Reviews

Emma Kowal (2023) Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity in Australia, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina. 264 pp. ISBN: 9781478025375 (PB) 9781478020592 (HB) 9781478027539 (ebook), US $27.95 (PB) US $104.95 (HB).

Ghosts and hauntings are not commonly welcomed in scientific arenas, and have little place in scientific methods or texts. However, it is precisely the ghostly legacies of studies concerned with Indigenous biological difference that author Emma Kowal suggests we embrace if we are to enact forms of science—Indigenous-led or otherwise—which are adequate for our current times, and not simply doomed to unwittingly repeat the failures of the past.

The question animating this book ‘Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity in Australia’ is ‘how are we to understand Indigenous biological difference in the twenty first century?’. Acting as a continual refrain throughout the book’s eight chapters, this question helps to keep in view tensions arising within attempts to prove, document, mobilise, deny or in some way resolve the status of Indigenous biological difference as it has been engaged historically and within scientific methodologies. It recognises the troubled pasts that have been created through government policies undergirded in one way or another by ‘Indigenous exceptionalism’ or claims that we are ‘actually all the same underneath’. And recognises that there are significant hopes invested in the possibilities of well-governed and Indigenous-led genomic innovation enabling forms of negotiated reconciliation and address pressing indigenous health needs.

Current debates within contemporary Indigenous genomics, as Kowal points out, tend to revolve around two dominant poles. The first of these advocates for a rejection of all forms of science which lend themselves to genetic determinism and which may produce potential for further marginalisation of Indigenous peoples and groups. The second looks to a reappropriation of forms of science which, while damaging in the past, may be rerouted and tamed when properly governed and run by Indigenous authorities acknowledging and honouring ancient heritages through practices of modern science and reconciliation.

This book offers a different kind of contribution, seeking not to align with one of these poles or another, but to bring some of the past practices of science and anthropology into view within the formation of the present. Over the course of the book, our attention is directed towards a series of compelling historical stories, all variously recounting initiatives for identifying biological and racial sameness and differences in post-settlement Australia. Dwelling in the details and contradictions of these episodes, the text gradually unfurls a method for learning to read present and past histories of Indigenous biological science, and nurture possibilities for living (uneasily) with their ‘ghosts’.

While predominantly a work of historical anthropology, readers from science and technology studies and areas of contemporary anthropology concerned with ‘pluriversal politics’ will see resources from their own familiar literatures being activated as crucial methodological innovations here. Drawing on M’charek (2014) and Serres (1995), attending to DNA as a ‘folded object’ is a particularly significant move. A folded object can be seen as akin to a handkerchief, which when ironed out flat has a certain regular geometry and linear temporality, but when crumpled up in a ball brings distant corners into close proximity. Seeking to read DNA in this way opens a pathway for a rich series of stories which do not exclude their Indigenous interlocutors at the outset, and which reveal particular entanglements of colonial science, biocapital, ancestral kin relations, new genetic technologies and more.

The core chapters of the book each take as their focus particular material interlocutors relevant to the conduct of nineteenth century science and anthropology in Australia, which continue to carry significance in contemporary times. In chapter 3, we are offered front row seats to a chance encounter at a train station in which an ‘aging British ethnologist’ paid a few coins or a piece of fruitcake to a ‘young Aboriginal man,’ and in so doing purchased a lock of his hair. This hair was then retained in the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, from which it was plucked 84 years later by a Danish geneticist who, in sequencing its genome, enabled this lock of hair to ‘speak for the entire Aboriginal race’.

In chapter 4, we follow the station manager Alexander ‘Sandy’ McPhee as he heads into the Western Australian desert, intrigued by stories of a ‘white man’ seen in the midst of an Aboriginal ceremony. Through this, we come to meet Jugun, the first recorded case of an Aboriginal albino, and then trace an anxious fascination with Aboriginal albinism which continued to reverberate decades later, animating the question of whether ‘biological absorption’ of Aboriginal people into the Caucasian race was, or was not, possible.

