PAUL TURNBULL

INTRODUCTION

LEARNING TO UNDERSTAND WESTERN AND INDIGENOUS SCIENCES

This issue of Humanities Research offers Indigenous knowledge and cultural four papers exploring relations between heritage, and lain McCalman, Director of Western and Indigenous sciences. They the Humanities Research Centre. By early derive from the `Science and Other 1995, these discussions included David Indigenous Knowledge Traditions' Turnbull, a cultural historian intern- conference, held at the Cairns campus of ationally known for his work on the James Cook University in August 1996. relations between Indigenous and The confer-ence was an ambitious Western ways of mapping time and space. venture, sponsored by the Humanities Since assuming the Directorship, Research Centre, in collaboration with McCalman had sought to encourage Bukal Indigenous Consulting, the Centre Indigenous participation in the Centre. for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Given that in 1996 the Centre's activities Participation in Research and would cohere around the theme of Development of James Cook University It `Science and Culture', it seemed to us brought together Indigenous Elders and logical and timely for a major conference knowledge custodians, Indigenous and exploring the relations between European non-Indigenous researchers from and Indigenous sciences. Also, we felt it and overseas for five days on the should be held at the Cairns campus of ancestral country of the Djabugay people, James Cook University This would on which James Cook's recently maximize opportunities for participation established Cairns campus is located. by Elders and knowledge custodians from The decision to devote a major across Northern Australia. However, we Humanities Research Centre conference were also keen to recognize and draw to exploring the relations between upon the expertise in issues relating to European and Indigenous sciences grew Indigenous Australian knowledge out of conversations through 1994 developing within James Cook's Centre for between myself, Henrietta Fourmile, a Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Yidinji historian and policy analyst, well Participation in Research and Develop- known for her research on protection of ment. Indeed, it was while Henrietta

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Fourmile was employed at the Centre that Indigenous biological resouces and other she won international recognition for her less tangible forms of cultural property in research into the theft of Indigenous grave risk of appropriation and use cultural property in Australia. without permission or compensation.

In Queensland, with the gradual For several years, I had likewise been dismantling from the mid-i96os of the interested, as a non-Indigenous protectionist regime under which they researcher, in documenting the fate of had lived since the turn of the twentieth Indigenous cultural property and century Aboriginal and Torres Strait knowledge in nineteenth and early peoples gained legal rights to ownership twentieth century Australia. In particular, and enjoyment of cultural property. Yet, as I had been exploring the history of research by Henrietta Fourmile had scientific procurement and uses of shown, restoration and community Indigenous bodily remains. As is well protection of cultural property hinged on known, the 198os witnessed at times fierce demonstrating the property in question controversy over the continued was used in accordance with 'tribal custom preservation of Indigenous skeletal or law'. State bureaucrats and non- material within museums and medical Indigenous experts effectively reserved schools. Demands by community Elders the right to determine just what and Indigenous spokespersons provoked constituted 'tribal custom and law'; and as debate as to whether scientific criteria or was evidenced by cultural property being obligations prescribed by Indigenous defined as 'relics' in the relevant ancestral belief should ultimately legislation, the presumption on the part of determine their fate. I was particularly non-Indigenous authorities was that little if anything remained by way of Indigenous culture and customary law

Moreover, as Fourmile argues in her contribution to this volume, the continuing persuasiveness of these colonialist assumptions places

lain McCalman, Director of the Humanities Research Centre, and Henrietta Fourmile, conference co-convenor. Photo: Leena Messina INTRODUCTION

