The skull of an unidentified Aboriginal man in the Melbourne Museum’s collection piqued the curiosity of historian Alexandra Roginski and led her to solve a 150-year-old cold case featuring a body snatching phrenologist. Amanda Smith reports on how the remains of ‘Jim Crow’ eventually came home.
It's June 30, 2015 and a ceremony is taking place at the Melbourne Museum. The doors haven't opened yet and the crisp morning air in the museum's Milarri Garden is thick with the smoke of burning gum leaves. The skull of an Aboriginal man who died in 1860 is being handed over to his people to be taken back to country.
This homecoming is the culmination of detective work done by a researcher on a student scholarship at the Museum of Victoria. The mystery of the skull revolved around two 19th century practices—body snatching and phrenology.
Phrenology was developed at the end of the 18th century by Franz Joseph Gall, a German physician. Gall identified 27 'organs', or human attributes, that supposedly correlate with the outward appearance of the skull and with bumps on the head. The organs include cleverness, forethought, memory and language.
Phrenology is seen as an obscure pseudo-science now, but throughout the 19th century it was well-known and popular in Australia, and was thought to reveal much about a person's character.
'People from across society were not only aware of the ideas and principles that [phrenology] was arguing, but in many cases also had personal readings,' says Alexandra Roginski, the young historian whose research led to the identification of the skull. 'Phrenologists often pop up on the public lecturing circuit, in gold rush towns for example, where they can garner large audiences.'
One of the prominent colonial phrenologists was A.S. Hamilton, a Scotsman who arrived in Australia in 1854 and toured the country for 30 years. But was he a dedicated man of science or a travelling showman?
'He was possibly the most famous or notorious phrenologist of the 19th century but whether he believes in phrenology is a moot point,' says Roginski, the author of The Hanged Man and the Body Thief: Finding Lives in a Museum Mystery.
Hamilton would give private delineations of character (future PM Alfred Deakin was a client) and read the heads of audience members invited on stage as part of his public demonstrations. One of his major drawcards was a collection of some 50 human skulls, which he used in his lectures to illustrate the connection between character traits and cranial features.
Phrenology diagram
Phrenology held that different 'organs' or regions of the skull were demonstrative of a person's character.(Stuart Rankin, Flickr.com, CC-BY-NC-2.0)
This is where phrenology gets tied up with racial theory and with body snatching. A number of Hamilton's skulls belonged to Aboriginal people—many of whom were executed criminals. According to Roginski, Hamilton often visited the condemned in jail.
'He gets these quite desperate men to tell their side of the story, to tell their family history, and then he is able to use that information as part of the back story in the lecture when he is actually presenting the skulls,' she says.
After Hamilton's death in 1884, his widow donated the skull collection to the Museum of Victoria. This is where, in 2013, Roginski first encountered a skull labelled 'Jim Crow'. Earlier efforts to identify who this man was and where he came from had failed. The label accompanying the skull had deteriorated over the more than 120 years it had spent at the museum.
It was clear that the skull's original owner was Aboriginal, and that he had been executed, but the place name on the label had deteriorated to the point where only the suffix '-land' was legible. Moreover, 'Jim Crow' was a popular nickname for Aboriginal men in the 19th century. Earlier efforts to identify the skull had concentrated on Jim Crows in Portland, Victoria.
The digitisation of colonial-era newspapers by the National Library allowed Roginski to turn up a report in the Brisbane Courier from April 1862, which eventually led to the successful identification. The report described A.S. Hamilton demonstrating his craft using Jim Crow's skull.
The report goes on to note that Jim Crow was executed at Maitland, NSW in 1860 for raping a European woman. Roginski discovered that Hamilton had also been arrested there in 1860—for attempting to dig up recently executed criminals.
'Hamilton approaches the sexton of the cemetery and offers him one pound to dig down to the remains and to remove the heads,' she says. 'He makes it seem very commonplace, something that has happened lots of times before, so it shouldn't be a problem.'
The sexton, however, reported Hamilton to the police and a trial ensued. During his defence, Hamilton revealed information about how he has acquired the skulls in his collection.
'He says that some he had assisted to dissect immediately after their execution, others were given to him by men in high office, and the remainder he disinterred in the bush of Australia.' Hamilton was acquitted of the charge, and the graves in the Maitland cemetery remained unmolested.
Read more: James Randi on challenging pseudoscience
Yet by 1862, Hamilton had Jim Crow's skull and was using it in his lectures to demonstrate features he considered criminal. It remains unclear just how he acquired the skull, however. Roginski says that he may have engaged someone to act as his agent and exhume Jim Crow.
'Either it has been supplied to him, or he has actually gone back himself with a shovel and done the job,' says Roginski. Hamilton believed it was entirely appropriate that he should possess the remains of convicted criminals. During the exhumation trial he said that just as a geologist needs rocks for his study, so a phrenologist needs skulls. He also played on the widespread fear of body snatching.
'There was a fear of body snatching for medical schools and dissection, and he's able to say, "Look, we need access to criminals, because otherwise it'll be your mother or your sister." It's quite emotive,' says Roginski.
For Roginski, the investigation has shown how historians can make a real contribution. 'It's this detective work with archives and other sources through which historians try and piece together where remains have come from, so that they can be repatriated to country,' she says.
The case also demonstrates the great complexities of identification to allow for repatriation. Australian museums are nowadays willing to facilitate the return of human remains—it's identification that's often the stumbling block.
At the Melbourne Museum to accept the skull of Jim Crow is Tom Miller, an elder of the Wonnarua people of the Hunter Valley. 'Even though it's been a hard journey, it will be good to be able to get him back to where he does belong,' he says.
Also present is Wonnarua man James Wilson-Miller. He explains why the repatriation of Jim Crow is important: 'Spiritually, to have him cleansed from past journeys that he's been on, taken from place to place and having his head held up in an audience and having certain bumps or grooves in his skull explained: "This is what an Aboriginal criminal looks like." His next journey will be one of peace.'
The identification of their forebear by Roginski came as unexpected but welcome news. 'I can say on behalf of all Wonnarua people we are certainly thankful for that research,' says Wilson-Miller. 'We feel now that we are bringing him back home, and we can be thankful for that too.'
For Roginski, identifying Jim Crow also meant turning a museum object into a real person. 'What I'm really passionate about is this is the story of a man, this is what we've pieced together; he was a living, vital, three-dimensional person.'
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