The Cradle of Race’: Imagining the deep Indigenous Past, 1925-1940 - Prof Paul Turnbull

In late 1925, a heavily mineralised cranium was unearthed in the course of excavating an irrigation channel, near the town of Cohuna in Victoria’s Murray Valley.  The discovery stimulated what at times was acrimonious debate in medico-scientific circles over the implications of the discovery for human evolutionary history.  In Melbourne, William Colin Mackenzie, a highly regarded surgeon, comparative anatomist and eventual founder and first director of the Australian Institute of Anatomy, was convinced that the cranium antedated not only all known fossilised human remains, but also possibly even those of Neanderthal.  Yet, even before seeing images of the cranium, leading metropolitan anatomists were quick to judge it unlikely to be more than 4000 to 5000 years old. Grafton Elliot Smith (1871-1937), the Australian-born Professor of Anatomy at University College, London, declared it incredible to think that anything approaching the age of the Piltdown skull was to be found in Australia.

 Mackenzie and his supporters within Australian medico-scientific circles were to be proven wrong: the cranium unearthed at Cohuna turns out to be between 13,000 and 9,000 years old. However, as I discuss in this seminar, the discovery of the cranium, now near a century ago, greatly influenced subsequent scientific discourse and praxis, and popular imaginings, of a deep Indigenous past.  Although, as I also discuss, paradoxically, recognising the longevity of Indigenous Australia was to have pernicious consequences for the First Peoples of the Murray Valley.

Paul Turnbull is an Emeritus Professor of the University of Tasmania, and an Honorary Professor in the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University.  His research on the scientific uses of the bodies of Australian and other Indigenous has made major contributions to the global history of the human sciences, intellectual history and the history of anthropology in colonial contexts. His books include Science, Museums and Collecting the Dead in Colonial Australia (2017).