skilled practitioners of the science to make a more fne-grained assessment of their phrenological peculiarities. One infuential follower of Spurzheim who was inspired to do so was James Deville (1777–1846), Britain’s most successful phrenological entrepreneur from the mid-1810s to the early 1840s (Browne 1846). Deville was a sculptor, lamp-maker and dealer in natural curiosities, who was also active in radical politics. He embraced phrenology after attending Spurzheim’s lectures and with his encouragement began lecturing on the science. Like many converts, Deville emphasised how the science had vastly improved his own happiness and material well- being. Phrenological examination had revealed to him that his strongest mental faculties were ‘benevolence’ and ‘love of self-improvement’. Psychologically he could not have been better equipped to make a career out of promoting the science. Deville made a good living out of the science by selling a range of busts and cranial casts he took from rare and phrenologically interesting crania in private, university and hospital anatomy collections across Britain and continental Europe. In the course of his dealings he created a wide network of contacts within phrenological clubs and societies founded in the wake of Spurzheim’s lectures and demonstrations. He also made the acquaintance of leading figures in continental European societies devoted to the science. When he learnt 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 161 that interesting skulls had been acquired by a society he negotiated their loan in return for casts of other phrenologically intriguing crania. By the early 1830s he stocked around 2400 casts and several hundred original skulls. Deville displayed the more curious items in this remarkable collection in a room adjoining his lamp and curios shop, which he opened for public viewings several times a week. Despite his radical politics, he readily arranged private tours of the collection for persons of quality, and for a fee gave discreet diagnoses of their personal cerebral strengths and weaknesses. As one seemingly rather sceptical client was to recall, Deville

certainly gave me a great deal for my half Guinea, and of the most fattering description; and I could not but admire the dexterity or rather rapid- ity with which he ascertained the relative size of the 35 organs, by merely passing his hand for a few seconds over my head. (Caldwell 1834)

Deville was fond of showing customers his rarer racial specimens. He was especially proud of casts he had made of skulls in Paris’s Muséum d’histoire naturelle collected during state-sponsored French explorations of the Pacifc since the 1790s (Deville 1828, p. 10). His assessment of the phrenological peculiarities of these ‘savage’ peoples mirrored that of Spurzheim. When speaking of Indigenous Australians he drew attention to what he claimed was their typically possessing a remarkably underdeveloped organ of constructiveness. This he saw as explaining why residents and travellers in New South Wales reported that the land’s inhabitants had ‘not the least idea of contriving any thing [sic] for barter or sale, or even their own comfort’ (Deville 1828, 41). Among the casts Deville was selling by the early 1830s were copies of Australian crania belonging to Joshua Brookes, who, as previously mentioned, had been bankrupted when he had refused to have his teaching regulated by London’s Royal College of Surgeons, and was forced to auction his collections (Davis 1867b, p. v). Deville also possessed the cranium of a man who had died of massive head injuries, casts of which he mar- keted as belonging to a ‘Chief of the Moreton Bay Tribe’ who was alleged to have speared Patrick Logan, the frst commandant of the penal settlement established at Moreton Bay in 1823 (Davis 1867b, p. 262). Logan had in fact been clubbed to death while s urveying the country inland of the bay in October 1830, although it was widely believed at the time he 162 P. Turnbull had been murdered by convicts in the survey party. His killers were never identifed (Cranfeld 1959, pp. 310–311). In 1833 Deville acquired a further four skulls of Indigenous Australians, one of which he purchased from Robert Espie (d. 1870), a naval surgeon who had become a successful pastoralist on the Ouse River in Tasmania’s South Midlands (Bateson 2004, p. 213; Russell and Brown 1941, p. 58). We know something of the circumstances in which this skull was procured. Espie was a benefciary of the demand for wool in the 1820s that saw the rapid development in Tasmania of a proftable pastoral economy sustained by assigned convict labour. But the growth of pastoral settlement caused the depletion of wild game, which led to the island’s tribes taking European livestock. The confict between colonists and tribes escalated to the point that the colony’s Lieutenant- Governor proclaimed martial law in 1828, and two years later used military force to drive the Tasmanian tribes on to ‘protective reserves’ within two peninsula regions of the island (Atkinson 2008, p. 46). Espie had no qualms about violently securing his hold on the land. When he visited England in 1832 he brought with him the skull a man of the Larmairremener (Big River) tribe, which he offered Deville. Espie told him the man had been shot by one of his overseers in retaliation for killing two of his convict shepherds on grazing leases that he held on plains between the Clyde and Shannon Rivers, about ninety kilometres northwest of Hobart (Davis 1867, p. 268). This was one of two skulls that Espie obtained after the killing of Larmairremener men. The other skull was acquired when one of a party of warriors was killed by an overseer of Espie’s when raiding a hut in August 1831. The attack occurred about three months before the arrival of George Augustus Robinson (1791–1866). Robinson, a bricklayer and would-be Evangelical missionary, had been commissioned by Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur (1784–1854), after the failure of his using military tactics to force the island tribes on to reserves, to travel the island to persuade the Tasmanian tribes to place themselves under government protection. Robinson learnt of the raid from one of two shepherds living at the hut when they came under attack. Larmairremener men had used the stone walls of sheep pens near the hut as cover from which to hurl fre sticks onto the roof. Robinson was told that the warriors had called out to Espie’s men ‘to go away to the women or elsewhere’ before they attacked (Robinson and Plomley 2008, p. 541). This seemed to him to confrm 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 163 that they were not ‘activated by a thirst for blood’ but sought only to scare the white people into leaving their country. A Larmairremener woman that Robinson met soon afterwards told him that Espie’s men had shot one of the raiding party through the thigh. He had been carried away by his clansmen, but later died; and he was buried as custom required in a hollow tree on the edge of nearby marshes. Robinson persuaded the woman to take him to the tree, but there was no body. The woman insisted that ‘the white men had taken him away’ (Robinson and Plomley 2008, p. 541). Robinson doubted this, but was forced to admit that so far during his time with the island’s Indigenous inhabitants he was yet to ‘experience any instance of decep- tion among them’. Some four weeks later, he learnt that the body of a man who had recently died had been found in a hollow tree with sticks placed around the entrance. Robinson also learnt that Espie had taken the head, which may have been why the woman had led him to an empty tree: to prevent the rest of the body being taken. According to Jorgen Jorgenson (1780–1841), a convict–constable who accompanied Robinson,

When the Aborigine was shot … the tribe carried off the dead body, placing it in a tree in an upright position, with a spear drove through the chin to keep it from settling down. The body had been, in a great measure, destroyed by vermin but the head remained entire, and what is most singular, the hair was in perfect preservation and two beautiful rows of teeth in the head. Dr. Espie took it with him to England. (Plombley 1991, p. 101)

One may well imagine that in exhibiting the skull, Deville spoke of this Larmairremener man’s fatal resistance as stemming from his race’s possessing a large organ of ‘destructiveness’ and the cerebral basis of only a feeble capacity for ‘constructiveness’.

Colonial Phrenology in the 1820s: The Cranial Collecting of Alexander Berry James Deville was clearly the inspiration for a satire published by the editorially conservative Sydney Gazette in April 1829. The satire took the form of a letter addressed to a Sydney phrenologist called, predictably enough, ‘Jeremiah Bumpkin’. In the letter, one ‘Jack Sprat, Esquire, of Chuckabiddy Lane, London’ sounded out Bumpkin on a new business 164 P. Turnbull venture. Sprat, a wholesale supplier of cheap iron copies of tomahawks and adulterated gunpowder to colonial traders, had fallen on lean times. His clientele had found it increasingly hard to swindle native people with his shoddy wares due to the growing infuence of Christian humanitarians in imperial government circles. It was time to diversify. Phrenology, Sprat told Bumpkin, had stimulated a brisk ‘free trade in skulls, black and white, red and raw’. Missionaries and other humanitarians were bound to object, but as Sprat told Bumpkin, ‘We have as much right to an honest penny by the outside of the skulls of heathens, as others by adorning the inside of the same’. They would both be the wealthier for exploiting the opportunity to collect and sell Indigenous skulls to phrenologists. As Sprat explained,

They are buried somewhere in the bush, and it will not be diffcult for a drop o’ bool to fnd them out. I have been advised to send out some rum for distribution among the living, in which case some specimens might be obtained. But not to speak of the questionable morality of the act, I fnd it will be too expensive. (News 1829a)

Indeed, it was a ‘ripe time’ for skulls, Sprat declared, thanks to disease, brutal dispossession, social anomie and alcoholism. ‘For depend on it’, urged Sprat, ‘in this science, there is nothing like a skull well heightened and hallowed, and as every blow of the waddie [sic] must deepen some depression, or fatten some organ, we shall have rare work among the professors’. Bumpkin and Sprat were fctional characters; but Indigenous crania were the subject of ‘rare work’ by a number of colonists attracted to Gall and Spurzheim’s unorthodox cerebral science. One of the earliest was Alexander Berry (1781–1873), who settled in New South Wales after serving as an East India Company surgeon. By the early 1820s Berry was a successful merchant and pioneer pastoralist in the Shoalhaven district about 130 kilometres south of present-day Sydney (Perry 1966; Swords 1973). One of the most detailed accounts of phrenological grave-robbing in early colonial Australia is to be found in his surviving papers in a draft of a letter he wrote in August 1827 to Michael Goodsir (n.d.), a Royal Naval surgeon and fellow Scot who had arrived in Sydney as surgeon superintendent on the convict ship Countess of Harcourt (Admiralty 1826; News 1827c). The letter reveals that sometime in 1824 or 1825, Arawarra, an elder of the Wandandian people journeyed to 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 165

Cooloomgatta, a mountain in the Shoalhaven, in the shadow of which he been born, and had now returned to die. The frail old man’s country was now occupied by Berry, who in 1822 with his business partner, Edward Wollstonecraft (1783–1832), had established a thriving timber business in the densely forested Shoalhaven region south of Sydney. Using convict labour, Berry had cleared several hundred acres of Wandandian land for cereal crops, cattle and pigs. He had also built a homestead, naming it, tellingly, Cooloomgatta. Arawarra died within two days of returning to his birth place and was buried in accordance with Wandandian tradition. But his body only remained in the care of the land for at most three years. Then Berry wrote to surgeon Goodsir:

I have the pleasure of sending you a craniological specimen being the skull of a former chief of the neighbourhood, valuable on account of a part of the History of the personage to whom it originally belonged being known. He was of the rank of a German Prince, or the chief of a Highland clan, and renowned for many dark deeds of Blood. Many years before Shoal Haven was settled ... it was resorted to by parties of Cedar cutters, in course of time these were either all destroyed or driven away by the natives. Arawarra the owner of the present specimen attacked and destroyed a Party of these sawyers who were employed at Black Head seven miles to the North of Shoal Haven River and utterly destroyed them, and if report speaks true, afterwards feasted on their fesh. He has left a numerous Progeny behind him, and notwithstanding the bloody deeds of his youth lived to an extreme old age and died in time. On our arrival here he was tottering on the verge of human life. About 2 or 3 three years ago I met Charlie his youngest son, a peaceable well disposed native like another Pious Orcus carrying this once formidable warrior upon his shoulders. The venerable old gentleman [who had] merely come to take a last look of Cooloomgatta now occupied by strangers, died two days after & was buried in the neighbourhood. He was buried in the sand to the depth of ten feet, laying on his face with his head pointing to south. Thus although this man of blood escaped punishment and died in peace, yet mark eternal Justice his bones have not been allowed to rest in their grave & it is to be hoped that his skull will throw such light on science as may suffciently expiate the crimes he committed. (Berry 1827) 166 P. Turnbull

Berry was a hard-headed businessman who assiduously cultivated good relations with leading fgures in the colonial establishment to secure and invest precious capital in the frst land leases granted in the Shoalhaven district (Swords 1973). It seems puzzling that he would have done anything to risk his success by jeopardising his relations with the Wandandian and neighbouring clans of the Gundungarra people, but he seems to have been ready to risk intruding on what he knew to be a sacred place to dig up Arawarra’s remains and carry away the Elder’s skull. Berry’s letter to Goodsir arguably provides some clues as to why he did so. His use of classical allusion comes as little surprise, given what we know of his early life. He was a Scot of lowland bourgeois origin, who in common with most men of his age and class had an easy familiarity with Roman and some Greek writers through early schooling in Latin. After grammar school in Fifeshire he had attended the University of St Andrews before studying medicine at the University Edinburgh and anatomy with several extra-mural teachers (Perry 1966). His ironic styling of Arawarra’s youngest son as Orcus, the Roman lord of the underworld, can perhaps be read as intending to impress on metropolitan scientists the depth of his learning and thus the trustworthiness of his reportage. By the time he left Edinburgh in 1804, Berry was well acquainted with the writings on societal development by William Robertson, Adam Ferguson and other philosophical historians of the previous generation. His ‘history’ of Arawarra echoes these authorities in imagining human societies to have passed through successive stages of development, starting from a primordial state of savagery and culminating in commercial and polite society. This would explain Berry’s describing the skull as that of an archetypal savage chief, only distinguishable, perhaps, from the martial Germanic warrior kings depicted in Tacitus or the hereditary leaders of the Highland clans destroyed in the 1745 rebellion, by the darkness of his ‘deeds of blood’. Then there is Berry’s comment that he hoped to see Arawarra’s atrocities expiated in some measure by his skull becoming a ‘craniological specimen’. This reminds us that British law of the time allowed for the bodies of convicted murderers to be denied immediate burial after execution and delivered for dissection by anatomists. The original intent of this punishment was to intensify fear of the death penalty, although over time postmortem dissection also came to be justifed in more humanitarian terms as 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 167 a means of furthering medical knowledge (Richardson 1988, pp. 36–37). Anatomists of Berry’s time commonly held that those who had (deserv- edly) gone to the gallows were given a means of atonement as their postmortem dissection would beneft those who respectfully observed the law. Moreover, other colonists may have likewise thought the removal of remains from graves for scientifc ends was appropriate postmortem justice for unpunished attacks on settlers. Arawarra’s may not have been the only skull that Berry acquired. We fnd that in early 1819 he enlisted the help of the Reverend Robert Knopwood, chaplain to the Hobart convict settlement, to get Indigenous Tasmanian crania for Thomas Hobbes Scott (Border 1967). As noted in the second chapter of this study, Scott at this time travelled New South Wales and Tasmania as secretary to John Thomas Bigge, during his investigation of the effectiveness of convict transpor- tation (Bennett 2004). When broaching the subject of procuring crania with Knopwood, whom he knew to have taken an interest in the welfare of Tasmania’s Indigenous people, Berry playfully confded to him that Scott’s interest was phrenological. ‘This is generally not suspected here’, he told the cleric:

Still I know it to be the case. Therefore, you will oblige me by procuring him if possible a native cranium, but it may be as well if you advise such of your friends as have any reason to be doubtful of their own heads not to allow him to feel their bumbs [sic] lest he should discover what is inside. (Berry 1819)

Knopwood could not easily secure skulls because the funerary ceremonies of the Tasmanian tribes generally entailed secreting the dead within tree trunks or burning the body and afterwards breaking up the bones. Nonetheless, after some months he wrote to Berry telling him that he was sending a ‘very fne native skull’, and advising him that he had been promised two more from the interior of the island (Knopwood 1819). Quite possibly these were the skulls of men or women who had not been buried. Berry’s light-hearted mention of Scott’s interest in phrenology to Knopwood suggests that he may not have wanted to be thought to take the science seriously. As will be discussed in the course of this chapter, phrenology was condemned by many churchmen and Christian 168 P. Turnbull intellectuals as a thinly disguised form of materialism, although there were both Anglican and non-conformist clerics who were interested in the science; and Berry may have learnt through mutual acquaintances that Knopwood was among them, and open to providing its followers with Tasmanian cranial specimens. Even so, when Scott returned to England in 1821, he neither kept nor gave the Tasmanian skulls he took with him to phrenologists, but presented them to the Royal College of Surgeons. He also gave the skull of an Indigenous man from New South Wales to the anatomy school of Christ Church College, Oxford (Lee 1821). Richard Owen, incidentally, examined the two Tasmanian skulls obtained by Scott in the early 1850s while preparing the frst comprehensive printed catalogue of the College of Surgeon’s osteological specimens. The form of one seemed to him not Aboriginal, but more likely, as he described it in his catalogue, to ‘have belonged to some settler, murdered and perhaps eaten by the natives’ (Owen 1853, pp. 829, 840, 912–913)—a telling assessment of how Indigenous Australians fgured in the imagination of Britain’s leading comparative anatomist, a man acclaimed by his contemporaries for factual accuracy and cautiousness when framing hypotheses. In recent years historians of nineteenth century imperial science have led to our revising our understanding of the activities and motivations of colonists who collected on behalf of metropolitan scientifc authorities. It seems clear that in many instances colonial collectors regarded themselves as creators of scientifc knowledge, not simply as gatherers of raw materials for expert analysis and interpretation (see, for example, Endersby 2008). Berry’s phrenological activities are a case in point: he willingly helped secure Indigenous crania for metropolitan phrenologists. He also made generous donations of geological and natural history specimens to his old universities of St. Andrews and Edinburgh, and did so as a gentleman with scientifc expertise (Cadell 1821). However, when exhuming Arawarra’s corpse, he did not see himself as merely serving metropolitan scientifc authorities. As he cleaned the earth from the cranial cavities of the Elder’s skull and drafted his account of Arawarra, he regarded himself as engaged in producing new scientifc knowledge. Berry’s conviction that colonial gentlemen could be active partners in furthering the progress of science is refected in his helping found New South Wales’s frst scientifc society, the short-lived Philosophical Society of Australasia, in 1820. As Michael Hoare has shown, Berry and seven other men, prominent in the administration, professions and business 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 169 life of the colony with a range of scientifc interests. modelled the society on the Royal Society. (Hoare 1974). They sought to capitalise on the opportunities their location afforded to produce new knowledge of the ‘natural state, capabilities, productions, and resources of Australasia and the adjacent regions’ (Macleod 1982; PSA 1821). And what we know of their work suggests that they saw themselves as the intellectual equals of members of similar metropolitan societies. Much like the Royal Society, the scope of the New South Wales society was envisaged as fostering not only the study of ‘natural history [and] the various branches of physical sciences’ but also ‘the history and character of man, together with his language’ (PSA 1821). Also, like bodies such as the Royal Society, these colonial virtuosi formally agreed that their society would avoid discussing any possibly controversial religious or political implications of its members’ scientifc endeavours (Hoare, 1974). Several of its foundation members were drawn to the socially controversial science of phrenology, and Berry was not alone in plundering Indigenous places for skulls.

John Oxley, Explorer and Phrenological Skull Collector John Oxley (1785–1828) was another member of the Philosophical Society who took an interest in phrenology. Oxley had served since 1812 as Surveyor-General of New South Wales, and in 1817 led a government-commissioned expedition to follow the course of the Lachlan and Macquarie Rivers in the central west of the colony, to assess the suitabil- ity of the country through which the rivers fowed for raising sheep and cattle. He was also charged to report on ‘such natives or aborigines’ that he might encounter. Near where the upstream Lachlan disappeared into swamps, making progress westwards extremely diffcult, the expedition came across a ‘raised mound of earth which had somewhat the appearance of a burial place’. Oxley had the convicts assigned to the party dig into the mound, to reveal ashes so reduced as to be unidentifable—although it seemed clear to the party that this was a grave, on seeing that a trench had been ‘dug round one side of it, as if for seats for persons in attendance’ (Oxley 1820, pp. 108–109). The following day a second mound was discovered near where the expedition made camp. It too was opened, and human 170 P. Turnbull remains found which were in the process of decaying into ‘unctuous clayey matter’ (Oxley 1820, pp. 110–111). By this time the health of many in Oxley’s party was failing. Fish and game were scarce and remaining rations were barely suffcient for the return journey. The expedition made camp with a view to crossing the Lachlan the following day and heading north-east for the Macquarie River in order to follow it back to the outlying settlement of Bathurst. They found that they had stopped near a third burial place. Delayed by rains which made the river uncrossable, Oxley had George Evans (1780– 1852), his deputy, sketch the grave and its surrounds, after which the convicts were set to work opening it. Oxley recorded the progress of the excavation in his journal, describing the state of the body found within, which was probably that of a Wiradjuri man, and also several artefacts with which he was found to have been buried. In the account of the expedition he published in 1820, Oxley reported on the excavation sensing that it might disturb some readers. ‘I hope I shall not be considered’, he wrote, ‘as either wantonly disturbing the remains of the dead, or needlessly violating the religious rites of a harmless people, in having caused the tomb to be opened’ (Oxley 1820, p. 138). He stressed that after having ‘satisfed our curiosity’, he had precious time and energy spent on ensuring that ‘the whole was carefully re-interred, and restored as near as possible to the situation in which it was found’. But Oxley was not completely honest with his readers. As Allan Cunningham, the botanist on the expedition, recorded in his diary, Oxley took the man’s skull ‘as a subject for the study of craniologists’ (Lee 1925, p. 273). Oxley and Berry’s excavations of Indigenous burial places refect the infuence of growing interest in European intellectual circles through the early nineteenth century in excavating Neolithic barrow burials. Much like contemporary metropolitan antiquarians, Oxley documented aspects of Wiradjuri funerary practices with the intention of contributing to contemporary discourse on human origins, varietal branching and ancient paths of migration (see Hoare 1975). He took care to note that the ‘whole outward form and appearance of the place was … totally different from that of any custom or ceremony in use by the natives on the eastern coast’. It also seemed to him that the way the body was positioned was similar to how the dead were found in ancient British graves—so much so that he was inspired to poetic refection on the resemblance, and yet the lack of evidence suggesting why the bodies should both be so positioned– 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 171 quoting from Shakespeare’s tragedy of ancient British life, Cymbeline: ‘Nay Cadwal, we must lay his head to the east; my father has a reason for it’ (Oxley 1820, p. 140).

Carnambaygal: Indigenous Resistance and Phrenology The Australasian Philosophical Society also had among its members a young surgeon-superintendent on several convict voyages by the name of Patrick Hill (n.d.), who beside natural history collecting also took an interest in phrenology. In 1817 Hill sailed for England with the skull of Carnambaygal, a leader of the Gundungurra people, whose ancestral country extends inland from the Nepean River southwest of present-day Sydney to near Lake George. The earliest European reference to Carnambaygal appears in the journal of the naturalist George Caley (1770–1829), who arrived in New South Wales in 1800 to collect for Joseph Banks. In 1802 Caley and several convicts were gathering botanical specimens with the help of Dharawal men along the upper Nepean River. The Dharawal introduced him to a party of Gundungurra men, who had come from the Burragorang Valley further westwards to join in a Kangaroo hunt. Caley was inclined to think that his party was possibly the frst white men the Gundungurra had encountered, going by their reaction when he used a gun to bring down a bird. He also noticed that the Dharawal were subdued and respectful in the presence of their neighbours, and deferred to one man in particular, called Carnambaygal. It seemed to Caley as if the Dharawal believed Carnambaygal to be ‘invincible and more than mortal’, and were pleased that he appeared unsettled by the presence of white people and their guns (Caley 1966, p. 103). Over the next sixteen years, Carnambaygal became well known to the colony’s leaders and settlers in outlying districts to the southwest of Sydney, where he took a prominent role in meetings at which the colony’s governor or other senior offcials gave out blankets, axes and other European goods with the aim of ensuring peace with the region’s traditional owners. However, by 1813 these meetings occurred in the context of increasing European exploitation of Dharawal, Western Dharug and Gundagara lands and their resources. This led to attacks on convict shepherds and the burning of maize felds, which were met by punitive military actions. By early 1816 relations between the settlers and the region’s traditional owners had collapsed. Three years of ‘extraordinary 172 P. Turnbull and unprecedented’ drought, followed by torrential rains and food, had killed livestock in large numbers and severely depleted the colony’s maize, grain and potato stocks. Competition with the land’s ancestral owners for scarce sources of wild food on the Nepean, Hawkesbury, and Grose river plains intensifed. Killings occurred when warriors of local clans asserted equal rights to surviving crops, cattle, and sheep on their ancestral country (Colonial Secretary 1816a). By late March, Indigenous men of the river plains had begun a coor- dinated and effective guerrilla campaign; and with food shortages causing fear and heavy speculation in grain and meat, Lachlan Macquarie (1762–1824), the colony’s governor, resorted to tactics he had seen employed during his military service in Egypt and India: he sent out three well-armed detachments of the 46th Regiment garrisoning the colony with orders to drive the Indigenous people inhabiting the river plains inland and take ‘some of them Prisoner in order to be punished for their late atrocious Conduct so as to strike them with Terror against Committing similar acts of violence in future’ (Colonial Secretary 1816b). Those who resisted the clearance were to be shot and their corpses hung from trees (Colonial Secretary 1816c; Macquarie 1816). Macquarie was aware that this would result in indiscriminate killing of Indigenous people in outlying regions (Macquarie 1816), yet he was determined to protect the colony’s diminished food supplies. By a proclamation of May 1816, Indigenous people living peacefully within settled regions were forbidden to approach any settlement armed or in groups of more than six, ‘on the Pain of being considered Enemies, and treated accordingly’ (Colonial Secretary 1816d). Those who desired to place themselves under the protection of the British Crown were to be issued passports and granted land and supplies if they were willing ‘to relinquish their wandering, idle and predatory Habits of Life’ and agreed to the removal and formal schooling of their children as rural workers (Milliss 1992, p. 47). Soon after the traditional owners of the country to the south and west of Sydney began daringly raiding outlying farms. Carnambaygal was reported as leading the attacks, and was declared an outlaw. In early April 1816, a patrol despatched by Macquarie located Carnambaygal and members of his clan camped in mountainous country on the upper Nepean River. Waiting until evening, the patrol, led by Captain James Wallis (c. 1785–1858), charged the camp, killing Carnambaygal and seven other men. A further seven men were reported as having leaped 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 173

‘in despair’ over a nearby cliff. In his offcial report, Wallis paid tribute to Carnambaygal’s courage, reporting that on ‘being placed at bay, he died manfully, having received fve shots before he fell’ (Colonial Secretary 1816e). Following orders, he severed Carnambaygal’s head before hang- ing his body from a tree on a nearby farm as a deterrent spectacle of terror. Later that year the warrior’s skull left New South Wales aboard a returning convict transport with Patrick Hill, who appears to have acquired it through A.G. Parker (n.d.), a lieutenant in the patrol that ambushed Carnambaygal and his clansmen. Hill appears to have given the skull to George Steuart Mackenzie. Mackenzie was among Spurzheim’s most enthusiastic British converts, and a founder of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society in 1820. He was also the curator of its museum, which he established by personally donating a number of skulls, several of which he had acquired from family and friends in British colonies (see Kaufman and Basden 1996). Mackenzie regarded Carnambaygal’s skull as an especially valuable addition to the museum’s collection, and had plaster casts made of it for sale and for donation to other phrenological societies. He also described the skull’s phrenological attributes in a book introducing the principles of phrenology that he published soon after the founding of the society (Mackenzie 1820, pp. 233–234). Mackenzie judged Carnambaygal’s skull to have relatively concave eye sockets and a recessive forehead, which were phrenologically indicative of his having had poor linguistic and mathematical abilities and limited capacity for benevolence. It also seemed to Mackenzie that, if the shape of the skull and two plaster casts of other Australian crania (casts very likely bought from James Deville) were typical of the ‘natives of New Holland’, there was ‘little hope of their being capable of great improvement in knowledge’ (Mackenzie 1820, p. 235). Even so, Mackenzie’s reading of Carnambaygal’s skull led him to think that despite the signs of intellectual defciencies phrenology disclosed, its shape suggested that the Australian race might be raised out of savagery. For he saw in the warrior’s skull signs of his possessing religious and moral faculties that were capable of being ‘improved by exertions properly directed’:

the progress of these people may be slow; and although their reasoning powers are not such as to lead us to think that their lower propensities can 174 P. Turnbull

be under perfect controul [sic]; still, by working on their love of approba- tion, the sense of justice, and veneration; and by exciting the organ of attachment, by acts of kindness, much may be done for these miserable beings… (Mackenzie 1820, p. 235)

Also giving Mackenzie some cause for optimism was what he believed was a positive correlation between Carnambaygal’s cerebral geography and what he had learnt, presumably from surgeon Hill, about the warrior’s life and heroism in defending his country. Here was a man who Mackenzie believed ‘clearly possessed all the qualities which we should expect to fnd in a chief of such a people’. Moreover, these were qualities which, in Mackenzie’s estimation, ‘when united with great talents, [would] form a great leader in civilised life’(Mackenzie 1820, p. 236). Mackenzie’s optimism that humanitarian endeavours would improve the native Australian race was strengthened by his being able to assess a second skull donated to the Edinburgh society’s museum in 1824. However, what he made of the skull serves to alert us to how phrenological knowledge refected what were implicit cultural assumptions of the time. The skull came to Mackenzie described by its donor as that of a woman from the Sydney region, when it was actually that of a young man (Pickering 2003). With no reason to doubt that it was a woman’s skull, Mackenzie phrenologically assessed it as exemplifying how the female mind was naturally dominated by emotions and sentiments integral to successful fulflment of the roles of mother and wife. Indeed, the shape of this ‘female’ Australian skull seemed to Mackenzie to suggest that this was a race with remarkable mental powers for successful sexual reproduction and the nurturing of offspring. He also saw the skull as confrming the female brain to be typically smaller in those ‘organs’ that phrenology taught gave rise to intellectual faculties enabling dispas- sionate, objective reasoning. This would explain why it was, he reasoned, that settlers should report that Indigenous women were especially prone to sudden and emotionally volatile behaviour (Mackenzie 1824, p. 134). Even so, Mackenzie was inclined to suspect that the skull suggested that the Australian race might possess higher intellectual capabilities than other peoples who lived by foraging and hunting. But the proof of this he saw as depending on phrenologists being able to determining whether there were signifcant differences in the skulls of tribes found in different regions of the Australian continent. Hence it was crucial that the 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 175

Edinburgh and other phrenological societies make concerted efforts to acquire a much larger number of skulls from across Australia.

Lancelot Threlkeld and the Bathurst Massacre It is impossible to say how many skulls were acquired for phrenological collections from the mid-1810s to the late 1830s, after which declining interest in the science caused many of its societies to fold. As was the case with mainstream anatomical collecting, the acquisition of skulls by phrenologists, or those simply curious about the science, was haphazard and opportunistic; but this did not stop some from believing that phrenological collecting was organised and effective. The Congregationalist missionary Lancelot Threlkeld (1788–1859), for example, credited phrenology with causing widespread grave-robbing. Threlkeld lived for nearly ffteen years with the Awabakal people at Lake Macquarie in New South Wales. In 1825 he recorded attending the burial of a local woman, at which he was approached by mourners, one man pleading with him ‘in broken English, that I would not disclose where the body was laid’. On asking why he should let anyone know about the grave, he was told that the woman’s relatives were afraid that ‘white fellow should come and take her head away’ (Threlkeld 1824). At the time Threlkeld thought that this

fear arose from the circumstances of several human heads having recently been brought from New Zealand, prepared for exportation by the New Zealanders, so as to exhibit all the tatooing [sic] of the skin on the face in the greatest perfection, and having been exposed for sale as a market- able commodity, this became soon known to the blacks in the Newcastle through their living News-mongers who quickly conveyed intelligence from tribe to tribe. (Threlkeld 1974, v. 1, p. 48)

As was noted in Chapter 3, there was indeed a market in toi moko on Sydney’s waterfront, until humanitarian agitation led Governor Darling to ban this ‘loathsome trade’ in 1831. European and American collectors were willing to pay as much £20 for heads tattooed with the artistry reserved for chiefs and warriors of distinction. But getting them was a dangerous business, for toi moko possess great mana (spiritual power). They could only be procured by risking being caught committing the dreadful 176 P. Turnbull sacrilege of robbing ancestral burial places or disfguring the dead, as was rumoured to have occurred at various times during the frst third of the nineteenth century (see Manning 1863, pp. 63–64). When he came write of his missionary life for the Christian Herald newspaper in the mid-1850s, Threlkeld wrote of the Awabakal burial, now attributing the fear of the woman’s relatives to phrenology, claiming that ‘many a grave had been opened’ to provide practitioners of the science with skulls (Threlkeld 1974, v. 1, p. 84). Threlkeld’s belief that this was the prime cause of the Awabakal fear may have been because he had learnt, presumably after the burial of this woman, that skulls had been obtained in the aftermath of a massacre that was said to have occurred in the west of the Bathurst district. In 1824, Thomas Brisbane (1773–1860), then Governor of New South Wales, declared martial law over the Bathurst region in an effort to put an end to escalating confict between pastoral squatters and Wiradjuri men. Threlkeld claimed to have been told by a magistrate who was then at Bathurst that a military detachment had driven a group of Wiradjuri men women and children into a swamp where they had been shot, and afterwards forty-fve of their heads were ‘collected and boiled down for the sake of the skulls!’ The magistrate, Threlkeld wrote, had told him that he had seen ‘the skulls packed for exportation in a case at Bathurst ready for shipment to accompany the commanding Offcer on his voyage shortly afterwards taken to England’ (Threlkeld 1974, v. 2, p. 49). Historian Keith Windschuttle has dismissed Threlkeld’s account, drawing attention to the fact that when the missionary wrote of the massacre in one of the instalments of the reminiscences he published in the Christian Herald in 1854, he was challenged to substantiate his claim, but responded that it was ‘only necessary to state that investigations did take place both in the Colonial Government and the Imperial Parliament at the proper time, and that now such atrocities can only be referred to as matters of history’. ‘No historian’, Windschuttle has observed, ‘has ever found these institutions making any such investigations’ (2000, p. 8). True; but before conceding that Threlkeld made the story up from vague rumours, we should not overlook the following brief item that appeared in The Australian newspaper in October 1827, described as taken from a London newspaper: 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 177

The Sydney papers notice a new export from the Colony, a great phrenologist having sent to England twenty heads of the Aborigines, who had lately fallen in a skirmish with the settlers in the interior. (News 1827a)

This cynical observation did in fact appear in one London newspaper and was reprinted by at least two provincial English journals in December 1826 (News 1826b). The source of the allegation was an item that had appeared in Sydney’s Monitor newspaper on 7 July 1826:

It is reported that Major M——took home a score or two of sculls of the Aborigines slaughtered in the late war. Of course the poor fellows to whose shoulders these said sculls once appertained, were not worthy of a Coroner’s Inquest, either before pending or subsequent to martial law. It is a pity but that with heads, the Phrenological Societies of Europe were not equally gratifed with excoriated shoulder-blades—as we understand the penal settlements of this part of the world could have furnished several very well executed specimens of this description. (News 1826a)

‘Major M——’ was almost certainly Major James Thomas Morriset (1780–1852) of the 48th Regiment, whom Governor Brisbane had appointed commandant at Bathurst in 1823. After martial law was declared the following year Morriset had few qualms about using the seventy or so soldiers under his command to forcefully break Wiradjuri resistance. We also know that he sailed for England in February 1825 (News 1825, 1827b). It has to be admitted nonetheless that there are grounds for doubting whether so many skulls of massacred Wiradjuri were shipped to England. There are no references to this cache of skulls in the published writings of contemporary phrenologists, or in surviving letters or other unpublished sources. Such was the value that British phrenologists of the 1820s attached to Australian skulls that acquisitions of only one or two were reported in phrenological journals; and one would thus expect to fnd the acquisition of a ‘score or two’ of skulls by either phrenologists or more conventionally-minded anatomists would have provoked detailed comment. It would have been the largest single acquisition of Australian items by any phrenological society or medico-scientifc institution prior to the early 1860s. 178 P. Turnbull

The Phrenological Musings of Barron Field One other member of the Australasian Philosophical Society whose phrenological interests deserves attention. This is Barron Field (1786– 1846), New South Wales’s frst Supreme Court Judge. Field had wide- ranging literary, historical and scientifc interests by the time he arrived in the colony in 1817. His encounters with the traditional owners of the Sydney region led to his giving a lecture to the Philosophical Society in 1822 ‘On the Aborigines of New Holland and Van Diemen’s Land’, the revised text of which appeared in a selection of papers read before the Society that he edited and persuaded the frm of John Murray, at this time Britain’s leading publisher of exploration and scientifc travel narratives, to publish in 1825 under the title Geographical Memoirs on New South Wales. Field’s ethnographic observations attracted little comment at the time, or in the years following their publication, beyond dismissal by one colonial critic as ‘a mere tissue of random hypotheses’ offered in a clumsy pretentious style (News 1828b, 161). In the late 1950s they were redis- covered by John Mulvaney, who drew attention to Field’s humanitarian concern for the plight of Indigenous people dispossessed of their country, and to his being one of the earliest colonial administrators to argue that they were a race incapable of being civilised and very likely to become extinct within several generations (Mulvaney 1967, pp. 16–17). What is not widely appreciated, however, is that Field’s fatalistic progno- sis was phrenologically grounded (Reece 1974, pp. 87–89). In writing of Indigenous people as destined to extinction, Field maintained that what mental strengths they possessed were largely confned to their having well developed cerebral organs that were the seat of faculties enabling ‘quick conceptions, and ready powers of imitation’; he was of the view that they were a race (or several closely related races) possessing weak powers of ‘refection, judgment or foresight’ (Field 1825, p. 225). Reading Field alert to his phrenological interests throws into perspective his divergence from the orthodox environmentalist account of varietal diversity then prevailing in contemporary British scientifc and intellectual circles. He believed that the phrenological investigation of Indigenous Australians proved Blumenbach to have been mistaken in thinking that mainland and Tasmanian Indigenous peoples were Malay varietal types. He was convinced they were of African ancestry, reasoning that the ‘skull, the genius, the habits, of the Australians have, in all of them, the 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 179 degenerate Ethiopian character, like that of the Andamaners, and the negro races of the Indian Islands’ (Field 1825, p. 197), and hence it was impossible to try to effect any mental improvement in the Australias’s frst peoples. As he was to lament poetically in concluding his observations, the duty of his fellow colonists was to humanely ease their passing into history:

Still let him prompt the lib’ral colonist To tender offces and pensive thoughts. Then let him pass, — a blessing on his head! And, long as he can wander, let him breathe The freshness of the woods. May never we pretend to civilize, And make him only captive! Let him be free of mountain solitudes; And let him, where and when he will, sit down Beneath the trees, and with his faithful dog Share his chance-gather’d meal; and, fnally, As in the eye of Nature he has lived, So in the eye of Nature let him die! —(Field 1825, pp. 228–229)

Phrenology During the 1830s and Beyond The Australasian Philosophical Society folded in just over a year, most likely due to the many calls on the time of its leading members. However, Alexander Berry, John Oxley and Thomas Hobbes Scott were prominent in the intellectual life of the colony. In 1826 they were among the founders of a subscription library offering the colony’s middle classes, and those artisans who could afford membership, access to new works of philosophy, literature and the natural sciences. They were joined in creating the library by William Bland (1789–1868), a naval surgeon originally transported to New South Wales for killing a man in a duel. At the end of his sentence, Bland became a successful medical practitioner and politician who actively campaigned for representative government in New South Wales (Cobley 1966). He too was drawn to phrenology, assembling a collection of some sixty cranial casts and busts of heads, which he gave on extended loan to the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts three years after its foundation in 1833. 180 P. Turnbull

The subscription library appears to have brought together members of the colonial elite who were curious about phrenology. In June 1828, the Sydney Gazette reported:

A great number of Gentlemen, most of whom are members of the Australian Library are on the eve of forming themselves into a body, to be called The Phrenological Society. About sixty Members may be reckoned at present … it is conjectured that the number will be considerably aug- mented. (News 1828a)

Prominent British phrenologists were delighted by news that there was such interest in the science in Sydney, but they were soon to be disappointed. An initial meeting was held at which a lecture introducing phrenology was given, but this did not lead to the formation of a society. Portions of the lecture were published in the Sydney Gazette in March 1829, likely in the hope of launching a second attempt to start a society. The substance and defensive tone of these extracts suggests, however, that phrenology had come under attack by prominent colonial churchmen, who, like their metropolitan brethren, saw the science as thinly veiled materialism. What press reportage of phrenology there was in the wake of the failure to found a society rarely moved beyond ridiculing its practitioners, along the lines of the following poetic put-down:

To seek out skulls of every shape, Bacon and Shakespeare, ass and Ape, Phrenologists take pains; And in their search they’re surely right, For ne’er was system brought to light, So much in want of brains. —News 1829b

Combeian Phrenology and the Indigenous Skull Phrenology made little progress in the Australian colonies during the 1820s, but gained a more sympathetic reception during the 1830s through the infuence of George Combe, whose Constitution of Man (1828) was one of the most popular and infuential British books of the nineteenth century, selling over 350,000 copies (Cooter 1984, esp. pp. 120–1; Van Wyhe 2004, pp. 127–40). Combe championed a version 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 181 of the science that endorsed Gall and Spurzheim’s teachings in respect of cerebral localisation and faculty psychology, but which rejected what Combe saw as the determinism of the science’s founders, believing that mental attributes and qualities could be favourably changed. Combe’s interest in phrenology was sparked by attending Spurzheim’s Edinburgh lectures and his dissection of a brain. However, his conversion to the science was slow and appears to have been intimately connected with his personal religious sensibilities. Phrenology seems to have held out the promise to Combe of meaning and emotional satisfaction beyond what he could fnd within the Church of Scotland or independent Protestantism. He came to see the science as the gift of a supremely wise creator, providing humankind with the means of achieving moral improvement through self-knowledge of their cerebral inheritance. Its core truth, he believed, was that the mind was capable of improvement through phrenologically informed behavioural management, which in turn could produce inheritable modifcations of the organs comprising the brain. In phrenology, individuals, families, communities and all races of men would fnd the means truly to know themselves and thereby to enhance their own and others’ capacity for moral progress. Poverty, crime and just about every other social evil historically afficting humankind could be overcome by its phrenological re-alignment to ‘laws plainly written in Nature for the direction of man’ (Gibbon 1878, v. 1, p. xi). It may be going too far to say that Combe made a secular faith out of phrenology, but he won for the science many converts among younger liberal-minded British medical practitioners, lawyers and small businessmen anxious to see politics, indeed all established social institutions reformed on the basis of rational, utilitarian principles. Combe’s championing of phrenology’s practical benefts did not go unchallenged in Britain’s turbulent political climate of the 1820s and early 1830s. He was ridiculed by traditionalist churchmen, establishment intellectuals, and notably the conservative leadership of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, who accused him of attempting to breathe new life into Gall and Spurzheim’s scientifcally nonsensical and socially disreputable materialism. Combe and his defenders responded that they were not Godless materialists: they did not deny the existence of the soul and free will, and accused their critics of self-interestedly retarding progress by holding back the natural reservoir of intellectual talent within the nation’s commercial and professional classes. 182 P. Turnbull

Combeian phrenology understandably aroused interest among colonial medical practitioners, lawyers, colonial offcers and businessmen who regarded themselves as constrained by their social origins from the full exercise of their natural talents. Phrenology encouraged them to see themselves as endowed with mental abilities ftting them for active participation in the governance and development of colonial society. Understandably, too, they made much of the science’s potential to more economically manage and reduce the dangers posed by a large convict population. In the early 1830s convicts made up about forty per cent of the non-indigenous population of the Australian colonies; and while we cannot accurately assess in relative terms how prevalent crime was, the perception of the governing elite and free settlers was that it was growing, and that the costs of policing threatened to restrict the capacity of government to promote the development of pastoralism and commerce. There was also anxiety that the majority of convictions were recorded against assigned and ex-convicts, and newspapers routinely reported outrages committed on the fringes of settlements by escapees. Prominent among Combe’s Sydney-based admirers was George Frederick Moncrieff (d. 1839), an Edinburgh medical graduate and assistant government surgeon. With the aid of Francis Lascelles Wallace (1811–1852), a fellow Scot and Edinburgh trained physician (News 1852), Moncrieff assembled a phrenological collection largely comprising convict skulls, including several he acquired when personally dissecting the bodies of executed felons. He used this collection in lectures and demonstrations he gave through the mid-1830s to show that men and women fallen to crime were ‘defcient in that form and capacity of the skull … necessary to the possession of strong powers of reasoning’ (News 1834b). It was possible, he maintained, to phrenologically distinguish those in the convict population likely to be rehabilitated from those who would almost certainly offend again. Combe’s colonial admirers understandably stressed the practical value of phrenology for managing convicts reducing crime and preventing recidivism. But Combeian phrenology also spoke to other hopes and fears of free settlers. Employers could use the science to assess the moral character and skills of applicants. Young men and women and their parents could phrenologically appraise potential spouses to guarantee mari- tal harmony. The science could also be used to enhance the chances of dynastic good fortune by having children assessed to determine which trades or professions best suited their mental talents. 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 183

While the analysis of Indigenous Australian skulls fgured prominently among colonial followers of phrenology in the 1820s, there appears to have been less interest in their acquisition and appraisal by the 1830s and thereafter. This was despite Combe and his Edinburgh circle calling for the development of ‘national phrenology’, a specialised feld comparing the crania of non-European races in order to map the ‘national form and combination of organs… corresponding with the respective characters of the tribes’ (Combe 1837, p. 170). ‘National phrenology’ would, or so Combe argued, provide a scientifc basis for policies and programs for the welfare and improvement of racially diverse peoples under British colonial rule. Recently it has been suggested that Combeian phrenology held Indigenous Australians to be naturally incapable of improvement, thus adding weight to the polygenetic innatist interpretation of race espoused by Robert Knox and his admirers in the London Anthropological Society (Anderson 2007, pp. 130–133; Anderson and Perrin 2008, p. 20). Certainly Combe was an admirer of Samuel Morton, the American polygenist craniologist, who, as we saw in the previous chapter, accepted the phrenological premise that skull shape was a reliable indicator of racially typical attributes and qualities of mind. Combe too held that the skulls of Australians and other ‘savage tribes’ had head shapes indicative of ‘great defciencies in the moral and intellectual organs’ (Combe 1837, p. 166). However, he was no polygenist: he did not believe that racial traits were fxed and immutable. Rather, he saw the bodily economy as divinely regulated through natural processes that allowed the form of the brain and the qualities of mind to be modifed by human agency, and for the resulting changes to be transmitted by parents to their offspring (Combe 1837, pp. 167–171). Phrenology, Combe argued, would enable colonial authorities to devise regimes for Australian and other Indigenous peoples in which benefcial qualities of mind could be cultivated and increasingly strengthened through successive future generations (Combe 1837, p. 167). When he spoke of the mental powers of Indigenous peoples he did so referring to their ‘present brain’, confdent that phrenology would effect changes in its organisation causing them in time to ‘desire civilization … and adopt it when offered’ (1837, pp. 190–191). And to this end it logically followed that the benefts of national phrenology could be accelerated by selective interracial marriage (Combe 1837, p. 159). 184 P. Turnbull

Naturally enough, the progress of national phrenology was seen as requiring the acquisition of racially typical skulls in numbers beyond what had so far been secured in the cause of the science. But whereas the previous focus of collecting had been on acquiring skulls of racially homogenous ancestry, national phrenology also required the acquisition of the skulls of men and women of mixed racial ancestry, for the success of this sub-branch of the science was seen to hinge on accumulating knowledge enabling the identifcation and cultivation of desirable mental attributes and qualities in contexts where one or more inter-ethnic reproductive trends were already evident or seemed likely soon to occur. Interest in national phrenology was meagre and short-lived. It appealed to only a handful of mostly junior offcials in various British colonial possessions during the 1830s and 1840s. In Australia, only one administrator appears to have taken it seriously. This was Alexander Maconochie (1787–1860), who served as commandant of the Norfolk Island convict station in the early 1840s. Maconochie was a Christian humanitarian and penal reformer who could easily reconcile his faith in Christ with the teachings of phrenology (Barry 1967; De Giustino 1972, pp. 456–460). In July 1837 he approached Richard Bourke (1777–1855), the Governor of New South Wales, with the idea of promoting peaceful relations between settlers and the traditional owners of the Port Phillip District by training young Indigenous men as police (Bridges 1971, 114–116) (however, no mention was made of phrenology playing a part in the training of the mounted force that Bourke agreed to establish). Otherwise national phrenology appears to have sparked little or no interest among colonial followers of the science. Doctors George Moncrieff and Frederick Wallace lectured at the Sydney Mechanics’ School of Arts. There were also lectures at the School in the early 1840s by Arthur à Beckett (1812–1871), a surgeon and later parlia- mentarian, and Archibald Michie (1813–1899), a successful Sydney barris- ter with political ambitions (á Beckett 1828; Hall 1974). However, press reportage suggests that these lectures focused on detailing the moral and material benefts of phrenology for individual settlers and their society as a whole. Frederick Wallace appears to have been the only Sydney lecturer who spoke of the phrenological implications of Indigenous cranial morphology. This was in a lecture he gave in August 1838, in which after phrenologically comparing Indigenous skulls to European, Polynesian and Peruvian crania he explained how the differences in their cranial shape proved the ‘general superiority of Europeans over the Indian Nations’ and that ‘the Indigenous 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 185 people of this Colony’ stood ‘lowest in the scale of humanity and intellect’ (News 1838b). Doubtless many in Wallace’s audience agreed; for the late 1830s was a time of anxiety and polarised opinion on escalating confict between Aborigines people and pastoralists in New South Wales’s frontier districts. In fact Wallace gave his lecture when public debate on how to end frontier violence was sharply divided and infected with aggressive racialism—and was to become more later that year after eleven convict and ex-convict pastoral workers were charged with the murder of twenty-eight Indigenous men, women and children at Myall Creek (Milliss 1992, pp. 274–321; Reece 1974, ch. 4). It seems doubtful, however, that Wallace’s phrenological assessment of Indigenous psychology in this context won phrenology new converts or greater credibility. The only commentary his lecture met with was a satire published by the Colonist newspaper in the form of a letter from ‘A Phrenologist’, ridiculing national phrenology and portraying its would-be practitioners as advocating the improvement of the Indigenous race by releas- ing women imprisoned in the Parramatta Factory and sending them to frontier regions as wives for Indigenous men, while also arranging for young Indigenous women to be ‘distributed among our stockmen and shepherds on the frontier’ (News 1838c). Historians who have drawn attention to this letter have failed to realise that it was satire (Reece 1974, p. 91). The Colonist was founded and run under tight editorial control by John Dunmore Lang (1799–1878), then the most infuential Presbyterian minister in the Australian colonies. Lang sought to defend Indigenous people and convince colonial opinion in the wake of the Myall Creek massacre that they were as capable of living Godly civilised lives as any European. It was phrenology he had in mind when writing in an editorial, shortly after publishing the satire,

That the Aborigines are our fellow-men might be regarded as a self- evident proposition were it not for the notorious fact, that its truth has been somewhat more than questioned by certain fanatics calling themselves philosophers. (Lang 1838)

Lang was joined by the more secular-minded Australian, which reproduced an article that had appeared some months previously in the English press on the exhibition in London of a series of drawings of 186 P. Turnbull

‘native chiefs of New South Wales’. The author had written that these drawings invited the conclusion that

the Australian aborigines are not at all defcient in mental powers; the majority of the chiefs possess foreheads of extraordinary heights, such indeed as would dispose phrenologists to assume them capable of receiving the highest mental culture. (News 1838a)

The editor of The Australian observed that Indigenous mental ability was a subject whereon ‘vast differences of opinion existed among the professors of such abstruse sciences as that of phrenology’ (News 1838a). Differences did indeed exist. As we have seen, Combeian phrenology held that all humankind was naturally capable of mental improvement; and it comes as little surprise to fnd that Combe’s views were endorsed by colonial practitioners of the science. William Paton (1800–1854), for example, a Tasmanian surgeon and temperance campaigner, spoke at Launceston’s School of Arts in 1843 of having examined the crania of two murderers of European ancestry, two Tasmanian Aborigines and the skull of an Indigenous man from the Port Phillip District. The shape of the murderers’ crania, he believed, demonstrated they had lacked ‘all the faculties that tend to ennoble and elevate human nature’. In this respect he believed that they differed markedly from one of the Tasmanian Indigenous skulls in his possession which, he contended, ‘would not have disgraced the shoulders of a philosopher’ (News 1843, p. 4). We also have correspondence in 1825 between Threlkeld and Saxe Bannister (1790–1877), then New South Wales’s Attorney General These letters have been read as showing that the Christian humanitarian Bannister believed in the ‘innate defciency’ of Indigenous Australians (Reece 1974, p. 91). However, what passed between the two men on the subject of phrenology was that Bannister simply informed Threlkeld without further comment that phrenological examinations of Indigenous people had been undertaken by Francois Louis Busseuil (1791–1835), chief surgeon aboard Thétis, a French naval survey frigate that had arrived in Sydney in July 1825 during Hyacinthe de Bougainville’s (1781–1846) world expedition of 1824–1826 (Sydney’s small coterie of dedicated phrenologists seem not to have known of Busseuil’s activities). Surviving letters between Threlkeld and Bannister also jdisclose that during his two year tenure as Attorney General, Bannister was supportive of Threlkeld’s work with the Awabakal people having no doubt that 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 187

Indigenous people were not innately incapable of being civilised through missionary endeavours (Threlkeld 1974, v. 2, pp. 186–187).

