While we were eradicating the dream of an Inland Sea, some folks in rural America were entertained by the notion that the Australian wilderness was populated by cannibalistic pinheads wearing kilts. This photograph says so much about the pathetic reality behind that carny trick.

I found it via a post at a fine Australian history blog I’ve only just found…

The Vapour Trail.

Hmm.. Victorian theatre.. hmm… ectoplasm…. hmmm

What I didn’t realise when I became interested in The Lost Explorer (1890) and other novels was that the idea of a lost race in the Australian interior had roots in a mid-nineteenth century freak show. Indeed, from about the mid-1860s, two unfortunate kiddies from Circleville, Ohio, were billed as ‘the Wild Australian Children’ in a travelling American exhibit of freaks and ’scientific’ curios. In the cruel argot of the business, these children were ‘pinheads’: that is, they were microcephalic, and had severe intellectual disabilities. Promotional pamphlets accompanying their exhibit described them as the members of a near-extinct cannibal tribe, plucked from the desert wilds of Australia by an explorer-adventurer, Captain Reid.

The same show seems to have been advertised in this poster for S. Watson’s American Museum of Living Curiosities, appearing at 28 Oxford St, London, in 1885. Here is the relevant bit, which has a weird charm for us Antipodeans -

Maybe the similarity is just a standardised bit of carnival costume, or the photograph was used to inspire a London printing job, but the picture suggests the “kiddies from Circleville, Ohio” were exhibited thus for over twenty years. I shudder to think of their journey.

All ultimately via Air-minded.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 12:09 am and is filed under Austrapolitics, Uncategorized, history. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.