It is the probably one of the most significant colonial sources that we have, and he's been kind of saddling neglected except by me, because it's such a complicated character. He's so the good is so interwoven with the evil, it's really hard to pull them apart.
I'm Jen Kelly from The Herald Son and this is In Black and White, a podcast about some of Australia's forgotten characters. I need to tell you up front that today's episode will not be for everyone, but for those who choose to listen, it's one of the most compelling and disturbing episodes we've produced of this podcast. Just a warning to listeners, this episode contains extremely dark content and graphic details of the deaths of Indigenous people, particularly in
relation to the horrific crime of grave robbing. Today we are speaking with Tasmanian historian Cassandra Pybus, who is the best selling author of Traganini, who we spoke with four years ago about that wonderful book. Now Cassandra is here to talk about her new book, which is called A Very Secret Trade, The Dark story of Gentlemen collectors in Tasmania, and she'll talk about one of those collectors in particular who was named George Augustus Robinson. Welcome back to the podcast, Cassandra.
I'm delighted to be here now.
The last time we spoke was back in twenty twenty when we talked about your last book, TRAGANINNI Journey through the Apocalypse, which has now sold over thirty thousand copies. So well done, very well done.
How you like it now?
That was such a compelling story and if any listeners want to hear that episode, they should scroll back to March twenty three, twenty twenty, and I highly recommend it was such an amazing episode to listen to be Cassandra, I thought that it was an obvious starting point for us today because it was towards the end of you writing that book that you first stumbled across this horrific secret from the past. Can you explain what you found and how it all unraveled.
Well, I was just about to send my manuscript to the final manuscript to the publisher, and I thought, oh, I just better double tech something. The man who transcribed George Augustus Robinson's journals on which most of Chugliny is based, has an archive up in Lonceston, and I thought there must be something in there that I might need to see,
or something that I've missed. And so I'm sitting in this little archive and lon system push it, going through things, and I suddenly see this letter he's transcribed from a colonial lawyer who basically name didn't mean much to me, who describes that in the museum of the Royal Society of which he is the curator, the honorary curator, they had the complete skeleton of one of tugging in his best friends, who died several years before she did. And
I was just literally for a moment stop breathing. I was so shocked, so shocked to read this, And I thought, goodness, if this shocks me, who else is going to be shocked by this? And what more is there? And so I go and find his letterbook, his business letter books,
his lawyer's letter books. It's full of stuff about wills and you know, interest payments and stuff like that and touched away and there are several letters to overseas museums about the skeletons that he's complete and perfect skeletons that he's sending them, that he has gone to great expense, and personal trouble to get from the graves of Aboriginal people on Flinders Island and wait for it at Oyster Cove.
And who knew, Well, no one knew, because this is a very secretive business, and as the title of my book suggests, a very secret trade. So I thought, oh, here's something. And so it's taken years and years and years of work to uncover a whole network of grave robbing, basically so much so that I would think that there
was not one a known Aboriginal burial site. And I think it's important to know that the indigenous people of Tasmania burnt their dead, cremated their dead, and so that it was only after they came into contact with them were put into what some people would refer to as concentration camps, but or settlements offshore settlement at Flinders Island, where they buried in traditional kind of Christian burial, even if they weren't Christian. And so therefore all those known
burial sites eventually were raided for their schleetal remains. How's that for shocking?
That is shocking. And interestingly enough, Tragerini had always made it clear what she wanted to happen to her body after she died, didn't she?
Yes, she got a very sympathetic clergyman downe at Oyster Cove where that she were. She was the last survivor to row her out into the middle of the very deep and very broad don Tree Casto Channel and said to him, bury me here, it's the deepest place. Promised me, promise me. Because she knew what would happen to her body, and there was attempts to make to bury her secretly and to make sure that nobody got hold of her body,
but they did two years later. Some years after that it was put on public display.
So you think she was quite aware of this practice.
