Philip Jones
Senior Curator in Anthropology, South Australian Museum, and
Affiliate Lecturer, Department of History, University of Adelaide

In 1938–1939, Harvard University funded an expedition to Australia aimed at understanding how colonization had affected Indigenous peoples and their physiology, and at informing government policy as it shifted from segregation to assimilation. Led by anthropologists Norman B. Tindale and Joseph Birdsell, the expedition gathered more than 6,000 individual records from Indigenous people on missions and settlements—records that have since inspired community-based research projects and land claims. Philip Jones sets the expedition within the context of anthropological history and explore its complicated legacy.