A Science in Decline In both Britain and the Australian colonies, middle class participation in phrenological societies declined from the late 1830s. This occurred partly because of Combe’s and other leading practitioners’ inability to respond convincingly to mainstream medico-scientifc authorities who argued that advances in the study of the brain’s structures had shown phrenology’s mapping of discrete faculties originating in specifc ‘organs’ within the cerebellum had no empirical basis. The idea that the brain was the material substratum of the mind was not at issue, but it seemed questionable whether emotions and intellectual powers arose in different parts of the cerebellum. What was also responsible for the decline in membership of phrenological societies was the growth of artisan and working class interest in the science (see Cooter 1984). British phrenological societies sought to attract artisans and those they deemed respectable working class men to the science, encouraging them to capitalise on, identify and strengthen their mental abilities. They did not foresee that those whom they encouraged to develop their natural abilities would use the science to justify their securing greater participation in civic life and politics. Similarly, in the Australian colonies, medical practitioners, lawyers and businessmen who actively championed phrenology during the 1830s encouraged artisans and skilled workers to take up the science by giving lectures and demonstrations at schools of arts and mechanics institutes. Newspaper reportage of these events suggest that they drew good audiences from these social strata, and quite likely won over some who attended, although it also seems clear that many came just to be entertained by the spectacle of friends and neighbours having their ‘true’ character revealed by cranial examination. The credibility of phrenology among both metropolitan and colonial bourgeois was further weakened by artisan and working class interest in the science creating a market for self-styled ‘doctors’ and ‘professors’ specialising in phrenological fortune-telling and patent medicines supposedly rectifying cerebral weaknesses. A number of these men also claimed expertise in mesmerism, electro-magnetism and hypnotism, and some, like the Sydney ‘Ultra-Phrenologist’ Mr. Moreau, went as far as to 188 P. Turnbull offer advice for a fee on ‘all questions which involve loss or gain’, ranging from real estate speculation to horse racing (News 1860b). But most of these phrenological entrepreneurs sought to distance themselves from the likes of Moreau. They represented themselves as serious students of phrenology, blending instruction in the science with entertaining demonstrations of its truths—although they were conscious that the more time they spent reading the crania of members of the audience in their lectures, the larger their audiences would be. The publicity they gained thus proved a double-edged sword: newspaper reportage of their lectures swelled audience numbers and their door takings, but it enabled press commentators to use phrenology as grist for satirical comment on local politics and other topical concerns of the day. One of the more successful of these itinerant self-styled experts was Archibald S. Hamilton, whose career is the subject of a remarkable study by Alexandra Roginski (2015). Hamilton lived by lecturing and giving private head readings, from his arrival in Australia from Scotland in the mid-1850s until just before his death in 1884. He was unusual in two respects: he was one of only several itinerant professional phrenologists we know of who compared Indigenous and European skulls in his lectures; and he was able to do this because in his possession were rather more than just one or two Indigenous skulls. In fact, by the time of his death, Hamilton had acquired the skulls of thirty men and women of Indigenous descent. As to how he acquired these skulls, Roginski provides a vivid and disturbing account of his attempting to procure the head of Jim Crow, an Indigenous man found guilty of rape, who in 1860 was hanged and buried in the general cemetery of the New South Wales town of Maitland. By all accounts Hamilton was an obsessive narcissist with a record of dishonesty. His attempt to procure the heads of Crow and another hanged man led to his arrest and trial for inciting the cemetery’s sexton to unlawfully disinter bodies. Hamilton, conducting his own defence, boasted of his expertise and ‘made no secret of how he came into possession of such skulls’:

Some he had assisted to dissect immediately after execution; others were given to him by men in high offce under Government, and the remainder he disinterred in the bush of Australia. All these facts were known to the people who attended his lectures, yet they gave him their patronage and applause. (News 1860a; Roginski 2015) 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 189

Another phrenological entrepreneur who pressed Indigenous skulls into the service of the science was the Melbourne-based Philomen Sohier (n.d.), who claimed to have been a professor at the ‘University of France’ (Sohier 1861). Sohier spent several years lecturing in Melbourne and on Victoria’s goldfelds before setting up a phrenological practice in the city in 1857. Promoting himself as Melbourne’s frst expert in ‘practical phrenology’, he assured prospective clients who might have doubts about his expertise that a fattering account of his frst public lecture at the city’s Mechanics Institute could be read in the Argus newspaper, which he stressed was renowned for its commitment to promoting moral respect- ability. Those who consulted the piece would have found it in fact politely evasive about the accuracy of Sohier’s cranial readings of volunteers from the audience, saying no more than that his lecture had ‘afforded a good deal of amusement and information’ (News 1854, p. 5). Shortly after setting up his Melbourne practice, Sohier and Ellen Williams (d. 1859), his de facto wife, took over a waxworks show, adding a phrenological museum to its attractions. The museum, containing various casts, skulls and busts, was housed in the same room as wax fgures of notorious British and colonial criminals, the heads of which Sohier claimed were nearly all modelled from casts that he personally had taken ‘before many witnesses’. Sohier and Williams capitalised on local murder trials, as well as sensational British cases covered in the Melbourne press; however, public fascination with these exhibits does not seem to have greatly beneftted Sohier in marketing his phrenological expertise. Writing of phrenology’s infuence on colonial racial thought, Henry Reynolds has drawn attention to Sohier’s appearance before a select committee of the Victorian Legislative Council that sat in 1858–1859 to inquire into the state of the colony’s Indigenous population (Reynolds 1974). Sohier appeared at his own request, and the reception of his testimony points to phrenology having little if any credibility in contemporary Victorian government and intellectual circles—despite the select committee’s interest in collecting information of anthropological interest to metropolitan scientists. The thrust of Sohier’s submission was that phrenological analysis of Indigenous crania confrmed that the improvement of adult Indigenous men and women would prove at best ‘a very diffcult achievement’, but that there was hope the condition of the colony’s Indigenous population would improve if Indigenous children were taken from their parents and raised in government- or missionary- run institutions. Sohier, ended his submission by venting his frustration 190 P. Turnbull at the lack of interest so far shown in the practical value of phrenology, warning that

the great inferiority of the race, combined with the small brain will cause the whole race to be extinct before learned men, as a body, have the moral courage, or honest common sense of taking the subject of practical phrenology in their always August, but not often unprejudiced consideration. (Victoria 1858, p. 47)

In its report the select committee recommended the creation of ‘reserves for the various tribes on their own hunting grounds’ where they would be encouraged to adopt agriculture and manage livestock. Contradicting Sohier, it stressed that the colony’s Indigenous people were ‘possessed of mental powers on a par with their brethren of the other races of man’. There was every reason to think that under paternal supervision the Indigenous inhabitants of the colony could be ‘civilised and Christianised’ (Victoria 1858, v). And in what was clearly a rebut- tal of Sohier, Thomas McCombie (1819–1869), the committee’s chair and architect of its key recommendations, declared that Indigenous Australians were ‘perceptive, apt learners’, pointedly referring to the American ethnologist Charles Pickering (1805–1878), who in his Races of Man (1854) argued that native Australians had no natural intellectual defciencies, and had heads which ‘might be compared with an antique bust of a philosopher’ (Victoria 1858, p. v).

Assessing the Impact of Phrenology From around 1817 to the late 1830s the meaning and values that Indigenous Australian skulls acquired amongst phrenologists aroused the curiosity of men prominent in colonial administration, commerce, medicine and other professions. Skulls were procured in the belief that they strikingly confrmed the core tenets of this unorthodox psychological science. Most were acquired by plundering burial places, although as we have also seen, several are known to have been cut from the bodies of Indigenous people killed by military parties or settlers. From the early 1830s, metropolitan and colonial phrenologists appear to have become less interested in investigating Indigenous cranial morphology, even though it would appear that Australian skulls continued to be prized additions to phrenological collections, and fgures such as George 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 191

Combe encouraged the collecting of skulls in connection with promoting the phrenological governance of native peoples in British colonial possessions. How many skulls became phrenological specimens is impossible to determine. The attempts of Indigenous Australians to secure the return of their ancestral dead since the early 1970s has given rise to claims that hundreds of heads were acquired. We have the testimony of the missionary Lancelot Threlkeld that phrenology led to ‘many a grave having been opened’. But what phrenological publications and private papers of leading practitioners survive suggest that the number of skulls and cranial bones acquired by individual phrenologists, or by societies dedicated to the science, was not much more than the number acquired by mainstream medico-scientifc researchers and institutions during the frst half of the nineteenth century. There is no reason to think that the total number was more than 200 skulls. The more important question is what infuence the use of Indigenous skulls in the production of phrenological knowledge had on European perceptions of Indigenous people. In the 1970s, R.H.W. Reece concluded that phrenology was ‘certainly the most popular theory explaining Aboriginal Inferiority’ (1974, p. 87), on the basis of noting the frequent press coverage of lectures on phrenological science given at schools of arts and mechanics institutes in the 1830s. Even if we grant that these lectures were popular, the coverage they gained suggests that people attended out of curiosity or wanting an evening’s entertainment, and left unconverted. Overall, what reportage there was of phrenology in the colonial press invites the conclusion that its few dedicated followers failed to overcome doubts about its scientifc status and social respect- ability within the colonial elite and middle classes. It also appears that after the mid-1820s phrenological practitioners were little interested in demonstrating the cerebral peculiarities of Indigenous people and focused their energies on convincing the colonial public of the benefts they could gain from applying the science to their own lives. Certainly the science as taught by Spurzheim gained a small number of followers within the colonial elite of New South Wales during the 1820s, while the following decade saw a revival of interest in phrenology as reformulated by George Combe. The attraction of the science in its Combeian form was its rejection of Spurzheim’s determinist reasoning that qualities of mind were incapable of signifcant modifcation by human agency, in favour of the belief that substantial mental 192 P. Turnbull improvement could be achieved by phrenologically informed behavioural conditioning. Even so, Combe’s calls for the management of the destiny of Inidgenous people through the development of national phrenology does not appear to have been infuential, nor a direct stimulus for collecting Indigenous skulls. But this is not to say that phrenology did not contribute to the suasiveness of biologically determinist perceptions of Indigenous people. Rather, the evidence explored in this chapter suggests it did so in more oblique and diffuse ways. It is worth recalling Henry Reynold’s observation in the mid-1970s that phrenology was less important in infuencing colonial racial thought than a vague yet ‘ubiquitous concept of savagery’ (1974, p. 50). This was certainly the case. But we would do well to see that this concept of savagery owed its persuasiveness in popular discourse to its putative scientifc status. Mainstream scientifc thinking about the nature and origins of human variation was often an integral element in the representation of savagery in popular discourse as the outcome of Indigenous peoples experiencing the degeneration of its intellectual capabilities by necessarily living by hunting and gathering. It was arguably a similar story with phrenology. The science gained nothing like the number of followers that its critics feared; but even its most vocal detractors accepted that the brain was the organ of the mind. Moreover, as we saw in Chapter 4, the infuence of Georges Cuvier among British anatomists and ethnographers was such that they readily accepted his reasoning, on the basis of cranial thickness and internal volume that African and other darkly pigmented peoples had suffered an irreversible degree of intellectual degeneration. Even ardent believers in the unity and natural equality of humankind, such as James Cowles Prichard, were inclined to agree with Cuvier that the brain was as susceptible as any other bodily structure to racial variation through the infuence of climate and cultural practices (Prichard 1836, p. 216). In short, one did not need to believe in Gall, Spurzheim or Combe’s mappings of the mind to specifc parts of the brain to credit the notion that cranial morphology confrmed the fact that Indigenous Australians supposedly stood ‘lowest in the scale of humanity and intellect’. We fnd in fact that colonial phrenologists commonly attributed what they declared to be the ‘miserable manifestation of mind’ in Australia’s frst peoples to the overall ‘smallness of the Aboriginal brain’ rather than to the phrenological peculiarities of its organisation. Alexander Knowles (n.d.), for example, a professed member of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society who lectured in South East Queensland in the early 1850s, 6 ‘RARE WORK FOR THE PROFESSORS’: PHRENOLOGISTS … 193 claimed to ‘have examined the skulls of many “black-fellows” in different parts of the colony, and invariably found that these were about double the thickness and density of a “white-fellow’s”’. He was convinced that even if the external measurement of such a skull was equal to that of a European, the measure of brain or thinking power [in the latter] would be ‘very much superior’ (News 1851, p. 4). In short, by simply and erroneously regarding brain size as a reliable indicator of mental power, mainstream anatomical science furnished an intellectual resource that was more than suffcient to strengthen racialised perceptions of Indigenous people without the assistance of phrenology’s mapping of their mind. CHAPTER 7

Colonial Museums and the Indigenous Dead, c. 1830–1874

By the late 1860s, museums had been established on the basis of recur- rent but frugal public funding in all but Perth (the Western Australian Museum was not established until 1891). Sydney’s and Melbourne’s museums refected in choice of name the economic strengths, political infuence and the aspirations of the elites of New South Wales and Victoria to educate their citizenry and advance science within the British empire: Sydney had its ‘Australian Museum’, while Melbourne boasted a ‘National Museum’. The trustees and curators of the Tasmanian, South Australian and Queensland Museums likewise envisaged their institutions playing a prominent part in public education, economic advancement and the progress of imperial science. This chapter and the two that follow explore the collecting and scientifc use of Indigenous bodily remains in Australia from the 1830s, which saw the earliest attempts to create local anthropological collections, to the eve of the First World War. I begin by exploring colonial collecting of remains prior to the early 1860s, after which I draw attention to how the evolutionary signifcance that metropolitan Darwinian anatomists attributed to Indigenous Australian morphology led them to seek the help of colonially-based scientists, museum curators and other contacts to increase the size and thus the evidential value of their collections of bones and other bodily material of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders. Here, particular attention is paid to Gerard Krefft, the German-born and scientifcally trained curator of the Australian Museum

© The Author(s) 2017 195 P. Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia, Palgrave Studies in Pacifc History, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51874-9_7 196 P. Turnbull between 1861 and 1874. British Darwinians found an intellectual ally in Krefft, who was ready to help Thomas Henry Huxley, and possibly other metropolitan scientists, obtain typologically representative crania and other skeletal remains. However, as we will see, Krefft was the frst of several Australian museum curators of the half-century after 1860 whose readiness to help fellow evolutionists was qualifed by the desire to see his museum come to play a leading role in human evolutionary science by capitalising on the possibilities its location offered for collecting the remains of the Indigenous dead. My focus narrows in Chapter 8 to explore the anthropological ambitions of three leading museum curators: Krefft’s successor Edward Pierson Ramsay, a self-taught ornithologist and zoologist, who led Sydney’s Australian Museum from 1874 to 1894; Edward Charles Stirling, a Cambridge-trained physiologist who served as board chair- man and then director of the South Australian Museum between 1884 and 1912; and Walter Baldwin Spencer, the Oxford-trained biologist and pioneering anthropologist, under whose direction, from 1899 until the early 1920s, the National Museum of Victoria came to possess one of the most signifcant collections of Indigenous Australian cultural artefacts and bodily remains. Chapter 9, the third in this trio of chapters, focuses on the collecting of ancestral remains by the curators and trustees of the Queensland Museum, and their interactions with local and visiting anthropologists from the 1870s until the years prior to the outbreak of the First World War. Here my concern is to show that while the impetus for museum’s anthropological collecting heightened scientifc interest in the Indigenous body, it occurred in the context of popular discourse representing the opening of Queensland’s west and north for settlement as having been won despite savage resistance by the land’s traditional owners. Pride in the progress of settler society was notably refected how the museum selectively displayed its acquisitions of ancestral remains, notably those of the coastal rainforest people of Far North Queensland. By the late 1880s, however, a shift had occurred in how the Indigenous people of Queensland’s remote western and northern regions were perceived in both medico-scientifc circles and wider popular discourse. Racialised perceptions of indigeneity became more pronounced, as those of the colony’s traditional owners who had survived what was very often violent dispossession of their ancestral country and were forced to live on cattle stations and the fringes of white settlements were no longer seen as a threat to progress, but as a problem to be 7 COLONIAL MUSEUMS AND THE INDIGENOUS DEAD, C. 1830–1874 197 managed. The Museum continued to collect remains, but shared what was by this time the common view within and beyond scientifc circles that the surviving Indigenous tribes of the colony’s western and northern regions were doomed to racial extinction: indeed, it strove to collect the bodily remains of Queensland’s traditional owners in the context of scientifc anxiety that time was fast running out to study what supposedly was a rapidly diminishing pool of racially pristine representatives of what might be the most archaic living form of Homo sapiens. It has long been a commonplace in Australian historiography that Darwinian evolutionism fxed in the European imagination the false and pernicious notion that Australia’s frst peoples were biologically primitive, inferior types of humankind. Since Indigenous Australians began successfully campaigning for the return of their Old People in the early 1970s, wide public credence has been given to the view that in collecting and scientifcally investigating Indigenous remains, scientists used Darwin’s arguments in respect of evolution by speciation to fabricate pseudo- scientifc grounds for justifying the dispossession and colonial subjugation of their ancestors. Media reportage of the return of remains to the care of communities by museums and medical schools has had a pronounced tendency to represent scientists involved in the acquisition and analysis of remains as wanting to prove that Indigenous Australians were a ‘missing link’ or intermediate form between humankind and simian species. This chapter and the two that follow critically assess how the collection and analysis of remains infuenced perceptions of Indigenous Australians in both the colonial and metropolitan contexts. In doing so, it will be shown that there were disturbing connections between science, museums and the collecting of ancestral remains, but it also shows that these connections were more complex than is popularly thought. Contrary to what has been claimed in popular media, anatomists and anthropologists of the second half of the long nineteenth century had no interest in seeking evidence scientifcally confrming Indigenous biological primitivity and hence inferiority to European racial types. As was discussed in Chapter 4, it was generally assumed within European scientifc circles by the early 1820s that Indigenous Australians were naturally inferior. What motivated scientists was rarely if ever racial chauvinism, but in the main curiosity about the causes of human variation and the place of Australia’s frst peoples in the natural history of humanity. Certainly some researchers of the later nineteenth century were drawn to investigate the remains of mainland and Tasmanian Aboriginal 198 P. Turnbull people believing that they were possibly a transitional form between Homo sapiens and the higher apes; however, most engaged in or encouraged the collection and study of remains in the more modest belief that they might furnish new evidence illustrative of evolutionary adaptations within the human species, and perhaps also yield important clues about genealogical connections between living and extinct hominids. This said, regardless of what they saw in Indigenous Australian morphology, these investigators, by their curiosity about the origins and subsequent natural history of humanity, stimulated the collecting of remains of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders on a scale that greatly surpassed that which had occurred during the frst seventy or so years of Australian colonisation. As discussed in Chapter 3, the fow of Australian remains into scientifc collections was small compared to the acquisition of the remains of peoples of African and Asian ethnicity, and by the mid- 1860s probably no more than 200 Australian crania and other skeletal bones are known to have come to lay in British and colonial anatomical and phrenological collections. However, between 1860 and the late 1920s, the remains of around ten times as many people were acquired by Australian museums and medical school anatomy collections, while in the same period the bones of just over 1000 individuals were obtained by overseas natural history and anatomical museums. Most went to British medico-scientifc collections, with the remainder to be found in museums and medical school collections from Dublin to St Petersburg.

Before Darwin In order to appreciate how evolutionism provided the intellectual stimulus for the collecting of remains by Australian museums, it seems best first to survey briefly what we know of anthropological activities in the Australian colonial context before the publication of Darwin’s explaining the origin of new species by means of natural and sexual selection. British imperial science was characterised by scientific activity in the settler colonies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa developing through several relatively distinct successive phases. As Roy Macleod has persuasively argued, these phases were roughly analogous to the development of governance of these colonies from direct control by the British parliament to eventual independent dominion status (Macleod 1982). In the Australian context, researchers in British metropolitan universities, 7 COLONIAL MUSEUMS AND THE INDIGENOUS DEAD, C. 1830–1874 199 medico-scientific institutions and a growing number of museums and specialised technical institutions held a near monopoly on the production of scientific knowledge until the last third of the nineteenth century. Science in colonial contexts prior to the 1860s was largely confined to descriptive reports of newly discovered minerals, flora and fauna, and collecting specimens for analysis and interpretation by metropolitan experts. There were, of course, exceptions. In the Australian context, for example, Sydney’s Australian Museum owed its establishment in 1827 to Alexander Macleay (1767–1848), the Colonial Secretary of New South Wales. Prior to his arrival in the colony, Macleay’s passions for entomol- ogy and botany had won him fellowships of the Linnaean and Royal Societies. He encouraged the scientifc interests of his eldest son, William Sharp Macleay (1792–1865), whose entomological research brought him to the attention of leading European scientists. The younger Macleay, in fact, developed a taxonomic system that London’s leading extramural anatomy teacher, Joshua Brookes, employed to organise his zoological specimens (Brookes 1828, p. 7), as did Richard Owen when arranging the specimens of tunicates held by the Royal College of Surgeons (Moyal 1965). Macleay’s system also interested for a time Thomas Henry Huxley. After he settled in Sydney in 1839, the younger Macleay continued to participate in metropolitan theorising and debates on the meanings of morphological differences in the forms of living organisms. Together with his father, he envisaged the Australian Museum creating collections that would enable new generations of local naturalists to play an active part in the progress of imperial science; but he accepted that for some time to come colonial scientific activity would only slowly evolve beyond collecting, describing and exporting geological, plant and faunal specimens for metropolitan analysis and interpretation. The predicament of the Australian Museum was typical of these colonial museums. The New South Wales legislature was persuaded to vote enough funds to employ a curator, but little more. Things were diffcult. The surgeon and naturalist Geor ge Bennett, whose collecting of Indigenous remains was discussed in the second chapter of this study, served as curator 200 P. Turnbull and secretary of the Australian Museum between 1836 and 1841, but was forced to spend much of his time in medical practice because, as he com- plained to Richard Owen, ‘the museum appointment … made only 100 pounds per annum & is therefore anything but lucrative’ (Bennett 1836). Twenty more years passed before New South Wales politicians felt suffciently confdent about the stability of government revenues to vote the Australian Museum suffcient annual funding to enable the appointment of a full-time scientifcally qualifed curator and staff to collect and prepare specimens. It also helped that the museum then found a strong supporter in the colony’s governor William Denison (1804–1871), a champion of popular education and keen amateur naturalist. Gubernatorial patronage also helped colonists active in scientifc pursuits to establish museums in the capital cities of Tasmania, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland. Denison was lieutenant governor of Tasmania for ten years before his appointment to the governorship of New South Wales in 1856. During this time he actively promoted popular education and scientifc investigation of the island’s remarkable geology, fora and fauna. In this he followed his three predecessors in the offce by supporting the aspirations of the colony’s small but remarkably active circle of amateur naturalists. The frst of these three patrons of science in Tasmania was Sir John Franklin, a naval offcer with wide-ranging scientifc interests, many of which were shared by his spouse, Lady Jane Franklin. Shortly after they arrived in Hobart in 1837 they encouraged the founding of a natural history society and helped it establish a museum and library. John Franklin’s successor was Sir John Eardley-Wilmot (1783–1847), under whose patronage the frst Royal Society in Australasia was founded in Hobart. Eardley-Wilmot was in turn succeeded after briefy holding offce by Charles James Latrobe (1801–1875), who had previously been superintendent of the Port Phillip District. Latrobe had been the patron of the Melbourne Mechanics Institute from shortly after its establishment in 1839. By the mid-1840s the institute had a small museum that thanks to his support had collections of geological, fora and faunal specimens, as well as a modest collection of Indigenous artefacts and skeletal remains. The probable donor of these remains, incidentally, was Edmund Hobson, an executive member of the institute, who, as we saw in Chapter 3, sent Indigenous skulls to Richard Owen for the Royal College of Surgeons. Despite Latrobe’s patronage the museum proved too costly for the Institute to run; and it was not until 1853, some two years after the 7 COLONIAL MUSEUMS AND THE INDIGENOUS DEAD, C. 1830–1874 201

Port Phillip District became the colony of Victoria, that the nucleus of Melbourne’s National Museum was established. Here too, Latrobe, who became the colony’s frst governor after its separation from New South Wales, played an infuential role. He persuaded his executive council to grant initial funding to create museums of geology and natural history which were envisaged as being administered by a ‘Royal’ scientifc society, as in Tasmania. A society was created in mid-1854, but personal rivalries and declining government revenues from land sales and gold mining led to the museum of natural history being administered by the newly established University of Melbourne. This was seen as having the advantages of reducing the level of ongoing public investment in the museum, and of trusting its direction to the university’s foundation professor of natural science, Frederick McCoy (1817–1899). Adelaide’s South Australian Museum similarly originated with prominent citizens with interests in the natural sciences winning gubernatorial support. They formed a society under the patronage of George Gawler (1795–1869), the second governor of the colony, in 1836. Within three years the society had a museum, the frst donations to which were marine shells and ‘a collection of weapons and instruments used by the natives in the neighbourhood’ of Adelaide. The society, however, was short-lived, and it was not until the creation of the South Australian Philosophical Society in 1853 that the colony’s legislative council was persuaded to vote annual funding for a public library and museum. Even then it was not until the early 1860s that the museum was able to employ a full-time scientifcally-trained curator: Frederick Waterhouse (1815–1898), a naturalist who had previously been employed at the British Museum. It was much the same story in Queensland. After the colony’s foundation by separation from New South Wales in 1859, a small group of professional men, civil servants and pastoralists in the Moreton Bay and Darling Downs districts established a society ‘for the discussion of scientifc subjects, with special reference to the natural history, soil, climate and agriculture of the colony of Queensland’ (News 1862). George Bowen (1821–1899), the colony’s frst governor, readily agreed to be patron of the Philosophical Society of Queensland, as it was known, which by the end of 1862 had established a museum in cramped temporary rooms provided by the colonial executive in a convict built windmill subsequently converted into a signals station. 202 P. Turnbull

As Queensland’s per capita public debt was then the highest of the Australian colonies, Bowen and his executive council were understandably unwilling to favour the society with more than housing its museum, and even less enthusiastic after the colony fell into recession in the mid- 1860s. It was not until 1871 that the colonial government assumed responsibility for the administration of the museum, after which it progressively secured more space in public buildings until late 1879, when it was moved into purpose-built premises under the direction of a full-time curator. The genteel amateur naturalists responsible for founding Australia’s museums were keen to build collections of Indigenous artefacts and bodily remains, motivated not by any pronounced desire to justify the dispossession of the colony’s traditional owners, but out of curiosity—albeit grounded in and refective of confdence in their own racial superiority—about the origins, lifeways and beliefs of Indigenous people. They also sought to collect artefacts and remains, anxious that the continent’s ‘native races’ were in danger of being lost to science; for they shared the view common in British political, colonial administrative and intellectual circles since the late 1830s that Indigenous Australians appeared incapable of surviving the expropriation of their lands for pastoralism and agriculture. It was generally been a source of moral disquiet that native peoples’ resistance to settler ambitions had frequently led to their indiscriminate killing; but the consensus was that settler violence was only a contributory cause, not the primary reason, for the rapid collapse of Indigenous populations with the spread of white settlement. Colonial naturalists were inclined to agree with medically trained observers like George Bennett, who, as we saw in Chapter 3 of this study, concluded on encountering evidence of high Indigenous mortality when travelling inland New South Wales between 1829 and 1831, that the extinction of Australia’s frst peoples had natural causes that possibly might never be scientifcally confrmed. The founders of Australia’s museums were of the same mind as Bennett in believing that they had a duty to collect as best their limited resources allowed

weapons, utensils, and other specimens of the arts … as well as the skulls of the different tribes and accurate drawings of their peculiar cast of features … to create a ftting memorial to a race destined to soon be known only by name. (Bennett 1834, v. 1, p. 69) 7 COLONIAL MUSEUMS AND THE INDIGENOUS DEAD, C. 1830–1874 203

The geologist William Blandowski (1822–1878), for example, the frst employee of Melbourne’s National Museum, was among many early museum personnel who, over the next half-century, capitalised on the Australian colonies’ communication needs and comparatively high literacy rates creating healthy metropolitan and regional markets for newspapers. Blandowski appealed to Victorians via the press to seek out and send the museum whatever artefacts and skeletal remains they could acquire before the colony’s ‘native race [ceased] to exist except in tradition’ (News 1856). He was supported in his call to collecting by fgures such as W.H. Archer (1825–1909), a prominent Melbourne civil servant and keen amateur naturalist, who was to decry publicly the ‘total absence of Victorian Indigenous relics’ in the museum when it seemed that already ‘whole tribes’ were extinct and others were ‘fast decaying’. It was vital, Archer declared, that

All that tangibly relates to the Indigenous population of the land we now inhabit should fnd a place for perpetual preservation here. We would not only save their boomerangs, spears, and waddies, but even collect the skulls of their deceased men, women and children; and, if possible, preserve their very bodies as mummies. (Archer 1857)

The same sentiments were voiced in Adelaide when the South Australian Museum opened in 1862. Prominent among the frst trustees of this museum was William Wyatt (1804–1886), who had briefy served as the colony’s interim protector of Aborigines in the early years of the colony. Wyatt spoke for his fellow trustees in lamenting in the colony’s press that much knowledge of its Indigenous tribes had already been lost to the world. In Brisbane, the Philosophical Society of Queensland’s executive regretfully observed, soon after establishing what would become the Queensland Museum, that it was ‘hardly too much to anticipate that not long after the last Sydney native has gone to his rest we shall have the last Brisbane native known amongst us as the only remaining representative of his tribe’ (QPS 1864, p. 2). Among the frst papers read to the society was an account of the customs of the Kamilaroi people of northern New South Wales, by Charles Coxen (1809–1876), a founding member of the Philosophical Society and the frst honorary curator and secretary of the Queensland Museum after it became a government funded public institution in 1871. In his paper, Coxen lamented that thirty years of contact with white settlers left little reason to believe other than that within ‘a few years more 204 P. Turnbull nothing will be left but a few border tales to remind posterity of their traditions or existence’ (Coxen 1866, p. 5). In no colony was there greater consciousness of the destruction of Indigenous society than Tasmania. There, moral unease at white complicity in what was taken to be the looming extinction of the island’s Indigenous tribes found expression in an acute desire to collect native artefacts and bodily remains which would memorialise and, perhaps, atone in some measure for the brutal confict ending with the forced removal and confnement of nearly all the surviving Indigenous population on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait. Yet by the time a museum was established at Hobart in 1848, under the auspices of the Royal Society of Tasmania, there seemed little left to collect. Few items of material culture were to be found on the Tasmanian mainland, and the customary practices of the island’s tribes of cremation and the placing of bones within trees rendered discoveries of skeletal material rare. The fourteen men, twenty-two women and ten children—all those who remained on Flinders Island when the settlement was closed in 1847—had all but ceased to make or use traditional objects beyond shell necklaces of great artistry and marine spears. What modest holdings the museum of the Royal Society had by the mid-1860s were artefacts and bodily remains acquired from surgeons and other offcers of the Flinders settlement in its early years, supplemented by occasional donations of chance discoveries in other parts of Tasmania. Museums on the Australian mainland had better prospects of acquiring ethnological artefacts and Indigenous bones, but doing so still proved diffcult. Colonial governments wanted what funds they voted museums to be spent on collecting ‘natural productions’ likely to be of practical beneft, and museum trustees and curatorsunderstandably focused on building geological and botanical collections. Prior to the 1860s it was not uncommon for Indigenous skulls to be offered to British and other overseas scientifc institutions known to be building collections of racial crania in exchange for rock, plant and animal specimens. For example, as we saw in Chapter 4, Samuel Morton, the North American craniologist, obtained Australian crania between 1845 and 1849 from Charles Nicholson, in his capacity as one of the Australian Museum’s trustees, in exchange for North American zoological specimens. 7 COLONIAL MUSEUMS AND THE INDIGENOUS DEAD, C. 1830–1874 205

The South Australian Museum’s frst curator, Frederick Waterhouse, knew and did his best to meet government expectations that he would give priority to collecting geological samples and other ‘natural productions’, but he also encouraged donations of living and fossil faunal specimens and Indigenous material. Through the 1860s and early 1870s, the latter were acquired through occasional donations by missionaries and superintendents of the government stations on which, by this time, most of the Indigenous peoples of South Australia were forced to live. Items were also acquired from members of parties surveying the vast expanse of the Northern Territory, which at this time was under the control of the colony. Queensland’s Philosophical Society, uncomfortably mindful of the colony’s high level of public debt, sought to cultivate government support for its museum by building collections likely to contribute to the colony’s economic development. But Charles Coxen and Joseph Bancroft (1836–1894), two of its infuential founding members, had strong ethnological and humanitarian interests in the colony’s traditional owners, with the result that the Society sought to gain public and government support for the ‘study of the natives of Queensland’, arguing that it would prove of practical beneft in the development of the colony:

To us, as a community, the knowledge the native possesses of the natural productions of the soil may be of more general value. There can be no doubt that they possess much knowledge of the medicinal properties of herbs, which are unknown to us even by name or sight, and of roots which have long since supplied them with the staff of life. (QPS 1864, 2)

Even so, the better part of what was collected for the museum prior to the 1870s were mineral and botanical specimens. Prior to the 1870s, Australian museums had an additional problem: often settlers with scientifc interests were inclined to send desirable specimens to British collectors. As South Australian Museum trustee William Wyatt lamented,

it was singular—but it probably arises from the fact that people are not generally speaking domiciled in the country—that so little trouble should be taken to procure specimens of natural objects for the purpose of preserving them in a museum. Whenever collections are made they are sent home, or to friends out of the colony, so that we lose many things which are highly important that these should be procured as rapidly as possible, 206 P. Turnbull

as many species are becoming very rare or dying out, and will be utterly lost to science. (Wyatt 1863, p. 5)

London’s Zoological Society appealed for specimens through the colonial press (News 1827), with the result that among the donations received by Nicholas Aylward Vigors (1785–1840), the Society’s co-founder and secretary, were a number of Australian skulls and ‘the bones included in the dried skin of a female Native of Australia’. Vigors offered the woman’s remains to the Royal College of Surgeons in return for duplicate specimens of insects and other invertebrates (Clift 1831). Richard Owen, who at this stage in his career was deputy conservator of the college’s collections, took the body, fnding it ‘quite perfect and in a ft state to mount as a skeleton’ for display in the Hunterian Museum (Clift 1831).

Anthropological Collecting Before the 1860s Australia’s museums had only small and haphazardly acquired collections of Indigenous bodily remains by the early 1860s. The earliest records of skulls being received by the Australian Museum date from 1837. Three of these early acquisitions were crania, probably removed from burial places by George Bennett during his travels in southern inland New South Wales. By 1844 the museum had at least six skulls and a dried corpse presumably stolen from a burial platform (News 1844). It also had a number of plaster casts of the heads of Indigenous men, part of a collection of phrenological busts of criminals which appears to have been put together by Bennett. Only a few more items were obtained prior to the 1860s, the most substantial being the donation in 1857 of nine skulls of either Wakka Wakka or Gubbi Gubbi people by Simon Scott (1816– 1858), who ten years earlier had established the frst pastoral property in Queensland’s South Burnett region (Murphy and Easton 1950, p. 23). As to what scientifc use was made of these remains, it seems likely that one or two skulls were displayed with European and Asian skulls to illustrate how human varietal diversity was refected in cranial morphology. In 1860, Simon Rood Pittard (1821–1861), a young London trained anatomist who had been appointed curator that year through the patronage of Richard Owen, gave a series of public lectures at the museum in which he probably used one or more Indigenous skulls to 7 COLONIAL MUSEUMS AND THE INDIGENOUS DEAD, C. 1830–1874 207 illustrate his patron’s ideas in respect of embryonic development in higher vertebrates (News 1860). The South Australian Museum likewise had only a small osteological collection prior to the appointment of Adelaide university physiologist Edward Charles Stirling (1848–1919) as its director in 1884. While, as previously noted, the museum had encouraged the collecting of Indigenous remains by amateur naturalists in rural and remoter parts of the colony, it had acquired no more than perhaps two dozen skulls and two or three skeletons in the years between its foundation in 1862 and Stirling’s appointment. This was even though the South Australian government had become more sympathetic by the early 1870s to the collecting of Indigenous material, due to the growing salience of anthropology in metropolitan intellectual circles, and the appeal of exhibits illustrative of the traditional lifeways and culture of the colony’s frst peoples at what by this time was a growing number of metropolitan and colonial international exhibitions. Frederick Waterhouse and the museum’s trustees were primarily interested in securing donations of artefacts, but they were now able to make some purchases of ethnographic objects, laying the foundations of what by the turn of the twentieth century was regarded by other museum curators as by ‘a great deal the best Australian collection’ of Indigenous material culture (Spencer 1897). In Queensland, a small number of skulls had also been acquired through occasional donations by the time the colony’s Philosophical Society ceded ownership of the museum to the colonial government in 1871. What little we know of these bones suggests that the manner in which they were displayed, together with Indigenous weaponry and other artefacts acquired in the aftermath of punitive actions by police and settlers, gave false and pernicious credence to the notion that the opening of the colony’s central and northern districts to pastoralism necessi- tated, as a matter of necessity, the pacifcation of local Indigenous tribes by just measures of violence. Victoria’s National Museum was exceptional in not seeking to collect Indigenous bodily remains in any systematic fashion until the early years of the twentieth century. This was due to foundation director Frederick McCoy’s lack of interest in anthropology during his near forty year tenure. McCoy was born into a solidly middle-class Dublin Catholic family, and studied medicine before developing a passion for palaeontology. This brought him to the attention of Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873), the Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge from 1818 to 208 P. Turnbull

1873, who encouraged McCoy’s conversion to Anglicanism and was largely responsible for his securing the frst chair in natural science at the University of Melbourne in 1855. McCoy shared Sedgwick’s belief in scientifc research as the practical expression of faith: the goal of the National Museum he believed was to educate the colonial public, and particularly students aiming for careers in medicine and other professions, in how the perfection of God’s will found expression in the processes governing life and its reproduction in earth’s myriad life forms. His admiration for Georges Cuvier’s and Richard Owen’s theistically grounded comparative anatomical research was refected in the museum’s collecting priorities and its modes of exhibiting living and extinct fossil animals and plants. With no interest in ethnology or anthropology, McCoy, after 1870, generally passed on Indigenous artefacts that the museum was offered to the Industrial and Technological Museum, founded in Melbourne that year to foster local interest and expertise in applied science and technology. He also gave artefacts to Melbourne’s National Gallery of Art. By the late 1880s these collections appear to have been brought together and jointly curated by the Industrial Museum and Art Gallery. On its foundation in 1854 the National Museum inherited the collection from the failed museum of the Mechanics Institute, within which were a number of Indigenous skulls. McCoy kept several, most likely so the museum could illustrate Cuvier’s teaching that racial differences in humankind were biologically superfcial variations in bodily form and psychology, attributable to environmental adaptation. When, as occasionally happened thereafter, he was offered Indigenous skulls, he passed them on to George Britton Halford (1824–1910), the University of Melbourne’s frst professor of anatomy, who put them within the several complete skeletons of Boon Wurrung people that he had acquired for the university’s anatomy museum by arranging for the plundering of graves in the cemetery of an abandoned Aboriginal station at Mordialloc, in what is now a south eastern suburb of Melbourne. Halford’s interest in securing these relics was that they enabled him, when lecturing on human variation, to demonstrate to students the form that crania and other bones characteristically took in Australia frst peoples. The only substantial skeletal material that McCoy appears to have retained was the collection of the phrenologist Archibald Hamilton, which he was offered by his widow in 1889. This collection of just under ffty skulls included two Tasmanian crania and around thirty mainland 7 COLONIAL MUSEUMS AND THE INDIGENOUS DEAD, C. 1830–1874 209

Indigenous skulls and cranial fragments. Contemporary sources shed no light on why McCoy took these skulls, which he passed on to the Industrial and Technical Museum. Perhaps it was curiosity about phrenology, but this seems unlikely. At some later date, the Indigenous skulls making up the bulk of the collection appear to have been put with the ethnographic artefacts jointly curated by the Industrial Museum and the National Gallery. McCoy’s neglect of anthropology and ethnographic collecting did not escape criticism. In 1868 Melbourne journalist and politician David Blair (1820–1899) charged the colony’s government with allowing ‘the original possessors of our magnifcent territory to perish out of existence before our very eyes, without preserving any record of them, beyond, perhaps, a row of grinning skulls in the national museum’. As Blair argued, ‘savage tribes’ had been found to ‘differ strangely and widely from one another in physical characteristics, in language, manners, personal habits and traditions’. It refected no credit on the colony that its government had made no effort to sponsor the collecting of ethnographic or anatomical material. This was in stark contrast to the US Federal Government, Blair stressed, which had commissioned a series of ethnological surveys of Native Americans. Worse still, he pointed out, the colony’s indigenous inhabitants were being studied by foreign scientists, such as the naturalists accompanying the imperially-sponsored Austro-Hungarian Novara expedition whose fndings were only available to interested Victorians in expensive German language volumes published in Vienna (Blair 1868). This was one of a number of occasions during the last third of the nineteenth century when colonial governments were called on to support local scientifc research with appeals to patriotism. In the case of Victoria, the strategy appears to have had some measure of success. Two men employed as civil servants who sought to document Indigenous lifeways and culture were able to secure publicly fnanced publication of signifcant ethnological works: Robert Brough Smyth (1830–1899), whose Aborigines of Victoria appeared in 1878, and Edward Micklethwaite Curr (1820–1889), whose study The Australian Race was published in 1886. Nevertheless, as we will see later in this chapter, it was not until the early years of the twentieth century that Melbourne’s museum and the medical school of its university became active in anthropological inquiry and collecting. 210 P. Turnbull

Darwinism and the Collecting of Indigenous Remains By the 1860s, imperial science was becoming more ‘federative’ in character. Colonially-based scientists increasingly looked to contribute to the interpretation of and theorising about local natural phenomena, although they continued to defer to the ideas and arguments of authorities active in peak bodies such as the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. A London Anthropological Society was founded in 1863. Like similar societies founded in Paris (1859) and Berlin (1869), its leading members were medically trained men convinced that race was the key to understanding human diversity, while the Ethnological Society of London, which had been founded two decades earlier by Christian humanitarians, now had among its infuential members younger professional scientists, many of whom believed with Darwin in the evolutionary origins of humanity. Colonial aspirations towards greater equality in the production of knowledge were encouraged by the desire to strengthen British science, as the scale and infuence of research across the spectrum of the sciences grew in France and Germany, both of which had expanding economic, political and scientifc interests in Africa and the Pacifc. The long-term prospect of greater colonial participation in knowledge-making had inspired Australian efforts to create museums since the 1820s, but it not until the 1860s that locally-based scientists could realistically imagine themselves becoming equal partners with their European-based peers in advancing science. Post-Darwinian evolutionism was a signifcant factor in this shift in how locally-based scientists saw themselves in relation to metropolitan science. The reception of Darwin’s argument for evolution in the Australian colonies matched that in metropolitan Europe, where it was vigorously criticised by churchmen, intellectuals and scientists who continued to favour received explanations of variation in plants and animals, even as it rapidly gained assent especially among younger medico-scientifc professionals. In the Australian context, museum personnel and other locally-based scientists, whether they were convinced by or sceptical of all or parts of Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis, saw themselves as uniquely situated to contribute to the further refnement or refutation of Darwin’s and his leading supporters’ re-writing of human natural history. Australia had been a fertile source for new discoveries and philosophical speculation about natural phenomena since James Cook’s 7 COLONIAL MUSEUMS AND THE INDIGENOUS DEAD, C. 1830–1874 211 survey of the eastern Australian coast on his momentous frst Pacifc voyage of 1768–1771. Darwinism rendered the continent’s ancient geology, unique fora and fauna, and, importantly, its Indigenous inhabitants, rare if not unique potential sources of new knowledge of nature and humankind’s place within it. Naturalists and museum curators continued to respond favourably to metropolitan requests for Indigenous skeletal material, as they had during the frst half of the nineteenth century. They did so accepting the anthropological ideas and arguments of leading researchers; but they now envisaged Australia’s museums and medical schools as having the potential to become internationally signifcant sites of research centred on the evolutionary development and racial genealogy of the Indigenous body. Now when they sent skeletal material and (occasionally) soft tissue structures to Britain, they did so hoping to enlist the support of leading metropolitan authorities in creating local collections of skulls and skeletons as systematically as circumstances allowed. As was discussed in Chapter 5, the Indigenous Australian body had special signifcance for early Darwinian anatomists and anthropologists. They saw the morphology of the skull in particular as exhibiting remarkably similar features to the fossilised head bones discovered in the Neander valley in the late 1850s. They believed that they were in a race against time to ensure that science would be able to determine what was racially typical about the bones of Australians before their biological peculiarities disappeared through the combined effects of population decline and interbreeding with varietally different races. This fear was nothing new, as we have seen. Belief in the likelihood of Indigenous extinction had gained currency from the mid-1820s on. By the 1860s it was widely believed, however, that the acceleration of population decline among Australia’s frst peoples had pushed many in settled regions to the brink of extinction. The fact that only several Tasmanian women of wholly Indigenous ancestry, all beyond child bearing age, remained alive appeared to confrm that they were already an extinct race (Brantlinger 2003, pp. 124–130). In this context Darwin’s concept of natural selection was seen as providing scientifc confrmation of the inevitability of Indigenous extinction, by representing Indigenous Australians as one or possibly several closely related evolutionarily archaic races which the continent’s environment had rendered physically and cognitive incapable of adapting to changes of the speed and magnitude that were occurring with white settlement. 212 P. Turnbull

Darwinian scientists thus believed that in seeking to understand the place of Indigenous Australians in human natural history, the best they could practically hope for was to secure skulls and other racially typical skeletal material—even though they held that much more might be learnt by examining remaining living Australians or any bodies that might be obtained and preserved as soon as possible after death. Berthold Seemann (1825–1871), who had been a naturalist aboard several Royal Navy survey voyages, spoke for many of his peers when he told a meeting of the London Anthropological Society in June 1863 that he ‘should like to see in London an anthropological garden, something on the same principle as the Zoological Gardens, where living specimens of the principal varieties of the human race might be seen and compared’ (Reade 1863, p. xxiii). In the same vein, the Darwinian anatomist George Busk lamented in 1861 that

while in the case of animals and plants, copious collections can be made and stored up in museums for accurate and leisurely examination and comparison … at best but few perfect specimens of pure or unmixed races (to use an indefnite term) can be obtained, and the Anthropologist at home is compelled to rely for the materials of his studies upon such fragmen- tary portions of the body as can be easily obtained and transported … . A Gorilla or a Chimpanzee can be caught and sent alive to the Zoological Gardens, or killed and forwarded in a cask of rum to the British Museum, but loud would be the outcry were similar attempts made to promote the study of Anthropology. (Busk 1861, pp. 348–349)

Busk knew from over thirty years’ experience as surgeon to the Dreadnought hospital ship at Greenwich during which time he donated numerous soft tissue specimens to the Hunterian Museum that relatively few opportunities for studying racially interesting corpses occurred. Resigned to the fact that the study of human variation was confned to the investigation of crania and other skeletal structures, he believed it essential to extract as much information from them as possible; and to this end he personally pursued the development of new anthropometric techniques and instruments refective of Darwinian assumptions about primate evolution (Busk 1861; Flower 1879, pp. xx–xix). Leading Darwinians were dismayed that Australian remains were becoming a rapidly diminishing source of potential new insights into human evolution, and the prospect of their loss spurred them to 7 COLONIAL MUSEUMS AND THE INDIGENOUS DEAD, C. 1830–1874 213 approach the personnel of Australian museums and other colonial contacts, many of whom were medical practitioners whom they had taught or studied with. Busk, for example, secured several skulls for the Hunterian Museum from the mid-1860s to the early 1880s. One he obtained from a medical colleague in Western Australia who told him that it was that of a man ‘known to the residents of the colony as above ordinary intelligence among the natives, who was killed in a fray with one of his race about the year 1847’ (Flower 1907). Two others had been ‘dug up’ in 1825 on land granted to William Ogilvie (1782–1859), a pastoralist in the Hunter River region of New South Wales. The skulls were brought to England some years later by a neighbouring pastoralist, Peter Cunningham (1789–1864), a Royal Navy surgeon on half pay. Cunningham gave the skulls to Ogilvie’s brother-in-law, also a medical practitioner, who like Busk was an active member of the Anthropological Society of London. Ogilvie, incidentally, also ‘sent over an entire skeleton of a young native girl as a present’ from the Hunter River region of New South Wales to a member of the Zoological Society of London. The skeleton was set up in the society’s museum, where, it was said to have been ‘looked on as a great natural curiosity on account of the skin being entire over the bones, and the hair which was long and black still attached to the skull’ (Atkinson 1866, p. xxxii). Busk’s last donation to the Hunterian Museum was two skulls obtained in ‘the neighbourhood of Sydney’ by the surgeon and geologist William Stanger (1812–1854), who had travelled in New South Wales sometime in the 1830s (Flower 1907; Newman 1840, p. 3). Another prominent Darwinian who used colonial contacts to get remains was the Oxford anatomist George Rolleston. The frst person he approached was his brother, Christopher Rolleston (1811–1888), who had settled in New South Wales in the late 1830s and become a successful pastoralist and civil servant (Cunneen 1976). Among the specimens he obtained for the university’s anatomy museum this way were four skulls removed from burial places on a cattle station that Christopher Rolleston owned, some 320 kilometres to the west of the city of Rockhampton in Central Queensland (Hill n.d.). However, George Rolleston secured the majority of remains he acquired through former students practising medicine in the Australian colonies. In 1869 he received the skull of a Wiradjuri woman from H.M. Rowland (d. 1882), the medical offcer and secretary of the hospital at Carcoar, in the Bathurst district of New South Wales. The skull had been 214 P. Turnbull removed from a burial place unearthed during the clearing of scrub near the Campbell River, about half way between the townships of Bathurst and Goulburn. Rowland informed Rolleston he suspected the burial pre- dated white settlement and that the woman might have died of tuberculosis (Rowland 1869). In the same year, Rolleston received a case containing fve skulls shipped by Alfred Hill (n.d.), another former pupil then living in Adelaide. Hill got these skulls from a local natural history collector who had come across burials in sandy country near the Murray River entrance. Two of these were said to belong to a man and woman, known to local settlers as ‘Johnny Comical and his Lubra [wife]’. They had been given traditional Ngarrindjeri burial as recently as 1862. Hill told Rolleston,

If you should wish to have any more skulls I may have opportunities of obtaining some, but at present I do not know for certain of any place where I could get some. Those from freshly dead natives would of course be most valuable, & those I do not know how to get. I think I would undertake to clean them myself if I had them, as I have often prepared the skulls of lower animals. (Hill n.d.)

Sometime in the early 1870s Rolleston acquired the complete skeleton of a man from the Port Augusta region of South Australia, from J. Marshall Stokes (n.d.), another former pupil. Stokes informed Rolleston that the man, who had died in 1869, was in his opinion ‘considerably below the average stature of his tribe and I always fancy weakly so as not to be taken as a type of his race physically’. Interestingly, Stokes further observed, ‘I do not know how science may reckon with his craniological development but the popular theory as to low intellectual capacities of the Australian Aboriginal is a very mistaken one’ (Rowland 1869). Also in Rolleston’s hands by 1872 was a skull acquired from a burial place discovered on a sheep station (named Oxford Downs) about 130 kilometres west of Mackay in central Queensland. The skull had been sent by George Marten (n.d.), who had been an undergraduate at Pembroke College, Oxford, in the early 1860s. Marten, now growing sugar in the Mackay district, had got Rolleston the skull on learning of his wanting Indigenous remains from Marten’s neighbour, W.R. Davidson (n.d.), another of the anatomist’s former students. In sending the skull, Marten wrote that he would be ‘glad to know if there is [sic] any special objects of interest that I might be in the way of procuring in 7 COLONIAL MUSEUMS AND THE INDIGENOUS DEAD, C. 1830–1874 215

Queensland’, being ‘glad to do anything we could in the cause of science’ (Marten 1872). Many of Rolleston’s former pupils successfully pursued scientifc careers. Among them was Henry Nottidge Moseley (1844–1891), who in 1872 was appointed as a naturalist to the four-year Challenger scientifc expedition. When the vessel put into Sydney in mid-1874, Moseley met a cousin of Rolleston’s at a city club. ‘He said he had never met you’, Moseley told Rolleston,

but that you had written to him to get him skulls of blackfellows from Queensland. He seemed to think that you must have hardly been in ear- nest as the skulls could not be of much value. But as he said he knew a cave full of bones and easily accessible I laid before him at once with what extended beneft to the world at large the placing of the remains of these interesting savages in your hands must necessarily be connected. I had plenty of liquor and I am sure put the matter forcibly. (Moseley 1874)

Rolleston also secured skulls through British-based medical colleagues. In 1880, Edward Jenkins, a surgeon at St. Barts Hospital, sent him the skull of a woman, and that of a man in a poor state of preservation that he described as having belonged to ‘Tin Pot Billy … a native of N.S. Wales’ who allegedly had caused many to fear settling in the Bathurst district by ambushing travellers, before eventually being captured and hanged. Jenkins claimed that the woman whose skull he had sent was one of his victims (Jenkins 1880). The truth, however, was less sensational than tragic. The only Indigenous man executed for murder in Bathurst known as Billy was a Wiradjuri man found guilty in 1854 on the basis of questionable eyewitness testimony of drunkenly murdering Jane Bradley, the wife of a shepherd (News 1854b), who may have been a Wiradjuri woman. Rolleston looked on Queensland as an invaluable source of racial specimens. The north of the colony had only recently been opened for settlement, and its traditional owners still lived as they had done before the intrusion of Europeans into their ancestral country. He believed that unlike the peoples of the long colonised south they possessed the high degree of racial integrity required to offer new scientifc insights into their place in human evolutionary history. In May 1870, he approached John Douglas (1828–1904), a prominent Queensland politician, administrator and member of the Queensland Philosophical Society, telling him 216 P. Turnbull that he had learnt from one of his past pupils now living in the Mackay district ‘that the natives of Queensland are a much fner and more war- like race than most other Australian tribes’ (QPS 1870). Hence, he explained, his securing their remains for Oxford’s anatomy museum ‘would be a very important thing for science’ in that it would provide ‘additional data as to the vexed question of the affnity of the Australian or his non-affnity to the Papuan stock’. Rolleston appealed to the patriotism of the society’s members, claiming that some German museums had come to ‘possess as many as three or four skeletons’ whereas he was not ‘aware of more than three being in England at all’. Here he was being untruthful; he well knew that there were a least a dozen complete skeletons in British collections. But he was concerned to impress on the Queensland Society as strongly as he could that if

in any public expedition or undertaking in the way of exploration, the needs of the old University—which is sure to be always open to persons speaking English as it is at present—could be borne in mind, I believe much might be gained for science. Some two or three skeletons and a half- a-dozen detached crania would afford a tolerable basis for reasoning upon. (QPS 1870)

Naturally, Rolleston assured the society, all the costs of shipping specimens to Oxford would be reimbursed. Sympathetic to the anatomist’s request, the society arranged for his letter to be published in the colony’s principal weekly newspaper. However, it was unwilling to give Rolleston any of the few items the Queensland Museum then possessed, being—as will be discussed shortly—intent on building up its skeletal holdings.

