Whilst I have been on a poodlewalk with a sick Maleko in Adelaide’s West Terrace Cemetery in the late afternoon I have been looking at the various gravestones from the perspective of them as historical texts. It’s a reasonable perspective as some of the gravestones have been explicitly constructed as if they are pages in a book with the text to be read as if it were a book.

So these book-style gravestones are historical texts. They can be read as being about personal history and their meanings can be interpreted in the context of which religious section of the cemetery they are in and whether they were aboriginal or non-aboriginal. For instance, I’ve yet to come across gravestones for First Nation’s people in the cemetery. So what happened to their bodies? I’ll keep looking for them as I walk around.

Some of the pages of these historical texts have faded and the text is difficult to read. The metaphor is that some history has been forgotten, is only dimly remembered, or is absent.

I came across a gravestone that is not about personal history in the unmarked “paupers“ section of the cemetery (north-east) whose text refers to the relationship between bodies and medical history; albeit a text that raises questions of interpretation. about Adelaide’s history. The text on the plaque refers to people of good will generously bequeathing their bodies for the benefit of medical science. It’s in the pauper’s section so ‘bequeathing’ on a stone background whose colours refer to First Nation’s country is also an oblique reference to the historical body snatching by the medical profession in the nineteenth century —- the acquisition of bodies for dissection, with some of them sent in parts to Great Britain.

*open to interpretation, West Terrace Cemetery*

The 1903 case of William Ramsay Smith, the SA state coroner and inspector of anatomy, and Edinburgh-educated doctor, is well known in Adelaide. His position in the medical hierarchy had enabled him to easily procure and sign off on the bodies of itinerant people who ended up dying in hospital or in the "lunatic asylum", where many Aboriginal people ended up, purely because they were unable to communicate in English. Smith defleshed and dissected the bodies and sent off body parts and skeletons to colleagues at Edinburgh University.

What Smith had been doing was normal practice within Adelaide's museum, hospital and medical school. Edward Charles Stirling, the South Australian Museum director (1895 to 1912), Adelaide University physiology professor and Adelaide Hospital surgeon, was another key player in the body snatching involving the museum and Adelaide’s medical, academic and government elites. The South Australian Museum was body snatcher central for the bodies of First Nation’s people — mostly Kaurna and Ngarrindjeri. It is the most traditionally-conservative British-style collecting institution in Australia and it has held some 4,600 Aboriginal remains over the past 165 years. It began a process of repatriation in 2016 but the remains of 3,500 First Nations people remain with the museum, which is currently undergoing a restructure.

gravestones, texts, bodysnatching

Late Autumn