Episode Three – What remains of Joe Governor? Transcript

Emma Lancaster – Cultural Warning:

This is an Impact Studios production from the University of Technology Sydney. Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander listeners are advised that the following episode contains names of people who have passed. The story you’re about to hear starts in the year 1900 and draws on the colonial archive. Listeners are advised that there may be words and descriptions that may be culturally sensitive, and which might not normally be used in certain public or community contexts. Terms from archival material used in these podcasts reflect the attitude of the author or the period in which the item was written and may be considered inappropriate today. The story also contains information about acts of violence that may be distressing. In this episode, we’ll be talking about repatriation of ancestral remains. Please be aware that this information can cause sadness and anger and is part of living histories connected to people’s families. We want to tell this story with truth and respect. Thanks for listening to the Last Outlaws.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Last time on the Last Outlaws, Jimmy and Joe Governor go on the run after a series of murders. Jimmy is captured and his legal case becomes a lightning rod for justice in the New Federation before he meets the hangman’s noose. When we last saw Jimmy’s younger brother, Joe, he was also wanted dead or alive.

Aunty Loretta Parsley:

Joe would have followed Jimmy to the end of the earth.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

So what happened to Joe?

Leroy Parsons:

Surrender or I’ll shoot.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

I’m Kaitlyn Sawrey, and now the final episode of the Last Outlaws, what remains of Joe Governor?

Leroy Parsons:

On October the 31st, 1900, the local paper, the Singleton Argus proclaims “Joe Governor is dead”. Joe’s body is slung over a horse and transported to town by police. The paper describes the event as having “large crowds of sightseers congregated, hoping to get a glimpse of the notorious desperado’s lifeless clay”. Joe Governor’s body is laid out on a billiards table in the Caledonian Hotel for a coronial inquest into his death. Witnesses claim that the soles of Joe’s feet are so weathered that you could strike a match of them. The Singleton Argus reports, “Sandpaper would not have lent a better surface for Lucifer’s ignition”. As your guide, I want to warn you, these shameful descriptions of Joe Governor do not stop here. As 12 white men act as jurors, a crowd packs into the Caledonian Hotel to watch. The incidents of the chase, as we’re calmly told at the inquest on Tuesday, were thrilling enough for fiction, reports the local paper.

Leroy Parsons:

The Wilkinson brothers, a pair of white farmers from rugged country outside Singleton, waited until dawn to approach. The Singleton Argus continues, “When discussing what they would do in whispers, a white cockatoo flighted to the top of a tree, standing quite close to where the black demon lay asleep, and screeched his welcome to the coming day.”

Leroy Parsons:

The Wilkinsons hold their breaths, thinking the noise would wake Joe, but he slept on. In his carefully worded sworn statement, John Wilkinson says he cried out, “Surrender or all shoot you.” Joe springs up from his slumber and makes a run for it, dropping his rifle. Joe attempts to jump a 20 foot gully but stumbles. From 100 yards away with his rifle aimed at the back of Joe Governor’s head, John Wilkinson fires, ending the chase. Joe, somersaulting over a steep bank, falls nearly 40 feet to his doom. The Singleton Argus describes Joe’s demise as, “an end that he richly deserved.”

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

One of the Wilkinson brothers would go on to state, “From his actions, I believed him to be a Governor. He was in an out of the way place. I felt perfectly justified in taking the law into my own hands.” At the conclusion of the proceedings, the paper reports that three hardy cheers were given to the Wilkinson brothers.

Professor Katherine Biber:

Look, there was no question about what caused Joe Governor’s death. He was killed by gunfire. He was shot in the back of the head. He was an outlaw, so if he didn’t surrender, they could legally shoot him.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

That’s Katherine Biber, our guide and law Professor at the University of Technology Sydney. A big part of Katherine’s investigation into this history over the last 20 years has been looking into the inquest into Joe Governor’s death and the many questions around the delivery of justice and rife misconduct that surrounded.

Professor Katherine Biber:

The inquest was to figure out did the Wilkinson brothers murder Joe Governor, or kill him legally.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

The answers aren’t straightforward. As usual with the Governor brother’s story, they seem to lead to more questions. One of those questions is how did John Wilkinson know that the person he was shooting at was actually Joe Governor. Now, remember Joe had been on the run for over three months and despite this had somehow managed to elude the capture of the 2000 odd men looking for him.

