The women convicts of the First Fleet’s Lady Penrhyn went ashore at Sydney Cove on February 6, 1788. Most had seven or fourteen year terms and there were a few ‘lifers’ among them. The surgeon aboard the former slave ship that had brought them to the ends of the earth, Arthur Bowes Smyth, wrote ‘The Men Convicts got to them very soon after they landed, & it is beyond my abilities to give a just discription [sic] of the Scene of Debauchery & Riot that ensued during the night.’ According to subsequent writers, a wild orgy of rum, sex, storm and lightening followed, a fitting act for the foundation of a colony of convicts.
Popular as this story has become, in one version or another, historians have found little evidence of it ever happening. Bowes Smyth was nowhere near the scene of the alleged orgy, he was on the Lady Penrhyn quite a long way out in the harbour. None of the other keen diarists of the First Fleet, such as officers Watkin Tench or Ralph Clark seem to have noticed the orgy either. They certainly did not mention it in their accounts, an unlikely omission, especially for Ralph Clark who believed women convicts were all ‘damned whores.’
Why Bowes Smyth believed that ‘Debauchery & Riot’ occurred as soon as the women set foot in New South Wales is worth considering. He was certainly glad to see the women leave the ship: ‘we had the long wish’d for pleasure of seeing the last of them’, he wrote. The Lady Penrhyn’s voyage from England had been tedious and troubled with illness, lack of food and indiscipline. Many of the women were prostitutes and suffered from venereal disease. Although attempts were made to keep men and women separate, cohabitation quickly became commonplace. In April 1787, a month or so before they set sail for Botany Bay, five women were chained up for having relations with crewmen. There is no record of the sailors being punished.
During the voyage seventy year-old Elizabeth Beckford died of ‘dropsy’, or oedema, her bloated corpse buried at sea. She was not the last. Jane Parkinson died as they sailed from Cape Town to New Holland, as Australia was often known. Off Van Diemen’s Land the lumbering transport was lashed by a storm so fierce that the women fell to their knees praying for deliverance. Short of food once again, the Lady Penrhyn finally made Botany bay in late January 1788, only to discover that Arthur Phillip had decided the place was unsuitable for settlement. He had departed for Port Jackson.
By the time the Lady Penrhyn finally anchored in the great body of water that would become known as Sydney Harbour, the 101 women and more than 70 male crew and Marines had been cooped up on the thirty by eight metre vessel, in some cases for over a year. The women were flogged, chained, punished with thumb screws and had their heads shaved bare. Bowes Smyth wrote in his journal:
‘I believe I may venture to say there was never a more abandon’d set of wretches collected in one place…The greater part of them are so totally abandoned & callous’d to all sense of shame & even common decency that it frequently becomes indispensably necessary to inflict Corporal punishment upon them…’[i]
The doctor was clearly not well disposed towards his female charges. When he finally did ‘see the last of them’ he was predisposed to assume that they would behave in what he considered their typically debauched manner. Bowes Smyth was a product of his time and circumstances, as were all those who arrived on the First and subsequent fleets.
The double standard that masqueraded as respectability and punished only women for acts that involved a male partner continued in the colony. Four of the convict women of the Lady Penrhyn became the de facto partners of officers and the Judge Advocate. Esther Abrahams and Lieutenant George Johnston began what would become a lifelong relationship during the voyage. They did not marry for another quarter of a century.
Bowes Smyth also recorded an incident when one of the sailors was caught in the women’s tents. His hands were tied and he was publically drummed out of camp to the tune of ‘The Rogue’s March’, a ceremony used for dishonorable discharge from the army and usually followed by a flogging.
These more domestic relationships and official attempts to maintain propriety are not the stuff of myth. They lie forgotten in history while the more salacious story lives on. Historians have been trying to scotch the orgy myth ever since one of their own mistakenly set the yarn spinning in 1963. Manning Clark wrote of it though soon withdrew the assertion after a more careful look at the available evidence. But it was too late. The lewd rumour neatly captured popular views of early colonial society and the image of degraded convicts that had grown up over the generations. ‘The orgy that wasn’t’ gathered further currency from a procession of later writers and television shows repeating and embellishing the alleged scene.[ii] A yarn of ribald abandonment still resonates with a common view of the founding of Australia. No matter how often and convincingly historians demolish the myth, many still prefer to believe it.
As the story goes, Detective Chief Inspector Harry (Henry) Mann of the Western Australian police was wined and dined at London’s swanky Cafe Monaco in the early years of the twentieth century. His genial hosts were from a group of Australian con men with records longer than the arms of everyone at the table. The cafe was their London hangout and distribution centre for the proceeds of crime. Cop and crims were obviously well known to each other and this strange moment says a lot about the relationship between the police and the Down Under dupers who dominated Britain’s confidence games for decades.
In the years directly before the Great War of 1914–18, right through to the end of World War II in 1945, there were more Australian con men on British police registers than those of any other nationality—by a long shot.[i] They were recognised as highly skilled exponents of their nefarious schemes and were very successful. When caught, many had what amounted to small fortunes in their bank accounts and stuffed into the upholstery of their expensive furniture and cars—and they were just the stashes the police found. No self-respecting trickster would be without a secret hidey-hole or two for the inevitable emergencies. Bags of cash were essential to set up the bigger cons and to fund the lavish lifestyles needed to impress rich marks.
And there were plenty of them. Especially after World War I, Britain, Europe and the United States were awash with money flowing through newly opened international financial channels and connections. Business deals and schemes were being rolled out around the world in oil, minerals and a hundred other lucrative enterprises. A lot of people made a lot of money—and often spent it lavishly and ostentatiously. Perfect pigeons for gangs like London’s Hanley Mob, among others working the same rackets.
Sometimes the wealthy individuals suckered in were themselves con men of a kind, wheeling and dealing in the white-collar areas of finance and investment. But they were rarely found out and, if they were, could usually buy their way out of trouble. Eventually, their activities would play a part in the great stock market crash of 1929 and the deep depression that followed. But, for now, it was not only an era of excess and indulgence, it was also the golden age of the con.
The fix was in.
Just how and why Australians became the main exponents of the con in Britain, and sometimes Europe, is a mystery. Operators like Bludger Bill Warren, Dictionary Harry (Harry Harrison) and Dave the Liar (David John Lewis) excelled in new and clever versions of classic cons. These included the infallible betting system (and its variant known as ‘the brass’), ‘the pay-off’ (and an adaptation known as ‘the rag’), and other scams large and small also perfected by the cons from Oz. In one celebrated operation, Bludger Bill and some accomplices took down the immensely wealthy English shipping magnate, Sir Walter Cockerline, for more than £20,000—just under $2 million—in 1923.