struck by the perplexity of personnel natural history collectors or ordinary working in institutions housing settlers keen to aid contemporary collections of remains. Why, as it seemed scientific research into the origins and to them, did research focused on human nature of Indigenous society. Many of remains now cause Indigenous these sources also proved remarkable for Australians such anguish and outrage illuminating the ways in which the when it had never done so before? Several scientific practices and ideas that confessed to me that they could only make rendered the Indigenous dead objects of sense of the controversy in which they had curiosity in European eyes also become embroiled by assuming that it was determined how the living and their orchestrated by younger Indigenous knowledge systems were understood. activists, whose motivation was purely political: quite likely they had been inspired by similar campaigns for the reburial of remains undertaken since the explorers, surveyors and mid 197os by radical North American squatters routinely availed Indian organizations. themselves of Indigenous knowledge There was no reason to doubt that these sentiments were genuine, but what they raised in my mind was whether the What emerged in the process were also controversy over scientific use of glimpses of how explorers, surveyors and Indigenous bodily remains had more squatters routinely availed themselves of complex historical origins that needed to Indigenous knowledge. They used the be considered. This question seemed expertise of Indigenous people to navigate especially pertinent as during the course unknown country and to assess its worth of the controversy both scientific for pastoralism. Explorers often found researchers and their Indigenous critics that the Indigenous men they employed to justified their stance by recourse to claims help them travel, and often live off the about how and why Indigenous bones and land, were anxious to gain the permission soft tissue had come to rest in medical of traditional owners to do so. The schools and natural history museums. diplomacy of Indigenous guides was often Working in the collections of the National critical to expeditions gaining safe Library over the summer of 1994-5, I came passage. Interestingly, guides were at across numerous accounts written during times as unfamiliar as the white men with the course of the nineteenth century the culture of the people whose country documenting how different Indigenous they passed through. When they met with communities sought to prevent the what from their own experience seemed desecration of burial places by explorers, sacred places, Indigenous guides readily

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sought to persuade their European determined by Indigenous knowledge of companions to leave quickly without weather patterns and the reliability of disturbing anything. Typical in this regard local water courses: Indigenous were the expeditions undertaken by pharmacopoeia and ways of healing were George Grey in northwest Australia during assessed and used when they paralleled the late 183os. In his account of his second contemporary western medical practice. expedition in early 18 39, Grey wrote of the Settlers in outlying districts similarly used wariness of Kaiber, the party's principal the ashes of woods favoured by guide, when travelling through unknown Indigenous healers to cauterize wounds, country, and his 'concern and unease' on and employed steam baths using herbs and the party's encountering a newly made species of fern which Indigenous people grave on the upper reaches of the Harvey had discovered to be effective in treating river.' After the loss of their stores and rheumatic pains and bronchial boats, Grey's party was forced to make a congestion.2 Stiff black and white joints gruelling journey of some six hundred were treated with goanna fat.3 The resin kilometres back to. Perth, which they of the red gum ( resinfera) was survived only through Kaiber's diplomacy, used to prevent wounds turning septic, his ability to discover water and and taken in pill form to check dysentery/. persuading the people they encountered As one settler in Western Australia to share frogs and other seasonally recorded in his journal in the early 184os, plentiful foodstuffs. `it is a very strong astringent and has been taken medicinally very generally in the Pastoral, and later mining, frontiers were colony, and certainly I found immediate typical of colonial situations in that the relief from it.'5 colonizers assumed they were inherently superior to the colonized. While as has Throughout the nineteenth century, been extensively documented by colonial naturalists drew heavily on historians, sexual relations between Indigenous knowledge. They invariably Indigenous women and European men relied on Indigenous people to locate were widespread, other relationships, specimens of flora and fauna, as is well grounded in senses of affinity or equality, exemplified by the activities of the early were much rarer, with the result that nineteenth century botanist, George Caley. Indigenous knowledge was used by Through the patronage of , settlers only when it made pragmatic Caley collected extensively in the ancestral sense in terms of western understandings country of the Eora, Dharug and Tharawal of nature. peoples of what is now the greater region between i800 and i8o8. Caley was For many early squatters the choice of quick to appreciate the value-of employing homestead and out-stations was Indigenous help. As he wrote to Banks in INTRODUCTION ii