Then in chapter 5, we follow a medical expedition into the central Australian desert to explore the possibility of ‘human torpor’ amongst Aboriginal people. Here, invited to participate in a scientific ‘ceremony’ only suitable for initiated men, groups of Anmatjera men were enticed to have their breathing measured, and skin and core body temperatures taken so as to better understand their extraordinary capacity to sleep in sub-zero desert temperatures. As a project oriented around Indigenous physiological difference, medical practitioners and anthropologists sought to prove if these men did indeed have superpowers, in a project with significant military implications which may, or may not, still be being pursued today.

The focus on these complexified cases within Australian scientific history makes for compelling and at times disturbing reading. As noted by the author, this treatment is likely to be controversial and not to everyone’s taste. The connections being drawn sometimes seem to be minor and haphazard, relying heavily on oddities and chance encounters, but the stories are compelling and the structured process of weaving pasts and presents offers a well-rounded and gratifying analysis.

Living with ghosts is, of course, a practice complexly unexceptional for many Australian Aboriginal people, with ancestors—both benevolent and disruptive—being constant companions in collective life. However, nurturing such convivialities within modern institutions of knowledge practice may take some practice. This book makes a compelling argument both for the need for such careful work and one promising mode by which we may try—through a continued historicisation of the present. As such, it seems to be an excellent companion to both the work of scientists and other scholars in this field. Likewise, by suggesting that ‘even the most skilled amalgam of science and justice will be haunted’, I hope this book might make more space for discussions in which the object of DNA is itself decentred, thereby opening opportunities for collaborative epistemic practices in which Aboriginal knowledge institutions participate in their own terms in the constitution of important working concepts such as identity, belonging, heritage and public health.

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Michaela Spencer

Charles Darwin University

Clarke, Phillip A. (2023) Aboriginal Peoples and Birds in Australia: Historical and Cultural Relationships, CSIRO Publishing, Clayton. 344 pp. ISBN: 9781486315970, $59.99.

Black and red feathers line the mantlepiece above the fireplace in my house. These are gifts from a Menang Noongar friend, Larry Blight, shed from the Kurrack/red-tailed black cockatoo, one of Larry’s totems. He wears Kurrack feathers in his hat and his ancestors wore them in their hair and on their bodies in ceremony. Kurrack was also recorded as the name for a deep red fish by Larry’s ancestors, when colonist Robert Neill collected fish specimens and their Aboriginal taxonomies in Albany, Western Australia, in the 1840s. This fish has a prominent dorsal fin beginning at the front of its head, reminding colonists of a ship’s prow (its common name is now the Australian prowfish) but for Menang people its head resembles the crested plumage of the red-tailed cockatoo, suggestive of the interrelatedness of birds and other animals and to Aboriginal people, culture and Country and the very localised knowledge ecologies which sustains them. A bunch of feathers from a different kind of cockatoo and made into a ceremonial head ornament illustrate the cover of this book, which draws out the spiritual, ancestral, practical and ecological connections that Aboriginal peoples continue to have with birds—or, as Clarke writes, ‘a group of organisms that Europeans refer to as birds’, a reflective acknowledgement of the dominant western knowledge structure framing bird knowledge. Clarke’s long career as a curator in anthropology at the South Australian Museum, and his earlier influential work on Aboriginal people’s contribution to the development of colonial science (with Aboriginal people and plant collectors) accumulate in this significant book, which is situated in the field of biocultural knowledge.

This work is also a culmination of years of practice, research, reflecting and relationships, but Clarke does not spend time describing his position as the writer of this work. He stresses that the aim of the book is to ‘raise awareness of the alternative bodies of ornithological knowledge that reside outside of western science’, which he does very successfully, closely interrogating the ways in which Aboriginal people relate to birds in spiritual and tangible ways.

Clarke begins with birds as ancestors, starting with the moulding of featureless landscapes, creating paths or tracks (Clarke doesn’t use the term songlines or Dreaming) and topographies in Country, centring birds as a focus of creation mythologies which (who) gave meaning to Country and were (are) meaningful as ancestors of Aboriginal people today. Clarke acknowledges the diversity of creation stories across Aboriginal Australia but recognises the importance of birds as a common focus across diverse groups. Such myths are not simply stories about the past, but a ‘fund of knowledge’ for cultural and religious expectations and ‘repositories of much essential environmental knowledge’, for subsistence of people and survival of Country.