Professor Katherine Biber:

I suppose that any Aboriginal man who’s camping might run away. Not because he’s a homicidal outlaw, but because he’s afraid. So I think the Wilkinson’s probably felt pretty confident that whoever they shot, even if it was not one of the Governors, that that homicide would be excused.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Katherine says that the Wilkinson brothers who stalked and shot Joe Governor told a story that was almost too neat.

Professor Katherine Biber:

Both of them gave very identical testimony and testified in a way that made it very clear that Joe Governor was asleep and then they wake him up and then they invited him to surrender and then he ran away and then they shot him. So either that’s because that’s exactly the way it happened or it’s because they got their stories lined up before they testified, because that story makes it indisputable that their killing was not an unlawful killing and that Joe Governor’s death was not an act of homicide.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

It was just the brothers who saw this happen?

Professor Katherine Biber:

Yes.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

News of Joe Governor’s death spread quickly around the country town.

Professor Katherine Biber:

There are media accounts that said because there was so much of a local buzz that members of the public could come and view Joe’s body. I’m sure that didn’t happen at every coronial inquest, but at this one, people were permitted to see his body in groups, because there was so much interest.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Some reports had the crowds in the hundreds.

Professor Katherine Biber:

It said that local people would come and strike a match on the sole of Joe’s feet because his feet were so rough from having walked barefoot for months and months. That’s a story that many people have told me before.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

It’s such a weird detail.

Professor Katherine Biber:

It’s a very weird detail. Sometimes weird details suggest themselves to be true because they’re the kinds of things a person wouldn’t make up. I don’t really know. It seems hugely disrespectful to physically touch a dead body that is not personally connected with you. It also makes me wonder if there is a serious judicial process, a coronial inquest, that is happening. Why people members of the public are allowed to come up and touch him, strike matches on the sole of his foot, it suggests to me that this is not a conventional legal process.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

On the second day of the inquest, the coroner ordered that a photo be taken. It was meant to be official evidence to confirm that Joe was actually the deceased person, but somehow the photo made its way onto the wall of the Caledonian Hotel and stayed there for over a hundred years. When Katherine visited Singleton in 2019, it was still there.

Professor Katherine Biber:

All right. So the Caledonian Hotel is this really old hotel in the high street of Singleton on a corner, and the pub is filled with souvenirs and memorabilia and old photographs. So in the area where you go down a little corridor to order your meals from the bistro, there’s this whole set of photographs and newspapers and other old images related to Joe Governor. In amongst that is the photograph of Joe Governor dead, laid out across the pool table, and no one’s really paying any attention to it.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

But Joe’s coronial inquest photo turned memorabilia wouldn’t last much longer on the wall of the Caledonian Hotel. About a month after Katherine’s visit, an Aboriginal musician just happened to stay at the hotel and see the photo. Outraged, he wrote a Facebook post that attracted some media attention and the photo was finally taken down. But why was Joe’s coronial inquest being held at a pub anyway? Was that normal for 1900 Australia?

Professor Katherine Biber:

Look, it’s an interesting question. I think it was conventional to hold coronial inquests in pubs at this time. If you had a license, as a publican, one of the requirements was that you make your premises available for coronial inquests.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Weird.

Professor Katherine Biber:

Yeah, especially weird because in the Caledonian Hotel, the pool table, as well as being used to lay out Joe Governor, was also a place where local women would deliver their babies.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

The medical officer tasked with performing autopsies and delivering babies on the billiard table was Dr. Alistair Bowman. As the local bush doctor in Singleton, Joe Governor’s coronial inquest was likely the biggest case of his career. To begin with, Bowman did all the usual things you’d expect when performing an autopsy. He examined Joe’s body to determine the cause of death; gunshot to the head. But then Dr. Bowman does something that sparks a national debate.

Professor Katherine Biber:

Rumors start to circulate and the first rumor that’s publicized is fairly gruesome.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

What you’re about to hear could cause sadness or anger. Remember, Joe Governor was a real person and he’s still connected to a living history.

Professor Katherine Biber:

So a newspaper report from the Evening News, in fact, it was titled a special report, publishes rumors of Joe Governor’s head being removed. In that same report, it’s noted that only three hours after the conclusion of the inquest into Joe’s death, a box marked perishable is placed on the 1:28 PM train out of Singleton.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

So where was this package going? What was in it?

