The Trade in Indigenous Bones in Australia

The trade in indigenous corpses in Australia was so brisk that particularly good specimens were earmarked before they even had a chance to die. One example was a man named Wunamachu, a Yarawaka man who was tried in English despite speaking no English after an alleged tribal murder. He was sent to an asylum in Adelaide and marked for dissection while he was still alive. When he died in 1903, Ramsey Smith defleshed him. His bones remained in Edinburgh until they were repatriated in the 1990s.