Klaatsch, Hermann (1863 - 1916)

Summary

Hermann Klaatsch was a German physician, anatomist, physical anthropologist and evolutionist. He travelled to Australia and Java 1904-1907 to further his studies into the evolution of human beings. His primary contact in Queensland, an initial focus of his visit, was Walter Roth, the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Queensland 1904-1906. He also visited Sydney in New South Wales, Melbourne and Warrnambool in Victoria, Adelaide South Australia and Perth, Roebourne, Broome, Beagle Bay in Western Australia. On 12 December 1905 he left Broome for Java before returning on 21 May 1906. He then travelled to Wyndham via Derby and then via Port Keats to Darwin arriving in September 1906. Following a trip to Melville Island he left for Sydney arriving 19 November 1906. From Sydney he visited Hobart Tasmania and Adelaide again, where he met with Francis Gillen, before heading to Sydney, leaving Australia on 18 February 1907. He actively collected First Peoples' ancestral remains.

[CONTENT WARNING: Australian First Nation people, communities and others should be aware that the resources listed below could contain language and stories that may be challenging as well as images and names of deceased persons.]

Details

Quotes:

"Roth also brought the Museum's collections to the attention of metropolitan scientists and, as Protector, used what resources his office allowed to assist other local scientists and metropolitan visitors to travel to rural and remote parts of Queensland. Among the most influential investigators of the Museum's holding he helped was the German comparative anatomist Hermann Klaatsch. Arriving in Brisbane in March 1904, Klaatch sought to investigate whether the morphology of Queensland's Aboriginal people might confirm, as Otto Schoetensack (a Heidelberg colleague) believed, that Australia's indigenous inhabitants were not descended from prehistoric migrants, but that the continent had been the site of the human genus having evolved from a pithecoid ancestral form, when the continent was part of a larger landmass." (Turnbull 2015 page 79)

"After several weeks meticulously examining the Queensland Museum's crania, Klaatsch set out for far northern Queensland, where, with Roth's assistance, he attempted, with mixed success, to obtain anthropometric data and bones of Aboriginal people still living traditionally on islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria, or supposedly close to their 'wild state' on the coastal missionary settlements of Mapoon, Arakun and Yarabah, to which most far northern Aboriginal people had by this time been forcibly moved. He proved ruthless in trying to secure skeletal material, on one occasion escaping death at the hands of relatives of a man whose grave he was caught plundering." (Turnbull 2015 page 79)

"On 22 December he left Sydney for Tasmania, where he examined anthropological material at the museum in Hobart. From there he continued to Adelaide in order to attend a meeting of the Austral[as]ian Association for the Advancement of Science, at which he gave a talk which was published in English.21 It was on this occasion that the above-mentioned meeting with Gillen took place. After another stopover in Hobart he arrived in Sydney on 7 February 1907.

During his last few days in Australia he received the offer of a chair in Anatomy, Anthropology and Ethnography at the University of Breslau, which he gladly accepted. He left Sydney on 18 February 1907, returning to Germany via Canada and finally arriving in Bremerhaven on 3 April 1907. " (Stehlik 1986 page 64)

"During his three years abroad Klaatsch had assembled an impressive collection of ethnographic material, comprising altogether 2,300 objects. These were temporarily shown in an exhibition which opened on 7 September 1907 in the Rautenstrauch-Jost-Museum fur Völkerkunde in Cologne. Afterwards the ethnographic collections were distributed to other museums, the greater part being kept in the Ethnological Museums of Hamburg, Leipzig and Cologne. His collection of stone artefacts went to Breslau." (Stehlik 1986 page 64)

Related entries

Published resources

Journal Articles

• Erckenbrecht, Corinna, 'The politics of the time: Hermann Klaatsch in the wet tropics and the fate of his ethnographic collection in Europe', Memoirs of the Queensland Museum - culture, 10 (2016), 93-106. Details
• Fitzpatrick, Matthew P., 'Indigenous Australians and German anthropology in the era of "decolonization"', Historical journal, 63 (3) (2020), 686-709. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0018246X19000384. Details
• Pelayo, Francisco, 'Hermann Klaatsch and his photographic representations of Australian aborigines during his scientific trip through Australia (1904-1907', Culture & history digital journal, 12 (1) (2023), 14. https://doi.org/10.3989/chdj.2023.008. Details
• Stehlik, Brigitte, 'Hermann Klaatsch and the Tiwi, 1906', Aboriginal history journal, 10 (1986), 59-77. http://doi.org/10.22459/AH.10.2011.06. Details
• Turnbull, Paul, 'Australian museums, Aboriginal skeletal remains, and the imagining of human evolutionary history', Museum & society, 13 (1) (2015), 72-87. https://doi.org/10.29311/mas.v13i1.318. Pages 79, 80, 82. Details