However, new historical evidence shows that he actually robbed graves, stole human body parts and sent them to European universities, and also killed endangered Tasmanian tigers (talacins). Apparently Allport “An uneducated lawyer who sold stolen Aboriginal remains along with Tasmanian tiger skins for scientific prestige”.

A wolf in sheep’s clothing

Morton Allport was born in England in the 19th century, but lived for a long time in Hobart, the capital of Tasmania. Their activities, including the desecration of an Aboriginal corpse to gather evidence for pseudoscientific theories of white supremacy, coincided with genocide against the island’s local indigenous people and the eventual extermination of the extinct Tasmanian tigers. 1936.

Portrait of Morton Allport, taken 1854 / Photograph Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, State Library of Tasmania.

The research, based on Allport’s archival letters held at the State Library of Tasmania, was published in the journal Archives of Natural History on 29 November.

We now see that Allport has sent more thylacine samples to Europe than anyone else. He is also proud to say that he is the only person to have sent skeletons of Tasmanian Indians to European institutions. Almost every Tasmanian skeleton that reached Europe was sent by Allport.
– says Jack Ashby, Deputy Director of the University Museum of Zoology at the University of Cambridge.

When British colonists established the first European settlements in Tasmania (now a state in Australia) in 1803, the island’s original Aboriginal population numbered between 5,000 and 10,000. However, by 1876, after several successive campaigns of violence, murder and forced resettlement with direct support from the then British state through the bounty system, only women abducted by the colonists, many of whom were subjected to torture, forced labor and torture, survived. rape.

The systematic killing of Tasmania’s indigenous population, which modern scientists call genocide, coincided with the hunting of thylacines living on the island. The characteristic striped marsupial, which once lived throughout Australia and later became endemic to Tasmania, was exterminated by British settlers who saw it as a threat to sheep farms.

As Aboriginal and thylacine numbers declined in Tasmania, demand for “specimens” of both increased rapidly. Examining Allport’s correspondence, Jack Ashby generally found the following: Allport sent five Tasmanian Indian skeletons and 20 thylacine skins to Europe. Once there, the samples were examined by naturalists who attempted to draw pseudoscientific conclusions about the evolutionary “inferiority” of both thylacines and aborigines.

Thylacines were viewed as pests in their own environment and were described in the same way as the natives: “primitive”, “stupid” and evolutionarily maladaptive. In fact, both were blamed for what happened to them; Because of genocide and extinction, it exempted colonists from shooting or rounding them up and removing them from the islands.
– comment of the scientist.

Allport’s most notorious case of grave robbing occurred in 1869 with the death of William Lannett, who was mistakenly believed to be the last male Tasmanian native. Lanne was a coveted “specimen” and Allport engaged in a bitter struggle with another colonist (the physician William Crowther, who later became Tasmania’s premier) to retrieve Lanne’s remains.

The result was an obvious crime: Crowther and his son snuck into the hospital morgue, cut off Lanna’s head, and replaced it with the skull of a dead white man. Arriving at the bloody site later, Allport ordered Lanna’s legs and arms to be cut off so that Crowther could not obtain the entire skeleton. The remains of the body were buried the same day, but the body was later dug up and stolen. Later, in one of his private letters, Allport admits that the body is his.

Lanne’s skull has never been formally identified. It was probably brought to England by Crowther’s son. Almost all of the identified Aboriginal remains that Allport sent to museum collections were repatriated and buried, except for one skeleton from a grave on Flinders Island which is currently at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS).

According to Ashby, his research not only illuminates the horrors of colonialism, but also shows that zoological collections in museums are important for social history as well as for scientific data.

“Understanding why and how animals are harvested, including the underlying political and social motivations, is key to understanding and overcoming some of the social inequalities that exist today.”– said Rebecca Kilner, director of the Museum of Zoology at the University of Cambridge.