This week we investigate the case of the remains of Mungo Man and how the discovery of these bones changed the narrative of Australian history forever.
For a few hundred years, historians had a vague idea of how long Aboriginal people had lived in Australia. Estimations of a few thousand years were generally accepted, but then the discovery of one body, forever changed the way that we thought about Australian history. That body belonged to none other than Mungo Man.
This episode is designed to align with Year 7 Ancient Overview or a Year 11 Ancient: Digging up the Past unit.
The History Detective Season 1 & 2 Album is now available on Spotify and all of your music streaming services.
Accompanying teaching resources for season 1 and 2 episodes can be found on my Amped Up Learning Store or on my Teachers Pay Teachers store.
Contact: Twitter @HistoryDetect, Instagram @HistoryDetective9, email historydetective9@gmail.com
All original music written and performed by Kelly Chase.
Welcome
Hi, this is Kelly Chase and you are listening to History Detective, a podcast where I delve into the past to uncover the mysteries of history and then I explore how that story might be reimagined through song. This is Case 2: These Old Bones.
(Rabbit Hole Music 1 🎼)
Introduce the topic
Before we begin, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners are warned that the following podcast contains descriptions of deceased Indigenous persons. And I would like to acknowledge the Yugumbeh people, the traditional owners of the land from which this podcast is being recorded today.
For a few hundred years, historians had a vague idea of how long Aboriginal people had lived in Australia. Estimations of a few thousand years were generally accepted, but then the discovery of one body, forever changed the way that we thought about Australian history. That body belonged to none other than Mungo Man.
Story Time (1:25 minutes)
I assume he had another name, but as we will never know his true name and because I love alliteration, today we will refer to him as Mungo Man.
Lake Mungo is located in New South Wales, and according to Google Maps it’s about an 11-hour drive West from Sydney, or 46 hours if you wanted to ride a bike, that would be sure to give you a serious case of bicycle face, but that is a story for another episode.
In 1974, a geologist Dr Jim Bowler discovered the bones of Mungo Man. This wasn’t the first time that he had found bones in this area. In fact, 6 years before, he had found some bones protruding from lunette- which is a kind of sand dune that has hardened into clay.
One year after finding the original bones, he decided to enlist the help of some professional archaeologists and they excavated the bones and tested them to determine that they belonged to a female who had been cremated.
The very fact that this was identified as a cremation was significant because it became the oldest known cremation in the world.
So, in 1974, after some particularly heavy rainfall, our afore mentioned geologist, Jim Bowler, was riding on his motorbike when he saw part of a white skull poking out from the soil. He had found another skeleton… but this time it was a male.
How do you know the difference between a male and a female skeleton? Well usually, the main way archaeologists can tell is by the pelvis. Quite simply, a female pelvis must be wide enough to fit a baby’s head through during childbirth. If you are brave enough, do a Google image search and you will see a clear difference.
There are a few other factors such as skull shape, height- that can be estimated from the length of the other bones, bone density and finger length. Unfortunately, due to deterioration, the skull and pelvis were not in great shape, after all the skeleton was more than 40 000 years old and scientists had to use post-cranial measurements to determine the sex.
FYI, post-cranial just means all the bones other than the skull. Mungo Man clocked in at about 170cm tall or 5 ft 6, and he was about 50 years old. I know that doesn’t seem too tall to be a woman in our modern society, but 40 000 year ago, women just simply didn’t get that tall, in fact, at 157cm, I probably would have been a giant lady.
Back to our motorbike riding 70s geologist, now that the bones had been discovered, the question was what to do with them?
(Transition music🎼)
Digging Deeper (5 minutes)
This is where we get into some moral and ethical questions about what to do with human remains that are dug up in archaeological excavations and this particular case creates a conundrum. The scientific carbon dating on these human remains was able to date Australian Aboriginal culture back more than 40 000 years at the time. This was a hugely significant discovery.
There is a plethora of articles that refer to this scientific discovery as re-writing history. However, what I have found particularly difficult to find out in researching this episode is, exactly how old historians thought Aboriginal culture was before this point. And that is exactly why I love history, because the deeper you fall down the rabbit hole, the more mysteries there are to uncover.
