Why did the British send Keppetipola?s skull to England?

by S. Pathiravitana

I happened to be in Australia in 1997 and to my surprise I found the Australian Government commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the granting of citizenship to the aboriginals who, I was under the impression, were the first citizens of that country for the last 50,000 years. A leading Australian newspaper, The Age, carried, the day following the ceremony, a report of the proceedings in which the address made by the Governor General?s wife, Lady Deane, caught my attention.

She was vowing to work for the reconciliation of aboriginals and non-aboriginals and said that it was impossible to deny the past oppression of the aborigines or ?the terrible extent of their present disadvantages.? and set the date for the reconciliation as 2001. It is 2006 now and, far from seeing any signs of any reconciliation, the latest report from Australia is that Tony Abbott, a senior minister has suggested that the aboriginal community has fallen behind the mainstream community so far back that only a return to paternalism could save the situation.

This suggestion may come as a surprise to many, even Australians, knowing what damage has been done under this ?paternalistic? approach in the past.

As the plight of the aborigines not being too well known here I took the chance when I was in Australia to get acquainted with it a little more and walked into a city library in Melbourne. There were plenty of books on this subject enlarging on what Lady Deane called the ?past oppression of the aborigines.? It is a sordid tale of this long oppression and unbelievable sometimes how supposedly civilised human beings could descend to this level of barbarity against fellow human beings. From the beginning, the white men who came to these shores had little understanding of the ways of these people living in an entirely different part of the earth.

Most societies that are described as ?backward? have fallen for the beads and trinkets that were offered to them by visitors. But Captain James Cook, the explorer, encountered on the eastern coast of Australia could not be tempted by these gew gaws. Our normal experience is that nearly all societies engage in some form of agricultural activity. But these people he met had no such inclinations. Unlike in Tahiti and Tonga, where he had touched at earlier and found an agricultural people who were pleasant looking and friendly, the aboriginals in contrast wore no clothes and were black (subconsciously in the minds of Cook and his men it was the colour of Satan), so much so another explorer who had come to these shores earlier has described them as ?the most miserable creatures on God?s earth.?

The aboriginals and the non-aboriginals coming face to face may also be described as the meeting of a capitalist with a non-capitalist society. Not only the lack of interest in money and monetary transactions, but in general aboriginal society was something unusual to the foreigner because it was singularly lacking in what Australian anthropologists have called inquisitiveness and envy. The lack of interest in the trinkets displayed by Captain Cook showed up these qualities very well. As the Australian historian David Day points out in his Claiming a Continent, Cook?s impression of the aboriginals recorded in his diary was closer to that of Rousseau?s vision of the Noble Savage, where Cook remarks that they lived in ?tranquillity? due perhaps to their lack of inquisitiveness and envy, two features deplored in the teachings of the Buddha, too...

All this, however, was a total puzzle to the men who took over the governing of Australia who thought the aboriginals were stupid and unintelligent not to appreciate the gifts of civilisation they brought. Their disinclination to work came naturally to the aboriginals who preferred to live in ?tranquillity.? And there was no need for them to work either for they lived off simply from whatever the backwoods offered them in the form of fruits, nuts, tubers and animal flesh. When the squatters, as the aboriginals called the Australians, took over the traditional hunting grounds of the aboriginals they were driven off from the land of their birth. This part of the story has been narrated to an Australian writer, Douglas Rockwood, who records verbatim what the man driven away from the land he was born in told him.:

?Bad times, bad times alright. We been live like wallabies, frightened-one, allabout all-a-time we go, walk about, no more sit down one place and be happy, all-a-time we go, we go, runaway from white man and his bullet. Naked we go, get nothing blanket, nothing food only what we hunt, nothing water only what we steal from white-feller man.

?Ah-h, bin properly bad times alright. White man bin say him Boss along all that land, all that water. He send us into hills rifle bullets chasing us proper-fast feller, can?t see him, We frightened to make fire ?cos may be white feller see smoke and fin us. So we eat meat raw.?

In Queensland in particular, they were picking up the blacks on the most trivial of offences and sending them into an island called the Palm Island, which was a reserve but more like a penitentiary where aboriginals of different tribes were put together to live higgeldy-piggeldy. The authorities frowned on the rites and rituals of the aboriginals and anybody organising them were thrown into the Palm Island accused of practising witchcraft. Whole families were removed to this penal colony where they were subject to abuse and oppression. One man who had been there all his life from the age of 7 was interviewed by a journalist, Bill Rosser. He had been commissioned by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies in Canberra to gather stories of those who had suffered oppression in such reserves.

These were to be kept in the library of this Institute for the use of students.

What he gathered from his life story is a strong commentary on the Queensland Act, which was passed to set up such inhuman reserves.

Undoubtedly, writes Rosser, the Queensland Aborigines Act ?is one of the most monstrous pieces of legislation ever to be gazetted.? ?The current (revised) Act is no better . The fact that areas of land are put aside for Aborigines, who are now forced to reside in them under a different and oppressive ?set of rules? from that of white people, is not merely racist but is undeniable apartheid.?

Along with this racism and the genocide that followed of the aboriginals in Tasmania, another curious habit of the conqueror shows up. At a spot close to the present Sydney Opera House there were attacks made against a settlement close by. After the Governor once got speared there was a determined effort to capture the leader of these guerilla attacks and they finally succeeded in capturing him. Pemulway, the guerilla leader was killed and his head removed, pickled, and sent to England.

A similar fate overtook Trucanini, a Tasmanian woman leader who having co-operated once with the missionaries, later turned against them and dedicated the rest of her life to preserve whatever was left of the old Tasmanian culture that was being destroyed. The destruction took the form of a pastime for Australians and their families who went on picnics to the forests where the men went round taking pot shots at the aboriginals. When Trucanini, who was said to be the last Tasmanian, died at the age of 64 in 1876, fearing that her body would be mutilated after death in the interests of medical science, as had happened to others, she was buried in a prison yard. Later her skeleton was dug up and kept as an exhibit in the Hobart museum till 1947.As a result of protests, her hair and specimens of her skin, which had been taken to England, were returned on the hundreth anniversary of her death.And along with her skeleton the remains were cremated and the ashes thrown into the sea. We had a similar experience with one of our national heroes.When the British executed Keppetipola and buried him, his skull was removed later and sent to England. It was returned on the day we attained independence. Why this desecration of the dead? It is said that cannibals ate their foes not because they were hungry but to acquire the power of the foe to make them strong. Is there some hidden link with cannibalism and the inquisitiveness of scientists who look into the skulls of national heroes only to satisfy their hunger to know what makes a national hero?