By Philip Deery
HISTORY
A Very Secret Trade: The Dark Story of Gentleman Collectors in Tasmania
Cassandra Pybus
Allen & Unwin, $34.95
This is a disturbing and, at times, heart-wrenching study of an appalling practice that was long shrouded in silence. Throughout much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the skulls of Indigenous Tasmanians were exhumed from burial sites, stolen from morgues and autopsy tables and retrieved, after decapitation, from random killings and targeted expeditions.
Cassandra Pybus became physically sick when examining the archives in one museum.Credit: Peter Mathew
These skulls were highly prized because, it was erroneously believed, Indigenous Tasmanians were more primitive and distinctive than peoples on the mainland and, most importantly, were on the edge of extinction.
The dismembered heads and skeletal remains were harvested by settlers, surgeons, “naturalists” and government officials and sent or sold to royal societies, museums, university anatomy departments, and private collectors.
Cassandra Pybus is a well-established historian.
This atrocity was not random or isolated. It was, Cassandra Pybus tells us, “a systematic process baked into the colonial project from the very beginning”. Much of it was clandestine: little of the prolific trade was listed in official customs records, sales and donations were unrecorded, and the origins of the displays in British museums and elsewhere were never revealed. The “gentlemen” perpetrators knew, then, this trade was illegally sourced and ethically unsound.
Much money passed hands between London and Hobart, more so if an Aboriginal skeleton were intact and authenticated. Possession guaranteed status and standing to the institution in the British scientific community. Possession also provided self-aggrandising individuals with leverage to enter eminent scientific bodies as “fellows”. Those medical men of 19th century science – anthropologists, anatomists, eugenicists and phrenologists – were all complicit.
Truganini’s skeleton was eventually cremated in 1976 and scattered in the waters off Bruny Island.
Cassandra Pybus is a well-established historian who lives close to the site – Oyster Cove in south-eastern Tasmania – where frequent pillaging of graves and mutilations of bodies occurred. Her research often left her “haunted” as well as aghast. When examining the archives of one museum, her reaction was visceral. She became physically ill, “so sickened that I had to leave”. For the reader, too, parts of A Very Secret Trade are harrowing.
It is well known – in part from Pybus’ own Truganini: Journey through the Apocalypse (but retold here in two unbearably sad chapters) – that Truganini, mistakenly declared the “last Tasmanian Aboriginal”, was desperate not to be mutilated. On her deathbed she pleaded to be buried in “the deepest part of D’Entrecasteaux Channel”. Her wishes were callously ignored: her bones were packed in a basement apple case and her skull was put on public display. It was not until 1976 that indignity ended: her skeleton was cremated and scattered in the waters off Bruny Island.
Another familiar story, but engagingly told by Pybus, concerns the attempt by Lady Jane Franklin (far more formidable than her hapless husband, Governor John Franklin) to “civilise” an Aboriginal girl, Mathinna. She lived with the Franklins in Government House, for three years but retained, in Lady Franklin’s exasperated words, “the unconquerable nature of the savage”. She was sent to Flinders Island, where she was brutalised on a daily basis: she told an inquiry “I was once flogged when blood ran down my head … [but] I never complained about being flogged”.
The portrait of Mathinna commissioned by Lady Franklin.Credit: Thomas Bock
Lady Franklin commissioned a portrait by Thomas Bock of the melancholy Mathinna wearing her trademark scarlet frock and sent it to London; later it was repatriated to the Tasmanian Art Gallery and is now beautifully reproduced in this book.
Lady Franklin sought, relentlessly, to promote the colony to the imperial centre as an important place of scientific research and learning. After she founded a local Royal Society, her reputation was ensured. She also impressed visiting naval officers with her own collection of Aboriginal specimens and skulls on display in Government House.
One source of this collection, Pybus believes, was the ambitious George Augustus Robinson, who obtained skulls while overseeing Wyballena Aboriginal station on Flinders Island. This was before he assumed the ignominious role of Chief Protector of Aborigines of the Port Phillip District.
Pybus has managed to lift the veil from an extremely dark chapter in Australia’s colonial history. But A Very Secret Trade is not without flaws. The most striking is the total omission of citations and accompanying endnotes (there is also no index). This criticism may seem churlish, but footnotes and endnotes are the signature of scholarly work. They provide the bridge between the author’s claim and the source used to support that claim. They offer empirical scaffolding for stories told, a tool for identifying source types, and confirmation of the book’s credibility and veracity. Ultimately, they permit the reader to answer “how does the author know this?”
In their absence, the reader and future researchers are unable to identify the sources of the many quotations or assess the degree of debt to existing secondary literature, with which Pybus does not engage. We must take the author on trust. This is a pity. That said, this remains an important book that deserves to be widely read.
Phillip Deery is an emeritus professor of history at Victoria University.
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