Mythological links connect birds with spirit beings, and they are evidence of their ancestors on the land and in the sky. Closely aligned with creation stories are totems, in which Aboriginal people have kinship and closely interact with birds (or other animals and plants). Clarke focuses on key birds that commonly feature in this way: the eagle, crow, emu, brolga and bird fishers. I was particularly interested in his discussion about the presence of bird ancestors as astronomical features or other elements in the sky.

The stories behind the Aboriginal nomenclature of birds offer another layer of meaning and speak of connection between Aboriginal people and birds. I found this chapter to be the highlight of the book. Here Clarke further reflects on the necessary but imperfect nature of historical archival records for this work: the issue with word lists and vocabularies compiled by explorers, colonists and missionaries in the nineteenth century who brought their own orthographical practices to recording bird names, and at a time when colonial science meant many species were undescribed by Europeans, leading to a confusion about which bird was being referred to. Clarke argues that while problematic such lists are useful when unpacked by linguists and ornithologists in collaboration, to enable a more accurate understanding of the naming of birds with the correct species. While I understand the limitations of such lists from my own work with ichthyologists on historical fish taxonomies, such projects need to prioritise contemporary Indigenous interpretations of these records or risk further western misunderstandings.

Clarke reveals how Aboriginal people classify birds in a unique way, and quite differently from western scientific systems. He explains how earlier researchers were disappointed when seeking to understand how Aboriginal people view distinct bird species, a good reminder about the ‘lack of a perfect fit between Aboriginal and scientific classifications of the biota’. Birds are ‘clustered’ in different ways in Aboriginal nomenclature: rather than a system built on evolutionary relationships, they are named according to particular features including shape, size, habitat and behaviour, or by Aboriginal needs such as ‘minh’ in the Wik Mungkan language, which is the name for ‘edible animals, including birds that are edible’. The cluster is further grouped in the following way: ‘Minh achamp—emu; minh keech—all large white wading birds which have long necks and legs, with straight pointed bills: cattle egret, great egret, little egret’ and so on. Clarke stresses that scientists searching for a link to genera with Aboriginal nomenclature will be generally disappointed, and that ‘this fact remains a warning for contemporary scientists who may want to uncritically import into their work a single piece of Aboriginal environmental knowledge without understanding its original context’. The European classifications of what constitutes a bird, is also out of step with Aboriginal conceptions as Clarke explains that ‘feathers and bird shape alone do not combine to define a “bird”’, another reason why Clarke refers to these creatures as ‘a group of organisms that Europeans refer to as birds’. Aboriginal taxonomy of birds is complex, layered with deep meaning, and often suggests a relationship to other animals or aspects of Country. Colonial translations of Aboriginal words meant that names for birds by Aboriginal groups from elsewhere created generic Aboriginal names for particular birds, such as Kookaburra, which were eventually adopted into Australian English. This, with the colonists’ adoption of bird names from the old world to new, has resulted in what ornithologist Mark Bonta described as ‘a riotous jumble of terminology’.

Having focused on the spiritual and descriptive aspects of the relationships between Aboriginal people and birds, Clarke turns to the tangible. Birds were important sources of food and Clarke documents the early hunting and gathering of birds with a deep understanding of Aboriginal resource management. Linked to this are connections such as the close relationship between birds and plants; birds as ‘firestick farmers’; the ways in which birds call out changes in Country, alerting Aboriginal people to the arrival of seasons; the shift in tides; and the location of fresh water by their presence, behaviours or their call. Following the tangible aspect of the relationship, the book concludes by documenting the many ways in which Aboriginal people used birds—their feathers, wings, quills, sinews, eggshells, beaks, claws, bones, skin, oil and intestines—in their material culture, for utilitarian, medicinal, ritual and ceremonial use. This chapter draws on museum objects, Clarke’s own field experience, and historical and anthropological literature.

The multi-layered connection to birds that Clarke documents—the spiritual, practical, ancestral and tangible—is a warning for outsiders who silo Indigenous knowledge into ‘environmental’ and ‘cultural’, as the connection between is critical.

