It was indeed a secret … and grisly … trade conducted between the ‘gentleman collectors’ of Tasmania and equally gentlemanly recipients in England in the 1800s.
Pybus, a noted Tasmanian historian, has spent several years researching the trade in Aboriginal skulls, skeletons and bones to England, the US and Europe.
With unknown human remains in private collections, she estimated that in public collections there were 72 skulls in Britain, 21 in Europe, only two in the US and 66 in Australia, as well as seven complete skeletons.
Pybus has read letters, museum articles, Royal Society of Tasmania papers, family papers and those lodged with state libraries. In the UK, Ireland and Europe she followed the paper trail of those gentlemen who requested remains from counterparts in Tasmania and other colonies of New Holland in the 1800s, and even into the 20th century.
Notable botanist Sir Joseph Banks was one man who requested, and even seemed to demand, skulls of natives from the new colony of New South Wales. He made his desires known to naturalists, appointed to the colony on Banks’ recommendation, as well as vice-regal figures such as Governor Arthur Phillip and Governor King.
One woman who features large in Pybus’ account of this trade was Lady Jane Franklin, wife of the governor of Van Dieman’s Land from 1837 to 1843, Sir John Franklin.
In modern parlance, she would be termed ‘a piece of work’, and the colonists soon started referring to her as the She-Governor. She surrounded herself with younger men who were all avid naturalists and she herself collected Aboriginal skulls, even giving one to a longtime female companion.
It was not just Tasmania of the 1800s where Aboriginal graves were robbed, and surgeons decapitated corpses to provide collectors with what they desired. Between 1920 and 1950, a grazier and amateur ethnologist in Victoria ransacked about 1800 burial sites beside the Murray River, providing more than 800 skeletons for institutions in South Australia and Melbourne.
‘The great Australian silence’ is how anthropologist Bill Stanner in 1968 characterised the history of colonisation and settlement. Pybus has broken that silence to reveal an appalling truth.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
Read a book review of Truganini by Cassandra Pybus
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cassandra Pybus is ARC Research Professor at the University of Sydney.
Cassandra Pybus is an award-winning author and a distinguished historian. She is author of 12 books and has held research professorships at the University of Sydney, Georgetown University in Washington DC, the University of Texas and King’s College London.
She is descended from the colonist who received the largest free land grant on Truganini’s traditional country of Bruny Island.
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