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Returning the stolen generation

© Tristram Paul Besterman

25 November 2006 - Despite the warmth of the Tasmanian sun high overhead, the wide, windswept valley had a desolate air. Or was this merely fanciful – an involuntary response to a tranquil landscape made bleak by my knowledge of its chilling history? Rows of unmarked graves there are at Wybalenna, but this is no Srebrenica: the Tasmanians interred here suffered no deliberate, arbitrary execution, but died a despairing, disease-ridden death at the hands of a misguided and incompetent British administration. And even in the ground they weren’t left in peace.

I was on Flinders Island, a sea-scoured mass of granite, hunched against the waves of the Bass Strait. Standing with me at Wybalenna was Adam Thompson, my Aboriginal companion and guide: our lives two narrative strands from across the globe, now twined in this place of half concealed histories.

Adam is descended from remnants of the Aboriginal community that survived the purging of Tasmania of most of its indigenous population in the nineteenth century. He is one of an estimated 2,000 people of Tasmanian Aboriginal descent alive today. Working for the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, Adam manages land restored to the indigenous community. To me – and anyone who takes the time to listen – Adam shows nothing but courtesy and good humour. But beneath the patiently-turned phrase burns a different fire, fuelled by the anger and distress shared by his community at what they see as an act of continuing colonial dispossession. He and they want their ancestors back from Britain. In September this year he travelled to London to receive the remains of his forebears from the British Museum, which is where our paths initially crossed.

That first encounter took place, appropriately enough, beneath Foster’s glazed roof in the BM’s Great Court – an architectural metaphor for enlightenment and modernity resting on tradition. A year earlier, I had been invited to write an independent report for the Trustees on the ‘public benefit’ of two items in the BM’s collections, which they had been asked repeatedly to return to Tasmania. The objects in question were two small bundles of kangaroo hide, containing cremation ash that had been given to the BM in 1882. These turned out to have been collected by a George Augustus Robinson, a name largely forgotten in England, but one that is terribly familiar to most living Tasmanian Aborigines.

Robinson (c.1788-1866) had been appointed in 1829 as ‘conciliator’ of the Tasmanian Aborigines, in a last-ditch attempt by the colonial authorities to ‘rescue’ the last few hundred Aborigines who survived in Tasmania. In the space of the first three decades of the nineteenth century, violent clashes with European settlers and the diseases they brought reduced the Aboriginal population from an estimated 5,000 prior to colonial impact to the point of extinction.

A settlement was established at Wybalenna (meaning Black Men’s Houses) to receive and ‘civilise’ all the remaining indigenous Tasmanians that Robinson rounded up with a mixture of inducements and deception. By 1833 there were about 220 Aborigines at the Wybalenna settlement, which Robinson supervised for five years. Despite – or because of – the administration of liberal doses of Christianising education, agricultural practice, medical care and western food, the population steadily declined, so that by 1847, only 46 Tasmanians survived at Wybalenna. The law of unintended consequences has a long pedigree, especially when a powerful nation tries to impose alien cultural values on peoples ‘for their own good’. Robinson, it goes without saying, thrived. Fresh from the tragic failure of his social experiment in Tasmania, in 1839 he was appointed ‘Protector of Aborigines’ at Port Phillip on mainland Australia, from where he retired to England to enjoy his wealth and place in society.

This was the man who collected the cremation bundles that found their way to the BM through two intermediaries. By his own account - he kept an exhaustive diary – the Tasmanian women who wore such bundles (as protection or cures against illness and injury) did not give them up willingly. Indeed there was a thriving market at the time in such relics, and most of all for skeletal remains of a people who were considered by Europeans to be ‘inferior’, an evolutionary aberration. Museums with zoological and anthropological collections in Europe and Australia were keen to get their hands on specimens from a race they consigned to a place somewhere between apes and humans. There are authentic contemporary accounts of grave-robbing, corpse mutilation and dead bodies rendered down in Tasmania, to be shipped back to Britain in barrels as skeletal specimens, often to order. These acts of barbarity were illegal even under British colonial administration – a few of those complicit in this illicit trade were brought to justice, but most were not. Once in the collections of august museums, a blind eye was turned by the authorities to the heinous origins of such sought-after ‘specimens’.