My current hypothesis is that to historians and scientists, it possibly wasn’t even an area that was being studied in any great depth. To Australian academics, history would have been Ancient Egypt and Ancient Rome, and not their own back yard.
Additionally, because in the 1960s, Aboriginal children were still being taken from their families by the government, and Aboriginal people were only just counted as citizens in the census and fighting the right to vote, the issue of equality was a much more pressing concern.
See how easy it is to fall into the information vortex! Back to the moral and ethical dilemmas. At the time there was some opposition by Aboriginal groups, not wanting scientists to take the bones away from their resting place and the bones were taken without the permission of the local elders. However, the discoveries from both Mungo Man and his distant relative Mungo Lady changed both the scientific and historical perspectives on the extent of Aboriginal culture in Australia.
With this discovery, the door of Australian history was flung open to reveal one of the oldest continuing cultures on earth. So, wow! As the articles say, history was rewritten, and the academic field of Ancient Australian Aboriginal History was kickstarted.
The only problem was that after studying the bones, they were kept in a storeroom at the university, much to the distress of the traditional owners of the land. On the one hand, science had opened the window and allowed Aboriginal Australia to be recognised, but on the other hand, human remains were not being treated respectfully.
For a long time, archaeologists and anthropologists have a very dark history of looting and there are many stories of museums refusing to return stolen human remains and other artefacts to their rightful owners.
This story does have a resolution, in 2017 Mungo Man’s bones were returned to his decedents on his country in a ceremony -in other words repatriated. But because of erosion they were unable to be reburied. They are now kept safely back on country.
However, these were just one set of human bones that have been repatriated.
Mungo Man’s remains were discovered accidentally and have been able to go home, but there is a much darker side to the repatriation story.
(Transition music🎼)
A Dark Turn
Many of the bones of the First Peoples that are housed in museums, not generally on display, but in a storage room, are the spoils of the very gruesome and violent pastime of bone collecting and trade for the sake of anthropology. In order for early museums to acquire the bones, unscrupulous men would rob graves, some doctors would take bodies from mortuaries, prisons, hospitals and asylums; wherever they could get their hands-on human remains. Journalist Paul Daley wrote of the practice, he says “Their bodies were cut up for parts that became sought-after antiquities in colonial homesteads across Australia and in cultural, medical and educational institutions.”
I found a newspaper report on the Trove website from 1903 about a Dr Ramsay Smith who was suspended from his job and went on trial for his shocking corpse related crimes. The newspaper says, “the accusations deal with the alleged mutilations of dead bodies and clandestine exhumations.” I can’t even fathom the idea.
I remember in my early travels in the UK, and a travel guide was touting the eccentricities of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, they discussed the shrunken heads on display. I am ashamed to say, that I didn’t even think about the ethics of having human heads in a display case, or the stories behind how these remains came to be on display.
I didn’t think about what might be hidden in the back rooms or who the remains might rightly belong to. To be honest I knew nothing about the atrocities of Australian history, I was taught in the era of “Three Cheers for Australia”. Needless to say, I have come a long way since then. In fact, it was on that very plane ride back home, I was reading a travelogue about Australia by an American author when I first read about the massacres that had been inflicted on the Aboriginal people and I started to think, I have some very real gaps in my education. But that a story for future episode.
One of the articles I read while researching, said that in the Indigenous Repatriation Program, more than 1200 of the remains that have been returned to country have come from the UK and I am sure there are many more in gruesome hidden stockpiles that have yet to be returned. But the positive news is that as of November 2019 more than 1600 Aboriginal ancestors have come home.
(Rabbit Hole Music 2🎼)
I would love to hear any suggestions for future episodes, so please get in contact. You can follow me on Twitter @HistoryDetect, Instagram @HistoryDetective9 or email me at historydetective9@gmail.com
Now I would like to play you a song that I actually wrote on the 26th of January which was inspired by the repatriation of Indigenous bones. It is called “These Old Bones”.
This Kelly Chase, on the Case.