At the time for—let’s say—professional reasons, Bill was sojourning on the continent. He’d fleeced a businessman in Portugal of £15,000 and found it necessary to fade away, turning up on the French Riviera. Here, the normally foul-mouthed Bill with his strong Australian accent became the owner of a South African diamond mine or three. Employing his practised skills, Bill checked into the same expensive hotel as Sir Walter, and soon made a good friend of him. Only a day or two later, Bill introduced Sir Walter to an acquaintance who was, quite coincidentally, a guest at the same hotel. The acquaintance was an American oil king.
After getting to know each other a little more, the convivial trio visited Monte Carlo for some wagering at the tables. As they refreshed themselves with a coffee, the oil king noticed a man he described as ‘the biggest bookmaker in the United States’. The bookmaker, whose betting limit was said to be ‘the blue sky’, was invited to the table and was soon a member of the affable group.
It wasn’t long before the conversation was about betting on the gee-gees. Bill and the oil king placed big bets through the bookmaker and invited Sir Walter to join the fun. By day’s end, the bookmaker was pleased to tell the informal syndicate that they had netted £170,000 in winnings.
It was time for the sting.
When settlement of the bets was due, Bill, very annoyed, informed Sir Walter that the bookmaker’s club through which he had laid their bets would only pay up when the punters proved they could show they were men of substance. ‘But’, said Bill, flashing a large wad of cash, ‘I’ll put up the “cover”’, as it was called. Being gentlemen, of course, the others couldn’t allow Bill to pony up the full amount of their joint obligation so they each wrote personal cheques for £25,000.
Sir Walter then had to return to England before the group’s winnings were drawn. Soon after he arrived, he received a wire from France. Bill was embarrassed, naturally, but he’d had a spot of bad luck and was temporarily short of £12,000 of his share of the cover. Would Sir Walter possibly be so good as to advance him that sum until the winnings were available? Completely conned, Sir Walter obligingly wired the money to Bill and never heard from the diamond magnate again.
Until the French police caught up with Bill and his wife in Paris. They had fled there in a newly purchased luxury car after another mark had complained to the authorities. When the police raided the con man’s apartment they found stashes of bank notes in various European currencies, as well as share certificates and a lot of diamonds being worn by Bill’s wife. The expensive car was also full of loot.
One of the advantages of being a confidence trickster was that the risk of being caught was very low compared with most other forms of crime. Victims were often too embarrassed to admit they had been so easily fooled and often reluctant to report their loss to police. Even when they did, it was often difficult for prosecutors to make winnable cases because the nature of the transactions could often be represented as commercial business deals, gambling wins and losses, or gifts. There was rarely a paper trail documenting what happened, whatever that had been. In the case of Bludger Bill, the French court in which he was brought to book was at first reluctant to admit the case at all, as the prosecution failed to establish Bill’s true identity, even with help from Scotland Yard.The wily fraudster also maintained that his arrangement with Sir Walter had been a commercial matter.[ii]
This and the odd loophole in the laws of the various countries in which the Aussies operated meant that they often escaped conviction. The only recourse available was to prosecute them for fraud under civil law, a course taken by several victims who had the financial resources required. No that this made much difference to their finances. Bill and his accomplices were tried and convicted, spending some more years in a French prison. It’s unlikely any of their victims ever saw their money again.
Confidence tricksters are a special type of criminal. They depend on their wits, powers of persuasion, and the gullibility and greed of their ‘marks’, or victims. They have been fleecing the foolish forever and will never stop. Their wiles and ploys are complex and clever, as well as despicable. As one writer on the subject put it in 1935: ‘in its higher reaches the art of the confidence trick is a subtle science demanding more than common qualities of nerve and brain—or if you like a front of brass and a fertile cunning. Steal a fiver and you get thrust into gaol; steal a million and they build you a monument. That is the creed of the master of craft.’[iii]
Con artists are generally considered to be elite criminals who avoid violence in favour of elaborately researched and constructed frauds usually perpetrated against those who most people think are too wealthy for their own good. That includes the averagely paid police officers tasked with tracking con artists down. Chief Inspector Mann was in London to visit colleagues at Scotland Yard and swap intelligence on the roots and scams of the con men well known to them all. They were few enough in number to be recognised by police who often had an ambivalent relationship with them. The hunters and the hunted shared a bond of common interest in crime, even if from different perspectives. The diners at Cafe Monaco were all aware of their roles that night but suspended hostilities for a few convivial hours, each no doubt hoping to learn something to his advantage from the event.
Confidence tricksters also need to keep up with changing times. The Australians were at the forefront of the new, twentieth-century breed of operators. A few gentlemen thieves and suave manipulators of an earlier age were still around but had largely been succeeded by a brasher, often more proletarian crim, better suited to the world of self-made millionaires, often with colonial connections. The same skills of deceit and manipulation were used to rob the rich and had evolved, from the lowliest short con to the most sophisticated long con, into finely staged performances in which the star was also the mark.
The con men, and some women, weren’t exactly benefiting the poor but they did not batten onto everyday mugs. Not worth the trouble, of course. Since that time, scams and cons have increasingly targeted you and me through the internet and mobile phones. We’re not filthy rich but there are an awful lot more of us and it’s all so easy to play the Nigerian money scam, for example: simply the modern form of an ancient con known as ‘the Spanish prisoner’. These tawdry rorts employ the tricks of deception, diversion and persuasion used by the earlier fraudsters, but they are crude echoes of a much cleverer and more artistic form of criminality. The old-time operators weren’t known as ‘con artists’ for no reason.
[i] W. Meier, Property Crime in London, 1850–Present, Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke, UK, 2011.
[ii] ‘Warren’s arrest’, The Evening Star (Dunedin), 10 July 1923, p. 4. According to this report, Bill netted £23,000 from Sir Walter. Dilnot, below, also says £23,000.
[iii] George Dilnot, Getting Rich Quick: An outline of swindles old and new with some account of the manners and customs of confidence men, Geoffrey Bles, London, 1935.