Of course she was aware of it. They've been digging up the graves of Oyster co for at least fifteen years before she died. I discovered and who was it who was organizing that. Two separate governors, two separate governors, first Governor gor Brown and then Governor James Duquet, trying to please people in London who were collecting these remains because they considered the Tasmanian First people to be a completely unique race, completely unique, nothing like anybody else in
the world. They placed them somewhere between neanderthor Man and modern man. And so they thought, oh, these are really curious. You know, rare rare verity is a big thing if you're a collector. And there's a lot of nonsense talked about this being a scientific inquiry, and it was scientific in so far as they decided that this were These were the skulls mostly what they were interested in of a people unlike any other people. But my but they
did very little. They've never done very much scientific investigation on these skeletal remains. I think it was really about collecting verities.
Now, your new book A Very Secret Trade tells the story of what you term grave robbers or gentlemen collectors as they're called in Tasmania. But today we're going to tell the story of one in particular who featured very heavily in Tuggerini's story. And there's obviously a lot of crossover in the two stories. So where does Robinson's Where does Robinson's story begin?
Well, basically, he comes from London. He was a working class Londoner. He was a bricklayer. I think came to the colony in the late twenties, eighteen twenties and set up building houses. Quite successful builder he became. But of course, you know, the colony is just a kind of mirror image of the imperial world. So of course his London
lower class accent would have always given him away. He would never have been able to pass himself off as a gentleman or anything close to one, so that he might have been making quite a bit of money as a tradesman, that he would always be looked down on by the colonial elite. And so he seems to have a genuine, deep religious conviction about saving the indigenous people of Tasmania from destruction that he could see was you know, inevitable,
and bringing them into the light of God. And so he went around Tasmania over a period of four years with a handful of his mission guides or hissabled companions as they called them, including Kragnini and her husband Worriedy, conciliating the different clan groups all around Tasmania and persuading them that if they didn't come with him and put
themselves under the Governor's protection, they would be annihilated. And I think they could see enough of the riding on the wall to often agree with him that they that their life, their way of life was completely under attack and they would not survive. But others were just persuaded by at gunpoint eventually that this is what they should do. And he never understood until quite near the end that the intention was to remove these people from the island
colony completely. And so he then becomes the instrument of taking them to a settlement on Flinder's Island in the middle of the Bass Strait, knowing full well that this is a betrayal, fundamental betrayal of what he had promised them, that they would be somehow allowed to stay in, if not exactly their own country, at least in a part of the country that they had the islands they had inhabited for forty thousand years. And so then he becomes
the commandant of the Aboriginal settlement on Flinders Island. That's the title he's given, and so this is a huge step up in the world for him. But it's terrible because not unsurprisingly, these less than three hundred people who just died. There's a myth that circulated around when I was a younger person in Tasmania about how they died of a broken heart or they died of loneliness because
they'd been taken away from their country. They died of tuberculosis, they died of measles, they died of they basically tuberculosis ran rife through that population, and so they were all very susceptible to any kind of respiratory viruses that came in when ships came to bring the salted food that they were being fed, so the water they drank was salty. Their health was just they went from being very healthy people to being extremely unhealthy people who died very quickly,
and they had no proper medical treatment. And so he just wanted to get out of there as soon as he could and became the protector of the protector interesting terminology of Aborigines in Victoria, which was then called the Port Phillip Settlement.
Did he put his hand up for that role?
Oh, he begged and begged and he basically created the role, the idea of the role, and then begged and cajoled and wheedled the governor of New South Wales to give it to him.
And why was that? Was that because he saw that as a way to move up in the world, or.
