| Robert A Cunningham |
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Roslyn Poignant's excellent Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle tells in vivid detail the story of two groups of Aboriginal people from northern Queensland who were toured throughout North America and Europe in the 1880s and 1890s. Most of the book is devoted to the first group, which comprised nine individuals--six men, two women and a young boy--from communities on the Palm Islands and Hinchinbrook Island. Probably both unwillingly and unwittingly this group left Australia in 1882 under the management of Robert A. Cunningham, who at the time was acting as an agent for the legendary P.T. Barnum. During 1893 they formed part of Barnum's 'Ethnological Congress of Strange and Savage Tribes', a performing collection of not only 'human beings of different races' but also 'those who possess extraordinary peculiarities' (p.59) such as giants and dwarfs. Cunningham and the group of Islanders joined Nubians, Toda, Zulu and Sioux and 'the entirely bogus Wild Men of Borneo' (p.88) on a tour of North America that lasted almost a year. After the circus season ended, Cunningham and the Aboriginal performers began a larger tour of Britain and Europe that would last more than three years. By October 1886 they had travelled through Russia and as far as Constantinople before heading back to London. LINK FOR PROFESSIONAL SAVAGE |
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