She was a slight, short woman, a young adult. He was around fifty years old, built lightly and around 1.7 metres tall. They were both buried in the Willandra Lakes on Paakantji, Ngyiampaa, and Mutthi Mutthi country around forty-two thousand years ago. Mungo Lady’s remains were recovered in 1968 and those of Mungo Man in 1974. Until these discoveries, humans were thought to have occupied Australia for only around ten or twelve thousand years. More recent evidence suggests that the ancestors of First Nations people arrived here much earlier.
Mungo Lady and Mungo Man were buried only around five hundred metres apart yet they did not know each other. Later excavations revealed many more sets of human remains and a community of humans living for generations in the usually well-watered area, hunting, harvesting, procreating, dying and being ritually buried – she by cremation, crushing and interment; he face upwards, hands folded on his lap and his body sprinkled with red ochre. [i] Ancient though these people were, their forebears may have lived in Australia for thirty or more thousand years.
Scientists are rewriting what we thought we knew about early human history and a prehistoric supercontinent called ‘Sahul’ has an outsize role in the story. Existing in the Pleistocene Epoch, from around 2.6 million to around twelve thousand years ago, it consisted of mainland Australia, attached to Tasmania, and to many of the islands we know as Papua New Guinea and to what is now called Timor. From perhaps as long as seventy-five thousand years ago, large groups of technologically sophisticated humans crossed from the northern reaches of the supercontinent to begin the peopling of Australia. More followed at later times, probably by sea, and within around ten thousand years of first arrival the ancestors of the First Nations had reached the southern tip of Sahul.
The routes these first comers travelled on their epic journeys – continental ‘superhighways’ – began in Timor and Papua New Guinea then passed, broadly, along the west and east coasts and through the centre, looping through the Nullarbor and, eventually, reaching Tasmania. There were secondary connecting routes but the superhighways were created by waves of people moving towards and through ‘highly visible terrain’, basically the mountain ranges of the continent. These tracks became trade routes and songlines and often correlate with later stock routes and even modern highways.[ii]
We have long held the idea that Australia and the people living here before colonisation were unknown and isolated from the rest of the world. For many centuries, stories of an unknown continent at the southern end of the globe circulated through the ancient and medieval worlds. Often called ‘the unknown south land’, or ‘terra australis incognita’, this continent was shrouded in mystery and myth. Any people who might live there would necessarily walk upside down, it was said, and there would be strange beasts and flowers growing there – wherever it might be.
Beginning in the seventeenth century, European navigators began to slowly peel back the mysteries of the land as they came into contact with it and, sometimes with its original inhabitants. Gradually, coastlines were charted, the odd river or island was hastily explored and by the time James Cook came to make his celebrated voyage along the east coast in 1770, Europeans had some idea of the size and shape of what we now call Australia. But at this time there was almost complete ignorance of the inland and it was not clear whether Tasmania was attached to the rest of the continent. Answers to those questions would come in time, but the dominant story was that the great south land was completely unknown – other than to its original occupiers – until ‘discovered’ and colonised by Europeans. It followed that there had been no outside contact for millennia. But in recent years, other possibilities have arisen.
The north-west of Arnhem Land has a wealth of rock paintings depicting sea creatures, European sailing ships and other scenes. Among these paintings are two intriguing images that archaeologists believe to be war craft from the Maluku Islands. It has long been known that trepang fishers from the area usually known as Macassar regularly visited and sojourned in Arnhem Land since around 1700.[iii] But these were, as far as we know, peaceful visits by fishing boats. The paintings on the rock shelters of Awunbarna (Mount Borraedaile) show craft with pennants and other indications that they were designed and fitted out for war rather than trade.[iv] To date, no one has found any indications of conflict between First Nations people and whoever might have sailed the warships, but the paintings are evidence of pre-European interactions with people from islands to the north of Australia.
In Queensland’s channel country, the Mithaka have been quarrying stone for seed grinding for several thousand years. These quarries are spread across an area of more than 30 000 square kilometres in which are dwellings and elaborate stone arrangements thought to be of ceremonial significance. The stones are also part of an ancient industrial production and trade system dubbed ‘Australia’s Silk Road’ that runs from the Gulf of Carpentaria to the Flinders Ranges in South Australia.[v] Archaeologist Michael Westaway observes that the route ‘connected large numbers of Aboriginal groups throughout that arid interior area on the eastern margins of the Simpson Desert’ and that ‘You get people interacting all across the continent, exchanging ideas, trading objects and items and ceremonies and songs’.[vi]
It is possible that this trans-continental Silk Road also connected with trade routes beyond Australia. There is strong evidence of interchange between Torres Strait Islanders and what is now Papua New Guinea for over two thousand years.[vii] The discovery of a platypus carved into a sixteenth-century church pew in Portugal and the documented presence of cockatoos in medieval Sicily[viii] suggests that there were links between Australia, south Asia and, ultimately, Southern Europe, for centuries before Europeans began to arrive on the unknown south land.
First Nations people also travelled beyond Australia to islands in the north, even forming family attachments there. These places were linked to other parts of the world through trading networks we are only beginning to uncover, so it would be possible to send Australian wildlife, as well as other items, along these routes. Ongoing research will reveal more information about the pre-modern world and its extensive connections, so the image of an unknown south land might need to be even more radically reshaped. First Australians were not completely isolated though they, and almost everything else about Australia, would remain a mystery to those who came much later. In the many millennia before that there was enough time for even geological and cosmic events to become part of Australia’s story.
Tall tales and colourful characters, from ancient times to today; these are the stories that reveal what makes us distinctively Australian.
Some of the world’s oldest stories are told beneath Australian skies. Master storyteller Graham Seal takes us on a journey through time, from ancient narratives recounted across generations to the symbols and myths that resonate with Australians today.
He uncovers tales of ancient floods and volcanic eruptions, and shows us Australia’s own silk road. He locates the real Crocodile Dundee and explores the truth behind the legend of the Pilliga Princess. He retells old favourites such as the great flood at Gundagai, the boundary rider’s wife and the Australian who invented the first military tank, and presents little known figures like mailman Jimmy, who carried the post barefoot across the Nullarbor Plain, architect Edith Emery and Paddy the Poet, as well as the unusual sporting techniques of the Gumboot Tortoise.
These yarns of ratbags, rebels, heroes and villains, unsettling legends and clever creations reveal that it’s the small, human stories that, together, make up the greater story of Australia and its people.
The Flying Dutchman by Albert Pinkham Ryder c. 1887 (Smithsonian American Art Museum)
The legend is first recorded in 1790, but it was already old in sailors’ lore. Undoubtedly the most famous nautical yarn of all, the enigmatic tale of the Flying Dutchman is known around the world. And the spectral sailing ship has been sighted in many oceans, including in Australian waters.