He thought the way to get away from the graveyard. He was living in and to take the remaining people with him, but the governor wouldn't let him take all the people from why Berlina. He said that he could take one family, now that would have been drugging and
we're already and we're ready his two sons. But in fact he couldn't leave behind the people who'd been with him for all these years, and he took them all, fourteen people and because they were all family to him, and that caused a huge amount of trouble for him in Victoria because he then became responsible for them. Because these are Tasmanians, they're not Victorians. They've got nothing in common with the people. They've been separated from Victoria twenty
five thousand years. He got nothing in common with people from Victoria. It was a disastrous thing to do, and basically they were Eventually what was left of them were returned to Flinders Island, including Drugnenni and he then went on to have a short lived career in Victoria before
he retired and went to live in England. And in that time he made himself a very rich man because he traded in land in Port Phillip when it became became Melbourne, and then there was the gold rush and he was one of the first people to buy gold nuggets from guys who came in from finding the gold. And then he had huge land grants in Tasmania that he sold, and he sold them all up and went to England as a very wealthy man. His first wife
had died. He left all his kids behind, bereft and without any money into the gentry class because they had the money to do it, and then went off to Europe for three years and taught himself foreign languages, which got rid of his accent.
So you talked about how his motivations were genuine at the beginning. Did they stay that way? Did he always believe that he was doing the right.
Thing by these aboriginal people, or did his motivations changed because he obviously made a lot of money. So did he just become very greedy and see this as a way to make his fortune.
Anyone who comes to the colony of Van Diemen's Land, as Tasmeia was known as a free settler is wishing to increase their status in the world and make money. Has five children and he's got to provide for those children. So always in what he is doing. There is this pecuniary interest in land grants, getting more the lang grands, in particular getting as a tradesman, he wouldn't have normally got land grants. He gets a lot of lang grands
as a reward. But he would always have said, and I have often defended him to a degree of saying, well, Georgia, Gustus Robinson's the best, you're going to the best of them. He always believed that bringing these people into the light of into God's life would save them. He didn't expect that God would allow them all to die, and so that's why there's this sort of desperate desire to try and move them to Victoria where they might be healthier
and they could integrate with the Victorian first people. And of course that didn't happen, because that's not how the world works. And in Victoria that the task that faced him with the Victorian clans was so overwhelming that he just couldn't handle it. And so building a big house for himself in Victoria and buying up land cheaply to sell once prices boomed with the gold Russian stuff became much more of a driver for him because I think he couldn't face the fact that he was failing at
his god given task of saving the indigenous people. So there's always been this balance between his ideal his idealism, and his his desire to rise up in the in the status he felt bitterly the way in which even the convicts used to make fun of him, how lowly his status was, and he wanted to have you know, he wanted he wanted respect, he wanted to be treated like a gentleman, and eventually he was.
Now. I'd love you soon to take us through some of the very specific discoveries that you made about George Augustus Robinson, but first to understand that we really need to hear about his journal. So can you explain to us the family connection that you have to Robinson.
And ancestor mi colonial ancestor. The first first Pybus to come to Tasmania took up the first land grant on big Land Grant on Brunie Island, and within months of that, that was in eighteen twenty nine, George Augustus Robinson was given a very small grand Land Grand immediately adjacent to the Pybus Land Grand to set up a kind of mission station. It didn't last for very long, because an epidemic of influenza wiped out the people of Bruney Island
very quickly in eighteen twenty nine. But that those two people, Robinson and Richard Pybus, became close friends and stayed close friends, so that Richard Pybus was his agent when he was in Victoria, and he sold his property for him and looked after his property and then sold it for him. And I was directed to read George Augustus Robinson's journals.
Turns out he was a great scribbler, and he wrote a journal long often item every day by the great Lindall Ryan, Australian historian, to whom I'm very indebted, who died yesterday, oh published which has touched it. And she said, ah, you know you should read Georgia Augustus Robinson's journal. He
talks about your grand great grandfather, great great grandfather. Oh oh god no. And so I started reading this journal, this daily account of his association with the people are the first people of the island, and what he was doing and the justifications he was making about what he was doing and removing these people, and it was it just turned my life around. And now I hear I am with my third book about George Augustus Robinson and his vision for the people of Tasmania and where that led.
It is probably one of the most significant colonial sources that we have, and he's been kind of saddly neglected except by me, because it's such a complicated character. He's so the good is so interwoven with the evil, it's really hard to pull them apart.
So let's start to go through what you discovered in the journals. So Robinson returned to Australia before leaving Australia for good.
