AFTERWORD, SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This novel, while inspired by real events, is a work of fiction. It is an attempt to shine a light on the silences surrounding ethnic shows, a largely forgotten form of mass entertainment that had far-reaching consequences regarding views of race. While the recorded history of such shows is mostly Eurocentric, hints exist as to the agency of some, but not all, performers. The lost stories of the men, women and children who participated in these ‘people shows’ or Völkerschauen can only ever be imagined.

Historically, ethnic shows, also somewhat contentiously described as ‘human zoos’, were big business in Europe and America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In some cases, people considered to be exotic performed behind fences, while in others, the appeal was to have people displayed intimately, without fences and within touching distance of the audience. In Carl Hagenbeck’s European ‘anthropozoological shows’, the focus of Paris Savages, performers were often displayed with their animals, with a focus on showing the activities of daily life as outlined in the research of Dr Hilke Thode-Arora (see the 1989 publication Fur fünfzig Pfennig um die Welt: Die Hagenbeckschen Völkerschauen, soon to be republished in English). Other showmen, such as P.T. Barnum in America and Farini in Europe, were more sensational. Farini marketed a young girl ‘Krao’, who had the hair disorder hypertrichosis, as a missing link between monkey and man. P.T. Barnum showed Australian Aboriginal troupes in America as cannibals, as outlined in Roslyn Poignant’s Professional Savages. Such examples beg the question: what sort of society shows fellow human beings in this way? What do such shows say about the people looking on? Who were the savages?

Various texts on the subject of ‘human zoos’ informed the novel, including Human Zoos: Science and Spectacle in the Age of Colonial Empires (Blanchard et al.), In the Footsteps of Abraham Ulrikab (Rivet), The Diary of Abraham Ulrikab (Lutz), People on Parade (Qureshi) and the catalogue and website of the 2012 Paris exhibition Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage.

Sadly, many exhibited people died from diseases such as tuberculosis or smallpox. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio documentary Cast Among Strangers reported that, of the twenty Aboriginal people exhibited in Europe in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, fifteen died of tuberculosis. Others, such as Carl Hagenbeck’s entire group of Inuit brought to Europe in 1880 from Labrador, died of smallpox as outlined in Rivet’s book listed above. Not all experiences and representations, however, were negative. Dr Hilke Thode-Arora’s research reveals that the groups of Somalis who visited Hagenbeck’s Thierpark in Hamburg made repeated journeys and willingly returned with other members of their families, making performing their paid career; likewise, Sioux, especially from Pine Ridge Reservation, became professional and highly sought-after performers.

Overwhelmingly, however, the story of human zoos is a story half-told. There is largely silence concerning the views of the performers themselves. What did they think about being exhibited, and what were the circumstances surrounding their transportation? Exceptions include a rare diary of one of the Labrador Inuit shown at Hagenbeck’s Thierpark in Hamburg. The diary of Abraham Ulrikab was translated from German and made available in English by Dr Hartmut Lutz and students at the University of Greifswald; also in Dr Hilke Thode-Arora’s 2002 article ‘Abraham’s Diary – A European Ethnic Show from an Inuk Participant’s Viewpoint’ (Journal of the Society for the Anthopology of Europe), which juxtaposes Abraham’s experience with that of the recruiter Jacobsen. In her book chapter ‘Rethinking Sami Agency during Living Exhibitions: From the Age of Empire to the Postwar World’, Cathrine Baglo has revealed a nuanced understanding of Sami performers’ experiences in Europe, with indications of some agency on the part of performers with regard to living conditions and wages (see Performing Indigeneity: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences edited by Laura Graham and H. Glenn Penny). Nevertheless, it is likely that in most cases of human exhibition, the power balance between performer and showman remained unequal. The experiences of performers varied widely depending on the intentions of the impresarios and the scientists involved, the origin of the performers, and the country in which they were shown.

Paris Savages draws on research conducted in Australia, France and Germany on the wider topic of ethnographic exhibition, as well as the scant facts gathered about the K’gari group in particular. Bonny/Boni/ Bonangera was one of three Badtjala people who travelled to Europe in 1882 with the German engineer Louis Müller. Dorondera (also known as Susanne) and her uncle Jurano/Durano (Alfred) were the other two. Other historical figures were the nine Aboriginal people taken from north Queensland’s Hinchenbrook and Palm Islands, first to America and then to Europe, by the infamous and self-confessed manhunter R.A. Cunningham. In Paris Savages, I have brought Cunningham’s journey to Europe forward by a year, also the date of the abridged version of the letter by P.T. Barnum sent to agents worldwide, held at the Smithsonian Institution Archives and reproduced in Roslyn Poignant’s Professional Savages. I have invented the scene where the two groups meet at Paris’s Jardin d’Acclimitation.