Valuing knowledge that is ‘outside’ of western frameworks, what Clarke refers to as ‘knowledge that is alive’, does not extend to the type of sources that Clarke draws on. He limits his source material to what he refers to as ‘outside’ perspectives: archival or published European accounts which are accessible in the public domain. While I see this as a continuation of the colonial order, he stresses the importance of not including contemporary Aboriginal voices: to protect ‘inside’ knowledge that should remain secret for Aboriginal communities.

Despite stipulating that he wrote the book with Aboriginal readers in mind, ‘to offer information about their culture’, the book will more likely be read by Clarke’s other imagined audience of ethnoscientists, environmental historians and ecologists. Clarke dedicates this large reference work to all Australians who love birds, and there certainly is something here for that dedicated readership too.

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Tiffany Shellam

Deakin University

Prudence Gibson (2023) The Plant Thieves: Secrets of the herbarium, NewSouth Books, Kensington. xvii + 254 pp., ISBN: 9781742237688 (PB) 9781742238722 (ebook), $39.99 (PB).

Dr Prudence Gibson is fascinated by the relationships between people and plants. An Australian Research Council grant allowed her three years to focus that interest on a scientific institution—the National Herbarium of New South Wales. During that time the herbarium’s 1.4 million specimens were digitised and transferred from the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney to new premises in the Australian Botanic Garden at Mount Annan.

Gibson’s broad quest was ‘to make better sense of our human relationships with plants, to face the truth about colonial erasure of Indigenous knowledges about plants, to learn about conservation and to better understand psychoactive plants’. She interviewed botanists, horticulturalists, geneticists, conservationists, traditional owners, artists, poets and historians, and commissioned art works, which opened her eyes and mind to things she had previously not seen.

If you share my interest in the scientific context and consequences of ideas and issues, remember that Gibson has broader interests. Botanical science provides only some of the strands of plant-people relationships that she explores. She peers into the wonderful National Herbarium of New South Wales, not to reveal its institutional history, but to follow her own curiosity.

The Plant Thieves is divided into three parts: ‘First encounters’, ‘Psychoactive plants and their keepers’ and ‘Rewilding, conservation and creative revaluing’.

The first specimen sheet that Gibson encountered was a seaweed. The specimen of kelp, coastal forests of which once thrived near Sydney, reminded her of childhood swims and prompted her re-entry into the water to observe kelp in the wild and to learn about algal restoration projects.

Gibson was also shown much earlier specimens in a special secure freezer room. Collected in 1770 by Joseph Banks during Captain Cook’s expedition, they so impressed Banks that he bestowed the name Botany Bay on the locality. They include the very first banksia material collected for scientific examination, material that Linnaeus used to name a new genus in Banks’ honour. However, the taxonomic author of Banksia species was not Linnaeus senior (who had died by this time), but rather his son. Nor did Banks take his Australian collections to the gardens at Kew. (Are these specimens perhaps the ones that Sydney Botanic Garden director, Joseph Maiden, had had transferred from London to Sydney?)

Herbarium director, Hannah McPherson, showed Gibson some beautiful surprises revealed during the huge task of digitising and moving the herbarium collections to Mount Annan. Secreted with specimen sheets were sheets of botanical art by Margaret Flockton who was employed in the early twentieth century to illustrate publications. Also surprising here were nineteenth century specimens collected for a German museum—while working on Amalie Dietrich’s Australian collections in Hamburg, McPherson had selected duplicates for the Sydney herbarium.

Director of the Royal Botanic Garden and Domain Trust, Denise Ora, told a remarkable tale of cross-cultural investigations. Indigenous Australians long ago devised treatments to detoxify the nutritious seeds of the Australian native black bean, Castanospermum australe. But the tree’s distribution puzzled researchers. The seeds were considered too big for animals to disperse and too heavy for wind dispersal. Recent DNA research led by Maurizio Rosetto suggested human dispersal—and a songline story confirmed this. Other chapters with such intriguing titles as ‘Zombie fungus and the black drink’, ‘White death’ and ‘Dieffenbachia and the Himmler story’ discuss other cross-cultural encounters.