What did he get up to there?
Well, basically he I'll go back to the time that he was trying to get out of going to staying at Yvelina and just burying more people. And he was visited by the new governor of Van Dema's Land, Sir John Franklin and his wife Lady Jane Franklin, both famous names, or certainly Lady Jane Franklins, for very briefly for a
sort of tour of duty of the Aboriginal settlement. And in order to get to go to Victoria, he needed the new governor to give his permission, and so he wanted to curry favor with the new governor, and so he got the people to dance for them and to pretend to be aboriginies for them, as normally they weren't allowed to they weren't allowed to take their clothes off, and they weren't allowed to wear oka, and they weren't allowed to have ceremony, but he let them do it
to entertain, to entertain the governor and his wife. And as they were leaving, Lady Jane Franklin asked him if she could he could get her some Aboriginal skulls, and he had noticed that in his diary, And then a bit later in his journal he notes that he was attending auta he demanded that there be autops he's done on the bodies as people died, because he wanted to establish, if possible, what was they were all dying of, And it was all to do with disease lungs, and there
it is, he says. He talks about this man called Christopher and how he ordered the body decapitated and sent it off to someone else to be have the flesh taken off the skull and then buried the rest of
the mangled body. And then a little while later there was another, a woman, and then a little while after that there was the woman's husband, who was a major figure in the you know what we might have referred to as the chief and he took a trip up to see the governor and could present his case about why should be the protector of Aborigines in in across Bastradia in what became Victoria, And he undoubtedly took those three skulls with him, And that lady Jane Franklin donated
those skulls to the Royal College of Surgeons in eighteen fifty four. Shouldn't say where she got them from, but she donated three Tasmanian skulls, and I can only presume that they were the three skulls that George Augustus Robinson took from the people that he'd been caring for and looking after and was and had vowed that he would
look you know, that he would protect them. And I also discovered that at the same time that he was weedling to get the amulets of the dead that they would wear around their neck, small bones from the body of their children or their loved ones, and he would get hold of them and say he'd keep them for safe keeping, and in fact he was keeping them for a collection which he eventually took to England with him.
So that much I knew about him from his journal, But it was only until I was looking into his life in Bath that I found out that what I had written about in his journal for those three skulls was routine. And then he probably left why Billina with at least a dozen Kasmanian skulls as well as these amulets of the dead and some other skletal material and
bits of their hair, obviously building a collection. And I can tell you I was pretty shocked about this, because I'd always given him much more the benefit of the doubt. He knew, he knew, absolutely knew these people very very well. He knew they had a complete abhorrence, a horror of
anybody interfering with their bodies after death. He knew that, but he did it anyway, And to my mind, that makes him the most abhorrent of all of these skull collectors, because he understood at a profound level what a terrible betrayal this was.
Tell us more about the journal entries and exactly what they said. Was he talking about them in sort of scientific terms or medical terms. Was he showing any sort of sense of guilt.
No, he was just being completely pragmatic about it. He describes the state of their diseased lungs and then casually, basically casually says, you know, I ordered the skull that I ordered the body to capitate it in the skull s off for you know, to be stripped, and then he doesn't say anything more about and then then then
their extentry will be talking about the funeral. Now, it was quite interesting that before George Augustus Robinson came to Flinder's Island and there were other people in charge, people were not buried in coffins, but he insisted that they'd
be buried in coffins. Now I think he insisted they would be buried in coffin was because the bodies were so mangled by the time the surgeon had cut them open for him to look at and take bits off, that the people would be just horrified and so distressed if they got to see the state of the body. So they would have these Christian burials of mangled bodies in what whilst he was going off with their heads. I don't know how many, but I can account for about a dozen.
Now you were able to visit Robinson's final resting place last year, weren't you. Can you tell us about that?
