Edward Charles Stirling adds to extensive stellar contribution to South Australia as museum director (1885-1913)
The giant marsupial dipodotron (inset illustration by Peter Trusler), a megafauna ancestor of the wombat and koala, was excavated in far north South Australia by an expedition organised by Edward Charles Stirling in 1893. Casts of the skeleton, based on his work, remained the only articulated examples to be found in Australian and overseas museums, such as the one in the Galerie de Paléontologie et d'Anatomie compare (pictured) in Paris.
Main image courtesy Wikipedia
The South Australian museum became the major focus of the packed life of one of South Australia’s greatest renaissance men: Edward Charles Stirling.
Stirling was the museum director from 1884 to 1912 with other roles as consulting surgeon to Adelaide Hospital, Adelaide University’s first professor of physiology and, as a member of the South Australian House of Assembly, introducing the first bill in 1886 to give women the vote.
Born into his father’s pastoral wealth, Stirling was educated at St Peter’s College (winning the Westminster scholarship) and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received a bachelor of arts with honours in natural science (1869), master of arts (1873), bachelor of medicine (1874) and medical doctorate (1880). He became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1874 while working and lecturing in London medicine.
Anthropology, palaentology, exploration and zoology were among Stirling’s interests that included horticulture, public health, education, advancing and access of culture and the arts, and social justice. Stirling took part in pioneering explorations in Iceland in 1870.
Returning permanently to South Australia in 1881, Stirling became honorary director of the South Australian Institute Museum from 1884 and appointed salaried director from 1895 to 1913. From 1914 until his death, he was its honorary curator of ethnology.
In 1893, Stirling travelled to Lake Callabonna in far north South Australia where a field party, organised by him, was excavating many remains of the giant marsupial Diprotodon. That year, he was made a fellow of the Royal Society, London.
Stirling was medical officer and anthropologist with the William Horn expedition that, in 1894, made a comprehensive survey of the country between Oodnadatta and the MacDonnell Ranges. He wrote the extensive anthropological section as part of the four volumes recording the expedition's discoveries.
Stirling’s work on the diprotodon culminated in a full description of its skeletal anatomy in the Memoirs of the Royal Society of South Australia in 1899, and the complete reconstruction of its skeleton in 1906. Casts of the skeleton remained the only articulated examples to be found in museums in Australia and abroad.
During the Australian expeditions and by establishing network of contacts throughout the country, Stirling gathered the largest collection of Aboriginal artefacts to be found anywhere in the world. He also travelled widely in North America, China, Japan and New Zealand.