August 18ot, 'I mean to keep a bush native whom he relied heavily upon when constant soon, as they can trace anything collecting well beyond the boundaries of so well in the woods, and can climb trees European settlement. He was, Caley wrote, with such ease, whereby they will be very `...the best interpreter of the more inland useful to me...'6 Yet, he soon realized that native's language of any that I have met Indigenous people were able to provide with. I can place that confidence in him him with crucial information about the which I cannot in any other — all except animals and plants he encountered. In him are afraid to go beyond the limits of 1802, for example, he sent Banks the space which they inhabit with me (or specimens of various kangaroo and indeed any other)...'. Moowat'tin wallaby species, together with detailed accompanied Caley to and descriptions of their usual habitat and Tasmania in 1805. From what survives of behaviour which had been gathered from Caley's letters and journals it would seem Dharug men. At the turn of the twentieth that this expedition proved a fascinating century, some fifty type specimens of cross-cultural engagement in which two Eucalyptus collected by Caley were individuals schooled in radically different discovered in the Imperial Herbarium at knowledge traditions worked closely Vienna. They reveal how extensively together to make sense of the ecology of Caley relied upon Indigenous people not places to which both were equally only to find specimens, but to provide him strangers. Moowat'tin eagerly questioned with detailed information as to their Caley about the relations between climate, reproductive cycle, growth and uses landform and the forms of vegetation they within Indigenous society. Of a specimen encountered. On the basis of their of the Turpentine Tree (Syncarpia discussions, Moowat'tin sought to locate glomulifera), Caley wrote, `When the tree plant specimens typical of particular is wounded it discharges a turpentine like environments. substance of a peculiar taste and smell While he admired the intelligence of his which bees are remarkably fond of and if I Eora friend, Caley remained conscious do not mistake the natives at some that Moowat'tin lived between two worlds. particular times [they] make incisions into That other world intrigued and disturbed the bark to attract the bees in order to Caley. Exploring the upper reaches of the trace them to their hives or nest for Nepean river in 180 7. Caley and his party robbing them of the honey.'7 Caley also were introduced by one Tharawal clan to a regularly recorded the flora and party of Gundungurra men who had geographical features he encountered by supposedly come to share in a hunt for their Indigenous names. kangaroo. Among the party was Caley came to form a close relationship Carnambaygal, a warrior 'who was to with an Eora youth named Moowat'tin, figure prominently in the campaign of

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resistance that Tharawal, Dharug and forged from cultural resources peculiar to Gundungurra clans fought through the the historical context of its creation. For autumn of 1816. Caley recalled being all its seeming discursive unity European struck by how subdued and respectful the science has been in many respects as Tharawal were in the presence of intellectually diverse as the knowledge Carnambaygal, until seeing his startled systems of Indigenous societies. reaction to Caley's using his gun to bring Where European science has differed is in down a bird. The Tharawal were the persuasiveness of its claims to delighted, Caley wrote, to see universalism. From the mid-seventeenth- Carnambaygal's unease, as they believed century British scientific communities him to be `invincible and more than gave varying degrees of credence to mortaL8 sceptical modes of reasoning. No one way Caley's interpretation of the encounter is a of knowing was believed certain to minor but telling illustration of how by, the confirm the true and essential nature of early nineteenth century Europeans' belief things. Scepticism found much favour in their scientific superiority—tangibly with intellectuals from the 165os, as a way proven in their minds by technologies of ensuring social stability through such as the gun and the time-piece- neutralising the truth claims of both shaped their interaction with Indigenous radical Puritans and Catholic apologists. societies.9 This theme is further explored Another strand of thinking that gained by David Turnbull in his contribution to widespread assent, especially in British this volume, which explores the cultural intellectual circles during the course of entanglement of European and Polynesian the eighteenth century, was the idea that knowledge traditions in the 176os. the methodological aims and procedures Turnbull retells the well:known story of adopted by Newton in determining the James Cook and Tupaia, the Raiatean existence of regularities in the physical priest and navigator, but does so in ways universe could be extended to all domains that tease out the cultural presumptions of human knowledge. Especially amongst implicit in European navigational theologians and moral philosophers these expertise. two strands, scepticism and what we might justifiably call positivism, lay in uneasy Western scientific communities have contradiction. But gradually they came to interacted so as to form complex webs of be seen as capable of resolution by interconnections in which shared accepting that while no way of knowing assumptions and theories about the could lead to certainty, human nature was workings of the natural world have stubbornly disposed to accept various evolved. Even so, as Turnbull shows, propositions as proven Beyond doubt. scientific knowledge has invariably been What was thus required was close INTRODUCTION