At first, the story was a short yarn about a distressed Dutch ship seeking safe harbour at the Cape of Good Hope during a raging storm. A pilot to guide the vessel to safety was not available and the ship was lost with all her crew. Ever since then, the glowing apparition has been seen during stormy weather. Sighting the Flying Dutchman was considered to be an omen of doom.
The Cape of Good Hope was a regular port of call for ships on the Australian run from Europe and although the legend was initially a Dutch story and largely restricted to sailors, it flowed into the broader community in the late eighteenth century. One of the earliest accounts is that of the ‘Prince of Pickpockets’, George Barrington, on his way to serve a sentence in Australia in 1795. Barrington’s version of the story is a little more elaborate than the basic legend (though he was a notorious confidence trickster with a silver tongue):
. . . it seems that some years since a Dutch man-of-war was lost off the Cape, and every soul on board perished; her consort weathered the gale, and arrived soon after at the Cape. Having refitted, and returning to Europe, they were assailed by a violent tempest nearly in the same latitude. In the night watch some of the people saw, or imagined they saw, a vessel standing for them under a press of sail, as though she would run them down: one in particular affirmed it was the ship that had foundered in the former gale, and that it must certainly be her, or the apparition of her; but on its clearing up, the object, a dark thick cloud, disappeared. Nothing could do away the idea of this phenomenon on the minds of the sailors; and, on their relating the circumstances when they arrived in port, the story spread like wild-fire, and the supposed phantom was called the Flying Dutchman.
Barrington did not see the apparition, but he met a sailor who did. About 2 a.m. he was woken by the boatswain ‘with evident signs of terror and dismay in his countenance’ and begging for a drink of spirits. The man claimed to be ‘damnably scarified’ because he had just seen:
the Flying Dutchman coming right down upon us, with everything set—I know ’twas she—I cou’d see all her lower-deck ports up, and the lights fore and aft, as if cleared for action. Now as how, d’ye see, I am sure no mortal ship could bear her low-deck ports up and not founder in this here weather. Why, the sea runs mountains high. It must certainly be the ghost of that there Dutchman, that foundered in this latitude, and which, I have heard say, always appears in this here quarter, in hard gales of wind.
After a few deep draughts, the boatswain ‘grew a little composed’, admitting that he was prone to seeing ghosts. Barrington went on deck with him to see for himself but ‘it had cleared up, the moon shining very bright, and not a cloud to be seen; though, by what I could learn from the rest of the people who were on deck, it had been very cloudy about half an hour before, of course I easily divined what kind of phantom had so alarmed my messmate’.
A more respectable figure who did see the Flying Dutchman in Australian waters was no less a personage than Prince George of Wales, destined to be King George V. Sometime before dawn on 11 July 1881, while travelling through Bass Strait, the prince (or his brother travelling with him) recorded:
At 4 a.m. the Flying Dutchman crossed our bows. A strange red light as of a phantom ship all aglow, in the midst of which light the masts, spars and sails of a brig 200 yards distant stood out in strong relief as she came up on the port bow. The look-out man on the forecastle reported her as close as on the port bow, where also the officer of the watch from the bridge clearly saw her, as did also the quarterdeck midshipman, who was sent forward at once to the forecastle; but on arriving there was no vestige nor any sign whatever of any material ship was to be seen either near or right away to the horizon, the night being clear and the sea calm. Thirteen persons altogether saw her . . .
Just over six hours later, the sailor who had first reported seeing the Flying Dutchman fell to his death from the foretopmast and ‘was smashed to atoms’.
Another Australian connection with the Flying Dutchman comes from John Boyle O’Reilly, the famous Irish rebel. While being transported with his fellow Fenians to Western Australia in 1867, O’Reilly wrote a poem for the ship’s newspaper. The poem uses the Flying Dutchman tale to give expression to O’Reilly’s forebodings at what was going to be a long exile from his homeland:
They’ll never reach their destined port
They’ll see their homes no more,
They who see the Flying Dutchman
Never, never reach the shore.
Since then the legend has grown, gathering more detail and depth through endless accounts, books, films and artworks that feed from it. The Flying Dutchman soon fused with another piece of world folklore known as the ‘Wandering Jew’. This is said to be a man who refused to help Christ bear the burden of the cross as he struggled towards his crucifixion. In a bit of Old Testament revenge, the man was condemned to wander the Earth forever in eternal life. In the Flying Dutchman version, the captain of a Dutch merchantman attempting to enter Table Bay was frustrated by a change in the wind. The captain swore to be eternally damned if he did not enter the bay and that he would sail these waters until Judgement Day. He did not and he does.
In another version it is said that the crew of the Dutch ship committed some atrocious crime and are condemned to never enter a port and must voyage onwards until their penance is done. This echoes a theme of Coleridge’s famous poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1797–98). A few years later the arch-romancer Walter Scott made the Flying Dutchman a pirate ship, in which guise the tale may be most familiar to modern audiences in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.[i]It’s not surprising that such a compelling legend is told again and again and that the cursed ship has been seen even in Australian waters.
[i] George Barrington, A Voyage to Botany Bay, with a description of the country, manners, customs, religion, &c. of the natives, sold by H.D. Symonds: London, 1795.
Prince Albert Victor and Prince George of Wales, The Cruise of Her Majesty’s Ship ‘Bacchante’ 1879–1882. Compiled from the private journals, letters, and note-books of Prince Albert Victor and Prince George of Wales, with additions by J. D. Dalton, Vol. 1, Macmillan and Company: London, 1886, p. 551.
Children playing in the street Turnham Green, 1891. Catalogue Ref: COPY1/406 (149) National Archives UK
There are many children’s word games, including Pig Latin, Double Dutch and G-talk. They all arise, thrive and go in and out of fashion within the restricted sub-culture of children. This is a culture of the playground and the park that is to some extent in opposition to the world of grown-ups, teachers and formal education. It is a world that is made and maintained by children for children. Adults who may cling fondly to the more romanticised images of childhood often find the expressions of this world to be shocking, which children fully intend them to be.
After surveying children’s play and language across Britain, Iona and Peter Opie produced their classic work The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959). It revealed a deep, vast and everchanging reservoir of kidspeak, resonant with creativity, colour and not a little mischief. Children from Newcastle and elsewhere used what they often called crook’s language, such as going for a ball and chalk, meaning to go for a walk and calling a thief a tea-leaf.