Yeah, it took a bit of finding. I always knew he was buried in Bath, and I knew that there was a kind of engraved thing I thought on her headstone. It turned out he didn't have a headstone to say, you know, here lies George Augustus Robinson, the Protector, the Protector and Pacificator of the Aboriginals of Australia, or I think that's what it says. But the two terms that
stuck in my mind were protector and pacificator. And it was a graveyard that was clearly a private graveyard that was clearly for the gentry class, that had huge, great statues and stuff, and you know, all that kind of fancy Victorian graveyard. But you know, the wealthy people of Bath were buried there, and that's exactly where he wanted
to find himself. But it was really only until I got up to the top of the hill and looked at the extraordinary house that he had built, which was on the market for four point five million pounds at that point, that I realized just how much he had managed to turn himself inside aft and into it to a completely new person. And I always had this suspicion
that there were more too. There was a great, a famous skull collector who was sniffing around George Augustus Robinson in his later years, trying to get He got some of the amulets of the dead, and lots of lots of the wonderful drawings by Thomas Block of his of his aboriginal guides. He got all of those of him, but he couldn't and he got one skeleton, one skull of a boy and one skull of a man. But there was the assumption was there that there were many
more that Robinson wouldn't give him or sell him. And so where did they go? I mean, I presume they disappeared. And then when I was in the a Museum and which apparently had some Tasmanian aboriginal hair, I was looking at a little card on which a famous anthropologist had written that she got this hair from a professor in Germany called von Lucian, who had got it from George
Augustus Robinson's widow when he bought seven Tasmanian skulls. So I count three, go to the Franklins, two go to three go to skull collectors I know about England, and then there's seven that go to Von Lucian. So that's at least a dozen that I know about. And so this again is just I mean, it's all very shocking, Jen the whole saga, not just Georgia Gousta's Robin, the whole saga of what happened to the bodies of the
Tasmanian First people is all very shocking. But this one really cut to the quick for me because I had somehow trusted George Gustus Robinson to be a good man at heart, and I just couldn't see it in this. This was just he bought these skulls and the relics of the dead and all kinds of bits and pieces that he got from them and the people of Victoria back to London in order to prove that to get entry into the gentleman class, because they were all these
gentlemen collectors were really interested in that stuff. It was, you know, it was a betrayal. I mean, so the protector and pacificator of the first people of this country, basically at its root, saw them as a commodity to advance his own self interest. Now he's alone in that because that's basically part of the course. But I thought
he was better than that. And you know, it's been difficult for me, after thirty years of being attached to the journals of the dogged and broken backed journals of George Augustus Robinson, to realize that his betrayal was that deep that he would betray them after death.
And it's amazing when you think about how much he did turn his life around off the back of his exploits in Australia. I was interested to see that you wrote that this house that he lived in in Bath, that he actually entertained Lady Franklin, so you know, another skull collector and several other important people who came to Bath for the.
Actual He gave one of his skulls to who was the president of the Ethnological Society, that he wanted to be joined, that he wanted to become. And this is what this is, the story behind the whole made is that they don't want money. They're not selling these things.
What they want is to be made a fellow of the Royal Society, a fellow as the Theological Society a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, because back down here at the end of the world, in a colony, a pen or colony at the end of the world, this gives them real status because this is the recognition from the highest kind of intellectual centers of the center of the universe, London. And so that's what that's what drives it,
and that's what drove him. This is a kind of recognition of his not you know, being a gentleman and living in a big house is one thing, but this is, you know, this being admitted as a member and being able to entertain these people in his house is the living proof that he has become a gentleman.
M Now tell us more about these skull collectors. What did they do with skulls? Were they put on display in their homes?
Eventually, the major driver of it in Tasmania was the Royal Society of Tasmania, which was initially set up as a little scientific society by Lady Jane Franklin, and that eventually became got royal assent to be called the Royal Society of Tasmania and they started collecting aboriginal remains for their museum in the eighteen thirties, in eighteen forties, I suppose you know, so some people might have had skull
collections in their family. Now why would they have those the world because when they went out on killing parties, they probably took trophies. So you get they keep getting donations from very well to do settlers of aboriginal skulls, so you think, well, where did they get those from? And then it becomes a big issue in England that the Tasmanians are about to become extinct. You know, we know about how they go on about the file the scene. Imagine how they're going to go on about a form
of human life that's about to become extinct. And so there's this big scramble to get hold of aboriginal remains. And so the only way you're going to get them and to be sure they're aboriginal is to go into the grave sites. And the most obvious one is the one just outside of Hobart or is to Cove where people are still living, including drugging in and so there's an issue about you have to be very secretive about it.
