William Crowther recently flashed across the international media firmament when his statue was toppled from its pedestal in Hobart’s Franklin Square. Crowther, a former state premier, was the man who stole the skull of the last Tasmanian man back in 1869.
But this colonial surgeon was merely the last in a line of Hobart surgeons who together donated around twenty Tasmanian skulls to British museums. In fact, collecting Indigenous body parts had been integral to the colonial project from its beginning in 1788, and it was driven by the man whose statue still stands proudly in the Sir Joseph Banks Park at Botany Bay.
Joseph Banks was a man of omnivorous curiosity whose mania for collecting reached around the known world. As his friend Lord Hobart admiringly observed in 1793, “Wide as the world is, traces of you are to be found in every corner of it.” His most distinct traces were to be found on the continent he had visited with Captain Cook in 1770. Having lobbied strenuously for a penal colony on the coast of New Holland, Banks had exerted influence over every particular in the creation and administration of the New South Wales colony. It was no mere flattery that he was dubbed “the father of Australia.”
Late in 1787 Banks received a letter from a German friend, Göttingen anatomist Johann Blumenbach, asking if he could procure skulls from New Holland. The First Fleet had already departed for Botany Bay, so Banks felt his best hope lay with William Bligh, a young protégé he had recommended to captain the HMS Bounty on an expedition to transplant breadfruit plants from Tahiti. Banks assured Blumenbach that Bligh would “collect crania for me wherever he touches,” and that was sure to include a landing somewhere on the coast of New Holland.
On 19 August 1788, Bligh dropped anchor at Adventure Bay, on that part of the far southeast coast of New Holland marked on the map as Van Diemen’s Land. He had visited Adventure Bay on Cook’s 1777 voyage and hoped to make contact with the same friendly people Cook had encountered. But Bligh caught only fleeting glimpses of the locals through his telescope and had no chance of procuring any skulls.
Banks sent a similar request to the inaugural governor of New South Wales via the Second Fleet, which eventually straggled into Sydney Cove’s beleaguered penal settlement, loaded with sick and dying convicts, in June 1790. Banks’s outsized influence was evident in the harried governor’s response to the request. “I shall send skulls by the Gorgon,” Arthur Phillip wrote on 26 July 1790, adding that “I shall always be happy in receiving your commands,” as if — with so many convicts to bury and so many more mouths to feed out of the colony’s almost extinguished food supplies — he had no more pressing matters to handle.
Commands from Banks were not so easy to oblige, Phillip discovered. But opportunity presented itself in December 1790 when his favoured game-shooter was fatally speared by the formidable Eora warrior, Pemulwuy. Watkin Tench believed the game-shooter had given serious offence to the Eora, but Phillip was having none of that, and insisted the killing was entirely unprovoked. Tench was instructed to lead an expedition to Botany Bay to bring back Pemulwuy, as well as the heads of another ten men.
Shocked and surprised, Tench tried to reason with Phillip. But he was only able to reduce the head requirement from ten to six. He set off at dawn on 14 December with fifty or more armed men carrying hatchets for decapitation and bags for the heads. When it finally reached Botany Bay, however, this insect-ravaged party could find no men to decapitate. Back they trudged to Sydney Cove, only to be ordered out again, to no better advantage. “To our astonishment,” Tench recorded, “we found not a single native at the huts; nor was a canoe to be seen on any part of the bay.”
The governor’s overreach had the effect of enshrining Pemulwuy as a dangerous enemy. The head of this resourceful warrior was the trophy Phillip dearly wanted to present to Banks, yet Pemulwuy continually managed to evade capture. “I am sorry that I cannot send you a head,” Phillip wrote in his next letter to Banks in April 1791, eliding the sorry headhunting expedition.
