A Judicious Collector: Edward Charles Stirling and the Procurement of Aboriginal Bodily Remains in South Australia, c.1880–1912

Over the past decade, a number of historians of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia have shown that, arguably more than in comparable settler societies, material and moral progress to nationhood was envisaged as dependent on ensuring the biological integrity and potential of an evolutionarily advanced white social body. ¹ They have also shown how, within Australian settler culture, the concept of race and belief in the fundamentality of safeguarding white racial purity gained much of their existential concreteness through the experiences of the continent’s Indigenous inhabitants being interpreted as an object lesson on the dreadful consequences of racial decay.