The Opies were also able to report on the varieties of backslang and related language tricks played by children on each other and on parents and teachers. Kids in different places had their own names for these secret languages, such as eggy-peggy and arague. Most of these involved moving the last sound in the word to the front, so that ‘bash you if you don’t shut your trap’ was rendered as Shba uyo fi uyo tedon teshu aryou petray.
Pig Latin, in which the initial consonants are moved to the end of the word while either ‘ay’ or sometime ‘ee’ was added, turning the same more or less standard English phrase given above into Ashbay ouyay ifay ouyay ontday utshay ouyay aptray. Other variations involved the addition of one, sometimes two syllables, before the vowel. This produced sentences like eg, known in some areas as stage slang and elsewhere as aygo-paygo language.
The Opies give a literary reference to the existence of such children’s languages at least as early as 1808. Around the same time similar language games were played by American children. One was called hog Latin and involved the addition of ‘gery’ to every word spoken.
The lexicographer, Eric Partridge, gives examples of a children’s language called ziph, which apparently had various levels of complexity. The intermediate form, as he calls it, was a simple addition of the suffix vis to each English word, a sentence like ‘Shall we go away in an hour’ becoming Shagall wevis govis awayvis invis andvis houris? The more complex form that inserted syllables such as ga, ge, gi and go into the words. The same English sentence then becomes Shagall wege gogo agawaygay igin agan hougour? Variations on these techniques are almost endless, limited only by the creativity, playfulness and needs of their speakers.
Such word games are also known to have been played by French children in the seventeenth century. One variety known as le javanaise, was eventually picked up by adults and became a craze during the 1860s. Expatriate Trinidadian musicians in 1970s London played with another variation of this word game. They called it ‘I Y’. It consisted of adding these sounds to the start and finish of words. Multi-syllabic words could also have these sounds inserted, the overall effect being a playful obfuscation of whatever was being said.
Another form of children’s speech is the nonsense oration, a variety of the stump speeches sometimes used by adults as a form of verbal amusement. Here is an example from American tradition:
Ladies and jellyfish, I come here not to dress you or undress you, but to address you as to how Christopher Cockeyed Cucumber crossed the Missisloppi River with the Declaration of Indigestion in one hand and the Star Speckled bannaner in the other.
Another whimsy from British children, highlights the fact that the common tongues of children are not bound by national boundaries:
Ladles and jellyspoons,
I stand upon this speech to make a platform,
The train I arrived in has not yet come,
So I took a bus and walked.
I come before you to stand behind you
And tell you something I know nothing about.
It hardly needs to be said that these expressions show the familiarity of children with the adult ways of the world and their delight in sending up those ways. The Opies called such expressions ‘tangletalk’, also providing some examples in verse form:
I went to the pictures next Tuesday
And took a front seat at the back.
I said to the lady behind me,
I cannot see over your hat.
She gave me some well-broken biscuits,
I ate them and gave her them back;
I fell from the pit to the gallery
And broke my front bone at the back.
An important element of the adult world is the insult, in which skills children also serve a linguistic apprenticeship. Children also have inventive repertoires of name-calling and other insults designed to bring other children into line with whatever is considered to be the norm at any particular time or place. In Scotland children who were conceited were known as swankpots, in England as Swankypants or Swanky Liz, a porky prig and a puff bag, among other derogations.
Moody types were cross-patches, oldgrousey, grumpy, misery, mardy-baby, sourpuss or sulky Sue. Unusually bright children were clever-Dicks, clever–guts, clever-pot or clever-sticks, among other half admiring, half-demeaning terms. Inquisitive children were nosey parkers, peep-eyes, flap-ears and keyhole Kates. In Australia such people are known as stickybeaks. And so it went on through cry babies, toadies, blabber-mouths, snitches and wide-mouths, just a few among the amazing number and diversity of children’s insults recorded by the Opies.
In her collection of children’s speech from Australia, Kidspeak (2000), June Factor identified over 4500 terms used by children. These included words related to toilet functions (poo, bum), sex (a tonguey is a French kiss), insult (dweeb, dork, vege head) play (chasey, the truce term barley and its variants, names for marbles, such as cat’s eye, peewee and stonk, among many others), friends (pals, buddys, dudes) and enemies (scrags, square bears and the reviled dobber).
The languages are not only Australian-English but also varieties of Aboriginal-English, including fully-developed Creoles such as to get proper wild or angry, and gury, a Kimberley Creole for ‘greedy’. There are also words taken from the many non-English languages of the community, including Greek (malaca, an insult), Italian (putana, an insult. Factor also highlighted the sheer creativity and verbal vibrancy of childisms like snot block (vanilla slice) and over-shoulder boulder-holder (bra) as well as a few rhyming slang terms such as horse and cart for fart and backslang, as in gaff for a fag, or cigarette.
Foolishness, stupidity and ineptitude are a constant theme of folk humour. The astoundingly silly actions of the residents of certain towns, real or not, feature in many traditions. But beneath the apparent craziness of some stories, there are some serious points being made. Communities of fools, sometimes known as ‘Fooltowns’ are located in Chelm (Poland) Schilda in Germany and Lols in Denmark, among others. In England the Nottinghamshire town of Gotham is one of several settlements with an unenviable reputation of being peopled with the commonsensically challenged.
Twelve Fools Go Fishing
On a certain day there were twelve men of Gotham that went to fish, and some stood on dry land; and in going home one said to the other, ” We have ventured wonderfully in wading: I pray God that none of us come home and be drowned.”
“Nay, marry,” said one to the other, ” let us see that; for there did twelve of us come out.” Then they told {i.e., counted) themselves, and every one told eleven.
Said one to the other, “There is one of us drowned.” They went back to the brook where they had been fishing, and sought up and down for him that was wanting, making great lamentation.
A courtier, coming by, asked what it was they sought for, and why they were sorrowful. ”
Oh,” said they, “this day we went to fish in the brook twelve of us came out together, and one is drowned.”
Said the courtier, “Tell [count] how many there be of you.”
One of them said, ” Eleven,” and he did not tell himself.
” Well,” said the courtier, ” what will you give me, and 1 will find the twelfth man?”
“Sir,” said they, “all the money we have got.”