When Phillip returned to England early in 1793 he took with him many crates of specimens addressed to Banks. A general description of the material given to customs officials indicated two sets of “bones” — as distinct from much animal and plant product — but nothing more specific. We can only guess that the crates contained the skulls Banks would distribute within months of Phillip’s return. One went to Blumenbach at Göttingen, a second to a professor engaged in a similar pursuit in Leiden and a third to the museum of Banks’s good friend, the surgeon John Hunter.
Phillip was succeeded as governor by Philip Gidley King, a Banks protégé who was also on the hunt for human specimens, especially the head of Pemulwuy. On 15 April 1794, Pemulwuy led an attack on a government farm beyond Sydney in which several warriors were killed. The diary of David Collins records that “the head of one is brought in… as a present for Banks’ friend Dr. John Hunter.” This was not Pemulwuy, who was badly wounded but made a miraculous escape; it was eight years before Governor King was able to get that prized trophy.
On 24 November 1802, the owner of the whaling ship Speedy sent Banks a letter to report the delivery of a head preserved in spirit as a gift from the governor of New South Wales. The customs records don’t mention a spirit cask containing a human head, but we know that it was inspected by customs officers because it made the news in a local paper, the Bury and Norwich Post, on 15 December 1802. The paper reported that a customs officer had felt an obstruction during the gauging of a cask of spirits and “to his great surprize… found a head of one of the natives of Port Jackson… the deceased being one of the most desperate and atrocious offenders of that country. On investigation, it proved to be a present from Governor King to Sir Joseph Banks.”
Banks was both amused and grateful to King. “The head of one of your subjects, which is said to have caused some comical consequences when opened at the Customs House… makes a figure in the museum of the late Mr. Hunter,” he wrote on 3 April 1803, adding that the “manifold packages you have had the goodness to forward to me have always… come safe and in good condition to my hands.” The traffic in curiosities between Banks and the colonial governor — none of which were ever listed in the customs records — was clearly sizeable.
Vice-regal appointees were not the only officials hunting on Banks’s behalf. A small army of would-be naturalists hoping to curry favour with the great man were hard at work seeking out botanical, zoological and human specimens. One such was the colony’s assistant surgeon, Denis Considen, who took the first opportunity in November 1788 to ship cases of botanical specimens, birds and animals back to London and continued to supply Banks until his return to Britain on extended sick leave in 1793.
Another was William Paterson, a passionate collector who owed Banks for his appointment to the colony as senior officer of the NSW Corps. Patterson served as administrator of the colony for nine months in 1796 before returning to England on sick leave the following year; soon after, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, just as Banks had promised. Patterson returned to the colony in 1799 as the commanding officer of the NSW Corps.
Banks’s interest in New Holland extended far beyond the precarious penal settlement at Sydney Cove. He was therefore delighted to hear of the coastal explorations undertaken by Matthew Flinders and George Bass, especially the revelation that Van Diemen’s Land was an island separated from the mainland by the wide and wild waterway they had named Bass Strait. He was eagerly receptive to a proposal from Flinders to complete a full survey of the coastline of the whole continent and lobbied for Flinders to be given command of HMS Investigator for the voyage.
Banks paid for all the expedition’s scientific equipment and rations, as well as providing wages for a naturalist with a gardener to assist, a botanical illustrator, an astronomer and a landscape painter. The naturalist was Robert Brown, a young man in his twenties who was to be Banks’s eyes, ears and hands, exploring the untold botanical and zoological richness of the great southern land, collecting, analysing and classifying botanical and zoological specimens, and gathering ethnographic and anatomical material from the human inhabitants.
Brown kept a detailed journal throughout the journey, penning intricate descriptions of the voyage and the items he was collecting. On 23 July 1802 he recorded a landing at Sandy Cape, later named Fraser Island. He took a small exploratory party deep into the island and came across a burial site marked by three tall sticks with branches covering what was revealed to be the skeleton of a man. “The skull being tolerably perfect I brought it off,” he recorded.
