During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, phrenology as folk science featured prominently in two contrasting sites: the city, with its nooks of seamy thrills; and the bush, the stomping ground of itinerant male labourers. While phrenologists had long taken rooms in city markets and arcades, their work transformed by century’s end into a mystical hybrid of bumps, clairvoyance, palmistry and even tea-leaf reading. Urban diviners emerged concurrently with another archetype: the bush phrenologist of the new, masculinist ‘radical nationalist’ literary tradition. Bush phrenologists – real and imagined – echoed the resourcefulness of city diviners, switching between occupations and combining heads with palmistry and even water divining. But while urban divination was feminised and stigmatised, the male bush phrenologist often escaped the mark of perceived irrationality and exemplified a muscular identity. When pitted in court against working-class women or girls reporting assault, even the most disreputable bush phrenologist benefited from legalistic misogyny.

During the 1870s, popular scientist Professor Bruce grew accustomed to improvisation as he travelled through the Eastern colonies of Australia. While visiting the timber town of Bulahdelah, on the Central Coast of New South Wales, he lectured on phrenology in his Irish brogue within the best space set aside by town residents for the job. In a hut knocked together from slabs of Eucalyptus, the faint glow of six candles in bottles flickered over the faces of thirty or so locals. The audience crowded onto “three boards deposited on three boxes or casks, in the shape of a triangle” to watch the Professor read heads. “I have seen many entertainments in our bush villages and on stations, but never such a gloomy one,” declared a correspondent. “The more so, as I heard that this hut had been not long ago the depositary of a dead body, awaiting an inquest, and some one called it the ‘dead-house’.”1

From 1880, the performer Lio Medo embarked on a career as a phrenologist in colonial New Zealand and – later – Tasmania, fleeing controversy and another name. As a man of African descent, Medo laboured under heavier cultural baggage than his white brethren, not least because of a recurrent minstrel trope. Originating in the US, the joke of the ‘lack phrenologist’ sailed to Australia with minstrel troupes, sheet music and newsprint, constantly confronting real-life Black phrenologists such as Medo. A performer’s awareness and skill in navigating such representations created opportunities, even while these caricatures perpetuated oppressive racial myths. Men such as Lio Medo therefore plied popular science within a paradox, the signifier of skin attracting attention that added to the usual phrenological work of winning improved social status. For Lio Medo, signs of identity emanated not just from a top hat and a gold watch, but from his very body.

When I drove up the Hume Highway to the Australian capital of Canberra in the autumn of 2014 to begin a PhD, I knew that phrenology was not dead-and-buried history. Far from it.

Within a tidal wave of dispossession, Indigenous performers forged livings in scientific showmanship. In 1850, ‘Jemmy’, an Aboriginal boy, starred in a Melbourne lecture series that fused phrenology with mesmerism. During the mid 1860s, Tamati Hapimana Te Wharehinaki, chief of the Ngati Ruangutu hapū of the Tapuika Iwi, toured through the Australian colonies with the infamous Thomas Guthrie Carr. Supposedly mesmerised by the lecturers, these performers demonstrated actions that corresponded with particular phrenological organs, wrapping feigned subordination in displays of cultural difference that fascinated Europeans. An ethnographic history approach to these lecture reports reveals how these performers cannily shaped these representations for personal gain. Although serving colonial fantasies of control, the stage world nevertheless allowed them to push against the constraints that bound their daily lives. The fragile relations of power that made or broke a show enabled tactical choices for fleeting material or social benefit.

How did Aboriginal audiences experience popular science when it unfolded on stage in a mission site? This chapter considers phrenological visits to Yorta Yorta country in south-eastern Australia, and particularly the lectures of JB Thomas at Maloga Mission in 1884 and John Joseph Sheridan at nearby Cummeragunja in 1892. Like other scientists and medical men who visited here, these men perpetuated scientific racism. But newspaper reports also point to the possibility of these lectures – which also included lantern slides – as moments of nuanced interaction from which Yorta Yorta and other Aboriginal residents derived value and pleasure, rather than as straightforward impositions. As participatory entertainments, such shows hinged on uncertain moments with mixed emotions on both sides. This chapter considers the possible ways that, within the local context, phrenology and rational amusement might have become items for perusal and collection by Aboriginal people negotiating two-way living in a changing world.