” Give me the money,” said the courtier, and began with the first, and gave him a stroke over the shoulders with his whip, which made him groan, saying, ” Here is one,” and so served them all, and they all groaned at the matter. When he came to the last, he paid him well, saying, ” Here is the twelfth man.”
“God’s blessing on thy heart,” said they, “for thus finding our dear brother! ” [i]
Versions of this tale are also told in Iceland, India and further afield. Here is one from the ancient province of Hainaut in what is now Belgium:
The Six Sillies
Once upon a time there was a young girl who reached the age of thirty-seven without ever having had a lover, for she was so foolish that no one wanted to marry her.
One day, however, a young man arrived to pay his addresses to her, and her mother, beaming with joy, sent her daughter down to the cellar to draw a jug of beer. As the girl never came back the mother went down to see what had become of her, and found her sitting on the stairs, her head in her hands, while by her side the beer was running all over the floor, as she had forgotten to close the tap. ‘What are you doing there?’ asked the mother.
‘I was thinking what I shall call my first child after I am married to that young man. All the names in the calendar are taken already.’
The mother sat down on the staircase beside her daughter and said, ‘I will think about it with you, my dear.’
The father who had stayed upstairs with the young man was surprised that neither his wife nor his daughter came back, and in his turn went down to look for them. He found them both sitting on the stairs, while beside them the beer was running all over the ground from the tap, which was wide open.
‘What are you doing there? The beer is running all over the cellar.’
‘We were thinking what we should call the children that our daughter will have when she marries that young man. All the names in the calendar are taken already.’
‘Well,’ said the father, ‘I will think about it with you.’
As neither mother nor daughter nor father came upstairs again, the lover grew impatient, and went down into the cellar to see what they could all be doing. He found them all three sitting on the stairs, while beside them the beer was running all over the ground from the tap, which was wide open.
‘What in the world are you all doing that you don’t come upstairs, and that you let the beer run all over the cellar?’
‘Yes, I know, my boy,’ said the father, ‘but if you marry our daughter what shall you call your children? All the names in the calendar are taken.’
When the young man heard this answer he replied:
‘Well! good-bye, I am going away. When I shall have found three people sillier than you I will come back and marry your daughter.’
So he continued his journey, and after walking a long way he reached an orchard. Then he saw some people knocking down walnuts, and trying to throw them into a cart with a fork.
‘What are you doing there?’ he asked.
‘We want to load the cart with our walnuts, but we can’t manage to do it.’
The lover advised them to get a basket and to put the walnuts in it, so as to turn them into the cart.
‘Well,’ he said to himself, ‘I have already found someone more foolish than those three.’
So he went on his way, and by-and-by he came to a wood. There he saw a man who wanted to give his pig some acorns to eat, and was trying with all his might to make him climb up the oak-tree.
‘What are you doing, my good man?’ asked he.
‘I want to make my pig eat some acorns, and I can’t get him to go up the tree.’
‘If you were to climb up and shake down the acorns the pig would pick them up.’
‘Oh, I never thought of that.’
‘Here is the second idiot,’ said the lover to himself.
Some way farther along the road he came upon a man who had never worn any trousers, and who was trying to put on a pair. So he had fastened them to a tree and was jumping with all his might up in the air so that he should hit the two legs of the trousers as he came down.
‘It would be much better if you held them in your hands,’ said the young man, ‘and then put your legs one after the other in each hole.’
‘Dear me to be sure! You are sharper than I am, for that never occurred to me.’
And having found three people more foolish than his bride, or her father or her mother, the lover went back to marry the young lady.
And in course of time they had a great many children.[ii]
The King’s Orphan Asylum, later known as the Queen’s Orphan Schools, the girls’ school to the left of the chapel, boys’ school to the right, Mount Wellington in the background. The idyllic scene masked the horrors which were imposed on its inmates.
Bruce Lindsay has researched and written about the life and times of his great grandfather, John Lindsay. John was the son of Scots highland Traveller parents, transported to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) at the age of three with his mother, Mary, in the mid-1830s. Mary had been one of a group of travellers who invaded a home-based store at Sweetie Hillock (just outside Aberdeen), and stole a number of items, including clothing, food and drink. Mary was transported for fourteen years, accompanied by young John. His story throws much light on the little-known life experiences of transports to Australia (whether convicted or not) and is a valuable historical record. Below is an edited version of a chapter from Bruce’s fascinating colonial family history.
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John Lindsay is thought to have been born at Inverness on 15th January 1832, in the year following the marriage of Isaac Williamson and Mary Lindsay. Common Scots naming practice at the time was for the bride to retain her maiden name, although children generally adopted their father’s surname. However, children of female convicts travelled under their mother’s name, and without this convention, we may have never established the connection to our family line.
John first appears in our records sitting in the tinkers’ horse-drawn cart in March 1835, while his parents and the rest of the troupe confronted the shopkeepers at Sweetie Hillock. After his safe arrival in Hobart with his mother on 25th April 1836, and following a decision by Lt Governor Arthur on 4th May 13 children of mothers confined at the Cascades Female Factory were admitted on 5th May to what was then known as King’s Orphan Asylum (from 1837, upon assumption of the British throne by Queen Victoria, as the Queen’s Orphan Schools). Surviving records show John was listed as “#341, John Linsay (sic), Age 3 at Sept 5 1836, Father unknown, Mother a Prisoner”. Routine practice was to remove children from convict women, either for the term of their mothers’ servitude, or until they reached the age of 14.
The orphanage is described by contemporary and later observers as a severe and uncaring place, in which young John may well have felt intimidated and alone. Robert Hughes, in his seminal work The Fatal Shore, quotes the Reverend Robert Crooke – catechist with the Van Diemen’s Land Convict Department at the time – as saying:
“The slightest offence, whether committed by boy or girl, was punished by unmerciful flogging and some of the officers, more especially females, seem to have taken a delight in inflicting corporal punishment… The female superintendent was in the habit of taking girls, some of them almost young women, to her own bedroom and for trifling offences… stripping them naked, and with a riding whip or a heavy leather strap flagellating them until their bodies were a mass of bruises” (p. 525).
A surviving Report on the state and conduct of the orphan schools dated 30th August, 1848, by the Inspector of Schools, Charles Bradbury, provides depressing details of the physical and educational conditions under which John and the other inmates lived. He said:
“The punishments employed are the cane, solitary confinement, and in extreme cases the birch; few of the latter only have occurred during the last four years. Solitary confinement is inflicted perhaps once in the course of a fortnight; 48 hours have been resorted to as a severe punishment, but the customary time is about two or three hours. The offences, so far as I could ascertain, appear to be those ordinarily incident to large schools; there are none of a flagrant character, petty stealing, violence, and oppression towards each other; occasional indecent and blasphemous language are the chief varieties of misconduct.”