Professor Katherine Biber:

Well, it was said to be addressed to a professor at the University of Sydney, and we can only guess at what it contained.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

These rumors go all the way to Parliament House, triggering an investigation, and telegrams start flying across the countryside.

Professor Katherine Biber:

So Dr. Alistair Bowman, who’s back in country New South Wales, was forced to address these rumors and he does it in a telegram that’s very brief. He says, “The brain was taken out in order to trace bullet and forwarded with portion of bone to Professor Wilson, University of Sydney.” So in attempting to quash the rumor that Joe Governor’s head was removed, we end up finding out that Joe’s brain and a portion of his skull were removed. From now on, I’m going to call them his ancestral remains because that’s the respectful way to refer to them.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Why did Bowman do this, and what happened to Joe’s ancestral remains?

Professor Katherine Biber:

Well, I mean, they were stolen, but we know where they were sent. Joe’s ancestral remains were sent to the University of Sydney to a professor called James Wilson. Wilson is one of the great heroes of the University of Sydney’s history, so he would have been well known and well-known amongst doctors in the bush as someone who would be interested in obtaining Aboriginal remains.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Okay. So he’s well known, but did Bowman know Wilson?

Professor Katherine Biber:

We do know that Bowman studied at Edinburgh University and he studied there at the same time as James Wilson. It was a large medical school so it’s possible that they were not close friends, but equally it’s highly likely that they knew each other.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Edinburgh was one of the premier universities for medical students at the time and created networks that spanned the globe. Katherine says that Professor Wilson and Dr. Bowman were not the only scientists that came out of Edinburgh who’s swapping human remains, and these kinds of exchanges were happening all the time and on a much larger scale.

Professor Katherine Biber:

In the days before social media, people in the handwriting age shared little bits of gossip and job offers and rumors and clues, but they also shared biological specimens and remains. So someone would have the eggs of a monotreme and in return they would get a mummified cat or human remains. So there was this very kind of casually conducted body trade in parts of humans and animals.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Katherine says Joe Governor’s remains would have had high value in this global body trade network.

Professor Katherine Biber:

Well, first of all, the history of Australian science is absolutely entangled with the defilement of Aboriginal bodies. In this context, certainly I think Joe’s remains were viewed as doubly valuable because he was an Aboriginal person and he was a criminal person. He was regarded as a murderer, an outlaw. So some scientists, including Wilson, said that we could learn things from those qualities.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

When it became public knowledge that Joe Governor’s remains had been sent to the University of Sydney to be studied, controversy followed. There are headlines in newspapers around Australia which attracted the attention of a member of parliament whose arguments are surprisingly woke for early 20th century Australia.

Professor Katherine Biber:

There is this troublesome member of parliament who won’t let this go. He was a member of parliament called Dr. Andrew Ross. And he himself had been a government medical officer in the bush. His view was that you should never take remains without the permission of family. What kind of cowboy just takes remains from deceased bodies and what kind of science is it to study the brains of Aboriginal murderers? What can possibly be learned from this? He firstly thinks it’s bad medical practice, but secondly, he thinks it’s bad scientific speculation, and he doesn’t let it go. As well as asking numerous questions in parliament, he then publishes this long angry essay in the local press that is a huge criticism about politics, science, bush medicine, the treatment of Aboriginal people, the kind of primitive state of criminology and just everything that he’s very angry about. And he had a point. The behavior he was calling out would be absolutely unlawful.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

All this parliamentary drama catches the attention of a newspaper reporter from the Evening News. The reporter goes straight to the recipient of Joe Governor’s remains, Professor James Wilson. This wasn’t the first time Wilson had faced questions about how he obtained human remains. A few years before, Wilson was hauled before the University of Sydney Senate for stealing the skeleton of a Chinese man. So when asked about Joe Governor, Wilson appears to choose his words carefully. This is what he told the reporter, which was published in the Evening News on the 3rd of November, 1900.

Tom Allinson – Voice Actor for Professor J.T. Wilson:

We do everything in a legal way. We respect all prejudices and if there are relatives who object, we pay attention to their wishes. But in a case like this, where there were no friends to consult,… there cannot be the slightest objection to the cause taken.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

No friends to consult, no relatives seems convenient. When we dug into this story, we found someone who called Professor Wilson’s defense into question, a different Wilson with a different story.