Other people described in this novel, including Abraham Ulrikab and his family, the ‘Sinhalese’, Zulus, the ‘Feugians’, the ‘Laplanders’ and the ‘Samoyeds’, also existed. Also true were many of the scientists mentioned, although their stories have been fictionalised. These scientists include: Professor Rudolf Virchow; biologist and physician Ernst Haeckel, whose views on evolutionary racism, some (such as evolutionary biologist and science historian Stephen Jay Gould) write, contributed to the rise of Nazism; Léonce Manouvrier; Ernest Chantre; Guido Adler and Adolf Bernhard Meyer. In several instances I have quoted recorded words. Barnum’s advertisement about ‘cannibals’ was taken from an 1883 edition of the Advance Courier reproduced in Professional Savages. Dickens’ 1853 account of the Zulus exhibited in Hyde Park was taken from ‘The Noble Savage’ in Household Words. Virchow’s comments about Bonny and Dorondera being ‘excellent specimens’ comes from an 1883 scientific journal article written by the professor himself. Virchow’s opening address at the Panoptikum and his description of Dorondera making a ‘virginal impression’ include quotations from the publication Das Ausland. Guido Adler’s quote about the development of music was taken from his 1885 article ‘Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft’, digitised by Digizeitschriften; and Manouvrier’s comments about difficulties examining the ‘redskins’ at Paris’s Jardin d’Acclimatation is a variation of an account quoted in Human Zoos: The Invention of the Savage. The route taken by the ‘Nubians’ visiting the Berlin Zoo comes from archival sources referred to in Through the Lion Gate: A History of the Berlin Zoo by Gary Bruce. I have drawn from Gabi Eissenberger’s finding of a report in the Magdeburger Zeitung that criticised ‘human zoos’, as well as from newspaper reports (Evening News and Cleveland Herald) on Cunningham’s troupe, both quoted in Professional Savages.

Bonny was seen with a group of ‘Samoyeds’ at the Cours du Midi, Lyon, France, and the novelty of that association was noted in the newspaper report ‘Les Samoyèdes’ published in Le Progrès on 23 August 1883. A quote from this report appears in the final chapter of the novel. In September 1883, a record of Bonny casting a bar’gan (boomerang) and inspiring a military ballistics expert in bullet design appeared in the publication Le Salut Public. An excerpt of this account, the last recorded sighting of Bonny, also appears in Paris Savages (thanks to a translation by France Rivet).

Virchow’s 1880 Zeitschrift für Ethnologie description of the Inuit group appears in English in France Rivet’s In the Footsteps of Abraham Ulrikab. Castan was indeed the owner of Castan’s Panoptikum and St Hilaire the director of the Jardin d’Acclimitation in Paris at this time. The year 1883 was busy at the Jardin with four ethnic shows attracting 900,000 visitors. While Bonny, Dorondera and Jurano are known to have visited Hamburg, Hannover, Leipzig, Dresden, Cologne, Basel and Lyon at approximately the months indicated in the novel, there is no evidence of them being at the Jardin d’Acclimitation, however this was a regular touring venue for Hagenbeck’s troupes, so it is plausible that they went there. There is also evidence Bonny performed in Geneva (thank you, France Rivet). Although the Hagenbeck archives do not include a listing of Bonny and his compatriots, Hagenbeck is listed as the tour director of the K’gari group in an 1882 article in the Dresden newspaper the Illustrirte Zeitung. The article, an excerpt of which is quoted in Paris Savages, describes Bonny and Jurano/Durano’s performances at the Dresden zoo.

The Queensland state archives list a man named Sheridan who called for Fraser Island to be made a reserve for the Badtjala. Louis Müller was a German engineer who had lived in Australia (for eighteen years, rather than the six described in the novel), before taking Bonny, Jurano and Dorondera to Europe (Das Ausland). It is not known how willing Bonny, Dorondera and Jurano were to travel with Louis Müller, although the Das Ausland article reveals a level of trust between Müller and Bonny, with Müller reporting that he felt he could ‘rely on Bonny under all circumstances’. They also shared a room. The same article reveals casts were made of Bonny and Jurano in Dresden by A.B. Meyer. However, archival research that Dr Birgit Scheps and I carried out in Dresden revealed that casts held in Dresden of Bonny and Dorondera were in fact made at Castan’s Panoptikum. The holdings list also included a cast of Jurano (made after life, that is, a death mask), although we didn’t find this cast. Daniel Browning’s valuable radio documentary Cast Among Strangers notes that Jurano and Dorondera fell ill in Cologne and were admitted to hospital, but, despite further searching, the fate of all three remains unknown. A record from Castan’s Panoptikum reveals that Jurano was also admitted to the Berlin Charité hospital.

A rare full body cast was made of Bonny in Lyon in the museum described in Paris Savages. On occasion, the plaster used for body casting and in sculpture was contaminated with lime, which burned the skin. As noted above, the last recorded sightings of Bonny were in France where he was performing alongside a group of ‘Samoyed’ people from the northern Arctic. (Note: The statue described in the Place Perrache/Carnot is real, although I have altered the dates slightly.) The remainder of Bonny’s story, as told in this novel, is fiction.