Popular phrenologists lecturing in the Tasman World from 1850 onwards performed head public readings, on stage or in the street. Although bump readers abounded across the Anglosphere, the region and its rapid population growth shaped a particular reception experience. The arrival of an exotic outsider provided a chance for townsfolk, often newly thrown together, to glean an objective – if chaotic – perspective on their community and neighbours. Across this patchwork of settlements, popular phrenology became a tactile lingua franca, with audiences scrutinising the lecturer to catch out humbug through the public ordeal of “trying the bumps”. Whatever the outcome, the town experienced the dual entertainment of theatre and public power-play. Here was a chance to jest about their town and pecking order under the veil of science. Inevitably, phrenologists altered the local climate. But the town always won, and a phrenologist with a crushed reputation could face disaster.

Phrenology’s enduring interest in defining national types coincided with a growing nineteenth century preoccupation with nationhood, with Australia’s Federation in 1901 seen as a move towards membership of a white imperial community. In line with debates about nationhood, some phrenologists with political or reformist leanings considered both the white Australian type and social organisation. During the mid nineteenth century, William David Cavanough offered massed nationalist head readings. In the 1880s and 1890s, phrenology appeared alongside lessons about physical fitness and therapies such as the water cure, aligning with medical interest in hygiene and population health. Phrenologist Joseph Fraser outlined utopian visions in a science-fiction novel, and American celebrity Jessie Fowler visited to offer insights about health and national type. And at the Phrenological and Health Institute of Australasia, established in early twentieth-century Melbourne, reformers shared ideas for cultivating the white Australian race in a magazine rich with metaphors of buds and seeds.

More than 140 phrenologists ascended the platform as popular lecturers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand during the second half of the nineteenth century, seizing on scientific spectacle for their own physical and social mobility. These scientists – usually men – also often offered private consultations and blended phrenology with other forms of knowledge such as mesmerism or physiognomy. Joining waves of migration to and from new settlements, phrenologists faced harsh physical conditions, with women performers confronting the additional risks of gender-based violence. Phrenologists generally did not pursue respectability. Rather, in building up their personas, lecturers embraced the word ‘science’ as a signifier of progress and authority, policing the boundaries between the ‘valid’ science that they supposedly offered and that of their rivals. They lived in a state of tension between their public, fee-earning selves – founded on supposedly good reputations – and their private ordeals, struggling to make ends meet.

Phrenology mediated everyday moments in Aotearoa New Zealand. It became associated with the spiritual leadership and healing practised by Māori tohungas and featured in the tactics of a stage performer during a tense diplomatic exchange in Te Rohe Pōtae (the King Country) in 1878. Meanwhile, for members of the colonial government and its administrators – both Māori and Pākehā – phrenology became a symbol of the irrational and anti-modern, a smear on the idea of progress at a time of debate over Māori survival. Phrenology’s critics were right to apprehend the authority that it garnered. As an appropriated European ’science’, it became one among various practices and technologies that shaped evolving Māori cultures and polities. Although moments of phrenological encounter are pebbles in the broader terrain of Māori life during this period, they nevertheless illuminate the questions that Māori were forced to ask themselves when navigating an upturned world

More than one in ten lecturers in the Tasman World also served as lay preachers or clergyman, with Methodists particularly represented. Sometimes they occupied both roles at once as scientific men of the cloth. At other times, one identity slid away as another formed. Such preachers were almost all men, owing to the gendered nature of pulpit and platform. The configurations of authority that they navigated are best studied from the fissures revealed by court cases or scandals. In 1893, Wesleyan minister Ralph Brown benefited from gender and class advantages when charged with indecently assaulting a teenage girl after mesmerising her. At the turn of the twentieth century, Albert James Abbott, nurseryman, practical phrenologist and leader of Melbourne’s Free Christian Assembly, faced allegations related to perceived scientific powers. Layered authority helped these men to recover from the rubble of their excesses. Popular science proved a resilient safety net when God departed.