Huxley, Gerard Krefft, and ‘Savages Fossil and Recent’ The most prominent Darwinian to solicit Australian remains was Thomas Henry Huxley. Among the colonists he approached was the mining engineer and colonial ethnographer Robert Brough Smyth, author of The Aborigines of Victoria (1878). Interestingly, Smyth easily reconciled Darwin’s theory of organic development through speciation with the essential truths of Christianity, at least as they were understood by more liberal Anglicans. In a lecture he gave at the Bendigo Working Men’s Club in 1886, he argued that Providence had bestowed on man two 7 COLONIAL MUSEUMS AND THE INDIGENOUS DEAD, C. 1830–1874 217 books of supreme wisdom: the Bible and On the Origin of Species (Smyth 1886). As secretary and later chair of Victoria’s Board for the Protection of Aborigines during the 1860s, he similarly reconciled Darwinian notions of Indigenous evolutionary primitivity with the administration of a regime premised on conversion to Christianity as an essential and achievable precondition for civilising the colony’s Indigenous inhabitants. He subjected residents of Aboriginal reserves to scientifc examination of their presumed racial peculiarities on behalf of leading metropolitan Darwinians. Nor did he have qualms about trying to procure the skeleton of an Elder of the Boon Wurrung people named Derrimut, who had been given Christian burial in Melbourne’s general cemetery in 1863. This we know from a fragment of a letter perhaps drafted by or for William Thomas (1793–1867), then Guardian of Aborigines, concerning the possibility of exhuming Derrimut’s remains. Thomas, it seems, was agreeable to the skeleton being measured and photographed, but on the understanding it would be reburied (Smyth n.d.). Smyth put Huxley in contact with Christopher D’Oyly H. Aplin (1819–1875), who was employed at this time by the Victorian Geological Survey Offce. Aplin in turn approached friends and colleagues on Huxley’s behalf, securing him three skulls. One, Aplin claimed, had been ‘found … in an excavation made ... for the purpose of examining the nature of the large mounds or “myrnong heaps” rather numerous in the Western Districts of the colony’. The other two were obtained after burials in sand dunes at Port Fairy were exposed by erosion (Huxley 1865). In 1866 Huxley approached the zoologist Gerard Krefft (1830– 1881), who had succeeded Owen’s short-lived protégé, Simon Rood Pittard, as curator of Sydney’s Australian Museum. Krefft was known to metropolitan British anatomists for having supplied rare vertebrate fossils to Richard Owen at the British Museum, and for his taxonomic descriptions of Australian reptile and fsh species in London scientifc journals. As Huxley rightly assumed, Krefft was a fellow evolutionist, although it seems that he was not convinced that the emergence of new species occurred purely through the blind operation of natural selection. Like infuential metropolitan fgures such as George Campbell (1823–1900), Duke of Argyll, and the geologist William Boyd Dawkins (1837–1929), Krefft was inclined to think that some inherent law ensured evolutionary adaptation moved in a purposeful direction (Krefft 1873a). But unlike these British authorities, who could reconcile speciation with their belief 218 P. Turnbull that natural processes were governed by Providence, Krefft appears to have favoured the radical pantheistic account of evolutionary processes promoted by the Prussian zoologist, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). As is well known to historians of science, in Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866), Haeckel sought to transform Darwin’s theory into a monistic naturphilosophie grounded in the idea that through the agency of fundamental causal laws, all living organisms and inorganic matter were more or less complex expressions of the same substance (De Grood 1982). Krefft supplied Huxley with measurements of the museum’s crania and promised to help him if possible secure skulls, mentioning that he was in contact with James Wilcox (n.d.), a farmer in the Grafton district of New South Wales, who for some years had supplemented his income by selling bird and marsupial specimens to the Australian Museum and the Museum of Victoria. Krefft knew that Wilcox was likely to be willing to take remains from graves (Wilcox 1865); however, this was as far as Krefft was prepared to help Huxley, not wanting to put metropolitan ambitions ahead of his building up the museum’s own skeletal holdings. When Huxley subsequently approached Krefft seeking further remains, in particular female pelvic bones, Krefft defected the request by sending photographs of Indigenous skulls in the museum’s collection and telling him that it was becoming increasing rare to discover burial places. ‘I wish I could’, he told Huxley, ‘but it is very diffcult—we have 2 female skeletons in the museum but I cannot send them’. He had told a collector ‘a few days ago to look out for same’, but added, ‘I suppose the greater portion of the native graves are obliterated’ (Krefft 1872). Certainly it was not easy to fnd remains, but Krefft over-accentuated the diffculties of getting them. Since his appointment as assistant curator in 1860, the museum had obtained four complete skeletons and some eighty skulls of Indigenous and Oceanic origin, and Krefft was actively seeking more (Maddock 1874, p. 78). He was well aware of the value of Australian specimens within the new Darwinian evolutionary para- digm, and saw their collection as greatly contributing to the Australian Museum becoming a major institutional contributor to the progress of imperial science under his direction. One of his frst acts on being formally appointed curator in 1864 was to instruct the museum’s assistant, George Masters (1837–1912), to gather remains from any burial places that he might discover on collecting trips. Among Masters’s frst fnds were the bones of a Yagara woman 7 COLONIAL MUSEUMS AND THE INDIGENOUS DEAD, C. 1830–1874 219 buried in the vicinity of Ipswich, in southern Queensland (Masters 1865). Krefft also actively solicited the help of amateur naturalists who donated zoological specimens to the museum. One of the frst to oblige him was a resident of Central Queensland who in September 1865 wrote to Krefft that he had ‘got the bones of an alligator for you as soon as they are ft to send away’ and ‘also two blackfellows buried in a paddock of mine on purpose to get the skeletons to send you’ (Nobbs 1865). How he had managed to get these bodies he did not say. That same year, the museum received another two skeletons of Central Queensland Indigenous people from George Rolleston’s old student, W.R. Davidson (New South Wales 1866, 4909). In 1869 the collecting of remains acquired new signifcance for Krefft. That year he discovered what he took to be a fossilised human tooth when excavating a cave in the Wellington Valley of central western New South Wales. The seeming antiquity of the tooth appears to have led Krefft to conclude that the Indigenous skeletal material so far acquired by the museum bore remarkable anatomical similarities to the fossilised bones of four adults and an infant discovered in a rock shelter in limestone cliffs at Cro-Magnon during the construction of a rail- way line along the Vézère river valley in the Dordogne region of France (Broca 1873). As Krefft learnt from reportage of the discovery to the French Academie des sciences by Paul Broca (1824–1880), the eminent Parisian physician and founding secretary of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, the form of these bones was thought to confrm that the Cro- Magnons were a morphologically distinctive race, unlike any of the people whose remains had been found in neolithic barrow burials across Europe. The thigh-bones, for example, were much thicker than in any modern human race although they appeared closer in shape to modern men than to higher apes. Their skulls were much longer than those of modern European races, and possessed cranial sutures that, Broca reasoned, were so similar to those of modern ‘savage nations’ as to suggest that they were probably on the same level in terms of social sophistication. Even so, Broca felt that the form of the Cro-Magnon skull showed ‘signs of a powerful cerebral organisation’ which licensed the conclusion that they had been constrained in achieving their full developmental potential by environmental or social factors. Seeming to confrm this was that items of material culture found in the vicinity of the skeletons took three distinctive forms, quite unlike archaeological fnds of a later date. It seemed plausible to assume, Broca reasoned, that the Cro-Magnons were 220 P. Turnbull a peaceful race who had proven intellectually and technologically incapable of escaping extinction on the intrusion into the Vézère of a different, more aggressive racial type (Broca 1873, pp. 426–428). Krefft was left in no doubt on reading Broca that there were striking similarities between this ancient drama of racial supersession and the one that he believed, along with many of his contemporaries, was being played out in the Australian colonies. But he differed from Broca in one key respect. This was the French scientist’s resistance to Darwinism on the grounds that the evolution of species was as yet entirely unproven, and his belief that the Cro-Magnon remains provided morphological evidence confrming that the defning hereditary characteristics of each race were primordially fxed, suggesting that humanity had not evolved through speciation from one ancestral type. Krefft never realised his ambitions for the Australian Museum. Its trustees, most of whom were Anglicans or nonconformists, rejected the theory of the evolutionary origins of species. He found himself obliged to arrange the specimens in the museum’s galleries to illustrate Georges Cuvier’s and Richard Owen’s anti-evolutionary biological functional- ism. As he later claimed when writing to Darwin, his evolutionism was the prime cause of his relations with the trustees becoming increasingly marked by irresolvable, personally debilitating disputes that eventually ended with his dismissal in 1874 (Butcher 1994, 52–54). Krefft used the Sydney press to cultivate popular interest in the natural sciences. As relations with the museum’s trustees broke down, he began publicly championing Darwinian evolution. In one essay in the Sydney Mail, entitled ‘Fossils Recent and Ancient’, Krefft argued that across Australia, Indigenous people could be found in each of the three of the stages of societal development that Broca had proposed the Cro-Magnons had passed through before their extinction. ‘Comparing the weapons of our savages with these descriptions of the learned Frenchman’, Krefft wrote, ‘we must acknowledge that he has hit the proper distinction to a point’ (Krefft 1873b). It seemed to Krefft that in Western Australia there were to be found ‘savages with scarcely any covering except a cape of wallaby skin, without possum rugs and with the roughest lump of granite embedded in grass-tree gum for a hatchet’. These people lived as had the earliest Cro-Magnons; whereas, Krefft maintained, the people living along the Murray River and inhabiting coastal New South Wales were ‘more advanced’. Like later Cro- Magnons, he argued, they fashioned stone hatchets with ground edges 7 COLONIAL MUSEUMS AND THE INDIGENOUS DEAD, C. 1830–1874 221 and carved or drew hunting scenes. And then there were the inhabitants of New Guinea, whom Krefft was in no doubt were modern counterparts of the Cro-Magnon race in the third and fnal phase of its social development. This racial fantasy of Krefft’s culminated in his portraying the Maori tribes of Aotearoa–New Zealand as a race whose intellectual superiority to Indigenous Australians was such that had they ‘in different circumstances’ colonised the continent they ‘would have made short work with our gentle savages’ and ‘given future invaders more trouble than they gave them in their limited islands, though even there they proved hard to conquer’ (Krefft 1873b). No contemporary public or private comment on Krefft’s conjectural history survives in either Australian or British sources. But regardless of how it was received, his history vividly illustrates how by the mid- 1870s the comparative study of ancient European and contemporary Indigenous Australian bones gave empirical weight to racial discourses which licensed the imaginative reconstruction of human history as one of universal racial struggle and supersession. CHAPTER 8

‘Judicious Collectors’, 1870–1914

This chapter explores the anthropological ambitions of museum curators and scientists in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne in the half century or so after 1860. In these years, Sydney’s Australian Museum grew in local and international reputation under the curatorship of Edward Pierson Ramsay, a talented self-taught zoologist with particular expertise in ornithology. In Adelaide the South Australian Museum also developed collections exciting local and metropolitan scientifc interest under Edward Charles Stirling, who combined the directorship of the museum with his duties as professor of physiology in the University of Adelaide. Both men had numerous interests, and bold visions for their respective institutions that encompassed building anthropological collections, which ideally would comprise crania and other bones of individuals from a wide range of Indigenous tribes. The collecting of Indigenous material culture and bodily remains at Victoria’s National Museum under the directorship of Walter Baldwin Spencer will also be explored in this chapter. Spencer, who came to Australia as professor of biology at Melbourne University, is best known today for his pioneering anthropological feldwork among the peoples of the centre of the continent between 1894 and 1903. Prior to his appointment in 1899, the museum had been governed for nearly four decades by a director who had no interest in anthropology. The prime focus here is on how Ramsay, Stirling and Spencer went about building skeletal collections. We will see how they instructed the feld collectors whom they employed, when museum funds allowed, to

© The Author(s) 2017 223 P. Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia, Palgrave Studies in Pacifc History, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51874-9_8 224 P. Turnbull collect remains from burial places they might encounter. I also draw attention to their having encouraged donations by police, other government agents and settlers in various walks of life, either living in or travelling through rural and remote regions of Australia where opportunities arose to acquire remains. Donations of fnds were preferred, given that annual funding for purchases never matched the three men’s collecting ambitions; but all three were prepared to make selective purchases when offered well-preserved skeletons and crania. While this chapter focuses primarily on Ramsay’s, Stirling’s and Spencer’s involvement in collecting human remains, it also explores their interactions with metropolitan and locally-based anatomists and physical anthropologists, with a view to explaining how the bodily remains of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders were used in research on the origins and evolutionary genealogy of the human species pursued by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British metropolitan and Australian-based anatomists.

Edward Ramsay’s Regime The curatorship of the Australian Museum was given to Edward Pierson Ramsay after Gerard Krefft’s dismissal in 1872 amidst allegations of drunkenness, allowing the theft of museum exhibits, and the use of equipment to develop lewd photographs. Ramsay was Australian born, and studied medicine at the University of Sydney before coming into an inheritance that enabled him to become a full-time naturalist. His primary interest was ornithology, but during his years heading the museum he was also to publish papers on a variety of New South Wales fora, mammals and snakes. Ramsay’s association with the Australian Museum began during Krefft’s time as curator, although relations between the two men quickly soured; and Ramsay may have played some part in Krefft’s dismissal. At any rate, he was the trustees’ choice to take over the museum, and by the time the colony’s government confrmed his appointment in 1876 he had begun an ambitious program of collecting natural history specimens, ethnographic artefacts and Indigenous skeletal material. Ramsay was not surprised to fnd on approaching curators in Britain, continental Europe and other settler colonies to exchange specimens, he was commonly asked if he could provide Indigenous skulls. He also received visitors such as Thomas Williams (n.d.), the surgeon aboard the 8 ‘JUDICIOUS COLLECTORS’, 1870–1914 225 warship H.M.S. Sapphire, when it put into Sydney in late 1878. Williams had been trying to obtain a skull for some time, and asked whether a spare one might be given to the Haslar naval hospital’s museum. Ramsay was agreeable as providing one might guarantee future exchanges; but he made sure to emphasise the rarity of the gift (Williams 1878). The following year he was approached by Emil Schmidt (1836–1909), then widely regarded as one of Europe’s leading experts in craniometry. Best known for his investigation of ancient and modern Egyptian skulls, Schmidt had a collection of over a thousand ‘skulls of different races’, but as he told Ramsay, ‘Australia and Polynesia are very badly represented and I would be glad if I could get through exchange or purchase additions to my collections from these parts’ (Schmidt 1879). He offered mummifed ancient Egyptian heads and modern sub-Saha- ran African skulls in exchange. Ramsay responded that while ‘Egyptian and South African skulls would be very acceptable’ there were no skulls he could presently send, although in the near future he could possibly arrange for Schmidt to get some New Guinean skulls (Schmidt 1879). Even fgures as infuential as George Rolleston and Paul Broca found it hard to get skulls out of Ramsay. Acting on Broca’s behalf, Charles Cauvin (n.d.) the surgeon of a visiting French survey vessel received two Torres Strait Islander skulls and casts and photographs of Australian crania for Paris’s Anthropological Institute, but Ramsay explained that the museum had ‘few if any’ Australian specimens to spare, and it would not be until after its collections were properly arranged that he could judge whether he could provide one or two specimens. However, with a mind to securing future French exchanges, Ramsay found one poorly prov- enanced skull he was prepared to give Broca (Cauvin 1880). Rolleston was told that there were few duplicate crania in the museum, and little prospect of securing others to send. ‘Nearly all of the N.S.W. Aborigines are gone’, Ramsay told Rolleston, ‘and the skulls are so much sought after by collectors that it is, even now, very diffcult to obtain good specimens’ (Ramsay 1881). Yet by the early 1880s Ramsay was acquiring suffcient skulls to make strategic exchanges with metropolitan curators. He got these crania in large part through the network of amateur natural history collectors he had cultivated since becoming curator, and which by this time extended throughout New South Wales and into other Australian colonies and the islands of Melanesia. To help collectors safely send natural history specimens to the museum by rail or sea, Ramsay provided them with a pamphlet how best 226 P. Turnbull to preserve the bodies of native fauna, drawing on the chapter on zoological collecting that Richard Owen had contributed to the Admiralty’s Manual of Scientifc Inquiry (1849). He also arranged for the publication of extracts of the guide in several widely circulating newspapers. In the pamphlet, Ramsay let it be known that besides native fauna, the ‘SKELETONS of Aborigines are much wanted’; and for the beneft of would-be collectors he provided a ‘list of the separate bones of a complete human skeleton’. If whole skeletons could not be procured, Ramsay advised, then ‘the skulls, along with the lower jaw, will prove of great interest and value’. And like Richard Owen some thirty years before, he emphasised:

Any apparent malformation or peculiarities in the formation of the cranium of the various tribes should be carefully noted; and all possible information obtained respecting such occurrences, and whether produced by artifcial means or otherwise. Skulls of Aborigines found suspended around native dwellings are of little value, but authentic skulls may be obtained from the graves of the natives of each tribe. (Ramsay and Ratte 1887, p. 6)

In corresponding with collectors, Ramsay emphasised the value of securing remains that were ‘as fresh as possible, so that the bones can be whitened’, adding that should they ‘obtain fresh specimens [they should] leave the sinews on the hands and feet to prevent the small bones going astray, and leave the scalp and hair on the head’ (Ramsay 1890). Collectors were also urged to gather as much biographical information and other evidence of the tribal origins of the dead as was possible. Besides encouraging the plundering of burial places, Ramsay alerted collectors that ‘the brains of Aborigines’ preserved in spirits ‘would be of great value’ (Ramsay and Ratte 1887, p. 6). Very likely George Rolleston had alerted Ramsay to growing interest in the evolutionary history of the human brain (Ramsay was a close friend of the Oxford anatomist’s brother, Christopher, who, as previously mentioned, was a prominent New South Wales pastoralist and civil servant). Rolleston was among the frst Darwinian anatomists to research racial variations in the human cerebellum. Unlike Richard Owen, he believed that simian and human brains had no differentiating characteristics: the structures of the latter were simply more sophisticated. Yet Rolleston’s research ambitions were constrained by the diffculty of obtaining specimens, and most of the few of that he got were from colleagues and past pupils performing autopsies 8 ‘JUDICIOUS COLLECTORS’, 1870–1914 227 on seamen of non-European ancestry dying in British cities. This may have been the fate of a man from South Australia whom the craniologist Joseph Barnard Davis encountered begging in the centre of Birmingham (Davis 1865c). Within fve years of Ramsay’s appointment, the Australian Museum was able to contribute ‘in a very large degree to the success of the Ethnological Court’—one of the most popular attractions of the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition (IEC 1881). Among the items on display were skulls from the Fijian island of Viti Levu that Ramsay had purchased from one W.F. Abbot (n.d.) for £1 each (Abbot 1878). By the time the exhibition opened, Ramsay had also got Indigenous remains from Kenrick Harold Bennett (1835–1891), whom he employed casually to collect for the museum while Bennett was looking for employment as a stock inspector (he was offered no better job than supervising the control of rabbits in the large stretch of country between the Lachlan and Darling Rivers). It was some compensation, he told Ramsay, that he had opportunities to collect Indigenous artefacts and skeletal material. ‘In my wanderings’, he explained, ‘I see nearly all the darkies now remaining of the numerous tribes who inhabited that large extent of country’ (Bennett 1885). Another of Ramsay’s collectors was James Yardley (n.d.), who farmed sugar at Murwillumbah in New South Wales’s Northern Rivers District and shared Ramsay’s passion for ornithology. Yardley was also ready to collect Indigenous remains. In 1889 he wrote to Ramsay that he had been told of an old burial place in nearby mountains, and that

the man that is going to take me to look at them is going to get a skeleton from one of the graves to send to someone in Sydney. If you was wanting any good skeletons or skulls I could get them while we had the tools there. (Yardley 1889a)

Ramsay telegraphed Yardley: ‘secure all skulls and skeletons you can and any fints or native implements from the graves’. He also quizzed him as to whether he had seen carved trees near the graves, but learnt nothing more until Yardley wrote apologetically some six months later that he had

not obtained any good skulls or skeletons. I have turned up a good few but they have all been too much Decayed. it is a very wet place anything a few inches under the soil soon gets water-logged and all of them that are 228 P. Turnbull

buried now are put in a hole and covered with soil. Formerly they made a hole and put the corpse in it in a sitting posture and covered it with a sheet of Bark never flling any Earth at all. (Yardley 1889b)

It would seem that by this time the Bundjalung people of the Northern Rivers District now buried their dead as did the occupiers of their ancestral country. It would also seem that Yardley had some experience in investigating traditional burials. Within Ramsay’s network of amateur naturalists there were a number of government employees in rural districts who took a keen interest in the lifeways and culture of local Indigenous people. Most did so believing that they were witnessing the extinction of local tribes. Among them was Thomas Illidge (1843–1927), the telegraph master at St Lawrence on the central Queensland coast. Illidge sought to do what he could for the families who lived in fringe camps on the edge of the township; and if we are to believe him, it was compassion for the living that led him to plunder the dead. In early 1883 he wrote to Ramsay that he was sending him a box containing two skeletons with the request that he

kindly remit what they are valued at, as the amount will be invested for the good of the tribe to which they belong. It may perhaps prolong the existence of some old Gins [women] by increasing the amount of fower [sic] and blankets. (Illidge 1883)

Other collectors were less charitably motivated. C.J. McMaster (1853– 1930), a district surveyor in northern New South Wales, wrote to Ramsay in October 1886 that he had had his ‘eye upon a number of Indigenous skeletons which I will send you as soon as I can fnd time to get them’. He also told Ramsay that he had discovered that ‘a very remarkable man’ and ‘a great warrior in his time’ had been given Christian burial in the Warialda district cemetery. McMaster wanted advice as to ‘What steps could I take to get him?’ (McMaster 1886). Ramsay’s reply is unrecorded. Ramsay’s anthropological ambitions suffered a major setback in September 1882 when the purpose-built ‘Garden Palace’ housing the Sydney Exhibition’s Ethnological Court was destroyed by fre (Strahan 1979, p. 39). Such was the popularity of the Court that he had chosen to keep nearly the entirety of the museum’s artefacts and skeletal material on display there. He and the museum trustees sought to replace as 8 ‘JUDICIOUS COLLECTORS’, 1870–1914 229 best they could what had been lost. Within a month of the fre, a collector hired to search for fossils in caves near Cowra, in the central west of New South Wales, was instructed to collect ‘at the same time … as many Skeletons and Skulls of Aborigines as may be found buried near your camp’. Nearing the end of his contract in December 1882 and anxious to have it renewed, the collector wrote to the trustees from Yass in the New South Wales southern tablelands, ‘offering skeletons of Aborigines with no further expense to the Museum than carriage’. Dissatisfed with his overall performance Ramsay refused the offer, but noted that remains were likely to be acquired in the region. Ramsay and the trustees also appealed for donations in metropolitan and regional newspapers, emphasising that the museum was in a race against time: ‘if the Australian ethnological collection is not completed very shortly’, they warned, ‘we will have nothing worthy of the name to bestow on future generations’ (News 1884). The urgency, they explained, arose from Indigenous peoples’ increasing interaction with settlers resulting in their choosing to make artefacts infuenced by ‘European models, or … with the tools of the white man’. Such things they deemed ‘of no value as ethnological specimens’, believing that they provided no insights into the world of the continent’s native races prior to their contact with settler society. The museum assured collectors that they would be fully reimbursed for costs incurred in donating artefacts and remains to the museum, but a number responded that they were only prepared to provide specimens if the museum was prepared to buy them. This Ramsay was willing to do, thereby creating a market wherein until the end of the century the museum offered £10–£15 for ‘fresh’ complete Pacifc and Australian skeletons, and was prepared to buy preserved skulls with lower jaws for ten shillings—about a third of the average weekly wage in Australia in the last third of the nineteenth century (GPIH n.d.).

Commercial Collectors and Traders Ramsay also bought skeletal remains from naturalists who collected on a commercial, but not a full-time, basis; for as he himself observed, ‘making a living at collecting … alone in this Country is out of the question’ (Ramsay 1878). We know something about two of the more successful of these semi-professional collectors who sold natural history and ethnological specimens to Australian, British and continental European museums: 230 P. Turnbull

Francis Maschmedt (n.d.) and Adolphus Peter Goodwin (1842–1914). Based in the Far North Queensland town of Cooktown Maschmedt ran a trading company with a store in Port Moresby. He advertised dealing ‘in a large way … with every kind of curio & specimens of natural history’, emphasising to museums his ability to supply New Guinean carved artefacts and decorated skulls (Maschmedt 1887; News 1887). Goodwin arrived in Australia in the mid-1870s, having made several voyages to America and the Pacifc from his native Denmark, during which he collected geological, fauna and anthropological specimens that he later sold to various European museums. Settling in the northern New South Wales town of Lismore, he established a business importing and selling china and glassware while continuing to collect and deal in natural history specimens and ethnographic objects. He also set about plundering ancestral burial places of the Widjabul and Bundjalung people (see Garbutt et al. 2017). In 1882, he sold the partial skeletons of two Bundjalung people to Holland’s Royal Museum of Ethnology, along with a collection of artefacts from the Lismore region (Veys, F.W., 2013, pp. 63–64). In late 1883, Ramsay purchased a mixture of items that Goodwin had acquired while travelling through America, Britain and Europe selling Australian specimens, and two skulls from New Britain that he had also acquired. Goodwin made sure to impress on potential customers his experience in international trading in order to drive a hard bargain. When, the following year, Ramsay told him a collection of Queensland artefacts he had been offered was overpriced, Goodwin replied that he had ‘spent considerable time and money in collecting these specimens’, adding

It might not be altogether out of place to tell you that…I have travelled in Europe and Amerika [sic] where I have had ample opportunity of ascer- taining what the museums there possess and the price they are paying for specimens. (Goodwin 1884)

Probably Goodwin’s thinking that he could get a better price than Ramsay or any other Australian museum curator was prepared to offer him for ‘fresh’ skeletons led to his selling the skeleton of a Widjabul Elder that he had procured around 1890 to Harvard’s Peabody Museum. In 1935 James Brown, who had lived in Lismore in the 1880s, recalled that the north of the town was then ‘almost virgin scrub’ and 8 ‘JUDICIOUS COLLECTORS’, 1870–1914 231

The aborigines were particularly wild and, for the most part, kept to the hills, but the king of the tribe, King Neddy Larkin, was popular and had been presented by the residents with a brass plate, upon which was his title which he suspended from his neck. (News 1935)

In guaranteeing the skeleton’s authenticity—and hoping for a good price—Goodwin claimed that he had known Neddy Larkin, ‘saw him buried and personally secured his skeleton’ (Dorsey 1896, p. 2). As confrmation of this, he provided the Peabody with a photograph of the Elder which appears to have been taken not long before his death. (It was not until late 1990, incidentally, that Neddy Larkin’s descendants learnt of the theft of his remains, from a journalist working with a British documentary flmmaker. After a documentary, entitled ‘Darwin’s Body Snatchers’, was shown on Australian television the following year, a direct descendant of the Elder who had agreed to speak on camera of her grief on learning that her ancestor’s remains were a museum specimen was subjected to anonymous racist abuse, as I learnt from an ABC radio journalist who approached me to comment on the affair.) William Day (n.d.) was another semi-professional naturalist who procured skeletal material in Queensland’s northern coastal rain forests (Day 1892a). He approached Ramsay in early 1891, learning that the Australian Museum would be ‘glad of any black skulls, not too much broken’, for which it was prepared to pay ‘at least 5/- if perfect with the lower jaw, more 7/6 [to] 10/- for good ones’ (Ramsay 1891). Ramsay was particularly keen to acquire ‘some of the skulls of the Russell River blacks’ (the Mamu people) and examples of their distinctive tropical hardwood swords. Day did his best to oblige. Several weeks later he informed Ramsay that he secured him ‘two skulls of Bungee (Russell River blacks’, describing them as the ‘the last of their tribe as they all got shot’. He was also keen to know what price ‘a perfect skeleton of a Russell river black’ would fetch (Day 1891). The following month, Day forwarded three Mamu skulls that he had taken from burial places, together with two swords and a stone axe, which he told Ramsay he had had ‘a lot of trouble getting’ (Day 1891). It appears that he also tried to procure for the museum a complete Mamu skeleton, but by November 1891 he was forced to abandon this ambition after the spearing of a miner sparked what was now an all too familiar cycle of indiscriminate murderous reprisals and revenge killings. As Day put it, ‘all are on the war path or whatever you call it in Australia’ (Day 1891). By early the 232 P. Turnbull following year, Day was contemplating travelling to New Guinea and sounded Ramsay out as to whether the New South Wales government might pay someone to collect exclusively for the museum (Day 1892b). As well as Australian-based commercial collectors, Ramsay dealt with British and North American dealers in ‘natural history and ethnographic curios’ that accompanied the growth of scientifc education and the creation of new natural history museums during the second half of the nineteenth century. These dealers acquired and sold specimens not only to museums but to schools, mechanics institutes and a large clientele of middle-class amateur naturalists. They advertised their wares in popular scientifc magazines and often displayed selected items at the great exhibitions that were so much a part of life in late nineteenth-century metropolitan and colonial cities. They were astute entrepreneurs always on the look-out for specimens, and it was not unknown for them to infate the price of ‘desiderata’ by playing interested curators against each other. Among the best known British dealers was John Crace Stevens (1809–1859), whose premises were close to the British Museum in London’s Covent Garden. He began dealing in 1834, becoming, in the words of one historian, ‘the natural history equivalent of an impresa- rio, acting as agent for many wayfaring naturalists’ for a healthy commission (Slotten 2004, pp. 42–43). On his death his brother, and later his son, ran the business, which during the last third of the nineteenth century auctioned various anthropologically interesting skulls and skeletons as well as ‘curios’ such as the calcifed remains of a Meintangk man stolen from a cave near the South Australian township of Naracoorte (News 1866)—about which more will be said in the closing chapter of this study. Another prominent London-based dealer was Rowland Ward (1848–1912), who specialised in the preparation of big game trophies and stuffed specimens of large African and Asian mammals. Ward’s dealings in human skeletal material, however, appears to have been confned to making cigar cases and tobacco-holders out of skulls which one sati- rist of the time suggested were ‘probably … Zulu crania—war trophies brought back by some of our young bloods, fresh from South-African warfare, and with some taint of its practices’ (Punch 1879). The most active dealer in what were seen as anthropologically signifcant human remains was Henry A. Ward (1834–1906). Ward gave up teaching natural science at the University of Rochester in New York State to found his Natural History Establishment, which soon became 8 ‘JUDICIOUS COLLECTORS’, 1870–1914 233 a leading supplier of zoological and geological specimens to North American and European museums. In 1880 and 1881 Ward visited New Zealand and Australia. Among the ‘ethnological specimens’ he offered Australasian curators was a ‘Stalwart Indian Warrior (mounted with wax head and hands) in full costume’ (Ward 1881b). As he informed Julius von Haast (1822–1887), the director of New Zealand’s Canterbury Museum, his price for the ‘warrior’ was $600, for which the buyer would also have his weaponry as he had ‘fxed them up to suit his savage taste’. For another $150, Ward told Haast, ‘he shall be the actual Indian (as far as skin of head arms, hands, lower legs & feet go—you shall have the skeleton) nicely stuffed’. For a further $275, he would supply a horse ‘of their peculiar breed’ rigged with a native saddle and ropes with the warrior set up to stand beside or mounted on the beast. Finally, should the buyer be able to afford an additional $150, he would get the warrior’s ‘high wigwam’ of painted buffalo hide (Ward 1881b). After publicising his frm at the Melbourne International Exhibition, Ward visited the southeastern colonies. In Sydney, he offered Ramsay various skeletons, ‘beautifully white and nicely mounted’, of North American mammals on the basis of his paying in part with duplicates of Australian zoological and geological items (Ward 1881c). Although Ward was on the lookout for racially or otherwise interesting skulls and skeletons, no evidence survives that Ramsay sold or traded Indigenous remains. Leaving Sydney, Ward journeyed northwards by coastal steamer, stopping at several Queensland coastal towns with the aim of acquiring corals, dugong skeletons—and Indigenous skeletal remains (Ward 1881a). The Australian Museum’s anthropological ambitions were undimin- ished by Ramsay’s retirement in 1895. His successor, the palaeontologist Robert Etheridge (1847–1920), took an active interest in the lifeways and culture of the Indigenous peoples of Australia and the Pacifc, and among his innovations was the creation of a department of ethnology within the museum in 1906. Etheridge too sought remains through the museum’s network of amateur naturalists, and, like Ramsay, grudgingly bought desirable specimens. In 1904, for example, when Charles Hedley (1862–1926), the museum’s scientifc assistant, was collecting conchological specimens on the Barrier Reef off Cooktown, he was approached by a local resident offering to sell him remains wrapped in bark. Hedley telegraphed 234 P. Turnbull

Etheridge, ‘what offer complete skeleton’. Etheridge replied, ‘Do not make offers—what price?’ (Etheridge 1904). Etheridge personally supervised the removal of skeletal material from burial places, from soon after he joined the museum in 1885 as its assistant curator until his sudden death in 1920. His familiarity with Indigenous culture meant that he knew well the distress and anger that removing remains caused the relatives and communities of the deceased. Moreover, as will be discussed in the fnal chapter of this study, he knew that British law in respect of burial applied in New South Wales protecting both settler and Indigenous traditional burial places; but what doubts he may have had about plundering graves were overridden by his belief that it was imperative Indigenous remains be secured for science.

‘A Judicious Collector:’ Edward Stirling and the South Australian Museum The collecting of Indigenous bodily remains in South Australia during the half century after 1860 is largely the story of the anthropological interests and aspirations of Edward Charles Stirling during the four decades he served as director of the South Australian museum. Much of the impetus for his collecting, as we will see, was his believing that morphological peculiarities in Indigenous bones were of potentially great signifcance in reconstructing humanity’s early evolutionary history. On his retirement, it was widely agreed that his principal legacies included the creation of one of the world’s most anthropologically signifcant repositories of human crania, numbering around 800 specimens (Hrdlička 1924). Nor was the South Australian Museum the only benefciary of his collecting: leading metropolitan British anatomists drawn to investigate the evolutionary genealogy of the human species received some of their most valuable specimens from Stirling and his colleague, Archibald Watson (1849–1940), Adelaide University’s professor of anatomy from 1885 to 1919. Stirling was appointed to the directorship of the museum in 1884, and was to hold the position in an honorary capacity for the frst eleven of a near-forty year tenure. Professor of physiology at the University of Adelaide, he was previously a university nominee to the board governing the museum and South Australian Library, where he joined Ralph Tate (1840–1901), who had been appointed to the university’s chair in natural science in 1875. The two men were to persuade fellow board members 8 ‘JUDICIOUS COLLECTORS’, 1870–1914 235 that besides natural science the teaching of medicine would soon commence at the university, and the museum should thus follow the lead of its British and European counterparts by creating series of teaching specimens comprising ‘skulls, articulated skeletons and dissections illustrating the most important classes of animals ... for ... students of zoology and comparative anatomy’. Stirling shared Tate’s vision of the harmonious co-evolution of museum and university teaching and research. On the resignation in 1882 of Frederick Waterhouse, the museum’s frst and long-serving curator, they secured the appointment of Johann Wilhelm Haacke (1855– 1912) as his successor. Haacke was an experienced curator abreast of the latest developments in European museology, who had begun his scientifc career assisting none other than Ernst Haeckel (Stirling 1882). With Tate and Stirling’s backing, Haacke began putting the museum’s collecting on a more systematic scientifc basis. He introduced new techniques for feld preservation and the curation of wet and dry natural history specimens. During Waterhouse’s years as curator, feld collectors had been contracted when funds allowethey secured. Now the Museum and Library Board were persuaded by Stirling and Tate to allow Haacke to employ a full-time feld collector and expand the number of staff skilled in preserving and cataloguing specimens. As the museum’s funding continued to depend on the colony’s political elite being convinced of the usefulness of its collections in fostering South Australia’s economic and social development, one of the frst things that Haacke did after becoming curator recommended to the Museum and Library Board that the museum’s ‘mineralogical and geological collections be made as complete as it seems desirable before any large additions are made to the zoological and ethnological collections’ (Haacke 1882). Even so, he, Tate and Stirling were conscious of the importance that collecting of Indigenous Australian artefacts and bodily remains had assumed in contemporary efforts to reconstruct human evolutionary history. All three men were also aware that new connections were being drawn between bodily morphology and forms of material culture. Tate was an energetic researcher in various felds of geology and zoology (Alderman 1976) but was also fascinated by the bodily and artefactual traces of humanity’s deep past. A member of the London Anthropological Society from soon after its foundation in 1863, he had joined James Hunt, the society’s co-founder and admirer of the controversial racial anatomist Robert Knox, in superintending the excavation of 236 P. Turnbull ancient grave mounds on the Shetland island of Unst in the summer of 1865 (Hunt 1886). The outcomes of their investigation met with lively discussion in the Society on the resemblance between stone implements they unearthed on Unst and recent fnds in the Loire district of France, with Tate suggesting that further investigation of the morphology of a skull found in one mound might shed light on the racial origins of the ancient inhabitants of the Shetland Isles. As Tate’s involvement in the life of the South Australian Museum grew, he sought the help of friends, scientifc colleagues and the colony’s many amateur naturalists to enrich the museum’s ethnological collections, readily acting as a go-between for those he persuaded to sell ‘articles of native industry’ at mutually agreeable prices (Tate 1882). Tate regarded these artefacts as valuable sources of comparative insight into the connections between human biological and cultural evolution. He was well aware that in this his thinking mirrored the views of leading metropolitan anthropologists, for by the early 1880s the museum was receiving requests from European museums and other scientifc institutions for help in procuring ‘skulls of natives in exchange for other objects’. One of the earliest was from Ferdinand von Hochsteller (1829– 1884), the director of Vienna’s Imperial Natural History Museum (Hochsteller 1880). Haacke too envisaged the museum as educating students and the public about the evolutionary emergence and subsequent development of humankind. Despite the priority given to its geological and mineral collections, he began purchasing anthropoid ape specimens soon after being confrmed in his position as curator. The ‘geological’ purchases he made included on various occasions comparative fossil specimens, including casts of ancient human remains such as the Neanderthal skull and the ‘Guadeloupe skeleton’—mineralised post-cranial remains acquired by the British Museum that were found encased in what was thought to be extremely ancient limestone strata (Stirling 1881). By late 1882, Haacke had begun contacting settlers and government offcials inter- acting with Indigenous peoples in remoter parts of the colony and the Northern Territory to see whether they could get the museum not only Indigenous artefacts but also skulls and skeletons. Haacke also encouraged donations of Indigenous artefacts and purchased individual items when the price was reasonable or the item was thought to be so ethnologically interesting as to justify its price. He also acquired ethnological 8 ‘JUDICIOUS COLLECTORS’, 1870–1914 237 items from other parts of the world by giving artefacts displayed in the South Australian courts of international expositions to other museums (see Stirling 1882). After Haacke’s resignation in 1884, Stirling assumed the directorship of the museum. He and Tate continued to be strategic in their ethnological and anthropological collecting. At times they thought it best not to purchase items that would have enhanced the museum’s capacity to educate the university’s students and the visiting public in advances in knowledge of human evolutionary history. In February 1885, for example, they regretfully declined the offer of Robert von Schlagintweit (1833–1885), professor of geography at the University of Giessen, to sell the museum copies of ffty life-size gypsum facial casts of ‘characteristic types of races’ that von Schlagintweit and two of his brothers had made while travelling in Asia and undertaking geological surveys for the British East India Company in the mid-1850s (Schlagintweit 1885). In April the following year, August Saupé (n.d.), a young German sculptor living in Adelaide whom Haacke had previously commissioned to produce hand- coloured casts of fsh specimens, approached the Museum offering the originals of ‘two life size fgures of Indigenous natives belonging to the Macleay Tribe … executed … in plaster of Paris and painted in their natural colour’ that he had created for the South Australian exhibit at the 1886 London Colonial Exhibition (Saupé 1886). The asking price of 55 guineas was beyond the museum’s means. In November that same year, Stirling and Tate were forced to turn down the offer of James White (1861–1918), a young English sculptor newly arrived in Sydney, to sell the museum a group of wax models derived from ‘plaster casts of living Aborigines … fnished, with the skin marking carefully preserved, & in various attitudes, illustrating the habits of the natives’ (White 1886). White claimed to have secured orders from other museums, but needed more to enable him to create and sell the fgures at a suitably attractive price. Funds could not be spared, but on Tate’s suggestion White was informed that the museum would ‘bear his offer in mind should they be able to avail themselves of it in future’ (White 1886). Similarly, offers of prehistoric European artefacts were refused as being ‘somewhat outside the present scope of the Museum’ (White 1886). Stirling and Tate were nonetheless successful in securing other items that would prove valuable in illustrating advances in evolutionary science. They bought higher primate skeletons through Edward Gerrard (1810–1910), one of London’s leading taxidermists and dealers in 238 P. Turnbull natural history specimens (Morris 2004), who specialised in the sale of comparative osteological specimens to museums in Europe, North American and British settler colonies (Saupé 1886; Tate 1882). Gerrard, from whom the anti-Darwinian director of the Melbourne Museum, Frederick McCoy, had also purchased three gorilla skins and skeletons in 1865 (Butcher 1988), was aware he was dealing in specimens much sought after by colonial museums and the prices he charged were accordingly high—especially as by the later 1880s the growing use of frearms by peoples living in the vicinity of Gorilla habitats for whom they were a source of bush meat were reducing populations. Stirling was able to obtain both chimpanzee and gorilla skeletons and skins as Gerrard was willing to accept Australian fauna as part payment, although not without complaining of the diffculty of fnding buyers for them (Gerrard 1886). Stirling was also to obtain specimens of Proboscis monkey and three Ourang Utan skeletons through the British government resident of Sarawak (Gerrard 1886). By the late 1880s Stirling and Tate were in a stronger position to convince the Museum and Library Board to support more extensive and systematic anthropological collecting. In late 1888, Stirling sent Amandus Zietz (1840–1921), the Museum’s chief preparator, to Sydney and Melbourne, ostensibly to arrange exchanges of specimens, but also, one suspects, to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their collections. Zietz reported that in both institutions the holdings of ethnological material were weaker than expected. In Melbourne, he judged what he saw of the ethnological collection housed in the Industrial and Technical Museum as at best ‘fair’, and neither arranged nor labelled properly; it also seemed unlikely that many more Indigenous Victorian items would be acquired. The ethnological collection in Sydney’s Australian Museum he judged ‘very poor’ (Zietz 1888): despite Edward Ramsay’s best efforts it had proved impossible to replace the many Australian artefacts destroyed in the 1882 Garden Palace fre. Zietz also learnt (probably from Ramsay) that the Queensland Museum was actively collecting Indigenous material in the northern and western regions of that colony. It seemed that despite the obstacles to collecting, the South Australian Museum’s ethnological holdings could justly ‘be considered as one of the most valuable in Australia’ (Zietz 1888). Moreover, the development of pastoralism and mining in the Northern Territory under South Australia’s administration presented new opportunities for the museum, with the help of police, other government agents, missionaries and 8 ‘JUDICIOUS COLLECTORS’, 1870–1914 239 frontier settlers, to become the premiere institution for the study of southern and central Australian ethnology. Indeed, Stirling was eventually able, despite fnancial constraints, to collect on a more systematic and ambitious scale. By 1896 he could speak proudly of the museum having a ‘fne … collection from Central Australia’ (Stirling 1896, p. 4).

Stirling and the Evolutionary Implications of Indigenous Morphology From the late 1880s, Stirling actively encouraged the collecting of Indigenous skulls and skeletal material. What motivated him was his coming to think that certain cranial and other morphological traits within the Indigenous population of southern and central Australia had an intriguing evolutionary signifcance. Sometime in 1888–1889 he was struck by what he saw as a ‘marked resemblance’ between a South Australian cranium recently donated to the museum and the cast of the Neanderthal skull that the museum had purchased in 1881 (Stirling 1916). When Stirling visited England in 1891–1892 he took casts of the Indigenous cranium with him, giving one to Alexander Macalister (1844–1919), then professor of anatomy at the University of Cambridge. Macalister, an admirer of Darwin who was particularly interested in the evolutionary signifcance of rudimentary organs in human and primates (Macalister 1870, pp. 112–123), judged it ‘the most Neanderthaloid skull that he had seen’ (Stirling 1893c). Stirling also saw what he thought was a ‘curious point of resemblance between palaeolithic man and the modern Australian Aboriginal’. This was ‘the shape of the tibia or shin-bone’ in each appearing ‘markedly fattened’ (Stirling 1893c, p. 12). Stirling and his anatomist colleague Archibald Watson had been aware that this fattening of the tibia (platycnemia) was common in Indigenous communities in central Australia but had assumed it to be pathological condition. In England, however, Stirling learnt that what appeared to be identically platycnemic tibia had been found not only in Indigenous peoples who at this time were generally thought to be ‘lower races’ in the continuum of human evolution, but also ‘with varying frequency in different localities, in those of ancient man’ (Stirling 1893c, 12)—in fact, all the tibia of the so-called Cro-Magnon skeletons discovered thus far appeared to be platycnemic (Stirling 1896, p. 19). 240 P. Turnbull

On returning to Adelaide in mid-1892, Stirling set about carefully examining Indigenous tibia in the museum and university medical school. He found ‘nearly all of them [to be] more or less platycnemic’ (Stirling 1896, p. 19). By early the following year he had used the colony’s newspapers to enlist the help of residents of outlying parts of the colony and the Northern Territory in locating burial places. A number were happy to oblige, one writing to him that stockmen on several Barkley Tableland stations knew of ‘many … undisturbed examples such as would rejoice the heart of Mr. Stirling’ (Stirling 1893b).

Primitive Men of Europe and Australia In September 1893 Stirling gave a public lecture in conjunction with the Adelaide meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science.1 It was a lively account of what was known about Europe’s earliest human inhabitants, and he spoke of discovering typically Neanderthaloid cranial characteristics and platycnemic tibia that proved, as he was now convinced, that ‘we have about us in the Aboriginal races an almost exact counterpart of the most ancient men [in Europe] whose remains have come to light during recent years’ (Stirling 1893c, 2). Stirling suggested that these morphological affnities raised an interesting question: how had Europe’s most ancient human inhabitants eventually become ‘a race which can claim a Shakespeare or a Newton’, while, as he saw it, in Australia their ‘almost exact counterpart’ had not only ‘remained practically unchanged through long ages’ but also seemed ‘doomed to speedy extinction’? This question he did not answer, pleading that he was unable to do so satisfactorily and still achieve the stated aim of his lecture, which was to summarise what the earliest ‘indu- bitable evidence’ suggested Europe’s palaeolithic inhabitants had been like (Stirling 1893c). Even so, his account of palaeolithic life in Europe went some way towards suggesting why that continent should have witnessed the gradual emergence of civilisation while Australia’s autochthonous people had supposedly experienced evolutionary stasis. Drawing on the work of the Darwinian palaeontologist William Boyd Dawkins (1837–1929), Stirling spoke of human prehistory as essentially a story of interracial struggle and supersession. A protégé of

1 Stirling was ill, so his lecture was actually read by James Hector, director of Wellington’s Colonial Museum. 8 ‘JUDICIOUS COLLECTORS’, 1870–1914 241

Thomas Huxley, Dawkins was admired by his peers especially for two books that attracted wide public interest, in which he traced the course of European prehistory on the basis of what could plausibly be deduced from an increasing number of discoveries of sites of early human occupation in ancient river terraces, rock shelters and lake shores (Dawkins 1874, 1880; Tweedale 2006). Dawkins believed that prehistoric Europe had seen the successive displacement, and quite possibly the extermination, of racially distinct peoples by physically and intellectually superior types. The earliest of these races, whose arrival in the Middle Pleistocene Dawkins believed was marked by the presence of distinctively worked stone tools found in river gravels, had been displaced in the upper Pleistocene by at least two different races of cave-dwelling people, the latter possessing superior stone and bone tools that suggested they had lived much like modern Inuit hunter–gatherer bands. The discovery and excavation of these peoples’ dwelling places seemed to indicate that by the end of the palaeolithic era they had been forced into the northern regions of the continent by new waves of migrants, the last being ‘Aryan’ peoples who throughout the Neolithic era arrived from the east to establish themselves as the ancestors of modern Europeans. Stirling was so drawn to Dawkins’s depiction of ancient Europe as the scene of ancient racial struggles for survival that he declared himself convinced that Inuit-like peoples of the late European palaeolithic era had been ‘overwhelmed and annihilated by … advancing hordes of neolithic invaders’. He was convinced, moreover, that this ancient racial antipathy had its modern analogue in ‘the same feelings as have always existed between the Eskimos and Red Indians, terror and defenceless hatred being met by ruthless extermination’ (Stirling 1893a). Moreover, his attraction to this agonistic racialist vision of humanity’s deep past may have been coupled with his sharing Dawkins’s scepticism about one key aspect of Darwinian theory: the idea that nature was a self-regulating arena of competition, in which individuals within a species exhibiting variations favouring their survival and reproduction were ‘naturally selected’ by prevailing environmental conditions. Dawkins was one of numerous scientifc contemporaries of Darwin who accepted his argument that new species with greater ftness for survival arose through speciation, but did not believe that favourable variants of physical form and intellectual capability had arisen through natural selection. He believed that the natural history of humanity clearly illustrated that a creative, divinely originating force was at work in the 242 P. Turnbull physiology of all living organisms, purposively guiding the course of evolution (Desmond 1982, pp. 181–82). Stirling may have thought likewise, perhaps believing with his Cambridge colleague, Alexander Macalister, that there were two fundamental parts to the human mind:

one the seat of the passions, desires, and appetites … identical with that of the lower animals … the other … which has no correlate in the lower animals, the seat of the moral sense, and the religious feelings … which no evolution can account for. (Livingstone 2007, p. 78; Macalister 1871, p. 150)

If Stirling was in agreement with Macalister, this might explain why in his lecture he distanced himself from Dawkins’s suggestion that the origins of modern European civilisation lay in the easterly migration and spread of Neolithic ‘Aryan’ peoples. Possibly Stirling thought that the morphology of ancient European skulls was indicative of intelligent design in the emergence of the modern peoples of Europe from possibly autochthonous racial types. In 1894 Stirling participated in the Horn expedition to the McDonnell Ranges of the Northern Territory. Named after its sponsor William Austin Horn (1841–1922), a wealthy mining magnate and pastoralist, the expedition comprised scientists with a range of interests and expertise from the Universities of Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. The aim of the venture was to survey as comprehensively as resources allowed the geology, biology and Indigenous peoples of the region. Stirling was charged with directing the expedition’s anthropological work. Another member of the expedition was the Oxford-trained evolutionary biologist Baldwin Spencer, who had taken up the foundation chair of biology at the University of Melbourne in 1897 and was to become internationally known by the turn of the twentieth century as the foremost authority on the anthropology of Indigenous Australia. Much has been written about how the Horn expedition provided Spencer with an ‘anthropological apprenticeship’ while endorsing his assessment that Stirling’s ‘observations on Aboriginal subjects were few and scrappy’ (Mulvaney 1996, p. 6). Spencer in fact intervened to have Stirling’s report of the 8 ‘JUDICIOUS COLLECTORS’, 1870–1914 243 expedition’s anthropological work published only after the addition of observations by Frank Gillen (1855–1912), the outback postmaster whom Spencer frst met on the expedition and who was to become his invaluable feld-work partner over the next two decades (Morphy 1996, pp. 135–148). One section of the Horn expedition’s anthropological report stands out, however, in terms of focus and attention to detail. This is Stirling’s documentation of the prevalence of platycnemic tibia among Indigenous people of the McDonnell Ranges. He was to report that when the expedition

came into more frequent contact with the blacks, I was surprised to fnd that the tibiæ of a considerable number of them, both males and females, adults and young, presented the same peculiar bent conformation, the associated platycnemia being apparently also well marked. (1896, p. 19)

If Stirling needed further proof that the platycnemic anterior curvature he had found in Indigenous tibia was an ‘evolutionary modifcation of form’, he had it. The lack of resemblance of this curvature to those in tibia known to have been caused by tuberculosis or other diseases strongly suggested to him that it could have only one origin: it had arisen from ‘the Australian native … [being] perpetually on the tramp, either in the pursuit of game or in the course of his wandering life’ (Stirling 1896, p. 20).

Building a Collection And yet it would appear that Stirling did not further investigate tibial or other Indigenous morphological peculiarities in any depth after returning from the Horn Expedition. Possibly because he believed that further research on Indigenous evolutionary genealogy required larger numbers of morphological representative specimens, he focused on encouraging donations of crania and other skeletal remains by fellow medical practitioners, police and frontier offcials in remote regions of South Australia and the Northern Territory (Various 1892). We fnd that on various occasions after the Horn expedition he accompanied museum employees on short ‘body snatching’ trips to burial places (see Stirling 1895). 244 P. Turnbull

Stirling may have had his shortcomings as an anthropological observer of Indigenous lifeways and culture, but he was aware of the distress that the plundering of ancestral burial places caused. During his 1891– 1892 visit to England he had enlisted the help of his elder brother, John Lancelot Stirling (1849–1932), in getting museum employees to get and send him several complete skeletons for British scientifc institutions. They were to be removed from burial sites that appear to have been on or near a pastoral station leased by the Stirling family on the Mundi Mundi Plains of central western New South Wales. However, Robert Kay (1825–1904), the Museum and Library Board’s long-time secretary, intervened, worried that the museum staff who would collect the remains did not, in his view, ‘have judgment enough to be trusted in a rather delicate matter as any row or squabble might I suppose have grave consequences’ (Kay 1892). John Stirling responded that his brother would regret being unable to present skeletons to his metropolitan colleagues, assuring Kay that the museum’s men would not be at any risk—although he also admitted that he did not want any of his employees involved. As he explained to Kay,

The reason for our Station people not desiring to appear in the matter is merely from the fact of our employing a good many natives and our men doing anything in the matter would probably make them shy of remaining where their last resting place may be disturbed. (Stirling 1892)

Possibly Kay also had moral qualms about Stirling’s exhuming these graves. Moreover, surviving museum correspondence discloses that there were residents of outlying regions of South Australia and the Northern Territory who were willing to aid the museum, so long as they were able to collect remains exposed by erosion or land clearing. As both Stirling and Kay were aware, it was harder to persuade would-be collectors to take part in ‘rifing any known graves’. (McCallum 1899). Even so, Stirling found a number of frontier police, other government offcials and pastoralists who were prepared to get him Indigenous skulls and skeletons by plundering graves. William George Stretton (1847–1920), for example, served in the Territory as a mounted policeman from the late 1860s until joining the Customs Department in 1887. In the early 1890s, while posted to Borroloola, he sent the museum two sets of bones within hollow log coffns, which he had taken from tree burials of the Yanyuwa people. In August 1894, he wrote to Stirling 8 ‘JUDICIOUS COLLECTORS’, 1870–1914 245 of having secured ‘the bones of the huge native I mentioned some time ago’, adding that although he had been unable to obtain all the smaller bones of this Yanyuwa man’s skeleton, he would be able to get the museum a second ‘perfect specimen later on’ (Stretton 1894b). It seems he was unable to do this, but in 1896 he sent the museum a femur and a tibia painted with red ochre, together with six Yanyuwa people’s skulls. Another of Stirling’s skeletal collectors during the 1890s was Paul Foelsche (1831–1914), a sub-inspector in charge of the Northern Territory’s mounted police. A keen amateur naturalist and skilled photographer, Foelsche regularly sent the museum specimens of local fora and fauna after he was posted to Port Darwin in 1870. He also took a keen interest in the lifeways and culture of the Larrakia and other peoples whose ancestral lands he policed. Foelsche had periodically sent the museum skulls he came across on his patrols; with Stirling’s encouragement, his collecting during the 1890s became more regular and extensive. In 1894, for example, he sent Stirling the skulls of six Malay fshermen allegedly killed by Aborigines, together with four Indigenous skulls (Stretton 1894a). Foelsche also assisted other Territory police, sending the museum remains they acquired out of Port Darwin by steamer (Stretton 1894b). Stirling was wary of letting it be known that police were collecting for the museum. In 1898 he thought it wise to inquire of Lewis Madley (1844–1916), then South Australia’s commissioner of police, whether he had any objection to naming Paul Foelsche ‘as a donor in many cases of native skulls’. ‘Personally I do not’, Stirling declared, though he admitted he was concerned that ‘there might be those who, on senti- mental or other grounds, would say that members of the Force should not thus occupy themselves’ (Stirling 1898). For his part, Madley was agreeable so long as it was made clear that Foelsche had collected in his own time ‘as a civilian’ (Madley 1898).

Valuable Scientific Capital By the turn of the twentieth century, the South Australian Museum possessed nearly 200 Indigenous crania, around a dozen full or near complete skeletons, and probably a hundred or so other post-cranial remains. Stirling had also equipped the museum with the principal cranial and anthropometric measuring instruments then employed by British and European anatomists and anthropologists (Stirling 1897). However, 246 P. Turnbull he appears to have become resigned to the likelihood that there would be no further large-scale expansion of the collection. Its value would thus most likely be its contribution to large-scale comparative investigations of Indigenous morphology entailing the examination of specimens in Australian, British and continental European museums. Possibly the anatomist and anthropologist Wilhelm Krause (1833–1910), then head of Berlin’s prestigious Anatomical Institute, confrmed as much to Stirling when in 1897 he arranged through Archibald Watson, his pupil for a time at the University Göttingen, to visit the museum and measure its crania (Krause 1897). Regardless of what Krause made of the collection, Stirling seems to have thought that more was to be gained scientifcally by his passing on remains of particular morphological interest to leading British anatomists investigating the evolutionary genealogy of the human species. Stirling had long occasionally given crania to British medico-scientifc colleagues (News 1882). Now he not only sent them skulls and casts of crania in the museum, but with the aid of Archibald Watson dispatched a number of complete heads preserved in spirits, two of which we know to have been dissected during 1896–1897 at the University of Cambridge by W.H.L. Duckworth (1870–1956), a talented young anatomist who soon afterwards became the university’s frst lecturer in physical anthropology (News 1897). Stirling had reason to be discreet, however, as the specimens were acquired from postmortem examinations of Indigenous people dying in the colony’s hospitals, benevolent asylums and prisons. He did not believe that he contravened the legislation governing anatomy teaching and postmortem dissection in South Australia, which as professor of physiology at Adelaide University he had co-drafted in 1884 with the colony’s chief justice. He presumed it that he could lawfully remove scientifcally interesting bodily structures and keep them for teaching or research, unless the deceased, their relatives or friends had exercised their right under the Anatomy Act to deny him from subjecting their body to ‘anatomical examination’ (Stirling 1903). Even so, he was conscious that his reputation in Adelaide society could easily fall victim to popular fear and revulsion at the dissection of those whose only fault was to die in poverty, especially should the removal of whole heads become publicly known. From the middle of 1903 he had good reason to be concerned for his reputation, due to the public outcry caused by the postmortem anthropological harvesting of heads and other bodily structures by his medical colleague and Adelaide’s city coroner, William Ramsay Smith 8 ‘JUDICIOUS COLLECTORS’, 1870–1914 247

(1859–1937) (MacDonald 2009); in the years thereafter that he continued to direct the museum, Stirling counselled would-be collectors that Indigenous remains should be ‘judiciously collected for you would naturally not wish to create a scandal’ (Stirling 1910).

Late Ambitions Unrealised: The Swanport Discovery By 1910 Stirling was in his early sixties, and contemplating retirement from the museum’s directorship. He continued to encourage the donation of remains although, as he lamented to Archibald Watson when arranging to acquire skulls from him, he was resigned to the museum acquiring no more than 250 Indigenous crania in his lifetime. In April the following year, however, swamp reclamation work by South Australia’s lands department at Swanport, on the lower Murray River, disturbed a large ancestral burial place of the Ngarrindjeri people. Stirling quickly sent museum personnel to the site only to learn that most of the unearthed skeletons had either been ‘promiscuously thrown into a hole’ or shovelled up with soil and tipped onto the adjacent river bank. Despite retrieving as many bones as possible, ‘the individual identity of the skeletons so handled was unfortunately lost’ (Stirling 1896, p. 4). Worse, nothing like the number of skeletons broken up were recovered. However, in spite of this setback the burial place was a remarkable discovery, and the removal of remains under the supervision of museum personnel increased the institution’s number of Indigenous crania to more than 500 (Jones 1997, p. 290). It also led Stirling to think that further reclamation work in the lower Murray region might lead to other sites where large numbers of people had been buried, giving researchers associated with the museum the means to investigate comprehensively the morphology and evolutionary ancestry of local Indigenous communities. At any rate, three months after the Swanport discovery Stirling spoke before the Royal Society of South Australia of investigating the remains ‘from a craniological, osteological and pathological point of view’ (Stirling 1911, p. 42). He never began any such study, despite in the previous two decades having consulted local and European researchers skilled in anthropometric techniques, and having supervised the museum’s acquisition of relevant osteometric instruments and publications (see Stirling 1897). These intellectual resources lay unused and Stirling confned himself to investigating whether the Swanport bones confrmed historical speculation 248 P. Turnbull that the Indigenous peoples of South Australia had suffered one or more smallpox epidemics in the century or so prior to European settlement (Stirling 1911). Stirling’s surviving papers and correspondence provide no clues as to why he did not undertake or encourage other museum personnel to investigate the Swanport remains. It could be that his preparatory reading left him unwilling to immerse himself at this late stage of his career in craniometry or other anthropometric inquiries, which by now had evolved into highly technical pursuits marked by disagreement and debate among their leading practitioners. He may also have been aware of growing doubts within contemporary metropolitan British scientifc circles as to whether the morphology of the human head and limbs could in fact be used to map human racial diversity with any degree of accuracy. As Nancy Stepan has observed, although many British scientists well into the late 1930s continued to believe that metric analysis of crania and limb bones would yield insights into the racial and evolutionary genealogy of human populations, there were other infuential evolutionary biologists and anatomists who, by the time of the Swanport discovery, were convinced that the human head and limbs were so susceptible to variation in response to environmental conditions as to render them useless as markers of evolutionary ancestry (Stepan 1982, pp. 99, 102). Regardless of whether Stirling’s failure to investigate the Swanport remains stemmed from this or other more mundane reasons, he took no further active interest in investigating Indigenous remains. It is clear, though, that he still saw the museum’s skeletal collection as one of his principal contributions to colonial science. Stirling’s collecting and interpretation of Indigenous remains is a telling illustration of how these relics could be represented as verifying that the future of Australian nationhood depended on safeguarding an evolutionary inheritance that, as Stirling put it, was responsible for Britons becoming ‘a race which can claim a Shakespeare or a Newton’ (Stirling 1893c). Like Gerard Krefft some twenty years before him, Stirling confdently drew parallels between ancient European and contemporary Indigenous societies that underscored the lesson that human history was essentially a drama of racial struggle and supersession. In Stirling’s correspondence with his collectors we see how this racialised vision of history could easily be interpreted as giving scientifc credence to, and thus morally justifying, the pacifcation of frontier regions by taking punitive action against resistance by the traditional owners. In the surviving 8 ‘JUDICIOUS COLLECTORS’, 1870–1914 249 record of the conversations about the remains of the Indigenous dead, we fnd much said by Stirling’s collectors to suggest that they implicitly saw themselves as engaged in an evolutionary struggle in which Indigenous Australians were destined to suffer racial extinction.

