Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia

Paul Turnbull

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319518749
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Chapter 1 Introduction: ‘To What Strange Uses’
• Chapter 2 European Anatomists and Indigenous Australian Bodily Remains, c. 1788–1820
• Chapter 3 Skeletal Collecting Before Darwin
• Chapter 4 Indigenous Remains in British Anatomical and Ethnographic Discourse, 1810–1850
• Chapter 5 British Polygenists and the Indigenous Body, 1820–1880
• Chapter 6 ‘Rare Work for the Professors’: Phrenologists and the Australian Skull, c. 1815–1860
• Chapter 7 Colonial Museums and the Indigenous Dead, c. 1830–1874
• Chapter 8 ‘Judicious Collectors’, 1870–1914
• Chapter 9 ‘Tales of Blood and Mummies’: The Queensland Museum, 1870–1914
• Chapter 10 Murdered for Science? Anthropological Collecting and Colonial Violence in Late Nineteenth Century Australia
• Chapter 11 Indigenous Australians’ Defence of the Ancestral Dead
• Chapter 12 Repatriation and Its Critics
• Chapter 13 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index