James Wilson-Miller:

James Wilson Miller, I’m a former school teacher, university academic and a curator of the Powerhouse Museum.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

This Wilson is James Wilson-Miller. He’s from the Gringai clan of the Wonnarua Nation in the Hunter Valley. James is a historian who wrote a book called Koori: A Will to Win, and his great grandmother used to tell him stories about the Governor brothers.

James Wilson-Miller:

These two bad black fellows that came through Singleton one day. She said, “I knew them from when I was a little girl.” She remembered going to school with these two fellows.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

She told him the story of what happened to Joe Governor when he died.

James Wilson-Miller:

My great-grandmother did say that her and a couple of other ladies wanted to go and clean the body, but they were refused. Why they were refused, I don’t know. Remember, they would have been religious by then and to having a body cleaned in so many ways and anointed before you meet your maker, so to speak, would have been a reason for them wanting to go and clean the body. But of course they were refused to do it.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

So we know there were friends and perhaps family who wanted to claim Joe’s body and wash him before burial. Based on the information we now have, Professor Wilson’s defense is, at best, shaky.

Leroy Parsons:

Joe Governor’s ancestral remains were stolen. Science used Joe Governor as a specimen and denied him his humanity. Professor James Wilson was one of many professors across the globe collecting and swapping stolen human remains and although he is gone, we are still dealing with his actions. The University of Sydney still has a collection named after JT Wilson containing 660 human remains.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

The controversy around the removal of Joe Governor’s remains falls out of the papers. Forgotten by the public, Joe Governor becomes another transactional asset in the world of comparative anatomy. There’s no record of what happens to Joe’s ancestral remains until 1903.

Professor Katherine Biber:

James Froude Flashman publishes a study of four brains, which belong to four different Aboriginal people, one of which identifies as Joe Governor’s. This study is the last known record of Joe Governor’s stolen remains that I can find.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

James Froude Flashman was a friend to Professor Wilson and an up and coming anatomist. He was the pathology director of the brand new lunacy department at the University of Sydney.

Professor Katherine Biber:

Look, I think that the term lunacy has not aged well. I mean, at that time it was probably a quite modern term, but he was interested in studying human psychology, anatomically and medically.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Okay. So we know that Joe’s remains were passed from the doctor who performed the autopsy to the professor in Sydney with the checkered past who ‘gifted’ Joe’s remains to a scientist who put them in a study. So the question is where are Joe’s ancestral remains now?

Professor Katherine Biber:

Well, that’s a good question, Kaitlyn. I did find out that Professor Wilson sent a lot of his records to Cambridge University, so I had thought that maybe Joe ended up there. After a few emails back and forth, Cambridge University did get back to me, but sadly, no luck. They said they didn’t have Joe’s ancestral remains. I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s highly likely Joe’s remains may not even have survived, but I don’t want to give up.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

When revisiting the subject of where Joe’s ancestral remains could be, Katherine recalled an email from a colleague suggesting she tried the medical pathology collection at the University of Sydney. This one of a kind collection is the only place Katherine Biber hasn’t looked for Joe’s ancestral remains, and it may just be our best shot.

Dr Murat Kekic:

So here’s the museum. Well, it’s actually not a museum. We’re not allowed to call it a museum because under university bylaws, I think you have to be an entire building to be called a museum.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

It’s an off shoot of a museum.

Dr Murat Kekic:

Yeah, we got in trouble for that in our … What are we? Collection.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

This is Dr. Murat Kekic. He’s a curator of the medical pathology collection at the University of Sydney, which has a very particular collection.

Dr Murat Kekic:

So that’s the lung from the last pandemic.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Oh, wow.

Dr Murat Kekic:

It’s about the only one remaining in the world and I’ve been called into place like, “Oh, we’ve just found a container full of fingers or something. What should we do?” Or guys pass away and they’ve got stuff in the cupboards and things like that.

Professor Katherine Biber:

What guys have fingers in their cupboards?

Dr Murat Kekic:

Well, anatomists and things like that. Right? I won’t name names, but there was an elderly gentleman who was a hand surgeon. Right? He used to like to dissect at home.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

You’ve got literally two walls of brains. It’s kind of amazing. So some of these are bigger sections than others, some of these are like slices. How do you go about preserving them?