Evolutionary Museology in Melbourne It was not until the turn of the twentieth century that Melbourne’s university and National Museum became sites for the study of Indigenous culture and evolutionary history. As mentioned in Chapter 7, there were a number of professional men active in the governance and intellectual life of Victoria during the last third of the nineteenth century who took a keen interest in the lifeways and culture of the colony’s traditional owners (Curr 1886; Smyth 1878). The most infuential of these amateur ethnologists among contemporary British anthropologists were Alfred William Howitt (1830–1908), and Lorimer Fison (1832–1907). Howitt’s ethnology was greatly infuenced by Edward Tylor’s (1832– 1917) and John Lubbock’s (1834–1913) Darwinian interpretations of human cultural development. Fison was a Wesleyan missionary whose fascination with marriage and kinship amongst the peoples of Oceania became the basis of friendship and a near thirty-year intellectual collaboration with Howitt, although Fison’s anthropological research refected his theistically grounded ambivalence about aspects of Darwinian evolutionary thought. As previously noted, anthropology was of no interest to Frederick McCoy during his near-forty-year tenure as the director of Victoria’s National Museum. There was also in these years little collecting of Indigenous remains by medico-scientifc personnel associated with the University of Melbourne’s anatomical museum. But this was to change on McCoy’s death in 1899 and the appointment of Walter Baldwin Spencer (1860–1929) as museum director. Spencer had held the university’s chair of biology since 1887, but by the turn of the century was known in British and continental European scientifc circles for his pioneering feld investigations of the lifeways and culture of Indigenous societies in central Australia. His anthropology was frmly grounded in the Darwinian premise that the cultural peculiarities of peoples refected their adaptation to environmental conditions. One of his frst actions on assuming the museum’s directorship was to secure space to exhibit Indigenous weapons, implements and ceremonial objects 250 P. Turnbull when the museum moved from the university grounds to a building in the city centre, adjacent to the Public Library that housed Melbourne’s Industrial and Technological Museum. This was Spencer’s frst step in building collections that removed ‘Aborigines from the human context of comparative technology, and reclassifed them frmly among the fora and fauna of a natural history museum’ (Mulvaney and Calaby 1985, p. 247). In exhibiting Indigenous artefacts Spencer employed the evolutionary typology devised by Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers (1827–1900) to arrange the remarkable collection of diverse objects that he eventually donated to the University of Oxford in the early 1880s. When studying at Oxford in 1885 he had spent a month unpacking and arranging Pitt Rivers’s collection under the supervision of Henry Nottidge Moseley and Edward Tylor. Pitt-Rivers had arranged over 15,000 items in his collection on the basis of their function, ‘so as to trace, as far as practicable, the succession of ideas by which the minds of men in a primitive condition of culture have progressed from the simple to the complex, and from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous’ (Pitt Rivers 1874, p. xi). Spencer’s choice of an initial centre-piece for the museum’s Australian ethnological exhibits refected his intellectual debt to Pitt Rivers: it was a series of boomerangs ‘exhibited … to illustrate the various forms and the possible development from a straight stick of … the return boomerang’ and throwing clubs. Spencer’s desire for the museum to begin systematically collecting artefacts was a further incentive for him to embark on further feldwork in central Australia with Frank Gillen in 1901–1902. In their time spent with Indigenous communities between Charlotte Waters and Borroloola, he and Gillen gained a wealth of new ethnographic knowledge and secured a wide range of ceremonial and domestic artefacts for the museum. Spencer’s ambition was also to see the museum play a prominent part in the investigation of human evolutionary history; and to this end he spent a considerable amount of time taking anthropometric measurements and photographs, and removed skeletal material from burial places the expedition encountered when it appeared safe to do so. So it was that when the expedition reached the Ti Tree Telegraph Reserve about 190 kilometres north of Alice Springs in June 1901, Harry Chance, an ex-mounted policeman serving as driver and cook, alerted Spencer and Gillen that they had failed to see a tree burial close to the track they had been following. Gillen was to record in his journal with characteristic joviality that: 8 ‘JUDICIOUS COLLECTORS’, 1870–1914 251

Had we seen the grave we should have bagged the bones and added them to our collection. Chance severely reprimanded for not at least laying violent hands on the skull and so that there may be no repetition of such remissness he is promptly and solemnly appointed Chief body snatcher to the Expedition. (Gillen 1968, p. 102)

Six months after returning to Melbourne in March 1902, Spencer joined R.H. Walcott (1870–1936), the former head of the Industrial and Technical Museum and now his curator of mineralogy and ethnology, in taking remains from graves discovered near Koondrook on the confu- ence of the Murray and Loddon Rivers in north western Victoria. This was among the frst of numerous pre-colonial sites of Indigenous habita- tion in Victoria that provided the museum with skeletal material. Most of these excavations were undertaken by amateur naturalists who had previously supplied natural history specimens for the museum. The most active collectors were members of Victoria’s Field Naturalists Club, of which Spencer had served as president for much of the 1890s. Charles French (1868–1950), for example, a horticulturalist and life- long member of the club, obtained over twenty skulls and post-cranial remains for the museum in 1905. He dug them out of eroded banks of the Murray and Loddon Rivers. Alfred S. Kenyon (1867–1943) was another prominent member of the club. He was a civil engineer who fostered public interest in Indigenous art and extensively collected stone tools (see Griffths 1996). Spencer was impressed by Kenyon’s mode of classifying stone tools, incidentally, which he saw as confrming that the technology of Indigenous Australians refected their supposed environmental entrapment in evolutionary stasis. From 1907 until the mid- 1930s Kenyon also provided the museum with bones he unearthed at pre-colonial camping and tool-making sites across northern Victoria.

Richard Berry and the Indigenous Skull The collecting of remains gained further momentum with the appointment of Richard Berry (1867–1962) to the University of Melbourne’s chair of anatomy in 1905. Berry had been interested in human evolutionary history since his student days at Edinburgh University, during which time he was a star pupil of William Turner (1832–1916), whose recommendation clinched his securing the Melbourne chair. Like Turner and other early Darwinians, Berry believed that reconstructing 252 P. Turnbull the natural history of humanity required the differentiation of races and sub-racial types on the basis of stable physical traits. Turner introduced Berry to craniometry as the best practical means of determining where a race stood within the evolutionary history of our species, along with the potential evolutionary signifcance of other bodily structures such as the bones of the pelvis. Berry followed Turner and other Darwinians in assuming that the volume and interior form of the skull were reliable proxies for estimating the mental sophistication of racial types. As Turner observed, by adult- hood the bones of the cranium were ‘moulded on the organ which they enclose’ (Turner 1919, 238). Both men thus assumed as had most anatomists since Georges Cuvier over half a century before that large brains gave rise to vigorous intellects, feeble mindedness was invariably found in individuals with small brains, and that some races typically had substantially larger or smaller brains than others. Turner encouraged Berry to take advantage of the possibilities that the Melbourne chair offered for investigating Australian racial morphology. He himself had taken an interest in the place of the continent’s frst peoples in human evolutionary history since Thomas Huxley’s fnding clear similarities between the forms of Neanderthal and Australian skulls in the early 1860s. Inspired by Huxley, Turner examined Edinburgh University’s holdings of mainland and Tasmanian skulls publishing a paper in 1864 comparing the shape of Neanderthal and Australian occipital bones. He also willingly agreed to describe the Australian skeletal material collected during the course of the Challenger scientifc expedition of 1873–1876 (Turner 1884); and at about the time that Berry moved to Melbourne, he began comparing the seventy-two Tasmanian skulls and skeletons known to be in British and continental European collections. Turner’s investigations of Australian skulls eventually led him to think that while there were structural similarities between Neanderthal and modern Australian skulls, comparing ancient and modern European crania and those of anthropoid apes showed that humanity could not be arranged into a graded series of racial types wherein any one was evolutionarily higher or lower in all of its characters. He found that Indigenous Australians could exhibit both modern and archaic features, proving that there was no scientifc basis for believing that Europeans were a more evolutionarily sophisticated type that had evolved through 8 ‘JUDICIOUS COLLECTORS’, 1870–1914 253 successive stages ‘from the lowest or from any existing black race’ (Turner 1911, 452). Turner’s study of Tasmanian skulls also confrmed to his mind that reconstructing the evolutionary emergence of the human genus required further investigation of primate fossils to see whether they exhibited any morphologically hominid characteristics. Here it seemed to Turner that an important clue was to be found in a fossilised skullcap discovered in Java in the early 1890s by Eugène Dubois (1858–1940), a young Dutch anatomist working as an east India Army medical offcer. In shape, the skullcap—which Dubois believed was that of an ape-like species he named ‘Pithecanthropus erectus’—appeared to Turner to be ‘more in a direct line with existing man than with any form of ape with which we are presently acquainted’ (Turner 1911, 453). Turner’s conclusions were the starting point of Berry’s Australian anthropological research. After rectifying defciencies he found in the teaching of anatomy, Berry used a private bequest to equip Melbourne’s medical school ‘to study the physical attributes of the Indigenous inhabitants of Tasmania and Australia’. Turner thought it unlikely that many more ‘racially pure’ Tasmanian crania would be found, yet within three years of his arrival in Melbourne, Berry was to report that with the help of junior colleagues and students he had discovered thirty-three skulls in Tasmanian museums and private collections that were hitherto unknown to scientists. Half of these specimens, he lamented, were in private hands, and while he had been able to measure them, ‘nothing would induce the owners … to part with them’ (Berry 1909, 13). Yet in the summer of 1908 he acquired a further nine crania from graves on land owned by the family of one of his students near the site of the Oyster Cove station, to where the few Tasmanians to survive exile on Flinders Island had been moved in 1847 (Crowther 1949, p. 83). The student in question, incidentally, was William Crowther (1887–1981), the grandson of the Hobart surgeon who had mutilated the corpse of William Lanne, the so-called ‘last Tasmanian man’. In the 1970s Crowther spoke regretfully of his youth- ful involvement in the removal of these and other remains from graves at Oyster Cove (News 1981, p. 2). He explained that at the time he had seen these relics as scientifcally invaluable, and had no sense that what he was doing was morally wrong or illegal (Evans 2011). Berry measured these fnds and other skulls in Australian collections with the aim of building on Turner’s work to the point of being able to determine the likely ‘relationship of the Tasmanian to the anthropoids 254 P. Turnbull and primitive man’. Naturally enough he began by comparing Tasmanian skullcaps with that of Dubois’ Pithecanthropus erectus, the form of which had been minutely described by the Strasburg anatomist Gustave Schwalbe (1844–1916) in a widely-read paper (Schwalbe 1899). Possibly Berry visited Schwalbe and examined frst hand his cast of Dubois’ fnd, during leave he took to visit British and German centres in 1910. At any rate, he metrically compared the fossil with the bones of anthropoid apes, primitive Homo sapiens and living racial types. This proved to his satisfaction that the Tasmanians, at the time of their supposed extinction stood nowhere near Pithecanthropus erectus in evolutionary terms, but on most points of comparison were ‘well within the range of variation of modern man’ (Berry 1912b, p. 68). Campaigning by Victorian Indigenous communities in the early 1990s for the reburial of their ancestors’ remains drew attention to Berry’s anthropological research, with the result that he came to be portrayed in popular media as intent on proving the sub-humanity of Indigenous Australians:

It is 1907 in the laboratory of the professor of anatomy of Melbourne university, Richard Berry. On his table are the skulls of several Tasmanians exhumed by the professor from an Indigenous burial ground. Dr. Berry turns up each skull and pours lead shot into a measuring beaker to determine each skull’s cubic capacity. He hopes to prove the Tasmanian Aborigines were the missing link between ape and man. (Glover and Langsam 1990, 79)

More recently Berry has been described as having ‘collected 400 Aboriginal corpses, some stolen from traditional graves, for experiments’, and also as having been one of a number of ‘old professors [at Melbourne University] who wanted Aboriginal people killed, sterilised or their children removed’ (Dobbin 2015). The latter charge is nonsense; and the best that can be said of the other claims about Berry’s anthropological activities is that they ignore what he claimed he had achieved in his investigations of Indigenous remains. As we have seen, he did acquire remains by plundering traditional burial places; and he very likely acquired some skulls and skeletons removed during postmortem examinations. However, there is a not a shred of evidence that he acquired 400 corpses ‘for experiments’. Moreover, Berry did not ‘hope to prove’ that Indigenous Tasmanians were a transitional form between the higher apes and the human genus. On 8 ‘JUDICIOUS COLLECTORS’, 1870–1914 255 the basis of multiple craniometric measurements made with the help of his colleague A.W.D. Robertson (n.d.), he concluded instead that they were a race that ‘had progressed … to a higher plane than is generally either admitted or supposed’ (Berry 1912b, p. 68). Certainly he believed that the ‘mental culture’ of the Tasmanians at the time of their supposed ‘extinction’ was primitive, but he attributed this to their social isolation. He saw nothing in Tasmanian or mainland Australian skulls to support the conclusion that the continent’s frst peoples were biologically incapable of improvement. It seemed to Berry that they had in fact reached the same level of intellectual capability as Europeans of the early stone age (Berry 1912b, p. 68). Berry also capitalised on his having ready access to around 150 crania in Melbourne’s medical school and National Museum to assess the claim of the German anatomist Hermann Klaatsch (1863–1916) that skulls he had measured in Australia between 1904 and 1907 strongly suggested that its Indigenous inhabitants were an autochthonous racial type, whose origins lay in a fnal evolutionary transition from a simian ancestor to the human genus on the Australian continent (Berry 1912a, pp. 18–19; Klaatsch 1908). Here, Berry was cautious, believing it necessary to examine all the Tasmanian and mainland skulls at his disposal along with casts of all known fossilised hominid cranial bones and also a range of modern skulls of different ethnic ancestry. Simply comparing them with a selection from Papua New Guinea, he felt, enabled neither the racial unity nor the hybridity of mainland Australians to be biometrically confrmed, although it seemed to him that the exercise did suggest that the Tasmanians were a purer, and thus older, racial type (Berry 1912a). By 1912 Berry and Robertson had highly detailed measurements of Australian, fossil and ethnically diverse modern skulls, statistical analysis of which confrmed to their satisfaction that mainland Australians and Tasmanians were not an autochthonous racial type but ‘descendants of a common late Pliocene or Quaternary stock’ that had prehistorically colonised the continent. Thereafter, they reasoned, the Tasmanians had evolved in isolation while mainland populations ‘crossed’ with other racial stock of Asian or Pacifc origin. Yet more signifcant was that Berry and Robertson could see nothing in these skulls to support the received Darwinian view that Indigenous Australians were closely related to Neanderthals. It seemed to him that both populations had ‘attained, morphologically, to a higher stage in the evolutionary scale than is usually supposed’ (Berry 1914, p. 186).

*** 256 P. Turnbull

This chapter has surveyed the collecting activities and scientifc ambitions of several leading Australian museum personnel and local scientists from 1870 until the early years of the twentieth century. We have seen how they secured the remains of the Indigenous dead for their respective institutions, and explored the science that was produced by the examination of these crania and other bodily structures. The next chapter explores the anthropological activities of the curators and trustees of the Queensland Museum and scientists with whom they interacted in the same period. The ways in which remains were collected by the Queensland Museum paralleled, for the most part, those employed or encouraged by Ramsay, Stirling and Spencer; but they also differed in that, until the late 1880s, collecting occurred in the context of public awareness and concern about the scale of Indigenous resistance to the opening of the far west and northern regions of the colony to pastoral enterprises and mining. This was to infuence how remains were displayed in the museum. The ritually prepared bodies of men and women of the coastal rainforest peoples of Far North Queensland, for example, were selectively displayed to underwrite public perceptions of colonial progress having been won despite bloody resistance by the land’s supposedly innately savage original inhabitants. Yet, as we will also see, by the early 1890s the rationale for collecting came more to refect the belief that Queensland’s frst peoples were destined to racial extinction and that their remains were all the more valuable because of their diminishing availability to science. CHAPTER 9

‘Tales of Blood and Mummies’: The Queensland Museum, 1870–1914

Soon after his appointment as curator of the Queensland Museum in 1917, Heber A. Longman (1880–1954) wrote a brief article on several crania in the museum’s possession that he found morphologically interesting. In describing their peculiarities, he observed in passing that even though the museum had paid ‘no special attention … in the past to the collection of Indigenous and other crania … a considerable number of specimens’ had nonetheless been acquired (Longman 1918, p. 2). Certainly, only his immediate predecessor, Ronald Hamlyn Harris (1874–1953), who been director between 1910–1917, shared his anthropological research interests; but as this chapter will show, earlier museum personnel had sought, as far as had been practicable, to acquire Indigenous remains. By late 1879, when the Queensland museum moved into purpose-built premises under a permanent scientifcally-trained curator, provided by the colony’s government, its staff and trustees had already reached out to amateur naturalists across the colony to help them collect remains. Like their peers in the older southern colonies, they were alert to the scientifc value of the bodily remains of Queensland’s traditional owners, not least by often having been approached by prominent British scientists and British and continental European feld-researchers. One of the frst to visit the museum, and who hoped to gain help in obtaining remains, was James Whitelaw Craig (1849–1880), a Scottish naturalist. Craig arrived in Brisbane in 1876. Charles Coxen, then honorary curator and secretary of the museum, assisted him in collecting a variety of

© The Author(s) 2017 257 P. Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia, Palgrave Studies in Pacifc History, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51874-9_9 258 P. Turnbull natural history specimens and Indigenous artefacts on Moreton Bay, and at Cunningham’s Gap to the south west of Brisbane. Craig left Australia with ten cases of natural history specimens, for the museum of the Scottish town of Paisley that he had played a signifcant part in establishing in 1871 (News 1876b). However, he was unsuccessful in obtaining crania, recording in his diary that an Indigenous man at Cunningham’s Gap—almost certainly a man of the Yugarabul people—whom he asked to procure him a skull ‘was horrifed by the idea’ (Craig 1908). Two years later the museum was visited by the French explorer and archaeologist Claude-Joseph Désiré Charnay (1828–1915), who had been commissioned by the French ministry of public instruction to collect Australian specimens and arrange exchanges with the museum of Paris’s Jardin des Plantes. He arrived in Brisbane via Victoria, where, among other things, he had sought unsuccessfully to obtain a complete skeleton of a ‘southern Aborigine’ (Charnay 1881, p. 31). In Brisbane he met with museum trustees, telling them that French anthropologists were especially keen to be able to study frst-hand the remains of the colony’s Indigenous peoples; and, having learnt that two men were shortly to be executed in the Brisbane gaol, he asked the trustees whether they could help him secure their skeletons. The trustees were agreeable, and requested the Colonial Secretary, Arthur Palmer (1819–1898) that ‘favourable consideration be given to the proposal’ (QM 1879). However, by the time the Palmer received the request, the two men had been reprieved. Before leaving for Cooktown in Far North Queensland, Charnay was interviewed by Brisbane journalists, and took the opportunity to call on residents of rural and remote regions of the colony to help the museum obtain suffcient remains to make it possible for science to investigate the racial peculiarities of its Indigenous population. ‘He is astonished’, the Brisbane Courier reported,

at the apathy that exists here as to collecting anthropological specimens, and believes we shall regret out lost opportunities when the chance no longer exists of making such a collection. Dr. Broca, he says, has a collection of 2000 skulls, and here we allow our native curiosities to be decently buried without bequeathing any legacy to science. (News 1879a)

The Frenchman’s support for the museum’s collecting remains attracted satirical comment by one correspondent with The Queenslander observed: 9 ‘TALES OF BLOOD AND MUMMIES’: THE QUEENSLAND MUSEUM, 1870–1914 259

European science, in the person of M. Charnay, considers that we coloni- als have been resting too long on our oars, to the neglect of these precious skulls. It appears that the skull of a blackfellow is invaluable in the eyes of the anthropological connoisseur. It appears that we are surrounded with scientifc treasures, of the value of which we have had no due appreciation, and which we are as good as squandering by allowing them to return to their native dust. Let us wipe away this reproach from our colony. Let us not allow a single blackfellow to go down to his grave with peace—at least with his headpiece. (News 1879b)

One suspects that the museum trustees quietly welcomed any commentary that brought their wants to public attention. And while they were unable to help Charnay acquire skeletal material, they readily agreed to begin exchanging specimens with the Jardin des Plantes, and presented Charnay with a small collection of natural history specimens and Indigenous artefacts. Charnay was not the only scientifc traveller who sought to take advantage of Indigenous men who had been condemned to death. Shortly after his departure from Australia, Nikolai Mikluho-Maklai (1846–1888), the Russian naturalist, explorer and ethnographer, had better luck with men hanged in Brisbane gaol between May and August 1880. Maclay (as he was usually known) travelled Australia between 1878 and 1886.1 He studied crania in the Australian Museum and other colonial collections, and actively collected skeletal material, notably in the Torres Strait, Cape York and Western Queensland. He was especially interested in comparative brain anatomy. As he was to observe soon after arriving to the secretary of the Russian Geographical Society,

There are still large gaps in research relating to the comparative anatomy of the brains of human races, so any material whatsoever is valuable …. As Australian natives are very seldom admitted to municipal hospitals, I have been granted permission … to remove and examine the brain for scientifc purposes in the event of a native dying in prison. (Miklukho-Maklai 1996: 202)

Maclay spoke of plans to spend at least six weeks in Queensland collecting marsupial, dugong and lungfsh brains, adding that he had been told

1 It was said that he did so with a reading lamp made from the skull of a young woman with whom he had fallen in love while treating her. The story went that the woman had asked him to keep her skull as a token of their lost love. 260 P. Turnbull that his chances of securing Indigenous Australian brains would be far greater there. This was to be the case. With the help of the trustees of the Queensland Museum, Maclay secured the brains of three men of Melanesian, Philippine and Chinese ancestry, hanged in the Brisbane gaol, and the corpse of a man of the Gubi Gubi people named Umbelah, known to settlers as Johnny Campbell (Mikluho-Maclay 1882, p. 174). Convicted of rape, Umbelah died on the scaffold in August 1880. Maclay witnessed the execution, immediately after which he was allowed to dissect and photograph Umbelah’s brain. The following day he injected the corpse with an arsenic-rich preserving fuid newly devised in German anatomical circles before submerging the body in a variant of this fuid that he had developed in collaboration with Karl Staiger (1833–1888), the Queensland Museum’s curator and formerly the government’s analytical chemist. As The Queenslander reported,

Baron Maclay has had the use of the room in the old Museum formerly used by the analytical chemist. Johnny Campbell, who, since his untimely decease, has been the Baron’s close companion, is, we believe, going in a cask to a scientifc man in Germany. (News 1880a, p. 421)

Over two months Maclay sought to ensure the body was well preserved before judging it safe to ship it to Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902) in Berlin, in the hope that ‘this consignment will add a few facts to our knowledge of the Comparative Anatomy of the Races of Mankind’ (Mikluho-Maclay 1881, p. 578). As it turned out, the fuid used by Maclay did not prevent the body decaying within months of its arrival. The affair, incidentally, was to become grist to the literary mill of Archibald Meston, journalist, politician and eventual Protector of Aborigines. Himself a collector of remains and artefacts, Meston regaled newspaper readers with how the body of Campbell was

sent to Russia by Baron Miklouho Maclay in a hogshead of rum, injudi- ciously labelled ‘dugong oil’, and the Russian sailors drank the contents on the journey up the Volga, and declared dugong oil to be the champion beverage of the age. The odour from the cask when it arrived in St. Petersburg diffused itself over half the Russian empire, and created a belief that a Chinese invading army had started on the warpath, and was already within 1000 miles of the Russian capital. (Meston 1892) 9 ‘TALES OF BLOOD AND MUMMIES’: THE QUEENSLAND MUSEUM, 1870–1914 261

Thanks to Meston, the story of how the body of Johnny Campbell was shipped to Germany in rum passed into Queensland folklore (Smith 1917).

The Museum Under Charles de Vis, 1882–1905 The museum’s frst full-time scientifcally trained curator was William A. Haswell (1854–1925). Appointed in late 1879, Haswell was a biologist with little personal interest in anthropology, but he nonetheless encouraged the collecting of skeletal remains during the year he served before resigning because of his low salary and what he took to be government disinterest in adequately funding the development of the museum. His successor was Charles de Vis (1829–1915), who during his long tenure as curator from 1882 to 1905 greatly expanded the connections that Haswell had made among medical practitioners, government offcials and pastoralists in rural and remote parts of Queensland, with the aim of having them collect natural history specimens and ethnological material for the museum. De Vis’s vision for the museum was similar to that of Frederick McCoy’s for Melbourne’s National Museum. He was an Anglican cleric, and like McCoy regarded scientifc inquiry as the quest to understand the divine will as expressed in the design of nature, and its implications for humanity’s moral enlightenment. He was committed to popular scientifc education, encouraging museum visits by schools and opening the museum on Sundays for the beneft of Brisbane working class families. As to his personal scientifc interests, de Vis had studied zoology along with theology, and came to the museum’s curatorship with well- developed interests in ornithology and palaeontology. He was also curious about Queensland’s frst inhabitants, and like contemporary missionary ethnologists such as Lorimor Fison believed that the study of their life-ways and culture confrmed the common origins and psychic unity of humankind ‘so affording a striking evidence of the truth of God’s Word’ (Gardner 2008, p. 143). He appears to have shared with other liberal Anglican theologians and scientists the belief that although humankind had experienced evolutionary development, Darwin’s argument for the blind operation of natural selection was mistaken: evolution was a divinely guided, purposeful process. De Vis accepted the museum’s curatorship knowing that Queensland’s often volatile legislature needed to be assured of the worth of allocating to 262 P. Turnbull the museum scarce public revenues. Although he gave anthropology a lesser priority than geological and botanical collecting, which might lead to the discovery of new sources of mineral and agrarian wealth, De Vis tried, as best limited resources allowed during his 23 years as curator, to collect Indigenous Australian and Pacifc artefacts and bodily remains. Within six months of his appointment, he circulated the frst of what would be periodic requests to police and other government agents in rural and remote regions of the colony for help in acquiring artefacts, skulls and skeletons (Hodgkinson 1882). In late 1883 his second such circular met with several responses, including one from a sub-inspector of the native police stationed at Blackall in central western Queensland, who agreed to try to procure the museum skulls, adding that eighteen months earlier, when stationed at Gladstone on the central Queensland coast, he had seen ‘any amount of skulls knocking about a few miles from there’. He encouraged de Vis to contact the editor of the Gladstone Observer, assuring him that ‘he would call attention to your request and I am sure the district inhabitants would respond’ (Murray 1883). When De Vis took charge of the museum, Indigenous skulls were displayed within a jumble of weaponry celebrating the triumph of European civilisation over ‘native savagery’. During his short tenure, William Haswell had begun arranging the museum’s geological and natural history collections on evolutionary lines. His only innovation in respect of anthropology was to put on display several bodies of Indigenous people from the far north of the colony that were subject to funerary ceremonies involving smoke drying and embalming. De Vis sought to collect more of these so-called ‘Queensland Mummies’, several of which were still on public display when the museum moved to its current premises in 1986. He saw them as ‘historical relics’ that vividly impressed upon museum visitors the distance in terms of social development between the Indigenous and Anglo-Saxon races. Just before de Vis arrived in Brisbane to take up the curatorship, in March 1882, the museum trustees had declined to negotiate purchasing the ‘mummy’ of a young girl of the Mbabaram people, which had been obtained by armed settlers attacking a camp site to the west of the present-day far northern Queensland township of Herberton. As will be discussed in the next chapter, the trustees had no qualms about how the remains were acquired: what they found objectionable was having to bargain with the seller, who told them that he knew he could get an extremely high price for the body were he to take it to Sydney or 9 ‘TALES OF BLOOD AND MUMMIES’: THE QUEENSLAND MUSEUM, 1870–1914 263

Melbourne. In July 1883 the museum was approached by another settler offering a dried body from Far North Queensland. The corpse was that of a man of the Malabarra Yidinyji people, stolen some six months after being placed on a burial platform along the course of the Mulgrave River in coastal Far North Queensland. Claiming the body was a ‘very large one, being a King and Great Warrior’, the seller asked what the museum ‘would be willing to give for it, ‘—intimating that unless he was offered a good price he would sell the remains in England. This time de Vis did not hesitate to offer £5, which the buyer accepted’ (McGregor 1883). What led those who acquired these bodies to think they could ‘realise a very handsome sum’ by selling them in southern Australian centres or England was the wide reportage in the colonial press of a dried Indigenous body proving one of the most popular displays in the Queensland Courts of the International Exhibitions held in Sydney and Melbourne between 1879–1881. The remains were those of a Yirrganydji or Djabugay man, stolen in 1876 from a a ceremonial site by one Leopold Sachs (n.d.), the leader of an expedition to fnd a suitable road inland from Trinity Bay on the Far North Queensland coast to the Hodgkinson River Gold Field (News 1876d). The following year Sachs took the body to Sydney, where, he told the Sydney Morning Herald, it had been ‘inspected by leading medical and scientifc men’ who pronounced it the best example of this mode of preparing the dead they had seen (News 1877). With an eye to potential buyers, Sach variously embellished the story of his discovery. He claimed the body was that of a great chief of a people unlike any so far encountered by Europeans, in that they made ‘dwellings … far superior to the gunyahs of ordinary Australian aborigines’ with many ‘from 70 to 80 feet in circumference, with a height of from 10 to 12 feet’. The Yirrganydji and Djabugay people certainly built large shelters from rainforest saplings, vines and grass, but not of this size. Sach also played up the risks taken in securing so remarkable a curiosity, the Herald reporting his telling how he and his party of ‘adventurous explorers, [had] by their sacrilegious appropriation … incurred the anger of the natives, and were hotly pursued’ (News 1877). This was at odds with Queensland press reportage soon after the event which suggests that the clan of the dead man did not forcibly try to reclaim his body—even though, as The Queenslander reported some four years after the deed, ‘Recent amicable arrangements with the Trinity Bay natives brought out the fact that they are much distressed by the loss of their ancestral king’ (News 1880b). 264 P. Turnbull

Sachs priced this ‘ethnological curiosity’ far above what potential buyers in Sydney were prepared to offer. This led to him loaning the body for public display, with the result that it became one of the most discussed exhibits in the Queensland Court of the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition. The body was displayed in a glass case together with a watercolour painting depicting the large huts that Sachs claimed to be structurally unlike any other Indigenous dwellings encountered in Australia. Sachs sought to proft by heightening public curiosity about this ‘Indigenous Cheops’, as the press readily took to calling the body by claiming that it was at least 200 years old, and was ‘preserved with powerful antiseptics, the recipes for which were now entirely unknown amongst the existing tribes’ (News 1880a). Sachs’s inventiveness spurred the Brisbane Courier to call for this ‘Queensland Mummy’ not to ‘be allowed to fnd its way to European museums, the conservation in future years to us of this historical relic being of much importance’ (News 1880a); yet it appears that Sach again found no one willing to pay what he wanted for the body, and again he arranged for it to be displayed by the Queensland government, this time at the Melbourne International Exhibition between October 1880 and April 1881 (News 1880b). Subsequent efforts to sell the remains failing, Sachs commissioned Ludwig Bruck (1883–1900), a Sydney-based medical publisher and importer of surgical instruments, anatomical models and human skeletons, to sell the remains for £60. Bruck accordingly approached a number of Australian and European museum curators, including Charles de Vis, who took advantage of his son being in Sydney to have him examine the body and convey an offer on behalf of the Queensland Museum. The young de Vis reported that the body was ‘in a very good state of preservation’, warning that Edward Ramsay of the Australian Museum had offered £20 (De Vis 1885). Bruck declined both Ramsay’s and de Vis’s offers until such time as he heard from overseas curators he had approached. However, in May 1887 Sach was declared bankrupt (News 1887), and Bruck kept the body in lieu of his commission. The following year he met Maximilian Buchner (1846–1921), the director of Munich’s Royal Museum of Ethnology, who was then in Australia, and presented him with the body. It is probable that he did so in the hope of selling Munich and other German museums other natural history and ethnographic specimens that he might acquire. The most enterprising collector of skeletal material for the Queensland Museum during de Vis’s years as curator was Charles 9 ‘TALES OF BLOOD AND MUMMIES’: THE QUEENSLAND MUSEUM, 1870–1914 265

Howard Clarkson (1842–1894), resident surgeon of the hospital built in the northern coastal town of Mackay by the colony’s government and funded by levies on local sugar planters, for their 4000 or so inden- tured labourers from the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides. De Vis and Clarkson probably got to know each other through shared paleontological interests. In July 1883 Clarkson spent a week or so travelling Central Queensland by rail, writing to de Vis from the township of Emerald that he was sending the museum not only local fossils but also the skeleton of an Indigenous man that he had dug from a grave, adding that several more could be procured with the help of a local pharmacist (Clarkson 1885c). A few days later he wrote to de Vis that he had procured the skeletons of an Indigenous man and woman at Bogantungan, about 350 kilometres west of Rockhampton on Queensland’s central highlands (Clarkson 1883). He also recommended that de Vis contact R.H. Symes (n.d.), a medical colleague in the Central Queensland town of Springsure, who ‘could I am told supply any amount of skulls & bones’ (Clarkson 1885c). The bones in question were almost certainly from some of the 200 or so Indigenous people shot by armed parties in revenge for the killing in October 1861 of nineteen settlers at Cullin-la- ringo Station, to the north of Springsure. De Vis promptly approached Symes, who, some seven weeks later, wrote that he had delayed replying until being able to provide ‘some information as to the possibility of collecting some specimens of skulls of the natives about this district’. So far he he had been unsuccessful, but hoped soon to be able to assist de Vis, being ‘only too happy to render you any assistance in collecting any specimens you may deem worthy of a place in your national Museum’ (1883). Clarkson passed his leisure hours anthropologically, studying his patients at Mackay’s Polynesian Hospital. He compiled vocabularies of their dialects, and took anthropometric measurements of the bodies of two hundred men from the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides on whom he performed postmortem examinations (Clarkson 1885b). He provided the Queensland Museum, and possibly other scientifc institutions, with skulls of his Melanesian patients, whose corpses he ‘planted’ for ‘resurrection’ in the hospital grounds. He told de Vis that at one point he had ‘19 specimens quietly crumbling away in various stages under ground’ (Clarkson 1884). Clarkson was happy to be credited as donating Australian remains, but did not want local planters learning of his anthropological research at 266 P. Turnbull the hospital. He asked not to be named as having given the museum the skull of a young man from New Ireland found dead in local bushland, whose skeleton he also offered de Vis. As he explained, ‘it might harm one’s position here and preclude further obtaining’ (Clarkson 1885b). In August 1885, Clarkson sent the skeleton, and in the following month two skulls of young New Hebridean men he had removed during postmortem examinations, with the request that de Vis have the museum ‘make them look a little ancient or some inquisitive friend may want to know too much’ (Clarkson 1885a).

Walter Roth, Hermann Klaatsch: Evolutionary Anthropology and the Queensland Museum By the last years of the nineteenth century, the consensus in scientifc and wider intellectual circles was that in Queensland the native race was rapidly experiencing the same fate as had occurred to other Indigenous groups with the spread of white settlement. Alfred Cort Haddon (1855– 1940), for example, wrote to de Vis from Dublin two years after having had been ‘converted’ from zoology to anthropology by his initial feldwork in the islands of the Torres Strait in 1888 (Urry 1982). He bluntly put it to de Vis that ‘as Queensland has annexed the Straits & thereby helped to civilise the natives & thus destroy their past—it is only right that it should give to the world all possible information on the Natives before it is too late’ (Haddon 1890). De Vis doubtless agreed, but the economic depression of the frst half of the 1890s constrained the museum’s already modest capacity to document the racial and cultural peculiarities of the colony’s Indigenous peoples. He did what he could, encouraging the collection of artefacts and reportage of local cultural practices by ethnologically minded settlers. The most active of these was Jeremiah Coghlan (n.d.), the manager of the Glenormiston pastoral station in the north of Western Queensland (Rowlands 2010). Between 1891 and 1896, Coghlan gave or sold the Queensland Museum a substantial number of artefacts of the Pitta Pitta people of the Boulia–Glenormiston region. He and several other outback collectors also sent skulls and partial skeletons they discovered when burial places were exposed by soil erosion or bushfre (Coghlan 1893). But living with Indigenous people and knowing how they cared for the dead, they were uneasy about plundering graves. 9 ‘TALES OF BLOOD AND MUMMIES’: THE QUEENSLAND MUSEUM, 1870–1914 267

Coghlan, for example, responded to De Vis’s asking if could obtain skeletons, ‘I will not promise, but will try the natives are very fond of the remains of the dead; and I never like to hurt their feelings in those matters. They often sweep around the graves and put fresh giddia leaves on them’ (1894). The late 1880s were also when the museum’s relationship with Walter Roth (1861–1933) began. Roth was to produce the most signifcant body of ethnographic reportage on Indigenous people in northern and western Queensland at the turn of the twentieth century. He did so initially while employed as government medical offcer for the remote northwest of Queensland between 1894 and 1897, and subsequently as the colony’s frst Northern (then later Chief) Protector of Aborigines. Roth’s recognition by leading metropolitan authorities in the emerging discipline of anthropology, his friendship with de Vis and several of the museum’s trustees, and his experience of the medical and sanitary needs of both Indigenous people and Europeans in the tropical north of the colony, all contributed to his being chosen as the region’s frst Protector under the Aborigines Protection Act of 1897—the legislation by which the colony’s government established the regime that well into the twentieth century forcibly subjected Queensland’s frst peoples to regulation, control and intrusive surveillance of practically every aspect of their lives. As Protector, Roth’s principal duty was to ensure the welfare of Indigenous people after their removal to reserves or their employment (under strict conditions) in Queensland’s northern cattle and fshing industries. He spoke of having considerable sympathy for Indigenous people, the majority of whom he argued were worthy of admiration and respect; and he made enemies among northern pastoral and maritime entrepreneurs and their political representatives by his efforts to prevent the exploitation and abuse of Indigenous men, women, and especially children. However, his sympathy was grounded in the belief that the colony’s traditional owners were an evolutionarily primitive race in need of constant, frm, paternal supervision. Moreover, he could be harsh with those who dared challenge his authority; and he viewed the many Indigenous casualties of opium, alcohol and sexually transmitted disease with ill-disguised moral disgust. Roth convinced Queensland’s government to allow him to document, as best his day-to-day administration of the colony’s protec tionist regime allowed, the beliefs and cultural practices of Indigenous peoples across its vast northern and western regions, stressing both the acclaim the government would receive in British scientifc and 268 P. Turnbull intellectual circles, and the contribution his research would make to the management of the colony’s surviving native inhabitants. So it was that between 1898 and 1906, Roth, frst as Northern and then as Chief Protector, produced a series of remarkably detailed ethnographic reports and supplied the Queensland Museum with over three hundred artefacts collected in central and northern parts of the colony. Roth’s Queensland researches also refected his long standing interest in physical anthropology, which had its origins in his studies of human and comparative anatomy at Oxford. Among his teachers was the naturalist Henry Nottidge Moseley, who, as previously noted, had sought to obtain Australian skulls for his fellow Darwinian and mentor, George Rolleston. The earliest of Roth’s surviving letters to the Queensland Museum we fnd was a request to borrow several Indigenous skulls to illustrate human variation to students at Brisbane Grammar School. During his frst two and a half years as Northern Protector, Roth completed no fewer than nineteen detailed reports in what he planned to be a comprehensive ethnological survey of Western and North Queensland. When inspecting northern reserves, he took physical measurements, photographs and thumbprints of the residents. By mid-1900 he had compiled ffty anthropometric charts ‘illustrative of the different types of men and women to be met with in the North’ on the basis of ‘over 2000 distinctive measurements’ (Roth 1900, p. 592). He used the anthropometric system devised by Alphonse Bertillon (1854–1914), the Parisian criminologist, to identify recidivist criminals on the basis of the probability that they would exhibit particular bodily traits; while neither Roth nor anyone else involved in Queensland’s Indigenous protectorate said as much, it is likely that he represented this research as having practical value in the policing of Indigenous people. Roth took advantage of opportunities to collect crania and skeletons, some of which he offered to the Queensland Museum. In late September 1897 he informed De Vis that he had obtained the complete skeleton of a young man which he was willing to exchange for items under-represented among the artefacts he had personally collected since arriving in Queensland. However, he kept most of the crania and skeletal material he collected, until he resigned as Chief Protector in 1906 (in controversial circumstances), after which he sold eighty skulls and other bones of thirty-nine individuals to the German comparative anatomist Hermann Klaatsch (1863–1916). He also sold the remains of another ninety-four individuals, along with his remarkable 9 ‘TALES OF BLOOD AND MUMMIES’: THE QUEENSLAND MUSEUM, 1870–1914 269 collection of artefacts, to the Australian Museum (Klaatsch 1905, p. 211; Milicerowa 1955). Little is known about the provenance of these remains. All that he provided Klaatsch with the skulls he sold to him was the general location where each item was collected—so general that the community of origin of many of these skulls might not now be safely identifed. The information he provided to the Australian Museum was equally meagre. It seems that the remains of thirty-nine of the people the museum received were removed from burial places. In six cases they were the remains of men who had died while employed as native police troopers; another six were those of men and women who were probably patients that Roth had treated before they died. The bones of a further eight were of individuals who had died violently: two at the hands of Indigenous men and six whom Roth described as having been ‘murdered and left to rot on the beach’ by an armed party on North Keppel Island off the central Queensland coast (he had taken the remains from a cave where they had been placed by grieving family). In a report he prepared in 1898, Roth wrote of

having seen the actual camping ground where at least 7 or 8 males were shot down one night in cold blood, the father of one of the surviving gins (who described to me the scene that took place) being butchered while his little girl was clinging round his neck. (1898, pp. 9–10)

Examination of one skull returned in the mid-1990s to the Woppaburra people, the traditional owners of the Keppel islands, found entry and exit wounds possibly caused by a bullet (Donlan and Pardoe 1991, p. 22).

The Australian Travels of Hermann Klaatsch Roth not only sold Hermann Klaatsch Australian remains but also helped him to collect them when the anatomist travelled in Queensland in 1904–1905. Klaatsch spent three years in Australia, arriving in Brisbane in March 1904 with letters of introduction to de Vis and Roth provided by Queensland’s London-based Agent General (Gill 1990). Roth learned that the anatomist had come to Queensland in the hope of determining whether the morphology of its Indigenous peoples might confrm, as Otto Schoetensack (1850–1912), Klaatsch’s colleague at the University of Heidelberg strongly suspected, that the Australian continent’s native 270 P. Turnbull races were not the descendants of prehistoric migrants but living examples of the frst human type to have evolved from a pithecoid ancestral form. Schoetensack believed that this transition had occurred when the Australian continent was part of a larger landmass. This would explain, he and Klaatsch reasoned, why darker skinned races with similar bodily traits were to be found in an arc extending from Australia to Southern Africa (Klaatsch 1908, p. 160). There was some urgency to testing this hypothesis: as Klaatsch told Brisbane journalists soon after his arrival, he was embarking on what might be the last opportunity to study the ‘evolution of the genus homo … in relation to the original type from which he sprang’; for the colony’s Indigenous inhabitants were, as Klaatsch saw it, ‘fast drifting into the condition of civilisation, in which their value from my point of view evaporates’ (News 1904b). Not all agreed with his reasoning. One anthropologically-minded Adelaide commentator (possibly William Ramsay Smith, the ex-coroner, anthropologist and recently disgraced grave robber) responded to the reports of his arrival as follows:

The structure of the skull is very similar in all parts of Australia, and it is diffcult to understand why Professor Klaatsch has chosen to direct his enquiries to the north of Queensland. The condition of the aborigines are more primitive in the centre of South Australia than anywhere else, for the reason that the natives there are much farther removed from outsider infuences. (News 1904a)

After spending several weeks closely examining the museum’s collections of crania, Klaatsch made several short excursions from Brisbane, primarily seeking marsupial fossils. In mid-May 1904 he set out for Far North Queensland, where he spent around eight weeks attempting, with mixed success, to obtain anthropometric data by measuring people living in the vicinities of Herberton, Cairns and Cooktown. He then went to Thursday Island in the government launch, which Roth put at his disposal, to examine Indigenous people still living in what Klaatsch termed their ‘wild state’, on islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria or on the coastal mission-run reserves of Mapoon and Aurukun, to where most of the region’s Indigenous population had by this time been forcibly removed. Klaatsch also spent several days in the Gulf Country settlement of Normanton, where a former colleague of Roth at the town hospital told him where he could fnd graves. After visiting the Wellesley Islands he 9 ‘TALES OF BLOOD AND MUMMIES’: THE QUEENSLAND MUSEUM, 1870–1914 271 returned to Normanton in September 1904, where with the help of a local resident he plundered burials. In doing so he was discovered: as he recalled in a lengthy unpublished account of his travels written between 1907 and 1912,

We encountered a number of blacks who seemed not to pay us much attention, but an old ugly woman came up to me, grabbed at the bag of bones and jabbing me with the index fnger of her right hand cried: Devil Devil. That sounded like a declaration of war. (Erckenbrecht 2010, p. 86)

Indeed it was. That evening at his hotel, Klaatsch was told by a local resident that he had encountered a group of highly agitated men on a road into town, one menacingly shaking a spear in a woomera. He had asked what the cause of the anger was, and the spear-shaker excitedly shouted, ‘we speak of Devil Devil! Devil Devil dug out my brother, me spear him!’ (Erckenbrecht 2010, p. 89). Klaatsch wrote that he stayed in the hotel three days armed with a revolver, until he could leave on the next steamer. On the way back to Thursday Island a month later, the steamer on which Klaatsch travelled stopped at the mouth of the Norman River, where he was recognised as the ‘Devil Devil’ who had stolen bones for what could only be the working of terrible magic (Erckenbrecht 2010, p. 89). After three months in the Gulf Country, Klaatsch returned to Cooktown for four weeks, and visited the Hope Valley mission. He then travelled by coastal steamer to Cairns, from where he made three trips during December 1904 and January 1905 to settlements in the coastal rain forests of the Bellenden Kerr Range, with the help of Joseph Campbell (1856–1933), Cairn’s Anglican archdeacon. The church- man was a keen mineralogist with expertise in tropical agriculture. He arranged for Klaatsch to stay on one of these trips with James Pollard (1853–1930), a tin miner turned farmer on the southern slopes of Mount Bartle Frere (Eastwood 1930). Pollard, who had lived in the region since the mid-1880s, enjoyed good relations with several families of the Wanyurr Majay people, its traditional owners, who managed to still live on their ancestral country by working for him. Klaatsch’s escape from spearing at Normanton did not deter him from robbing graves, but to take greater care to make sure he was not discovered. If we are to believe him, he found Pollard was willing to 272 P. Turnbull direct him to burial places where remains could be removed with relative safety, even though this was an unforgivable betrayal of the Wanyurr Majay people’s trust. As Klaatsch confded to his colleague Schoetensack, ‘The blacks of this region have the greatest confdence in this sole white inhabitant of their homeland. They call him ‘Pappa’ and ask him to watch that the graves are not disturbed’ (Erckenbrecht 2010, p. 97). Klaatsch’s second trip from Cairns was to a gold feld on the upper Russell River, which from its opening in the late 1880s had been the scene of violent clashes between miners and local Ngadjon-Jii men. From there he travelled by rail via Cairns and Atherton to another mining feld at Boonjie, on the western side of the Bellenden Kerr Range. In a paper he read at the 1906 Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science Meeting, in Adelaide, Klaatsch reported that in his anthropological investigations

A most important feld … proved to be the Bellenden Kerr Mountains inland from Cairns, where a great number of half-civilised and free-living tribes are located. Some of these were found to be in a good condition, but others were in a state of decay, largely owing to the introduction of opium by the Chinese. One of the best specimens collected here was the mummy of an old chief, ‘Naicha’ of ‘Boonjie’ (Upper Russel [sic] River), which had been perfectly smoked eight months after death. The negotiations with the relatives for the possession were diffcult, but successful. (Klaatsch 1907, p. 578)

The diffculty to which Klaatsch referred was, he told his Heidelberg colleague Schoetensack in a letter he sent shortly after obtaining the body, that he thought he had persuaded the Elder’s relatives that their ‘father’ would want them to have good food, plenty of tobacco and good clothes. He had taken them to the Boonjie feld’s general store to buy whatever they desired, assuring them that Ngadja’s remains would be taken to a ‘Holy House’ far better than their camp. The pounds he spent at the Boonjie store, Klaatsch told Schoetensack, was a small price for securing so valuable an anthropological specimen (Erckenbrecht 2010, p. 101). The men agreed to give him Ngadja’s body, or so Klaatsch claimed, after rituals had been performed for the fnal phase of his burial; but the women of Ngadja’s family and clan had cried unrelent- ingly through the following night, and the next day the men remorse- fully pleaded with him to return the Elder’s body in exchange for the 9 ‘TALES OF BLOOD AND MUMMIES’: THE QUEENSLAND MUSEUM, 1870–1914 273 skulls of two children—which they may have done believing that at the end of funerary ceremonies their spirits had returned to their birth sites in Ngadjon-Jii country, and their remains could be given to Klaatsch. In the end, Klaatsch managed to keep not only Ngadja’s body but the two skulls, by again inviting the dead man’s relatives to the store to ‘buy till their heart was content’ (Erckenbrecht 2010, p. 101). Klaatsch smugly told Schoetensack that on his offering the women a second visit to the store, ‘A strange confict was refected in the faces of the old Gins [women]—materialism triumphed over religious considerations’ (Erckenbrecht 2010, p. 101). This story needs to be assessed in the light of the Ngadjon-Jii people’s version of events. As Mrs. Jessie Calico, a senior Elder of the community, told anthropologist Sandra Pannell in the mid-2000s when researching the history of the Ngadjon-Jii, the Boonjie mining feld was Ngadja’s country:

Grandad Barry [Ngadja] was here. This is his ground. They called it Barry’s Pocket. He lived here with his fve wives. This was early days. Migalu [white people] gave him a plaque and crowned him as a king. My mum [Dinah Calico] was little then. Grandad Barry had a daughter called Jinny, and those two were small, they used to say, ‘Grandad don’t walk around with that thing. It looks heavy. Take it off’. And he said, ‘No I can’t do that’. And they said, ‘Why’. ‘Because I’m King’. When they took his body from around here, that plaque went with him. Our old grandfa- ther died at Boonjie. The old people mummifed him. They dried out his body. They took it over to Germany. We are still looking for him. (Pannell and Ngadjon-Jii Traditional Owners 2006, p. 42)

Ngadja’s remains have since been located in a Berlin museum collection and returned for burial.

Christian Versus Scientific Humanitarianism On his journey northward Klaatsch visited the Anglican mission station of Yarrabah on the coast just south of Cairns. He did so again in January 1905 (Erckenbrecht 2010, p. 65, p. 104). This latter visit coincided with the arrival in Cairns of Gilbert White (1859–1933), the Bishop of Carpentaria. In reminiscences that White later published of his thirty year missionary career, he recalled that Klaatsch had ‘asked that the natives 274 P. Turnbull might be sent to him in order that he might measure their skulls’ and ‘sat accordingly on the veranda with a big pipe and measured the skulls of all who came, and the more he measured the more he shook his head’. This, so White tells us, upset his fellow minister Ernest Gribble (1868–1957), the superintendent of the Yarrabah Mission:

‘Will you not come into the school and examine the children?’ said the superintendent. ‘They have made remarkable progress, and up to the age of eleven do the same lessons as the children in the white schools.’ ‘No,’ said the Professor, ‘I do not want to see them. I know that they are incapable of learning anything. I have measured their skulls.’ ‘But will you not look at our steam‐engine, which is run entirely by two Indigenous boys?’ ‘No,’ was the reply. ‘They cannot possibly understand machinery. I have measured their skulls.’ ‘But,’ persisted the superintendent, ‘will you not at least listen to our band, which is often in requisition when good music is required in Cairns?’ ‘No,’ was the reply. ‘It is no good. I have measured their skulls. (White 1918, pp. 158–159).