investigation of human nature and natural forces. As these societies survived specifically how beliefs came to be through hunting and gathering, there was formed. little or no opportunity for experiences which might allow the formation of the In essence this was the rationale kinds of complex ideas necessary to grasp informing the Enlightenment project of the actual relations between objects and analysing the origins and natural history of entities in the world. Human belief. As the philosophers of the understanding was a captive to the Enlightenment maintained, the human irrational play of,the mind Indeed, when mind was acutely susceptible to the power eighteenth-century European intellectuals of the emotions as they were stimulated or spoke of non-European societies as subdued by the engagement of the senses `savage', they did so presuming savagery to with the body and the external world. In be a distinct condition, characterized by unfavourable existential circumstances, the 'life of the chase' circumscribing what humanity easily fell to irrational thinking its practitioners could believe and know. and behaviour. As David Hume, the highly influential Scots philosopher, argued, 'the Could the savage escape savagery? This mind of man is subject to certain question was to be the focal point of unaccountable terrors and apprehensions, metropolitan and colonial debates about proceeding from the unhappy situation of the fate of Indigenous communities until private or public affairs, from ill health, well into the 184os. The stress that from a gloomy and melancholy Enlightenment philosophy placed on the disposition, or from the concurrence of progressive development of human these circumstances'. Worse, in such a understanding through experience was state of mind the presence of 'infinite interpreted by Christian humanitarians as unknown evils' of unknown causation proving that Indigenous people could be were actively and fearfully assumed to be civilized, at least to the same level as the at work in the affairs of men. labouring classes in settler society, provided they were removed from their The Enlightenment conceptualized country and life-ways at an early age. religious devotion and belief in magical or Humanitarians also aligned themselves occult powers as arising directly out of the with those philosophers who had argued mind's natural propensity to generate that, though ideas were derived solely irrational hopes and fears. The weight of from sensation, there was nonetheless historical evidence was overwhelmingly overwhelming scientific evidence that seen to support the conclusion that the humanity possessed an innate sense of first forms of religion were the most moral judgement. When freely exercised irrational, because life in the earliest this moral sense ineluctably led the mind human societies was lived at the mercy of to embrace the essential truths of

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Christianity. Indeed, it was the teachings objects and entities they perceived almost of Christianity which had refined human exclusively by the patterns of cause and sensibilities so as to seek social and moral effect they associated with them. As improvement. Conversion to Christianity Joseph Banks famously remarked of the was integral to the task of raising the astronomical observations in which he Indigene from savagery. participated on Tahiti during Cook's first Pacific voyage of 1768-71, they were However, as is evident from the writings of inspired by the goal of measuring the early colonial naturalists such as George frame of the world.`° Caley, belief in the supremacy of experience in shaping human intellect By way of confrast, Indigenous Australian could equally result in ambivalence and societies have been equally concerned to often fatalism about those perceived as observe and account for relations between living in the condition of savagery. This objects and entities, but have understood the order of things from the perspective that they themselves either share the same qualities, or are distinguished by not Indigenous science is possessing them. Sylvia Kleinert takes up underwritten by the presumption this point in her paper on Indigenous that all sentient beings are not artistry and craft in southeastern Australia, just created by ancestral spirits showing how everyday life and artistic but are the living embodiment of practice is informed by complex webs of those creative entities meaning drawn be tween self, community, the ancestral realm of being and other phenomena in the world. may also help explain why colonial What seems, to the western eye, intellectuals proved so receptive to knowledge of phenomena that has been theories which posited that the minds of acquired through the same inductive non-Europeans were physiologically less processes that characterize post- equipped to process sensory data. seventeenth-century European science Extending 'the experimental mode of only makes sense—only becomes reasoning into moral subjects', science—through its connections with Enlightenment thinkers drew upon a other beings or things that Europeans culturally engrained repertoire of implicitly see as external to the self. As the assumptions—notably the distinctiveness late David Mowaljarlai, a senior Elder of of mind and body, and culture as opposed the Ngarinyin and Worora peoples of the to nature. They saw reality in terms of Kimberley region, explained by availing physical causality. They explained the himself of the conceptual vocabulary he INTRODUCTION

