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Sad history of Aboriginal remains nears its conclusion Editorial

11 May 2003 - The return, and reinterment, in recent weeks, of hundreds of sets of skeletal remains of Aboriginal Australians collected, mainly in the 19th century, by doctors and scientists about the world brings us close to the end of a distasteful chapter of our Australian history. But it is only a symbolic closure, of which far too much can be made.

Even now, indignities visited on living Aboriginal Australians, from settlement up to the present day, deserve as much attention. And even now those who look over the sad chapter should appreciate that while there were strongly racist elements to the indifference manifested by the anatomisers to the rights of the dead and of the living, what they did to Aborigines was but part of the story of what they did even to their own kind. Indeed, we might not have the modern science of medicine were it not for body snatching. In the 16th and 17th century, some doctors had rights to dissect the not inconsiderable numbers of felons hung at places such as Tyburn, in London, but the supply could never keep up with the demand.

The demand was not only from those researching often bizarre theories of health, or race, but of would-be doctors simply learning of the mechanism of the body and practising their surgery. So strong was the demand, indeed, that an industry arose of supplying illicitly obtained bodies from graveyards, and many a citizen, high or low, was removed, unknown to the relatives, soon after burial to be dissected on a surgeon’s slab.

The celebrated murderers, Burke and Hare, Edinburgh provisioners to the trade, or resurrectionists as they were called, discovered that the problems of a sufficient supply of bodies in graves could be dealt with by cutting out the middleman, the Grim Reaper. They lured at least 15 people to their deaths. The euphemism “to Burke”, meaning to garrotte or strangle, is actually unfair: they were smotherers.

Aborigines, Native Americans, Africans, Asians and other exotic folk only became of great scientific interest, as dead bodies, when racial theories became prevalent, particularly after the evolutionary theories of Darwin. The scientists of the day became absorbed in issues such as differences in skull shape and size, the search for differences as well as similarities, ideas of “missing links” and stages in evolution, and even ideas, regarded as absurd today, which related cranial capacity or shape to capacity to
think and reason.

Much of what was done was, we know today, quite silly, but it was, for its time, of serious purpose, as was the equally distasteful tendency of seeking specimens for museums and public display. There was an extra, horrible ingredient, to the depredations of indigenous graves, arising from a racist contempt as much as an indifference to the feelings of relatives, but, really, much of what happened was on the same scale as among other human beings, and little of what happened to Aborigines matched, in the scale of bad behaviour, the lack of respect for the same people when living.

Some respectful return and reburial now reflects some modest atonement; but it is by our treatment of the descendants of these people that our sense of civilisation will be judged.

Source: Canberra Times

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