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This introduction raises issues concerning transactions involving Aboriginal artefacts of the North Queensland Wet Tropics. We highlight relationships between artefacts, persons and place, as well as the importance of understanding the nature of exchange and concepts of ownership in the creation and collection of artefacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walter Roth ranks among the most prolific collectors of Aboriginal artefacts from North Queensland, including the Wet Tropics, as well as being one of the leading ethnographers in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Australia. He was also one of Queensland's first official Protectors of Aboriginals, appointed immediately after that colony introduced its now-infamous Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act, 1897. This paper explores Roth's twin careers as ethnographic collector and Aboriginal Protector, teasing out the connections and commonalities between the two. It was for his achievements in ethnography and collecting, as well as his medical expertise, that he was appointed to the Protectorship. He carried out both his anthropological work and his administrative duties with determination and dedication. Yet his continuing activities as an ethnographer and collector contributed substantially to his downfall as a senior figure in Aboriginal administration. The paper also positions Roth in the historical context of an evolving Australian anthropology, with particular pertinence to North Queensland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1930s Norman Tindale and Joseph Birdsell identified the inhabitants of the North Queensland rainforests as a distinct race of Indigenous Australians. This classification was a keystone of their attempted reconstruction of the deep past of Australia. According to their narrative, the Aboriginal inhabitants of the rainforests were relicts of the first human occupants of Australia, refugees from later waves of Aboriginal invaders who seized all but the most inhospitable parts of the continent. From the outset, Tindale and Birdsell's argument was burdened with serious problems, both in the qualities they attributed to rainforest people and in their representation of the rainforest environment as a 'refuge'. While Tindale and Birdsell's racial theorising and historical speculations drew some supporters, they failed to win general academic acclamation and by the 1970s were quite thoroughly discredited. Yet the category 'rainforest Aboriginal' survived, disengaged from the reconstruction of Australia's past that had inspired it and anchored instead to the distinctive economy of rainforest subsistence, instantiated in a unique material culture. This paper takes Tindale and Birdsell's relict-race representation of rainforest Aboriginal people as the starting point in an exploration of how European people represented the Aboriginal inhabitants of the North Queensland rainforests over roughly a hundred years, from the 1870s to the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores past connections of Aboriginal people within what is now known as the Wet Tropics, a coastal strip of tropical rainforest in northeast Australia. As a result of historical and ethnographic descriptions the rainforest is often defined as a 'cultural zone'. The proclamation of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area, based on environmental parameters, has exaggerated the idea of the rainforest as a cultural boundary. We propose that in the past, Aboriginal connections were multifaceted, multifunctional and multidirectional, extending beyond the Wet Tropics boundaries. We use rock art to illustrate connections within and beyond the rainforest. For example, decorated shields, an iconic item of rainforest material culture, are depicted in rock art assemblages south of the rainforest boundary. Are the shield paintings out-of-place or do they illustrate networks of connection? We examine rock art motifs found in rainforest areas and compare them with those found in other rock art regions in North Queensland. We identify, for example, that sites located in the eastern rainforest are dominated by painted anthropomorphs (people) and zoomorphs (animals) in the silhouette style similar to figurative rock art of southeast Cape York Peninsula. We suggest that, like other areas, there were connections between cultural groups within the rainforest but that these same groups had links that went beyond this environmental zone. We further propose that the proclamation of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area has particularly influenced non-Aboriginal understandings of the past within this region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]