You've got to do it when they're away hunting, or take them up to town to go to a special event, like have their photograph taken, and that's when you dig up the graves. So this is why trugging In knows that this is going on, because she's not stupid. And besides, everybody a noyster cove who lived around there, the settlers who lived around there, would have known about it because some of them would have been employed to dig up
the grades. And so that's why she knows that this is what's going to happen to her, because it's been happening for since. The first one that I know about is in eighteen sixty two and she dies in eighteen seventy six, so there's a long time in which this is systematically going on. And so they're packaged up and sent off in the governors in the governor's postage, so that it's not interfered with by you know, anybody. It's governor to the Secretary of State. It's like you know,
presidential communications. And so I found out about them in the in the in the records of the Secretary of State, the Duke of Newcastle, because every trace of it has been removed from the archives here in Tasmania. And then I found that those three skulls that I was looking for that were taken from graves in eighteen sixty two were still in Oxford University. After my prodding and prompting and pushing, a new curator came in and lo and behold he found them and said, oh, yeah, we have those,
We have those skulls. And so how come you didn't have them the last time I was here? How come they've never been shown in the catalog? How come you're not you're denying the fact that you had them, and
suddenly now you've got them. And this was a story that was being repeated time and time again that even though they were so pleased to have these special, remarkable trophies or curiosities or scientific exhibits, however you want to call it, of this extinct race of people, they were being very secretive about it always because they knew that what they were doing was immoral. And they knew it was also, and this is very important, against the law.
It was against the law to rob graves, even graves of people who are not Christians but had been buried properly. And so you know, these governors, these secretaries of state, these professors of anthropology at Oxford University. They knew that if this was publicly known, there'd be an outcry about it.
But they did it because you know, collectors, as you would people would not just looking at what gets paid for the watch of the man who went down on the ship they hit the iceberg and they paid this vast some money to buy his watch, John Asta. They know that people will pay a lot of money or go to a lot of troubled to get what is rare and has an amazing story attached to it. And what was rare was a race of people, human beings you had become extinct. Well, of course they didn't become
extinct as we now know. And also they were the same people as the people who occupied Australia, but they didn't know that then, and they were just as adaptable as anybody else was. But they by the time they were all dead, you could make up any stories you wanted to about them.
So, Cassandra, what happened to the three skulls at Oxford? Are they still there?
They're still there?
Oh.
I passed that information onto the Tasmanian Aboriginal Center, who had been asking to have material returned for thirty years or more. And most of it had been, but not these three skulls. And I kind of kept looking at the records and thinking, no, there's three skulls on account for here, and I was assuming they probably got thrown out with the trash or something. But no, no, they still had them. And then there was then the same at Cambridge University. I knew that they had once got
five skulls. They had once. I had read the paper of a professor there in the nineteenth century talked about the Tasmanian skulls he had. But I could find no way. And the Tasmanian Averageal Center had been asking and asking, and the Australian government had been asking about them. Nothing. But then suddenly they found them and they said, oh, do you want to see them. I'm not sure I want to see them. No, but I guess I should see them, just to prove that you do have them.
I still have them, And they said, yes, of course, we will repatriate them. But you've got to jump through all these hoops. You know, the lawyers are all in charge of this. Now, nothing so simple as to return their ancestral remains of the aboriginal people of Tasmania. No that would be that would be too easy. We can't do that.
So were any of these skulls at the time put on display in museums or do they always remain in private actions?
