William Smith's part in Adelaide trading of Aboriginal people's bodies exposed by 1903 Tommy Walker scandal
Poltpalingada Booboorowie, well known around Adelaide as Tommy Walker, and South Australian coroner Dr William Ramsay Smith.
Image courtesy State Library of South Australia
An Adelaide scandal in 1903 exposed the size of a trade in bodies going on behind the ornate institutional facades along North Terrace. South Australian state coroner and inspector of anatomy, Edinburgh-educated doctor William Ramsay Smith, was accused of grave robbing in an era when European museums and universities were competing for “specimens” – skeletons and body parts – of so-called “disappearing races” such as the Australian Aboriginal people.
Many Australian doctors and scientists saw a chance to please their alma maters in Europe and make their own reputations in racial anatomy. The powerlessness and official invisibility of Aboriginal people made this body trade possible. Coroner Smith was exposed over the robbing of a particular person’s grave: Ngarrindjeri man Poltpalingada Booboorowie, well known around Adelaide as Tommy Walker.
Popular and spirited, Walker dressed in a top hat and tails, liked a drink and enjoyed teasing and satirising the self importance of colonial society. When he was booked on the tram for not paying the fare, he would say he had the same rights as the parliamentarians who got free fares. White Adelaide society also enjoyed Walker’s confident and humorous ownership of the streets.
When Walker died in the 1901 winter, he received tender newspaper obituaries and the Adelaide stock exchange paid for a proper funeral and headstone in the city's West Terrace cemetery. The grave was well kept and children left flowers.
Two years later, after a tipoff from disgruntled colleagues of Smith, the South Australian had the coffins of Walker and two other men – one Chinese and one negro – exhumed, reportedly at night. Their coffins were filled only with sandbags. Walker’s body, in the coroner’s care, had been stolen between the hospital and the cemetery, dissected, and sent in parts to Edinburgh University.
Amid the press scandal, the South Australian Aborigines Friends Association wrote to the government, on behalf of the Ngarrindjeri community at Point McLeay Mission, asking that Walker’s remains be returned from Edinburgh. It took decades for such requests to be taken seriously and not until the 21st Century that, by 2019, more than 1,500 ancestral remains, among the thousands in British, American and European institutions, had been brought home to Australia.
Coroner Smith was charged with 18 breaches of the Anatomy Act but only was reprimanded for being "indiscreet" and for letting his "zeal in the cause of science" impair his judgement.
A parliamentary inquiry found the medical hierarchy had enabled him to easily get the bodies of itinerant people who died in hospital or the "lunatic asylum", where many Aboriginal people ended because they couldn’t speak English. Smith’s activity was normal within Adelaide's museum, hospital and medical school, with police and mortuary attendants involved, and stories of skulls in kerosene tins outside a doctor’s rooms. The museum had a defleshing room for the stream of bodies of Aboriginal people procured for science.
Smith was removed from his position at the Adelaide Hospital but he spent the next 20 years with others on Ngarrindjeri country, around the River Murray mouth, collecting bones from burial sites. When Smith died in 1938, 180 skulls were found in his house.
Aboriginal people became deeply distrustful of Adelaide Hospital. Elder Major Sumner said in 2020 that Ngarrindjeri people still insisted on an open coffin at a funeral.