Talking heads on a Murray River mission: phrenological lecturers and their Aboriginal receptions decoded

Abstract

In contemporary Australia, the nineteenth-century science known as phrenology, which claimed that character and intellect could be judged from head shape, often serves as a metonym for the excesses of racial science. While this legacy accounts for some of its history, phrenology also functioned as a system of personal improvement and a genre of lecture entertainment that attracted diverse practitioners and audiences. Here, a close reading of the visits of phrenological lecturers to Maloga Mission (in 1884) and neighbouring Cummeragunja Station (in 1892) explores the reported positive receptions by Aboriginal residents. While acknowledging the power imbalances of these sites and inherent biases of European sources, this article decodes reported delight by considering the visits within the context of performative mission culture. Contrary to institutional goals of segregation, many residents were in fact highly mobile and enjoyed contact with visitors from around the world. These connections fed a taste for European popular culture, a connoisseurship of performance also sharpened through expectations that residents routinely perform both classical culture and ‘civilisation’. This article proposes that the mixture of science and self-improvement might also have appealed to residents, resonated with traditional belief systems, and facilitated intercultural knowledge-sharing.