For nearly three decades, my working life has been shaped by archive-based historical research, conducted at the intersection of the historiography of science and the history of settler colonialism. What began as scholarly inquiry soon acquired practical and ethical dimensions. I have drawn upon this research in assisting First Nations communities, state and national museums in Australia and overseas, and the Australian federal government, to locate, identify, and repatriate First Nations Ancestors held in overseas scientific institutions, returning them to their communities of origin for reburial.

Alongside this work, I have been closely involved in developing research-based digital resources for Pacific and Australian history. The most substantial of these has been the Return, Reconcile, Renew Archive, an innovative  online knowledge base created to assist Australian and other First Peoples in tracing and repatriating their Ancestors from Western medico-scientific archives. The archive employs digital technologies to assist communities in researching dispersed, opaque, and often wilfully obscure institutional records relating to the theft of their Old People.

My academic career has combined teaching, no small amount of university administrative work and research in history and digital humanities across several Australian universities, supplemented by guest appointments and fellowships in European and United States institutions. In 2017, I retired as an emeritus professor of the University of Tasmania in order to devote myself more fully to research and writing.

I was born in Luton, in England’s south Midlands, and spent my early years on the town’s post-war Farley Hill council estate. History entered my life early, not as abstraction but as narrative and material presence, through James Dyer FSA (1934–2013), an archaeologist and historian who taught at my primary school during the 1960s. In 1966, my immediate family migrated to Brisbane as assisted migrants. Other aunts and uncles had already arrived in Queensland as ‘Ten Pound Poms’, beginning in the mid-1950s, exchanging coal mining in Britain for work as Holden car builders in Australia.

We settled in what was then the outer southern Brisbane suburb of Acacia Ridge. I attended Salisbury High School, leaving at the end of Year 12 with unremarkable results. My route into higher education was indirect. While employed as a junior clerk with Queensland’s Comptroller General of Prisons, I attended evening classes, eventually securing adult matriculation to James Cook University of North Queensland.

I began my studies at James Cook University in 1974, in the wake of the Whitlam Government’s Student Assistance Act of the previous year, which introduced means-tested financial support for tertiary students and made university study possible for people like myself. I initially intended to become a clinical psychologist, a choice shaped by my experiences within Queensland’s prison system. Yet I was increasingly drawn to literature and history, as it seemed to me that many of the psychological problems that culminated in imprisonment were, at root, social problems with long and traceable histories.

During the late 1970s, the History Department at James Cook University was pioneering the study of Indigenous–settler relations in Australia. Rather than pursuing doctoral work on frontier history, however, I turned to European intellectual history. My doctoral thesis examined the religious, philosophical, and historical thought of Edward Gibbon, the Enlightenment historian of Rome. This choice owed much to the exceptional good fortune of studying under Paul Lawrence Rose, a brilliant scholar who joined the department in 1975.

The thesis was favourably examined by Roy Porter and J. G. A. Pocock. In the absence of the institutional support necessary for sustained research in British and American archives, it was never revised into a book, though individual chapters appeared as journal articles. By the late 1980s, my interests had begun to shift, away from Enlightenment thought in Europe towards its afterlives in early colonial Australia. At the same time, I was active in North Queensland politics, particularly in support of Indigenous land rights. It was in this context that several Elders asked me to assist in locating the bodily remains of Ancestors believed to be held in British scientific collections. As an intellectual historian, I was also prompted to ask a related question: why such persistent scientific curiosity had been directed towards the bodily morphology of Australia’s First Peoples.