Paul Turnbull

In 1957, Clinton Hartley Grattan, one of Australia's most important foreign observers, wrote of the shadow of the "urban" in legends of the Australian "bush".1 He argued that the early frontiers of Australian settlement were frontiers of men with private capital, or entrepreneurs, and those frontiers thus carried more elements of the urban than is commonly realised. Such early colonial enterprises around Australia's south and southeastern coasts, and across the Tasman included sealing, whaling, milling and pastoralism, as well as missionary, trading and finance ventures. In advance of official settlements in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, entrepreneurs mapped coastlines, pioneered trade routes and colonised lands. Backed by private capital they established colonial infrastructural architecture effecting urban expansion in the Australian colonies, New Zealand and beyond. Yet this architecture is rarely a subject of architectural histor...

This chapter focuses on the remarkable wealth of surviving evidence showing that from the foundation of the penal settlement of New South Wales in 1788, settlers and travellers in the Australian colonies knew that Indigenous Australians took great care to bury their dead in accordance with their ancestral traditions, and regarded burial places as sacred places, the desecration of which was unthinkable in pre-colonial times. Indeed, the customary rights of Australia’s first peoples to continuing ownership and use of land for burial were legally recognised by the British imperial government on the founding of South Australia in the late 1830s. Knowing how the care that the living gave the dead did not prevent the plundering of burial places for scientific ends; but as this chapter shows, many would-be collectors confessed to feeling uneasy about grave-robbing, or kept quiet about their involvement in the plundering of burial places for fear of more censure by their peers. As this chapter documents, there were also instances when settlers declined requests to help procure remains from burial places. What is more, by the end of the nineteenth century, it was not uncommon for settlers to protect graves and even memorialise the Indigenous dead.

Banks, Sir Joseph, 1743-1820 - Biographical entry - The Dalton Guide to Sources in North Queensland - NAME is a biographical, bibliographical and archival database of SUBJECT with links to related articles and images. ADD MORE DESCRIPTION AS REQUIRED

I have found many documents surviving in archives and libraries telling of the theft of Aboriginal bones in Queensland. But one of the most disturbing accounts of how they were procured is to be found in Queensland's State Library in the unpublished memoirs of ...

In this article, I discuss how returns of Ancestral Remains of Indigenous Australian communities from overseas museums and other scientific institutions since the early 1990s have occurred in the context of changing Australian government repatriation policies and practices. The article then highlights how the past three decades have seen numerous instances of the return of Ancestral Remains to their community proving difficult and stressful because of the loss of ancestral lands, life-ways and the experience of colonial subjugation. As I explain, returning the dead has challenged the living by requiring them to address questions of authority, power and historical legacies of colonialism, notably in the case of those communities seeking the restoration of ownership of their ancestral country within the framework of Australia’s current national and state land laws.

This article examines in contextual depth the investigations of Indigenous Australian ancestral bodily remains by four influential British Darwinian comparative anatomists active between 1860 and 1919: George Rolleston (1829-1881), William Henry Flower (1831-1899), Alexander Macalister (1844-1919), and William Turner (1832-1916). It also reviews the examination of the structural morphology of the brains of four Indigenous Australians by Macalister's protégé, Wynfrid Lawrence Henry Duckworth (1870-1956). Since the 1970s, Darwinian scientists of the last third of the long nineteenth century have been represented in connection with the efforts of Indigenous Australian communities to have the remains of their ancestors returned for burial, as having acquired and investigated their skulls and other bodily structures to prove their evolutionary inferiority, and thereby legitimate their violent dispossession and near enslavement under so-called 'protective' regimes, where they struggled to maintain their families' health and well-being, their languages and culture. Racialized perceptions of Indigenous Australians as an evolutionarily primitive human type were perniciously influential among Australian-based and metropolitan British scientists, intellectuals, politicians and government officials during the last third of the long nineteenth century. However, as this article aims to show, by contextual scrutiny of the reportage of these leading four anatomists on their investigation of the skulls and brains of the first peoples of Tasmania and mainland Australia, they had no interest in proving Indigenous inferiority. They were driven by curiosity as to what investigation of the bodily remains of Indigenous Australians might disclose about the evolutionary genealogy of humankind. Hence, we would do well to see the outcomes of their investigations as having more complex connections with racialized perceptions of Australia's first peoples beyond medico-scientific circles, and the formulation of colonialist solutions for managing their future in the aftermath of dispossession by settler colonialism.

The Endeavour Project is a collaborative venture in digital publishing being undertaken by the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research of the Australian National University and the National Library of Australia. Other major partners include the State Library of New South Wales and the Can-berra Art School. The project has two interrelated major goals. Firstly, it employs web-based hypermedia to pursue new lines of research into James Cook's first Pacific voyage (1768-71), focusing in particular on how the records of Cook's encounters with Indigenous Australian and Oceanic peoples have influenced European intellec-tual and cultural history. Secondly, the outcomes of this research are being used to develop editing standards for the preparation and delivery of historical documents in digital forms.

