2024, 336 p.
If too many Australians thought that The Voice was too hard, then Truth Telling is going to be even harder. Cassandra Pybus' book A Very Secret Trade: The Dark Story of Gentlemen Collectors in Tasmania confronts the clandestine trade in Tasmanian indigenous remains head-on: something we've all long known about but somehow tucked away back of mind. In a way, we've been softened up for the truths in this book by Marc Fennell's podcast and TV series 'Things the British Stole'. But in this book, the blame is not easily sheeted off to 'the British'. Certainly, the governors and many of the civil servants in Van Diemen's Land in the 1840s and '50s were sojourners, returning back 'home' to England once they had attained their long-sought pensions. But collecting institutions like museums and universities were founded here as permanent institutions, and they need to own their histories of acquisition, obfuscation and refusal.
It was Zoe Laidlaw's early book Colonial Connections 1815-45: patronage, the information revolution and colonial government (2005) that first opened my eyes to the connection between patronage, colonial careers and collecting. It underpinned the webs of influence that stretched from wealthy gentlemen collectors back in Britain, who could pull their parliamentary and civil service strings, across the ocean to civil servants in the colonies on a couple of hundred pounds a year. Once here, those local civil servants could pull on their own (rather more threadbare) strings to source animal and human remains which could be forwarded back 'home' to keep the connection strong. The gentlemen patrons back 'home' competed amongst themselves over the size of their personal collections and the prestige of the institutions with which they associated themselves, so there was always a market for curiosities, and especially those curiosities which were perceived to be on the road to extinction.
I hadn't realized, though, that once the local functionary was in the colonies, he (and it was almost always 'he') deliberately petitioned and importuned for postings that made it possible to source such objects for his patrons. Pybus introduces us to doctors and surgeons (many of them), constables, merchants, Superintendents and magistrates, surveyors and artists, clergymen and librarians who were part of this network. Most disturbingly, some of them - especially those charged with the 'care' of this 'dying' race- deliberately maneuvered their positions so that they were untrammeled in finding, digging up and shipping human remains. And so many remains, often innocuously labeled as 'specimens' flowed across the ocean into private and institutional collections.
As a historian, Pybus has to work with silences and euphemisms. Clearly all these people realized the sensitivities of the indigenous people over the treatment of their people after their death, and so no-one actually wrote definitively about what they were doing. Many of the disinterments took place in isolated places or under the veil of darkness, and permission was neither given nor sought. Thus, the documentary record from the Tasmanian end is largely silent but at the receiving end, accession files, private correspondence and wills reveal the flood of 'objects' that made their way across to British and European patrons and institutions. They were being shipped overseas at scale, under the anodyne label of 'specimens'.
Both through her own personal connection, and in keeping with her earlier book Truganini (my review here), Pybus focusses particularly on the islands north and east of Tasmania and the nearby mainland coastal areas, and the remaining people of the different nations on Van Diemen's Land who were shipped between Wybalenna (Flinders Island) and Oyster Cove. They are so few that they can be named, and she does so in her Appendix 2. I've read quite a bit about George Augustus Robinson, the 'Protector' but I was unaware of his upwards change of fortunes once he returned 'home', where a lucrative marriage gave him all the property and status that he ever yearned for. He barely needed the dozen or so skulls that he carried in his luggage home, sourced from the First People who died under his 'care' at Wybalenna.
Lady Jane Franklin, too, is cast in a different light by her cultivation of collectors in her circle of friends, particularly young and handsome ones. Her expeditions across rugged terrain take on a new meaning when you realize the collecting intentions of the gentlemen accompanying her. The sheer number of surgeons and doctors in Pybus' Appendix 1 of 'The Worshipful Society of Body-Snatchers' is chilling.
Pybus closes her book with Truganini, the so-called "last Tasmanian Aborigine" who, in floods of tears, had begged a minister whom she trusted that when she died, her body be burnt and the ashes thrown into the deepest part of the D'Entrecasteaux Channel. It took a hundred years for her wishes to be complied with. Copies and casts of her articulated skeleton were on display until 1969, and may even still be on display somewhere in the world as part of the inter-museum trade in objects. The push-back to the idea of repatriation and burial from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery is instructive, as they garnered support from various professors of Anthropology and Anatomy, all of whom agreed that it would be a crime against humanity to comply with her wishes, even though Truganini's remains had barely been properly studied at all in the 100 years of institutional custodianship.
This is a very personal book for Pybus too. It is beautifully written, and her use of 'I' is measured but always warranted. She grew up overlooking the D'Entrecasteux Channel, and although oblivious to it as a child, gradually came to understand her forebears' connection with Oyster Cove. She had always thought of them as altruistic, but as she came to realize the web of patronage and obligation that touched her family too, she began to question this. I'm reminded of David Marr's stance on ancestral guilt (see here) but I think that Pybus - who shares their name in a way that David Marr does not with the ancestors he writes about- cannot distance herself so easily. Her love of Tasmania, and especially the eastern coast bursts through her beautiful descriptions, and her own sense of country gives her an added feeling of indebtedness and complicity in the dispossession of the First People who were there before her. She had resisted for many years the 'thorny' word "genocide" but admits that "after years of research into the hidden corners of the history of my beautiful island home, I find the fact of it inescapable." (p. 256) The rapid commodification of the remains of indigenous people, the ransacking of burial grounds, and the trade to collectors and museums world-wide with the added marketing-edge of "last of" and "extinct" certainly makes the word hard to avoid.
My rating: 9/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library
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