encountered amongst anthropologists ancestral spirits, but are the living with whom he worked over many years: embodiment of those creative entities. We Aborigines of Australia see our land as Each being, moreover, is conscious of its a grid system, within which every man has place and purpose within the schema of his symbol in nature. One man will have a ancestral creation, and may communicate mountain as his symbol, another the river, that knowledge to other beings. Hence the another a plain; still others represent the investigation and appraisal of phenomena stringy bark tree, or the track of a spirit, a is a process of learning what things say fish such as the rock cod, or a tree blossom. about themselves and other beings. As At our camping place on the grid, we do Deborah Bird Rose writes of the Yarralin not sow seed and plant food, as our spirit people of the Victoria River district of the ancestors put out all our foods for us. Northern territory, they see thei country There are increasing-places where a stone as 'alive with information for those who could symbolize a yam or a barramundi have learned to understand': fish. When we hunt we touch these stones for and obtain that food. Crocodiles (Crocodylus johnstoni), instance, only lay their eggs at one time of There are women—images and man— the year. Yarralin people know that it is images in the earth itself. These images time to hunt for crocodile eggs when the relate to our stories and the cave-painting, black march flies start biting. These and without them we could not live. They annoying flies carry a message:'the march give us energy and power, they give us flies are telling you the eggs are ready.' much wisdom, they are controlling our This sort of knowledge is accurate. If we lives know that crocodiles lay their eggs toward When the really hot weather comes, and the end of the dry season, the calendar can the water supply is reduced to one pool, we tell us that they will probably start know that Wandjina the creator puts that sometime in September or October. March pool there for us. Everybody drinks there flies tell us exactly. together, including the kangaroo, the goanna, the lizard and the snake. The children who drink at that waterhole are However, as Bird stresses, Yarralin do not the image of the Wandjina, who goes on understand this relationship, as western creating our families, our young people ." observers would, in terms of cause and effect. Since the mid-decades of the nineteenth century, western science has come to No one tells the march flies to bite because regard the question of what ultimately the crocodiles are laying eggs. Rather, the big river country where Yarralin is located, causes the regularities discerned in nature march flies know when it is time to hatch as beyond its concern. Indigenous science and forage. Their time is also crocodile is underwritten by the presumption that time. Neither causes the other, nor is all sentient beings are not just created by caused by an external other. In following PAUL TURNBULL

their own Laws they communicate classification as primordial, pre-scientific themselves; those who know the modes of thought. Hence, as David interconnections find information in their Okpako explains in his paper comparing actions 12 Western and African modes of medical To the outsider, the attributes of fellow diagnosis and treatment, there has been a beings discernible to Yarralin clearly long engrained tendency with the Western reflect a specific cultural geography. So academy to relegate Indigenous too does the knowledge they acquire from knowledge to the analytical categories of studying the relations between beings. myth. If we are usefully to re-evaluate the This is not to suggest that western science relations between indigenous and western evades precipitating the wider cultural sciences, we would do well to accept that forces in which it is located into its no knowledge system can make sense of practices and intellectual products. As the world without recourse to deeply much recent historical research has enculturated narrative traditions and demonstrated, western science equally has techniques. All knowledge systems might a social history: the play of wider cultural be considered myth or lore in this respect, forces has similarly determined how facts and analyzed as giving voice to those about the world have become evident.'3 things which matter most in particular As suggested above, where western knowledge traditions. science differs from Indigenous In Australia today most researchers in the knowledge is in how it has come to talk physical or biological sciences appreciate about our primary relations to objects. and respect Aboriginal and Torres Strait What has been distinctive is its use of Islander cultures. However, those who narrative techniques to strengthen choose to interact with Indigenous cognitively its claims to interpret literally communities remain anchored within the world—to be a way of knowing that professional communities still greatly accurately and transparently mirrors the inspired by narratives which represent the unconditioned external world, no matter researcher as discoverer of radically new where and how it may be encountered. and universally applicable insights into the Western scientific discourse relies heavily workings of nature. Over the past decade, on metaphors that not only underwrite its notably within Australian universities claims to interpret literally the grain and which have supported the development of substance of physical existence, but Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander occlude perceptions of its employment of Research Centres, there have been metaphor. Notably in colonial contexts numerous programs undertaken on the other knowledge systems have basis of Indigenous participation and consequently been seen as so suffused control, notably in - the area of with metaphor as to warrant their environmental science. But the outcomes INTRODUCTION