(This report was part of a despatch from Lt. Governor Sir William Denison to Earl Grey and was copied from the British Parliamentary Papers Volume 8, pp356-374, held at the University of Tasmania Library).
In her comprehensive study of children’s lives at the orphanage, Joyce Purtscher (Children in Queen’s Orphanage, Hobart Town, 1828-1863) describes a daily regimen beginning at 5.00am in Summer or 6.00-6.30am in Winter, with a mix of play and classroom instruction. Inspector Bradbury recorded that:
“The industrial training is on a very limited scale: the trades taught are only those of the tailor, shoemaker, and baker. Not one of the boys is employed in farming or gardening. The boys in the shoemaker’s shop are taught repairs alone, not one can cut out, or is acquainted with the making of a shoe. The shoes in the first instance are supplied from the Ordinance Storekeepers’ Department”.
Since internal records from the orphan schools do not survive, if indeed they were ever kept, we cannot confirm whether John may have undertaken basic training in shoemaking during his time there, even though he later practised the trade with his stepfather, William Higgs.
Schooling took place in large single rooms 50’ X 30’, heated by one small fireplace. Bradbury noted that the only teachers in the boys’ school, girls’ school and infants’ school were unqualified and had never previously been engaged as teachers. This was reflected in the children’s typically poor reading and writing skills, of which Bradbury was scathingly critical.
Of the children’s very limited scholastic abilities he observed somewhat laconically:
“I found the members of the upper classes with reference to secular information very deficient, far below the average of the primary schools I am accustomed to visit. Several, especially in the first class, can read with tolerable correctness, though with no expression; but they cannot explain the meanings of many of the commonest words…”, “There is nothing attractive, stimulating, or strengthening in the whole routine, and, at the same time, little actual information is given, that the memory may possibly retain. It would seem, indeed, that, for the ages of the children, their mental capacity and intelligence, are, as a general result, in inverse proportion to the duration of their attendance in the school”.
He further noted that the children’s capacity to learn was not helped by the fact that they were required to stand in class, there being no seating.
Care of the boys’ physical wellbeing was apparently as peremptory as their schooling. They slept in hammocks 80 to a dormitory, and bathed their upper bodies in cell-like rooms paved with flagstones, with stone water troughs in their centre. There was no hot water. Once a week, winter and summer, they were taken to the Derwent River to bathe. Bradbury observed
“In the personal habits of the boys, I think cleanliness and order might to a much greater extent be enforced. In their dress they are mostly untidy, and in some instances so dirty, that it is unpleasant to stand near them, from the odour arising from their outer clothes”.
The orphanage was always overcrowded, hastening the spread of any disease, and in 1843 (while John was there) 56 children died from Scarlet Fever. Even the handsome convict-built stone chapel – St John’s Anglican Church – was heated only by four small fireplaces, one of which was located conveniently abreast of the Governor’s pew. The children could freeze, but not His Excellency.
The interior (2014) of St John’s Anglican Church, New Town, which doubled as the chapel for the Orphan Schools. The gallery shown was used to accommodate the orphans, girls to the left of the monitors’ enclosure, boys to the right. Free settlers rented named and lockable pews on the ground floor (now replaced with standard movable pews facing the sanctuary).
Given several damning assessments of the incompetence of the orphan schools’ provision neither of physical care, nor of any stimulating curriculum or training, it is heartening that young John not only survived the time he spent there, but appears to have emerged ready to take his place in the world. From such unpromising parentage, and such inadequate schooling, he appears to have become a sober, hard-working young man with strong ethics and family values. His later service to his large family was augmented by a willingness to become involved in community affairs (when living at Winslow in Victoria), and the generation by the community of genuine respect and affection for the man.
Originally the Chapel for the orphan schools, this handsome building, designed by Colonial Architect John Lee Archer, and built with convict labour in 1835, is now St John’s Anglican Church, New Town – WITH heating.
Boys’ section of the Queen’s Orphan Schools, where John survived 11 years from 1836 to 1847. Photographed in 2012, and externally largely unchanged, it then housed the “Meals on Wheels” organisation.
Joyce Purtscher further tells us:
“When children turned 14 years of age, they were apprenticed out. They had to work for no money until they were 18. They were at the mercy of their masters regarding food, clothing and housing”.
John was released from the orphanage on 26th August 1847, and apprenticed to Mrs Mary Cox, a remarkable woman who had operated several businesses in Launceston. Her late husband, John Edward Cox, was licensee initially of the Macquarie Hotel in Hobart, and later the Cornwall Hotel in Launceston, owned by John Batman – the co-founder of Melbourne. He also initiated Tasmania’s first coaching service between Launceston and Hobart, and fathered nine children, eight of whom survived. Upon his death in 1837, responsibility for management of family and businesses fell to his wife.
Assuming that, as outlined by Joyce Purtscher above, John was required to work for Mrs Cox without payment until he was 18 years old, by 1851 he would have been free to live and work where he pleased. We know from the 1848 Census that Mary Lindsay and William Higgs were then living together in Adelaide Street, Westbury (after marrying there in 1844), and Higgs had resumed his trade as a shoemaker. John probably joined them after leaving Mrs Cox. Surviving records do not tell us in what trade or capacity John was indentured, but it is possible that he learned the basics of shoemaking when at the Orphan School. Since on the title to his Westbury property later in the 1850s he is listed as a shoemaker, he evidently joined his stepfather in the trade, although this possibility has not been confirmed by searches for business registrations or commercial advertisements. But we know that at that time he adopted his stepfather’s surname, becoming known as John Lindsay Higgs.
John’s signature on the title deed for 1 Reid Street, Westbury, which he sold on 28.5.1862
Under that name he married Charlotte Wells at Westbury on 3rd July 1857. Charlotte was the free-born daughter of former convicts Robert Wells and Margaret Casey. They married in her parents’ private home “according to the Rites and Ceremonies of the Wesleyan Church”. Although born of convict parents on 13th January 1839, Charlotte never suffered the horrors of the Queen’s Orphan School, having been raised by her parents in Longford and Launceston.
