The government must bring the stolen Indigenous dead home | Paul Daley

Submitted by Paul Daley on Thu, 05/10/2017 - 12:08pm

How we treat the dead is a mark of how we regard the living. When will we finally have a keeping place for Indigenous remains?

An anthropologist tells me of an Australian soldier’s skull with terrible shrapnel damage and an intact bullet in the forehead that’s stood for a century in a ghoulish American medical museum’s collection of body parts.

I immediately recognise the possibility of identifying the Australian Anzac (who turns out to be 27-year-old Private Thomas Hurdis of the 59th Battalion) from what the Mütter Museum has on its website about the skull’s provenance and the date of death.