The Yarrabah Dance Company perform as part of the welcome ceremonies for the conference. Photo: Leena Messina. have not yet greatly influenced come to be seen as more than `uni mainstream scientific practice. When tucker'--i.e. raw information about findings have been reported in scientific natural phenomena that is free to be journals, research data has generally been digested by western science with little or re-conceptualized in terms of no consciousness of its being Indigenous conventional disciplinary aims and intellectual property, and no guarantees practices. that its owners will benefit from its use in the commercial development of processes Since the mid-i99os, the refashioning of and products. This presumption, Indigenous knowledge in the light of incidentally, still seems implicit in western scientific aspirations has been Australian science policy. What is critically appraised by Henrietta Fourmile, noticeable about the Federal Government's Errol West, and other researchers at James 1999 White Paper on Higher education, Cook University's Centre for Aboriginal New Knowledges, New Opportunities is and Torres Strait Islander Participation in that is has much to say about invigorating Research and Development. What they Australian science through encouraging have found on consulting North stronger linkages between university- Queensland community Elders and based researchers and industry, but says knowledge custodians is that information nothing about Indigenous science, nor shared with non-Indigenous researchers is indeed anything about the contribution of often still regarded as if the communities Indigenous peoples to our understanding have no real moral or legal claims to of the world. dictate how it will be represented or used within the wider world. As Gladys The Cairns conference aimed to open a Tybingoompa, a senior Elder of the Wik dialogue amongst scientists working people, observed at the Cairns conference, within western and Indigenous traditions, Indigenous knowledge has only recently so that they, philosophers, anthropologists PAUL TURNBULL

and historians could come together to Federal Government in respect of discuss how western and Indigenous Australia's response to the United Nation's sciences might interact in more Convention on Bio-Diversity. The intellectually and morally profitable ways. workshops resulted in the Commission Critical to our thinking about how this being strongly advised to demand of might best be done was the Indigenous government that it endorse provisions Research Ethics Conference organized by within the draft convention safeguarding Errol West that took place in Townsville in Indigenous ownership and rights over the September 1995. Discussions with various uses of traditional knowledge. community leaders during the conference Clearly, such a conference could not take resulted in the decision to hold the the routine academic form of papers read conference in Cairns, with a view to and subsequently offered for publication. maximizing opportunities for We discussed filming the proceedings, but participation by Indigenous Elders and found key participants had doubts that we knowledge custodians across Northern should. Rightly, they were concerned at Australia, where there had been most what would subsequently be made of the interaction with western scientific footage. While happy to share their researchers. In view of concern that the thoughts and expertise with those conference not replicate the inequalities participating at the conference, several widely felt to characterize those Elders were troubled by the prospect of interactions, and thus treat Indigenous having no control over its future participation as another source of `uni- interpretation, especially being in the tucker', it was agreed that the conference process of framing claims under native would take the form of a mix of prepared title legislation. As one Elder pointedly papers, workshops and presentations asked, what guarantee was there that what which the presenter considered best he and others might say would not suited to what they wished to achieve. forewarn hostile parties of what would be In view of rising concern that Indigenous argued before Queensland's Native Title intellectual property gain stronger and Tribunal. more culturally appropriate forms of legal We could hardly ignore these concerns, protection, it was also decided that the especially given the aims of the conference would include workshops conference. By the same token, even if it aiming to provide advice to peak Indigenous organisations. Indeed, as it had been possible to ensure that turned out, the conference coincided with participants enjoyed control over how the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander footage was edited and subsequently Commission's seeking community advice presented, we would have then been in the framing of its submission to the obliged to negotiate appropriate copyright

