Germany’s Colonial Entanglements in the Pacific

Daniel Boyd’s version of a plate from the estate of Robert Louis Stevenson, which is held in a museum at the University of Sydney, could be thought of as the inspiration for this undertaking. Stevenson was the author of popular novels like Treasure Island and lived in Apia on Samoa from 1890 onwards, where the plate was part of his household. Not just as a result of Boyd’s specific painting technique, but also of what it depicts, the plate breaks with what we expect from art about and from the Pacific: instead of flowers like the hibiscus or tiaré that we might consider exotic, we see a Victorian everyday object with a decidedly English floral motif. It raises the question of how this piece of England came to Samoa and what impact this particular history has on the present. Translated into the intention of my lecture: What does it mean to trace pieces of German colonial history in the Pacific in relation to some of Boyd’s paintings?

There is an obvious connection between the Mai painting and Daniel Boyd’s portrait of Joseph Banks as Sir No Beard. The British naturalist Joseph Banks first met Mai in Tahiti in 1769, and he acted as Mai’s host during the latter’s stay in London. In fact, in Joshua Reynolds’ portrait, Mai is in all likelihood wearing an item of clothing that Banks himself had brought back from Tahiti: a tapa cloth that belonged to the learned navigator Tupaia, who had intended to travel to Europe with Cook and Banks a few years before Mai, but had died en route.

Like Boyd’s painting of Mai, his depiction of Banks is based on a contemporary portrait. When Thomas Phillips painted him in 1810, he showed Banks at the height of his powers as the president of the Royal Society, to which he had been elected in 1778 and presided over for more than 40 years. Banks advised King George III on the layout of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. In this capacity, he sent explorers and botanists to many parts of the world, making Kew Gardens arguably the most important botanic garden in the world. He supported several famous expeditions, including that of George Vancouver to the north-eastern Pacific and the voyages of William Bligh, who transplanted breadfruit trees from the South Pacific to the Caribbean islands where they were intended to provide cheap food for enslaved people. Banks lobbied for the British settlement of New South Wales and the colonisation of Australia, as well as for the establishment of Botany Bay (Sydney) as a convict settlement and basically advised the British government on all Australian affairs.

Boyd shows this Banks and his power, but he also shows him as a pirate who violently appropriates the property of others. But for today, I’d like to focus on the decapitated head floating next to Banks in a glass container. I know from the exhibition texts that Boyd is referring to Pemulwuy, a resistance fighter executed by British colonial authorities in 1802, whose head was cut off, conserved in alcohol and sent to Banks in London. But when the painting is shown in Germany, it also inevitably recalls an earlier trade in the looted bodies of Australian First Nations people that involved Banks. And this trade was with Göttingen.

In his role as a patron of natural history and an expert on Australia, Banks received a letter in 1787 from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a professor of medicine in Göttingen. At the time, Blumenbach was working on a taxonomy of humans based on comparing the traits of human skulls. Blumenbach thus wrote to Banks to ask for his help in acquiring such skulls from Australia and Tahiti. Banks himself was certainly familiar with this interest, having taken a head from Aoteara New Zealand back to London as a so-called “curiosity” during his circumnavigation of the world with Cook.

To my knowledge, however, Blumenbach was the first scientist to ask Banks for skulls for research purposes. After all, it was not until the 19th century that there emerged a larger interest in the racialising study of human remains; research that would draw on Blumenbach’s comparative studies of 245 skulls and skull fragments that he produced until his death in 1840. It was Blumenbach’s work in comparative anatomy that legitimised research on human remains as a scientific method and created the logistical infrastructure for systematic body snatching. As a result of his work, the bodies of Indigenous people became sought-after research objects. It was in this context that Pemulwuy’s head could be sent to London in 1802 simply as a matter of course.

Banks immediately undertook a search on Blumenbach’s behalf among the anatomical collections and private cabinets throughout Great Britain. But it was not until November 1793, almost three years later, that a human head from Australia was delivered to Göttingen by diplomatic post from London. It was – according to Banks – the head of “a male native of New Holland who died in our settlement of Sydney Cove.” A few months later Blumenbach also received the requested head of a “Tahitian woman” from Banks (5). 

Who was the man from Botany Bay? In addition to his place of death (“in our settlement”), Blumenbach’s skull drawings indicate that he was a young man between 16 and 20 years old. Based on this data, Australian historians suspect that it could have been Baludarri, whose story is similar to Pemulwuy’s. Baludarri was a Burramatagal man from the Parramatta River near the penal settlement of Port Jackson who successfully traded fish with the British officers. In June 1791, this trade came to an abrupt halt when some convicts wantonly destroyed Baludarri’s canoe. His rage, as the diaries of the time describe it, “was unimaginable, and he threatened to take revenge in his own way on all the whites.” In the coming months, Baludarri injured a convict with his spear and organised a group of armed men who advanced to the outskirts of Port Jackson.

In December 1791, Baludarri fell seriously ill and died shortly afterwards on the way to hospital in the presence of staff surgeon White. According to European sources, he was not cremated, as was customary among the Eora, but buried on the grounds of the governor’s residence. So was it Baludarri’s head that Blumenbach received from Banks in 1793 and which is still in the Göttingen University collections today. Even if it is difficult to gather this information from colonial sources, this historical research constitutes a crucial step towards rehumanising the looted dead. Such provenance work is currently being undertaken as part of a Göttingen research project to identify the remains of some 1,300 individuals from colonial contexts in Africa, Oceania, Asia and the Americas in the university collections. Another, no less important way of engaging with this history came in the form of student protests in the summer of 2020, which opposed the uncritical commemoration of Blumenbach on the university’s campus and, in a symbolic act, laid a bust of Blumenbach flat on the ground.