Well, we don't know how many skulls there might have been in private collections. I mean, I don't know. When I say we I think this, who else knows. So there's undoubtedly they're in private in class cases, in private collections. That's where Lady James would have been before she gave them to the Royal College of Surgeons. They were on display in the Royal College of Surgeons Hunterian Museum until the Second World War when the Hunterian Museum was bombed
that whole collection was destroyed. They were on display in the pitt Rivers Museum well into the twentieth century. That the ones in the pitt Rivers Museum have been repatriated,
and so yeah, they were on display. I mean, let's face it, Trumpinese whole skeleton was on display in Tasmania until nineteen forty seven, and so when you go to the Hunterian Museum, which had the biggest collection, they still got human skulls on display from other people haven't been as the sifference about objecting to it, as the Australian Government and the Tasmanian Aboriginal Center has been so yeah,
I mean it's bizarre, but they have it. And they see they did discover when they did measurements of the skull that the Aboriginal people of Tasmania seem to be had the same sized skull brain size as modern people as them, and that was a big shock to them. So instead they lost all interest in skulls and got interested in chipped stones instead. So you see, look how primitive they are. They have their only tools, they've got
a chipped stones. So they shipped out tons and tons and tons of stones to European and British museums and Australian museums is a huge one in Canberra to prove that they are really, really, really primitive, more primitive than Stone Age men.
Amazing. Just as part of your research into skull collectors, you came across one collector who had more than five thousand skulls. Can you tell us about that?
Oh, that's one lusion. This is a German Man that lady he called for Lady Robinson, which I think is entertaining that George Augustus Robinson's widow sold his collection too. He had this massive collection of skulls, which were acquired eventually by the Natural History Museum in New York on West Park Avenue. I'm sure anyone who's been to New York has senate, not the collection, just the museum. And
most of those skulls came from Africa. They came from the Herrero and Harmer people Nama people of Namibia as who were basically destroyed as a result of a genocidal war that was waged against them in the early twentieth century. And they herded these people who were not killed outright into concentration camps. That's what they called them, and that's
where the term comes from. And he von Lucian had people who worked in the camps, getting the people who living is a really grotesque story, living in the camps, to strip the bodies as there dead, for their skeletal remains. And he got their skulls, thousands of them. And so when he got the skull from George Augustus Robinson's widow,
what he says about it is really very interesting. He says her husband was the commandant of the camp in Tasmania, and so that's how he has accessed to these undeniably unique skulls. So he saw that what he was looking at was people whose skulls had been taken from a concentration camp, because that's what he was familiar with. And where I read that, I thought, yeah, he's absolutely right
about that. That's exactly what was going on. The first of all, you take people, you drive them off the island, you put them on an island in the middle of nowhere, You give them no decent food, you give them no decent medical attention, You wait for them to die, and then you commodify their bodies and turn them into museum exis. Now. If that is not a description of genocide, I don't
know what is. And it was something that von Lucien recognized absolutely that what he was looking at coming from Tasmania, it was the same thing that it had coming from the German West African colonies. Something the colonists did.
So, as you say, George Augustus Robinson was not the worst of the traders in Indigenous Human Remains. We've already talked about Lady Jane Franklin. Who are some of the others that you mentioned in the book.
