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3 Researchers and Coranderrk 3 Researchers and Coranderrk Coranderrk was an important focus of research for anthropologists, archaeologists, naturalists, historians and others with an interest in Australian Aboriginal people. Lydon (2005: 170) describes researchers treating Coranderrk as ‘a kind of ethno- logical archive’. Cawte (1986: 36) has argued that there was a strand of colonial thought – which may be characterised as imperialist, self-congratulatory, and social Darwinist – that regarded Australia as an ‘evolutionary museum in which the primi- tive and civilised races could be studied side by side – at least while the remnants of the former survived’. This chapter considers contributions from six researchers – E.H. Giglioli, H.N. Moseley, C.J.D. Charnay, Rev. J. Mathew, L.W.G. Büchner, and Professor F.R. von Luschan – and a 1921 comment from a primary school teacher, named J.M. Provan, who was concerned about the impact the proposed closure of Coranderrk would have on the ability to conduct research into Aboriginal people. Ethel Shaw (1949: 29–30) has discussed the interaction of Aboriginal residents and researchers, explaining the need for a nuanced understanding of the research setting: The Aborigine does not tell everything; he has learnt to keep silent on some aspects of his life. There is not a tribe in Australia which does not know about the whites and their ideas on certain subjects. News passes quickly from one tribe to another, and they are quick to mislead the inquirer if it suits their purpose. Mr. Howitt, Mr. Matthews, and others, who made a study of the Aborigines, often visited Coranderrk, and were given much assistance by Mr. Shaw in compiling their works. He warned them to be very careful when questioning the old people, as they could very easily be misled by the Aborigines. Sometimes the old men got very tired of so much questioning by the students of the Aboriginal customs. One old man went off to bed one day after a long talk with an inquirer, saying he was “too sick”. He remained “sick” until the visitor left the station, when he speedily recovered. “What was the matter with you, Dick?” someone asked. “Oh, that fellow; he ask too many question; he make me sick,” was his reply. 3.1 Enrico Hillyer Giglioli, May 1867 In 1867 Italian zoologist and anthropologist Enrico Hillyer Giglioli (1845–1909), then director of the Royal Zoological Museum in Florence, Italy, visited Australia on the Italian warship Magenta, as part of a three-year scientific circumnavigation of the globe sponsored by the Italian government. London-born to an English mother and an Italian father, Giglioli studied natural science at the University of Pisa in 1864 and became director of the Royal Zoological Museum of Florence, where he began to teach zoology in 1869. After his death his collection went to the Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography in Rome. 72 Researchers and Coranderrk Following his arrival in Melbourne in May 1867 (The Age, 6/5/1867),25 Giglioli was keen to meet ‘authentic’ Aboriginal people. R. Brough Smyth, Vice-chairman of the Board, told him that ‘the aborigines, of whom I had seen only a couple of miserable individuals in the streets of Melbourne, had almost disappeared from the neighbour- hood of the city and the other centres of settlement’, and recommended he visited Coranderrk, Sandhurst (Bendigo) or Echuca on the Murray River where Aboriginal people could be seen ‘still in an almost independent state’. Subsequently he travelled to Ballarat to have a look at the goldfields in and around that city, and then to Lake Moira on the Murray River, in order to form an impression of the Aborigines then living by the river. On 21 May 1867 he visited Coranderrk. John Green was the superin- tendent at this time. Massola (1975: 66–67) translated and published an extract from Giglioli’s (1876: 772–4) account. Appendix 3.1 presents a longer translation of Giglioli’s writings and indicates through footnotes where it differs from Massola’s translation. One differ- ence is significant: in Giglioli’s account there is a section where he is discussing a family he met at Coranderrk: Tommy Hobson, his wife Maggie, and their son Thomas Harris. The discussion ends with the following sentence about Maggie and the child: His wife could be considered good looking for a native; the little one, like almost everyone to me, looked like a monkey. Massola (1975: 67) translated this sentence: His wife was passably good looking for a native, and the little boy, like nearly all those I saw, was quite smart and learnt quickly. The last line about the child in the original Italian is ‘pareva una vera scimmia’. In this study (see Appendix 3.1) this is translated as ‘looked like a monkey’. Massola (1975: 67) has translated this: ‘was quite smart and learnt quickly’. Scimmia is the Italian noun for monkey or ape. It is hard to avoid drawing the conclusion that Massola (who was Italian-born and presumably a fluent Italian speaker) has deliberately mistrans- lated Giglioli’s description of the child. Giglioli commented on the fact that the Aboriginal people at Coranderrk made wares such as baskets, and ‘beautiful blankets and rugs’ from possum and kangaroo skins, which they sold to visitors. With their proceeds they bought clothes, ammuni- tion, and supplies. He observed that the walls of residents’ huts were often papered with cuttings of illustrated newspapers from England and Australia, as well as photo- graphs which were ‘much appreciated by these people’. 