INTRODUCTION 19

agreements and royalty payments. And administrator, and her ability to manage while we had no hesitation about doing so, the logistics of an event which up to the the total funding we had secured left just last moment seemed ever to change its enough after meeting the travel and form. accommodation costs of invited PAUL TURNBULL participants to recognize their cont- ribution through payment as Paul Turnbull is a Fellow at the Centre for distinguished guest lecturers. We had no Cross-Cultural Research, Australian option but to drop the idea of creating a National University, where he is the film record of the proceedings. Director of the South Seas Digital Project. Amongst his most recently publications are This of course meant that we were left `The Network and the Nation: the National with a small selection of formal papers, Library and the History of Biblio graphical which stood as fragments surviving the Information _infrastructure in Twentieth ebb and flow of conversation in which Century Australia', in Peter Cochrane (ed), Indigenous voices were heard strong and Conversing with a Nation: the Centennial clear. Since 1996, several of these papers History of the National Library (woo), and have been revised in the light of things we Rare Work for the Professors' The talked about in Cairns, and published in Entanglement of Aboriginal Remains in other journals or within monographs. The Phrenological Knowledge in Early four which appear in this issue of Colonial Australia, in Jeanette Hoorn and Humanities Research address major Barbara Creed (eds), The Body Trade: themes that were explored and often Cannibalism, Captivity and Colonialism in vigorously debated well into each night of the Pacific (PlutoPress: Melb, 2oar). the conference. Each secured a place in this volume by virtue of being nominated by participants on our last day together as NOTES having provoked us to think in fresh and George Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions more rewarding ways about the relations of Discovery in North-West and Western Australia, during the Years 1837, 38, and between Indigenous and western sciences. 39...with Observations on the Moral and Finally, special thanks are due to Iain Physical Conditions of the Aboriginal Inhabitants... (2 vols., : John McCalman, who, besides offering the Murray, 1842), vol. i, p. 323. . resources of the Humanities Research 2 Perth Gazette 5 November 1833. Centre, helped secure the conference 3 Ronald Richards, The Murray District of additional funding from various sources to WesternAustralia: a History (Murray: Shire support Indigenous participation. Also, Council, 1978), p. 24. the success of the conference owed much 4 Edward (Mrs.) Millett, An Australian to Leena Messina, the Centre's conference Parsonage, or the Settler and the Savage in

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Western Australia (London: Edward to Roy Macleod, 'On Visiting the Moving Stanford, 1872), p. 258. Metropolis: Reflections on the 5 John Ramsden 'Wollaston, .WolIctston's Architecture of Imperial Science', Picton Journal, ed. Alfred Burton (Parth: Historical Records of Imperial Science, 5 Pitman, 194o), p. 79. (1982), 1-16. 6 Caley to Banks, August 18ot, cited by Joan David Mowaljarlai, 'Life, Death and Burial', Webb, George Caley; Nineteenth-Century Address given at the Ceremony before the Naturalist (Sydney: Beatty and Sons, 1995), Repatriation to Indigenous Control of Ancestral Remains from the Anatomy P- 51- Department, Edinburgh University 29 7 Caley `Notes on Plants', Sydney: Mitchell September 1991. Copy in Possession of the Library FM4/2468; also cited Webb, Author. George Caley, p.125. 12 Deborah Bird Rose, Dingo. Makes Us 8 Caley, Reflections on the Colony of New Human: Life and Land in an Australian South Wales, ed. J.E.B. Currey (Melbourne: Aboriginal Culture (Cambridge: Landsdowne, 1996), p. ro3. Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 225. 9 See Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure 13 On this point, see Steven Shapin,A Social of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies History of Truth (Chicago: Chicago of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), especially chapter University Press, 1989). one.