Dr Murat Kekic:

Well, I mean, in most cases, the way we would do it is after the autopsy, you’d get the brain and you’d put it in the bucket of formaldehyde.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

So if Joe Governor’s remains somehow survived, they could have been preserved this way or by putting a slice of the remains in paraffin.

Dr Murat Kekic:

Just a square block of wax with a bit of tissue in it. So we’ve got records on everything that’s here and including the 30,000 paraffin sections.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

So that’s 30,000 sections of human remains just in this museum. Sorry, collection. Murat told us there’s a huge part of the collection that hasn’t been digitized yet, so it’s possible that if Joe’s ancestor remains are still at the University of Sydney, the records could be in these paper archives.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

You’ve only gotten through what? 10% of it?

Dr Murat Kekic:

If that, yeah. They’re just like encyclopedias that have got all the autopsy reports in them, and so we’re digitizing those reports.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

If we were fingers crossed, hoping that potentially it is in the paper archive, to find it would be a needle in a haystack.

Dr Murat Kekic:

Well, I mean, we’re going to go through every bit of hay anyway, so if it’s there, we’ll find it.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

The 1903 Flashman study reads like a long-winded description of neuroanatomy, but one thing that sticks out, even to me, is that Joe’s injuries aren’t visible in any of the photographs and it definitely doesn’t look like a bullet passed through. There are no clear signs of trauma, which makes us wonder.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

But again, it’s kind of strange that doesn’t have a bullet wound.

Professor Katherine Biber:

So, Kaitlyn, you’re skeptical that that even was Joe Governor?

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Yeah. A little bit, because when you read the study, the way he’s done this piece, he describes all the folds in real detail. No mention of the bullet, which seems strange.

Professor Katherine Biber:

I thought so, but I thought I needed someone with more knowledge to tell me if that was conventional.

Dr Murat Kekic:

I mean, neuroanatomy is not really my thing, but if there was a bullet there, you’d think they’d show a photo of a point of entry or something.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

We left Murat to keep hunting through the archive.

Dr Murat Kekic:

I’ve actually often thought I should have been a detective.

Professor Katherine Biber:

Now’s your chance.

Dr Murat Kekic:

Now’s my chance. That’s right.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

So how could remains with no evidence of a bullet hole belong to Joe? We needed to speak to someone with a medical background to help us decipher the Flashman study.

Associate Professor Catherine Storey:

I was a neurologist in a former life.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

You’re in this very niche area, which is very useful to us because you understand the brain and you also understand the history. It’s quite a particular area.

Associate Professor Catherine Storey:

Yes. Only a few of us around. Yeah, I wonder why.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

This is Dr. Catherine Storey. She’s an Associate Professor and historian at Sydney University’s medical school. She was also the former head of neurology at the Royal North Shore Hospital. Dr. Storey took a look at the Flashman study for us, but the photocopy wasn’t great, so she found the original. It’s over a hundred years old and a little bit yellow, but it was easier for her to read.

Associate Professor Catherine Storey:

So yes, I went to the College of physicians and looked at the original report.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

My first response was, “well, that looks like a whole brain, not one that’s had a bullet go through it.”

Associate Professor Catherine Storey:

So basically it went from the back of the skull and just straight through the bone and would have come out here in the temple, just above the jaw bone. I think that it just skimmed that lower part.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

So does it look like it could be Joe Governor?

Associate Professor Catherine Storey:

Bowman says that there is a cavity with fragments in it, and I think that that’s probably what he saw through there. So I think it is likely to be the brain, yes.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

So the remains identified in the Flashman study probably are Joe Governor’s, but what’s still unclear is what Flashman was trying to do.

Associate Professor Catherine Storey:

What surprised me was that they made an extraordinary number of recordings. I mean, they must’ve spent hours and hours and hours with tape measures and bits and pieces to measure it and write all of this down but they made very few conclusions, and certainly to them, they thought it was a valid science.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

James Flashman states his purpose clearly in his study. “It’s looked on as a slur upon Australian science that no serious attempt has yet been made to work out the morphology of the brain of the Australian Aboriginal. We have here a race of a very low order of intelligence.” He goes on to compare the cerebral structure of Aboriginal people to that of marsupial’s. Catherine says his research tells us more about the shortcomings of science from that time than anything else. To understand Flashman’s thinking, we have to look at the science that came before him, phrenology.

