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1.
Yokununna
In November 2019, I visited the South Australian Museum in Adelaide to see if a certain man’s skull was among the collection of human remains held in the museum’s Keeping Place. A number of archival collections had been checked and a forensic anthropologist was attempting to match the man’s skull with the unprovenanced remains thought most likely to belong to him. He had been murdered in 1934. But the forensic anthropologist could only positively identify the skull.
Museum officials Anna Russo and Professor John Carty and I decided that we would travel together to Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock), a huge iconic monolith more or less in the center of Australia, to inform Sammy Wilson, chair of three community organizations—Mutitjulu Community Aboriginal Corporation, Uluru–Kata Tjuta Board of Management, and the Central Land Council—that the indigenous person whose skull this was had been identified. He was in fact the granduncle of Sammy Wilson. His name was Yokununna.
Before we headed for Uluru, Anna and I drove to the large factorylike building in a nearby Adelaide suburb where the museum houses the human remains in its collection. Years of chasing down the events surrounding Yokununna’s killing at Uluru in central Australia had led me to this nondescript repository of horrors. We entered a vast space with little natural light and walked through several rooms, signing in as we moved from one area to the next. When we reached the room where Yokununna’s skull was stored, I noticed a number of wooden boxes stacked in the corner, draped in the Aboriginal flag.
The provenance of these human remains had been established, and now they were waiting to be collected by elders and returned to Country. Nearby, medium-size cardboard boxes containing Aboriginal remains that were moved from the University of Adelaide in 2017 were stored on four shelves.
Yokununna’s skull rested in Box 39. Anna took the box from the shelf and laid it on the table; she turned on an overhead lamp, put on white cotton gloves, carefully removed the skull, and placed it on tissue-like paper. With the stark white light bearing down from above, the words etched in capitals on the crown were clearly visible: yockanunna [sic] complete skeleton. As Anna explained, this naming was unusual. Perhaps the skull was so labeled because Yokununna’s remains were crucial evidence in the 1935 Commonwealth Board of Inquiry into Yokununna’s death.
We noticed the missing initiation tooth and the crazing on the skull’s surface: a thin, spidery web that indicated it had spent considerable time in the ground before exhumation. The slight yellowing of the bone was probably caused by tissue residue or the chemicals that may have been used to clean the skull. Eighty-five years after Yokununna’s death, his remains were still subject to the invaders’ gaze; still the captive object of inquiry and examination. Anna placed the skull back in the box and we washed our hands before walking into the next room.
There, stacked on shelves from floor to ceiling, were more unprovenanced remains that had come to the museum from Adelaide University—mandibles, hip bones, collarbones, vertebrae, and countless others—filed in numbered cardboard boxes. Perhaps Yokununna’s postcranial remains were here, but testing the contents of every box would be an expensive and prolonged process. It was also possible that Professor John Cleland, who headed the board of inquiry into Yokununna’s death, or someone else could have handed them over to the university’s medical school for teaching purposes, in which case they would have been discarded long ago.
Above me, on the very top shelf, standing upright and wrapped tightly in plastic, were casts made of the heads of Aboriginal men and women by the archeologist and ethnologist Norman Tindale from the 1930s. The thickness of the plastic that encased them made it impossible to discern any features.
This grotesque mausoleum—evidence of the racism and violence committed by the state against Australia’s indigenous people over so many years—existed in a permanent limbo. With their origins unknown, the human remains cannot be returned to Country. Yet they cried out for a Keeping Place that would pay them due cultural respect. As for Tindale’s scientific monuments to inhumanity, the subjects’ communities will guide journeys back to Country and make sure these traces of their ancestors’ spirits return home safely. They cannot be destroyed—that would erase the truth. Nor can they be placed in public view, for that would only perpetuate the injustice. We drove back to the museum, discussing the next steps in the long journey back to the families at Uluru.
Seen for so long as barely human, Aboriginal people had suffered the same fate as stuffed animals exhibited in the Adelaide museum. They were shot, collected, studied, objectified, and categorized, a people and their cultures marked as primitive curiosities, destined to be dispossessed by their usurpers. Yokununna’s remains were one among thousands.
Aboriginal remains were collected by the South Australian Museum from the late nineteenth century, but the practice began from the moment the British arrived in Australia in 1788. Private and state institutions throughout Australia and overseas hold vast collections of human remains and ethnographic material, which, in the name of scientific racism and an allegedly superior British civilization, were either traded, raided from resting places and burial sites, souvenired during the frontier wars, or stolen from Aboriginal people across the continent. By the early twentieth century, the South Australian government declared that “all native remains found on Crown lands” were to be brought to the museum in Adelaide, a policy that continued until the 1960s. Today, the museum board “cares for almost 5,000 ancestral remains, both Australian Aboriginal and from overseas nations.” Of the 4,500 Aboriginal ancestors, about 3,700 are from South Australian burial sites. Since the late 1980s, the museum has worked with Aboriginal communities to repatriate remains and the Tindale casts.
Australian white supremacist culture bears responsibility for this history. But there was one white man who played a leading role in it.
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