Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia (Palgrave Studies in Pacific History)

La 4e de couv. indique : "This book draws on over twenty years' investigation of scientific archives in Europe, Australia, and other former British settler colonies. It explains how and why skulls and other bodily structures of Indigenous Australians became the focus of scientific curiosity about the nature and origins of human diversity from the early years of colonisation in the late eighteenth century to Australia achieving nationhood at the turn of the twentieth century. The last thirty years have seen the world's indigenous peoples seek the return of their ancestors' bodily remains from museums and medical schools throughout the western world. Turnbull reveals how the remains of the continent's first inhabitants were collected during the long nineteenth century by the plundering of their traditional burial places. He also explores the question of whether museums also acquired the bones of men and women who were killed in Australian frontier regions by military, armed police and settlers." Acknowledgements 6 Contents 10 List of Figures 12 Chapter 1 Introduction: ‘To What Strange Uses’ 13 Chapter 2 European Anatomists and Indigenous Australian Bodily Remains, c. 1788–1820 45 The Hunterian Portrait 46 Foreign Bodies from Distant Lands 51 John Hunter and Human Diversity 54 Joseph Banks’s Anatomical Patronage 62 Banks and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach 67 Banks and the Royal College of Surgeons 75 Chapter 3 Skeletal Collecting Before Darwin 83 The Collectors 88 Naval Surgeons 89 The Haslar Collection 96 Army Surgeons 99 Colonial Physicians and Surgeons 101 Explorers and Amateur Naturalists 106 Chapter 4 Indigenous Remains in British Anatomical and Ethnographic Discourse, 1810–1850 109 Alexander Monro and the Indigenous Australian Body 112 The Influence of Georges Cuvier 116 William Lawrence and the Materiality of Human Diversity 119 James Cowles Prichard and the Physical History of Humanity 124 Chapter 5 British Polygenists and the Indigenous Body, 1820–1880 132 The Racial Science of Robert Knox 136 The Cabinets of Dr. Barnard Davis 141 Davis and Tasmania’s ‘Black War’ 144 Davis, the Darwinians and the Neanderthal Skull 146 Davis and George Augustus Robertson 153 ‘Nothing More Loathsome’: The William Lanne Affair 154 Dr. Davis and Mr. Allport 156 Chapter 6 ‘Rare Work for the Professors’: Phrenologists and the Australian Skull, c. 1815–1860 161 Gall, Spurzheim and the ‘Savage’ Skull 168 James Deville, Phrenological Entrepreneur 170 Colonial Phrenology in the 1820s: The Cranial Collecting of Alexander Berry 173 John Oxley, Explorer and Phrenological Skull Collector 179 Carnambaygal: Indigenous Resistance and Phrenology 181 Lancelot Threlkeld and the Bathurst Massacre 185 The Phrenological Musings of Barron Field 188 Phrenology During the 1830s and Beyond 189 Combeian Phrenology and the Indigenous Skull 190 A Science in Decline 197 Assessing the Impact of Phrenology 200 Chapter 7 Colonial Museums and the Indigenous Dead, c. 1830–1874 204 Before Darwin 207 Anthropological Collecting Before the 1860s 215 Darwinism and the Collecting of Indigenous Remains 219 Huxley, Gerard Krefft, and ‘Savages Fossil and Recent’ 225 Chapter 8 ‘Judicious Collectors’, 1870–1914 231 Edward Ramsay’s Regime 232 Commercial Collectors and Traders 237 ‘A Judicious Collector:’ Edward Stirling and the South Australian Museum 242 Stirling and the Evolutionary Implications of Indigenous Morphology 247 Primitive Men of Europe and Australia 248 Building a Collection 251 Valuable Scientific Capital 253 Late Ambitions Unrealised: The Swanport Discovery 255 Evolutionary Museology in Melbourne 257 Richard Berry and the Indigenous Skull 259 Chapter 9 ‘Tales of Blood and Mummies’: The Queensland Museum, 1870–1914 265 The Museum Under Charles de Vis, 1882–1905 269 Walter Roth, Hermann Klaatsch: Evolutionary Anthropology and the Queensland Museum 274 The Australian Travels of Hermann Klaatsch 277 Christian Versus Scientific Humanitarianism 281 Chapter 10 Murdered for Science? Anthropological Collecting and Colonial Violence in Late Nineteenth Century Australia 287 Murdered for Science? 288 Museum Collecting and Frontier Violence 293 Frontier Collecting for the South Australian Museum 302 Chapter 11 Indigenous Australians’ Defence of the Ancestral Dead 307 They Bury Their Dead with Neatness 308 Protecting the Dead 315 Recognition of Rights to Care for the Dead 317 Scenes of Horror and of Elegiac Reflection 323 Chapter 12 Repatriation and Its Critics 336 Chapter 13 Conclusion 363 Bibliography 371 Index 409 Annotation This book draws on over twenty years' investigation of scientific archives in Europe, Australia, and other former British settler colonies. It explains how and why skulls and other bodily structures of Indigenous Australians became the focus of scientific curiosity about the nature and origins of human diversity from the early years of colonisation in the late eighteenth century to Australia achieving nationhood at the turn of the twentieth century. The last thirty years have seen the world's indigenous peoples seek the return of their ancestors' bodily remains from museums and medical schools throughout the western world. Turnbull reveals how the remains of the continent's first inhabitants were collected during the long nineteenth century by the plundering of their traditional burial places. He also explores the question of whether museums also acquired the bones of men and women who were killed in Australian frontier regions by military, armed police and settlers