Building Bodies in the Australian Periphery: The Enactment of Aboriginality in Tasmania Christopher Berk University of Michigan University of Michigan Working Papers in Museum Studies Number 9 (2012) Museum Studies Program Charles H. Sawyer Center for Museum Studies University of Michigan Museum of Art 525 South State Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1354 Office phone: 734-936-6678 Fax: 734-786-0064 www.ummsp.lsa.umich.edu [email protected] © 2012 University of Michigan All rights reserved The University of Michigan Museum Studies Program’s series of “Working Papers in Museum Studies” presents emerging research from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, all focused on the multiple concerns of the modern museum and heritage studies field. Contributions from scholars, members of the museum profession and graduate students are represented. Many of these papers have their origins in public presentations made under the auspices of the Museum Studies Program. We gratefully thank the authors published herein for their participation. This paper is an elaboration of a talk presented as part of the University of Michigan Museum Studies Program’s “Issues in Museum Studies” lecture series on November 1, 2011. It is a product of research supported by a U-M Museum Studies Program Fellowship for Doctoral Research in Museums. Christopher Berk is a member of the 2007 cohort in the U-M Museum Studies Program and is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Christopher can be reached at [email protected]. Building Bodies in the Australian Periphery: Tasmania in Aboriginality of The Enactment Periphery: Australian Bodies in the Building The Enactment of Aboriginality in Tasmania Christopher Berk • the Tasmanians as racially and culturally distinct University of Michigan and different from Aboriginal peoples of mainland Australia Introduction • the Tasmanians as extinct. With the passing of Truganini in 1876, so passed the Tasmanian race In January 1931, E.J. Dicks, a sculptor hailing from Melbourne, was hard at work in a studio in Tasmania’s These three messages are interrelated and complemen- capital city of Hobart. The task-at-hand for Mr. Dicks was tary. They are not mutually exclusive, but reinforce one to build representations of (some would say surrogates another in a circular fashion. However, as this enactment of for) the “Lost Tasmanian Race.” The Hobart Mercury of Aboriginality is by its very nature perpetually in process, January 17, 1931, reports that its attempt to freeze one image/ideology was destined to fail. By focusing on a sequence of newspaper articles from Mr. Dicks [had] already completed the man for the group, and is occupied with the female The Hobart Mercury that detail the process of the group figure. It is a strange commentary on life to see exhibit’s creation, following it from disparate materials the modeler at work with his clay, and beside of plaster, wiring, and so on, to a specific interpellation of him the skeleton of the last of the true Tasmanian reality, I seek to foreground the inherent incompatibility aborigines, Truganini, while at odd intervals between this form of Tasmanian Aboriginality and the skulls peep out here and there, all contributing more heterogeneous and continuous experience of being a moiety of past life to give reality to a present Aboriginal in the Tasmanian context. figment. (The Hobart Mercury, January 17, 1931: 6) For my discussion of the enactment of difference in the Made possible by a gift of £500, the largest given to the Australian periphery, I take inspiration, if not necessarily Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (hereafter referred methodological guidance, from core members of the school to as TMAG) to that point, the group exhibit1 sought to of thought that has become known as Science Technology give Hobartians a glimpse into the “life and habits of a Studies, Bruno Latour and Annemarie Mol in particular. vanished people” (ibid.). Void of clothing and with jet-black As Latour writes, “No science can exit from the network of skin, these three figures, designed to represent a natural its practice” (Latour 1993: 24). Annemarie Mol’s The Body familial unit, were a visual depiction of a people who had Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (2002) exemplifies come to represent the lowest and most primitive culture2 this insight. Mol recounts her time spent at Hospital Z, a ever documented (see fig. 1). In this working paper I argue nameless teaching hospital in the Netherlands. While at that the 1931 group exhibit at TMAG sought to enact, Hospital Z, she focused her attention on atherosclerosis, consecrate, and consolidate one form of Tasmanian Aborig- a disease that leads to the hardening of the arteries in a inality by literally building surrogate representations of the person’s lower leg. By discussing the multiple departments “Lost Tasmanian Race” (who one author poetically, and within the hospital and the varying ways atherosclerosis androcentrically, describes