(Play full song🎼)
Song Lyrics
These Old Bones
Capo 1- C, G, D, Am…Chorus + C, G
I lay alone here,
for what seemed like 40 000 years
Now my story has been told
These old bones are getting cold
Chorus
These old bones, just wanna go home
These old bones, shouldn’t be alone
These old bones, just wanna go home
Time has passed
The lake is now bone dry
All the people
Have long since said goodbye
15 million times I’ve seen the sunrise
I don’t want to compromise
Now my story has been told
These old bones are getting cold
Chorus
These old bones, just wanna go home
These old bones, shouldn’t be alone
These old bones, just wanna go home
Your microscope has told you
Everything you need to know
Maybe my flesh has gone away
But my soul is still here
In this country
Even after all of these years
Chorus
These old bones, just wanna go home
These old bones, shouldn’t be alone
These old bones, just wanna go home
(Transition music🎼)
Reflection Questions
If you are a teacher or student, you will find reflection questions in the show notes. Additionally, a link to the website with the transcript, song lyrics and a list of references is also in the show notes.
(Find transcript here) https://history-detective.simplecast.com/
Next time on History Detective (Transition music)
Next time on History Detective, we will meet a Japanese Shogun Nun, wife of the first shogun of Japan, who was a powerful ruling force in her own right.
Episodes are released every fortnight, and if you liked what you heard and know someone who might enjoy History Detective, please share it and don’t forget to subscribe, you will find me on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Bibliography
Bugos, C, 2019, Website Provides Blueprint for Repatriating Aboriginal Remains, Smithsonian Magazine, Access Date 5 July 2020, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/website-provides-blueprint-repatriating-aboriginal-remains-1-180973323/
Burden, G, 2018, The violent collectors who gathered Indigenous artefacts for the Queensland Museum, NITV, Access Date 4 July 2020https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitv-news/article/2018/05/29/violent-collectors-who-gathered-indigenous-artefacts-queensland-museum
1903 'DR. RAMSAY SMITH'S SUSPENSION.', Port Pirie Recorder and North Western Mail (SA : 1898 - 1918), 15 August, p. 3. , Access Date 05 Jul 2020, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article95302567
Daley, P, (2017), Finding Mungo Man: the moment Australia's story suddenly changed, The Guardian,Access Date 18/5/2020 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/nov/14/finding-mungo-man-the-moment-australias-story-suddenly-changed
Daley, P, 2014, The bone collectors: a brutal chapter in Australia's past, The Guardian: Australian Edition, Access Date 4/7/2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/14/aboriginal-bones-being-returned-australia
Durband, A, Rayner, D, Westaway, M, 2009, A new test of the sex of the Lake Mungo 3 skeleton, Archaeology in Oceania, Volume 44, Number 2 / July 2009Oceania Publications, Access date 6/7/2020 https://archive.is/20120711162814/http://oceania.metapress.com/content/40431866327877q0/
Hawley, S, (2019)London's Natural History Museum returns Aboriginal remains to elders, ABC News, Access Date 5 July 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-27/aboriginal-ancestral-remains-handed-over-by-london-museum/10943254
Lawless, J et al. (2008) Unlocking the past: preliminary studies in the ancient world, 2nd ed. Nelson, South Melbourne
McGregor, L. (2018) Mungo Man: What to do next with Australia's oldest human remains? Australian Story, ABC News, Access Date 18/5/2020 https://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-12/mungo-man-what-to-do-next-with-australias-oldest-remains/9371038?pfmredir=sm
Perrottet, T. 2019 A 42,000-year-old man finally goes home, Smithsonian Magazine, Access Date, 18/5/2020https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/mungo-man-finally-goes-home-180972835/
Russell-Cook, M and Russel, L, 2016, Museums are returning indigenous human remains but progress on repatriating objects is slow, The Conversation: Australian Edition,Access Date 5 July 2020 https://theconversation.com/museums-are-returning-indigenous-human-remains-but-progress-on-repatriating-objects-is-slow-67378
Stockwell, S, 2018, The quest to remove Aboriginal remains from museums, Triple J Hack, ABC, Access Date 5 July 2020, https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/the-quest-to-remove-aboriginal-remains-from-museums/10497952
Webb, S,(N.D) Mungo Man and Lady, Visit Mungo National Park, Access Date, 18/5/2020 http://www.visitmungo.com.au/who-was-mungo-man,