Staged savagery: Archibald Meston and his Indigenous exhibits

Abstract

Archibald Meston is remembered as the major architect of Queensland's 1897 legislation that was to regulate its Indigenous people for almost a century, and also as its Southern Protector of Aborigines from 1898 to 1904. Meston's contribution as a policymaker and Protector has received much scholarly attention, however, his activities as a showman - that is, in exhibiting live Indigenous people and himself joining in the performances - are not so well known and have been documented only sporadically. Even his best known offering, the Wild Australia Show, which was the subject of an exhibition held by the University of Queensland's Anthropology Museum in 2015, has not been fully explored. This article takes a closer look at Meston's exhibiting activities, which can now be traced more easily with the help of online searching of newspapers. It shows that these activities were central to his policies for solving Queensland's 'Aboriginals problem' and to his work as a Protector, and eventually gained him a national reputation (or notoriety) as a showman. Further, Meston's forays into the sphere of popular entertainment highlight a paradox in the treatment of Indigenous people in Queensland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whereby these people were publicly paraded as 'noble savages' while behind the scenes they were being dispossessed, institutionalised, or at worst, exterminated. Meston's activities also highlight the narrow line of demarcation that existed at the time between ethnology and entertainment, enabling him to claim scientific credibility for his observations of Aboriginal life that were mostly more sensationalist than accurate.