Excerpt
It is a Friday evening in March 1869, and two bodies lie in the General Hospital in Hobart Town. These men had grown old in this colony at the far end of Britain’s world, and when they died as patients in the hospital a fortnight ago, no-one came to claim them for burial, leaving them in the surgeons’ hands. An offensive smell permeates the dissecting room. What is left of the men lies on two tables. For a fortnight now, by daylight and by candlelight, these bodies have been subjected to probing hands and instruments. They have been cut and torn, hammered and chiselled, snipped and sawn until they are no longer recognisable as individuals.
Not so the body carried into the dead house next door on this evening. A new smell now enters the dissecting room. Diarrhoea clings to this man’s clothes. His arrival in the hospital is causing some excitement. People come to look and talk and touch. The words ‘King Billy’ hover in the air, where they are surrounded by laughter. Dan, the hospital barber, removes the stinking clothes and washes the body, then lifts it into a coffin. More visitors arrive, some with plans in mind. This man’s blackness seems to fill the living with a possessive desire.
When all is quiet, one of the hospital’s students, Bingham Crowther, arrives in the dissecting room. His father, who is a surgeon in the hospital, comes with him. By candlelight, these two go to work on one of the tattered bodies lying there. The older man makes a deft cut through the material that still holds Thomas Ross’s skull to his body. He passes the skull to his son, and the two go into the dead house. Leaning over the body in the coffin, William Crowther makes a neat incision along the side of William Lanney’s head. Then he carefully peels back the facial skin and cuts through the vertebrae beneath this skull. The surgeon lifts the skull out and Bingham hands him Thomas Ross’s skull to insert in its place. Then the black skin is drawn over this substitute so that it assumes something like the shape of a face once more. Thomas Ross could never have imagined playing such a part in a post-mortem minstrel show. Then the candle is blown out, and the living leave the room, taking William Lanney’s skull with them.
Meanwhile in the dead house, Thomas Ross’s skull lies uneasily beneath the foreign skin that now covers it. In an hour or so, the hospital’s resident surgeon enters the room to check on William Lanney’s body, which he has been instructed to guard. It appears odd. He lifts the head to take a closer look, and Thomas Ross asserts his presence. The skull shifts beneath George Stokell’s hands, turning so that the bones of the face can clearly be felt through the back of the head.
Panic ensues. The resident surgeon shouts for the hospital’s steward and mounts a desperate search for Lanney’s missing skull. When it cannot be found, he contacts the Secretary of the local Royal Society, which he knows longs to possess Lanney’s skeleton. The society’s Fellows give Stokell a specific instruction. He is to cut off Lanney’s hands and feet, to prevent Crowther returning to the hospital for the rest of the body, then put the lid on the coffin to keep these serial acts of theft a secret.
When Lanney’s friends arrive to accompany his body to its funeral on the following day, they have heard rumours that he is no longer in one piece. They insist that the lid of the coffin be removed. Then the coffin is sealed and the public procession from hospital to St David’s church begins. More than one hundred men join in, for this event marks the death of the so-called last Tasmanian Aboriginal man. The coffin is eventually lowered into the earth in the town’s burying ground, while words such as ‘salvation’ and ‘sanctity’ and ‘rest’ are pronounced. Then the living – you could not really call them mourners – move away.
All is quiet until midnight, when the sound of a barrow being wheeled can be heard. Spades slice through earth under the impact of a serviceable pair of gardener’s boots. The blades strike wood, the coffin is partially unearthed and its lid is chiselled off. Rough hands haul Lanney’s shrouded body free. This is too much for Thomas Ross’s skull. It drops to the earth and is kicked aside, while the hospital’s gardener and messenger awkwardly thrust the body into a sack. Then the barrow is laboriously wheeled back to the hospital, which is uphill all the way.
Thomas Ross is about to get his revenge. His skull has landed on a nearby grave, where it waits until morning (the sexton’s dog aside). A group of early visitors to the burying ground discover it there, and a wildfire of excited speculation is set off, which soon embroils the whole town. While George Stokell spends the day harvesting Lanney’s bones on behalf of the Royal Society, Thomas Ross’s skull sets about the business of destroying careers. It shakes a marriage, brings men and their science into ill-repute, and notches up a dozen other, less obvious little victories before the wildfire finally burns out.