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Anthropological Collecting and Colonial Violence in Colonial Queensland: A Response to 'The Blood and the Bone'

journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-18, 13:24 authored by Paul TurnbullPaul Turnbull
In 2008, I contributed a short essay to the Griffith Review exploring little known controversial aspects of Queensland history and politics. I wrote reflectively about researching the connections between scientific collecting of Aboriginal skeletal remains and frontier violence. I drew attention to what then, as now, struck me as a dark, and in various ways unresolved, legacy of Queensland's colonial past. This was that museum curators, evolutionary anatomists and anthropologists active in Queensland between 1860-1900 appeared to have had few qualms about being knowing beneficiaries of the violent dispossession and deaths of Aboriginal people that occurred with movement of the frontier of settlement. Rarely, if ever, did they let pass opportunities to secure the bones of Aboriginal people they knew to have been obtained by desecrating traditional burial sites. There were also occasions when they sought remains known to be those of Aboriginal people killed in frontier violence.

History

Publication title

Journal of Australian Colonial History

Volume

17

Pagination

133-158

ISSN

1441-0370

Publisher

University of New England * School of Humanities

Place of publication

Australia

Rights statement

Copyright 2015 University of New England School of Humanities

Repository Status

  • Restricted

Socio-economic Objectives

Understanding Australia’s past

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