ABSTRACT Big History studies the history of humankind within the historical time scales of geological and biological history. It does so to understand how powerful forces and factors at work on these large time-scales have shaped our history. It focuses particularly on how societies throughout the world have responded to major environmental, economic and social changes. David Christian and other practitioners of Big History hold that although we have become less constrained since the end of the Palaeolithic era by our biology, our life-ways, forms of social organization and culture have continued to be influenced by our biology and by the play of large-scale and long-term natural forces, notably our planet's weather and ecological systems. In this article, I discuss Big History's particular focus on our development of social complexity and technological innovations in response to our energy needs. I also consider Big History's emphasis on our evolution of symbolic communication, drawing attention to the disinclination of practitioners of Big History to adopt rigorously Darwinian interpretations of our cultural and social evolution. The article concludes by way of brief comments on David Christian's championing of Big History as a return to universal history and some personal brief observations on teaching Big History.

For full text: http://www.alia.org.au/conferences/alia2000/proceedings/turn bull.blackall.html. ... In: ALIA 2000. Capitalising on Knowledge: The Information Profession in the 21st Century (Canberra, Australia, October 23-26, 2000); see IR 058 109. ... Help ERIC expand online ...

Much has been written about how progress to nationhood in British colonial settler societies was imagined to depend on safeguarding the biological integrity of an evolutionarily advanced citizenry. There is also a growing body of scholarship on how the collecting and exhibition of indigenous ethnological material and bodily remains by colonial museums underscored the evolutionary distance between indigenes and settlers. This article explores in contextual detail several Australian museums between 1860 and 1914, in particular the Australian Museum in Sydney, the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, and the Victorian Museum in Melbourne, in which the collecting, interpretation and exhibition of the Aboriginal Australian bodily dead by staff and associated scientists served to imagine human evolutionary history.

This article examines in contextual depth the investigations of Indigenous Australian ancestral bodily remains by four influential British Darwinian comparative anatomists active between 1860 and 1919: George Rolleston (1829-1881), William Henry Flower (1831-1899), Alexander Macalister (1844-1919), and William Turner (1832-1916). It also reviews the examination of the structural morphology of the brains of four Indigenous Australians by Macalister's prot eg e, Wynfrid Lawrence Henry Duckworth (1870-1956). Since the 1970s, Darwinian scientists of the last third of the long nineteenth century have been represented in connection with the efforts of Indigenous Australian communities to have the remains of their ancestors returned for burial, as having acquired and investigated their skulls and other bodily structures to prove their evolutionary inferiority, and thereby legitimate their violent dispossession and near enslavement under so-called 'protective' regimes, where they struggled to maintain their families' health and well-being, their languages and culture. Racialized perceptions of Indigenous Australians as an evolutionarily primitive human type were perniciously influential among Australian-based and metropolitan British scientists, intellectuals, politicians and government officials during the last third of the long nineteenth century. However, as this article aims to show, by contextual scrutiny of the reportage of these leading four anatomists on their investigation of the skulls and brains of the first peoples of Tasmania and mainland Australia, they had no interest in proving Indigenous inferiority. They were driven by curiosity as to what investigation of the bodily remains of Indigenous Australians might disclose about the evolutionary genealogy of humankind. Hence, we would do well to see the outcomes of their investigations as having more complex connections with racialized perceptions of Australia's first peoples beyond medico-scientific circles, and the formulation of colonialist solutions for managing their future in the aftermath of dispossession by settler colonialism.

This article considers how Aboriginal Australian bodily remains were procured and understood in British anatomical and phrenological circles from the beginning of Australian colonization in 1788 to the early 1830s. These years saw an important shift in European thinking about race. The idea that racial differences were the result of humanity’s diversification from one ancestral type through environmental modification came to be challenged by “transmutationist ” theories that concep-tualized racial characteristics as markers of biological peculiarities between different human-like beings, quite possibly of primordial origin. The article shows how comparative anatomical analysis of Aboriginal Australian remains – often procured in violent circumstances – served to reinforce received environmentalist explanations of the nature and origins of human variation. However, the article also shows how in what they made of Aboriginal remains, subscribers to the concept of environ-mental degrada...

... Kirchengemeinde, Wuppertal; Heidi Koch, Volkerkundliches Museum, Wuppertal; MichaelKnieriem, Historisches Zentrum Wuppertal; Historisches Museum, Frankfurt; Hauptstaatarchiv, Wiesbaden; Stadtarchiv Darmstadt; Hessisches Staatsarchiv, Darmstadt; Alter Friedhof ...

