The Return of the Bones
February 08 2010 — Claire Scobie
During the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hundreds of Aboriginal remains were scattered across the globe – sent to museums here and in Britain as ‘anatomical specimens’. The practice added yet another terrible stroke to Indigenous history and suffering in Australia and created a shadow stolen generation that is still in need of being brought home today. In the December issue of Meanjin, Claire Scobie writes on this dark legacy of grave-robbing and massacre, all in the name of science, and the struggle for repatriation by those who hope for healing. A brief extract is below, and the full essay is available on our editions page.
When Tom Trevorrow was growing up on the banks of the Murray River, local farmers drove around in big Chevies proudly displaying an Aboriginal skull on the dashboard. ‘It’s like they got a kick out of it, a thrill. It was a showpiece: “Look at me, I’ve got a real Aboriginal skull,” ’ he recalls. This was the 1960s, when Aboriginal skeletons gathered grime in cabinets in museums throughout Britain and Australia. ‘A lot of scientists say they’re skeletal remains. To us, they’re family,’ says Trevorrow, who, for the past twenty years as chairman of the Ngarrindjeri heritage committee, has worked tirelessly to ‘bring his old people home’.
In May 2009 a delegation from the Ngarrindjeri tribe collected three skulls from Oxford University, acquired in the 1860s. When Ngarrindjeri elder Major Sumner, his body painted in ochres, conducted the formal handover ceremony on the university lawns, he felt a sense of satisfaction. ‘It’s a big accomplishment, not only for us, but for Oxford University as it’s the first time they’ve agreed to repatriate,’ says Sumner. ‘It sends a clear message to other British institutions. Why do they need to hold on to our old people?’
The three skulls, from Goolwa, in the heart of Ngarrindjeri traditional country, which stretches from the mouth of the Murray north to the Adelaide Hills, joined hundreds of other sets of remains awaiting burial at Camp Coorong, a tiny Aboriginal community 180 kilometres south-east of Adelaide. The wetlands and sand dunes surrounding the tidal inlet of the Coorong lagoon have been home for millennia to the Ngarrindjeri—the ‘fresh-and-saltwater people’. Today they number around 3500.
In mid 2008, Edinburgh University returned the last of its collection—a solitary ear bone—to the Ngarrindjeri. To mark its homecoming, and that of two skulls from an Exeter museum, a ‘smoking ceremony’—to bless the bones and cleanse them of any negativity—was held at Camp Coorong. Gales are forecast when I arrive at the camp, founded by Tom Trevorrow and his wife Ellen in 1986 to promote reconciliation. At its entrance, a flag in blues, reds and yellow, representing the eighteen clans of the Ngarrindjeri nation, billows in briny air.
After Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s national apology in 2008, when he promised a new chapter in the nation’s history, Trevorrow hoped that the South Australian Government would follow suit and apologise for his tribe’s own ‘stolen generations’—hundreds of his ancestors whose remains were sent to Australian and British museums between the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as anatomical specimens. ‘We’re not asking for something that we don’t rightfully deserve,’ says Trevorrow. ‘It’s a fact that it happened. It was government and they know that it was culturally wrong. The longer they hang on, the longer the suffering.’
During this era of prolific collecting, bones and soft tissue were studied according to Charles Darwin’s theory that the ‘civilised races’ would almost certainly exterminate the ‘savage races’. Skulls in particular were believed to indicate racial characteristics. While the federal government has shown its commitment to repatriation, with the appointment of a new International Repatriation Advisory Committee in September 2009, the Ngarrindjeri are struggling to deal largely with the painful legacy of one man: Scottish-born William Ramsay Smith, one of the most prolific colonial collectors. A medical student at Edinburgh University, Smith was responsible for the bulk of its collection, some 500 to 600 individuals.
‘The Coorong is a particularly tragic case. In fact, it’s more than tragic,’ says Dr Mike Pickering, Repatriation Program Director at Canberra’s National Museum. ‘I don’t think anyone foresaw that one [Aboriginal] group would receive so many remains. And there are still remains left in the South Australian Museum, so there are more to come back.’
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