John appears to have been industrious and successful in his trade, since he managed to acquire property in Westbury, and ultimately to sustain a large family. It seems that the married couple lived on a block of land in what is now Reid Street, Westbury, purchased on John’s behalf by Higgs, where Charlotte gave birth to their first child – John – on 5th July 1858. In 1859, with Higgs subsiding into alcoholism, John acquired the nine-acre block owned by him on Suburb Road, Westbury, from the mortgagees to whom it had been surrendered. They continued to live at Reid Street, where Charlotte produced their second child – Alexander – on 28th October 1859. Their third child – Robert – was born on 5th May 1861.
John was devastated by his step-father’s suicide on 17th December, 1861. For reasons unknown, he shortly thereafter sold the Reid Street property and acquired a 160-acre rural block at Liffey Plains, near Westbury, from where we presume he continued his shoemaking business. He also deleted “Higgs” from his surname, reverting to “Lindsay”. In the absence of Title records, we must presume he sold the Liffey Plains property late in 1862, then embarked from Launceston with the family aboard the Western for Portland, Victoria, arriving there on 9th August 1862. It is possible that he sought to remove himself from the strong social stigma attaching to suicide at the time, and make a new start with his wife and family.
They settled at Winslow, a small town north of Warrnambool in Victoria’s Western District, where John probably established a shoemaking business in his own name, and from 1883 he and Charlotte assumed management of the local Post Office. Their family continued to grow and Charlotte produced 14 healthy children over a period of 28 years – the last when she was 48 years old – a quite remarkable achievement now, and even more so on the cusp of the 20th century.
The Winslow Post Office and store, attached to the south east front corner of the house in which John, Charlotte and their family resided from 1893 to 1922.
John died on 20th November 1890, when drawing water from a freshwater lake about 100 metres from the back of the family home in Winslow. To reach the water, it was necessary to descend steps, from which newspaper accounts reported John slipped and fell. One of his daughters discovered his hat and coat floating on the surface, and raised the alarm. By the time help arrived, John could not be revived. His age was given as 56 years, though if his assumed birth-date of 1832 is correct, he would have been 58.
The sometime freshwater lake in which John drowned while drawing water for his family. The house is off to the left of this picture, about 100m away. Since that time, a tannery operated on the lake’s shore, and the water is now brackish.
So ended the last direct family connection to the redoubtable Mary Lindsay. The large family produced by John and Charlotte developed in ways that Mary as a Highland Traveller could never have imagined. John’s wife Charlotte lived until 7th January 1922, dying at Winslow from a cerebral haemorrhage and pneumonia, aged 83.
John Lindsay, wife Charlotte and infant daughter, Eliza rest at Tower Hill cemetery near Warrnambool.
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Readers may also be interested in my book Condemned: The Men, Women and Children Who Built Britain’s Empire, which includes the Van Diemen’s Land experience, though not the King’s Orphanage story. My thanks to Bruce for bringing it to my attention and for allowing this part of his family history research to appear on Gristly History.
Large collections of bones and body parts lie in dark corners of Australian, American and European scientific institutions. They are the remains of First Nations people acquired during colonisation and shipped to medical establishments, private collectors and museums for preservation, study or exhibition. It is thought that 10 000 or more of these corpses or part corpses were sent to Britain alone and possibly thousands more to other countries.
This grisly catalogue, sometimes called ‘the first stolen generation’, was assembled during the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries by a puzzling assortment of individuals with a variety of motivations. Sometimes the impetus was money. Sometimes it was what is now seen as a misguided sense of contributing to the advancement of science. Always it was simple racial prejudice based on the flawed belief that Indigenous Australians were some sort of ‘missing link’ between modern and prehistoric humanity.
One of the most active body thieves was William Ramsay Smith, a Scottish doctor who became the coroner of South Australia in the 1890s. He gathered Indigenous remains from many sources, including asylums, prisons and elsewhere. Skeletons, heads and other body parts were sent to Ramsay Smith’s alma mater, Edinburgh University, where his friend, D J Cunningham, Professor of Anatomy, further desecrated them in the name of science.
When the body of a popular local Ngarrindjeri man known as ‘Tommy Smith’ ( Poltpalingada Booboorowie) disappeared while under Ramsay Smith’s control, an inquiry was established in 1903. Ramsay Smith, or someone under his authority, had filled Tommy’s coffin with sandbags. He had then dissected the body and sent the parts to Edinburgh.[i] Gruesome evidence was also given of heads kept in kerosene tins and of a going black market body snatching rate of ten pounds for a skeleton. Ramsay Smith was reprimanded but suffered no lasting damage to his reputation and continued as the state coroner. He also continued his close interest in First Nations bodies. When he died in 1937 more than a hundred human skulls were discovered at his house.
Ramsay Smith was only one of many bone collectors either trading or acquiring remains for what they usually claimed were scientific, medical or anthropological research. Beneath this delusion lurked the pernicious idea, derived largely from Charles Darwin’s theories on evolution, that European culture was the most developed and advanced ‘civilisation’ in the world. First Nations people were considered to be at the beginning of a hypothetical chain of evolution and so, went the scientific thinking of the time, should be closely studied. Researchers needed body parts to investigate and there was also a morbid curiosity among private collectors for examples of what they considered exotic lifestyles, including skins displaying customary markings, pieces of skeleton – one man’s skull was made into a sugar bowl – and, of course, heads. Full skeletons of adults and children were taken from graves and morgues, boxed up and despatched to waiting recipients across the seas.
Dark as these practices were, even more reprehensible parts of the Indigenous body trade depended on frontier violence. In April 1816, a group of Gandangara people was attacked by a military force at Appin, NSW. Fourteen or more men, women and children died, including the leader, Cannabayagal. According to an eyewitness, he and two other warriors were hanged from a tree. The soldiers then ‘cut off the heads and brought them to Sydney, where the Government paid 30s and a gallon of rum each for them.’[ii] When the National Museum of Australia received three repatriated skulls from the University of Edinburgh, one was that of Cannabayagal.[iii]
The unsanctioned removal of remains is a source of ongoing grief and trauma for First Nations communities. Many are anxious to have the remains of their ancestors returned so they can be given proper burials according to law and custom. Ongoing efforts to ensure that stolen body parts are returned to their country have had limited success. While the Australian government supports repatriation, some overseas institutions have been uncooperative in agreeing to returns. There are also practical difficulties in identifying remains and in deciding on the most appropriate way to honour them should they be returned to their First Nations descendants.
Here are some links to news stories about some recent repatriations:
GRISTLY HISTORY 