Associate Professor Catherine Storey:

There was a thought the phrenologists were very, very sure that they could pick a criminal just by feeling the bumps on their head.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Phrenology was heavily influenced by the racial ideas of the time. You guessed it, white people at the top of the pyramid. Pretty quickly, phrenology was debunked by science, but something new popped up in its place.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

So it kind of went from phrenology, looking at bumps on the head, to brain neurology, folds of the brain.

Associate Professor Catherine Storey:

Yes. They tried to make a scientific study of the so-called convolutions, those little in foldings of the brain.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

So that’s what they mean by convolutions. I wasn’t quite sure what that even meant, but that’s really just about all the shape of the brain.

Associate Professor Catherine Storey:

Yes, in much the same way as phrenologists would have done looking at the skull 80 years before.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

So why were scientists particularly interested in the brains of Aboriginal people?

Associate Professor Catherine Storey:

Just as part of the spectrum, they were looking for links between primitive man and the modern man, and they felt that some of the other races might fit into that spectrum.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

So there was this idea that Aboriginal people were less evolved?

Associate Professor Catherine Storey:

Absolutely. I mean, that had actually been part of the phrenologists’ thinking as well. I think the very pernicious ideology arose from phrenology and then it just carried through from there. They worked so hard at justifying their colonisation.

Leroy Parsons:

This kind of rice science, putting Aboriginal people at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder, justified the way governments treated our people. It’s not a stretch to make a connection between these studies and the Stolen Generations. You can’t untangle Western knowledge from its colonial past. Today, the remains of Aboriginal ancestors who died in the colonies are still held in scientific collections, here in Australia and all over the world.

Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:

We can say that at least 4,000 individuals that we know of, some in Europe and North America, we often find collections in all sorts of obscure places all over the world.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Dr. Lyndon Ormond-Parker. He’s an honorary senior lecturer at the Center for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University, and he’s of Alyawarra descent from the Barkly Tablelands region of the Northern Territory. Lyndon’s been on the front lines of the repatriation fight since the ’90s.

Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:

Repatriation is the physical return of Aboriginal ancestral remains. It’s important for our ancestors to go back to country because many Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders believe that the soul or spirit cannot be laid to rest until they have a proper reburial ceremony and are put back on country.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Why was this even happening? Why would people stealing remains?

Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:

So I’ve heard the Joe Governor story, which is not dissimilar to many other Aboriginal people’s experiences on the colonial frontier, with having their remains removed very soon after death. We’re looking at a time when also there was a quench for knowledge in Europe at the same time around new peoples and lands that were discovered. So of course, with that curiosity came an excitement around gaining as much physical material and sending them back to Europe and the United States.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Lyndon tells us though scientific ambitions are part of the picture, as usual, money played a role.

Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:

Then of course they were sold on and then sold on and found their way into collections all over the world. So this dollar value was also pushing the trade in ancestors, not just this scientific curiosity, but also a dollar value for collectors. We know that many Aboriginal people came into conflict with the ever expanding colony. We know that there were many massacres that happened in particular in New South Wales, and then fanning out as the rest of the continent was so-called explored and mapped.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Aboriginal remains weren’t just being collected from massacre and burial sites.

Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:

As the colonies grew, many Aboriginal people often died in hospitals. Their bodies ended up in morgues and their remains were often sent directly to collecting institutions all over the globe. It was often there would be a local doctor that had trained in an overseas institution, such as Edinburgh University, Oxford, Cambridge, and other places all over Europe and the Western world at the time.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

A local doctor trained overseas. Sound familiar? Lyndon tells us the archives reveal Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been objecting to the desecration of their ancestors for too long.

Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:

So we had a congregational missionary called Lancelot Threlkeld and he records in his diary that on seeing a Aboriginal burial that an Aboriginal lady came up to him and said in broken English that, I would not like to disclose where they had buried their relation, and on asking why, she replied that the woman’s relatives were afraid that a white fellow should come and take her head away. This is in 1824. It’s the very first recorded journal entry that we’ve been able to find. It wasn’t until the 1960s and ’70s through the Land Rights movement that Aboriginal people started gaining rights and were calling for rights to self-determination. Aboriginal people were requesting the repatriation and return of their ancestral remains and material culture.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

But research institutions and museums haven’t always made the return of ancestors easy.

Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:

The repatriation movement is a story of success, but it’s almost a story of success for the lowest common denominator of rights that you can give people. Now, we are still fighting with recalcitrant institutions overseas, but it should be a fundamental basic human right of everybody, including Aboriginal people to bury their loved ones in the way that they see fit. But I do know that some of the individuals still abstain from any decisions around returning ancestors, which is … Oh God, what do I really want to say?

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Obvious reasons, Lyndon feels passionate about this. Heads up, there’s some swearing.

Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:

They want to abstain because they don’t want to be seen as pro-repatriation because they’re seen as a traitor to their discipline. For fuck’s sake, you either agree with it or you don’t. Why would you abstain? And why would you be a slave to your discipline rather than actually doing something which is for the good of the Aboriginal people? It’s basic human dignity and if you can’t get that right, we’re all fucked. You can quote me on that.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Lyndon’s frustration doesn’t just come from dealing with institutions stalwarting the repatriation movement.

Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:

So at this particular point in time, quite a few ancestral remains come back from overseas and they’re just labeled Australia or Aboriginal or just Torres Strait Islander. So we have very little information associated with those ancestors that come back, and at the moment they’re stored in a tin shed in Mitchell as part of the national museum storage facility. Aboriginal people have lobbied since the late 1970s, early ’80s for what’s called a national resting place. We should have a national resting place in Canberra, and it should be there as a public space to tell the story of repatriation and ancestors. It should be a place where people can come and conduct ceremony when remains are sent from overseas and also a place where we can lay to rest in a facility that’s purpose-built for the ancestors who we don’t know where they’re from.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Lyndon tells us that a national resting place and repatriation of ancestors is about much more than battling bureaucracy.

Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:

These conflicts are often in the living memory of their descendants today, and so this is all part of the healing process for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in this country, trying to heal the damage that’s being done. We’re talking about individuals potentially murdered by the state, or ended up having their remains desecrated, and so repatriation of ancestral remains is probably a real base level starting point in the reconciliation process. I think if we can get this right, then we can get some other things right. We still have a healing process that goes on with things like the Stolen Generations and I’ve heard Aboriginal people describe our ancestors in museums as the first Stolen Generation.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Lyndon’s years long search for stolen ancestors has meant delving into horrifying stories in the colonial archives, but Lyndon believes these stories need to be told.

Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:

The archive is a violent space. This process of truth-telling in terms of our colonial past and the frontier conflicts, which I think haven’t been fully told yet and I think that part of the archive is part truth-telling. Even if that story is very sad and upsetting for many Aboriginal people, it’s something that we actually want the rest of Australia to be told and educated about. I don’t think there is anything wrong with educating people about traumatic, racist, violent pasts.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Like many ancestors, Joe Governor’s remains were lost somewhere in the institutional web, and that’s the problem. We can’t send ancestors home until we find them. When we told Lyndon about our search for Joe Governor’s remains, he did some research of his own, and with this kind of search, the best place to start is at the end, the last known record of Joe Governor’s remains, the 1903 Flashman study.

Dr Lyndon Ormond-Parker:

I’ve asked around about Flashman. Look, I have a hunch that it’s probably still at Sydney Uni and that someone will have to interrogate their archives a little bit more. If so, it’s possible that it’s not necessarily listed as Joe Governor. Who knows?

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Lyndon believes Joe Governor’s remains may still be at the University of Sydney. So I checked back in with Dr. Murat Kekic, who, along with his research assistant, has been scouring the medical pathology collection for us.

Dr Murat Kekic:

We did find some really old handwritten notes, like from the late 1800s going into the early 1900s. We just went through them comprehensively, and absolutely nothing. So I just can’t imagine there’s anything there that relates to it.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

Well, thank you for looking.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

While Joe’s ancestral remains don’t look like they are here, they may exist in some other collection. We just haven’t been able to find them. What we do know is that Joe’s body was buried outside the fence at the cemetery in Singleton, on unconsecrated ground. His grave is marked with a meter high headstone that reads …

 

Leroy Parsons:

“Joe Governor Bushranger Shot 31st October 1900”.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

As we sit with Loretta Ethel Parsley, the great granddaughter of Jimmy and Ethel Governor on country, she reminds us that there’s a different way of thinking about Jimmy and Joe coming home.

