Mapping an ancestral past: Discovering Charles Richards' maps of Aboriginal south-eastern Australia

Abstract

Drawn in 1892, the Charles Richards' maps locate 208 Aboriginal linguistic groups in south-eastern Australia. In 2009 the maps were rediscovered in the departmental archives of Museum Victoria. The maps are an important new nineteenth-century source for understanding the boundaries of language groups at that time. Richards interviewed Aboriginal people and recorded their languages and customs. As an ethnologist, Richards seems not to have been involved in many of the correspondence networks that were central to nineteenth-century ethnology and he was therefore little known in his own time and subsequently. Some of his word-list/dictionaries were published in 1902 in the journal Science of Man, but his maps have never been published before. This paper explores what is known about Richards, his research methodology and his work to compile the maps. The construction of these maps points to the importance of Charles Richards as a nineteenth-century ethnologist. His story is a window into nineteenth-century ethnology and Aboriginal/settler relations, and necessitates further research into this little-known figure.