Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia

Paul Turnbull is Professor of History and Digital Humanities at the University of Tasmania, Australia, and Honorary Professor in History at the University of Queensland, Australia.  He is the author of numerous essays on Western biomedical interest in the indigenous peoples of Oceania and is co-editor of The Dead and Their Possessions: Repatriation in Principle, Policy and Practice (2004) and The Long Journey Home: the Meanings and Values of Repatriation (2010).

“Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia offers a valuable contribution to the historiography of racial science and collecting in Australia. … The book is worthwhile reading not only for historians of science and medicine, scientists and museum professionals, and those work in the field of repatriation, but for anyone interested in the material and affective legacies concerning the colonial oppression of Australia’s Indigenous peoples.” (Eugenia Pacitti, Health and History, Vol. 22 (2), 2020)“Turnbull’s work is a rigorous and lively testimony to the significance of the history of science discipline for contemporary issues of indigeneity and postcoloniality. … Historians of science and collections, museum professionals, scientists, and activists concerned with repatriation will therefore find this book useful and valuable reading.” (Ricardo Roque, Isis, Vol. 111 (1), 2020)“The strength of Turnbull’s book is the systematic way he works through the different processes of collecting. … Turnbull’s ground-breaking work reads as two separate books: one on the removal of the remains and the other on the return of remains. However, in both areas, Turnbull has made a significant contribution to both the study and practice.” (Gareth Knapman, History Australia, Vol. 16 (3), 2019)

• 1: Introduction: ‘To What Strange Uses’.- 2: European Anatomists and Indigenous Australian Bodily Remains, c. 1788–1820.- 3: Skeletal Collecting before Darwin.- 4: Indigenous Remains in British Anatomical and Ethnographic Discourse, 1810–1850.- 5: The Indigenous Body and British Polygenists, 1820–1880.- 6: ‘Rare Work for the Professors’: Phrenologists and the Australian Skull, c. 1815–1860.- 7: Colonial Museums and the Indigenous Dead, c. 1830–1874.- 8: ‘Judicious Collectors’, 1870–1914.- 9: ‘Tales of Blood and Mummies’: The Queensland Museum, 1870–1914   .- 10: Anthropological Collecting and Colonial Violence in Late Nineteenth Century Australia.- 11. Indigenous Australians’ Defence of the Ancestral Dead.- 12: Repatriation and Its Critics.- 13: Conclusion.