Indisputably, not one bone of an Aboriginal was taken from Tasmania with the consent of the individual or their community. Without exception, every one of these anatomical specimens - as western scientists regard them - held in British institutions is stolen. The circumstances under which such material was collected and entered UK museums is recognised by an increasing number of museums as making its retention unethical. Consequently, museums in London, Manchester and Edinburgh have repatriated such ancestral remains unconditionally to the indigenous community.

When the BM returned the two cremation ash bundles to Tasmanian Aborigines earlier this year, Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, a BM trustee and human rights lawyer explained that “it has long been obvious that human remains are not like other objects held by museums. Descendants are distressed that the remains of ancestors have not reached their final resting place, in accordance with indigenous customs. And when, as in the case of the Tasmanian Aboriginals, those ancestors suffered such an egregious wrong, that distress is likely to be very intense.”

Parliament has recently changed the law to make it possible for national museums in England and Wales to dispossess themselves of human remains for the first time. This paved the way for the British Museum to return the Tasmanian bundles and for the Natural History Museum to think the unthinkable: the possibility of repatriating items whose status in their collections had simply not been up for discussion.
A dwindling number of UK institutions, however, still struggle with the moral arguments for and utilitarian arguments against return. Some scientists are exercised by the implications of losing material evidence that deepens our understanding of human diversity, origins and patterns of disease. This point should be conceded without demur: return of a relatively small number of these human remains to claimant communities will assuredly involve loss to science (though for material that has remained in store unexamined for over a century, one wonders whether the case is occasionally overstated). The decision made in mid-November by the Trustees of the Natural History Museum to repatriate seventeen ancestors to Tasmania is a watershed: as the Director of the Museum acknowledges, “our decision may be questioned by community groups or by some scientists. However, we believe the decision to return the Tasmanian remains, following a short period of data collection, is a commonsense one that balances the requirements of all those with an interest in the remains.”

Underlying this decision is the tacit admission that the ‘loss to science’ argument can no longer be allowed to override the moral issue: that these remains were stolen, they are not and never have been legitimately in the possession of UK museums. They are not ours to keep, however much we might argue about their usefulness to science. Ethical science proceeds from the principle of avoiding harm to others. Anthropologists and archaeologists who design their programmes of study with the consent of originating communities find that their research is not only untainted ethically, but strengthened academically. One can only hope that the Natural History Museum’s programme of ‘data collection’ – which, we are told, will include “imaging, measurements and DNA analysis” and the replacement of any material temporarily removed for this purpose, will be carried out only with the agreement of the indigenous community. To do so without such agreement will be seen in Tasmania and elsewhere as a final act of willful violation of the principle of consent.

The day before Adam and I visited Wybalenna, the state premier announced that the Tasmanian government would pay compensation to victims of the stolen generation: the forced removal of around 100,000 Aboriginal children in Australia from their natural parents to orphanages, missions or private homes. This shameful experiment in racial eradication was administered by the Australian Government over a period of about seventy years until 1969. The individual pain and collective trauma that this abuse of their human rights has caused in the Aboriginal community continues to this day. So does their sense of outrage that UK museums hold the remains of an earlier generation of indigenous Australians removed without consent and within a racist paradigm.

There aren’t many opportunities for us to redress the wrongs of our forebears: this is one we should embrace with a generosity of spirit that will cost museums little and do a great deal of good. At Wybalenna there is a small memorial to Aunty Ida West, a Tasmanian who died in 1995. The inscription ends with her words: “Where the bad was, we can always make it good.”

Tristram Besterman is a UK-based freelance adviser and writer on museums and cultural issues. He has worked in the UK museum sector for over thirty years, and whilst Director of The Manchester Museum, handed back five ancestors into the safekeeping of Australian Aboriginal representatives in 2003. Tristram served on the UK Government Working Group on Human Remains under the chairmanship of Norman Palmer from 2002-04, and now serves on the UK Government’s Advisory Panel on Human Remains in museums.

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