The Sea Inside

people mimicking cockatoos and dugongs, I discovered a yellowing newspaper clipping which, to judge from its typeface, appeared to have come from a contemporary edition of
The Times.
The dateline was Darwin, April 16. ‘A 19-year-old Aborigine who was said to have been put under a spell known as “singing him to death” by tribal women, was taken from an iron lung here to-day for 25 minutes and asked for food and water for the first time since he was admitted to hospital on Tuesday,’ it reported. ‘He cannot breathe voluntarily, and he cannot eat or drink. Doctors can find nothing organically wrong with him.’
    Truganini’s peers may have elected to die as passive victims, but she did not. She had tried to be part of the white world, or at least to work with it. In the aftermath of the Black War, during which the government had offered a bounty of £5 for each Aboriginal adult captured alive (and £2 for each child), Truganini moved to the mainland and joined a band of rebels, former whalers living on the outskirts of Melbourne, then a virtual war zone between the settlers and the settled. Resistance had become active. In one notorious raid, two white whalers were murdered and other settlers shot. In the ensuing pursuit, Truganini was shot in the head. She survived, but was tried in court and narrowly avoided being the first Aboriginal woman to be hanged in Australia. Sent back to Flinders Island, she and the last of her people were then removed to Oyster Cove, south of Hobart. New images showed them bowed down by oceans of cheap fabric, engulfed in their captors’ costume.

    Shortly before her death from ‘paralysis’ in Hobart in 1876, Truganini confessed to a Church of England priest that she feared the dishonour of her body. She had good reason to do so, given the fate of William Lanne, her second husband. A well-known whaler, ‘King Billy’ had died in 1869, and his corpse had become the subject of an unseemly dispute between scientists of the Royal College of Surgeons, run by John Hunter’s heirs, and those of the Royal Society of Tasmania, busy building their own collection. It is a remarkable story, as told by the historian Helen MacDonald, who points out that such grave-robbing had its precedent in the Antipodes.
    In 1856 Joseph Barnard Davis, an English surgeon and collector, instructed Alfred Bock, son of the painter Thomas, on how to salvage specimens of Aboriginal people to supply a Western taste for such ethnic curiosities. In order to obscure acts of pillage which were, if not illegal, then certainly unethical, Bock was to find not just one but two corpses: one black, one white, ready for burial. Since his customers generally only wanted the cranium, he was to peel the skin from the black skull and replace it with that of the white person. He would then dress the replacement so that the skin would assume its shape. This ghoulish deception was, perhaps, the ultimate insult for a dreaming people: to go to one’s grave with white bones beneath black skin.
    Eight years later another Englishman sent a request for more bones. William Flower, who had succeeded Richard Owen as conservator at the Hunterian, was eager to acquire a sperm whale for the collection. He wrote to William Lodewyk Crowther, a Tasmanian surgeon and owner of a fleet of five whaleships, and was duly sent the skeleton of a fifty-one-foot male sperm whale caught off the south coast of the island in 1864, along with the lower jaw of the largest sperm whale ever taken in Tasmanian waters, measuring sixteen feet and indicating an animal of more than seventy feet in length.
    But Flower had other acquisitions in mind, too. In a postscript to his letter he added the suggestion, ‘I suppose there is no further chance of obtaining a skeleton of … one of the aboriginal human inhabitants, or a pair, male and female?’ There was a hint of the black market in this whispered request. Crowther replied that there were just five such ‘specimens’ left – that is, Truganini and her friends at Oyster Cove – and promised to do his best. His grotesque efforts echoed John Hunter’s ‘collection’ of the Irish Giant in the previous century.
    On the night of William Lanne’s death, Crowther and his son stole into the morgue in the Colonial Hospital. Employing the techniques outlined by Joseph Davis, they took Lanne’s skull and replaced it with one from a white body. Did Lanne now look like a white black man, or a black white man? It