Thousands of Indigenous peoples were objectified in human zoos, including in Australia

Australia Broadcast Center

25-05-2025

WARNING: The following story contains information that may cause distress to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers, who are advised to exercise caution.
The term says it all: human zoos.
Strange as it may seem, human beings — largely Indigenous people from across the globe — were recruited to perform in ethnographic displays, also called human zoos, from the mid-19th century to the 1930s, mostly in Europe and the United States.
It's estimated that 60,000 people were trafficked in this global trade — including three documented Aboriginal groups: three Badtjala people from K'gari in south-eastern Queensland in 1882, and eight Bwgcolman or Manbarra-speaking people from Palm and Hinchinbrook Islands in north Queensland in 1883, who were followed by nine of their compatriots in 1894.
There was an appetite to see Indigenous people in their "natural state" and, as popular demand surged, the staging of human zoos grew into more exaggerated displays.
Some featured reconstructions of housing, enclosures and other encampments with domesticated animals tended by familial groups of Indigenous people in "traditional" clothing.
At the peak of these degrading spectacles, entire "villages" were constructed in some of Europe's biggest zoological gardens — including the Tierpark in Hamburg owned by exotic animal trader Carl Hagenbeck, as well as zoos in Dresden, Berlin, and Basel in Switzerland.
The phenomenon is often attributed to Hagenbeck, who, according to the records kept by Dresden Zoo, was the impresario behind the first documented exhibition of Aboriginal people in Germany in 1882 — that of the three people from K'gari.
Human zoos became a feature of world expositions and international trade fairs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, although ethnographic displays had figured since the Great Exhibition at London's Crystal Palace in 1851, the first world fair.
One of the last to include such reconstructions was the Paris Colonial Exhibition, held in a park in the Bois de Vincennes in 1931, which featured replicas of the temples of Angkor Wat, a Javanese temple and Mount Vernon, the plantation owned by George Washington.
As the title would suggest, only countries with colonies or overseas territories — Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Japan and the US — participated in the exhibition.
Human zoos were not only made possible by colonial networks; they derived much of their meaning from colonialism itself.
It's possible to consider the entire phenomenon of the human zoos in Europe and the United States as the performance of white supremacy, or the obscene fulfilment of colonial subjugation.
Sometimes, acting alone and with a degree of impunity, showmen (so-called "impresarios") or their agents from Europe's colonial powers — primarily Germany, Britain and France — would export people from "subject" populations, recruiting them to perform in the displays.
However, it was a Canadian, RA (Robert) Cunningham, who removed the two groups of Bwgcolman or Manbarra-speaking people from North Queensland — initially, in 1882, at the request of an agent acting on behalf of American circus showman PT Barnum.
The three people from K'gari meanwhile travelled from Maryborough with a German expatriate, Louis Müller, who later acted as their impresario, and were the first such documented group to reach Europe in 1882.
As well as Australia, people were trafficked from Africa, North and South America, the Middle East, Asia, the South Pacific and even the Arctic — most under meagre contracts or a form of indenture.
I've been researching the strange and disturbing phenomenon of human zoos since 2010, but my particular interest has been in the traffic of Indigenous people from Australia to Europe.
Until recently, I had no idea that such ethnographic displays were staged here — but indeed, a human zoo existed in Australia.
It's hard to justify the existence of human zoos, which is perhaps why the practice has been the subject of a deliberate forgetting in the West — although the human zoo phenomenon is now a burgeoning field of research.
While, like many blackfellas, I find this material deeply disturbing, I would suggest that collective white shame and guilt has — somewhat conveniently — submerged these histories.
Repressing collective memory of the phenomenon has also, in effect, buried the personal stories and lives of those recruited to perform in these bizarre, degrading and objectifying displays.
To conceal evidence of the human zoos denies the existence of the three groups of Aboriginal people who were trafficked abroad in the late-19th century, all of whom died overseas from respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, influenza and pleurisy.
One was even mummified and displayed in a dime museum in Cincinnati, until his body was repatriated to Palm Island in the 1990s.
No doubt many would prefer that this history remain submerged, arguing it on a point of relevance.
But some things refuse to be stifled and eventually rise to the surface.
In the 1920s, an anonymous donor to the Melbourne Museum discovered a strange relic in Royal Park, adjacent to Melbourne Zoo, which is possibly material evidence of Australia's human zoo.
Under a layer of topsoil, the donor found a boomerang — but this one was quite unusual.
It was a miniature version of the versatile tool and aerodynamic weapon, clearly made for smaller hands — perhaps as a training device.
Kimberley Moulton, curator of the TarraWarra Biennial 2025: We Are Eagles, has long been fascinated by the mystery of the child's boomerang, which was donated to Melbourne Museum some years after it was collected.
Once accessioned in 1938, the object was labelled more or less generically.
"This boomerang called to me for a long time … And it sat in this drawer labelled 'Port Phillip,'" Moulton recalls in an interview with me for ABC Radio National's The Art Show.
The Yorta Yorta woman began working with the Museum's collection of Indigenous material culture 15 years ago, and spent seven of those years in the senior curatorial role.
"And that was it, you know. And it always made me really sad, because it's this beautiful little child's boomerang", Moulton says.
The mystery so possessed Moulton that it followed her when she moved into an entirely new field of curatorship — as adjunct Indigenous curator at London's Tate Modern.
