Published Resources Details
Journal Article
- Title
- Australian museums, Aboriginal skeletal remains, and the imagining of human evolutionary history
- In
- Museum & society
- Imprint
- vol. 13, no. 1, 2015, pp. 72-87
- Url
- https://doi.org/10.29311/mas.v13i1.318
- Abstract
Blurb: British colonial settler societies was imagined to depend on safeguarding the biological integrity of an evolutionarily advanced citizenry. There is also a growing body of scholarship on how the collecting and exhibition of indigenous ethnological material and bodily remains by colonial museums underscored the evolutionary distance between indigenes and settlers. This article explores in contextual detail several Australian museums between 1860 and 1914, in particular the Australian Museum in Sydney, the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, and the Victorian Museum in Melbourne, in which the collecting, interpretation and exhibition of the Aboriginal Australian bodily dead by staff and associated scientists served to imagine human evolutionary history.
Related entries
Corporate Bodies
People
- Aplin, Christopher D'Oyly Hale (1819 - 1875)
Pages 75
- De Vis, Charles Walter (1829 - 1915)
Pages 77-78
- Etheridge, Robert (Junior) (1847 - 1920)
Pages 82
- Gillen, Francis James (1855 - 1912)
Pages 81
- Halford, George Britton (1824 - 1910)
Pages 81
- Hamlyn-Harris, Ronald (1874 - 1953)
Pages 82
- Haswell, William Aitcheson (1854 - 1925)
Pages 77
- Kenyon, Alfred Stephen (1867 - 1943)
Pages 82
- Klaatsch, Hermann (1863 - 1916)
Pages 79, 80, 82
- Krefft, Johann Ludwig Gerard (Gerard) (1830 - 1881)
Pages 75, 76, 81
- Masters, George (1837 - 1912)
Pages 75
- McCoy, Frederick (1817 - 1899)
Pages 81
- Meston, Archibald (1851 - 1924)
Pages 72-74, 78
- Ramsay, Edward Pierson (1842 - 1916)
Pages 72-72, 78, 82
- Roth, Walter Edmund (1861 - 1933)
Pages 78-80
- Smyth, Robert Brough (1830 - 1889)
Pages 75
- Spencer, Walter Baldwin (1860 - 1929)
Pages 79, 81, 82
- Stirling, Edward Charles (Ted) (1848 - 1919)
Pages 80, 81
- Turnbull, Paul
See also
Related Published resources
hasCitationTo
- Anderson, Warwick, The cultivation of whiteness: science, health and racial destiny in Australia (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 352 pp. Details
- Butcher, Barry W., 'Gorilla Warfare in Melbourne: Halford, Huxley and 'Man's Place in Nature'' in Australian Science in the Making, R. W. Home, ed. (Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 153-169. Details
- Griffiths, Tom, Hunters and Collectors: the Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge/Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 430 pp. Details
- Jones, Philip G., '"A box of native things": ethnographic collectors and the South Australian Museum, 1830s - 1930s', PhD thesis, University of Adelaide, 1996, 437 pp. Details
- MacInnis, Peter, Curious Minds: the Discoveries of Australian Naturalists (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2012), 213 pp. Details
- MacLeod, Roy Malcolm, 'On Visiting the 'Moving Metropolis': Reflections on the architecture of imperial science', Historical Records of Australian Science, 5 (3) (1982), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1071/HR9820530001. Details
- McGregor, Russell, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880-1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997), 326 pp. Details
- Morison, P., 'J.T. Wilson and the Fraternity of Duckmaloi', Clio-Medica (1997), 487. Details
- Robin, Libby, The Flight of the Emu: a Hundred Years of Australian Ornithology 1901-2001 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 492 pp. Details
- Spencer, W. B., Guide to the Australian ethnological collection exhibited in the National Museum of Victoria (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1901), 88 pp. Details
- Turnbull, P., 'A judicious collector: Edward Charles Stirling and the procurement of Aboriginal boodily remains in South Australia, c. 1880 - 1912' in The body divided: human beings and human "material" in modern medical history, Ferber, S.; and Wilde, S., eds (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2011), p. 22. Details
isReferencedBy
- Pybus, Cassandra, A very secret trade: the dark story of gentlemen collectors in Tasmania (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2024), 318 pp. https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Cassandra-Pybus-Very-Secret-Trade-9781761066344. Details
isRelated
- Turnbull, Paul, '"Ramsay's regime": the Australian Museum and the procurement of Aboriginal bodies, c. 1874 - 1900', Aboriginal history, 15 (2) (1991), 108-21. Details
- Turnbull, Paul, 'To What Strange Uses: the Procurement and Use of Aboriginal Peoples' bodies in Early Colonial Australia', Voices, 4 (3) (1994), 5-20. Details
- Turnbull, Paul, 'British Anthropological Thought in Colonial Practice: the appropriation of Indigenous Australian bodies, 1860-1880' in Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750-1940, Douglas, Bronwen and Ballard, Chris, eds (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2008), pp. 205-28. Details
- Turnbull, Paul, Science, museums and collecting the indigenous dead in colonial Australia (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 428 pp. Details
- Turnbull, Paul, 'Legally acquired? The moral and legal context of collecting Indigenous Australian human remains in colonial Australia' in The great laboratory of humanity: collection, patrimony and the repatriation of human remains, Minicia, Maria Teresa, ed. (Padua, Italy: CLEUP, 2020), pp. 235-70. Details
- Turnbull, Paul, '"Thrown into the fossil gap": Indigenous Australian ancestral bodily remains in the hands of early Darwinian anatomists, c. 1860 - 1916', Studies in the history and philosophy of science, 92 (2022), 1-11, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.12.010. Details