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Museum defended over bodies claim

By David Rennie in Sydney

19 March 1998 - A leading Australian academic has defended museums - among them the Natural History Museum in London - from the charge that they hold the bones of aborigines "murdered to order" for scientists in the last century.

Dr Paul Turnbull, of the Australian National University in Canberra and a specialist in the history of scientific procurement of Aboriginal remains, said yesterday that museums acquired skeletons from grave robbers, doctors, and from aborigines killed in frontier massacres.

Earlier this week, an Australian archaeologist, Lyndon Ormond-Parker, was quoted as saying that the Natural History Museum was one of the institutions tainted by a murderous 19th century trade for Aboriginal skulls, which were prized by scientists studying the "purity" of races.

His claims have been backed by the Queensland-based Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action, which said: "There's no doubt some aborigines were murdered to fill orders.

"The vast majority were acquired from grave-robbing. In some areas the Aboriginals practised tree-burials, so it merely required shinning up the tree and stealing the skull - if you had the stomach for it."

Dr Turnbull estimates that between 1,500 and 2,000 human remains reached museums around the world, with some being collected furtively as late as the Fifties, mainly from graves revealed by erosion.

The charge that museums incited murder "cannot be sustained," Dr Turnbull concluded. The Natural History Museum had only inherited its collection of remains after the Second World War, he said.

This article is from The Daily Telegraph

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