For her section on psychoactive plants, Gibson visited people propagating and researching plants within and just outside the law. The chapter ‘Psychoactive wattle’ concerns a rare endemic Victorian wattle, whose earliest specimen in the herbarium was collected in February 1853 by Dr Ferdinand Mueller. As Victoria’s recently appointed government botanist (not herbarium director), Mueller was collecting plants during the first botanical survey on the Buffalo range. Subsequently named Acacia phlebophylla, this Mount Buffalo wattle contains the psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT), making it a target for drug seekers and consequently suffering much destruction in the wild.

To illuminate the dilemmas posed by psychoactive species whose rarity makes them vulnerable to extinction, Gibson interviewed people with diverse interests in this wattle—from conservation, cultivation and propagation research to drug extraction and research. The wattle’s future in its only indigenous home, in Victoria’s Mount Buffalo National Park, is not secure. While DMT seekers are ripping out branches and whole trees from the park, its survival there is also threatened by bushfires, diseases and pests. Aware of the attraction of psychoactive plants to unscrupulous plant thieves, the herbarium is very careful with location information, providing it only to serious researchers. Other psychoactive chapters include ‘The cacao ceremony’, ‘Fungi fever’ and ‘Psychotherapy’.

Third section chapters include ‘Hardenbergia and the witches forest’, ‘Violence and murder’ and ‘Labyrinth’. Another, ‘The missing daisy and lost species’, concerns a single specimen. It is a daisy that was collected at the end of a rough, out of the way track during a collecting trip by Robert Story in 1961. It is the only known specimen of the daisy named Paenula storyi. Marco Duretto, herbarium manager of plant diversity, emphasised the importance of continuously adding to herbarium collections ‘as they are a physical and preserved representation of what is growing in the wild’ and would like to organise a field trip in search of Story’s daisy. He understands the significant importance of specimens which, like Story’s, are used to name and describe new species. These type specimens are permanently attached to those names.

The chapter ‘Fast evolution’ is devoted to another daisy. Introduced in the 1930s to stabilise sand dunes, the South African beach daisy Arctotheca populifolia speedily invaded Australian beaches and yielded 22 herbarium records from 1937 to 2013. But is it still the same species? Glasshouse experiments comparing various traits in Australian and South African populations revealed changes in the daisy’s leaves, flowers, photosynthesis and physical and chemical defences. Gibson wondered whether these changes are sufficient for the Australian daisy to deserve a name change, but not whether they affect the conservation of Australian coastal ecosystems.

Another chapter features huge trees once thought to be extinct. Discovered in a remote and inaccessible gorge in the Blue Mountains by an off-duty parks ranger, David Noble, in 1994, they were named Wollemia nobilis to acknowledge both the Aboriginal place name (but of which nation?) and ranger Noble. Protected during the 2019–20 fires, their location remains a secret, not publicly available for any of the 41 Wollemia nobilis herbarium records. An impressive propagation project has ensured that the Wollemi pine is now so widely cultivated that the species must surely survive. But will it, and the Mount Buffalo wattle, avoid extinction in the wild?

The Plant Thieves represents the success of Gibson’s quest. One minor criticism is the absence of an index which somewhat shields the contents from accessible scrutiny. However, with her love of plants and enthusiastic curiosity, she has extracted from the herbarium and elsewhere an eclectic collection of stories.

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Linden Gillbank

Brett Mason (2022) Wizards of Oz: How Oliphant and Florey Helped Win the War and Shape the Modern World, NewSouth Books, Kensington. ISBN 9781742237459 (PB), $34.99.

The emergence of ‘big science’ in the mid-twentieth century both bolstered and impoverished Australian research. At its best, this development nurtured dedicated teams via reliable revenue streams and cutting-edge facilities. Driven by American models and capital, it increasingly sidelined solo researchers and small institutions. Innovation, nevertheless, could emerge from any mind at any site. What big science enabled was the efficacious transformation of innovation into implementation—known today as translational research.

After World War 1, a new cohort of Australians gravitated toward overseas centres that enabled innovation. Two University of Adelaide graduates who trod the familiar path to Britain were medical researcher Howard Florey and, subsequently, physicist Mark Oliphant. As Brett Mason details in this lively joint biography, both Australians deftly capitalised on the emergent structures of big science, especially during the Second World War. In fact, he argues, they begat three technologies that ensured an Allied victory.

