Alexandra Roginski (Author)
Monash University Publishing
Publication date: 2015
Language: English
Physical Details: 142 pages
It is 1860 in Australia. An Aboriginal laborer named Jim Crow is led to the scaffold of the Maitland Gaol in colonial New South Wales. Among the onlookers is the Scotsman A.S. Hamilton, who will take bizarre steps in the aftermath of the execution to exhume this young man's skull. Hamilton is a lecturer who travels the Australian colonies teaching phrenology, a popular science that claims character and intellect can be judged from a person's head. For Hamilton, Jim Crow is an important prize. A century and a half later, researchers at Museum Victoria want to repatriate Jim Crow and other Aboriginal people from Hamilton's collection of human remains to their respective communities. But, their only clues are damaged labels and skulls. With each new find, more questions emerge. Who was Jim Crow? Why was he executed? And, how did he end up so far south in Melbourne? In a compelling and original work of history, author Alexandra Roginski leads readers through her extensive research, aimed at finding the person within the museum piece. Reconstructing the narrative of a life and a theft, she crafts a case study that elegantly navigates between the law and Aboriginal history, heritage studies and biography. The Hanged Man and the Body Thief is a nuanced story about phrenology, a biased legal system, the aspirations of a new museum, and the dilemmas of a theatrical third wife. It is, most importantly, a tale of two very different men, the collector and the collected, one of whom can now return home. (Series: Australian History) [Subject: History, Australian Studies, Aboriginal Studies]
...MoreReview Peter Hobbins (2016) Review of "The Library at the End of the World: Natural Science and Its Illustrators". Historical Records of Australian Science (pp. 92-102).
Similar Citations
Chapter
Turnbull, Paul;
(2011)
A Judicious Collector: Edward Charles Stirling and the Procurement of Aboriginal Bodily Remains in South Australia, c. 1880--1912
Article
Vanessa Finney;
(2022)
Dining on Geologic Fish: Claiming the Australian Ceratodus for Science
Book
Paul Turnbull;
(2019)
Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia
Article
Tim Murray;
(2019)
A Voyage Round My Grandfather: Australian Antiquarianism and Writing the History of Aboriginal Australia
Article
Batty, Philip;
(2014)
The Tywerrenge as an Artefact of Rule: The (Post) Colonial Life of a Secret/Sacred Aboriginal Object
Article
MacDonald, Helen;
(2007)
A Scandalous Act: Regulating Anatomy in a British Settler Colony, Tasmania 1869
Book
MacDonald, Helen;
(2010)
Possessing the Dead: The Artful Science of Anatomy
Book
Eugenia Pacitti;
(2024)
Body Collected in Australia, The: A History of Human Specimens and the Circulation of Biomedical Knowledge
Book
Jones, Ross L.;
(2007)
Humanity's Mirror: 150 Years of Anatomy in Melbourne
Book
Short, John Rennie;
(2009)
Cartographic Encounters: Indigenous Peoples and the Exploration of the New World
Article
Tom W. May;
Thomas A. Darragh;
(2019)
The Significance of Mycological Contributions by Lothar Becker
Article
Bruce Buchan;
Linda Andersson Burnett;
(2019)
Knowing Savagery: Australia and the Anatomy of Race
Article
Nicholas Smith;
(2020)
‘Carried off in their hundreds’: Epidemic diseases as structural violence among Indigenous peoples in Northwestern Australia
Article
Toby Raeburn;
Kayla Sale;
Paul Saunders;
Aunty Kerrie Doyle;
(2022)
Aboriginal Australian mental health during the first 100 years of colonization, 1788–1888: a historical review of nineteenth-century documents
Article
Thomas A. Darragh;
(2019)
Lothar Becker: A German Naturalist in Victoria, 1849–52, 1855–65
Article
Hilary Howes;
(2019)
Lothar Becker’s Contributions to Anthropology
Article
Hamacher, Duane W.;
Frew, David J.;
(2010)
An Aboriginal Australian Record of the Great Eruption of Eta Carinae
Article
Bronwen Douglas;
(2013)
Philosophers, Naturalists, and Antipodean Encounters, 1748-1803
Article
Hamacher, Duane W.;
Norris, Ray P.;
(2011)
Comets in Australian Aboriginal Astronomy
Article
McGregor, William B.;
(2008)
Missionary Linguistics in the Kimberley, Western Australia: A History of the First Seventy Years
Be the first to comment!