Aunty Loretta Parsley:

Our spirits return in different ways through our totem. So every time we see a goanna, of course, it’s Jimmy. When I see a kookaburra, that’s my father. When I see a magpie, that’s my mother. And they frequent visitors here on country, yeah, and that gives me peace too.

Kaitlyn Sawrey:

So would he still have returned to his totem, even though he’s not on country?

Aunty Loretta Parsley:

Yes, they can still return her matter where you are. So that spiritual connection is very strong to who we are as a people. It’s hard to explain to some people. They think, “Oh, they’re just making it up.” They’re not Aboriginal. They not connected to country. They’re not part of a system that was robbed from them. People like myself would like to renew the culture and our strong beliefs. If it wasn’t for Jimmy, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be sitting around talking about him. This is my ancestry. I’ll pass my knowledge on to my kids and my grandkids to keep our history alive. This is my story through Jimmy Governor, because of that responsibility. Jimmy had that responsibility and commitment to family. That was his role. So I don’t feel any animosity. I don’t feel any anger. I own my story. I tell my story of this is how it is.

Leroy Parsons:

Well, I should share my connection to this story too. This is my connection, my family tree. Jimmy and Ethel Governor had Sydney and Violet. Violet married George Parsons. They had Cyril, Robert known as Bobby, Ethel known as Etty  and Ruth. Cyril married Doreen and had twelve children – one of which was Greg, known as Megsy. Megsy is my father. I am Leroy Parsons and I’m one of the many proud great-great grandchildren of Jimmy Governor.

 

Emma Lancaster –  Credits:

The Last Outlaws series is made by Impact Studios at the University of Technology Sydney, an audio production house funded by the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research. The Last Outlaws was made on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, as well as the Walbunja people of the Yuin nation, Dharug people of Ngurra Country and Gubbi Gubbi Country, whose land was never ceded. Impact Studios would like to pay respect to Elders past, present, and emerging, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge on this land. Thanks to everyone who made this series possible, including the Governor family descendants and the Parsley and Parsons families, especially Aunty Loretta Parsley and Leroy Parsons. Thanks also to our UTS partners, the Faculty of Law, the Australian Centre for Public History, Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, as well as the Australian Research Council.

 

Emma Lancaster –  Credits:

Our wonderful Chief Investigator is Law Professor Katherine Biber, and of course the team at Impact Studios. Kaitlyn Sawrey is the host, writer and senior producer. Frank Lopez is the writer, senior producer, composer and sound engineer. The role of narrator was voiced and co-written by Leroy Parsons. Allison Chan was our producer, researcher and fact checker. Ben Vozzo is the digital communications manager. Belinda Lopez is our editorial advisor. Thank you to our cultural consultants at Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, especially Professor Daryle Rigney and Distinguished Professor Larissa Behrendt. As well as Dr. Lyndon Ormond-Parker, an honourary senior lecturer at the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University. Additional production by Ryan Pemberton and additional sound supplied by Camilla Hannan. Additional sound engineering by Martin Peralta. Jake Duczynski from Studio Hackett (Studio Gilay) created our incredible digital artworks and original artwork Blood On His Hands Cleansed By Saltwater was supplied by Aunty Loretta Parsley.

And there are many minds that made The Last Outlaws possible.

Emma Lancaster –  Credits:

A big thank you to everyone we spoke to and those who answered all our fact checking questions, including Jimmy Kyle, Dr. Katie Gilchrist, the New South Wales State Library, Laurie Perry, James Wilson-Miller, Sheila Johnson, the Gilgandra Local Aboriginal Land Council, Dr. Claire Britton, Deborah Beck, the National Art School, Nathan Sentance from the Australian Museum, Dr. Murat Kekic at the Ainsworth Interactive Collection of Medical Pathology and Emeritus Professor Paul Turnbull at the University of Tasmania. Thanks also to the deadly team at TEABBA in the Darwin studio, Lee Hewitt, Brendon Barlow, Bernard Namok. Voiceover artists are Andrew MacRae and Tom Allinson. The Executive Producer of Impact Studios is Emma Lancaster. Managing Directors of Impact Studios during production were Associate Professor Tamson Pietsch and Associate Professor Anna Clarke. Thanks for listening.