ABSTRACT
In the early 1860s, phrenologist Archibald Sillars Hamilton exhumed the skull of Aboriginal man Jim Crow from a cemetery in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales. Following Hamilton’s death, his collection ended up in a major museum in Melbourne, Victoria, in 1889. More than a century later, in 2013, the story of Jim Crow re-emerged, and the Wonnarua traditional owners of the Hunter Valley were contacted and informed of the possibility of making a claim for the skull’s return. Jim Crow’s repatriation hinged on decisions made by the Mindaribba Local Aboriginal Land Council and the associated Wonnarua Nation Aboriginal Corporation, one of the groups representing the region’s traditional owners. Following a handover at Museum Victoria in June 2015, Jim Crow’s skull was reburied in March 2016 in the same cemetery in East Maitland where his postcranial remains probably still lie, with about thirty community members welcoming him home to country. As the first repatriation for the land council and many of the traditional owners, the return of Jim Crow unfolded as an emotional and sometimes unsettling experience, as well as a test case for future returns of Ancestral Remains. Drawing on interviews and observation, this chapter explores how community members made sense of Jim Crow’s physical return while interweaving his story with the local histories and myth that form a foundation of contemporary Aboriginal identity in the region. The repatriation was generally viewed as a moving event that strengthened a community piecing together its history after two centuries of colonisation.