25 The writer of this article referred to Giglioli as an Italian ‘savant’. Henry Nottidge Moseley, March 1874 73 Giglioli’s Victorian chapter includes several images of Aboriginal people from the Moira Lakes and Gippsland and indicates that they were taken from photographs. He does not include any images from Coranderrk; Massola (1975: facing p. 49 and p. 64) has reproduced four images presumably taken at Coranderrk by Giglioli (they have been reproduced in Lydon, 2005: 97). Lydon’s (2005) research into Giglioli claims that some 11 Giglioli photographs remain extant – nine of which were taken at Corand- errk. In a later paper, after having undertaken further research into Giglioli, Lydon (2013: 6) notes that he ‘obtained a series of cartes de visite by Melbourne-based trav- elling photographer Thomas Jetson Washbourne (some via the Italian consul, Cava- liere Giuseppe Biagli), that were the basis for some of his published engravings’. For example, the two images ascribed as belonging to the Moira Lakes (See Giglioli, 1875: 772), and sourced from Washbourne cartes de visite, are of Freddy Wheeler and Queen Mary, and according to the State Library of Victoria catalogue entry are dated from 1870, which, if correct, confirms that Giglioli received these items after his return to Italy. Lydon (2001; 2005: 95-98; 2013; 2014; 2015) has undertaken research into Giglio- li’s Coranderrk visit as part of a larger research project into nineteenth century pho- tography as a medium through which to understand Aboriginal people. Lydon (2013: 7) has argued that what is distinctive about Giglioli’s Australian work was his use of photographic imagery to demonstrate the sameness and homogeneity, or ‘ethnic unity’ of the Australian mainland Aboriginal people. He demonstrated this by using images of Indigenous people ‘living at outlying and widely separated points of the continent’. Giglioli’s visual method was as follows: I have collected an extensive series of photographs of aborigines of various parts of Australia, which show that those of the north and west coasts often have thin limbs ... while the aborigi- nes of the surroundings of Adelaide, South Australia and of Queensland, probably by reason of their easier conditions of live, have well-shaped bodies, wide shoulders, big chests and muscular limbs (Giglioli, 1875: 777 in Lydon, 2013: 7). 3.2 Henry Nottidge Moseley, March 1874 Another researcher to visit Coranderrk was Henry Nottidge Moseley, the English natu- ralist who sailed on the global scientific expedition of the H.M.S. Challenger from 1872 to 1876. Born in Wandsworth in 1844, Moseley was the son of the Rev. Henry Moseley, a mathematician of some renown. In 1872, Moseley was appointed as a ‘Naturalist’ on the scientific staff of the Challenger. The vessel started on its scientific cruise in December 1872 and returned in May 1876. For Moseley the expedition gave him the opportunity to study fauna, flora, and races of men which ‘are perishing rapidly day by day, and will soon be like the Dodo – things of the past. The history of these things once gone can never be recovered, but must remain for ever a gap in the knowledge of 74 Researchers and Coranderrk mankind’. At Oxford he spent several years working on the results of the Challenger expedition, publishing amongst other things Notes of a Naturalist on Board the “Chal- lenger”. A curious connection with Australia and possibly with Coranderrk was his prowess at throwing – he used to exhibit the method of throwing the boomerang and used the Australian throwing stick in the parks of Oxford. In the preface to the First Edition (which was omitted from the second edition of 1892), Moseley explained that the contents of his book were mainly written on board H.M.S. Challenger and sent home from the various ports touched at, in the form of a journal (Moseley, 1879: v). In terms of Moseley’s observations, he confirmed that the Coranderrk Aboriginal women had the potential to make much money by plaiting baskets for sale. John Maynard (2009) has researched the history of organized sport and Aborigi- nal people and has argued that institutions such as missions and government-run stations encouraged Aboriginal sporting participation as a paternalistic means of civ- ilizing Aboriginal people.
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