Probably the worst of them is the man. I started with the lawyer Morton Allport, whose letter I read about how he had the complete perfect skeleton because this one had never been buried. This one was taken from the morgue secretly. Clander Stanley spirited away and stripped of its you know, flesh as soon as she died, as soon as she died, which started the hospital taken away to get a skeleton with the permission of the Premier if not,
and the governor. But all secret, nothing written down, you know, nothing that's going to come back to bite them. And he then started to get skulls for institutions in London and then moved from skulls onto four skeletons once he realized that there were no skulls left at Oyster Cove. He then got someone to find where people were buried at Flinders Island and exhumeed seven perfect skeletons as he
calls them, from there to center museums. And basically he was completely, you know, most all about this in these letters that he wrote to these museums, saying, you know, this is a perfect skeleton, and I knew these people. I can guarantee who they were I mean in some cases they actually gave them their names. You know, this woman's name is Bessie. I knew her well, and he knew her because his wife was a very close friend
of the superintendent of the Aboriginal station at Oysterco. He used to go down there and visit them, probably measuring them up with his eyes. You know, as soon as they were in the grave, he had them out of there. Now, no one knew that about him. I just I thought, well, that's not quite true, because obviously the person who transcribed
the letter that I read knew about him. And when I went looking for his letters for further evidence, I discovered that the whole letter books had been transcribed onto a typewriter, which means that it was quart some time ago that was done. And so people did know that he had done these things. And yet it never got into the public discourse. It had never become a public scandal ever. You know, people were still protecting this. Oh well, we better not talk about that, you know, we better
not let anybody know about that. That's too horrible. Besides, our library is called the in all Port Library. Will be in you know, we'll be in deep trouble they're in deep trouble now, but it's taken all this time for this horrendous story to be made public. And again again, he knew these people. He used to go down and play with them and talk to them, and you know, he knew who they were and he could boast to
the museum. He sent Bessie's skeleton too, that he knew her personally and that he could guarantee she was pure Tasmanian. So he's the one I most dislike. But he doesn't cut to the quick the way George, because you know, he's just an amoral man. He wasn't going around parading as the savior of the Aboriginal people.
Now. One of the other ones that you mentioned that was worse was a Victorian pastoralist named Murray.
Black Mary Blarry Well. One of the things is I focused on Tasmania only because the Tasmanians are the apex skeleton, if you like, in the whole skeletal collecting business at the very top of the tasman is the rarest, the most remarkable, unique. But the Aboriginal people of Tasmy of Australia were also big target and the professor of medicine
at Melbourne University. Was a big collector. He had quite a few Tasmanian skulls, but he also had a massive collection of Victorian and New South Wales people that was collected by a pastor that's called Murray Black who lived on the Murray River and he collected he just robbed graves willy nilly, and he's he writes of you know, not having enough crates to put all the skeletons in it, that he dug up in and bought He had a lot of crates, he had like forty fifty something like that,
and that he just threw the through the other skeletons that in the river. And then he was collecting for an institute in Canberra as well, and basically he collected tens of thousands of bones, like massive, and he's probably not even the worst of them. There was another one in South Australia who was the coroner and also the chief medical officer, whose name was Smith, Ramsey Smith, and anybody came through his hands. You know, they weren't always Aboriginal.
They were made people who were seen to be mentally deficient as well, but huge numbers of Aboriginal he just basically got his hands on anybody who died, and if they were of interest to him, he would just take their goals. And he's the major supplier of aboriginal material to the University of Edinburgh, which rewarded him by making him, of course a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Now somebody else can write about Ramsey Smith if they've got the stomach for it, or about Murray Black if
they've got the stomach for it. I'm not going to do it. I can't stand this stuff. When I was in the South Australian Museum and I was reading through their archives about their acquisitions or aboriginal material, I got physically ill and had to leave and never went back again. You can go so far with this stuff and then you think, no, no, it's too much. It's too much.
Oh, I can understand that. I'm so sorry to hear that. Well, that's been a very dark story, as you describe it, but it's been fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing it with us Today. The book is out now, A very Secret Trade, The Dark story of gentlemen collectors in Tasmania. Where's the best place for people to pick up a copy.
Cassandra, Well, I would think the big bookshops like readings, and you know, my understanding from my publishers are that it's gone out very widely to bookshops because the first book, the book that's proceeded at trugg it Any, was a best seller and so most bookshops will be getting copies of it. I think you'll be able to get it fairly easily.
And hopefully you sell another thirty thousand copies. It's now I'm amazing, all right, Thanks very much and best of luck.
Thank you very much, always good talking to you.
Thanks for listening. This has been In Black and White, a podcast about some of Australia's forgotten characters, written and hosted by me Jen Kelly, edited by Nina Young and produced by John ti Burton. You can find all the stories and photos associated with our episodes at Heroldsun dot com dot au, slash ibaw. If you've enjoyed this podcast, we'd love you to leave a five star rating on
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