Researching Australian history led journalist Paul Daley to accounts of a shameful trade by 19th and 20th century collectors that is still playing out to this day.
. That’s partly because the book is a culmination of perhaps a decade of my journalism about the tensions within, and blind-spots of, Australia’s national narrative –especially regarding frontier violence and its legacies.
I was struck and repelled by their ethnological obsessions and fiercely competitive collecting of Indigenous material culture – including ancestral remains. An Aboriginal friend calls it the “salvage mentality” of those who wrongly thought they were chronicling the extinction of the earth’s oldest enduring civilisation.This inspired me to learn more about the shameful 19th- and 20th-century trade in First Nations peoples’ skeletons.
At the South Australian Museum, I researched how the pillars of Adelaide society – doctors, museum directors, anthropologists – were impelled to steal the remains of so many Aboriginal people. was published in 2014.
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