White probably did not witness the exchange, but he knew that Klaatsch and Gribble had quarrelled when the anatomist made clear that he dis- approved of Indigenous people being put under the control of missionaries. Gribble used the colony’s press to defend the Anglican Church’s missionary efforts in northern Australia, declaring that ‘Professor Klaatsch may be an accredited scientist, but as he only spent his time indoors examining heads and asked for no other examination whatever, I fail to see how he has come to the conclusions he has’ (News 1905a). Gribble’s antipathy to Klaatsch needs to be understood in the context of the anxiety about the scientifc circumscription of Indigenous destiny that churchmen and their congregations felt by the turn of the twentieth century. The Catholic and Protestant churches had been instrumental in persuading the government to establish a protective regime by highlighting the plight of Indigenous people forced from their ancestral country into fringe camps on the edges of northern settlements, but now they were conscious that scientifc authorities such as Klaatsch were reaching a wide audience through the press, and gaining infuence in government circles. Few churchmen rejected the scientifc consensus of the day that Indigenous Australians had experienced evolutionary stasis rendering them intellectually inferior to Europeans and other ‘higher racial types’, but they did not accept that Indigenous people were incapable of improvement. 9 ‘TALES OF BLOOD AND MUMMIES’: THE QUEENSLAND MUSEUM, 1870–1914 275

Rather they saw white Australia as morally bound to care for ‘the remnants of the race’ by supporting missionary endeavours to provide spiritual and intellectual foundations enabling them to live independently by working on northern farms and pastoral properties. Hence Gribble saw Klaatsch as a threat: the scientist held missionaries guilty of an ‘exaggerated humanitarianism which sees brothers and sisters in all the lower races’. It was useless to attempt their conversion to Christianity or train them as pastoral workers and domestic servants, Klaatsch told reporters when visiting Western Australia in late 1905, because ‘No matter how you may educate them, they will sure enough, sooner or later, go back to their natural state. They cannot help it, if they would [sic]. It is in them and nothing will stop it’ (News 1905c). Klaatsch believed that true humanitarianism entailed scientifcally based management of Indigenous destiny. Of those forced onto reserves on losing their ancestral country, he believed it was a matter of protecting a race on the verge of extinction from white exploitation and abuse. The survival of those tribes in remote regions yet to come into sustained contact with settler society hinged on reserves being established in their country wherein they could live as they had always done. What Klaatsch envisaged was, in effect, an ambitious version of the fantasy played out in the European metropole during the last third of the nineteenth century, of creating ‘native villages’ at international expositions which would enable in-depth scientifc study of the bodily and psychological traits of racial types. Throughout his Australian travels, Klaatsch’s activities and ideas were widely reported in the Australian press. In interviews he rarely missed an opportunity to explain that his anthropometric investigations confrmed that Australia’s frst peoples were, in evolutionary terms, a transitional form between the higher primates and the human genus—the closest living descendants of an ancient ‘man-like ape’ from which the stock of all humankind had evolved (News 1905b). In this way he undoubtedly contributed to the strength of the European perception that Indigenous Australians were child-like beings in need of state care and protection. The evolutionary signifcance of Queensland’s frst peoples for Klaatsch, Roth and other scientists active in the early years of the twentieth century ensured that the Queensland Museum and other Australian scientifc institutions continued as best they could to collect remains which could safely be presumed to be those of individuals of wholly 276 P. Turnbull

Indigenous ancestry. Soon after his appointment as curator of the Queensland Museum in 1910, Ronald Hamlyn Harris sought and gained government permission to have those police acting as local Aboriginal Protectors in western and northern Queensland collect, if possible, artefacts made using pre-contact materials and techniques. He spoke of the regions’ traditional owners as a ‘doomed race’, and urged that efforts be made to collect their ritually dried bodies, skeletons, skulls and hair samples (Hamlyn-Harris 1914). He also secured government permission for his successor, Heber A. Longman, to obtain the remains of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders who died under medical care on government reserves (Loose 1917). The years following the end of the First World War saw collecting by Australian and British metropolitan museums diminish. Much of what was acquired from then until the 1980s were bones discovered after soil erosion or inadvertent human agency exposed Indigenous burials. In Queensland and other states, local police were commonly sent to investigate unearthed remains, each discovery, after which they might be examined by a local doctor. If it seemed clear they were of Indigenous ancestry they were considered to be anthropological relics and forwarded to the relevant state museum. The carnage of the Great War, which left few Australian families untouched, was doubtless a factor in why museums found it harder to obtain remains. But in scientifc circles there was also a shift in interest to studying living Indigenous populations, caused by developments in the study of human physiology and the infuence of Mendelian genetics. Research published in 1912 by Franz Boas (1858–1942), the North American-based anthropologist, was especially infuential in causing researchers to question whether cranial size and shape were stable traits, but in fact highly susceptible to changes caused by nutrition, disease and other conditions of material life. Doubts had been expressed by some scientists about the usefulness of craniometry and comparative measurements of other bodily structures since the 1860s. Now not only the number of doubters grew, but also the scientifc validity of explaining human evolution and varietal differences between populations in terms of racial typologies came to be questioned. Yet there continued to be some scientifc interest in the form of Indigenous bodily structures. Comparative anthropometric investigations of crania and other skeletal material continued to interest a small number of British and Australian anatomists and palaeontologists. There were also occasional investigations and reportage of specifc bodily structures in individual men, women or children who died in hospitals, 9 ‘TALES OF BLOOD AND MUMMIES’: THE QUEENSLAND MUSEUM, 1870–1914 277 prisons or benevolent asylums. Facial bones, teeth and brains all had their investigators (see Greenway 1963); but they were few in number, and mostly anatomists in Australian university medical schools whose main research interests lay elsewhere. European and Australian museum archives disclose that there continued to be instances where burial places were actively sought out—even after the Australian Commonwealth Government gazetted an ordinance (after lobbying by Baldwin Spencer) to forbid overseas export of ‘anthropological specimens’ without a ministerial permit (Australia Parliament 1913) remains are known to have been smuggled out of the country by Swedish and British scientifc travellers (Grant-Watson 1910; Mjöberg 2012). There were also occasions when organised, substantial collecting occurred after the discovery of well-used burial grounds. Between 1914 and 1930, for example, the Queensland Museum secured remains from burials on reserves in southeast and central Queensland after their residents were moved to larger settlements. In the early 1950s the state’s Catholic- dominated labour government felt unable to approve remains ‘uncovered in old native burial grounds being made available to the … Museum’ (Robinson 1951); yet by the late 1960s a more secular-minded climate prevailing enabling the excavation and removal to the University of Queensland of the remains of 130 individuals discovered buried together at Broadbeach, on the state’s southeast coast, despite the opposition of local men and women who identifed as their descendants (Haglund-Calley 1976). The Broadbeach excavation was an important event in the disciplinary coalescence of Australian archaeology. It was also signifcant in that in the early 1980s the removal of these remains from the burials became the focus of efforts by local Indigenous people to put a stop to unrestricted exhumation of the dead, and have those of their Old People whose remains were in museums returned for reburial. Archaeologists and other scientists with interests in human remains were confused and dismayed when confronted by demands that research on remains cease. They were ill-prepared, not only to deal with accusations of racist contempt for Indigenous people and their spiritual obligations to the dead, but also to address accusations that the acquisition of their remains had not been confned to widespread plundering of traditional burial places: it was alleged to have also involved the killing of Indigenous men, women and children for their bodily remains (FAIRA 1989). *** 278 P. Turnbull

Clearly, as we have seen over the course of the last three chapters, there is a wealth of evidence that through the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, scientifc interest in Australian Indigenous morphology led to the collecting of remains not only in ways that we would now judge morally abhorrent, but which also transgressed the moral conventions at the time they were collected and, in a number recorded instances, saw collectors knowingly break what were then the laws in respect of death and burial. But were there among the dead whose remains became scientifc specimens those who were casualties of the violence that accompanied the establishment of Australian frontier society? And was it the case that there were instances where people were actually killed to satisfy scientifc ambitions? These questions we turn to explore in the next chapter of this study. CHAPTER 10

Murdered for Science? Anthropological Collecting and Colonial Violence in Late Nineteenth Century Australia

At the meeting of the World Archaeological Congress that took place in Vermillion, South Dakota, in 1989, it was resolved unanimously to adopt an accord in respect of research on human remains. It was agreed that the fate of remains in scientifc collections should be determined through acknowledging that both scientists and ancestral communities had legitimate interests in their fate. Despite accepting the impossibility of ever fully reconciling the aspirations of the descendants of the dead and those wanting to continue using their remains for research, the Vermillion Accord, as it became known, has since helped to foster dialogue that has contributed to a number of scientifc institutions with extensive collections of the remains of Australian and other indigenous peoples agreeing to their repatriation. The Vermillion conference was also noteworthy in another, unsettling respect. Participants heard a paper by the Brisbane-based Foundation for Indigenous and Islander Research Action (FAIRA) which, together with the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC), has played a leading role since the late 1970s in Australian-based and international campaigning for the return of the dead. The paper, entitled ‘Aborigines, Archeologists and the Rights of the Dead’, remains unpublished to this day; but in the years that have passed since its presentation at the Vermillion conference it has circulated widely and has come to be regarded by many who have

© The Author(s) 2017 279 P. Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia, Palgrave Studies in Pacifc History, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51874-9_10 280 P. Turnbull sought or supported the repatriation of remains to Indigenous Australian communities as presenting evidence that not only did nineteenth century scientists and museum curators obtain the remains of men, women and children killed by colonial military forces or armed parties of settlers, but also that individuals were murdered specifcally to obtain their skulls or other body parts. As the FAIRA paper argued in respect of the continued retention of remains for scientifc ends, ‘the parallels … with the continued use of the remains of Jewish victims of the Nazi holocaust … cannot be overstated’ (FAIRA 1989). Indigenous Australians seeking the return of remains have since often rehearsed the charge that murder occurred in the name of science. This has notably happened in the course of campaigns from the late 1980s to the turn of the twenty-frst century to repatriate the substantial collections of remains held by Britain’s Natural History Museum and the Royal College of Surgeons of England. The leadership of FAIRA and TAC have been forthright in accusing these and other British scientifc institutions with hiding the fact that they possess remains of people who ‘were hunted down, murdered or robbed from graves’ (News 1990). Did this happen? That is the question this chapter attempts to answer. It does so by frst reviewing the evidence on which the charge that Indigenous people were victims of scientifcally motivated murder rests. The chapter then explores what can be found in museum archives, in terms of documentary evidence, pointing to connections between the collecting of remains and frontier violence in northern Australia during the last third of the nineteenth century. Finally, some refections are offered on the insights provided by museum records and correspondence concerning the nature and causes of frontier violence during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Murdered for Science? It seems best to begin by assessing the evidence that has most commonly been said to prove that Indigenous people were hunted down and murdered for science. We fnd it comprises four contemporary sources. The frst and probably most frequently cited of these sources is the unpublished memoirs of Korah Halcomb Wills (1828–1897). Wills was a butcher and hotel owner in the north Queensland coastal town of Bowen during the mid-to-late 1860s, when the opening of the region to 10 MURDERED FOR SCIENCE? ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTING … 281 pastoral settlement provoked a number of the worst instances of violence frontier in nineteenth century Australia. In his memoirs, which he likely wrote sometime after returning to England in the 1880s, Wills recalled that the Birri-Gubba people and other traditional owners of the region violently resisted pastoralists who came onto their country. This led the colony’s government to station a detachment of the Native Police at Bowen. The Native Police were formations of armed and mounted Indigenous men led by European offcers, routinely used by the Queensland government in frontier districts for the immediate, brutal suppression of indigenous resistance to European colonisation; the role they played in the dispossession of Indigenous people in Queensland has been much discussed by historians since the early 1970s. As Jonathan Richards has shown, on the basis of a meticulously study of archival records long presumed to have been destroyed, the Native Police operated in two worlds. Government offcials and politicians charged offcers commanding them with pacifying frontier regions, licensing them to use deadly force if necessary to protect settlers and their property. They accepted that preventing the spearing of cattle and attacks on settlers would likely result in some deaths of innocent Indigenous men, but few in government circles were aware of just how secretive and murderous Native Police squads were in outlying frontier districts (Richards 2008). Wills claimed in his memoirs that the superintendent of the Native Police detachment assigned to Bowen sought to augment his force with volunteers from the local settlers. He wanted men, Wills wrote, ‘whom he thought he could trust for pluck and a quiet tongue after all was over, whom he would solicit to join him and his one or two native troopers and go out and disperse the mob that had been committing depredations on the neighbouring settlers’. Wills participated in one such raid:

I took it into my head to get a few specimens of certain limbs and head of a Black fellow, which was not a very delicate occupation I can tell you. I shall never forget the time when I frst found the subject that I intended to anatomise, when my friends were looking on, and I commenced operations dissecting. I went to work business like to take off the head frst, and then the Arms, and then the legs, and gathered them together and put them into my Pack saddle and one of my friends who I am sure had dispersed more than any other Man in the Colony made the remark that if he were offered a fortune he could not do what I had done. (Wills 1895, p. 113) 282 P. Turnbull

Wills went on to claim that he cleaned the bones of fesh and exhibited them to raise money for the Bowen hospital:

I remember I had to cover them up with a fag, the Union Jack, and if anyone wished to see what was under that fag they had to ask the favor of one of the committee who were afraid the Ladies might get a shock, if they were left uncovered. We had some great swindles in that Bazaar and it was a grand success from a monetary point of view, and I think it was for the beneft of the Hospital. (Wills 1895, p. 131)

What are we to make of these claims? Queensland historian Ray Evans has suggested that what makes Wills’s ‘nonchalant’ telling of his murder, mutilation and exhibition of this man so chilling to read is knowing that he was no marginal fgure. He was not a ‘loner, outsider or gun-and knife-toting eccentric’: he was ‘part of the land-holding establishment of Queensland’ who enjoyed entrepreneurial success and social respectabil- ity. However, we have nothing beyond his memoirs to confrm the truth of Wills’s admissions. Even if we accept that he did butcher the man, he says nothing to suggest that he did so with the aim of donating or selling the man’s skeleton to a museum. All we have is his referring in bastard- ised clinical language to the man as a ‘specimen’, and of having ‘anato- mised’ and ‘dissected’ his corpse; and all we can do is speculate that Wills wrote of the affair possibly having heard rumours, at the time or in the year that followed, of instances where the bodies of Indigenous people had been mutilated during frontier clashes and their skulls and skeletons obtained for scientifc ends. Perhaps he personally knew of settlers who joined punitive expeditions as he had done, during which they were of a mind ‘get a few specimens’. Two further sources said to prove that murder occurred in the name of science give this reading of Wills’s claims some plausibility. The frst is a story passed down through the Archer family concerning Amalie Dietrich (1821–1891), a naturalist collecting for the Museum Godeffroy in Hamburg between 1863 and 1872. Dietrich had stayed with William Archer (1818–1896), a Rockhampton pastoralist and keen amateur naturalist. The story has it that Archer ordered her off his property after she asked him to have an Indigenous man killed for his ceremonially scarifed skin (Sumner 1993, p. 44). The second source is a history of the North 10 MURDERED FOR SCIENCE? ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTING … 283

Queensland coastal settlement of Mackay published in 1908 by Henry Ling Roth (1855–1925), an English naturalist and amateur anthropologist employed as an agricultural advisor to local sugar planters between 1878 and 1884. Beside retelling the story that William Archer had driven Dietrich off his property, he told of her having approached the white offcer of the region’s Native Police troop to have him shoot one of his Indigenous troopers for his skeleton (Roth 1908, p. 81). These stories have enjoyed widespread belief since their retelling in a 1991 feature article in the Bulletin, at that time Australia’s leading weekly news magazine. The Bulletin’s editors sought to boost sales by drawing a crude parallel between Dietrich and Irma Grese (1923–1945), the sadistic Ravensbrück and Auschwitz guard known as the ‘Blond Angel of Death’, by putting a photograph of Dietrich on the front page with a headline calling her the ‘Angel of Black Death’. Since the Bulletin article was published, Elders of the Birri-Gubba have since implausibly claimed that their traditions record that their ancestors knew Dietrich by this name. Several senior Birri-Gubba assured me this was so when I worked with them documenting aspects of their history during the 1990s. But to return to the events of which Roth wrote. If they did occur, then they did so at least ten years before his arrival in Mackay; and as with Korah Will’s unpublished reminiscences they are uncorroborated by any source beyond the oral testimony of the Archer family. It is true that when Dietrich returned to Hamburg in 1872 she left with the skin of an Indigenous man, and several skeletons from burial places in the Bowen region. However, it seems likely that the skin was procured not by murder but theft, from a burial place of one of the several Indigenous societies of Queensland’s coastline whose funerary rituals included the postmortem removal and drying of the skin of initiated men. Dietrich understandably wanted to secure the skin as no German museum possessed one. Only one appears to have been in scientifc hands at this time: that which was acquired by the botanist and explorer Allan Cunningham in the Moreton Bay region of southern Queensland and which, as we saw in Chapter 3, he gave to England’s Royal College of Surgeons in 1829. Given that William Archer enjoyed good relations with local Indigenous people, one can well imagine Dietrich’s asking him to help her procure a skin from a burial place was enough for him to demand 284 P. Turnbull she leave his homestead. This said, Henry Roth was well educated, and a careful observer of the social life and economy of the Mackay region. The fact that he could accuse Dietrich with having sought to enlist a local settler and a police inspector in having Indigenous people killed to obtain their bones and skin for scientifc ends causes one to wonder whether he thought it was possible such a thing could happen. After all, pacifying North Queensland saw many Indigenous people killed by Native Police and armed settlers; and at least ten native ‘troopers are recorded as having been shot dead by police offcers’ between 1860 and 1888 (Richards 2008, p. 172). The last of the four sources that is said to prove that Indigenous remains were murderously acquired is the letter of 1887 discussed in the introduction to this study, received by Edward Pierson Ramsay, curator of Sydney’s Australian Museum, from Archibald Meston, the Queensland journalist, politician and self-styled anthropological expert, then living on the Barron River, just north of the Far North Queensland township of Cairns. Meston was an enthusiastic collector of the material culture of northern Indigenous societies, and a generous donor to the Queensland Museum—which explains why Ramsay approached him to supply his museum with baskets, weaponry and skeletal material of the region’s rainforest peoples. As mentioned in introducing this study, Meston was to joke blackly that at the prices Ramsay was prepared to pay for skeletal material, ‘I could have procured about £2000 worth in the last six years’, adding that he hoped ‘to succeed in slaughtering some stray skeleton for you’ (Meston 1887). One can understand Meston being interpreted as willing to oblige Ramsay by murderous means. In the mid-1880s, Meston was publicly accused of taking part in armed raids on Indigenous camps during which he secured artefacts and, on one occasion, tried but failed to shoot a man (Smith 1885). When Meston let it be known via the Cairns Post that he intended to aid the Australian Museum by devoting ‘a short time to the neighbourhood of the Russell River in the hope of obtaining some skeletons and mummies of Aborigines’, this provoked the Post to observe cynically that the Russell River was a good place for fnding Indigenous remains as ‘They used to die suddenly in that district’ (News 1887). But we would do well to be cautious here, for the allegation that Meston took part in armed raids on Indigenous people was published in a pseudonymous letter to a Brisbane newspaper, at a time when Meston 10 MURDERED FOR SCIENCE? ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTING … 285 had political ambitions that would be harmed by such claims (Smith 1885). It also needs to be weighed against Meston having become an outspoken critic of the Native Police by the mid-1880s, who in both his journalistic writing and political campaigning called for the force to be disbanded. Meston held the common view of the time that securing the north for white settlement invariably meant pacifcation by violence, but although he accepted that settlers and the Native Police might have ‘occasionally to shoot blacks from necessity’, he condemned the latter who killed ‘for sport or [slaughtered] gins and picaninnies’. His talk of ‘slaughtering some stray skeleton’ was almost certainly a blackly humor- ous acknowledgement of the ubiquity of frontier violence across Far North and Western Queensland. Indeed, his publicly announcing in the Cairns Post that he intended to go to the Russell River to get Ramsay skeletons was because, since the discovery of gold and tin there over the previous decade, reprisals by settlers and Native Police against men of the region’s clans defending their country gave him reason to think he was likely to come across remains.

Museum Collecting and Frontier Violence In the course of the research on which this book draws, neither Australian nor European museum archives have been found to contain credible evidence that the remains of Indigenous Australians were murderously obtained; but they do disclose that museum curators and scientists in colonial Australian and British institutions appear to have had no moral qualms about indirectly beneftting from the deaths of Indigenous men and women who had been killed by settlers or the Native Police. This is especially so in respect of the Queensland Museum. Mention was made in the previous chapter of the museum having been offered the dried remains of a young Mbabaram woman in 1882. The seller was one Francis Lyons (n.d.), an earth-moving contractor working on the tin mining felds in the vicinity of the Far North Queensland township of Herberton. Lyons had offered the mummy to the museum, explaining how he had obtained it:

Sir, I take the liberty of addressing you trusting that I have in my possession a curiosity, which may be a great addition to your valuable list. It is that 286 P. Turnbull

of a Queensland ‘Indigenous Mummy[.]’ I procured it a short time since when in pursuit of the nigger who are very mischievous killing cattle in the Vicinity of the Herberton Tin-Fields. When their camp was stormed they abandoned everything except the Mummy in Question, a scull [sic] & the dilly bag which contained them And it was not until after a long & desperate chase and when their lives were in imminent danger that they gave it up or rather dropped it [.] I managed to capture one of the tribe in question. An intelligent boy about eleven years of age. And I learned from him through an interpreter that the mummy is that of a ‘native King’s Daughter’ who got shot a considerable time since. And having ‘Blue Blood,’ they preserved it and carried it about with them. As a mark of loyalty to their Chief. It is quite apparent that what the boy said is true as there is a small hole in the top of the forehead like that caused by a bullet. The body is in a splendid state of preservation. And all the fesh is on the body. The Arms and legs together with the fngers & toes are quite life like as is the whole body. It has been pronounced by everyone who saw it as the best specimen [they] ever saw. If I could take it to the Southern Colonies & exhibit it I am sure it would realise a very handsome sum. But my position prevents me from so doing. If you require the like for your museum Kindly let me know at once by ‘letter’ or ‘Wire’ stating your terms &c &c as I am negotiating with other parties likely to purchase[.] An answer at your earliest convenience will oblige. (Lyons 1882)

Neither Edward Ramsay at the Australian Museum, nor Charles de Vis, who by this time had taken up the curatorship of the Queensland Museum, hesitated in trying to obtain the young woman’s body. As mentioned in the previous chapter, De Vis refused to negotiate an acceptable price, telling Lyons that the museum already possessed the mummifed remains of three North Queensland Aborigines but would welcome its donation. Ramsay at the Australian Museum was keen to acquire the remains, but apparently could not persuade Lyons to part with them for the usual price of £10–£15 he offered for complete skeletons (QM 1876; Secretary 1882). Lyon’s letter is worth quoting above in full, for it corroborates oral testimony passed down among the Mbabaram people, the traditional owners of the country wherein the Herberton mining felds lay, that they 10 MURDERED FOR SCIENCE? ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTING … 287 suffered ‘almost instant elimination’ by armed parties of miners and native police in the early 1880s (Loos 1982, p. 95).1 The curators and trustees of the Australian, South Australian and Queensland Museums neither encouraged nor condoned frontier pacifcation by terror, but their attitude to anthropological collecting is well summed up in reminiscences by the German biologist Richard Semon (1859–1918). Visiting Cooktown in mid-1892, Semon learnt that he might be able to secure the skeletal remains of victims of a Native Police ‘dispersal’ for Munich’s Royal Museum of Ethnology. He wrote of being appalled to hear from a local resident that the bones of a number of people killed by the police ‘had for a long time been left to bleach in the open bush’, but

my humanity did not go so far as to prompt me to exert myself in order to obtain an honourable burial for these bones. On the contrary, I had the ardent desire to secure the remains of these poor victims for scientifc purposes, the study of a series of Australian crania being of considerable anthropological interest. (Semon 1899, p. 266)

Similarly, when Charles de Vis heard from a medical practitioner at Springsure, in central Queensland, that he could supply ‘any amount of skulls & bones from a place where a massacre took place’, he had no hesitation in asking the doctor to procure ‘all the material he could’ (Symes 1883). Even though he was an ordained minister of the Church of England, De Vis’s religious sensibilities did not stop him from seeking to acquire for science the bones of the Indigenous dead. De Vis took charge of a museum that was already the benefciary of frontier violence, as is evident from the following account of the anthropological acquisitions it had on display in 1869 that appeared in several Queensland newspapers:

Now, it has been shown how useful and instructive a study it is to compare the remains of a former world with this we now inhabit. In a glass case in the north-east corner you will observe a fne specimen of the bald tribe of natives well preserved. These natives frst appeared on the Warrego a

1 The letter is also of interest in illustrating how settlers could perceive Indigenous societies as akin to ancient northern European polities in having been ruled by hereditary chief- tains who enjoyed their subjects’ absolute loyalty. 288 P. Turnbull

few years ago. They are very savage and deceitful, and of unknown origin. Passing farther along, there are a great number of native instruments and articles of native manufacture, collected and presented to the museum by many old colonists and explorers. Some of these instruments could tell a tale of blood, and the names of some of the former owners of which even now are never mentioned except with feeling of horror and abhorrence. This collection of spears and nullas were picked up after the Hornet Bank massacre, and that very large club belonged to a well- known savage called Bilbo the terror of the shepherds on the Kulebah and Goongarry; stone tomahawks from the Brown River, dillies and shields from the Cullenlaringe; fnger bones and a pair of defunct blacks, found in the dillies of Jeranga gins; the spear brought from Carpentaria that fnished poor Kennedy’s career of exploration with skulls of a number of the most renowned blacks who were the terror of the frst colonists, with short narratives of the dark deeds which marked the early days of Queensland. (News 1869b)

The Queensland Museum began looking to collect Indigenous artefacts and bodily remains in a systematic way in the late 1870s. Its curators and trustees sought to enlist the help of settlers and employees of government agencies in rural and remote parts of the colony and especially sought to gain the help of Native Police offcers stationed on the colony’s northern pastoral and mining frontiers. Remarkable though it may seem given the force’s brutal reputation, its offcers included a number of well-educated men with interests in natural history and anthropology. William Armit (1848–1901), for example, arrived in Australia from Belgium in 1870. Within two years he was a sub-inspector; and during the eight years he served in the north of the colony he led numerous ‘dispersals’—the term used at the time to refer to raids by Native Police detachments on Indigenous camps in which people were often indiscriminately shot or hacked to death. Perhaps the bloodiest was the attack that Armit and a fellow offcer led in August 1876 on several hundred men gathered for ceremonies in the neighbourhood of the Creen Creek telegraph station, between the Gulf Country settlement of Normanton and the Gilbert River. The men had attacked the telegraph station, and after the arrival of the police, the fght ‘lasted a considerable time’ before, ‘the blacks were eventually dispersed.’ (News 1876a) (Fig. 10.1). When police duties were done, Armit enjoyed pursuing his interests in botany and birds. He was a fellow of London’s Linnaean Society; and besides publishing several scientifc papers, he regularly wrote newspaper 10 MURDERED FOR SCIENCE? ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTING … 289

Fig. 10.1 A Skirmish with Aborigines at Creen Creek, Queensland, Illustrated Sydney News, 12 October 1876 articles about the colony’s fora and actively supported the museum. He also took an interest in the customs of the Indigenous peoples that he encountered in the course of his duties, and contributed a paper on the subject to the journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Armit 1880). Convinced that much knowledge of the colony’s frst peoples was already lost to science by their impending extinction, Armit used the colony’s press to call on its government to ‘sanction and foster’ efforts to collect anthropological material. This did not occur until the late 1890s, by which time the creation of Queensland’s protectionist regime had led to Indigenous people being forcibly removed from their country and placed on government reserves. In the meantime, however, Armit and several of his fellow offcers took advantage of what anthropological collecting opportunities their frontier service presented. 290 P. Turnbull

Besides Armit, there was Robert Johnstone (1843–1905). He was the Scottish-educated son of a Victorian pastoralist, and managed a cattle station near Rockhampton before joining the Native Police in early 1867 (QPG 1867, p. 24). Between 1870 and 1880 he was sub-inspector of the Cardwell District on the eastern coast of the far north of the colony. Older histories speak of him being a modest man, greatly interested in natural history, who was ready to risk his life to protect settlers in a ‘hos- tile country’ (Johnstone 1984, p. vii). In his ten years of service he killed numerous Indigenous people. In 1869 Johnstone was in the Mackay district when South Seas Islander shepherds were attacked by Ngaro men. The Mackay Mercury was to report that troopers led by Johnstone ‘after a short chase came up with the Aborigines, and meted out to them the customary chas- tisement’ (News 1869a). In 1872 Johnstone joined the search for survivors of the brig Maria, which had been wrecked on reefs near the northern coastal settlement of Cardwell. His discovery that survivors had been killed by local Djiru men led Brinsley Sheridan (d. 1878), the Police Magistrate at Cardwell, to sanction punitive action. Lieutenant John Gowland (1838–1874), a young naval offcer assigned to lead the failed rescue mission, confded at the time, in a letter to his wife, ‘I felt that Mr. Johnstone would make the savages pay dearly for their barbarous treatment of the poor wretches left to their mercy’ (Vink 2013, p. 285). He was right: the troopers under Johnstone’s command sailed and walked the coast, burning camps and indiscriminately killing Djiru people they encountered (Qld 1875b, p. 1725; Richards 2008, pp. 25–26). Later that same year allegations were publicly laid that troopers under Johnstone’s command had kidnapped children and murdered several Gugu-Badhun men near the Valley of Lagoons on the upper Burdekin River in northern Queensland. Johnstone furiously but uncon- vincingly denied the charges (Colonial Secretary 1872). In his leisure time Johnstone chased butterfies, sending a collection to the Queensland Museum as well as various other zoological specimens and a number of Indigenous artefacts (Qld 1875a). In 1874 he also procured for the museum the mummifed remains of a woman, discovered after people fed when Johnstone’s troopers found them camped near the mouth of the Mulgrave River (Johnstone 1984, pp. 194–195). In reminiscences he published in the weekly Queenslander newspaper in 1904, Johnstone recalled that he ‘afterwards got several others’, one of which he wrote was stowed aboard a coastal steamer on top of the covering of 10 MURDERED FOR SCIENCE? ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTING … 291 the vessel’s water tank—with the result that after a thunderstorm ‘all on board became dangerously ill’ when ‘all the water was tainted by soakage from the mummy’ (Johnstone 1984, p. 107). Sub-Inspector Alexander Douglas (1843–1914) also collected for the Queensland and Australian Museums. He joined the Native Police in 1872 and rapidly gained notoriety for his ruthlessness in tracking down and killing men thought to have been involved on attacks on settlers. In 1873 a local magistrate in Central Queensland formally questioned him after troopers under his command shot two Indigenous men employed by local squatters. One body was found tied to a sapling foating in a water hole. A postmortem examination ordered by a local Justice of the Peace discovered a bullet in the skull, and two witnesses alleged that he had been murdered by Douglas (Wheeler 1873). The following week, Douglas’s immediate superior forwarded to the Commissioner of Police a report on the incident, lamenting that ‘Acting Sub Inspector Douglas seems as yet not to have learnt circumspection’ (Colonial Secretary 1873). In 1875 Douglas led punitive expeditions to stop the spearing of cattle in newly established pastoral runs on the Laura River, three hundred kilometres northwest of Cairns. He returned from one patrol with remains from two burials, which he sent the Queensland Museum. Two years later, growing anthropological interest in the funerary practices of northern rainforest peoples led the museum to approach Douglas, who in a short time obtained the mummifed remains of a child from the Barron River. In 1879 he sent the museum another mummy from the same location, and a skull from nearby Trinity Bay (Qld 1879b, p. 296; Qld 1879a, p. 659). James Lamond (n.d.) was another offcer ready to assist the museum. The son of a pastoralist, he joined the Native Police as a sub-inspector in 1879, soon earning a reputation for ‘energy and zeal’ in his duties (QPG 1879, p. 36; News 1880). By the mid-1880s he was in charge of a detachment based between the Nicholson and Gregory Rivers in the Gulf Country, where several of the most brutal Native Police actions took place (Roberts 2005). In April 1885 Lamond wrote to the museum that he had secured, and would send at the frst opportunity, ‘a Gregory River skull … found in a cave in the ranges in the head of the Gregory River’. He continued, ‘I also know of another burial ground or rather repository of Indigenous bones on the Nicholson River &c. shall furnish you with some from there 1st opportunity’ (Lamond 1885). 292 P. Turnbull

Four months after Lamond promised to secure remains from this ‘repository’, Frank Hann (1845–1921), the leaseholder of Lawn Hill Station to the south of the Nicholson River, confded to A.W. Howitt, the pioneer ethnologist, that Native Police had ‘shot, so Lamond told me, round this run alone over 100 blacks in three years’ (Hann 1885). Some three years earlier, Charles de Vis had similarly been told of police killings by a government surveyor in the colony’s far north western district of Normanton. On that occasion the surveyor had acknowledged receipt of a circular letter by de Vis asking for donations of artefacts and human remains, adding that had he received the letter sooner, he ‘could have brought you in several from my last trip out as I came across several Native Police grave yards (or rather I took them to be such) with splendid specimens of skulls lying about’ (Bedford 1882). Frank Hann, incidentally, exemplifes the complexities of frontier settlers’ behaviour. He sought to cultivate good relations with the traditional owners of the country on which he ran cattle. He aided early ethnologists such as Alfred Howitt, and was himself curious about their lifeways and culture. But he had few qualms about shooting any man who he believed threatened his or other settlers’ lives. In 1909 Hann told journalist of having wanted to decapitate a man who had tried to spear him when he was employed surveying in Western Australia’s Warburton Ranges. Hann said he had been unable to get a clear shot at the man, but had he done so he ‘would have cut his head off and sent it to Mr. F. Brockman, of Perth, who asked me to send him one, as a friend of his in London wanted one’ (News 1909d). It was further reported that Hann regretted not having got the heads of three other men who aided the attack on his party for Frederick Brockman (1857–1917), a government staff surveyor. The report of Hann’s boast outraged churchmen and other humanitarians, and caused Charles Gale (1860–1928), then Western Australia’s Protector of Aborigines to request a police investigation, while Newton Moore (1870–1936), the state’s premier, assured newsmen that while Hann had every right to defend himself from unprovoked attacks, ‘his extraordinary statements were, no doubt, made with a desire to obtain notoriety and were most reprehensible … there was no justifcation for his making a statement that he was desirous of obtaining the head of a native, in order to forward it to some person who was apparently anxious to obtain a specimen’ (News 1909a). 10 MURDERED FOR SCIENCE? ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTING … 293

The affair also inspired doggerel verses that Perth’s Sunday Times saw ft to publish under the headline, ‘An Orrible Tale of Gore’. The opening stanza of the poem ran as follows:

My name’s Frank Hann, I kill all I can, I’m a boshter at bones and blood, I take a delight In a furious fght, And a short, dull sickening thud. Though kind and humane, I can batter and brain The head of a myall dull; But I always try When my victims die, To carefully save the skull. —News 1909c

The poem went on to portray Hann as having tracked, slain and boiled down the bodies of Indigenous men to send their bones to ‘friends of mine / In the faraway ancient Dart’. Hann responded to this publicity by telling newsmen that ‘Any man who would shoot a black in cold blood only to get his head would be nothing less than a murderer’—but added, ‘Had I been lucky enough to have killed my man Mr. Brockman would most certainly have had his head, and he may yet’ (Hann 1909). For his part, Frederick Brockman publicly denied that he would have accepted remains murderously obtained and that he could not imagine Hann would have mutilated the body of a man he might have been forced to shoot in self-defence. He put Hann’s claims down to senility. That said, he admitted that on giving an illustrated talk on the Wandjina rock paintings of the Kimberley region at London’s Royal Anthropological Institute in June 1907, he had been asked by John Gray (1854–1912), its honorary secretary, if he could get the institute a skull; and that back in Perth he had approached Hann, who had obtained him the cranium ‘of an old man, who had apparently been dead for a number of years’ (News 1909b). Hann confrmed this to police who were sent to interview him, while again pro- testing that ‘he had never shot a black in his life’ and that the skull that he gave Brockman was the only ‘head’ he had ever obtained (News 1909e). 294 P. Turnbull

Frontier Collecting for the South Australian Museum In South Australia, as in Queensland, museum personnel collected remains with the help of police and government agents serving in remote regions of the colony and the Northern Territory, which from 1863 to 1908 was governed by South Australia. As mentioned in the previous chapter, one of the most active collectors was Paul Foelsche, the Darwin- based sub-inspector of police. Foelsche was ruthless in his determination to punish those who threatened or killed settlers or livestock, as were the men under his command. In 1875, for example, he ordered his second in command, Corporal George Montagu (n.d.), to lead an expedition to the Roper River in the Katherine region after a telegraph worker had been speared by Mangarrayi men. He instructed Montagu that

All that can be identifed as being of the attacking party are to be captured either dead or alive; the slightest resistance, attempt to resist, or assisting the guilty parties to escape must be met by prompt actions without waiting to be molested. I cannot give you orders to shoot all natives you come across but circumstances may occur for which I cannot provide defnite instructions. (Austin 1992, p. 15)

Three years later, Foelsche sent another party to the region after a bull- ock teamster was speared. It was headed by constable William George Stretton (1847–1920), who also sent the museum remains. On his return from Pine Creek, Stretton reported having killed seventeen men, while an unknown number were shot by a civilian party. In a letter to the Police Commissioner in Adelaide, Foelsche casually referred to the affair as ‘our Nigger Hunt’, adding that he had thought of going out with Stretton but ‘could not have done better than he did, so I am satisfed and so is the public here’ (Foelsche 1878). Nothing in museum or police records of the time show that either Foelsche or Stretton sent the museum the bones of people who had died at the hands of mounted police or settlers; yet, as noted in Chapter 8, Edward Stirling, the long-time Director of the South Australian Museum, thought it best not to advertise the fact that police were collecting remains on its behalf. This may have been because he knew that some had been collected in the aftermath of violent incidents. In November 1896, for example, Stirling wrote to the South Australian police commissioner 10 MURDERED FOR SCIENCE? ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTING … 295 asking whether any further information could be supplied about the skull of a man that he had passed on to the museum beyond it being said that his name had been Pompey and that he had been ‘shot by the Police some years ago’. The commissioner made inquiries, with the result that Stirling was forwarded a report by William Henry Willshire (1852–1925), a mounted constable who had gained notoriety for indiscriminate violence while serving in various parts of central Australia between 1884 and 1895 (in 1891, he stood trial for murder but was acquitted) (Richards 2008, p. 183). Willshire reported that there had in fact been three men named Pompey ‘who came to their death in my time in the far north’. One Willshire described as a ‘big strapping young nigger man’ who in 1884 was tracked by his patrol after killing cattle in the vicinity of Mount Stuart north of Alice Springs, and shot dead when he resisted arrest. A second Pompey had been shot the same year by his patrol on Undoolya Station to the east of Alice Springs after allegedly killing ‘a little civilized black boy’ kept by the station manager. The third bearing the name had been employed on the Victoria River Downs station, from which he had run off with a man known as ‘Jimmy … with frearms and joined the wild natives’. Willshire wrote that the men had been killed by ‘the wild niggers’ and he had gone out and recovered the frearms, adding that

some few months after when the bodies of Pompey & Jimmy had suffciently dried I went out and brought both their sculls [sic] in and buried them in my garden at Gordon Creek, as the Late John Watson Manager for Goldsborough, Mort & Co. stated that he wanted Pompey’s scull for a spittoon. (Willshire 1896)

It was not unknown incidentally, for settlers in remote and rural districts to turn Indigenous skulls into curios. Touring the Geelong District in 1851, one traveller wrote that

A mantel piece at a station in this neighbourhood struck me as a very unique affair in the way of ornament—a Yankee clock in the centre supported on either side by a pair of emu legs. Two joints of a horses back bone, painted to represent a clergyman emphatically nailing an argument. Next to those clerical bones grin’d two native skulls, each cranium being surmounted by eagles’ talons, and fanked by the head of a stone toma- hawk. (Wright 1851) 296 P. Turnbull

In the early 1920s W. Wright Davis, an elderly resident of the Canberra district, recalled having attended the funeral of a Kamberra Elder as a young boy, adding that ‘a number of years later a man named Smithie dug up the skull, and with questionable taste had it made into a sugar bowl which I actually saw in use on his table’ (Wright 1923, p. 57). Further examples could be given, but none are so refective of racialised brutality as John Watson’s plan to turn Pompey’s skull into a spittoon. The most detailed instance of police involvement in the collecting of Indigenous bodily remains in the wake of frontier violence in the Northern Territory is to be found in a letter Stirling received in January 1899 from Ernest Charles Cowle (1863–1922), a mounted constable stationed at Illamurta Springs near Tempe Downs. Earlier that month a miner had been speared near Alice Springs. The alleged spearer had been tracked and caught; but when the constable in charge of the tracking party fastened a chain to his leg the man had struck him down with his handcuffed hands and run; he was shot dead. Cowle informed Stirling that he had read ‘a garbled account’ of the shooting which had occurred close to where he had recently been camped, so his patrol had sought out the body. ‘I thought of the penis for you’, Cowle wrote, ‘but it was too diseased to handle & would have been rotten before I could get to the station next day, in fact this is what has occurred on each of the late troubles’ (Cowle 1899). Cowle appears to have known that Stirling wanted to obtain specimens of sub-incised penises, and there is anec- dotal evidence that at least one was sent from Adelaide to the anatomy department of the University of Edinburgh. In fact, it was not unknown for genitalia to be offered to museums. In 1910, H. Phillips (n.d.), a Brisbane dealer in antiques and ethnographic artefacts offered the Queensland Museum for thirty shillings

a few anatomical specimens which I hope may fnd a resting place in the Queensland Museum, they are in spirits and consist of, the brain of an Aboriginal, the privates of an adult showing the rite of incision as performed by the natives, and the female perineum similarly treated. (Phillips 1910)

*** What can we conclude in respect of the charges that the nineteenth century saw Indigenous Australian people murdered to obtain their remains? On the basis of the evidence reviewed in this chapter, it seems 10 MURDERED FOR SCIENCE? ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTING … 297 almost certain that this never happened. However, what museum records and other surviving sources do show is that museum personnel who sought to acquire remains appear to have had no moral res- ervations about obtaining the remains of individuals who were victims of frontier violence; in fact, we can say that the interactions between museum personnel and police, government offcials and settlers willing to collect them strengthened racialised perceptions of indigeneity within and beyond scientifc circles. Moreover, correspondence between collectors and curators in colonial Sydney Adelaide and Brisbane contains a wealth of observations and utterances that throw into question the adequacy of recent revisionist interpretations of the nature and extent of frontier violence. The past two decades have seen considerable academic and public debate over the extent to which violence marked the colonisation of Australia. One of the most contentious aspects of these debates has been the claim, notably advanced by historian Keith Windschuttle, that in the Australian colonial context, frontier violence occurred sporadically and was never a systematic phenomenon (Windschuttle 2002). Windschuttle’s criticisms of the explanatory validity of describing frontier violence as systemic to the degree of being tantamount to genocide deserve serious consideration. So too does his argument that British colonial governance was principally animated by humanitarian concern for the welfare of both settlers and Indigenous people. However, as we have seen in this study, there was a remarkable social diversity among collectors of remains in the half century or so after 1860: indeed, they could be said to come close to being a microcosm of settler society in rural and frontier regions; and what we know of them highlights the need to take account how, in this period, race determined in obvious and in many subtle ways the social and ontological categories shaping Indigenous–settler relations in frontier districts. While one can have no quarrel with Windschuttle’s claim that frontier violence was sporadic, what we know about the collecting of Indigenous remains comprises a record of behaviour and testimony inviting the conclusion that violence was nonetheless systematic. Anthropological collecting under- wrote racialized perceptions of Indigeneity that contributed to settlers and agents of colonial governance unhesitatingly condoning violence, in the belief that it was an effective and just means of ensuring peaceful co-existence between Indigenous peoples and settlers. 298 P. Turnbull

This is well illustrated by how the personnel of the Queensland and South Australian museums interacted with those who sought to procure them Indigenous remains in frontier districts. As John Mulvaney has observed of Edward Stirling’s involvement in the Horn Expedition his sympathies were overwhelmingly with the pastoralists of the McDonnell region, whose cattle were frequently being speared. In his contribution to the expedition’s anthropological report he downplayed the brutality with which station employees and mounted police punished cattle killing, declaring himself ‘glad to bear witness to the humanity and even the kindliness with which the natives are now treated by the present settlers’ (Stirling 1896, p. 9). However, in his surviving correspondence, and that of other museum personnel in both Adelaide and Brisbane, Stirling spoke of Indigenous people in ways that served to confrm to the settlers and government agents who were willing to collect remains vali- dated their perception of Indigenous peoples were inferior and incapable of being absorbed into settler society. As the collector and sub-inspector Paul Foelsche observed of pacifying the Northern Territory, ‘By the majority of the population here, the Aborigines are looked upon as beasts, destitute of reason and are treated as such’ (Foelsche 1878). *** Clearly, the Queensland and South Australian Museums were on occasion knowing benefciaries of the violence that accompanied the opening of central and northern Australia to pastoralism and mining between 1860 and 1914. The surviving correspondence of personnel in colonial scientifc institutions contains utterances and observations strongly suggesting that the practice of collecting gave scientifc credibility to long-standing prejudices, such as the idea that Aboriginal Australian people and Torres Strait Islanders were primitive racial types in whom emotional volatility could unpredictably fnd violent expression. At best the letters speak with condescension about Indigenous culture and religious beliefs, and implicitly endorse the legitimacy of expropriating ancestral country to facilitate the advance of British civilisation across northern Australia. Rarely if ever did they speak about the collecting of Indigenous remains in ways that suggest they felt moral doubt about the plundering of burial places or the acquisition of remains in the aftermath of frontier killings And in impressing upon those whom they approached to help them that the remains were increasingly scarce and valuable scientifc material, they gave additional weight to the idea that Australia’s frst peoples were doomed to extinction but, until that eventuality, were in need of frm paternal governance by the colonial state. CHAPTER 11

Indigenous Australians’ Defence of the Ancestral Dead

So far this study has investigated how the bodily remains of Australia’s frst peoples were acquired and interpreted by British anatomists, anthropologists and phrenologists from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. This chapter shifts focus, to explore how Indigenous communities reacted to attempts to collect the remains of their dead. In doing so, I draw attention to a wealth of surviving evidence illustrative of European awareness of Indigenous funerary customs and the reactions of communities to encountering skeletal collectors seeking to remove the remains of their Old People from burial places. The chapter also explores how, during the second half of the nineteenth century, Indigenous burial places in long-settled districts in the south of the Australian continent acquired new meanings in the European imagination that were refective of new discourses of race and the progress of settler society towards nationhood. Aboriginal funerary ceremonies came to be commonly represented as macabre practices of a primitive race teetering on extinction, but were also elegiacally represented in later nineteenth century settler culture as memorials to the passing of the Aboriginal race. In imagery, poetry, local histories of pioneer settlement and even funerary monuments, the humanity rather than the alleged biological primitiveness of Indigenous Australians was acknowledged, but in the context of lamenting that their extinction was naturally, if not providentially, destined to occur with the colonisation of their ancestral lands. The cultural effect of these seemingly contradictory modes of representing the ‘native dead’ was to help erase the

© The Author(s) 2017 299 P. Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia, Palgrave Studies in Pacifc History, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51874-9_11 300 P. Turnbull consciousness among settlers that the traditional owners of many long settled regions were still alive and, despite their dispossession, still maintained strong ties with their ancestral country.

They Bury Their Dead with Neatness In 1832 a short ethnographic account of the Indigenous peoples of King George Sound in Western Australia by Dr. Isaac Scott Nind (1797–1868) was read before the Royal Geographical Society of London. Nind was a military medical offcer who had recently returned from a posting to the Sound. Among other things, he told the Society that the Sound’s traditional owners constructed graves surrounded by intricate fgures carved high in the bark of surrounding trees. They also took care to perform ceremonies on approaching and leaving burial places (Nind 1832, pp. 46–51). Nind’s paper was one of many communications on the subject of Indigenous Australians’ care for the dead heard by European learned societies during the frst half of the nineteenth century (see Greenway 1963). It was also typical in that his account of funerary customs con- tradicted what by this time was the popular assumption that Australians were nomadic peoples with no sense of ownership or attachment to places in the country they inhabited. One striking illustration of how the Indigenous dead unsettled this assumption is to be found in the dispatches of Naval Commander James Brewer (1786–1850). Brewer arrived in the Gulf of Carpentaria aboard HMS Tamar in early 1824, to establish the Port Essington settlement and formally proclaim British sovereignty over the northern coast of Australia. Brewer reported to the Admiralty that the peoples his party encountered were more civilised than those they had met with on the eastern coast of Australia, which he took to be evidenced by a burial place he had examined on Bathurst Island. ‘The situation’, he wrote of the grave, ‘was one of such perfect retirement and repose that it displayed considerable feeling in the survivors, who placed it there, and the simple order which pervaded the spot would not have disgraced a civilised people’ (Admiralty 1824). Brewer’s depiction of the burial place found a wide audience beyond naval circles thanks to Henry Ennis, the purser on board Tamar. Ennis used Brewer’s despatches as a basis for a series of articles he wrote for The Monthly Magazine, in which he too wrote of the peoples of eastern Arnhem Land that they were more civilised than those he had encountered in New South Wales (Ennis 1983, p. 19). 11 INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS’ DEFENCE OF THE ANCESTRAL DEAD 301

Similar sentiments were expressed by John Lort Stokes when writing of his serving as a lieutenant on HMS Beagle’s 1837–1843 survey of Australasian coastal waters. In 1839 he was in a shore party that discovered a tree burial near the mouth of the Flinders River in the Gulf Country of Northwest Queensland. Stokes wrote:

There was an air of loneliness in the spot, perfectly in keeping with the strange feelings this discovery naturally called forth; and from the few recent signs of the natives, it would appear here, as in other parts of the continent, spots where the dead lie are kept sacred. (1846, v. 2, p. 296)

Colonial offcials, explorers and travellers were struck by the attachment that women had to the remains of children they lost in infancy—something that was dreadfully common in families dispossessed of their country and forced to live in camps on pastoral stations or at the outskirts of white settlements. In the mid-1840s, as the colony of South Australia prepared to celebrate its second decade, children were dying in the fringe camp on the bank of the Torrens River where the Kaurna people, traditional owners of the Adelaide region, now lived as best they could. William Mann, a young visiting Englishman, went to the camp, where he encountered a grieving mother with a dead child

she kept … covered up in her lap, keeping her eyes steadily fxed on it, was quite silent, and looked the very picture of despair. At stated times all the natives would gather round, and set up a howling noise of sorrow for the death of poor pickaninny. (Mann 1839, p. 286)

It was known that mothers mourned their child for many months, with intimate rituals to ensure their spirit would return happily to the care of ancestral country. John Lort Stokes wrote of one grieving woman, the wife of Marambari, a Madjunbalmi man, who had helped the white people at Port Essington keep peaceful relations with local clans, and whom he met when the Beagle visited Port Essington in 1839. Stokes found that Marambari’s wife

had treasured up the bones of the little one, and constantly carried them about with her, not as a memento mori, but as an object whereon to expend her tenderest emotions, whenever they swelled in her breast. (Stokes 1846, p. 355) 302 P. Turnbull

Eventually mothers would give the child’s remains over to the care of the land, taking comfort that its spirit might again take human form. What medical men and naval surveyors like Nind, Brewer and Stokes made of Indigenous Australian societies refected the prevailing belief in British scientifc and intellectual circles of the frst half of the nineteenth century that the continent’s native peoples were descended from tribes whose migration and settlement in Australia had denied them the ability to live by pastoralism or agriculture. They had been forced to survive by hunting and gathering, leaving them neither time nor resources to preserve more than the barest rudiments of the higher degree of social development and understanding of true religion they had once enjoyed. They consequently imagined Indigenous Australians to be peoples whose beliefs and behaviours were the remnants of ideas, lifeways and institutions inherited from the ancient civilisations of the Middle East and northern Europe (Kidd 2006; Stocking 1987). There was debate about far this inheritance could be recovered. As was shown in Chapter 4 of this study, it was commonly believed in scientifc circles that the physiological and mental effects of living by foraging and hunting had likely rendered Australia’s frst peoples incapable of reaching a more advanced stage of intellectual and social development. Within the accounts of travellers, explorers and also settlers in various walks of life, reports of Indigenous funerary ceremonies refected the infuence of antiquarian scholars of the European Enlightenment, and also of pioneer ethnologists such as James Cowles Prichard, for whom the funerary practices of Australian and other indigenous peoples were essentially those described in the Old Testament and other ancient texts which were now practised ignorant of their original meanings and signifcance. Some believed, however, that the care Indigenous Australians showed the dead gave reason to hope that their environmentally induced descent into savagery had not entirely extinguished their belief in the immortality of the soul. For example, John Henderson (n.d.), a prominent Baptist missionary and geologist, was convinced that remnants of Hindu custom were practised by some communities, and readily credited reports that peoples in present-day Far North Queensland and the Northern Territory possessed ‘a much fairer complexion than even the inhabitants of the Indian islands’ (Henderson 1832, p. 149). Henderson claimed to have learnt from missionaries in the Wellington Valley of central western New South Wales that while local clans had no settled place of residence, ‘the limits 11 INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS’ DEFENCE OF THE ANCESTRAL DEAD 303 of their respective hunting grounds appear to be distinctly recognised’. So too when they came to bury the dead, they selected ‘a spot near a clear portion of the forest’ and afterwards symbolically carved ‘the nearest tree, which serves to indicate the particular tribe to which the individual may have belonged’ (Henderson 1832, p. 149). Missionaries were not the only commentators who interpreted Indigenous funerary practices as remnants of ancient custom. One of the more imaginative writers to do so was Thomas Inman (1820–1876), a Liverpool physician, phrenologist and prominent member of the port city’s Literary and Philosophical Society. Drawing on published accounts of Australian exploration, Inman pressed Indigenous burials into the service of phrenology, arguing that the fact that the continent’s frst peoples did not build permanent dwellings had mistakenly ‘led many of the frst writers on the subject to consider the natives the very lowest on the human scale’, and to suffer from what he and fellow phrenologists diagnosed as the ‘absence of constructiveness’. ‘More extended observation’, he claimed, ‘had shown that they were by no means defcient in this attribute’; and one important proof was that while large Aboriginal burial grounds were uncommon, ‘some had been found of most romantic beauty’, and in Northern Australia ‘large cairns had been found … evidently of great antiquity’ (1846, p. 21). This was a common theme in published accounts of Australian exploration in the frst two thirds of the nineteenth century: while Indigenous communities lived by hunting and gathering, and did not set aside land for the construction of permanent dwellings, they nonetheless took great care to erect intricate structures on land reserved for burial. Written and visual records of funerary structures fgured prominently in the accounts of inland travel compiled by early surveyors and explorers. In Chapter 6 of this study we saw that John Oxley, the frst NSW Government Surveyor, sketched, and reported excavating, graves during his expedition along the Lachlan and Macquarie rivers in 1817 (Oxley 1820, p. 139). Similarly Thomas Mitchell (1792–1855), his successor, made written and visual records of burial places that his party encountered during his 1836 exploration of the course of the Darling River. Mitchell was particularly struck by one burial mound that he described as ‘consisting of a circular trench of about 30 feet in diameter, the grave … covered by a low mound in the centre’. It seemed to him that as in European cemeteries, this and other graves he encountered had been sited as high as possible in hills along the course of the river (1839, v. 1, p. 235). 304 P. Turnbull

Independent travellers similarly remarked on the care that Aboriginal communities took in where and how they created burial places. W.H. Breton (1818–1886) was one of many who came to Australia out of commercial interest but was also curious and of a mind to write about the natural history and Indigenous inhabitants of Britain’s new possession. A naval offcer, he travelled New South Wales on half pay in the early 1830s and encountered earth graves at what he thought a ‘very pretty spot’ on the banks of a river in the Wollombi District. He excavated several of them, recording how the bodies of four men and two women had been carefully laid to rest. The ‘neatness and precision’ of the graves’ construction seemed to him ‘very remarkable’. ‘Such evident pains and labour to make a place of sepulture’, he wrote, ‘struck me as being not a little extraordinary in a people so very indifferent about most other matters’. Breton also tried to fnd out from local clans something of their beliefs in respect of death and burial, but found them unwilling to tell him anything (1833, p. 180). Pastoral entrepreneurs were also among those who reported on Indigenous burial customs. Joseph Hawdon (1813–1871), who with fellow pioneer Charles Bonney (1813–1897) brought the frst cattle overland from the Port Phillip District to Adelaide in 1838, thought it ‘rather singular’ that the peoples they encountered along the Murray river made ‘better houses for the dead than for the living, the latter being composed merely of sheets of bark’. On two occasions Hawdon stopped to examine and sketch these structures. Discovering a complex of burials on fats adjacent to the Murray, south of what is now Lake Bonney, he removed a number of clay mourning caps which had been placed on around 30 well-defned graves, which he noted were ‘evidently kept with much care and in neat order’ (Hawdon and Bonney 1991, pp. 47, 57). There was also wide awareness that Indigenous people’s relations with the ancestral dead did not end with their burial. Many of the numerous accounts of funerary ceremonies recorded by colonial offcials and pastoralists during the frst two thirds of the nineteenth century note the care that people took to approach and leave the vicinity of burial places. Explorers and surveyors who employed Indigenous men to help them travel and live off the land found that they were anxious to obtain permission of the owners of the country they passed through. When burial sites were discovered, guides sought to persuade the expedition to move on quickly without disturbing anything. In his published account 11 INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS’ DEFENCE OF THE ANCESTRAL DEAD 305 of his explorations south of Perth in early 1839, George Grey recalled the ‘concern and uneasiness’ of Kaiber, the party’s principal guide, when a newly made grave was encountered on the upper reaches of the Harvey River. Grey asked Kaiber the meaning of various features of the grave:

His answer, — ‘Neither you nor I know: our people have always done so, and we do so now’. I then said to him, ‘Kaiber, I intend to stop here for the night and sleep’. ‘You are deceiving me,’ he said: ‘I cannot rest here, for there are many spirits in this place.’ (Grey 1841, v. 1, p. 323)

Grey wrote of laughing at Kaiber’s fears, but he had his party continue on for several more miles before making camp for the night. Although Kaiber was unwilling to tell Grey anything about the grave, other Indigenous men employed as guides appear on occasion to have been as unacquainted with the funerary ceremonies of distant tribes as the Europeans they led. Writing of his 1836 Murray–Darling expedition, Thomas Mitchell recalled fnding on a plain near the junction of the Lachlan and Murrumbidgee rivers ‘a large, lonely hut, of peculiar construction … that … stood in the centre of a plot of bare earth of considerable extent … enclosed by three small ridges’. Entering the hut and thrusting his sabre into the rush-covered foor, Mitchell realised that he had disturbed a grave. ‘Tommy Came-frst’, one of several Aboriginal guides with the expedition, ‘pronounced this to be the work of a white man’ (Mitchell 1839, v. 2, p. 71). While Mitchell sketched the burial place a woman appeared, called Tommy over to where she stood amidst nearby trees, and warned him that they were intruding on the grave of her husband. Tommy refused to return near the site. Seeing his and the woman’s distress, Mitchell also left the grave, ‘anxious that no disturbance of the repose of the dead should accompany the prints of the white man’s feet’ (1839, v. 2, p. 71). Graves were routinely visited by relatives. Mitchell, for example, learnt from the widow whose husband’s grave he had inadvertently desecrated that the rushes covering the foor of the tomb ‘were actually the nightly bed of some near relative or friend of the deceased’ who would stay with the body until the completion of ceremonies lasting several months (Mitchell 1839, v. 2, p. 71). In 1857, just over two decades later, William Blandowski (1822– 1878), a geologist and natural history collector, was contracted by Victoria’s Board of Public Lands and Works to obtain mineral and 306 P. Turnbull zoological specimens in the same region that Mitchell had surveyed for Melbourne’s National Museum. On his return he reported that he was moved to make ‘the most deplorable statements concerning our natives’. ‘Extermination’ seemed to him to have proceeded ‘so rapidly, that the regions of the Lower Murray are already depopulated, and a quietude reigns there which saddens the traveller who visited those districts a few years ago’ (Blandowski 1858, p. 137). He reported that, nevertheless, among the people who survived customary forms of burial were still practised. Structures continued to be built over graves, and ‘the female relatives of the departed enter the tomb every morning before daybreak, giving expression to the most melancholy lamentations’ (1858, p. 137). Similarly telling are the reminiscences of the wife of the manager of Keera station in the New England region of northern New South Wales. Shortly after arriving at the station in the mid-1850s, the couple was told a burial place lay a short distance from the homestead. After several fruitless attempts to fnd it themselves, they tried to persuade an Elder of the Githabul people, the traditional owners of the land, to reveal its whereabouts. ‘He shuddered’, she wrote, ‘and literally turned pale when we broached the subject’. The couple persisted, ‘questioning him as to which of his former acquaintances were interred’. With food scarce and more of his people arriving at the station malnourished and sick, the Elder gave in. Making sure none but the couple heard, he whis- pered the names of the dead ‘scarcely above his breath, at the same time looking around fearfully’. Pressure was similarly applied to younger men in the station camp, one of whom guided them to within a kilometre of the site, where ‘he stopped abruptly, pointed with his hand to a very tall tree, some few yards off, and darted away like an arrow, unwilling to linger near the terrible spot’ (MacPherson 1860, p. 225). They walked on to discover a number of burial mounds surrounded by trees adorned with intricate carvings. One in particular ‘bore the appearance of being tended with no little care’. Both were struck ‘that however much they dislike to name the dead or visit their last abodes, they do not allow the tombs of their friends to suffer from their neglect’ (MacPherson 1860, p. 226). So struck too was Edward Willson Landor (1811–1878), a solicitor who in the early 1840s regularly visited his youngest brother who managed a sheep property they jointly owned on the upper Swan River district of Western Australia. Landor recalled that when local men died a ‘hut’ was built over the grave, a fre was tended, and their wives and 11 INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS’ DEFENCE OF THE ANCESTRAL DEAD 307 other close relatives who subsequently passed the grave would ensure the structure was intact and sing the spirit of their loved one to rest. ‘Nothing’, Landor reported, would ‘induce a stranger to go near a new grave or to mention the name of the departed for a long time after his death’ (Landor 1847, pp. 213–214).

