Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia

Description

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. Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii Introduction: ‘To What Strange Uses’ (Paul Turnbull)....Pages 1-32 European Anatomists and Indigenous Australian Bodily Remains, c. 1788–1820 (Paul Turnbull)....Pages 33-70 Skeletal Collecting Before Darwin (Paul Turnbull)....Pages 71-96 Indigenous Remains in British Anatomical and Ethnographic Discourse, 1810–1850 (Paul Turnbull)....Pages 97-119 British Polygenists and the Indigenous Body, 1820–1880 (Paul Turnbull)....Pages 121-149 ‘Rare Work for the Professors’: Phrenologists and the Australian Skull, c. 1815–1860 (Paul Turnbull)....Pages 151-193 Colonial Museums and the Indigenous Dead, c. 1830–1874 (Paul Turnbull)....Pages 195-221 ‘Judicious Collectors’, 1870–1914 (Paul Turnbull)....Pages 223-256 ‘Tales of Blood and Mummies’: The Queensland Museum, 1870–1914 (Paul Turnbull)....Pages 257-278 Murdered for Science? Anthropological Collecting and Colonial Violence in Late Nineteenth Century Australia (Paul Turnbull)....Pages 279-298 Indigenous Australians’ Defence of the Ancestral Dead (Paul Turnbull)....Pages 299-327 Repatriation and Its Critics (Paul Turnbull)....Pages 329-355 Conclusion (Paul Turnbull)....Pages 357-364 Erratum to: Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia (Paul Turnbull)....Pages E1-E1 Back Matter ....Pages 365-428