This major gambit is of course an unwinnable battle. Innumerable candidates—from pugnacious leadership to standardised truck production—have been mooted as the ‘decisive factor’ in vanquishing Italy, Germany and Japan. Nevertheless, Mason contends, ‘it is a common conclusion that the atomic bomb ended the war, but microwave radar won it for the Allies’. Oliphant, as Mason shows, was a central figure in turning both of these technologies to martial ends.

A former acolyte of James Rutherford, by 1939 Oliphant was leading his own nuclear research team at the University of Birmingham. Given the prospect of German aerial campaigns against Britain, his scientists set aside theoretical physics and applied their intellects to developing radar. They devised a cavity magnetron which drastically reduced wavelengths, increasing detection capability while creating a unit small enough to fit into an aeroplane to intercept enemy aircraft. By 1943 it was adapted to create proximity fuses for anti-aircraft shells, while shipborne and aircraft-mounted sets were detecting and decisively defeating enemy submarines. By 1945, nearly a million microwave radar units had been delivered for the Allied cause.

Although inherently shy, Oliphant’s growing scientific stature drove him to become more effusive, assertive and—occasionally—indiscreet. Mason claims these as typically Australian characteristics, but such brashness typified many supremos who profited from wartime big science. Nevertheless, Oliphant’s success in delivering the cavity magnetron gave him a critical entrée into American scientific and political circles. He became ‘the central and indispensable figure’ in motivating the USA to commit wholeheartedly to developing and deploying nuclear weapons. Although one of Mason’s central tenets, it was certainly not the post-war American narrative which rapidly downplayed British contributions, including Oliphant’s.

Florey followed a parallel trajectory at Oxford University. By 1939 his microbiologists and biochemists were studying the bactericidal properties of the penicillin mould identified a decade earlier by Alexander Fleming. Their in vitro and in vivo experiments established its efficacy, but the fundamental challenge was production. Under wartime conditions, British industry simply had no capacity to manufacture this largely unproven compound. So Florey, like Oliphant, crossed the Atlantic to enlist philanthropic, governmental and manufacturing support in an America poised to become ‘the arsenal and pharmacy of democracy’.

While Florey’s mission was ultimately successful, the British team handed over their intellectual property to ensure that penicillin became widely available for military users by 1944. At war’s end, over 300 facilities and 6000 scientists in the USA were delivering this transformative medication—reaping a tidy profit and associated patents. Concurrently, however, Australia became the first nation worldwide to make penicillin accessible for the civilian populace, thanks to Melbourne’s Commonwealth Serum Laboratories. While Fleming earned popular acclaim for discovering penicillin, ‘Florey went on to win where he thought it counted more: among his scientific peers’.

Oliphant and Florey ended the war exhausted, yet both were courted to establish the proposed Australian National University. Florey shrewdly remained in the UK while Oliphant dissipated much of his research momentum in the politics, financial struggles and administration of building a new institution in Canberra. Ultimately, history has proven kinder to the medical scientist than the physicist who abetted the creation of nuclear weapons.

Focusing on two familiar stories in Australian science, Wizards of Oz ably delivers a dyadic biography that illuminates larger patterns of research, adversity, opportunity and success. The reference list is especially impressive, spanning oral histories, archives and secondary literature, although the text is well positioned for general readers. Perhaps the book’s most curious lapse lies in skimming over Oliphant’s ‘lost year’ in Australia over 1942 and Florey’s fleeting return home in 1945. Given that their homeland proved adept at manufacturing both microwave radar and penicillin without these two mavens, what are we missing?

A book of this nature will always skirt tendentiousness and hagiography. Mason certainly admires Oliphant and Florey as entrepreneurs of big science, yet sensibly avoids fawning terms like ‘genius’. If we set aside his combative claim that their scientific contributions ‘won’ the Second World War, this is an excellent entrée into the dynamic world of mid-twentieth century research enterprise.

The author declares no conflict of interest.

Peter Hobbins

Australian National Maritime Museum and The University of Sydney