When she was invited to curate the latest instalment of TarraWarra Biennial, Moulton created space for the boomerang and its maker alongside 22 new commissions or existing works by living artists such as Shireen Taweel, Warraba Weatherall, Nathan Beard and Iluwanti Ken.
A self-described "history nerd", Moulton discovered the site where the boomerang was found was designated a public park by Victoria's first colonial governor.
Later, known as Camp Pell, the area had been used as a place of temporary settlement.
It was the site occupied by the Melbourne Zoological Society and the now infamous Acclimatisation Society of Victoria, which introduced several invasive species as game, to make the settlers feel more at home — hence acclimatised.
Whether the settlers felt more acclimatised or not, we know that the now pestilential carp, deer and foxes would outnumber, predate upon or disturb the habitat of native animals.
Moulton's research into the child's boomerang eventually led to a startling realisation.
"If it was found in 1920 under soil, it's 19th century," she says. "What was there in maybe 50 or so years, you know, around that time?
"And that led me on a path to the Aboriginal encampment that was there in 1888 — which was essentially a human zoo — established by Albert Le Souef, who was the director [of Melbourne Zoo]".
At this point in the interview, I do a verbal double-take.
"As in a zoo where people would be exhibited, and people would come along and look at them?" I ask incredulously.
"Yes. So it was 1882 — the encampment — basically, it was all of these bark huts, these humpies, there were spears and, essentially, a diorama scene of Aboriginal life," Moulton replies.
Until Australia's centenary in 1888, Le Souef's tableau in the scrub in Royal Park next to the zoo's waterfowl enclosure was empty.
But the zoologist was also a member of the Board for the Protection of Aborigines, which would have led to an acquaintance with the government-appointed manager of Coranderrk, the highly successful Aboriginal reserve and mission station established north-east of Melbourne.
"And so, in 1888, [Le Souef] activated [the tableau] with real people. And that was obviously coinciding with the [Centennial celebration events] that were happening across the city … and the International Exhibition that was being held at the Royal Exhibition Building," Moulton says.
"[Le Souef] worked with Joseph Shaw, who was the manager of Coranderrk, to bring men, women and children into this encampment and to sort of activate it on the weekend. So it was about revenue. It was about bringing people to the zoo.
"People [would] pay to come and see Aboriginal people living this kind of imperial nostalgia," Moulton says.
Melbourne-based artist Tom Nicholson was on a residency at the State Library of Victoria when he discovered an etching of the "native encampment" in Royal Park, and in 2010, along with writer Tony Birch, he created a performance work called Camp Pell.
Kimberley Moulton met up with Nicholson and exchanged research notes. Moulton has since found a few extremely rare photographs of the encampment, empty and occupied.
In one, three separate groups of Aboriginal people in possum-skin cloaks sit under bark shelters, some of which are hung with dilly bags and baskets.
A panoply of traditional weapons — including hunting boomerang, spear and spear-thrower — is staked in the ground.
Off to the side of the main group, in the foreground, is a bizarre set piece: a stuffed dingo, with one of its front legs slightly raised as if distracted by the viewer's presence, and its tail curled impossibly.
This image has a disturbing parallel in the photographic evidence of the human zoos.
It's a photograph taken by Prince Roland Bonaparte in a Paris studio in 1884, of the three survivors of the first group of human zoo performers recruited from Palm and Hinchinbrook Islands in north Queensland by R. A. Cunningham.
A man, a 10-year-old child and his mother stare blankly at the camera with almost limpid eyes.
They don't seem to notice what is disturbingly clear to the viewer, in sharp focus in the foreground: a stuffed French bulldog, with bulging eyes and lolling tongue.
These two completely unnecessary props — the dingo in Royal Park and the bulldog in Paris — bring this history home for me in ways that I find hard to describe.
But perhaps these taxidermied animals speak to an unconscious desire that Indigenous people be frozen in time.
In the course of her research, Moulton has identified some of the Aboriginal people who "activated" Le Souef's diorama — including two Dja Dja Wurrung ancestors — DeardjooWarramin, also known as Tommy Avoca, and his wife, Rosie.
"This history emerged from me looking into this boomerang because I do feel it is likely from this event. It's collected in the same area. It's only 30 years after this encampment," Moulton says.
"We know the encampment was there until at least 1901 and it was definitely activated between August 1888 and January 1889.
"They were there through that time, performing and performing regularly … they were sitting there in their possum-skin cloaks. They were making fires. They were surrounded by this mass of cultural material.
"The people were there. There's evidence also of [Wurundjeri clan leader William] Barak going there to throw boomerangs."
The eagle-eyed curator felt a twinge of recognition when she spotted a particular shield while scanning one of the extremely rare photographs of the Aboriginal encampment.
She knew she had seen it before.
Following her nose, Moulton found the shield in the drawers of the Melbourne Museum — to which Le Soeuf was a donor and where she had been a custodian of the collection of Aboriginal material culture.
Then, she found another photograph in the State Library Victoria collection. It was of Tommy Avoca and his wife sitting outside a house at Coranderrk with three small children.
Moulton discerned a shape in the hands of a little boy in the photograph, which was taken in 1888, when Tommy was performing with several other Coranderrk residents — including children — in the Aboriginal encampment at Royal Park.
"It was an incredible moment," Moulton says. "One of the little boys is holding a toy boomerang in the photo."
"And so there's all of these threads of history coming together," she says.
"I feel like this story — I don't know — it was wanting to be told".
TarraWarra Biennial 2025: We Are Eagles runs until July 20 at TarraWarra Museum of Art (Healesville, Victoria).