Five months later, Brown recorded another landing, this time in the Gulf of Carpentaria, where a group of the local men ignited a violent altercation and one warrior was shot trying to escape in his canoe. Brown’s journal entry noted that the body “washd up on the beach.” He wrote no more about the incident but it’s clear from Flinders’ journal that a party was sent to retrieve the dead body for what he described as the “anatomical purposes [of] the naturalist and the surgeon.” It was the gardener-assistant who recorded that “the Surgeon Cut off his Head & took out his Heart & put them in Spirits.” Another witness, a sailor, described how the butchered body was then “hove overboard & seen to be devour’d by Shirks [sharks].”
Given Brown’s meticulous records, his silence about this instance of anatomical collecting might appear an anomaly, but it wasn’t. Keeping quiet about the collection of human specimens was Brown’s general practice in his journal and in reports to his patron. At one point he wrote a very detailed account of his collecting for Banks with no mention of the carefully preserved head from a dead warrior in Arnhem Land or the skull he picked up from the burial site at Sandy Cape. His reticence suggests he may also have collected human specimens as the Investigator travelled along the southern coast of New Holland — specimens that might have been included among the boxes he sent to Banks from Sydney in May 1802.
Brown’s journals reveal an intense interest in the First Peoples. He made carefully detailed notes about their bodies and always sought to record the local language for the various body parts of those he encountered. The “anatomical purposes” obliquely noted by Flinders suggest that Brown also sought information in their actual bodies, while prudently leaving this morally suspect activity out of his notebooks or letters.
Banks was a man with a keen sense of public relations who would have understood the strategic importance of concealing the actual business of acquiring such rare collectibles. Desecrating dead bodies and stealing body parts was not only considered morally abhorrent but was also a crime (the sole exception being for those who had been sentenced to be executed, whose bodies were available for medical science).
Flinders had to abandon the mapping of the west coast to sail back to Sydney Cove in the summer of 1803, his crew members debilitated by months of brutal heat, cloying humidity and battalions of voracious mosquitoes. The Investigator was condemned and Flinders, unaware the British were now at war with France, took a small ship back to England. His misfortune was to sail into Mauritius, where he was imprisoned for six years
The close proximity of the French in Mauritius had always posed a potential threat to British interests in New Holland, as did the several French scientific expeditions that lavished attention on Van Diemen’s Land. In September 1803, Governor King sent a detachment of the NSW Corps to establish a base in Van Diemen’s Land at Risdon Cove, several miles upstream on the Derwent River with confidential instructions to assert His Majesty’s claim to the whole island should he encounter any Frenchmen. The commanding officer was given no instructions about what to tell the people who already occupied the land.
Back in London, meanwhile, the colonial secretary had ordered that a new outpost be created, facing into Bass Strait, at Port Phillip. Once again Joseph Banks used his influence to secure the appointment of David Collins as lieutenant-governor. Collins arrived at Port Phillip with a party of 400 convicts in late October 1803 and promptly declared the chosen site utterly unsuitable. When the Lady Nelson was ordered to sail from Sydney Cove to collect Collins and his party and transport them to the Derwent, Robert Brown seized his chance to get to Van Diemen’s Land. He arrived there with Collins and his retinue in February 1804.
It quickly became apparent to Collins that the chosen site at Risdon Cove was also unsuitable. He moved his party about five miles down-river where the wide estuary could provide a deep harbour. Left to do as they pleased, the soldiers at Risdon Cove set about drinking, shooting birds, hunting kangaroos and taking leisurely excursions into this wild, new land.
Brown found the military camp a most congenial environment and formed a fast friendship with the military surgeon, Jacob Mountgarrett. Sometimes for weeks at a time, the two men made long expeditions up various rivers to explore the unknown reaches of this new territory.
Brown was away exploring in early May when Mountgarrett witnessed the alarming sight of a mass kangaroo hunt — more than a hundred men, women and children of the Oyster Bay Nation — approaching Risdon Cove. When men carrying long spears and wooden clubs came close to the camp and began making aggressive motions towards a convict who was holding a brace of dead kangaroos, the panicked commanding officer ordered soldiers to disperse the people with guns and a short-barrel cannon and sent other soldiers to defend a nearby hut.