Protecting the Dead Not all encounters with burial places were marked by peaceful interactions between mourners and strangers, as surviving testimony from would-be grave-robbers reveals. As mentioned previously, the pastoral entrepreneur Joseph Hawdon discovered numerous graves when driv- ing cattle down the course of the Murray River in 1836. He had several opened to procure skulls. While his men dug, the clan of the dead, knowing the weaponry the white men possessed, stood by ‘aloof, looking very solemn, but without uttering a word, and manifestly disap- proving of my curiosity’ (Hawdon and Bonney 1991, p. 57). Also, as previous mentioned, when John Lort Stokes surveyed Australasian coastal waters aboard Beagle between 1836 and 1843 he frequently led shore parties onto the country of people who, in many instances by this time, had violent encounters with armed parties from naval and merchant vessels over four decades. The Admiralty had instructed the expedition to collect ‘such objects of Natural History as may be new, rare, or interesting’ (King 1839, p. xvii). Stokes and his fellow offcers took this to include human skeletal material for the growing collection of racial specimens in the Navy Medical Department’s museum at Haslar. As mentioned in Chapter 3, Stokes led a party ashore in early 1838, near Point Cunningham in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. There they found and removed a body watched by local people. Stokes reasoned that they were not stopped because the family and clan of the dead believed that they would be punished by the ‘spirit of the departed’ or some more potent entity (Stokes 1846, v. 1, p. 116); yet it seems much more likely that the local people feared being shot. On other occasions the voyagers were prevented from stealing remains because the kin of the dead employed tactics that did not expose them to white guns. For example, in 1839, Kurtijar men prevented Stokes from obtaining the corpse from a tree burial near the mouth of the Flinders River. He was to recall that: 308 P. Turnbull

The method they used to lure us away from the neighbourhood of the dead was simple and ingenious, and might have proved successful had not the interposing ledge of rocks prevented our further progress. To effect their purpose they must have burnt up a very large space, as the smoke that arose obscured all that quarter of the heavens. We observed also that the ground about the burial tree had been submitted to the fames, as if to keep away the few kangaroos that visit this spot. (Stokes 1846, v. 1, pp. 296–297)

Some who disturbed the dead took a deadly risk by having no way to defend themselves should they be discovered. In 1874 Leonard Elvy (n.d.) and William Nation (n.d.), two experienced bushmen, found themselves forced to travel across Queensland’s Gulf country to Normanton after falling out with George Latour (n.d.), by whom they had been hired to help drive cattle from Julia Creek to present-day Darwin. They came across a burial of the Garrwa people on the journey, which Nation described in his journal as ‘the last resting place of some Prime Minister or other black boss’ (Nation 1874, p. 57). In the grave they found a painted section of tree trunk that had been hollowed and contained various bones, ‘very complete and worthy of having been robbed for a museum’. As Tony Roberts, historian of Queensland’s northern Gulf Country, observes, Nation and Elvy were lucky not to have been discovered by the Garrwa, for

The wide perimeter of heaped sand around the platform was a boundary beyond which only certain people were allowed to pass. This was such a serious matter that anyone else who entered the forbidden area would have been killed at the direction of those in charge of the funeral ceremony. To touch or tamper with a coffn was sacrilege of the highest order, an act so profane it would have been incomprehensible to the Garrwa. (Roberts 2005, p. 29)

Moreover, as Roberts notes, ‘Subsequent European travellers may have been punished for the actions of these men’. Even when the dead did not have the protection of family and clan members, they could deter would-be plunderers by their state of decom- position. In this respect the experience of Edward Snell (1820–1880), a young engineer and artist newly arrived in Adelaide, was not wholly unusual. In December 1850, he set out with a friend to steal skulls from a Ngarrindjeri burial place in woodland near the mouth of the Murray River. Unnerved by moving among the dead, they found the courage 11 INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS’ DEFENCE OF THE ANCESTRAL DEAD 309 to capsize one platform and tore the head off the corpse, only to fnd ‘it was too stinking to carry away’ (Snell 1988, pp. 187–188). Similarly, Augustus Gregory’s 1855–1857 Royal Geographical Society-sponsored expedition across northern Australia encountered the remains of a man which they planned to give to London’s Royal College of Surgeons, only to fnd its decay on the return voyage became so sickening that it was tossed overboard (Elsey 1855, p. 18).

Recognition of Rights to Care for the Dead One could present further evidence, but what is clear is that colonial offcials and settlers were so well aware that Indigenous Australian communities chose specifc sites in their ancestral country to bury the dead. So much so that in the late 1830s their customary right to do so was explicitly recognised by the British Crown. Britain entered the nineteenth century possessing the world’s most advanced capitalist economy, yet still governed by a complex of patri- cian institutions, many of which had existed since at least the early sixteenth century and up until this time had proved remarkably adaptable to change (Porter 1982). However, by the end of the frst third of the nineteenth century, the challenges and uncertainties attending the rise of industrialisation led to the creation of new state agencies and associated legislation, refecting the faith of Britain’s increasingly powerful middle classes’ in the idea of humanitarian reform. This spirit of moral reform- ism had complex origins in eighteenth century British society, but gained much of its impetus from the opposition of leading Evangelicals and non-conformist Christians to slavery (Bebbington 1989). By the early 1830s, however, slavery was only one aspect of the contemporary world that humanitarians had identifed as morally indefensible. Efforts to protect the Indigenous peoples of Britain’s settler colonies from aggressive dispossession of their lands by settlers without just compensation was another manifestation of this reformist impulse. In the case of Australia, the infuence of leading Evangelicals such as Beilby Porteus (1731–1809), Bishop of London, led to Arthur Phillip, the frst governor of New South Wales, receiving instructions specifcally charging him to establish peaceful relations with the peoples he encountered (Frost 1987). The welfare of the empire’s ‘aboriginal natives’ in general became a matter of growing concern in humanitarian circles through the frst third of the nineteenth century, as missionary ventures 310 P. Turnbull in Canada, Australia and various parts of Oceania reported disturbing news of the plight of these lands’ traditional owners. However, as with anti-slavery, agitation to protect Indigenous people gained or lost momentum as the salience of other domestic and international issues waxed or waned in metropolitan political and intellectual circles. On the formation of the Melbourne ministry in 1835, the Anglican Evangelical Charles Grant (1788–1863), later Lord Glenelg, was appointed Secretary of State for the Colonies, while another Evangelical, James Stephen (1789–1859), who had served as Counsel to the Colonial Offce since 1813, became its permanent Under-Secretary. Glenelg and Stephen had both played a major part in the anti-slavery movement’s political successes. They were resolutely opposed to the inhumane treatment of Indigenous peoples, but believed that Britain’s imperial expansion was providentially designed: the divine will was to be served by ensuring that the nation’s colonial possessions were governed to achieve the material improvement and spiritual salvation of both settlers and the native peoples over whose lands and lives the British Crown had assumed sovereign power (Reynolds 1992, pp. 90–91). Stephen was especially concerned to protect the Indigenous peoples of Southern Africa and Australia from abuse and denial of their customary right to ownership and enjoyment of their ancestral land and its natural resources (Stephen and Stephen 1906). The brutalities of the Tasmanian ‘Black War’ of the late 1820s and the subsequent removal of the Island’s native peoples to reserves in Bass Strait caused him and Glenelg particular anguish (Reynolds 1992, p. 99). Like many leading humanitarians of the 1830s, Stephen’s and Glenelg’s faith was tempered by pragmatic realism. They condemned the expropriation of native land as a moral evil and the primary cause of violence between Aboriginal people and colonists. However, they understood the process as having parallels in British history. They saw Aboriginal Australians as holding and enjoying tracts of territory in much the same way as had ancient Britons; and they read the history of common law as confrming that even though historically the Crown’s sovereignty had been established by conquest, its continuing legitimacy depended on its acting as legal guarantor and impartial judge of its subjects’ traditional proprietary rights and privileges in respect of land. For Stephen and Glenelg it was paramount that the Crown fulfl its duty of care to the Indigenous peoples inhabiting lands it now claimed 11 INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS’ DEFENCE OF THE ANCESTRAL DEAD 311 by right of discovery. The Colonial Offce had to put in place means of protecting the rights of the Crown’s new ‘native’ subjects. An important step in this direction was to support those of their fellow humanitarians active within parliamentary circles, who sought to establish a select committee to investigate the condition of ‘Aboriginal tribes’ in British settlements (Britain 1836). Stephen, Glenelg and their political allies at Westminster were far from confdent about the imperial government’s ability to protect native rights. In the case of the Australian colonies, they knew the strong opposition that the governors of New South Wales, Tasmania and Western Australia would meet from pastoralists and their political representatives should they be required to implement any legislation or policies favouring Indigenous rights to land. They were also mindful of the scale of Indigenous–settler confict experienced in Tasmania and New South Wales, and believed that many communities on whose lands sheep and cattle had been forcibly introduced appeared doomed to extinction. At best they could hope to achieve the protection of those who remained, and support missionary efforts for their assimilation within settler society by conversion to Christianity and education in farming techniques. However, in respect of one matter there seemed the possibility of substantially protecting the rights and welfare of Indigenous Australians: for on taking offce, Glenelg assumed responsibility for resolving the administrative complications attending the establishment of the new colony of South Australia. The colony had been approved by Act of Parliament in 1834, after several years of lobbying and political manoeuvring. The Act refected various compromises between the imperial government and the colony’s commercial sponsors; but Glenelg, Stephen and their political allies still regarded this founding article as seriously fawed, not least in that it gave overlapping and contradictory powers to the colony’s Governor and the Board of Commissioners, who would be responsible for the sale of land and emigration. The Act moreover contained no measures to protect the rights of those Indigenous people living within the bounda- ries of the proposed colony: in fact, it represented the land to be settled as ‘waste and unoccupied’. As Glenelg informed the Commissioners on 15 December 1835, if the utmost limits were assumed within which Parliament has sanctioned the erection of the Colony it

… might embrace in its range numerous Tribes of People whose Proprietary Title to the Soil we have not the slightest ground for disputing. 312 P. Turnbull

Before His Majesty can be advised to transfer to His Subjects the Property in any part of the Land of Australia, he must have at least some reasonable assurance that he is not about to sanction any act of injustice towards the Aboriginal natives of that part of the Globe (Colonial Secretary 1835b).

Glenelg made clear through various channels that settlement would not be allowed to proceed without explicit agreement that steps would be taken to ensure that native proprietary rights were protected. He also intimated that if this were done, the Colonial Offce would not further delay the colony’s establishment by requiring that all the administrative shortcomings of the 1834 Act be resolved. The Commissioners realised that Glenelg’s demand ‘amounted to a veto on the establishment of the colony’ (Brown 1836a). By this time they faced severe pressure from investors, some of whom held that whatever peoples inhabited the proposed colony they were highly unlikely to live other than by nomadic foraging and hunting, and thus had no proprietary rights to the soil. However, several infuential backers of the colony were inclined to think they might, and accepted Glenelg’s concern as just and humane. The Commissioners proposed the establishment of an offce of Protector of Aborigines along the lines of that established several years before in Tasmania (Torrens 1849, p. 70). As John Brown (1801–1879), the offcial emigration agent for South Australia, recorded in his diary in early January 1836, it was also agreed that there would be

payment by way of annual tribute to the natives of a certain quantity of food and clothing; the amount to be equivalent to the value of the land to them which we may occupy; the limit of the right of sporting to the surveyed ground. The limitation of the surveys to such lands as shall be unoccupied by natives & the granting rent-free, to any native who may desire to settle as a civilised being & cultivate land, so much land as he may cultivate. (Brown 1836a)

Glenelg accepted the Commissioners’ offer on condition that the offce of the Protector was administered by the colony’s Governor and invested ‘with the necessary powers to enable him to give effect to the objects con- templated in his appointment’ (Colonial Secretary 1835a). Should they not agree to this they risked the beginning of settlement being indefnitely post- poned by the Colonial Offce referring the 1834 Act back to parliament for amendment to this effect. The Commissioners had no choice but to agree. 11 INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS’ DEFENCE OF THE ANCESTRAL DEAD 313

When Glenelg and Stephen spoke of protecting Aboriginal proprietary title to the soil in the context of South Australian settlement, they implicitly assumed those rights to encompass rights to burial in accordance with tradition. The offcial instructions given to William Wyatt (1804–1886), on his appointment as interim Protector, in August 1837, make this clear. Wyatt was instructed that

If, on becoming acquainted with the habits and customs of the Aborigines, you should fnd that in any part of the country they are in the practice of making use of land for cultivation of any kind, or if they have a fxed residence on any particular spot, or if they should be found to appropriate any piece of land to funereal purposes, you are required to report such fact to the Colonial Government without loss of time, in order that means may be taken to prevent its being included in the survey for sale. [author’s italics added] (Colonial Secretary 1837)

The Ngarrindjeri, Walkandi-Woni and Merkani peoples of south eastern South Australia differed from many other Australian indigenous communities in that the fertility of their country allowed them a relatively sedentary way of life. Vegetable foods were gathered and stored for eat- ing at those times of the year when hunting was diffcult. Seeds were used to replenish the country for future seasons. As the anthropologist Ronald Berndt learnt from Ngarrindjeri informants in the 1940s, they ‘lived in well-known surroundings, hallowed by mythic associations and traditions, as familiar to them as their own close kin’ (Berndt et al. 1993, p. 17). Indeed, one of the frst problems Wyatt recorded confronting as Protector was settler anxiety over Walkandi-Woni clans determinedly maintaining substantial bark shelters on land claimed for grazing. Wyatt was a medical practitioner who, like many of his profession in the colonial sphere, was curious about the life-ways and culture of the peoples whose rights and interests he was charged to protect. During the two years he held the position, he appears to have sought to understand something of their languages and beliefs. However, in his quarterly reports to the Governor through 1837–1838, he was silent on the question of whether specifc parts of their country were used for the purposes defned in his instructions. What are we to make of Wyatt’s silence? Despite the unusually sedentary life of the region’s clans, one can understand his regarding the shelters they built and the forms of cultivation they practised as not what 314 P. Turnbull he, in common with Britons of his time, considered fxed dwelling places and agriculture. In September 1838, one settler who had purchased land in the Adelaide township was singled out for newspaper comment for having taken the terms of the protectorate to be such that he sent Wyatt £3-16-6 as ten per cent interest on a ffth of the cost of his land. ‘[We] do not see clearly’, wrote the editor of the Southern Australian, ‘that each landed proprietor in the colony should be called upon to give so much per cent on the produce of the land as a donation to the natives, much less do we see that the natives can claim such as a right’ (Finnimore 1998, p. 14). Even if Wyatt regarded continuously re-erected bark dwellings on the same spots of land as fxed residences, he was under considerable pressure to ignore the fact. For while the Board of Commissioners had assured Glenelg they would support the Protector in identifying and defending Aborigines’ rights to property, by as early as mid-Janu- ary 1836 they had quietly, ‘by way of protecting themselves against any encroachments of the Protector … passed & sealed an Order of the Board declaring all the lands of the Colony open to Public sale’ (Brown 1836b). When Wyatt raised the matter of reserving land for Aboriginal occupation with the Resident Commissioner, he was bluntly told ‘that, as the Act of Parliament admitted no reservation of the kind, my application was useless’ (Foster and Nettleback 2002, p. 24). It was made clear that his prime duty was to devote his energies to preventing clans season- ally burning grasslands and spearing sheep. What is more, by mid-1838 leading pastoralists had successfully pressured John Hindmarsh (1785– 1860), the colony’s frst governor, to revise the Protector’s instructions so as to require him to focus on encouraging Aboriginal peoples to move onto reserves where they could be taught Christianity and basic agricultural skills. What is more, Wyatt held offce on a temporary part-time basis, and one can well imagine that he sought not to jeopardise his future prospects by placing himself at odds with the Resident Commissioner and prominent colonists, the majority of whom were determined that the survey and sale of land would proceed without hindrance. But regardless of what weight this and other factors possibly had with him, he was to state publicly several weeks before the end of his appointment in mid- 1839 that ‘it … appeared that the natives occupy no lands in the especial manner’ described in his instructions. He therefore ‘felt it of no avail to keep my attention directed to it’ (News 1839). This was despite the fact 11 INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS’ DEFENCE OF THE ANCESTRAL DEAD 315 that Wyatt knew that the Ngarrindjeri, Walkandi-Woni and Merkani people all ‘appropriated land for funerary purposes’. Towards the end of his life, he contributed a chapter to a book documenting the lifeways and customs of the South Australian tribes as they had been at the time of the colony’s foundation. His chapter confrms that he had gained an in- depth knowledge of their funerary customs—as did Matthew Moorhouse (1813–1876), who succeeded him as permanent Protector.

Scenes of Horror and of Elegiac Reflection Why did Indigenous people in South Australia not gain the protection of their burial places to which they were legally entitled? The obvious answer is that neither the colony’s governor nor the Colonial Offce in London were able to constrain the ambitions of settlers who had the capital required to guarantee the success of the colony. However, there were also cultural factors that worked against the recognition of Aboriginal rights to land for burial, as seems evident from the book to which Wyatt contributed in old age, Native Tribes of South Australia (1879). Wyatt and other contributors to the book were to describe how Ngarrindjeri, Walkandi-Woni and Merkani returned their dead to the care of their ancestral country, but left their readers in no doubt that the success of missionary efforts to improve those who had survived dispossession was evidenced by their no longer practising funerary customs that appeared barbarous and shocking to contemporary European sensibilities. The representation of South Australian platform burials and associated ceremonies as exemplifying the primordial savagery in which Indigenous Australians had lived before the beginning of white settlement was a prominent trope in colonial and metropolitan ethnographic writings and imagery, from the 1840s until well into the early twentieth century. It was, moreover, a theme in which one image fgured in particular: this was the depiction of a Ngarrindjeri burial platform at Myponga Vale on the Fleurieu Peninsula, originally drawn in 1842 by the artist Samuel Thomas Gill (1818–1880) (Appleyard et al. 1986, p. 63). Well before the end of the 1840s, copies of Gill’s sketch and subsequent watercolour painting (Fig. 11.1) of the burial platform gradually became shorn of its localised signifcance. Gill himself gave his painting of the burial the title ‘Mode of disposing of the dead at the Lower-Murray’, when in fact the modes of burial among the traditional owners of this region 316 P. Turnbull

Fig. 11.1 Samuel Thomas Gill (c. 1845), ‘Mode of burial on parts of the Murray River, S. Australia’. PIC Solander Box A44 #T242 NK6897/F, National Library of Australia, Canberra were remarkably diverse. When he was employed by Edward Eyre (1815– 1901) to produce illustrations for Eyre’s account of his 1840–1841 central Australian expeditions, Gill approved the inclusion in the book of an engraved version of the Myponga Vale burial under the same more general title. Gill’s watercolour was also exhibited in Adelaide, where it was seen and copied by George French Angas (1822–1886), Gill’s artistic rival and the son of George Fife Angas (1789–1879), a founding director of the South Australian Company. The younger Angas included his version of the Myponga burial among the South Australian scenes he exhibited in Adelaide in 1845, and at the Egyptian Hall in London the following year (Tregenza 1980, p. 17). He also incorporated an engraving based 11 INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS’ DEFENCE OF THE ANCESTRAL DEAD 317 on the painting in his 1847 book, Savage Life and Scenes, accompanied by personal recollections of having encountered identical burial platforms on the fringe of Lake Alexandrina, to the south east of Adelaide (Angas 1969). In South Australia Illustrated, which he also published in 1847, Angas included engravings of the Lake Alexandrina burials and of grouped earth grave mounds he had encountered at Moorundi, accompanied by a brief survey of the different ways in which the peoples of southeast South Australia reunited the dead with their country. Images of platform burials derived from Gill’s and Angas’s engravings were widely reproduced in various popular ethnographic works through the second half of the nineteenth century. As time passed they were reproduced without reference to the Indigenous people of South Australia, depicting only how ‘Australian natives’ typically buried the dead. Perhaps the most infuential decontextualised reworking of the image was Gustav Doré’s engraved version of Gill’s depiction of Ngarrindjeri burial for Louis Figuier’s Primitive Man (1870). This ethnographic compendium was probably the popular scientifc writer’s most successful book. Editions were published in most major European languages and it sold well until the early 1900s, when the appeal of the book waned due to the publication of comparable works featuring photographs rather than line engravings (Fig. 11.2). What is striking about Doré’s reworking of Gill’s image for Primitive Man is the artist’s seeking to elicit horror in the viewer. The corpse on the burial platform is depicted with its limbs fexed as they would be if the dead were still alive and attempting to escape being torn apart by carrion crows and wild dogs. So successful is the effect of the image in this respect that one can see why the New York Review of Books chose in 1998 to use the image on its front cover to publicise an article on the torture and murder of Bosnian civilians during the Kosovo War. While descriptions and images of ancestral burial practices and places visually fxed Indigenous Australian primitivity in the European imagination, there was also poetry, prose and visual imagery reaching a wide audience through the second half of the nineteenth century that emphasised the humanity of the Indigenous dead and gave voice to moral disquiet and lament that the settlement of Australia appeared to hae doomed its native races to extinction. These reveries and refections differed on the question of why the continent’s native races seemed destined to die out. Providential design was a commonly 318 P. Turnbull

Fig. 11.2 Gustav Doré’s reworking of Samuel Gill’s depiction of burial on the Lower Murray River for Figuier’s Primitive Man (1870) 11 INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS’ DEFENCE OF THE ANCESTRAL DEAD 319 favoured explanation. Other writers more or less acknowledged and, in some cases, decried the complicity of settlers in the destruction of Indigenous societies. As one elderly long-time resident of the Goulburn district in the New South Wales’s southern tablelands at the turn of the twentieth century was moved to refect,

the Aborigines of the Tablelands have departed, and a cairn or pillar might ftly be built to their memory marked with the inscription—WE, the Australian Aborigines are no more. Civilisation killed us, and dug our grave: may a kindlier Civilisation fourish o’er our bones. (MacAlister 1977, p. 91)

Gothic imaginings of Aboriginal primitivity and humanitarian elegia- cism could be blended. When, for example, George French Angas exhibited his painting of the platform burial at Myponga Vale at London’s Egyptian Hall the work was hung together with an elegy written by ‘Mr. Miles, a Sydney friend of the artist’. ‘Tis the wild bird feeds’, Miles mused in closing, and ‘the wild dog eyes the corpse that rots’. And yet ‘Twas here a tribe have placed a chieftain in his once canoe; he rests the sleep of time on the branches of minor shrubs fowering in their beauty, on the land which the white man has left uncursed by misery, slaughter, and corruption, to the savage in the wild’ (Angas 1969, v. 1, p. 71). Poetry on the theme of the Aboriginal dead and their burial appeared in newspapers and journals. Much of this verse rehearsed well ingrained, racially-grounded perceptions of Aboriginal men and women, with some authors holding settlers to some degree accountable for the ill-health and high mortality in Indigenous communities after the loss of ancestral country. In ‘An Aboriginal Funeral’, frst published in the Sydney Bulletin in 1883, the author claimed have been inspired to verse by a rural newspaper report lamenting the ‘melancholy sight’ of the funeral procession through the town of Gunnedah of a Gomeroi man, said to have died a Christian. ‘He learned to slouch’, the author caustically observed,

in genuine Christian fashion, About the doors of pubs. And here some Vineyard groper, fat and gracious, Found him (as men have found the present bard, Half-mad), and silenced him with Athanasius 320 P. Turnbull

And won him to ‘the Lard’. —News 1883a

By far the most common theme in this body of verse was the depiction of traditional burial places as places provoking elegiac refection on Indigenous extinction in the wake of European settlement. The graves of male Elders were favoured subjects of poetic reverie, while the burial places of women appear to have failed to inspire the colonial muse. These verses generally wove together three themes with varying poetic skill. First was that of encountering the grave, which was invariably described as found in a quiet and picturesque spot, often in bush adjacent to land cleared for farming. Second the life story of the grave’s occupant was briefy told, emphasising his being the last man to be fully initiated into his people’s traditions and law, and who had been well known and respected by white families long settled in the district. Finally there was refection on the causes of his having been the ‘last of his tribe’. Some poems in this genre more or less openly acknowledged that the country been violently taken from its traditional owners, although most were silent about the manner of Indigenous dispossession. Typical in this respect was verse published by the Illustrated Sydney News in November 1880, the author of which wrote of having been inspired by an engraving appearing in the paper of a burial place said to be that of ‘the Last Native King of Wallerang’ in New South Wales’s central western tablelands:

They have all passed—the pale-face conqueror came— He slew them not, nor challenged them to fght, That they are gone, then, can he be to blame If more his energy and more his might; The felds he has obtained were his by right. The grain of wheat is better than nardoo, It nourishes far more, while to the sight Its blade is much the fairer of the two, And should their oxen starve to feed the kangaroo? —News 1880d

It was rare that the dead were memorialised as individuals. Even when they had been well known to local settlers for many years, their individuality was more often than not lost in lamenting them as ‘the last of their tribe’. Typical in this respect was ‘The Blackfellow’s Grave’ by one 11 INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS’ DEFENCE OF THE ANCESTRAL DEAD 321

S.V. Bennett (n.d.), who, in imagery echoing Thomas Gray’s perennially popular ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, mused:

There are no sable hatchments shown, No weeping seraphims in stone Above this sylvan grove; No towers or spires overhead, But lofty gums their branches spread And mournful grasstrees wave. The wild fowers bloom about the place, Sad token of a vanished race, Vanished, Ah! Who may know! O! Pass not by with careless tread The sacred ashes of the dead, The dead of long ago. —Meredith 1989, pp. 61–62

It was not uncommon for these ‘sad tokens’ of a ‘vanished race’ to be woven by local chroniclers into writings on the pioneering history and heritage of their communities. As one such historian writing at the turn of the twentieth century observed of the Dharawal people, the traditional owners of the Kiama district of coastal New South Wales, they

paid as much, or more, respect for their dead than some Europeans did. They picked a soft sandy spot—they did not believe in much hard work, consequently the sandy spot was their choice. One could always tell where they buried their dead by the great heap of timber they laid on the grave. A favoured spot was near the Kiama cemetery. Can it be possible that when the present site was suggested that the choice of the blacks had any effect on the minds of those whose duty it was to make the choice? (Burless 1902)

Nor was it uncommon that graves were fenced off from grazing cattle, and occasionally monuments were erected. As early as 1832, the grave of an Aboriginal woman called Wauba Debar (1792–1832) in the cemetery of the eastern Tasmanian township of Bicheno had a headstone ‘erected by some of her white friends’, and at a later date the grave was enclosed within decorative wrought iron fencing. Memorialised as one of the last of her race, older residents were said to recall that the town had been named after her before it was called Bicheno. In 1893 322 P. Turnbull local residents were outraged to fnd Wauba Debar’s remains had been taken from the grave, and suspected that the curator of the Tasmanian Museum in Hobart ‘in his enthusiasm to increase the attractiveness of the institution, [had] been at the bottom of … machinations to remove the remains’ (Cotton 1893). The island’s press took the side of Bicheno’s residents, congratulating their parliamentary representative for demanding the return of the remains, with the Tasmanian Mail editorially condemning the affair as ‘a pure case of body snatching for purposes of gain, and nothing else’ at which ‘the name of Science is outraged at being connected with’ (News 1893). However, what in the Mail’s view made the ‘whole proceeding … a disgrace to our Civilisation and our Christianity’ was the possibility that Wauba Debar’s bones would be ‘exchanged away to other colonies in exchange for curiosities of some sort or other’ (News 1893). There was a similar outcry when the grave of an Indigenous man known as ‘Kipper Billy’ in the burial ground of an Anglican church in Brisbane was plundered in the 1860s. The church’s wardens and parish- ioners demanded that the Colonial Secretary investigate this ‘act, alike of wanton outrage to ourselves and revolting to the good feeling of the whole community.’ Though here there was also fear that

the treatment of the remains of this aboriginal may be the treatment of ourselves, our relatives and our friends: and the offence in question we submit should be made the subject of public condemnation so marked as to prevent the probability of its occurrence. (Burless 1902)

But Indigenous people did not always lose their individuality in death. Perhaps the best-known example of this is Yuranigh, a Wiradjuri man who guided Thomas Mitchell on his 1845–1846 expedition. Yuranigh afterwards returned to his ancestral country near the town of Molong in central western New South Wales, where he worked as a stockman until he died and was traditionally buried, sometime in the 1850s. Told of his death, Mitchell successfully lobbied the colony’s legislature for Yuranigh to receive a headstone and fencing enclosing both the grave and nearby trees with customary burial carvings. In 1900 local residents enclosed the grave and trees with a strong picket fence and re-erected the headstone, which for some years had lain face downwards, on a base of local granite. Eight years later Joseph Carruthers (1856–1932), then premier of New South Wales, visited Molong and made of point of viewing ‘the 11 INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS’ DEFENCE OF THE ANCESTRAL DEAD 323 solitary sepulchre of the dusky Yuranigh’. Shortly afterwards the grave received a new marble headstone. As a local historian of Molong pioneering days observed of Yuranigh’s grave in 1913,

Even though it be to ‘an aboriginal’, it is well that such relics should be preserved—it is well that such memorials should be erected—the more particularly in the case under review, for it indicates, at least, that the leader of the great north-west expedition realised and recognised the sterling faithfulness of a man who, though his skin was black, had in him a heart as white as that of the best of the party. (Fitzpatrick 1913, pp. 42–43)

Certainly the most impressive of these memorials was that raised on the grave of Wombeetch Puyuun, known to the white community of Camperdown in the western district of Victoria as ‘Camperdown George’. Wombeetch Puyuun was believed to be the only Liwira Gunditj man still living on his ancestral country. On his death in early 1883, the Camperdown Chronicle noted that with him ‘the remnant of his race in this locality has passed away’, and that the idea of raising a memorial in the local cemetery where he had been buried ‘to commemorate the circumstance has met with the approval of all who have taken an interest in the welfare of the blacks’ (News 1883b, p. 2). The proponent of the memorial was James Dawson (1806–1900), a grazier and local protector of Aborigines at Camperdown. Despite the favourable reception the idea had at the time of Wambeetch Puyuun’s death, Dawson found himself left to build the memorial largely at his own expense. Completed in 1885, it bore the inscription ‘In memory of the Aborigines of this District’, followed in slightly smaller letters by ‘Here Lies the Body of the Chief Wombeetch Puyuun, Last of the Local Tribes’. Not every attempt by local settlers to incorporate the Indigenous dead into their pioneer history succeeded. In 1927 a local branch of the Australasian Society of Patriots in New South Wales’s Newcastle region tried to have a small parcel of coastal crown land resumed for the preservation of graves of the Awabakal people. The state government refused the request on the grounds that there was little direct evidence of the existence of burials, while, interestingly, also arguing that it was likely that there were burials scattered through the area, and ‘any site selected might easily exclude the burials to be protected’ (News 1927). Later nineteenth and early twentieth century memorialisation of the Indigenous Australian dead entailed their representation as ‘ancient’ 324 P. Turnbull peoples or men and women of tribes ‘of long ago’; but in reality they were frequently people who had died after their ancestral country had begun to be occupied by settlers. Their poetic and visual depiction, and in various instances incorporation by monuments and fencing within settlers’ sense of place, served to contribute to what Johannes Fabian has termed a ‘denial of coevalness’. The ‘native grave’ persuasively fgured in the settler imaginary as confrming that the Australia’s frst peoples were in effect still living at a time deep in humanity’s past, without the psychological resources necessary to negotiate the complexities of modern time (Fabian 1983, pp. 31–35). The dead memorialised by settlers had neither died ‘long ago’, nor as the ‘last of their tribe’. They were survived by relatives who were concerned to ensure they lay undisturbed in the care of their ancestral country. Indigenous families were forced in many cases to leave their country for government or church-run reserves, where the dead received Christian burial in European-style earth graves in local cemeteries, usually set apart from those of local settlers. But traditional funerary rituals and ceremonies were still performed. The dead might now be wrapped in a government issued blanket rather than bark, but they were still buried with possessions they valued—only now these were likely to be of European manufacture. Graves were also often decorated with stones or shells brought by relatives from their ancestral country, and nearby trees might be carved as would have happened had the dead been buried traditionally in country (see Byrne 1998). There were also communities that continued to live on or close to their ancestral country, when men and women could fnd work with local settlers. This appears to have enabled some communities to prevent graves being disturbed in the quest by museums to enlarge their skeletal collections. We fnd, for example, that Kenrick Harold Bennett, who, as we saw in Chapter 8, was casually employed as a collector by the Australian Museum, was managing a sheep farm at Moolah in north western New South Wales. Approached by the Museum to obtain skeletal material from traditional burial places on the property, he confessed to having not just ‘a disinclination to handle these evidences of mortality’ but ‘a dread of dis- pleasing the sable descendants of these to us “nameless dead”’. (Bennett 1879). Even so, Bennett was eventually persuaded to remove remains from the graves, making it clear that he did so ‘for the cause of science’. In long settled districts of Queensland there were also residents who were willing to send the museum skeletal remains they discovered, 11 INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS’ DEFENCE OF THE ANCESTRAL DEAD 325 but were in two minds about exhuming the Indigenous dead. W.T. Birkbeck (1848–1909), for example, was the manager of a timber mill at Tewantin, 120 kilometres north of Brisbane. A keen amateur naturalist, Birkbeck agreed to procure skeletons of the Gubbi Gubbi people, telling William Haswell, the curator of the Queensland Museum at the time, that he would have to pay two men to help him dig up the graves. Birkbeck also told Haswell that they would dig at night, as

you must admit it is not a very nice thing to go digging up dead bodies (in fact body snatching) and I shall have to see that there are no darkies about when it is done else I shall incur their enmity. As I have lived here in perfect amity with them and they have treated me very well during our intercourse, I feel a repugnance to hurt their feelings willingly. Tho at the same time I am aware it is to further the interests of science. (Birkbeck 1880)

The museum’s collecting also at times met with adverse public comment. In 1890, the Brisbane press reported that the museum had taken the bodies of two women and three men from a burial place in the Bunya Mountains.. The bodies of two of the men were found to have been buried without knee caps and pinned down with logs, which was interpreted by Henry Tryon (1856–1943), the donor, as suggesting that the kin of the dead feared these two men ‘rising and running after in pursuit of survivors’. The museum’s trustees welcomed the donation of the fve bodies and appealed for more, declaring

it is hardly possible from an ethnological point of view to exaggerate the importance of gathering up the greatest possible number of remains from different parts of the country, and it is regretful to fnd how little help in this direction must be hoped for from those who have the best opportunities of giving much. (News 1890)

A columnist in The Queenslander was moved, however, to refect on indi- cations that the bodies in question were those of people who had only recently died:

This is science of course, but after all isn’t it body snatching as well? If the bodies were even allowed to lie till the generation that had buried them and mourned over them had themselves passed away, there might be some favour of resurrectionism about the process, but there would not be enough to be absolutely disagreeable. But about the latest additions to the Museum charnel-house, we are told that being ‘freshly procured’ they are 326 P. Turnbull

‘not as yet in a state inviting close examination’, which looks uncommonly like as if these skeletons had been procured in a state of corpse. I doubt if the word ‘ethnological’ is suffcient excuse for the body snatching of black fellows, particularly when they are ‘fresh’. (Allegro 1890)

This critic went on to suggest that the removal of the men’s knee caps and pinning down of their bodies may not have been traditional funerary practices in this instance, but looked ‘extremely like an attempt to circumvent the resurrectionist practices of museum collectors and other body snatchers’, and prompted the question of what right they had ‘to frustrate the efforts of the interring party’. It also seemed to this commentator right to demand the museum to name, and presumably shame, those with ‘best opportunities’ to secure Indigenous remains, in order to prevent their returning to their ‘favourite skeleton hunting-grounds in the colony’. *** My concern in this chapter has been to show that Europeans were well aware of the care that Aboriginal people took to bury the dead and protect their graves from being plundered. We have also seen that during the second half of the nineteenth century, burial places in long-settled districts acquired new meanings in the context of contemporary discourses on human evolution and the racial peculiarities of Australia’s frst peoples. On the one hand Indigenous Aboriginal funerary ceremonies were represented as the macabre practices of a primitive race destined to suffer extinction. On the other, ancestral burial places were sympatheti- cally construed as memorials to the passing of the ‘Aboriginal race’, with the effect of elegiacally affrming the humanity rather than the supposed biological primitivity of Aboriginal people. Yet these two ways of envisaging the ‘native dead’ both discursively served to erase consciousness in settler society that the traditional owners of the land they now occupied were neither all dead nor spiritually alienated from their ancestral country. Today many scientists whose research centres on human remains accept that Indigenous Australians have the right to rebury remains, and to determine what if any research might be conducted on them. However, it has been argued by some that the recognition of this right has been gained by the unjustifable drawing of parallels between the aspirations of today’s biological anthropologists and other researchers, 11 INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIANS’ DEFENCE OF THE ANCESTRAL DEAD 327 who would like to employ various anthropometric or genetically-based techniques in investigating human remains, and those of nineteenth and early twentieth century scientists, for whom the concept of race and the supposed evolutionary primitivity of Indigenous Australians were biological realities. In making this criticism, scientists and intellectuals opposed to repatriation have not denied that grave-robbing was commonplace in the nineteenth century, nor that there were occasions when the remains of victims of frontier violence were acquired for scientifc collections. But they have done so maintaining that ethics are invariably situational, and that by focusing on the outrages that occurred in the colonial era, Indigenous activists and their supporters have been guilty of projecting their ethical concerns onto the past, ignoring the true complexities of the evolution of scientifc research on Indigenous and other human remains. They warn that privileging the religious and cultural beliefs of Australian and other indigenous communities over the interests of science has entailed a dangerous descent into cultural relativism, denying all humankind the possibility of discovering new knowledge that may contribute to our understanding of our evolution and prehistory, and which perhaps will lead to better understanding of some health issues amongst Indigenous Australians. In next and fnal chapter of this study I refect on whether the history of the collecting and scientifc use of the Indigenous dead the return of remains to Indigenous Australian communities for reburial amounts to what one recent critic has called as a crisis of cultural authority, entailing a surrender of universal humanist values (Jenkins 2011). And as I suggest in this concluding chapter, investigating the history of the collection and scientifc use of Indigenous Australian remains brings to light aspects of both Indigenous and European traditions concerning treatment of the dead, which serve to remind us of the existence and continuing salience of continuities of moral sensibilities and law in respect of our mortality that challenge the notion that the past should have little or no weight in our deciding the fate of Indigenous remains still held in western scientifc collections. CHAPTER 12

Repatriation and Its Critics

The repatriation of ancestral remains from scientifc collections has had its critics ever since Indigenous claimant communities began securing their return for burial in the mid-1970s. This chapter engages with the reasoning of scientists and social commentators who oppose repatriation. It particularly considers the tendency of critics of repatriation, when arguing for the continued scientifc preservation of remains, to contend that the issue of how these were collected has little or no relevance to the question of whether they should be returned for reburial. In recent years biological anthropologist Colin Pardoe has lamented that most historians who have written about the collection and scientifc investigation of Indigenous Australian remains have failed to see that while ‘some philosophers argue that there is a realm of ethics, based on reason, which transcends time and place, most of us would recognise that ethical behaviour is invariably situational and changes as we travel through time and space’ (2013, p. 734). The cultural sociologist and critic of repatriation, Tiffany Jenkins, has similarly observed that ‘The frst step in understanding the past is to appreciate that things have not always been the same; that many of the actions that appear unjust, even monstrous, to the present-day sensibility were accepted norms at the time’ (2016, p. 287). This sense of the foreign nature of the past, and thus its irrelevance to the question of whether the remains of Indigenous dead should be repatriated or kept for further scientifc research, commonly informs the stance taken by scientists with ongoing

© The Author(s) 2017 329 P. Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia, Palgrave Studies in Pacifc History, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51874-9_12 330 P. Turnbull research interests in remains who oppose their reburial. Chris Stringer, for example, a leading researcher of human origins at London’s Museum of Natural History, has argued that he is not opposed to the repatriation of known individuals, but defends the continued possession of the bones of those whose identity is now unknown. In response to questioning in 2003 by an Australian journalist whether the museum would return the remains of two unknown men who were very likely victims of a massacre that occurred around 1900 on the Victoria River in the Northern Territory, burial cave, Stringer observed,

I did not collect that material, and I would say that the research we are doing now puts quite a different perspective on human evolution. It’s not a racist agenda in any sense of the word. One would not condone now the way that material was collected. They were stolen or permission was not granted, or people visited the cave and no one was there so they took the material out of the cave and brought it back. Then the material got here and it then becomes part of a large natural history collection that people from all around the world come to study. So, we have a responsibility to see that collection is available for that kind of study and the worry is that through repatriation a whole continent might eventually disappear from any future study of human evolution. (News 2003)

And yet, when we compare our norms in respect of death and burial and those prevailing in European societies during the long nineteenth century, we can see not simply differences, but also clear continuities in terms of moral sensibility and ethical conduct. Consider, for example, one of the earliest records of Europeans’ encountering the Indigenous dead: the investigation of Tasmanian funerary practices by François Péron (1775–1810), naturalist and surgeon on the Baudin expedition of 1802–1803. In common with other voyaging savants of his time, Péron regarded care for the dead as a natural sentiment giving rise to one of humanity’s earliest expressions of its divinely bestowed capacity for civilisation. He was to recall in his Voyage de découvertes aux Terres Australes (1807) joining a survey party that went ashore at Maria Island, off Tasmania’s east coast. Here the voyagers encountered the Tyreddeme band of the Oyster Bay people, who regularly visited the bays on either side of the island’s central isthmus to gather shellfsh and kelp. While most of the party mapped 12 REPATRIATION AND ITS CRITICS 331 the island and surrounding waters, Péron set off ‘towards the north coast of the bay, and thus got into the interior of the country’ (1807, 264). Finding the vegetation too thick to make further headway, he was about to retrace his steps when he noticed a path that appeared much used, which he took, fnding himself on the top of a low hill where ‘divers kinds of beautiful grasses made a pleasant verdant car- pet’ with shrubs and trees growing in small thickets. From the hill the isthmus could be seen, and cloud-shrouded mountains on the mainland. Surveying the beauties of the scene with ‘a sort of pleasing inquie- tude’, Péron noticed under the shade of a large casuarina tree a ‘monument, whose construction excited a considerable degree of curiosity’ (1807, p. 265). Intrigued, he pulled off several large pieces of bark to fnd that the top half of the structure was hollow, while in the bottom lay a large fattened cone comprising layers of dried grass held in place by sticks driven into the earth and a large granite stone. ‘So many precautions’, Péron later recalled, ‘occasioned me to entertain hopes that I should make some interesting discovery, and I was not deceived’. Inside the cone he found ashes, and was shocked to pull out a partly burnt jaw bone. Momentarily Péron feared he had found evidence of cannibalism,

but on refecting a few moments on all I had observed in the construction of this monument, I soon began to experience sensations of a different kind: this verdure, these fowers, these protecting trees, this thick bed of green herbage, which so carefully had covered these ashes—all united to convince me that I had discovered a place of burial. (Péron 1807, p. 266)

Soon afterwards he discovered a second burial site, in what struck him as equally romantic surrounds. He did not know that controlled use of fre by the Tyreddeme to ensure plentiful game was largely responsible for creating what he saw as gardens in a wild and untrammelled landscape. It seemed to him that ‘nature had inspired sentiments of devotion in the savage mind’, with the result that burial sites had been placed close to fresh water and food resources so that the living, ‘impelled by their daily wants’, would ‘experience in a greater degree the sentiments of gratitude and attachment’ to the memory of the deceased’ (Péron 1807, p. 269). 332 P. Turnbull

I have spoken about Péron at some length here because his account is one of the earliest of many recorded by Europeans who encountered Indigenous funerary practices which show that they recognised in them a shared humanity in caring for the dead. Of course, like many collectors discussed in the course of this book, Péron’s humanitarianism differed from ours in obvious and in subtle ways. He implicitly presumed himself to be intellectually and morally superior to the Tyreddeme, and was quick to suspect them of cannibalism. But even so he was conscious of risking moral censure for, as the colonial surveyor John Oxley put it, ‘either wantonly disturbing the remains of the dead, or needlessly violating the religious rights of a harmless people’ (1820, p. 138). Moreover, in common with many subsequent collectors, Péron’s humanitarian sensibilities did not lead him to refrain from taking bones from burial sites. Like numerous other collectors who have been discussed in this book, he did not want to have it known that his humanity did not go so far as to stop him carrying away from the graves he examined ‘several human bones and even some pieces of fesh that the fre had not consumed’ (Baudin 1974, p. 341). In speaking over the years with scientists and museum professionals who regard Australian remains as irreplaceable scientifc material that they believe themselves ethically bound to preserve, I have found most to be sympathetic to Indigenous Australians’ believing that they have a profound spiritual obligation to ensure the reburial of remains within ancestral country. However, a number of these professionals have taken the view that repatriation has been a purely political campaign, exploiting the existence of remains in medico-scientifc collections to make progress on other issues, such as securing land rights by embarrassing the Australian Government among middle-class liberals in western Europe and North America—‘the BBC rent-a-crowd’, as Matthew Kaufman, then anatomy professor at Edinburgh University described growing British support for the repatriation of remains when we spoke in the aftermath of Edinburgh returning its Australian holdings collection in 1991. On my asking those critics who see repatriation as purely political why they do so, most have responded that campaigning for the return of remains has been orchestrated by urban-based activists of part-Aboriginal descent associated with radical organisations, notably the Brisbane-based 12 REPATRIATION AND ITS CRITICS 333

Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Action (FAIRA) and the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC). They see these men and women as having lost their traditional culture, and to have found meaning and purpose in contemporary African and Native American radicalism. The proof of this, as they see it, is that Indigenous Australians supposedly showed no concern about the existence of remains in scientifc collections until urban- based activists began campaigning on their behalf. As Tiffany Jenkins has recently claimed,

The campaign over human remains in Australia and America was initially an issue that concerned only a minority of Indigenous people. When repatriation was debated in anthropology, archaeology and museums in the mid-1980s, most tribes showed minimal interest in becoming involved. It was important for vocal Indigenous activists and radical archaeologists, but more general interest among tribal people was limited, as is indicated in the initial take-up of offers from institutions for repatriation. (2016, p. 312)

Jenkins argues that this is especially true of the Australian context, placing great weight on incidents such as Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum acting on requests by FAIRA and the TAC in the mid-1980s to return fve skulls and a soft tissue specimen by giving them to the Australian High Commission for return to the appropriate communities. One skull, known to have been taken from the Tiwi Islands, was apparently sent to the Tiwi Lands Council, but without any prior warning or information that might help identify the family or clan of this ancestor. The Council angrily responded that it was ‘a cultural offence to have body remains foisted upon a generation that had no knowledge of their origins and was being invited to invent some in order to dispose of the remains’ (Jenkins 2016 p. 313; England Parliament House of Commons 2000). It would be mistaken, however, to conclude from this distressing occurrence that repatriation was the concern of a minority of Indigenous activists prior to the mid-1980s. Rather, as Schuyler Jones, the Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the time, explained, the museum swiftly decided to repatriate the skull with the support of Oxford University’s council, because most of its staff as social anthropologists were aware of the sensitivity of keeping it; and as the skull was unadorned by any form of artistry it could easily be deaccessioned as an object irrelevant to the museum’s purposes as a museum of ethnography and prehistory 334 P. Turnbull

(it had actually transferred most other unadorned human remains to the university’s anatomy department in the late 1940s). Schuyler Jones and his colleagues raised the matter of the Tiwi skull to illustrate the ‘potential complexities of repatriation’, not to question whether it should have been repatriated or to suggest that the Tiwi Islanders had not wanted it (England Parliament House of Commons 2000): rather, they sought to draw attention to two problems that had caused diffculties for claimant communities and museums during the 1980s and 1990s. One problem arose out of FAIRA’s activism. There was widespread recognition and endorsement by Indigenous communities of Bob Weatherall, FAIRA’s coordinator, and Michael Mansell, the chair of TAC, visiting museums and medical schools to forcefully demand the return of remains, and use media coverage of their visits to draw public attention to the anguish of communities that these relics lay in museums and other medico-scientifc institutions. As Yorta Yorta Elder Henry Atkinson observed,

when … remains are released from their obscene holding areas before they commence the long journey home, where they can be joined by the waiting Indigenous community before—after due traditional customs— they are returned to the earth of their beginning. This is the way Bob Weatherall commenced his days in repatriation, caring for all we hold in relation to our spiritual beings, and this standard must continue (Turnbull and Pickering 2010, p. 19)

However, there were communities that regarded it as culturally inappropriate for FAIRA and TAC to have any role beyond assisting their Elders and representative organisations to meet the personnel of institutions and ask for the return of remains to which they were connected by familial or cultural ties. Others saw FAIRA as having no right to be involved in their affairs in any way. In 1992, for example, I agreed to be a consultant researcher for FAIRA to identify the origins of remains in several European collections, only to be told by representatives of the Koomburmerri people of Queensland’s Gold Coast region that FAIRA had no right to be involved in their affairs, and that they had community members with the skills to locate and research the provenance of remains and sacred artefacts in scientifc collections. The community as a whole would then decide their fate. 12 REPATRIATION AND ITS CRITICS 335

It was a similar story when, in 1985, FAIRA approached the Museum of Victoria, requesting the repatriation of material from Queensland and the Northern Territory. The museum was ready to repatriate the Queensland material to the appropriate communities with FAIRA’s assistance, believing that it represented the wishes of Indigenous communities in that state. As to the Territory material, which had been collected in the 1930s by anthropologist Donald Thomson (1901–1970), the museum sought advice on the material’s scientifc signifcance from anthropologist Nicolas Peterson and geneticist Neville White. Peterson and White held that the museum should be guided by the Elders of the Yolngu people of northeast Arnhem Land, whose ancestral remains they were. Having done many years of feldwork with Yolngu clans, Peterson discussed their possible repatriation with several senior men, who told him that Thomson, who spent much of his career working with the people of Arnhem Land, had very likely been given the remains in an effort to relinquish the responsibility of carrying and fnally disposing of them. Yolngu of that time believed that death was never natural but the work of a malevolent agent, and there may have been a desire to relieve social tension by removing the remains from the care of kin—especially if they were the remains of individuals killed in disputes. Should they now be returned, this could cause considerable confict. Some might take to task those whose ancestors had given Donald Thomson the items; more importantly (and likely), old enmities might be aroused as people recalled the reasons for the deaths. Elders of the relevant Yolngu clans further discussed the matter, eventually informing the museum that their grandparents had held Thomson in high regard and there would have been very good reasons why they had given him the remains. They frmly requested that they stay in the care of the museum, declaring that this was ‘Yolngu business’ in which the involvement of FAIRA or anyone else would not be tolerated. As for the TAC, it has actively supported other Indigenous Australian communities in their efforts to secure the return of ancestral remains since the mid-1970s, but it has not sought to become involved in repatriation negotiations and the returns of remains other than of those of Tasmanian ancestry. The TAC has taken the view that every aspect of the repatriation of Tasmanian remains, from research on their provenance to their reburial, must be undertaken by the Indigenous Tasmanians. 336 P. Turnbull

