Essay: The Field of Golgotha
The skull of a man from “New Holland”
Sometime around June or July 1790, Governor Phillip in Sydney received a letter from Sir Joseph Banks via one of the ships of the Second Fleet. The actual letter is no longer extant, but it clearly included an explicit request from Banks for the skulls of men from New South Wales to be collected in order to be sent to scientists in Britain and Europe.
My essay discusses the fate of one of these skulls collected by Phillip, which was sent to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in Göttingen, and the possibility that it is actually the skull of Baloderee, whose body was buried in the grounds of Government House.
Meanjin (Autumn 2017)