as the “Men Who Vanished” is brought into being, she argues that depending on [Dunbabin 1935]). Drawing on social evolutionary your methods, be it with a microscope, the leg of a frameworks of cultural (and/or social) progress, I argue that deceased individual, or conversation, an atherosclerosis the three main messages that informed, and were reinforced is brought into being, only it is not necessarily the same by, the building of the bodies that comprised the group atherosclerosis. Arguing against perspectivalism, Mol exhibit, were: believes these divergent practices are not merely different ways of getting at the same object; they are all getting at a • the Tasmanians as “Paleolithic Man;” as culturally different object that is given the label “atherosclerosis.” arrested and frozen for millennia due in large part to geographical isolation; in a “culture phase” (Balfour Of great utility to this study is Mol’s conceptualiza- 1925) analogous to pre-historic European culture tion of “enactment.” She puts enactment in opposition to terms such as “construction,” for the former involves an ongoing process while the latter “suggests that material 1 UM Working Papers in Museum Studies, Number 9 (2012) is assembled, put together, and turned into an object that frequently left “off the map” of the larger nation-continent, subsequently goes out in the world all by itself” (Mol 2002: a practice that is most telling. In The Lucky Country, 32). An emphasis on process, on the other hand, “suggests Donald Horne states that that in the act, and only then and there, something is— being enacted…. Thus, an ethnographer/praxiographer Hobart started life on the frontier and then went out to investigate diseases never isolates these from the to sleep. It was one of the earliest convict colonies practices in which they are… enacted. She stubbornly and a roistering whaling port. Then it stood takes notice of the techniques that make things visible, easy…. Existence is said to be somewhere between audible, tangible, knowable. She may talk bodies—but small-town serenity and small-town vindictive- ness. Mainlanders think little about Tasmania and she never forgets about microscopes” (Mol 2002: 33). It foreigners want to know who owns it. (Horne 2008 is in light of these insights that we must not forget about [1964]: 48) skeletal materials, plaster-of-Paris, wiring and paint, and the jobs to which they were entrusted. Specifically, these As an anthropologist who has conducted research in objects and human remains were used in concert to exclude Tasmania since 2004, I can attest to the presence of these and dismiss alternative Aboriginalities in the Tasmanian sentiments.4 context.3 What is concerning is not that there are different phenomena falling under the same label of Tasmanian The idea of Tasmania as an afterthought on the periphery Aboriginal People, but that the ones given credence histori- of mainland Australia is a relatively recent creation. “Van cally by the scientific and political world are not the living, Diemen’s Land,” as it was first named by Abel Tasman breathing human beings, but empty vessels, in the form in 1642, was one of the more prominent locales of British of skeletal remains and the imagined reality of the group Imperialism during the first half of the 19th century. First exhibit. The latter two, in collaboration, have been used to colonized in 1803, Van Diemen’s Land was Great Britain’s help perpetuate specific ideologies of Tasmanian extinction second colonial outpost in Australia, and famously saw and primitivity at the expense of the Tasmanian Aboriginal nearly 60% of convicts exiled to the continent reach its people themselves. shores during their lives. In many ways, the story of the Aboriginal peoples of Tasmania parallels that of the island Once I have established the geographical and historical itself; whereas both were once of central importance context of this topic, I will discuss the theoretical genealogy within broader frameworks, they have both, in many and background for the three interrelated messages respects, become afterthoughts. Interrogating the 1931 described above. I will then turn my attention to the focus group exhibit sheds light upon the critical position of the of this paper, namely the creation and unveiling of TMAG’s original Tasmanians within Victorian anthropology and Building Bodies in the Australian Periphery: The Enactment of Aboriginality in Tasmania Tasmania in Aboriginality of The Enactment Periphery: Australian Bodies in the Building 1931 group exhibit, paying close attention to newspaper evolutionary thought. It was the discursive positionality of coverage and its relevance within more general discussions extinct Paleolithic man that was reinforced and consecrated of museum dioramas. I conclude with a discussion of for mass consumption at the Tasmanian Museum and Art contemporary Tasmanian Aboriginal culture, and various Gallery. responses, both institutional and individual, to the group exhibit and its enduring legacy.