The second problem to which Schuyler Jones sought to draw attention was the distress almost certain to be caused by the unexpected arrival of remains in communities without little or no information about the circumstances in which they had been collected, in many instances well over a century ago. Given the likely circumstances in which Yolngu Elders had given Donald Thomson remains, one can understand the Tiwi and other peoples fearing that remains returned from scientifc collections might have been given to feld collectors to protect the living from harm, and that their return could cause ill-harmony, sickness and perhaps even death. In 1996 I was approached by Peter Pryor, an Elder of the Birri Gubba nation, to arrange for James Cook University to look after remains and a grinding stone that had been taken from a grave and recently returned to the community with only vague information as to how they had been collected. The Birri Gubba nation at that time had no keeping place for them, and Peter Pryor as a senior law man had had no option but to keep them in his home. Having worked with Uncle Peter on his writing his autobiography (Pryor 1993), he approached me after over the previous fortnight two young people had committed suicide. In the wake of the tragedy, Uncle Peter felt that he had to act to assure the old person whose remains these were that they were coming closer to being returned to the care of the land which had given them life. I did not feel that I could ask him whether he believed the deaths were in any way connected to the return of the remains, but agreed to have the remains in my university offce for several days before they could be moved to a specially prepared storeroom on campus. There they stayed until they could be buried with many other old people in ancestral country, near Cape Upstart on the Far North Queensland coast. By the early 2000s, considerable progress had been made by Australian based researchers and museum professionals to ensure communities were not distressed by remains being returned with little or no information as to their provenance. Under the leadership of Des Griffn, curator of the Australian Museum from 1976 to 1998, the Australian museum community had by 1993 adopted a new policy recognising the primary interest of Indigenous Australians in respect of their cultural property (CAMA 1993; Griffn 1996). In large part due to the work of Phil Gordon, the manager of the Australian Museum’s Indigenous cultural collections, the museum achieved numerous successful repatriations 12 REPATRIATION AND ITS CRITICS 337 using procedures that were adopted by other museums and medical schools in Australia and Europe. Gordon’s approach has been to ensure that communities were provided with all that the museum could establish about the provenance of remains and sacred artefacts. It was recognised that it might take years for a community to decide the fate of items by consensual processes, during which time the items in question would be kept by the museum under whatever conditions the community specifed (see Pickering and Gordon 2011). It also helped greatly that by the turn of this century that the Australian government had begun directly assisting communities to secure the return of remains. Support for repatriation within the Australian and state governments had grown during the 1980s, and the following decade saw important developments, such as the Australian Cultural Ministers Council commissioning a strategic plan for the return of remains, which aimed to co-ordinate the efforts of all levels of government and museums. The plan, implemented in 1998, provided a framework enabling communities to fnd out whether ancestral remains were held by Australian museums. From the early 1990s until 2005 the tasks of locating remains in overseas museums and assisting claimant communities to secure their return were given to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), which had been created in 1990 by the Australian government to give Indigenous Australians formal involvement in government processes affecting their lives. ATSIC’s handling of repatriation during the 1990s was neither well-funded nor well managed, but it had the support of Indigenous Australians because it gave them substantial control of decisions about repatriation. Indeed, a number of community leaders take the view that, since the disbanding of ATSIC, Indigenous people have had diminished involvement in repatriation processes while non-indigenous bureaucrats have undertaken roles that are culturally inappropriate. By 2000 there was overwhelming support within the Australian community at large for the repatriation of remains, in no small part due to the work of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation over the previous decade. In 1993 the council recognised repatriation as essential to reconciliation with Australia’s colonial past (CAR 1993). The profound importance of the return of their old people for Indigenous communities was also recognised by John Howard, the Prime Minister at the time and a man with relatively conservative views on many issues affecting Indigenous Australians. Howard initiated 338 P. Turnbull negotiations which in mid-2000 resulted in the British and Australian governments issuing a joint statement endorsing ‘the repatriation of Indigenous human remains wherever possible (and appropriate) from both public and private collections’ (Howard 2000). And in doing so, he did more in support of repatriation than any previous federal or state politician. My view is that he understood the anguish the presence of the dead in overseas museums caused Indigenous Australians, knowing frst-hand the grief of the many Australian many families at the death and burial of loved ones in overseas theatres of war. Whatever Howard’s motivation, within several months the Australian Cultural Ministers Council committed funding to assist Australian museums and communities in the repatriation of ancestral remains and secret sacred objects, and ATSIC received a much-needed increase in funds to assist communities to secure the return of remains from British and other European museums in a more strategic and effective fashion. A special Repatriation Unit in the National Museum of Australia was jointly created by ATSIC and the Cultural Ministers Council, to assist in the return of remains from Australian and overseas collections (Pickering and Gordon 2011). To critics of repatriation, these and other related developments might seem to be responses to campaigning born of contemporary Indigenous radicalism. Certainly, the TAC’s involvement in repatriation, for example, can be traced back to the centre’s foundation in the early 1970s. One of its frst acts was to campaign for the reburial of the skeleton of Truganini (c. 1812–1876). Truganini, a woman of the Nuenonne tribe, endured being known during her last years as the last surviving ‘full blooded’ Tasmanian Aboriginal. Today, we know how inaccurate and detrimental this portrayal of Truganini in scientifc and popular discourse was for those of her own and other Tasmanian tribes who survived violent colonial dispossession: morphological and physiological variations within more or less endogamous populations are as wide as those between populations who have rarely interbred (Lowentin 1972). However when Truganini died in in 1876, the strength of racialised perceptions of indigeneity in the settler and metropolitan culture was such that her death was seen as closing a sorrowful chapter in Tasmania’s history, wherein over some seventy years violent dispossession and disease had supposedly driven the island’s tribes to extinction (Brantlinger 2003, pp. 128–129). The TAC’s seeking Truganini’s reburial was by no means the frst attempt to right this injustice. There had been moral doubts about the exhibition of her skeleton in the Tasmanian Museum since it was frst displayed in 1905 (News 1905). By 1947 it had been removed from 12 REPATRIATION AND ITS CRITICS 339 public view; and in the mid-1950s a campaign to have her bones buried was led by Henry Brune Atkinson (1874–1960), a retired Anglican clergyman and social activist. The campaign gained momentum as Atkinson explained that his father, the Anglican minister who had conducted Truganini’s burial service, knew Truganini had died terrifed that her body would be dissected and her skeleton kept in a museum. He had done his best to ensure that her body had been buried untouched, but had failed to prevent her remains being exhumed by leading members of Tasmania’s Royal Society. Many Tasmanians of the post-war era found it hard to accept that the scientifc value of Truganini’s remains outweighed the woman’s dying wishes, and that the island’s government and scientifc community of the time had conspired in the charade of giving her Christian burial. However, most were satisfed when the Tasmanian government proposed building within the museum ‘a large Memorial Room to the Tasmania Race … in association with a large store room’, within which Truganini’s bones and those of other ‘the skeletal remains of the race’ held by the museum would be ‘kept rever- ently and only to be accessible to bona fde scientists’ (News 1954). As to what Indigenous Tasmanians thought of the compromise, we have only oral testimony history passed down over several generations that it did little or nothing to diminish their distress and anger at Truganini’s exhumation and the display of her skeleton. However, it is telling that the concerted reassertion of Tasmanian indigeneity that began to infuence island and Australian national politics from the late 1960s found expression in a determined and ultimately successful campaign to have Truganini buried in accordance with the ancestral traditions of her people. Similarly, we have oral testimony passed down through successive generations which stands at odds with claims that prior to the 1970s Indigenous Australians did not want ancestral remains reburied. Yorta Yorta Elder Henry Atkinson recalled that in the 1950s

I remember being with my father in the bush as a young man. He would point out places of interest where there were many sacred and spiritual sites to further my knowledge. He was also show me many burial sites and tell me stories about how these sacred resting places of our ancestors were robbed and we could not do a thing about it. There was no protection as we were still classed as nothing more than decoration of this country and on the same level as the animals. I also remember being with my mother 340 P. Turnbull

on one of those rare visits to the city for a country boy. We went to the museum and one has to be in my shoes to appreciate the pain and tears on my mother’s face when confronted with displays of her own people. There, for all to stare at, were her ancestors and artefacts with deep spiritual meaning on display. (2010, p. 18)

Poet and activist Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1993), when speaking to students at James Cook University in the mid-1970s, similarly recalled that as a young woman in the 1940s she had learnt that her Noonuccal people and other traditional owners of the Brisbane region would not visit the Queensland Museum, calling it the death house. Anthropologists Ronald (1916–1990) and Catherine Berndt (1918– 1994) undertook feldwork with the Ngarrinndjeri people of South Australia’s Lower Murray River Region in 1943 and 1945. The Berndts found that local Indigenous people had apparently helped archaeologists to excavate burial mounds and campsites, and that Albert Karloan (1864–1943), Pinkie Mack (1858–1954) and other Ngarrinndjeri Elders were ‘outspoken’ in condemning the opening of graves (Berndt et al. 1993, p. 16). Given the Berndts’ infuence in Australian anthropology and museum circles, it is hard to imagine that the distress of Ngarrinndjeri Elders was not widely known yet ignored. There is also oral testimony relating to the theft of remains from burial places in the Kimberley Region of Western Australia, dating as far back as 1910. In that year, the Swedish zoologist and ethnographer Eric Mjöberg (1882–1938) took skeletons from burial platforms of the Nyikina people, many of whom at this time lived traditionally while some men and women worked on cattle stations. A white stockman who accompanied him on one collecting trip ‘worried time after time about how risky it would be if the Negroes were to discover the contents of the sacks’, but Mjöberg appears to have expected discovery. Indeed, his taking remains was soon known and he was warned that ‘fatal revenge could one day be the punishment’ if he continued to do so (Mjöberg 2012, pp. 178–179). Yet he continued collecting, which left me curious to know why Nyikina men did not stop him from committing what Mjöberg himself boasted was a ‘terrible crime’. Speaking of the affair with Neil Carter, a Gooniyandi and Kidji man, who for over a decade now has served as the Repatriation Offcer of the Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Culture Centre. Neil explained that Mjöberg had been discovered taking remains shortly after two white 12 REPATRIATION AND ITS CRITICS 341 station hands had been speared for raping a young Nyikina woman, and a mounted police patrol which had been sent to hunt down the men had indiscriminately killed Nyikina people they encountered in the bush. So, of course, there was justifable fear that anyone who tried to prevent Mjöberg from collecting remains might be forced to defend themselves, which would likely lead to police killing more innocent people. They endured watching him take the remains, which, as he later boasted, he smuggled out of Australia as his plundering had occurred after the federal government had banned the exportation of ‘anthropological objects’ without a permit (Mjöberg 2012, pp. 310–311). Beside oral testimony we have at least one recorded instance of an Indigenous community seeking the return of remains from a museum in the late nineteenth century. In the archives of the Australian Museum there is a letter sent in late 1892 to its curator, Edward Ramsay, by Henry McCooey (n.d.), a keen amateur naturalist and collector of ‘Aboriginal curios’ who worked as a surveyor in the southern highlands of New South Wales. McCooey wrote warning Ramsay that

The Aborigines of Burragong are terribly annoyed about the remains of that black fellow which Mr. Etheridge dug up and took to Sydney some few weeks ago. They blame me for doing it; but I can prove I was in Goulburn at the time. They complain bitterly about the outrage and they undoubtedly regard it as such—and have threatened to do personal violence to whoever committed it. In matters of this kind even the most sensible or ‘tame’ aborigines are singularly morose, superstitious, and treacherous—more so, in fact, than Europeans. They have gone to Picton to see the Police Magistrate. (McCooey 1892)

Relevant government records that might disclose what action, if any, the police magistrate at Picton took, have not survived. However, the Gundungurra people did not secure the return of the remains. They stayed in the museum’s possession until they were returned to the community for reburial in 1992. For his part, McCooey was left in no doubt that plundering Indigenous burial places was illegal. Ramsay passed the letter in which he told of what had happened at Burragong on to Robert Etheridge, the museum’s assistant curator. Etheridge returned the letter with the anno- tation, ‘Seen—Mr. McCooey appears to be indignant over a very small matter. I am quite prepared to return to the District & investigate several 342 P. Turnbull other interesting occurrences known to be there’ (McCooey 1892). Yet other documents suggest that thereafter Etheridge took care that his excavation of graves was known only to his scientifc peers. When Henry McCooey contacted him in July 1896 to say that he had discovered graves which he believed could safely be exhumed, Etheridge cautiously replied, ‘If this is an indictable offence, as stated in a previous letter from you, I am afraid I cannot move in the matter’ (McCooey 1896). And yet he had not stopped bone hunting, and even went as far as to invoke the law to ensure that remains were left undisturbed until such time that they could be collected for the museum. In April of 1910, one of the museum’s trustees, T.W Edgeworth David (1858–1934), professor of geology at Sydney University passed on to Etheridge a letter that he had received from two young girls in the Molong district of central western New South Wales. They had discovered a mound grave while out rid- ing, and were convinced it was the resting place of a ‘king or great chief’ of the Wiradjuri people who would have been buried with his weaponry and other artefacts. The girls asked David whether ‘the government would pay someone to dig them up and if so, would they let us have just one thing for our collection’. Etheridge wrote on the letter,

It will be as well if Prof. David inform his lady correspondents that ‘disinterring a dead body’ is a misdemeanour at Common Law punishable by a fne or imprisonment, or both. It matters not whether it be an old or recent burial. The clause applies to both & I am personally acquainted with a case in which an individual was fned for disinterring aboriginal remains. (Etheridge 1910)

While surviving records do not confrm that Etheridge subsequently excavated this grave, it seems likely that the remains of Old People from the site were among those returned to the Wiradjuri people by the Australian Museum in the early 1990s. Robert Etheridge’s correspondence with McCooey and David raises another matter over which critics of repatriation have been at odds with Indigenous people seeking the reburial of their ancestors, and with historians who have written about scientifc collecting of Indigenous Australian remains during the long nineteenth century. This is describing the collecting of remains as theft (Fforde 2004; MacDonald 2005; Pickering 2006; Turnbull 2007a). On refection, one is obliged to concede that calling the collecting of remains theft is, in a strict sense, 12 REPATRIATION AND ITS CRITICS 343 historically inaccurate. There could have been no theft of remains because the law at the time collecting occurred did not recognise property in a dead body (Vine 2007). Nevertheless, the means by which Indigenous Australians were collected during the long nineteenth century was, more often than not, illegal. From 1788 onwards Indigenous Australians were held to be subjects of the British Crown with the same common law rights as colonists. As shown in the previous chapter, settlers and colonial administrators were well aware from the early years of settlement of the care that Indigenous Australians took in burying their dead, and in protecting their burial places from disturbance. We have seen that, in the context of the colonisation of South Australia, the British government formally recognised the rights of the colony’s traditional owners to retain possession and use of land to bury their dead (Colonial Secretary 1837). As at least one late nineteenth century museum curator, Robert Etheridge, was clearly aware, removing remains from a burial place—whether from a Church, municipal cemetery or land that had been in the possession of Indigenous people and used as a customary and ft place for burial— was a misdemeanour in Common Law. Acquiring remains by exhuming graves in land which had been gazetted by local white authorities for funerary purposes, as occurred on a number of occasions documented in this book, was also an offence under legislation governing the management of cemeteries (Vine 1998). The Gundungurra people may have failed in 1892 to secure their dead for reburial, but not so the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) when in 2006 it exercised the same rights to gain the status of execu- tors of the persons to whom remains kept by London’s Natural History Museum belonged by a ruling of the Tasmanian Supreme Court (Turnbull 2007b). In the legal proceedings that followed it soon became clear to the TAC and the Museum that legal costs would be enormous if the matter was deemed to require full judgment by Britain’s High Court. Also, there was the risk that the Court would rule that the Museum was legally able to retain the remains for medical or scientifc purposes against the wishes of any claimants. For while the Tasmanian Supreme Court rec- ognized the TACs right to gain possession of the remains for lawful and decent burial, neither in Common Law nor any metropolitan or colonial legal statute was there recognition of property in a dead body. So strictly speaking, one could not claim that colonial era museums that acquired 344 P. Turnbull

Indigenous Australian remains were implicated in theft as there was no property to constitute a theft. But more importantly, the Natural History Museum could argue that the remains in their possession were no longer bodily remains, but were now artefacts in which they had vested property rights through the intellectual labour and skill of preparing them as scientifc specimens. This was by no means the frst time that the legality of possessing Indigenous remains was argued to exist on the basis that they were scientifc specimens, not body parts. As early as 1861, the distinction was the nub of a civil case heard before South Australia’s Supreme Court, in which one Thomas Craig (n.d.) brought an action to recover the body of a Meintangk man that he had taken from a burial place in a limestone cave a hundred kilometres to the north of Mount Gambier. The body, which had been exposed to water containing silicates that had ‘petrifed’ its outer parts, had been confscated by the police on the order of a local Justice of the Peace (News 1861). Craig’s counsel argued that while no property existed in the body, the gradual impregnation of the corpse with silicates had transformed it into a ‘natural curio’ which Craig was as entitled to possess and show for scientifc instruction as the British Museum and Royal College of Surgeons did Egyptian mummies and other bodies subjected to postmortem manipulation. Craig partly made a living by privately exhibiting unusual natural history specimens. One of his most successful shows featured stuffed full- grown salt water crocodiles he had shot on the Fitzroy River in central Queensland. His counsel argued before the court that he stood to lose £500 by not being able to show this ‘petrifed black fellow’, which he would refuse to sell even if he were offered £1000. Under examination by the Crown Solicitor, Craig claimed that ‘it was not impossible that it might be worth £20,000’ (News 1861). The Justice of the Peace who had instructed local police to confscate the body said nothing of the distress that Craig’s taking it would have caused the Meintangk people. Rather, he and other local white residents wanted the body returned to the cave because it was ‘a valuable curiosity to the neighbourhood’, and did not seek to achieve this on the basis of giving the body lawful and decent burial, but argued that under South Australia’s Crown Lands Act (No 9 of 17 Vic, 1853), taking the remains was an unau- thorised removal of stone or similar material from crown land (News 1861). The case was heard before a jury, which was instructed by the presid- ing judge that the common law held that there could be no property in 12 REPATRIATION AND ITS CRITICS 345 a body, and that Craig was entitled to possess it just as any person could keep a skeleton they had set up as an anatomical specimen. However, the jury rejected Craig’s claiming damages of £500, convinced that he was more interested in making a proft out of the body than educating the public. They awarded him damages of one farthing. The judge declined to certify costs, leaving Craig to pay his legal expenses. Still, Craig regained possession of the body, which he exhibited in Sydney before taking it to Britain. In May 1862, the Lancet and various British newspapers announced that ‘Among the novelties announced to be exhibited in London this season is a petrifed “aborigine”. This extraordinary specimen of petrifcation was discovered by Mr. J, Craig [sic] in a stalactite cave in South Australia’ (News 1862). As to the subsequent fate of these remains, they were put up for auction in London in March 1866 by the prominent London dealer in natural history specimens, J.C. Stevens (News 1866). It was later said that they had been donated to the British Museum after being sold for £22 (News 1917; 1931); however, a search during the early 1930s found no record of the museum ever having received them (Highton 1931). Subsequent judgements in respect of whether proprietorial rights existed in human remains acquired as scientifc specimens did not exactly favour claimant communities. Indeed, the most infuential relevant case was in the Australian jurisdiction. In Doodeward v. Spence (1908), the High Court of Australia was asked to rule on whether a deformed (non- Indigenous) foetus preserved in formaldehyde which had been acquired and displayed by a showman was his property. Chief Justice Samuel Griffth (1845–1920) was of the opinion that

It is idle to contend in these days that the possession of a mummy, or a prepared skeleton, or of a skull, or other parts of a human body, is necessarily unlawful; if it is, the many valuable collections of anatomical and pathological specimens or preparations formed and maintained by scientifc bodies, were formed and are maintained in violation of the law. (CLR 1909)

Justice Edmund Barton (1849–1920) upheld the conventional interpretation of the common law: that no-one had a right to possess a dead body, or what had once been part of a dead body, and that the only right course of action was to give the remains a decent burial. As he saw it, the question was whether a foetus was ever a body. The third opinion, 346 P. Turnbull by Justice Henry Higgins (1851–1929), was that the only lawful pos- sessor of a dead body was the earth, and recognising proprietorial rights in a corpse would create a situation in which there would be nothing ‘to hinder anyone from snatching the corpse of some eminent man, such as Napoleon, and keeping it in a bottle, or using it for degrading purposes’. However, Higgins acknowledged that bodies were being bought and sold, and illegally obtained from dissection rooms, and conceded ‘that sundry contraventions of the strict law as to dead bodies are winked at in the interests of medical science, and also for the practical reasons that no one is interested in putting the law in motion.’ (CLR 1909). So the court did not unequivocally decide whether or not there was property in bodily remains that had been prepared by art or skill as a medical or scientifc specimen; but its reasoning was to be infuential in subsequent cases that had different outcomes. In 1999, Doodeward’s case was the basis of the Queen’s Bench ruling that preserved body parts taken from the Royal College of Surgeons were the property of the college (see Vine 2007). Yet it also fgured in the provision to the Museum of Victoria of legal advice favouring repatriation in 1985. In the previous year, Jim Berg, a Gunditjmara man whose work with Victoria’s Aboriginal Legal Service led to his appointment as an inspector under the state’s 1972 Archaeological and Aboriginal Relics Preservation Act, secured injunc- tions against the University of Melbourne with the aim of having skeletal remains in its possession entrusted to the museum as a frst step in securing their reburial. The advice the museum received was that Justice Higgin’s opinion in Doodeward was likely to sway a court in favour of reburial in the case of Indigenous remains, while the Relics Preservation Act appeared to give the Victorian state government the power to bury them (Museum of Victoria 1985). Recently, biological anthropologists Peter McAllister and Michael Westaway have observed that ‘at least some collection from traditional burial contexts in colonial Australia was illegal’ (McAllister et al. 2015, p. 130); but they argue that the law of the time allowed collectors ‘to obtain the remains of individuals who died without relatives, or whose relatives raised no objections’; and in response to my having drawn attention to museums having acquired the bones of men and women who were killed by police or armed settlers in frontier regions (Turnbull 2015), they argue that 12 REPATRIATION AND ITS CRITICS 347

however deplorable the violence that led to the deaths of Queensland Native Police victims … collection of unburied remains would have been clearly within the law and ethical by the standards of the day—if it ever actually took place. (McAllister et al. 2015, p. 130)

McAllister and Westaway would have us believe that medically-trained collectors such as Walter Roth, who, as mentioned in Chapter 9, acquired skulls through postmortem examinations of Native Police troopers and other Indigenous patients whom had he treated, was able to do so legally because they were ‘people who had quite possibly died a long way from their own country and people’. The issue of whether the remains of victims of frontier violence were acquired by colonial museums is perhaps best decided by assessing the evidence presented in previous chapters of this book. The point to make here is that it is wrong to think that feld collectors in colonial northern Australia could lawfully take possession of unburied remains they encountered because neither the deceased nor their relatives objected. The law required the discoverer of the remains to report the fnd to police or a local magistrate or Justice of the Peace. As Jonathan Richards has shown, many of our insights into the murderous behaviour of the Native Police in Queensland have been gained from records of inquests on Indigenous people found dead in localities where the force was operating (Richards 2008). But this said, it was the case scientists and museum personnel were of the same mind as Justice Griffth in the Doodeward case: strict interpretation of the law of death and burial would greatly retard the advancement of science. Lawful acquisition of remains on the basis that neither the deceased nor their relatives objected was the preserve of licensed teachers of anatomy. In relation to Roth’s possibly acquiring skulls during postmortem examinations of Indigenous men and women, Queensland did not have its own legislation regulating the teaching of anatomy until 1925, so the British 1832 Anatomy Act applied. This, like subsequent legislation in Australian colonial jurisdic- tions, required that bodies used for teaching be given decent burial after a specifed period of time; the intent of the law, moreover, was that all remains of the body in question were to be buried. To do otherwise was illegal, even though, as the justices of Australia’s High Court acknowledged, the law was ‘winked at’ when it came to taking and preparing bodily structures as specimens for teaching and research. However, the key point in respect of Roth is that he was never a licensed teacher of anatomy. 348 P. Turnbull

Colonial scientists obtained remains for racial collections were conscious that they risked being accused of breaking the law. Sydney University anatomist J.T.Wilson (1861–1945), for example, did not take a great interest in anthropology, but used his network of past students to secure racially interesting bones and other bodily structures. He himself was the subject of investigation by the University Senate after it became known that he had removed the skeleton from the body of a Chinese man who had died in Sydney’s Prince Alfred Hospital. Wilson had made sure that the face was left intact, to hide his act from friends who came to view the body before the coffn was sealed. He then had the skeleton whitened and articulated, with the aim of placing it in the university’s anatomy museum to illustrate its racial peculiarities. Wilson knew he was in breach of the New South Wales Anatomy Act of 1881, but told the senate that he was justifed in taking the skeleton as it was ‘the invari- able practice in all scientifc and properly equipped medical schools in the world to secure material in this way for Anatomical Museums and the latter would practically cease to exist were liberty restricted in this respect’. He assured the senate that when obtaining specimens, he had ‘always taken extreme precautions against publicity and consequent scandal’, and that news of his taking this particular skeleton had been spread by a disgruntled ex-porter at the hospital (Wilson 1892). The senate took no further action. Other scientists who sought to acquire what they held to be racially interesting remains were equally careful to do so discreetly. We have seen in Chapter 8 that Edward Charles Stirling quietly sent the whole heads of a number of Indigenous men and women to Cambridge University (where they remain to this day in the Duckworth Laboratory of the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies). He and Archibald Watson, Adelaide University’s professor of anatomy, acquired the heads during ‘anatomical examinations’ of the bodies of Indigenous people dying in South Australian hospitals, benevolent asylums and prisons. Watson also sent the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons the embalmed corpse of an Indigenous woman who had died in Adelaide’s Parkside Lunatic Asylum. As Arthur Keith, the conservator of the museum at the time of the body’s arrival, was to recall:

In 1910 ‘Lady Adelaide’ arrived; a ship-surgeon delivered her to my keeping … Her every feature and part were as fresh as on the day on which she had died. Her body had been given to the dissecting-room at Adelaide for 12 REPATRIATION AND ITS CRITICS 349

the use of medical students, but our Professor [Watson] thought it better that she should hand down the physical characters of her race to future generations in Europe. She was given a sarcophagus half-flled with a pre- servative fuid and became a ‘private exhibit’. In due time Royalty was to gaze on her. (Keith 1950, pp. 344–345)

Stirling and Watson believed that South Australia’s Anatomy Act of 1884 did not prohibit them from removing and keeping scientifcally interesting bodily structures, unless forbidden to do so by relatives or friends of the deceased (Stirling 1903). But they knew that the Act required that after postmortem examination or dissection for teaching purposes, bodily remains were to be ‘decently interred in consecrated ground’, or a burial place used by those of the same faith as the deceased; and they knew that their moral reputation could be seriously damaged if their removal of whole heads became publicly known. In fact they had reason to be very careful after the public outcry in 1903 caused by the outrageous postmortem treatment of bodies by their medical colleague William Ramsay Smith, Adelaide’s coroner and South Australia’s Inspector of Anatomy. Ramsay Smith had antago- nised many within South Australia’s medical establishment, with the result that allegations of his indecently treating bodies led to a government board of inquiry. The inquiry heard that, among other things, Ramsay Smith had roughly cut the skeletons out of the corpses of several men and women of different ethnic ancestry to send to his old teacher, William Turner at the University of Edinburgh. Among them was the skeleton of Poltpalingada Booboorowie (1830–1901), a Ngarrindjeri man well known to Adelaide residents by the name of Tommy Walker. On Poltpalingada’s death, money had been raised to pay for his funeral and a marble headstone marking his grave in Adelaide’s West End cemetery. However, it was revealed that Ramsay Smith had arranged for his skeleton to be removed before his burial (News 1903c). Ramsay Smith justifed sending Turner Australian and other remains on the grounds that their scientifc value was ‘second to none in any museum in Great Britain’, and told the board of inquiry that his colleagues Stirling and Watson had been sending remains to metropolitan scientists for many years (SAP 1903). The board was unwilling to fnd that Ramsay Smith had acted illegally, concluding that the South Australian Anatomy Act ill-defned what constituted an anatomical examination, and whether, among other 350 P. Turnbull things, body parts could be removed and kept as specimens as Ramsay Smith had done. But the board recommended that Ramsay Smith no longer hold the offce of Inspector of Anatomy or be employed by the Adelaide hospital, as he had been ‘indiscreet’ in using these positions. It was deemed that his ‘zeal in the cause of science’ had unfortunately impaired his professional judgement, as was notably evident in his obtaining and dissecting Poltpalingada’s corpse (SAP 1903). The board’s fndings, incidentally, were popularly decried as giving medical practitioners the freedom to do as they liked with the dead (News 1903b). The fate of Poltpalingada’s remains, along with other remains Ramsay Smith removed from ancestral graves to the south of Adelaide, on Hindmarsh Island, caused local Indigenous people great distress and anger. It led the humanitarian Aboriginal Friends Association of South Australia to demand that they be returned for reburial (Fforde 2004, p. 50). For his part, Edward Stirling now counselled would-be collectors for the South Australian Museum that Indigenous remains should be ‘judiciously collected, for you would naturally not wish to create a scandal’ (1910). Yet Ramsay Smith still had his supporters, who portrayed him as having been prevented by misguided piety from serving the advancement of science, and ridiculed those who condemned him for desecrating the dead (News 1903a).1 One further criticism made of historians who have explored the history of scientifc collecting and uses of remains is that they have failed to mention that most of the old people whom communities have sought for reburial since the 1980s were acquired in the twentieth century, after burials were exposed by erosion, during the clearing of earth for roads or buildings, or through archaeological excavation. By focusing on collecting prior to the 1920s, it is argued, this has blinded Indigenous people and observers of repatriation campaigning since the 1980s to the fact that researchers in felds such as human palaeontology and biological anthropology have radically different intellectual aspirations and ethics from anatomists and museum curators of the long nineteenth century.

1 A sad footnote here: When Poltpalingada’s remains were repatriated from the anatomy department of Edinburgh University in 1991, the bones of his legs and feet were found to have been misplaced. I was approached by the Aborigines Friends Association the following year to see whether I could provide any additional information to his descendants about the treatment of his remains beyond what they had received from Edinburgh. This led to a phone conversation in which I learnt from two of Poltpalingada’s elderly granddaughters of the distress of his family. 12 REPATRIATION AND ITS CRITICS 351

As Australian and European archival sources confrm, the majority of the remains acquired by Australian museums and medical schools during the twentieth century were obtained after erosion or inadvertent human agency exposed burials. Even so, there were instances when burial places were actively sought out. In November 1910, for example, the Cambridge biologist E.L. Grant-Watson (1885–1970) camped on Bernier Island in Western Australia with anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe- Brown (1881–1955), and Daisy Bates (1863–1951), the eccentric welfare worker among Indigenous peoples in outback regions and self- taught anthropologist. Grant-Watson wrote home to his mother and brother that

In a few nights Brown & I are going burking. Dead Mum over this. We go armed with shovels & dig up dead nigger women pack them in boxes and carry them off. No one is to be told of this Mrs. Bates knows nothing. (Grant-Watson 1910)

Looking back in old age on his 1910–1911 feldwork, Grant-Watson recalled that ‘the conscience of the white community was waking to the fact that the natives, had, in the past been badly treated’. He had thus thought it wise to get the remains he had secretly exhumed with Radcliffe-Brown back to England by packing them carefully in a strong wooden case labelled ‘Geological Specimens … and with the connivance of a young man, lately engaged as secretary to a Very Important Person, we smuggled them through in the luggage of the V.I.P. What was not known was not grieved over’ (Grant-Watson 1968, p. 70). In 1913, a Commonwealth ordinance was passed forbidding the exporting ‘anthropological specimens’ without a ministerial permit (Australian Parliament 1913). It came into being after Walter Baldwin Spencer gained the support of other Australian museum directors to persuade the Commonwealth Government that valuable specimens were being lost to overseas museums. Spencer was particular annoyed that the Anatomy Department of Edinburgh University had more Australian crania than were then in any one Australian museum collection (Mulvaney and Calaby 1985, p. 262). However, the ordinance did not deter some collectors from smuggling remains overseas. In 1935, for example, the bones of three Bardi Jawi people were secretly taken from graves on the Dampier Peninsula in Western Australia by Pallottine missionaries who 352 P. Turnbull tried to sell them to Vienna’s Museum of Natural History, from where they were repatriated in 2015 (Turnbull and Fforde 2013). While the majority of remains acquired by museums and medical schools from the end of the First World War onwards were unexpected discoveries, in a number of instances these serendipitous fnds led to the systematic excavation of burials and the removal of remains. The most signifcant and largest instance of the scientifc collecting of Indigenous remains was the single-handed exhumation of the bones of around 1800 individuals by George Murray Black (1874–1965), a farmer and enthusiastic amateur ethnographer in Victoria’s Gippsland District. Black plundered numerous traditional burial places, mostly along the Murray River, from the late 1920s until well into the 1950s. He donated his fnds to the Australian Institute of Anatomy established in the new federal capital of Canberra in 1931, and to the Anatomy Department of Melbourne University, and the Museum of Victoria (Black 1930). Black was taught by personnel at the Australian Institute of Anatomy to recognise skeletal material showing signs of antiquity, and encouraged to secure bones exhibiting signs of pathology (Black 1951). As a result, many of the burials he disturbed were those of individuals who had died of smallpox or other diseases introduced by Europeans not long before, or soon after, settlers took possession of their country. Later professional archaeologists lamented that Black had shown little regard for the discipline’s techniques: in seeking complete skeletons he discarded partial remains, on at least one recorded occasion dumping them into a nearby creek (Black 1938). Nonetheless, the bones that he gave Melbourne University were seen as an invaluably unique collection of bones from individuals living in ‘a restricted geographical region … spanning … from the Pleistocene to the end of the prehistoric period’ (Collier 1985). Archival sources shed no light on what the traditional owners along the Murray River knew or thought of Black’s activities before the early 1970s, when archaeologists excavating burial places discovered at Kow Swamp, in the Mallee region of north-central Victoria, met with Aboriginal protests (Griffths 1996, p. 95); but we do have oral testimony such as the reminiscences of Yorta Yorta Elder Henry Atkinson, cited early in this chapter which attest to the distress that the desecration of burial places caused. Irrespective of whether museum professionals and scientists with interests in human remains have been against, undecided about, or in favour of repatriation, they have generally interpreted the collecting 12 REPATRIATION AND ITS CRITICS 353 and investigation of remains during the long nineteenth century in much the same terms. They concede that remains were commonly acquired by desecrating burial places, explaining this as owing to scientists’ and collectors’ immersion in racialist beliefs and assumptions which at that time, permeated European culture. They also accept that the strict sense of the law in respect of postmortem examinations and the use of bodies for anatomy teaching was rarely adhered to in the case of Indigenous Australians. In short, they rarely disagree with repatriation claimants that anatomists and anthropologists from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century denied or diminished Indigenous Australians’ customary rights in respect of death and burial. But they hold that judging the motivation and means by which the bodily remains of Australia’s frst peoples were collected by today’s ethical norms does not justify the repatriation of remains. They maintain, quite rightly, that despite the fact that these relics were so erroneously interpreted with such detrimental social consequences, and then mostly left unexamined for many years, they have in recent years become an irreplaceable potential source of new knowledge about human evolution and our prehistoric colonisation of the planet, enabled by innovations in computer-based modes of comparative morphological analysis and new techniques for mapping genetic change. They thus hold that these bones are the heritage of all humanity. Moreover, they argue that whatever past injustices were committed to obtain them, this does not justify now surrendering remains. They maintain that the past is now a foreign country and to act so as to atone for outrages that occurred as the result of beliefs and behaviours that we fnd abhorrent is to commit the error of thinking that history offers us factual grounds on which to justify our value judgements. However, contextual investigation of the collecting of Indigenous remains in colonial Australia alerts us to the fact that the practice occurred in a past that is neither so distant nor foreign that there are no meaningful continuities, in moral sensibilities, in law in respect of the dead—and the determination of Indigenous Australians to fulfl their obligations to their ancestors. Now as in the past, the remains of the dead have never been inert things bereft of all sense of identity and agency. They are Old People: ancestors, whose spirits expected on their release from their bodily form to return to the care of the land. The belief that ancestral spirits may again take fesh is still strong in many communities. So too is the belief that they have supernatural powers that 354 P. Turnbull they can use to beneft or harm their descendants. As Ngarrindjeri Elder Tom Trevorrow explained

Our belief is that when our people’s remains are not with their people and in our country, then their spirit is wandering …. Unless they go back home, the spirit never rests. These are people that we know are uneasy. There are a lot of unhealthy spirits in our community; all sorts of negative energies around our people. (Scobie 2009)

Hence why it is that the process of repatriating ancestral remains from European museums involves the performance of ceremonies led by community Elders to calm the dead and assure them that they will be returned to the care of their ancestral country. Of course, one should not expect of museum personnel and scientists that they share these beliefs; but many within and beyond museums and scientifc communities have come to understand and respect them. They further see that research on human remains has never been an inherent right, and has always required the negotiation of competing moral claims. The question today is whether denying Indigenous Australians their rights to the dead promises to strengthen human solidarity through enriching our understanding of humanity’s deep past, or risks diminishing that solidarity by ignoring their deep conviction that their ancestors must be returned to the care of their ancestral country. As a historian who has been involved in research on the provenance of remains for over twenty-fve years, during which time have I have seen frst-hand how repatriation has affected claimant communities and museums who have returned the dead, it seems to me that the benefts for both in terms of their respective aspirations are clear, and outweigh those that might possibly be gained from continuing to conserve remains for scientifc research. Just over a decade ago Tiffany Jenkins argued

… the campaign to repatriate is detrimental to those it claims to help. It certainly cannot solve the very serious social problems that affect people’s lives today … the repatriation movement reinforces the politics of victimhood, it has promoted vulnerability as a key feature of identity. (Jenkins 2004, p. 6)

But what Jenkins overlooks in assessing the meanings and values of repatriation is growing wealth of evidence attesting to the contribution 12 REPATRIATION AND ITS CRITICS 355 that it has made to well-being within Indigenous communities through invigorating cultural identity, which in turn has strengthened the resolve of communities to overcome the many detrimental legacies of colonialism. Quite the opposite of reinforcing a politics of victimhood, repatriation has helped to fortify confdence in the future. As for its impact on museums, those museum professionals who continue to feel uneasy about the reburial of remains would do well to refect on how in Australia and other nations with histories as settler societies, repatriation has proven to be the basis for creating new relations with communities, that have seen museums gain new knowledge and insights into the meanings and values of the diverse kinds of artefacts in their collections. It has been integral to creating a degree of mutual trust that has enabled collaborations with communities that have created immensely popular exhibitions and educational projects in which museums have been able to present their collections in ways that enable communities to share their culture and experiences, past and present, in ways that encourage us to see in our diversity our common humanity. CHAPTER 13

Conclusion

In the early 1990s, soon after beginning the research on which this book was based, I was invited by the late Roy Porter to participate in a late- night book review program that he hosted on BBC Radio 4. In typical fashion, Roy arrived at Broadcasting House on his bicycle with a big smile and several bottles of red wine to lubricate what turned out to be a conversation between myself and two leading British anthropologists on the ethical challenges of practising anthropology and archaeology in a postco- lonial world. The focus of our discussion was a recently published book of essays, several of which discussed the claims of Native Americans and other Indigenous peoples in post-settler societies for the return of their ancestors’ remains, and also sacred or otherwise culturally important artefacts. As the conversation threatened to drift into listing specialist studies that the authors of the book under review should have been read, Roy asked me to explain why Indigenous Australians were seeking the repatriation of skulls and other bodily remains from museums across the United Kingdom. This I did, explaining how the ‘bones controversy’, as it was commonly known at that time in Australia, was causing a major re-assessment amongst museums professionals and research communities with interests in human remains of the ethics of conserving ancestral remains and items of profound cultural importance for research when Indigenous communities believed it to be vital that they be buried as their religious beliefs and customary law demanded, or at least kept in conditions respecting them as ancestors and safeguarding them from

© The Author(s) 2017 357 P. Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia, Palgrave Studies in Pacifc History, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-51874-9_13 358 P. Turnbull submission to further scientifc scrutiny. I mentioned that I had recently contributed to one of a series of pamphlets commissioned by Australia’s federal Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet aimed at identifying keys issue for public discussion to be facilitated by Australia’s newly established Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR 1993). I explained that my contribution had been to argue that an essential step in working towards the goal of reconciliation between Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders and non-indigenous Australians was recognition of the continent’s frst peoples’ customary obligations to and traditional bonds between the living, their ancestral land and the dead. Working with Elders in North Queensland communities to secure the return of their Old People had alerted me that the scientifc theft of the dead had long been a source of anguish in many communities. On my using the word ‘theft’ one of my fellow guests grimaced. The other took to the microphone, interjecting that he was sick and tired of anthropologists and archaeologists being subjected to emotional black- mail by radical third and fourth world activists, and despaired of those who, for whatever ill-conceived reason, erroneously imagined museums and other scientifc institutions holding Australian and other Indigenous human remains were perpetuating colonial oppression—as Indigenous intellectuals and activists had argued in various public forums. This was not the frst time I had been taken to task by fellow aca- demics over my supporting repatriation. I had visited the Department of Anatomy at Edinburgh University in August 1991 asking to see letters held there written by William Ramsay Smith detailing his collecting of remains from Ngarrindjeri burial places around the turn of the twentieth century. The head of the department, the late Matthew Kaufman (1942–2013), refused me access to Ramsay Smith’s letters, but granted me a ten-minute interview, in which he told me that one member of a visiting Indigenous delegation had threatened to assault him as he tried to explain the scientifc value of his department’s Australian collection, and that should the content of the letters become public, this would risk other institutions similarly making what he believed was the disastrous decision of agreeing to repatriate their holdings. After my ten minutes was up, I started to make my way out of the department, again meeting the department’s long-time conservator, who had shown me to Professor Kaufman’s offce. Maybe he was just being friendly, or perhaps could sense that I was not happy. He asked how the meeting had gone. On my briefy telling him what had occurred, he 13 CONCLUSION 359 confessed to having no great regard for his boss, who he told me was pressuring him to retire, adding with a smile, ‘He was a student here, and I suppose I must have kicked his arse once or twice.’ He also told me that in the early 1970s, he and other members of the department had had drinks at Doctors, a good Pub in the heart of the city, with ‘Black Mac’— as N.W.G. Macintosh (1906–1977), Sydney University’s Challis Professor of Anatomy, was known to his colleagues and students. After a couple of rounds, Macintosh, who had been a postgraduate student at Edinburgh, tried to persuade his colleagues to give their Australian collection to Sydney University’s Shellshear Museum of Physical Anthropology and Comparative Anatomy. But what came as an intriguing surprise was the conservator jovially adding that Black Mac had warned that Edinburgh would do well to give Sydney its collection as its presence would one day become a political issue. There have been other occasions when it has proved diffcult to gain access to documents illustrative of scientifc collecting and investigation of Australian remains. One I recall vividly occurred several months before trying to see the Ramsay Smith letters in Edinburgh’s anatomy department. Working in the library of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, I went to the adjacent University Museum, to ask the Hope Museum of Zoology’s librarian if I could see a letter they possessed relating to the collecting of Tasmanian remains by W.W. Spicer (1820–1879), a clergyman and keen botanist who lived in Tasmania during the 1870s. Someone from the library appeared and informed me that as the University’s possession of Australian remains had become a controversial issue, access would be denied until on receiving a written application, the Hebdomadal Council, the chief executive body of the University, was satisfed that I was a bona fde scholar. I was also told that the museum was only open that day to members of the university, and as I had no formal affliation with a College or Department I was escorted off the premises by one of the attendants. The Council took several months to decide that I was a scholar with a legitimate interest in how the university had obtained the remains in question, during which time I heard from Oxford colleagues that rumours had circulated questioning my motives and even my sanity. Since then a number of other British and continental European institutions with Australian collections have refused me access to their archives, usually on the grounds that they are not in a state enabling their consultation, or that the institution must frst develop a policy on repatriation. 360 P. Turnbull

These experiences seem worth recalling here as they have not been without infuence on my reaching view that returning the dead to their ancestral communities outweighs the benefts that admittedly may very well be gained by their continuing preservation for scientifc ends. It seemed disingenuous that senior personnel of a number of museums should tell representatives of Indigenous communities that the remains of ancestors must be kept to enable research providing new knowledge of value not only to them but all humankind, when they were ready to ignore the foundational premise of science that knowledge be freely shared when it came to documents in their possession telling of when, where and how these ancestral remains were acquired. Indeed, there were instances when representatives of claimant communities were denied access to institutional records which I was allowed to see. In mid- 1991, I spoke with the late Monty Pryor (1922–2007), a senior Elder of the Birri Gubba nation and a deacon of the Roman Catholic diocese of Townsville. It was some eighteen months after he had returned from Britain with the skull of one of his Old People. As he explained to me, ‘They stole my people from there. Now you [must] put that in the right- ful order. Abducting, an abduction of your people, to experiment on, or to experiment on the remains or whatever may be. It’s the same, see, to taking the whole being.’ (Turnbull 1997, p. 34). Uncle Monty went on to tell me of his meetings with senior staff of several British museums, in which he felt that they evaded answering when he asked what information they could provide concerning the origins of ancestral remains they possessed, and showed little interest in what he wanted to tell them about his people’s beliefs in respect of the dead. He recalled with sad- ness that they were only interested in convincing him that research on his ancestor’s remains would reveal new and remarkable things about their lifeways, culture and history. Other community members who similarly felt that they had been treated condescendingly were to conclude that scientists and museum curators opposed to repatriation were so because they did not want to reveal that remains in their possession bore the marks of violent death—a claim that appeared possibly true in several instances, when crania eventually returned were found to have bullets holes (Pickering 2007; Tuniz 2016, p. 206). As observed in the previous chapter, repatriation could only become politicised. Only by public protest were Indigenous Australians able to overcome disinterest in hearing their case for the return of the dead. As the biological anthropologist Colin Pardoe has observed, ‘Indigenous 13 CONCLUSION 361 people were demanding control, accountability and recognition of their ownership of their past. It was not something conceptualised by scholars for the good of Indigenous people’ (Pardoe 1991, p. 17). While the politicising of repatriation has been essential to the successes that communities have had in securing the return of their ancestral dead from the 1970s to the turn of the twenty-frst century, it has had, as I suggested in introducing this book, the accompanying effect of encouraging the caricaturing of collectors and scientifc analysts of bodily remains during the long nineteenth century as bent on scientifcally proving Indigenous Australians to be inherently inferior. And in this book, my concern has been to show that anatomists and anthropologists of that era collected and examined the Indigenous dead out of by genuine curiosity about the nature and causes of human diversity. Certainly, the idea that humankind comprised biologically distinctive and possibly unchanging racial types gained strength within and beyond medico-scientifc circles, the idea that race—in the words of the polygenist anatomist Robert Knox, was ‘everything … in a word, civilisation depends on it’—but this did not necessarily entail belief that the dispossession of Indigenous Australian was justifed. Moreover, most scientists who studied Australian skulls and other bodily remains—with the exception of British metropolitan and colonial phrenologists, whose faith in the practical benefts of applying their science to every aspect of life led them to endorsed George Combe’s ‘national phrenology’—cannot be characterised as having any particular view on how colonial authorities should deal with the continent’s frst peoples, beyond believing that they should be humanely treated. Indeed, as we have seen there were those who plundered the dead yet openly criticised the treatment of the living by colonial politicians and state agencies. But though medico-scientifc scrutiny of remains was rarely motivated by conscious desire to justify or rationalise Indigeno us dispossession, it nonetheless occurred in a cultural geography of national chauvinism and increasingly racialised perceptions of peoples, both within and especially beyond Europe. And these ‘external’ forces infused in what now seem obvious as well as subtle ways the modes of reasoning, argument and uses of evidence by which seemingly objective anthropometric knowledge of indigeneity was produced. Matters of fact were implicitly assumptions that race was ‘everything’, as is disturbingly confrmed by the ease with which metrical analyses of skulls and other bodily structures gave cognitive strength to a range of assumptions about the biology and psychology of 362 P. Turnbull

Indigenous Australians that found expression in colonial discourses ranging from the governmental to the poetic. It was a world in which, to give just one illustration, J.B. Stephens (1835–1902), a Queensland poet who enjoyed fame in the 1870s, won praise as late as 1921 for an ‘extremely clever’ verse portrait of an Indigenous woman in which what now seems the least offensive stanza bears the imprint of racial craniometry. ‘Thy skull development’, Stephens wrote

… mine eye displeases; Thou wilt not suffer much from brain diseases; Thy facial angle forty-fve degrees is. (Stephens 1873; News 1921)

The collecting and investigation of remains strengthened belief that Australia’s frst peoples were destined, in the words of George Bennett, the frst curator of the Australian Museum, to ‘at no distant period’ be ‘known but by name’ (1834, v. 1, p. 69). And this prospect encouraged what had been the inclination within medico-scientifc circles since the turn of the nineteenth century to construe the Indigenous dead as a rare and diminishing source of new insights into the natural history of humanity, the collection of which was easily represented as serving a greater good than respecting received moral sensibilities and the law in respect of death and burial. Contextual study of the collecting of Indigenous ancestral remains in colonial Australia undeniably confrms—as opponents of repatriation maintain—that great cultural and intellectual changes separate the study of human variation during the long nineteenth century from the aspirations and practices of scientists today who want to see the remains of Indigenous Australian stay in scientifc collections. But exploring how these remains were obtained alerts us to salient continuities in respect of moral norms, our laws in respect of death and burial, and importantly that for Indigenous Australians the remains of the dead have never been ‘objects’ bereft of identity and agency. A number of critics of repatriation have portrayed researchers in the sciences and humanities who have been supportive of Indigenous Australians securing the return of their ancestors as wanting to redress wrongs of the colonial past; and they warn that this commits the error of interpreting past events as if they can factually underwrite our present-day value judgements— a potentially dangerous confusion of epistemological and moral reasoning that Max Weber warned against long ago (Blum 1944). Some critics 13 CONCLUSION 363 additionally argue that holding the present to account for what we now agree were morally abhorrent means by which remains were acquired in colonial Australia risks the further danger of encouraging the portrayal of Aboriginal people and Torres Strait islanders as passive victims of colonialism. Speaking personally, there have been times when I have expressed concern to community Elders with whom I have worked that telling of how remains were collected in the context of frontier confict might encourage this perception; but I have been frmly told that everyone should know what happened—and also of the determination of the living to honour their cultural obligations to the dead. When the British Museum agreed to repatriate bundled cremated remains to Tasmania in 2006, a spokesperson for the museum made the point that this was only one of two such bundles ‘known anywhere in the world’ and thus ‘only surviving physical evidence of a whole system of belief and a social order that has since disappeared’ (Kennedy 2006). Yet what is striking about this reasoning is the lack of any sense that the resolve of Indigenous Tasmanians to see this ‘physical evidence’ repatriated refects the remarkable resilience of a people that never disappeared even though since the invasion of their ancestral lands their life-ways, beliefs and cultural practices have changed, as happens in all societies. Indeed, the return of this bundle and other bones has caused some Elders to refect on whether they should be reburied, or perhaps kept for spiritual purposes as they once were. It is hard to see how this gives us reason to fear that repatriation will encourage our imagining Tasmania’s traditional owners to be passive victims of colonialism. Repatriation does not entail our judging the past by our present-day moral standards. Rather it is to see in the complexities of the past the threads of common humanity in respect of the dead. In the course of my research and sharing its fndings with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders, colleagues and friends, I have come to understand the deep and abiding spiritual bonds that Australia’s frst peoples have with their Old People. I have shared in the excitement of research aimed at determining the identity and circumstances in which they were taken from country having provided people with new knowledge of their ancestors—how they lived at the time they experienced the invasion of their ancestral lands, how they resisted dispossession, and how they strove to maintain their identity and culture from generation to generation despite the adversities of colonial subjugation. It seems to me that the return of remains may prove more valuable for present and future generations than what scientifc analyses of their remains might yield. 364 P. Turnbull

And it may be that repatriation does not end scientifc investigation of ancestral remains. The late John Mulvaney, who can justly be regarded as pioneering Australian archaeology, was a passionate supporter of Indigenous rights; but he opposed repatriation believing that in the future there would be Indigenous archaeologists curious to know what their ancestors’ bones might tell them about the deep past (Mulvaney 1991). Many communities who have reclaimed their Old People do not wish to see them again become objects of scientifc curiosity; but there are some which are willing to have them studied, provided that senior men and women approve, supervise and see the outcomes of the research shared with their communities. Currently, there are projects aiming to gain greater knowledge of the provenance of ancestral remains (for example, Pate 2002). DNA is being extracted from bones and repatriated hair samples and used together with linguistic and cultural data to hopefully learn more about the population history of Australia prior to colonisation (Malaspinas 2016). The key point is that these developments are possible because Indigenous people have sought and, despite opposition, eventually gained the right to decide whether or not their ancestors should be studied. One can only hope that there will be further possibilities now and in the future for Indigenous people and scientists to work together. But this will not happen unless we are prepared to see repatriation through the lens of history, as the fulflling of deeply felt obligations thwarted by scientifc aspirations that thankfully no longer command our assent. And it will not happen unless our future explorations of Australia’s long human history are grounded in an ethics of mutual respect and recognition of the diffcult legacies of our colonial past. Bibliography

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A Allport, M., 143–145, 147 Abbot, W.F., 227 acquaintance with J.B. Davis, 145 Abernethy, J., 37, 107, 110 plunders Tasmanian burials, 96 Aboriginal Australians. See Indigenous Anatomists, 33, 39, 48, 54, 65, 68, Australians 69, 97, 98, 155, 158, 167, 177, Aboriginal Reconciliation Council, 192, 197, 234, 245, 246, 248, 337, 358 252, 276, 353, 361. See also Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Anthropometry; Craniometry Commission (ATSIC), 337, 338 belief in environmentally induced Admiralty, 67, 79, 84–86, 226, 300, variation, 73, 99 307. See also Royal Navy belief in monogenesis, 99 Manual of Scientifc Inquiry, 226 and brain size, 193 Ægean Isles, 53 compare humans and apes, 46, 48, Africa, 40, 48, 52, 56, 78, 151 106 African Americans, 19 Darwinian, 135, 148, 211, 226 Africans dissection of criminals, 166 ancestry and origins, 43, 46, 56, Edinburgh, 74, 75 59, 72, 74, 89, 106, 116, 117, French, 90, 109, 127 122–124, 157–160, 178 Anatomy Fort Pitt skeletal holdings, 87, 88 Australian Institute of Anatomy, 352 intellectual equality, 159 collections, 27, 29, 31, 34, 55, 71, sub-Saharan, ancestry and origins, 73, 74, 93, 94, 134, 160, 198, 11, 112, 117, 123 348 Agriculture, 39, 41, 104, 190, 201, models, 237, 264 202, 271, 302, 314 museums, 15, 71, 73, 84, 87, 88, Allen, J., 142 95, 96, 208, 213, 216, 348

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 403 P. Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia, Palgrave Studies in Pacifc History, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51874-9 404 Index

schools, 25, 51, 55, 67, 73, 78, 95, biological, 350 127, 139, 168 physical, 268, 359 teachers, 22, 34, 75, 127, 130, 159, racial, 122 199 Anthropometry university departments, 350, 352, instruments, 101 359 photography, 83, 138, 140, 250 Ancient pioneer Charles White, 123, 125, Britons, 310 304 Egypt, 130–132 techniques, 98, 212, 247; Bertillon’s Europe, 221, 224 system, 268; thumbprints, 268 grave mounds, 236 Antiquarians, 53, 153, 170, 302 paths of migration, 170 Aplin, D.H., 217 texts, 41, 302 Apollo, temple at Delphi, 49 Andaman Islanders, 179 Appel, M., 1, 2 Anderson, A., 59 Arawarra, Wandandian Elder, 164, 168 Anderson, K., 99, 156 Archaeologists, 132, 258, 277, 333, Anderson, W., 31 340, 352, 358, 364 Angas, G.F., 316, 319 Archer, W. Anglican church, 113, 274, 322 and Amelie Dietrich, 16, 282, 283 Brisbane, 322 Archer, W.H., 203, 283 clergy, 295, 339, 359 Armit, W., 288–290 Anglicans, 36, 113, 168, 220, 261, Army 339 medical department, 72, 87, 133 liberal, 216 surgeons, 87–89 Anglo-Saxon Artefacts churchyards, 115 collecting, 93, 151, 170, 196, 200, population, 31 202, 227–230, 235, 238, 250, races, 129, 149, 262 258, 262, 266, 268, 276, 284, ‘Animality’ of ‘savage’ races, 118, 156 288, 290, 292, 295, 296, 334, Animals 342, 344, 355; donor costs domestic, 44, 105, 109, 115 reimbursed, 229 extinct; fossil, 208; Pleistocene, 137 sacred, 334, 337 Animate nature, 36, 48, 49, 90, 106, Arthur, G., 162 123 ‘Aryan peoples’, 241, 242 Anthropologists, 129, 149, 196, 197, Asch, G.T., von, 58 211, 212, 224, 236, 245, 249, Asians 258, 270, 276, 283, 326, 333 ethnicity, 198 biological, 326 in Linnaeus’s typology, 46, 47 cultural, 333 skulls, 206 physical, 38, 224 Asylums, sources of Indigenous human Anthropology, 146, 199, 207, 208, remains, 77, 246, 277, 348 223, 242, 249, 261, 262, 266, Athanasius, 319 267, 288, 340, 348, 357 Atkinson, H.B., 213, 334, 339 Index 405

