Published Resources Details

Journal Article

Author
Turnbull, Paul
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.

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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

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

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"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260