Despite being a civilian, Mountgarrett took it upon himself to lead the soldiers in hot pursuit as the terrified mob retreated up the valley. Later that day, he sent invitation to Reverend Robert Knopwood, chaplain to Collins, to christen “a fine native boy who I have… poor boy, his father and mother were both killed” and to watch while Mountgarrett dissected “the body of a man that was killed.” He gave no explanation of how he came to have the boy or why he was so confident that the father and mother had been killed — or indeed, of the identity of the man he intended to dissect.
Knopwood declined the invitation but came to Risdon the following week to christen the child. There, he formed the opinion that some five or six of the mob had been killed in the affray, even though the officer in charge had specified the number as three. No record was made of the disposal of the bodies. Many years later ex-convict Edward White, an eyewitness to the event, gave sworn evidence to a committee of inquiry that a great many people were killed and “some of their bones were sent in two casks to Port Jackson by Dr. Mountgarrett.” The bones were sent on the HMS Ocean, he testified, a transport ship that arrived in Port Jackson from the Derwent River on 24 August 1804. According to the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, the Ocean was carrying the full detachment of the NSW Corps together with “Mr. Jacob Mountgarrett, Surgeon, [and] Mr. Brown, Naturalist.”
Within weeks of his arrival in Sydney, Mountgarrett was appointed surgeon for a new colonial settlement at Port Dalrymple near the mouth of the River Tamar on Van Diemen’s Land’s north coast. William Paterson was appointed lieutenant-governor on Banks’s advice, and Mountgarrett on the advice of colonial surgeon-general Thomas Jamison. Mountgarrett may well have leveraged his two casks of bones to secure the appointment.
Tantalising clues about the role of the bones can be found in the correspondence of George Johnston, who succeeded Paterson as commander of the NSW Corps. Johnston, not a man given to discretion, was unusually frank about the hunt for viable human remains in his letters to his old friend Denis Considen. Writing jubilantly on 1 April 1805 he explained that he had “prevail’d on Jamison to send you the skeleton of a native he receiv’d from Van Diemen’s Land, & I have added the skull of a native of this country.” No great leap of imagination is necessary to believe that Jamison had received this skeleton from Mountgarrett, whom he had favoured with recommendation for an advantageous appointment.
The same could be said of the governor who confirmed his appointment, who was also in the business of sourcing skulls for Banks. In early January 1805 King reported to his patron that he had sent “one box and one cask from the Derwent River.” As was invariably the case, material sent to Banks was not inspected by Customs and the only evidence I can find is two skulls from Van Diemen’s Land, undated and unsourced, that were given to the museum by John Hunter sometime before 1806. These could be the remains taken by Mountgarrett and sent by King to Banks, then given to Hunter, just as Banks had previously given the preserved head of Pemulwuy.
A third skull from Van Diemen’s Land that came to Banks through Governor King’s good offices was described in the Hunter collection as being “from Port Dalrymple 1806.” The place and date provided a potent clue that the source was lieutenant-governor William Paterson. Documentary evidence was found in a private letter to King, dated 14 November 1805, in which Paterson stated that he was sending specimens of plants, ore, soil, birds, as well “a very perfect native’s head.”
Writing to Banks on 1 November 1806, King reported that these boxes of specimens from Port Dalrymple would accompany him when he returned to England on HMS Buffalo. The customs inventory for that ship listed only sixteen boxes of “natural curiosities” destined for Banks, but King’s more detailed list of personal baggage included “six boxes of war Instruments and other articles, Human Bones and Head, Animals, Skins.” It is safe to surmise that the human head, if not the bones, went to “the late Mr Hunter’s museum.”
So, should Sir Joseph Banks be pushed off his pedestal too? •
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