Abstract: Review(s) of: The Bone Readers: Atoms, Genes and the Politics of Australia's Deep Past, by Claudio Tuniz, Richard Gillespie and Cheryl Jones 2009, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 256pp, ISBN 9781741147285 (pbk). ... To cite this article: Turnbull, Paul. The Bone ...

Page 12 1/1996 AUSTRALIANUNIVERSITIE S'REVIEW Conversational scholarship in cyberspace: the evolution and activities of H-Net, the online network for the humanities PAUL TURNBULL James Cook University of North Queensland In an unnervingly short space of ...

... 68 PAUL TURNBULL place of residence,'the limits of their respective hunting grounds appear [ed] to be distinctly recognized'. ... John Oxley, the first NSW Government Surveyor, was intrigued by the elaborate form burial took along the upper reaches of the Lachlan River in 1817. ...

The South Seas Project is a joint research venture between the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, James Cook University and the National Library of Australia. It is focused on the creation of a web-based hypermedia edition of the journals and images documenting Cook's momentous first Pacific voyage (1768‑71), together with annotations and essays in various media. The creation of such a complex artifact presents various intellectual conceptual and technical challenges. In this paper, I explore what seem to me some of the more important of these challenges, notably those relating to the cross-cultural nature of Australian and Pacific history. I also reflect on the problems associated with developing a digital information management and publication system that historians can use to engage in the critical practices they have traditionally undertaken and championed through the medium of print-based communication. Yes Yes

Within Australian historiography, the procurement of indigenous Australian ancestral remains by European scientists has generally been explained as resulting from the desire to produce evidence refining the core assumptions of Darwinian theory. I have argued elsewhere (1998, 1999) that the procurement of anatomical specimens through desecration of indigenous burial places in fact began shortly after the establishment of the penal settlement of New South Wales in 1788. It also seems clear that from the early 1880s indigenous burial places were plundered with a view to producing knowledge that would answer various questions about the origins and nature of racial difference that emerged as a consequence of the rapid and widespread assent given Darwinian evolutionary theory (Turnbull 1991). In this chapter, I want to show that the motivations of British metropolitan and colonial scientists in illegally procuring body parts in the first fifteen or so years after the 1859 publication of t...

"Harnessing the potential of the Internet and the World Wide Web has become a primary concern among humanists. In "'The Pictures of Health' Project," Paul Turnbull, e;ected the first president of H-Net in 2000, reflects on using the Web in teaching the history of the social sciences, truly part of the current renaissance. Turnbull's article deals with networked digital information systems and the ways in which computing is increasingly being used in the social sciences and humanities and the challenges we face. Turnbull is asking the most relevant question about computer technology: How is it connected to the changes now affecting scholarly culture? He offers a case study in which technology was used creatively to address disturbing assumptions about the relationships between technology and social change." Orville Vernon Burton, 'Introduction, The Renaissance', p.12. Yes Yes

In this paper, I discuss some of the more salient intellectual and technological dimensions of work over the past year, focused on developing an open source knowledge creation, management and publication system. In key respects, our work seeks to anticipate developments in national collaborative e-research infrastructure over the next five or so years. Especially in view of recent statements on innovation policy by the Australian government, we can expect the next five or so years will see significant advances in the development of online knowledge repositories for not only more complex kinds of quantitative research data, but also for qualitative data in rich and diverse media forms that will offer new possibilities for humanities research. We will also see improved or new middleware, allowing Australian research communities in the humanities collaboratively to create, share and interrogate new knowledge of cultural and social phenomena. However, if humanities researchers are to ex...

For the last two centuries Edward Gibbon has been regarded - either favourably or disparagingly - as the Enlightenment's greatest celebrant of the 'triumph of human reason'.1 He has been almost invariably portrayed as an essentially optimistic believer in rational man's potential for ...

This book draws on over twenty years’ investigation of scientific archives in Europe, Australia, and other former British settler colonies.  It explains how and why skulls and other bodily structures of Indigenous Australians became the focus of scientific curiosity about the nature and origins of human diversity from the early years of colonisation in the late eighteenth century to Australia achieving nationhood at the turn of the twentieth century.  The last thirty years have seen the world's indigenous peoples seek the return of their ancestors' bodily remains from museums and medical schools throughout the western world. Turnbull reveals how the remains of the continent's first inhabitants were collected during the long nineteenth century by the plundering of their traditional burial places. He also explores the question of whether museums also acquired the bones of men and women who were killed in Australian frontier regions by military, armed police and settlers.&nbs

p;

In this paper, I discuss some of the more salient intellectual and technological dimensions
of work over the past year, focused on developing an open source knowledge creation, management and publication system. In key respects, our work seeks to anticipate
developments in national collaborative e-research infrastructure over the next five or so years.