Atkinson, H.Yorta Yorta Elder, 339, Cultural Ministers Council, 337, 352 358 Atlantic slave trade, 158 Government, 332, 337 ATSIC. See Aboriginal and Torres High Commission, London, 333 Strait Islander Commission High Court, 345 Attuiock, Inuit Elder, 43 Institute of Anatomy, 352 Auctions of Indigenous human ministerial permit for exporting remains, 161, 232, 345 ‘anthropological specimens, Auschwitz, 283 277, 341, 351 Australasian Association for the Australian Museum, 4, 91, 132, 196, Advancement of Science 199, 204, 206, 217, 218, 220, Adelaide meetings, 240 222–224, 227, 230–233, 238, Australasian Philosophical Society, 259, 269, 277, 284, 286, 298, 168–171, 178, 179 336, 337, 341, 342, 351, 362 Australasian Society of Patriots, 323 Garden Palace fre, 228, 238 Australia. See also Indigenous Axes, traded, 116, 171 Australians ABC radio, 231 Canberra, 93, 296, 352; burial B caves, 93; skull used as sugar Bacon, F., 180 bowl, 296 Bancroft, J., 205 Carpentaria Gulf, 270, 273, 288, Banks, J., 34, 39, 50–55, 58–61, 64, 300 67, 68, 171 colonial frontier; killings, 172, head of Pemulwye, 63 231, 292; mining, 272, 285; Banks-Hodgkinson, R., 54 pacifcation, 207, 248, 285; Bannister, S., 186 violence, 89, 126, 129, 153, Barclay, J., 75, 100, 101, 127 172, 183, 185, 202, 207, Bartmann, Saartje, 106 280, 285, 287, 296, 297, Bashford, A., 31 327, 347 Bateman, Captain, 142 convicts, 76, 89, 92, 162, 169–171, Bates, D., 351 182; army regiments guard- Bath, Somerset, 61, 142 ing, 76; assigned, 65, 162, Baudin, N., 332 169, 182; escaped, 60; murder Bavaria, Royal Academy of Sciences, 2 of Commandant Logan, 161; Beagle, H.M.S. Myall Creek massacre, 185; Australasian survey, 301, 307 phrenologically assessed, surgeon, 77, 79, 81, 85 89; population, 182; shep- Beattie, J.W., 145 herds, 162; ships,Countess of Beckett, A., 184 Harcourt, 164 Beddoe, J., 133, 141 Council for Aboriginal Belgium, Musée royal d’histoire Reconciliation, 337, 358 naturelle, 146 406 Index

Bennelong, Eora man, 61 Botany, 51, 78, 79, 93, 199, 288 Bennett, G., 91, 93, 199, 202, 206, Bougainville, H. de, 186 362 Bounty, H.M.S., 58, 59 Bennett, K.H., 227, 324 mutiny, 59 Bennett, S.V., 321 Bourke, R., 184 Berg, J., Gunditjmara Elder, 346 Bowden, M., 66 Berndt, C., 340 Bowen, G., 201 Berndt, R., 313 Bradley, J., murdered, 215 Berry, A., 165–167, 179, 253, 254 Bradley, W., 60 phrenology, 167, 169 Brain, 86, 105, 106, 111, 116, 117, Berry, R., 251, 254 131, 153, 155, 158, 159, 174, Bertillon, A., 268 181, 183, 190, 192, 226, 252, Bigge, J.T., 95, 167 259, 362 Bildungstrieb, concept, 56, 57 cerebellum, 187, 226 ‘Billy,’ Wiradjuri man executed comparative anatomy, 259 Bathurst, 215 female, 174 Biology, preformist, 49 lungfsh, 259 Birkbeck, W.T., 325 Bramble, H.M.S., 81, 82 Black, G.M., 352 Breton, W.H., 304 Blackwood, F., 81, 82 Brewer, J., 300, 302 Blair, D., 209 Brewster, D., 101, 102 Bland, W., 179 Brierly, O., 82 Blandowski, W., 203, 305 Brisbane, T., 176, 177 Bligh, W., 58 Britain Blumenbach, J.F., 51, 55–62, 68, 73, Anatomy Act 1832, 347 75, 77, 89, 91, 98, 100, 107, Cambridge University, 24, 108, 113, 116–118, 130, 131, 196, 207, 239, 246, 348; 136, 158–160, 178 Leverhulme Centre for Human American admirers, 124 Evolutionary Studies, 6, 348 on bone growth, 57, 58 Colonial Offce, 310–312, 315 and Joseph Banks, 58–63 Edinburgh; Edinburgh varietal typology, 56 Encyclopaedia, 102; extramu- Blundell, J., 93 ral anatomy schools, 75, 127; Boas, F., 276 medical graduates in Sydney, Bock, A., 134 182; Phrenological Society, Bock, T., 134 173, 174, 192; Royal College Boerhaave, H., 46 of Surgeons, 72, 107; Royal Bonn, University, 137 Medical Society, 113; scientifc Bonney, C., 304, 307 societies, 126; Spurzheim’s Bonwick, J., 142 lectures, 160, 181; University Boomerangs, 203, 250 of Edinburgh, 5, 25, 74, 100, Botanists, 58, 59, 94, 170, 283, 359 113, 130, 166, 251, 296, 349; Index 407

Wernerian Society for Natural 84–86, 95; medical depart- History, 126 ment, 71, 72, 87, 133, 307; High Court, 343 surgeons, 75, 76, 78, 79, imperial government, 92, 95, 164, 81–87, 92, 162, 164, 179 311 Royal Geographical Society, 96, Liverpool, 123, 124, 152; museum, 116, 300 152 Royal Society, 39, 51, 54, 55, 93, London Anthropological Society, 145, 210 125, 136, 148, 183, 210, 212, Society of Antiquaries, 53 236 St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, 72, 73, London 107 Colonial Exhibition, 1886, 237 St. George’s Hospital, 34, 54 Egyptian Hall, 316, 319 St. Thomas Hospital, 74 Greenwich, 212 The Times, 6 Kew Gardens, 94 University College, 89 Natural History Museum, 85, 230, Zoological Society, 206, 213 343, 344 Manchester, 123, 124 Oxford University, 24, 28, 30, Shelton, Staffordshire, 130 95, 113, 148, 168, 196, 213, Shetland Isles, 236 216, 242, 250, 268; anatomy British Association for the museum, 213; Christ Church, Advancement of Science, 210 51, 55, 95, 168; anatomy British government resident, Sarawak, school, 168; Council, 333; 238 Pembroke College, 214; Pitt British Museum, 51, 83, 201, 212, Rivers Museum, 250, 333, 359 217, 232, 236, 344, 345, 360, Royal Anthropological Institute, 363 126 Broca, P., 219, 220, 225, 258 Royal College of Surgeons, 34, 37, Brockman, F., 292, 293 38, 63, 65, 66, 72, 73, 76, 78, Brookes, J., 73, 74, 130, 134, 159, 79, 81, 82, 86, 91, 93, 95, 161, 199 107, 110, 116, 133, 138, 141, students, 74 146–148, 153, 161, 168, 199, Brown, James, 230 200, 206, 280, 283, 309, 344, Brown, John, 312 346, 348; College Council, 36, Brown, R., 68 110; Hunterian Museum, 38, Bruin, C., de, 61 63, 65, 72, 73, 76, 79, 81, 82, Buchner, M., 2, 264 86, 91, 93, 95, 96, 111, 138, Buffon, Comte de, 21, 42, 44, 45, 206, 212, 213, 348; Hunterian 49, 52, 53, 55–57, 61, 104, 105, professorship, 110; Indigenous 108, 113, 118, 156 Australian heads, 65, 67 Histoire naturelle, 44, 52 Royal Navy; Haslar hospital, 78; Burnett, W., 84 anatomymuseum, 71–73, Busk, G., 86, 137, 212 408 Index

Busseuil, F.L., 186 Cemeteries, European, 146, 147, 152, Busts, 160, 179, 189, 206 303, 324, 343 Büttner, C.F., 55 Cerebral localisation, 181 Bynoe, B., 81, 85 Challenger expedition, 147 Chance, H., 250 ‘Charlie,’ Wandandian people, 164 C Charnay, C.J.D., 258, 259 Caley, G., 171 Cheselden,W., 43 Calico, D., Ngadjon-Jii people, 273 Children Calico, J., Ngadjon-Jii elder, 273 anthropometrically examined, 265, Campbell, G., Duke of Argyll, 217 274 Campbell, J. (Umbelah), Gubi Gubi forced removal, 104, 172, 190, 204, man, 260, 261 254 Camper, P., 54, 55, 59, 62, 69, 76, kidnapped, 290 101, 105, 160 phrenologically assessed, 174, 185 defence of African equality, 159 remains, 80, 203, 272; kept by Cannibalism, 159, 331, 332 mothers, 301 Canoes, 67 ‘wild,’, 48 Cape Colony, South Africa, 87, 89, Christian Herald, 176 100, 129, 154 Christian humanitarians, 114, 129, Carib Indians, skulls, 59, 74 136, 140, 164, 186, 210 Carlile, R., 110 Churchmen, 95, 121, 167, 180, 181, Carnambaygal, Gundangara man, 171, 210, 274, 292 174 Clarke, B., 146 skull, 173 Clarkson, C.H., 265, 266 Carruthers, J., 322 Clift, W., 65, 76, 79–81, 86, 91, 94, Carter, N. Gooniyandi and Kidji man, 95, 206 340 Climate Carter Blake, C., 125, 140 cause of disease, 44 Cartwright, G., 43 cause of variation, 42, 45, 47, 50, Cattle, 159, 169 52, 57, 69, 75, 107, 117; herding, 126 effects questioned, 54, 56, 85, overland drives, 304 97 spearings, 91, 153, 172, 231, 271, effects on seamen, 85 281, 291, 314 ‘extra-tropical’, 126 stations, 196, 213, 240, 267, 301, Coghlan, J., 266 340 Collins, D., 63, 66 ‘Caucasian’ varietal type, 21, 56, 105, Combe, G., 156, 157, 180–183, 186, 126 187, 190–192, 361 Caves, 93, 136, 215, 219, 229, 232, colonial admirers, 182 269, 291, 330, 344, 345 ‘Combeian’ phrenology, 156, 157, Cedar cutters, 165 180, 182, 186 Index 409

‘national phrenology’, 157, Thomas Henry Huxley, 136, 183–185, 192, 361 138–142, 148, 149, 196, 199, Comparative anatomy, 36, 73, 77, 79, 216–218, 241, 252 85, 86, 89, 107, 110, 113, 124, unstable traits in, 276 153, 235, 259, 260, 268, 359 Zulu, 232 Conchological collecting, 233 Crania Americana, 131 Conjectural historians, 41, 42 Craniometry, 100, 102, 130, 132, Cook, J., 50, 51, 54, 55, 61, 62, 78, 136, 151, 225, 248, 252, 276, 210 362 Cowle, E.C., 296 instruments, 101, 103, 201, 212, Coxen, C., 203, 205, 257 245, 247, 264 Craig, J.W., 257 Creen Creek massacre, 288 Craig, T., 344, 345 Crimean War, 133 Crania, 149, 151. See also ‘Crisis of humanism’, 11, 99 Neanderthal; skulls; skeletons; Crocodiles, salt water, 344 phrenology Cro-Magnons, 219–221 Carib Indians, 59 Crowther, B., 144, 147 casts, 141, 144, 158, 161, 173, 179, Crowther, W.E.L., 253 189, 236, 237, 239, 246, 255 Crowther, W.L., 143, 144, 147 collected by Joseph Banks, 67 Cullin-la-ringo Station massacre, 265 comparative series, 71; analysis, 69, Cunningham, A., 94, 125, 170 74, 103, 183, 189, 248, 255 Cunningham, P., 213 epitome of human history, 68 Cuvier, G., 89, 91, 104–112, 116, fossilised hominid, 83, 211, 219, 152, 192, 208, 220, 252 253, 255 Cymbeline, 171 internal volume, 116, 152, 192 morphology compared with ethnographic reportage, 103, 112, 157 D of murderers, 164 Dale, R., 152, 153 Ngarrindjeri nation, 83; See also Darwin, C., 83. See also Evolution Skulls Darwinians, 129, 135, 137, 140, 142, Peruvian, 185 147–149, 195, 196, 212, 217, Polynesian, 91, 185 251 sutures; in Australian, 141; in Cro- anatomists, 149, 195, 211, 226 Magnon, 219; in Neanderthal, Darwinism, 14, 210, 211, 220 140; Occipital, 250; occipito- monogenism, 136 mastoid, 141 opponents, 136, 148 synostosis, 140, 141 ‘Darwin’s Body Snatchers’, 231 Tasmanian, 134, 142, 145, 147, Davis, J.B., 74, 118, 122, 130–140, 162, 167, 168, 186, 195, 204, 142–149, 151, 227 209, 211, 252; See also Skulls Dawkins, W.B., 240, 241 thickness, 192, 193 Dawson, J., 323 410 Index

Day, W., 231, 232 Egypt, 172 Degeneration, concept, 57, 99, 100, ancient; burial sites, 131; Egyptians, 103, 104, 118, 156, 192 53, 225; mummies, 225, 344; Denison, W., 200 racial genealogies explored by De Quincey, T., 124 Morton, 130; skulls, 131, 132; Deville, James, 160–163 wall paintings, 131 Dietrich, A., 282, 283 skulls, modern, 225 Diseases Elvy, L., 308 and climate, 44 Endeavour, H.M.S., 52 effects on crania, 100, 103, 137, Ennis, H., 300 276 Erlangen, University, 89 effects on tibia, 239, 240, 243 Espie, R., 162, 163 Flinders Island, 142 Etheridge, R., 233, 341, 342 sexually transmitted, 267 Evans, R., 282 smallpox, 248, 352 Evolution, 121. See also treatment at sea, 85 Transmutation; Geoffroy Saint- DNA sampling of Tasmanian ancestral Hilaire, E. remains, 364 assent by British scientists, 97 Doodeward v Spence, 345–347 brain, 226 Doré, G., 317 Ernst Haeckel’s materialism, 218 Douglas, A., 291 evolutionary stasis, 240 Douglas, B., 31, 125 Knoxian critics, 122 Douglas, J., 215 Neanderthal and Australian skulls, Dreadnought hospital ship, 212 135–141 Dry, R., 143, 146 Owen, R., anti-evolutionary func- ministry, 144, 145 tionalism, 208 Dublin reconciliation with Christianity, 216 Royal College of Surgeons, 72, 78 Expeditions Dubois, E. Central Australian, 316 discovery of Pithecanthropus, 253, Baudin, 330 254 Challenger, 215, 252 Duckworth, W.H.L., 246 Gregory, 309 Dugongs, 233, 259, 260 Grey, 309 Dunne, C., 78 Horn, 242, 298 inland surveys, 94 Mitchell, Murray-Darling 1836 E expedition, 303, 305 Eardley-Wilmot, J., 200 Novara, 209 Earl, G.W., 82, 116 Oxley, 169, 170, 179, 303, East India Company, 67, 164 332 Edgeworth, T.W.E., 342 Eyre, E., 316 Index 411

F Paris Muséum d’histoire naturelle, Fabian, J., 139, 324 161 FAIRA. See Foundation for Aboriginal scientifc rivalry with Britain and and Islander Research Action Germany, 260 Ferguson, A., 42, 166 Franklin, Jane, 91, 95, 200 Fesl, E., 155 Franklin, John, 85, 86, 90, 95, 200 Fforde, C., 350, 352 French, C., 251 Field, B., 178, 179 Frontal sinuses, 101, 103 Figuier, L. Fuhlrott, J., 136, 138, 140, 141 L’Homme primitif, 317 Fijian skulls, 227 Flinders, M., 67, 68, 79, 204 G Flower, W. H., 80 Gale, C., 292 Fly, H.M.S., 81–83 Gall, F.J., 105, 111, 156–160, 164, Foelsche, P., 245, 294, 298 181, 192. See also Phrenology Foley, F., 15 Gawler, G., 201 Foley, R., 6 Genetic variation, 9 Fordyce, G., 54 Genocide, 17, 297 Fort Pitt, anatomy museum, 87, 88 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, E., 90, 97, 127 Fossils, 91, 105, 140, 229, 253, 255, Geologists, 137, 203, 213, 217, 302, 265. See also Neanderthal 305 fauna, 205 Gerrard, E., 238 hominid, 255 Gibson, assistant army surgeon, 88 ‘living’, 139, 140 Giessen marsupial, 90, 91 University, 237 primate, 253 Gill, S.T., 315 vertebrate, 217 Gillen, F., 243, 250 Foundation for Aboriginal and Glenelg, Lord (Charles Grant), 310, Islander Research Action 312–314 (FAIRA), 279, 280, 333–335 Godeffroy Museum, Hamburg, 16, 282 France Goldsborough, Mort and Co., 295 Académie des sciences, 219 Goodsir, M., 164, 166 anatomists, 109, 126, 127 Goodwin, A.P., 230–231 anthropologists, 258 Gordon, P., 336 Dordogne region; Vèzère River Gothic Valley, 219 imaginings of Aboriginal primitiv- Jardin des Plantes, 258, 259 ity, 319 Loire region, 236 Göttingen, University, 38, 55, 58, 60, Ministry of Public Instruction, 258 246 naval surgeons, 92 Gould, C., 147 Pacifc ambitions, 210 Gradations in nature, 46, 124, 125 412 Index

‘great chain of being’, 123 Higgins, H., 346 Grant, C. See Glenelg, Lord Hill, A., 214 Grant, R.E., 89, 90 Hill, P., 171, 173, 174 Grant–Watson, E.L., 277, 351 Hindmarsh, J., 314 Graves, J., 144 Hoare, M., 168 Gray, J., 293 Hobson, E.C., 89–91, 138, 200 Gray, J.E., 83 Hochsteller, F. von, 236 Gray, T., 321 Hodgkin, T., 73, 113 Gregory, A., 309 Hodgson, J., 72 Grese, I., 16, 283 Holocaust, 15, 280 Grey, G., 81, 95, 138, 305 Home, E., 38, 44, 54 Gribble, E., 274, 275 Home, H. (Lord Kames), 113, 122 Griffn, D., 336 Hooker, W.J., 94 Griffth, S., Justice, 345, 347 Horn, W.A., 242 Guadeloupe skeleton, 236 Hornet Bank massacre, 288 Gunn, R.C., 94 Howard, J., 337 Guthrie, W., 53 Howitt, A.W., 249, 292 Hrdlička, A., 234 Human H ancestry; evolutionary, 234, 247; Haacke, J.W., 235–237 monogenetic origin, 69, 99, Haast, J. von, 233 114 Haddon, A.C., 266 classifying, 56 Haeckel, E., 218, 235 cranial types, 117 Generelle morphologie, 218 deep past, 53, 137, 235, 241, 354 Hair, 44, 47, 48, 59, 154, 163, 213, early occupation sites, 241 226, 364 natural history, 53, 62, 70, 96, 97, samples collected, 276, 364 111, 125, 130, 136, 197, 210, Halford, G.B., 208 212 Haller, A. von, 56 origins, 114, 125, 138, 170, 330 Hamilton, A.S., 188, 208 pithecoid ancestry, 12, 270 Hamlyn–Harris, R.H., 257, 276 racial ancestry, 100, 101, 116, 159, Hann, F., 292–293 184 Haswell, W.A., 261, 262, 325 racial types, 98 Hawdon, J., 304, 307 species; separate, 49, 122; unitary, Heaviside, J., 73 113, 115, 123 Hector, J., 240 variation, 38, 43, 45, 46, 113; brain Hedley, C., 233 size, 193; cognition, 111, 117; Heidelberg, University, 272 effects of climate, 52, 56, 85, Henderson, J., 302, 303 112; effects of climate, ques- Herschel, J., 86, 115 tioned, 39, 41, 113; form, 121, Heyne, G.C., 55 131; ‘Malay’ type, 56, 89, 91, Index 413

103, 104, 126; Mongol type, ‘mummies’, 203, 262, 284, 126; ‘monster’ type, 46, 48 344; pelvic bones, 218; penises, varietal branching, 55, 99, 158, 170 subincised, 296; platycnemic Hume, D., 34, 122 tibia, 239, 240, 243; postmortem Humoural theory, 47, 49 dissections, 5, 29, 170, 344; skin, Hunt, J., 236 94, 206 Hunter, J., 33–38, 42–45, 49, 50, 54, postmortem dissections; arsenic- 55, 58, 100, 110 rich, 260; formaldehyde, 345; anatomy collections, 55, 71, 94 postmortem dissections, legal- death, 34 ity, 346; preserving fuids, 260, portrait, 34, 36, 46, 49 264, 345; R.J.A. Berry, 170; post-mortem dissections, 54 rum, 164, 212, 261; spirits Hunter, W., 37 of wine, 64, 65, 79, 357; soft Hurst, surgeon, 74 tissue structures, specimens, 21, Huxley, T.H., 83, 84, 136, 138–142, 33, 65, 80, 211; wax models, 148, 149, 196, 199, 216–218, 237; William Lanne, 143 241, 252 bones compared with Cro-Magnon, Hydra, experiments, 56 219, 220 brains, 226, 252, 259, 277, 362 burials; bundle, 143, 363; plat- I form, 96, 206, 263, 308, 309, Illidge, T., 228 315, 317, 319, 340; platform, Indigenous Australians. See also Skulls images, 315, 317; tree, 244, ancestral burial places; burial caves, 250, 301, 307, 308 93, 330; coastal, 80; oral tes- cemetery graves plundered, 146, timony, 339, 340; plundered, 147, 188, 208, 217, 228, 321 77, 82, 96, 169, 208, 226, colonial monuments to, 290, 291, 230, 244, 271, 277, 322, 326; 297 plundered, moral unease at, 77, contemporary protests against burial 204, 338, 341 excavations, 277, 352 armed raids on camps, 284 decapitated, 74, 155 artefacts, 93, 170, 196, 200, 204, dispossession, 7, 8, 10, 27, 164, 208, 224, 227, 229, 230, 197, 281, 320, 338, 361 235–238, 250, 259, 262, in evolutionary thought, 138, 249, 268, 276, 284, 288, 292, 275 296, 334 exploration guides, 288 bodies; children, 66, 104, 110, 170, funerary; ceremonies, 82, 92, 95, 188, 203, 276, 293; dried, 94– 132, 167, 170, 262, 273, 291, 95, 153, 263, 276; embalmed, 299, 302, 304, 305, 324, 326, 348; female perineum, 296; 330, 332; removal of skin, 134 heads in spirits, 64, 79, 226, imagined attributes, 99, 114, 131, 246, 296; ‘Lady Adelaide’, 348; 157, 181, 183, 184, 255, 302; 414 Index

imagined extinction, 31, 93, phrenologically examined, 173; 99, 105, 133, 139, 149, 156, tribes, 133, 142, 162, 167, 204 178, 198, 202, 204, 211, 220, drawn by Webber, 61 228, 240, 249, 254–256, 275, Inman, T., 303 289, 298, 299, 311, 317, 320, Inuit peoples, 85 326 Investigator, H.M.S., 80 initiation scars, 92 Ireland kidnapped children, 290 Royal College of Surgeons, 107 killed by convicts, 60 ‘Last Native Kings’, 143, 231, 273, 320 J ‘Last of their Tribe’, 231, 320, 324 James Cook University, 336, 340 medical patients, 267, 276 Jamison, J., 75 morphology, 33, 38, 68, 96, 99, Java, 52, 253 103, 112, 139, 149, 184, 190, Jenkins, E., 215 192, 195, 198, 239, 246 Jenkins, T., 329, 333, 354 opium, 267, 272 Jewish victims of Nazism, 280 plaster casts, crania and heads, 75, ‘Jimmy,’ shot by W.H. Willshire, 295 86, 173, 206, 237 Jinny, Ngadjon-Jii people, 273 proprietary rights, 310–312 Johns, R.E., 129 Protectors of Aborigines, 132, 142, Johnstone, R., 290, 291 203, 217, 260, 267, 289, 292, Jones, S., 333, 336 312–315, 323 Jorgenson, J., 163 repatriation campaigning, 172, 254, Jukes, J.B., 81 332, 333, 338, 339, 350 resistance, 104, 163, 171, 177, 196, 202, 248, 256, 281, 294 K rights to land for burial recognised, Kaiber, Noongar guide to George 313 Grey, 305 spearings, 231, 271; cattle, 267, Kames, Lord (Henry Home), 113, 281, 286, 292, 294–296, 298, 122, 123 341; sheep, 314 Kangaroos, 65, 153, 171, 308 spears, 64, 203, 204, 288; marine, Kant, I., 30 201 Kay, R., 244 suicide, 336 Keith, A., 38, 348 Tasmanians; ‘Black War’, 133, 310; Kennedy, E., 288 compared to early hominids, Kenrick H.B., 227, 324 83, 255; death mask, 89; Kenyon, A.S., 251 Flinders Island, 93, 142, 143, Keppel Islands, 269 146, 204, 253; funerary prac- Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Culture tices, 143, 204; seashells, neck- Centre (KALACC), 340 laces, 204; ‘Shiny’, 80; skulls King, J., 51, 55 Index 415

King, P.G., 64 Locke, J., 124 King, P.P., 80 Logan, P., 94, 161 ‘Kipper Billy’, 322 Long, E., 41, 122 Klaatsch, H., 255, 268–273 Longman, H.A., 257, 276 Knopwood, R., 66, 167, 168 Lonsdale, H., 126 Knowles, A., 192 Louisiade Archipelago, 84 Knox, R., 125–129, 135, 136, 149, Lubbock, J., 249 151, 183, 361 Lyell, C., 137, 138, 140 belief in infertility of hybrids, 129 Lyons, F., 285, 286 Kosovo War, 317 Krause, W., 246 Krefft, G., 195, 196, 216–221, 224, M 248 Macalister, A., 239, 242 dismissal from Australian Museum, MacGillivray, J., 82, 83 196 Mackenzie, G.S., 157, 173 Kulebah, 288 Maclay (Mikluho-Maklai), N.N., 259 Macleay, A., 199 Macleay, W.S., 199 L Macleod, R., 198 Lamarck, J.B., 90, 97 Maconochie, A., 184 Lambrick, G., 81 Macquarie, L., 172 The Lancet, 345 Madley, L., 245 Landor, E.W., 306, 307 Maluku Islands, Indonesia, 48 Lang, J.D., 185 Mann, W., 301 Langstaff, G., 72 Mansell, F., 78 Lanne, W., 143–146, 253 Mansell, M., 334 skeleton, 145, 146 Maori, 52, 95, 152, 221 skull, 144, 145, 147 ancestral burial places, plundered, Latour, G., 308 176 Latrobe, C.J., 200, 201 skull, 144 Law of death and burial, 234, 278, Toi moko (tattooed heads), 95, 152; 309, 320, 327, 342, 343, bought by seamen, 85 346–348, 353, 362 Marambari, Majunbalmi people, 301 proprietorial rights in human Maria, brig, massacre, 290 remains, 345 Marsupials Lawrence, W., 107, 110–112 specimens collected, 68, 90, 95, Leach, W., 100, 101 218, 259, 272 Linnaeus (Carl von Linné), 21, 43, Marten, G., 214 46–49, 51, 56, 57, 104 Maschmedt, F., 230 preformist biology, 49 Masters, G., 218 Systema Naturae, 48 Materialism, concept, 110, 112, 168, varietal typology, 47, 48 180, 181, 273 Lister, army surgeon, 88 May, R.H., 66 416 Index

McCombie, T., 190 Mulgrave River, 263, 290 McCooey, H., 341 Mulvaney, J., 178, 242, 250, 298, 351 McCoy, F., 201, 207–209, 238, 249 Munich McDonald, H., 31 ethnology museum, 2, 4, 264 McGregor, R., 31, 99, 156 Murray, J., 178 McMaster, C.J., 228 Murray Island, Torres Strait, 82 Medical practitioners, 17, 28, 89, 100, Musée royal d’histoire naturelle, 109, 117, 132, 133, 145, 153, Brussels, 146 181, 182, 185, 187, 213, 243, Muskets, 64, 67, 93, 95 261, 287, 313, 350 Myall Creek massacre, 185 Medical Times, 73 ‘Myrnong heaps’, 217 Melanesians, 83, 89, 225, 260, 265 Mendelian genetics, 276 Mermaid, H.M.S., 80 N Meston, A., 4, 10, 12, 14, 16, 260, Napoleonic Wars, 79, 87 284 Nation, W., 308 Michie, M., 184 National Museum of Australia, 1, 338 Midgegooroo, Beliar Elder, 153 Native Americans, 7, 19, 56, 57, 96, ‘Migalu’ (white people), 273 100, 123, 130, 131, 199, 209, Millar, J., 41 333, 357 Milligan, J., 93, 134, 135 Naturalists, 21, 22, 48, 63, 91, 113, Milton, J., 124 115, 122, 199, 209, 211, 229 Miners, 14, 17, 272, 287 amateur, 16, 64 Missionaries, 111, 117, 164, 175, 176, Naval surgeons, 75, 77, 78, 80, 86, 187, 191, 205, 238, 261, 273, 92, 162, 164, 179 275, 302, 309, 311, 315, 351 Nayinggu, J. Bininj Elder, 1 stations, 139 Neanderthal, 136–139, 236, 239, 252 Mitchell, T., 303, 305, 306, 322 skull compared with Australian, Mjöberg, E., 277, 340 111, 138, 140, 149, 239, 252; Moncrieff, G.F., 182, 184 deemed pathological, 140 Monro, A., 74, 75, 100, 103, 104 ‘Neddy Larkin,’ Widjabul Elder, 231 Montagu, G., 294 Neolithic Monthly Magazine, 300 barrow burials, 170, 219 Moore, N., 292 migration, 241, 242 Moore, W., 66 New Guinea, 82, 84, 91, 221, 232, Moorhouse, M., 132, 315 255 Moreau, ‘ultra phrenologist,’, 187 skulls, 225, 230 Morris, A., 88 New Hebridean skulls and skeletons, Morriset, J.T., 177 265, 267 Morton, S., 130–133, 135, 183, 204 New Ireland skulls, 266 Moseley, H.N., 215, 250, 268 New South Wales Mountgarret, J., 66 Anatomy Act, 1891, 348 Index 417

Attorney General, 186 Moolah, 324 Awabakal people, 175, 176, 186, Mundi Mundi Plains, 244 323; burial, 175 Murrumbidgee River, 93, 305 Bathurst district, 176, 214, 215, Murwillumbah, 227, 228 300; massacre, 176 Nepean River, 171, 172 Black Head, 165 Newcastle, 175, 323 Botany Bay, 50, 53 New England region, 306 Bundjalung people, 228, 230 Ngunnawal people, 91 Burragorang Valley, 171 Northern Rivers District, 227 Campbell River, 214 Picton, 341; police magistrate, 341 Carcoar, 213 Riverina district, 92 Central Highlands, 92 Shoalhaven district, 164–166 Cooloomgatta, 165 State Library, 89 Cowra, 229 Sydney; Australian Library, 180; Cudgegong River, 92 bodies exhibited, 263, Darling River, 227, 303 345; Bulletin, 6, 283, 319; Darug people, 60, 63–65, 75, 92, Challenger expedition, 215; 103 early Indigenous resistance, Gan-gaar people, 53 63, 64, 172; Exhibition 1879, Githabul people, 306 227, 228, 264; Gazette, 163, Gomeroi people, 319 180; H.M.S. Sapphire, 225; Goulburn, 214, 319, 341 Illustrated Sydney News, 289, Grafton, 218 320; Monitor, 177; Morning Grose River plains, 172 Herald, 6, 263; Parramatta Gundungurra, people, 166, 171, Female Factory, 185; phrenolo- 341, 343 gists, 164, 186; Port Jackson, Gunnedah, 319 68, 103; remains sent to, Gweagal people, 53 66; sale of Toi moko (Maori Hawkesbury River, 172 Tattooed heads), 95; School Hunter region, 213 of Arts, 179, 184; Sydney Kamberra people, 296 University, 342, 348, 359 Kamilaroi people, 203 Wallerang, ‘Last Native King, 320 Keera station, 306 Wandandian people, 164 Kiama, 321; cemetery, 321 Wellington Valley, 219, 302 Lachlan River, 169, 170, 227, 303, Wiradjuri people, 92, 170, 176, 305 177, 213, 215, 322, 342; Lake George, 171 funerary practices, 303; massa- Lake Macquarie, 175 cre, 176; woman buried, 214 Lismore, 230 Wollombi District, 304; Yass, 229 Macquarie River, 169, 170, 303 Newton, I., 40, 48, 111, 124, 240, Maitland, 188 248 Molong, 322, 342 New York Review of Books, 317 418 Index

New Zealand, Wellington, Colonial Victoria River Downs Station, 295 Museum, 240 Yanyuwa people, 244 Ngadja, Ngadjon-Jii Elder, 273 Yithuwa Madarrpa people, 67, 68 Nicholson, C., 132, 204 Yolngu people, 335 Nind, I.S., 300, 302 Nootka Sound, British Columbia, 51 Northern Territory, 27, 205, 236, O 238, 240, 242–245, 294, 298, Ogilvie, W., 213 302, 335 Oodgeroo, Noonuccal Elder, 340 Alice Springs, 250, 295, 296 Ornithologists, 147, 196 Arnhem Land, 67, 79, 80, 116, Ornithology, 223, 224, 227, 261 300, 335 Ourang Utans, 238 Barkley Tableland, 240 Owen, R., 81–83, 86, 90, 93, 94, 116, Bathurst Island, 300 133, 138, 168, 199, 200, 206, Blue Mud Bay, 67 217, 220, 226 Borroloola, 244, 250 Oxley, J., 169–171, 303, 332 Charlotte Waters, 250 Coburg Peninsula, 80–82 Darwin, 239, 245, 294, 308. See P also Port Essington Palaeolithic era, 239–241 Garrwa people, 308 Palaeontology, 86, 152, 207, 233, Gordon Creek, 295 241, 261, 276, 350 Goulburn Island, 80 Pallottine missionaries, 351 Illamurta Springs, 296 Palmer, A., 258 Iwaidja people, 81, 82, 116 Palm Island, W., 2 Katherine region, 294 Papua New Guinea, 83, 91, 255 Larrakia people, 245 Papuans, 61, 92, 216 Lawn Hill Station, 292 Pardoe, C., 269, 329, 361 Madjunbalmi people, 301 Parker, A.G., 173 Mangarrayi people, 294 Pastoralism, 41, 77, 90, 93, 164, 176, McDonnell Ranges, 242, 243 182, 202, 207, 213, 215, 226, Mount Stuart, 295 238, 242, 244, 256, 266, 275, Muralug Island, 82 282, 288, 290, 291, 298, 302, Pine Creek, 294 304, 311, 314 police, mounted, 244, 245, 294, stations, 92, 244, 266, 301 298; killing of ‘Pompey, 295 workers, 104, 185; convicts, 164 Port Essington, 81, 82, 85, 116, Paton, W., 186 300 Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Roper River, 294 230, 231 Tempe Downs, 296 Pemulwye, Darug People, 63–65 Tree Telegraph Reserve, 250 Péron, F., 332 Undoolya Station, 295 Perrin, C., 156 Index 419

Peru crania, 55 crania, 187 seaman, skulls, 91 mummy, 152 ‘Porcupine Men’, 109 Peterson, N., 335 Porter, R., 47 ‘Petrifed black fellow’, 344 Porteus, B., 309 Petrow, S., 143 Port Phillip district, 142, 184, 186, Pettigrew, T., 153, 154 200, 201, 304. See also Victoria Philadelphia Postmortem dissections, 253. See also Academy, 130, 132 Lanne W.; Truganini Phillip, A., 51, 60, 61, 309 attended by J. Reynolds, 34 Phrenology, 89, 130–132, 151–158, by J.G. Spurzheim, 156 164, 169, 173–175, 179–193, convicted murderers, 166 303 Saartje Bartmann, 106 busts, 160, 189, 206 South Sea Islanders, 290 colonial, 163, 172, 176 Tasmanians, 61, 112, 133, 255 electro-magnetism, 187 W. Ramsay Smith, 270 grave-robbing, 164, 170, 175 ‘Preformation,’ biological, 42 museums, 160, 174, 189 Preserving fuids national phrenology, 157, 183, 184, alcohol, 86 192, 361 arsenic-rich, 260 satirised, 188, 232 formaldehyde, 345 Physiognomy, 113, 128 rum, 164, 212, 261 Pickering, C., 190 Prichard, J.C., 69, 112–118, 136, Piggott, S., 6 192, 302 Pithecanthropus erectus, 253, 254 Primates, 11, 37, 106, 137, 212, 239 Pittard, S.R., 206, 217 apes, 46, 48, 49, 106, 116, 123, Pitt Rivers, A. H. L. F., 250, 333, 359 137, 198, 219, 252; anthro- Plant physiology, 43, 58 poid, 236, 252; morphological Poetry, 42, 53, 299, 317 similarities with humans, 48 An Aboriginal Funeral, 319 chimpanzees, 38, 138, 212 Blackfellow’s Grave, 320 gorillas, 138, 212, 238 Elegy Written in a Country Church Proboscis monkey, 238 Yard, 321 Prout, J.S., 134 An Orrible Tale of Gore, 293 Pryor, M., Birra Gubba Elder, 32 racial doggerel of J.B. Stephens, 362 Pryor, P., Bira Gubba Elder, 32, 336 Police, magistrates, 77, 94, 290, 291, 341 Pollard, J., 271 Q Polygenism, 41, 118, 122, 151 Quakers, 113 Polygenists, 122, 124. See also Davis, surgeons, 72 J.B.; White, C. Queensland Polynesians, 53, 91 Atherton, 272 420 Index

Aurukun, 270 Gladstone, 262 Barrier Reef, 233 Glenormiston pastoral station, 266 Barron River, 4, 284, 291 Goongarry (Goongarrie), 288 Barry’s Pocket, 273 government, 274, 288 Bartle Frere, 271 Gubbi Gubbi people, 206, 325 Bellenden Kerr Range, 271, 272 Gulf Country, 270, 271, 288, 291, Birri-Gubba nation, 29, 281, 283, 301, 308 336, 360 Herberton, 262, 285; mining felds, Blackall, 262 286 Bogantungan, 265 Hodgkinson gold feld, 263 Boonjie, 272–273 Hope Valley Mission, 271 Boulia, 266 Ipswich, 219 Bowen, 29, 202, 281, 283 Julia Creek, 308 Bowen hospital, 282 Koomburmerri people, 334 Brisbane; Anglican churchyard Kurtijar people, 307 plundered, 322; Brisbane River, Laura River, 291 75; gaol, 258–260; Grammar Mackay, 214, 216, 265, 283, 284, School, 268; Philosophical 290; Polynesian Hospital, 265 Society, 205; museum. See Malabarra Yidinyji people, 263 Queensland Museum Mamu people, 231 Broadbeach, burials excavated, 277 Manbara people, 2 Bungee (Russell River)’ people, 231 Mapoon, 270 Bunya Mountains, 325 Mbabaram people, 262, 286 Burdekin River, 290 Moreton Bay, 75, 88, 94, 161, 201, Cairns, 2, 270–274, 285, 286, 291, 258, 283 303 ‘mummifed’ human remains, 262, Cape Upstart, 336 286–291 Cape York, 259 native police, 15, 262, 269, 281, Cardwell District, 290 283–292, 347 Cooktown, 230, 233, 258, 270, newspapers, 1, 287; Brisbane 287 Courier, 258, 264; Cairns Post, Cunningham’s Gap, 258 14, 284; Gladstone Observer, Darling Downs, 88, 201 262; Mackay Mercury, 290; The Darnley Island, Torres Strait, 82 Queenslander, 258, 260, 263, Djabugay people, 263 325 Emerald, 265 Ngadjon-Jii people, 273 Endeavour River, 50, 54 Ngaro people, 290 Erub Island, Torres Strait, 82 Nicholson River, 291, 292 exhibition courts, 263, 264 Noonuccal people, 340 Fitzroy River, 344 Norman River, 271 Flinders River, 301, 307 Normanton, 270, 271, 288, 292, Gilbert, River, 288 308 Index 421

Oxford Downs Station, 214 retirement, 234 Palm Island, 2 Rattlesnake, H.M.S, 82–84 police, anthropological collecting, ‘Raubon Ton,’ skull, 88 262, 269, 276, 287–291, 297 Ravensbrück, 283 Pitta Pitta people, 266 Reece, W.H.R, 155, 191 Prince of Wales Island, Torres Strait, Renkioi, Crimea, 133 82 Repatriation, Indigenous human Rockhampton, 213, 265, 282, 290; remains, 279–280, 327, 329, Russell River, 14, 231, 272, 330, 332–339, 346, 352–354 284, 285 critics, 329, 338, 342, 362 Springsure, 272, 287 ‘Resurrectionism’, 265, 325 St Lawrence, 228 Retzer, J. von, 158 Tewantin, 325 Reynolds, H., 189, 192, 310 Thursday Island, 270 Reynolds, J., 34–38, 50, 55 University of Queensland, 277 Richards, J., 15, 283, 351 Wakka Wakka people, 206 Richardson, J., 85–87, 167 Wanyurr Majay people, 271 Rights, to land, 7, 311, 315 Warrego district, 287 Robertson, A.W.D., 255 Woppaburra people, 269 Robertson, W., 166 Yagar people, 218 Roberts, T., 291, 308 Yarrabah Mission, 274 Robinson, G.A., 142, 162 Yirrganydji people, 263 journals, 143 Yugarabul people, 258 Rochester, New York, 232 Queensland Museum, 196, 203, 216, Rock shelters, 219, 241 238, 257–268, 276, 284–291, Roginski, A., 188 296, 298, 325 Rolleston, C., 213 Rolleston, G., 148, 213–216, 219, 225, 226, 268 R Roth, H.L., 283 Race. See also Human variation Roth, W., 266–268, 275, 347 history as racial struggle, 221, 248 anthropometry, 268 racial typology, 98, 121, 128, Rowland, H.M., 213–214 152, 184, 197, 211, 220, Russia 242, 252, 274–276, 298, Geographical Society, 259 361 theorists, pro-slavery, 125, 153 Radcliffe-Brown, A., 351 S Raiatea, Tahiti, 52 Sachs, L., 263, 264 Ramsay, E.P, 4, 10, 223–233, 264, Sami people, 44 284, 341 Sapphire, H.M.S., 225 appointment to Australian Museum, Sappol, M., 19 213 Sarawak, 238 422 Index

Saupé, A., 237, 238 79–89, 91–94, 96, 99–101, 103, Schaaffhausen, H., 137, 138 105, 106, 112, 115, 116, 118, Schlagintweit, R. von, 237 124, 130–138, 140–142, 144, Schmidt, E., 225 147, 148, 151–171, 173–178, Schoetensack, O., 269, 272 182–184, 186, 188–193, 203, Schwalbe, G, 254 206–209, 212–215, 218, 225– Scott, J., 89 227, 229, 231, 232, 234–239, Scott, S., 206 242, 245–247, 251–255, 258, Scott, T., 78 262, 269, 273, 276, 279, 280, Scott, T.H., 167, 168, 179 287, 291, 292, 295, 296, 333, Sculptors, 160, 237 345, 347, 357, 361. See also Seager, F., 145 Crania; Skeletons; Phrenology Seamen African, 10, 25, 39, 44, 111, 117, non-European autopsied, 226 131, 158, 160 Sedgwick, A., 207 Africans, sub-Saharan, 41, 111, 131, Seemann, B., 212 158, 225 Semon, R., 287 Anglo-Saxon, 115 Shakespeare, 171, 180, 240, 248 as tobacco-holders, 232 Shanks, army surgeon, 88 Carib Indians, 74 Sheets-Pyenson, S., 20 cigar cases, 232 Sheldon, J., 55 collectors; Allport, M., 143, Shepherds, 42, 134, 162, 171, 185, 147; Aplin, D.H., 217; 215, 288, 290 Beaglevoyage, 81; Bennett, convict, 162, 171 G., calls for collecting of Sheridan, B., 290 skulls, 93; Berry, A., 168, 169; Sibthorp, J., 58 Blackwood, F., 81; Blandowski, Skeletons, 72, 74, 76, 85–87, 116, W., 203; Charnay, C.J.D., 258; 134, 146, 207, 208, 211, 216, Clarkson, C.H., 265; Cook 218, 219, 224, 226–230, 232, voyages, 51; Craig, J.W., 258; 233, 235, 237, 238, 239, 244, Craig, T., 344, 345; Crowther, 245, 247, 252, 254, 258, 262, W.E.L., 253; Cunningham, 266, 268, 276, 283–286, 325, P., 213; Davidson, W.R., 326, 340, 349, 352 214; Davis, J.B., 24, 74, as curios, 232, 295 87, 115; Day, W., 231, 232; Cro-Magnon, 219–221, 239 Earl, G.W., 116; Espie, R., Haslar anatomy museum, 84 162; Flinders voyage, 67, 68; Ourang Utan, 238 Foelsche, P., 245, 294; French, thigh bones, 219 C., 251; Gunn, R.C., 94; Skin Hamilton, A.S., 188; Hann, post-mortem removal, 283 F., 293; Hawdon, J., 307; Skulls, 33, 37–39, 44, 49–51, 58–62, Hill, A., 214; Hobson, E.C., 64, 65, 69, 71–73, 75, 76, 89; Jenkins, E., 215; Jukes, Index 423

J.B., 81; MacGillivray, J., 82; Melanesian, 83, 265 Marten, G., 214; Milligan, J., nasal; bones, 128; cavity, 103; sep- 93; Natural History Museum, tum, 55, 61 Vienna, 236; Nicholson, C., Native American, 100, 131 132; Oxley, J., 169–171; Neanderthal, 138, 140, 141; com- Phillip, A., 51, 60; police, pared with Australian, 111, Northern Territory, 245, 190, 198, 212, 330 294–296, 298; police, 244; New Britain, 230 Queensland, 276, 283–292, New Guinea, 225 347; Robinson, G.A., 142; Ngarrindjeri nation; stolen, 263; Rolleston, C., 213; Roth, W., water vessels, 83 266, 347; Rowland, H.M., plaster casts, 86, 173, 206, 237 214; Scott, T.H., 95, 168; Polynesian, 91, 184 Spencer, W.B., 223; Stanger, returned by Pitt Rivers Museum, W., 213; Stokes, J.M., 214; 333 Story, J.F., 93; Stretton, W.G., skullcaps, 95, 132, 138, 244; Vis, C. de, 261; Watson, 254; Neanderthal, 137; A., 234; Williams, T., 224; Pithecanthropus, 253; Yardley, J., 227 Tasmanian, 254 colonial frontier violence, victims, sub-Saharan, 11, 111, 112, 117 185, 280, 285, 287, 296, 297; synostotic, 141 bullet wounds, 269, 286, 291; Tasmanian, 51, 62, 72, 74, 80, ‘Native Police grave yards’, 292 91, 93, 95, 133, 142, 254; dealers; Deville, J., 160–162; examined by William Turner, Goodwin, A.P., 230; 254; Lanne W., 145, 146, 148; Maschmedt, F., 230; Phillip, Larmairremener people, 163; H., 296; Stephens, J.C., 314; taken to Flinders Island, 134 Ward, H. A., 232 thickness, 193 Egyptian, 132, 225 Timorese, 20 environmental effects on morphol- ‘Tin Pot Billy’, 215 ogy, 50 Tiwi Islands, 333 facial bones, 108, 117, 132 Torres Strait, 225 Fijian, 227 traded, for tobacco, 82, 232 Fort Pitt Australian collection, 87 Wiradjuri people, 177 Haslar collection, 84–86 Yagan, 152–155 and human variation, 62 Zulu war trophies, 232 Irish, 87 Slavery, 113, 122–124, 160, 309 jawbones, 51, 101 Smallpox, 248, 352 made into sugarbowls and spittoons, Smith, Adam, 41 295, 296 Smith, Andrew, 87 Malay, 245 Smith, W.R., 247, 270, 349, 358, 359 Maori, 159 Smyth, R.B., 209, 216, 249 424 Index

Snell, E., 308 320; Karloan, A., 340; Mack, Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 219 P., 340; Sumner, S., 32; Society Islands, 52, 58, 59 Treverrow, T., 5; skullcap Sohier, P., 189 water vessels, 83, 96, 137; Solander, D., 51 ‘Tommy Walker’ (Poltpalingada Solomon Islanders, 265 Booboorowie), 349; death and South Australia dissection, 346, 349 Aborigines’ Friends Association, 350 police; anthropological collecting, Adelaide; Australasian Association 245, 291, 294–296 for Advancement of Science Port Augusta, 214 meetings, 240, 272; Coroner post-mortem dissections, 246; and Inspector of Anatomy, 349, University of Adelaide, 234 350; hospital, 348; Kaurna Protector of Aborigines, 132, 142, people, 132, 138, 301; Lady 203, 312–315 Adelaide, 348; museum. Royal Society, 247 See South Australian Museum; Supreme Court, 344 Parkside Lunatic Asylum, 348; Swanport, 247, 248 University of Adelaide, 223, Walkandi-Woni people, 313, 315 234; West End Cemetery, 349 South Australia Illustrated, 317 administration of Northern South Australian Company, 316 Territory, 205, 239 South Australian Library, 234 Anatomy Act, 246, 349 South Australian Museum, 196, 201, Anatomy Inspector, 349 203, 205, 207, 223, 234, 236, Crown Lands Act, 344 238, 245, 294, 298, 350 Fleurieu Peninsula, 315 South Australian Philosophical Society, Hindmarsh Island, 350 201 Lake Alexandrina, 317 Southern Africa Lake Bonney, 304 Cape colony, 126 Lands Department, 247 colonial frontier violence con- Legislative Council, 201 demned by R.Knox, 128 Macleay Tribe, 237 Khoi people, 48, 87, 89, 106, 126, Meintangk people, 232, 344 128 Merkani people, 232, 313, 315 San people, 48, 87, 126 Moorundi, 317 Xhosa people, 87 Mount Gambier, 344 Zulu people, 232 Murray River, 214, 220, 247, 304, South Sea Islanders, 264, 290 307, 315, 316, 340; lower, Spencer, G., 67 247, 306, 318, 340 Spencer, W.B., 196, 207, 223, 224, Myponga Vale, 315, 316 242, 249, 277, 351 Naracoorte, 232 Spurzheim, J.G., 156, 158, 159, 164 Ngarrindjeri nation, 83, 95, 96, determinism, 151 214, 247, 308, 313; Elders, in Edinburgh, 181 Index 425

lectures, 181 Tasmania Staiger, K., 260 anatomy legislation, 145 St. Andrews, University, 75, 166, 168 Bass Strait, 67, 204, 310 Stanley, O., 83 Bicheno, 321 Stepan, N., 10, 97, 98, 248 Big River (Larmairremener) people, Stephen, J., 310, 311 162 Stevens, J.C., 232, 345 Black Jack, Indigenous Tasmanian, Stirling, E.C., 26, 153, 196, 207, 223, 89 224, 234, 235, 237, 244, 296, Bruny Island, 50 298 crown assumption of sovereignty, appointment as museum director, 310 223 Flinders Island, 93, 94, 142, 143, and Archibald Watson, 239 146, 204, 253 platycnemic tibia, 239 French; ambitions, 65; voyagers Stirling, J.L., 153, 248 encounter burials, 330 Stocking, G., 11, 98, 113, 302 Government, 339, 343 Stokell, G., 144, 145 Hobart, 89, 91, 134, 143, 147, Stokes, J.L., 81, 301, 307, 308 162, 167, 200, 204, 253, 322; Stokes, J.M., 214 colonial surgeons, 89, 168, Stone age, Indigenous Australians and 280; hospital, 91, 143; St. Europeans compared, 233 David’s Churchyard, 145 Stone tools, 241 Launceston, School of Arts, 186 axes, 171 Legislative Council, 91, 95, 189 classifcation by J.P. Kenyon, 251 Maria Island, 330 grinding stones, 336 Midland Plains, 162 tomahawks, 164, 288 museums, 253, 322 Story, G.F., 93 natural history society, 200 St Petersburg, 58, 198, 260 newspapers; Tasmanian Mail, 322 Stretton, W.G., 244, 245, 294 Nuenonne tribe, 338 Stringer, C., 330 Ouse River, 162 St Vincent Island, 59 Oyster Bay tribe, 331 Surveyors, colonial, 63, 82, 302, 304 Oyster Cove, 134, 146, 147, 253; Sweatman, J., 81, 82 Aboriginal station, 208, 240 Symes, R.H., 265, 287 Pinnanobathac (Bessie Clark), 146 Risdon Cove massacre, 65 Royal Society, 93, 143–146, 200, T 204, 339 Tacitus, 166 Shannon River, 162 Tahitians, 51, 52 Supreme Court, 343 skulls, 58 Surrey Hills, 134 Tamar, H.M.S., 300 Tyreddeme people, 331, 332 Tambo, Manbarra man, 2 Wauba Debar, 321 426 Index

Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC), V 279 Vanatinai, Papua New Guinea, 84 Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Van Diemen’s Land. See Tasmania 89 Varietal diversity, human, 45, 48, 96, Tasmanian tiger (Thylacine), 86 98, 121, 130, 131, 156, 178, Tate, Ralph, 234–238 206, 211 Thomas, W., 217 traits, 46, 47 Thompson, W., 147 types, 33, 43, 46, 47, 49, 56, 73, Thomson, D., 335 98, 121, 157, 178 Thomson, J., 83 Vermillion Accord, 279 Threlkeld, L., 175, 176, 186, 187, 191 Victoria Thurnam, J., 132 Aboriginal Legal Service, 346 Tierra del Fuego Bendigo Working Men’s Club, 216 Cape Desolation, 79 Boon Wurrung people, 208, 217 Haush people, 48 Camperdown; Camperdown Selk’nam people, 48 Chronicle, 323 Tiwi Islanders, 334 executive council, 201, 202 Lands Council, 333 Field Naturalists Club, 251 skull, 334 Geelong District, 295 ‘Tommy Came-frst,’ guide to Mitchell Geological Survey Offce, 217 expedition, 305 Gippsland District, 352 Torres Strait, 81, 82, 259, 266 goldfelds, 189 Islanders, 152, 195, 198, 224, 225, Koondrook, 251 276, 298, 358, 363 Kow Swamp, 6, 352 Townley, Sargeant, 145 legislative council, 189 Transmutation, 90, 97, 123, 127, 140 Liwira Gunditj people, 323 gradual, 97 Loddon River, 251 progressive, 127 Mallee region, 352 Trembley, A., 56 Melbourne; Argus, 189; general Trinity Bay, 263 cemetery, 217; Industrial and Truganini, Nuenonne woman, 338 Technical Museum, 209, 238, descendants, 324 251; International Exhibition exhumation, 339 1880, 233, 264; Mechanics reburial, 338 Institute, geological collection, Tuberculosis, 91, 214, 243 200, 232; National Gallery, Turner, W., 251–253, 349 208, 209; National Museum, Tylor, E., 249, 250 1, 3, 27, 195, 196, 201, 203, 207–209, 223, 249, 255, 261, 306, 338; phrenology, U 189; skulls sent from, 116; Umbelah (Johnny Campbell), 260 University of Melbourne, 242, Unst Isle, Scotland, 236 346 Index 427

Mordialloc, 208 Western Australia, 81, 85, 88, 152, Murray River; burial places exca- 155, 213, 275, 292, 300, 311, vated, 352 340, 351 Relics Act, 346 Bardi Jawi people, 351 Rosebud, 90, 91 Beeliar people, 152, 153 Western district, 217, 292, 323 Bernier Island, 351 Western Port, 91, 138 Cygnet Bay, 81, 96 Yorta Yorta people, 6, 334, 339, Dampier Peninsula, 81, 351 352; Elders, Atkinson, H., Gooniyandi people, 340 339 Kidji people, 340 Victoria River Massacre, 330 Kimberley region, 340 Vienna King George Sound, 80, 85, 154, Natural History Museum, 236 155, 300 Vigors, N.A., 206 Nyikina people, 340 Virchow, R., 260 Perth, 195, 292, 293, 305; Sunday Vis, C. de, 261, 262, 264, 265, 267, Times, 293 269, 286, 287, 292 Point Cunningham, 307 Viti Levu, Fiji, 227 Protector of Aborigines, 292 Swan River district, 85, 152–155, 306 Warburton Ranges, 292 W Western Australian Museum, 16, 195 Walcott, R.H., 251 White, C. Wallace, A.R., 110 measures Afro-Caribbean people, Wallace, F.L., 182, 184 124 Wallis, J., 172 racial typology, 123 Wandjina paintings, 293 White, E., 65, 66 Ward, H. A., Natural History White, G., 273 Establishment, 232, 233 White, J., 237 Ward, J., 65 Wilcox, J., 218 Ward, R., 232 Williams, E., 189 Washington, J., 116 Williams, T., 224 Waterhouse, F., 201, 205, 207, 235 Williamson, G., 72, 87, 89 Waterloo, battle of, 159 Wills, K. Watson, A., 234, 239, 246, 247, 348 Wills, K.H., 281, 282 Watson, J, 295, 296 Willshire, W.H., 295 Weatherall, B., 32, 334 Wilson, C., 32 Webber, J., 61, 62 Wilson, J.T., 348 Wellesley Islands, 270 Windschuttle, K., 17, 176, 297 Wellington, New Zealand Colonial Wise, F., 53 Museum, 240 Wollstonecraft, E., 165 Westall, W., 68 Wombeetch Puyuun, Liwira Gunditj Westaway, M., 346 people, 323 428 Index

World Archaeological Congress Yemmerrawanyea Kebberah, Eora (WAC), 15, 279 people, 61 Wyatt, W., 203, 205, 313–315 Yule, C., 82 Yuranigh, Wiradjuri people, 322, 323

Y Yardley, J., 227, 228 Z Yarrabah Mission, 274 Zietz, A., 238