Cosmetic Mirrors

Original People Online

9000-year-old Stone Houses and the first submerged ancient archaeological sites found on the seabed in Australia.

Too Strong for you Karen

Too Strong for you Karen

Can Coolers

“If this landmass represented a book of 1000 pages, [Australia] would represent the last paragraph on the last page of that book”

An anthropological view of Yarrabah Aboriginal Community in the early 1900s

Some years ago a noted German anthropologist, Professor K (Hermann Klaatsch), visited the Yarrabah Mission station and asked that the natives might be sent to him so that he might measure their skulls. He sat accordingly on the veranda with a big pipe and measured the skulls of all who came, and the more he measured the more he shook his head. 

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"Will you not come into the school and examine the children?" said the superintendent. "They have made remarkable progress, and up to the age of eleven do the same lessons as the children in the white schools." "No," said the Professor; "I do not want to see them. I know that they are incapable of learning anything. I have measured their skulls." "But will you not look at our steam-engine, which is run entirely by two aboriginal boys?" '' No," was the reply. "They cannot possibly understand machinery. I have measured their skulls." "But," persisted the superintendent, "will you not at least listen to our band, which is often in requisition when good music is required in Cairns?" "No," was the reply. "It is no good. I have measured their skulls." 

Comment on Hermann Klaatsch by Gilbert White, Anglican Bishop of Carpentaria - in Thirty Years in Tropical Australia (1918), pp. 158-59.