In 2014, the Australian Federal Court granted the Badtjala (Butchulla) native title rights to Fraser Island, and in April 2017, the island formally adopted its original name, K’gari. England’s Prince Harry used the name K’gari in his October 2018 address from the island, where he took part in a Badtjala ceremony.

Badtjala spirit names, lessons and legends referred to in the novel have as their main source the book The Legends of Moonie Jarl, written by Badtjala man Wilf Reeves and illustrated by Olga Miller. The stories of the boomerang and the Jun Jaree have been quoted verbatim with the kind permission of Badtjala man Glen Miller, whose uncle was Wilf Reeves and mother Olga Miller. The legend of the formation of K’gari is summarised with permission from Fraser Island Legends by Olga Miller. Some Badtjala words come with permission from the dictionary of Shirley Foley (courtesy of Badtjala artist and academic Dr Fiona Foley, who also provided the word wong for eugarie), the remainder from Jeanie Bell’s Dictionary of the Gubbi-Gubbi and Butchulla Languages (1994) and Dictionary of the Butchulla Language (2004) with the permission and kind assistance of the Korrawinga Aboriginal Corporation. My thanks to Dr Fiona Foley for her own scholarship (including ‘When the Circus Came to Town’, Art Monthly Australia, no. 245), for answering my questions, reading drafts, checking the accuracy of material relating to the Badtjala and K’gari, and for showing me around Maryborough. Additional sources that informed the novel include The Badtjala People: A Cultural and Environmental Interpretation of Fraser Island, a Unique Land and Seascape to which we Belong (Shawn Foley), Princess K’gari’s Fraser Island (Fred Williams) and the Ronin Films documentary Secret and Sacred. Information on the correlations between plant flowering times and hunting/gathering comes from L.P. Winterbotham, ‘Recollections of Willie McKenzie’, Occasional Papers in Anthrolology no. 8. and Farwell’s 1974 The Sun Country, quoted in Williams’s Princess K’gari’s Fraser Island. Information on K’gari plants and uses was also drawn from the Queensland Government’s Department of Environment and Science website.

My thanks also to Claire Brizon (Musée des Confluence) for enabling me to visit the cast of Bonny in Lyon and for her research on this and other casts; to Ann Lyneah Curtis (Masquerade Life Casting) for information on life casting in plaster; to Callum Hindhaugh for showing me around the tall ship James Craig, an 1874 barque; to Klaus Gille for sharing with me archival photographs of the Hagenbeck shows and taking me to the previous location of Carl Hagenbeck’s Thierpark in Hamburg; to Dr Hilke Thode-Arora for discussions in Germany about ethnographic exhibtions, for translations, for her original research about Völkerschauen in Germany, including details such as Hagenbeck’s unwillingness to tolerate drunkenness or quarrels (Fur fünfzig Pfennig), and for reading the manuscript; to Dr Birgit Scheps for discussions about Aboriginal visitors to Europe, for showing me casts stored in Dresden, for obtaining information about the Badtjala group’s perfomances at the Berlin Panoptikum, and for reading the manuscript; to France Rivet for assistance with locating newspaper evidence of Bonny’s travels in France and Switzerland, for her research on Abraham Ulrikab, which I gratefully draw from for Paris Savages, and for comments on the draft novel; and to Dr Hartmut Lutz for permission to quote from Abraham Ulrikab’s diary. Paris Savages was written as part of a Creative Writing PhD at the University of Tasmania. I am deeply grateful to my PhD supervisors, Dr Danielle Wood and Dr Mitchell Rolls (University of Tasmania), who have both read numerous drafts, for their generous guidance and expertise, and to Associate Professor Anna Johnston (The University of Queensland), Professor Richard Lemm (University of Prince Edward Island), Professor Gary Crew (University of the Sunshine Coast) and Professor Lynette Russell (Monash Indigenous Studies Centre) for valuable input. Thank you to the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania for support and camaraderie. Thank you to Arts Tasmania, the Graduate Research Travel Fund of the University of Tasmania and the Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship for financial assistance. I am grateful to the wonderful team at Ventura Press: Jane Curry for her passionate belief in this book, her vision, support and energy; Zoe Hale for her attention to detail throughout production; Sophie Hodge; and editor Simone Ford. Thank you also to my brilliant agent, Jeanne Ryckmans (and Jo Butler and Sophie Hamley), DMCPR and Simon and Schuster Australia. Finally, my heartfelt thanks to my friends and family, particularly Susan Bleakley, Alexa Moses, Penny Yarrow, Melinda Levy, Nicky Adams and Christie Collins for reading drafts, Karin Schaeffer for assistance with German translation, and to Craig, Laura and Calum, as always, for their love, patience and support.