The Hanged Man and the Body Thief: finding lives in a museum mystery

by Alexandra Roginski

It is 1860 in Australia. An Aboriginal laborer named Jim Crow is led to the scaffold of the Maitland Gaol in colonial New South Wales. Among the onlookers is the Scotsman A.S. Hamilton, who will take bizarre steps in the aftermath of the execution to exhume this young man's skull. Hamilton is a lecturer who travels the Australian colonies teaching phrenology, a popular science that claims character and intellect can be judged from a person's head. For Hamilton, Jim Crow is an important prize. A century and a half later, researchers at Museum Victoria want to repatriate Jim Crow and other Aboriginal people from Hamilton's collection of human remains to their respective communities. But, their only clues are damaged labels and skulls. With each new find, more questions emerge. Who was Jim Crow? Why was he executed? And, how did he end up so far south in Melbourne? In a compelling and original work of history, author Alexandra Roginski leads readers through her extensive research, aimed at finding the person within the museum piece. Reconstructing the narrative of a life and a theft, she crafts a case study that elegantly navigates between the law and Aboriginal history, heritage studies and biography. The Hanged Man and the Body Thief is a nuanced story about phrenology, a biased legal system, the aspirations of a new museum, and the dilemmas of a theatrical third wife. It is, most importantly, a tale of two very different men, the collector and the collected, one of whom can now return home.

Genres: Nonfiction

124 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2015

Reviews

[K. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trigger warnings: mentions of rape, capital punishment, mistreatment of human remains, mistreatment of First Nations human remains, bonkers Victorian-era medical procedures, eugenics.

I desperately wanted to love this because it sounded absolutely fascinating. Uuuuuuuunfortunately, it was so freaking short (like, 120 pages short) that it didn't give me anywhere near the level of detail I wanted. The whole thing is very clearly a university thesis that's been kind of turned into a book, and the writing was still more academic than popular.

So ultimately, this is a really intriguing story but at the same time, it felt like it just gave me a little taste of each of the characters involved without actually linking them together as effectively as I wanted it to be. I also wanted them to be more of a focus on repatriation than there was...