You know the French have this thing about bones, don’t you?
True. They love/hate them. Can’t make up their minds. They’ve built world-beating ossuaries. Places like with 130,000 soldiers from the Great War’s Verdun fiasco. That Verdun Citadelle Soutteraine’s something you don’t forget in a hurry either, I’ll tell you now.
Not sure why I ever became interested in bones. Maybe because Grandma’s old man was French. Thing is, the recent baby elephant leg-bone discovery at the Geelong Arts Centre piqued my curiosity.
Neat little natural history mystery. Where on earth did it come from?
Short answer: Africa or India. Probably had something to do with the mechanics institute that occupied the site in Geelong’s early days. A place of science, animal specimens would naturally gravitate there.
More specifically? The goldfields? Private zoo? Souvenir from India? I kind of doubt it came via the ‘Good Ship Rhinoceros’ that foundered off Breamlea with its menagerie of zoo-bound critters.
I’m tempted toward souvenir myself. An elephant in Australia in the mid-1800s was a spectacle – even a bone, let alone something more substantial.
Up at Ballarat, they’re still talking about the goldfields elephant that created chaos when it rampaged through some poor woman’s washing lines.
Likewise, the Bengal tiger that cut loose there. True. Publicans loved luring digger drinkers with zoo critters. The old Collingwood-painted horse was favourite. Roll up, roll up, see the zebra, all the way from darkest Africa!
This elephant shin’s not the only old bone to raise a few eyebrows among the grey heads of Geelong’s old scientific fraternity. We’ve had at least two first-rate candidates that’d leave the Gallic bone-fanciers slavering.
First was found beside Lake Timboon and sent old Geelong town into a fair spin. Folks bolting their doors in fear, praying the pookah wouldn’t get them.
“On the bone being shown to an intelligent black, he at once recognised it as belonging to the bunyip, which he declared he had seen,” this paper reported in July 1845.
“On being requested to make a drawing of it, he did so without hesitation.
“One declared that he knew where the whole of the bones of one animal were to be found; another stated that his mother was killed by one of them, at the Barwon Lakes, within a few miles of Geelong, and that another woman was killed on the very spot where the punt crosses the Barwon, at South Geelong.
“The most direct evidence of all was that of Mumbowran, who showed several deep wounds on his breast made by the claws of the animal.”
The late historian Jack Loney wrote: “For several weeks after the Advertiser report, Geelong and district residents waited in fear and trepidation for the mythical predator to strike, while terrified children never left their homes after dark.”
No surprise, either, given other stories of the day: livestock ripped to pieces by unknown assailants from Barwon Heads to Little River, a huge snake-like creature carrying off poddy calves, drag tracks beside bloodied horns and carcass remains, farmers selling up in fear and leaving the district.
The bunyip bone passed between scientists in Australia and England without any real clue to its provenance. Where it is now is anyone’s guess. Probably mistake it for an elephant bone, myself. Latter-day thinking, however, suggests it belonged to a diprotodon, a giant megafaunal wombat.
The second bone – well, two of them actually – date to 1937 plus an additional couple of thousand years. Not sure why now, but I remember Googling ‘Geelong Egypt 1937’ to see what might happen. I landed this gem:
The Age, 3 June 1937:
“A hand and a head of an Egyptian mummy, taken from the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, have been presented to the Geelong Free Library and Museum by Mr E. J. Haynes.”
Not sure but I think E.J. Haynes was a coroner of the day. And yep, The Mummy’s Head, and The Claw, like some Karloff horror movie, were invested with the former library and museum. Beautiful big colonnaded building in Moorabool Street. Sixty years gone now.
The museum was chockers with stuffed birds, crocodiles, spears, boomerangs, all sorts of stuff. Most of it went to the South Geelong tip on Barwon Terrace, the late historian Peter Alsop told me.
But three unaccounted-for bags made their way to a local resident’s place, possibly a rear garage, he suggested more pointedly.
Many of the exhibits went to Drumcondra’s Lunan House, a teacher’s college at the time. Could have been pterodactyls and diprotodons in there – maybe the mummy and the claw, too – for all its non-existent inventory.
When the teachers took off 20-odd years later, whatever was left had basically disintegrated, Peter told me.
I’m betting the Mummy’s Head and the Claw weren’t among the detritus and perhaps are in a private collection someone’s keeping quiet.
And they’d just about have to be the collection’s chief treasure, though. The elephant in the room, if you like. Sorry, l’elephant.
PICTURE: MYTH OR MONSTER? An 1848 drawing of the bunyip by Murray River Aboriginal artist Kurruk.
LINK: https://regionalnews.smedia.com.au/geelongadvertiser/TranslateArticle.aspx?doc=NCGA%2F2019%2F09%2F24&entity=ar01504
