Stolen Motherhood: Aboriginal Mothers and Child Removal in the Stolen Generations Era

and the trafficking of bodily remains predated the Darwinian era by almost a century. Turnbull should be congratulated for his commitment to the evidence. He describes horrendous violence, grave robbing, racism, and cruelty and does not shirk from revealing the brutal realities of collection of Indigenous dead. At the same time, though, he tries to arrive at a better understanding of the motivations of collectors and build an accurate picture of how these collections were made. Chapter ten, for example, addresses claims that Indigenous Australians were deliberately murdered for their body parts and concludes that there is no ‘credible evidence that the remains of Indigenous Australians were murderously obtained’ but that historical records ‘do disclose that museum curators and scientists in colonial Australian and British institutions appear to have had no moral qualms about indirectly benefitting from the deaths of Indigenous men and women who had been killed by settlers or the Native Police’ (285). Elsewhere he provides a well-balanced discussion of the political and historical forces that have shaped current attitudes to repatriation, and the conclusion further deepens these discussions via an account of his personal experience as a scholar working within collecting institutions and alongside Indigenous parties. Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia is a superbly written and exemplary scholarly work that approaches these delicate, hurtful, and sensitive issues with integrity. I highly recommend this book, which is sure to become essential reading for students and scholars in the fields of museology, Australian history, repatriation studies, and the history of anthropology.