The extinction of the Australian pygmies. (History).

FROM THE 1940S until the 1960s, it was fairly widely known that there were pygmies in Australia. They lived in North Queensland and had come in from the wild of the tropical rainforests to live on missions in the region. This was a fact recorded at the time not only in anthropological textbooks and articles but also in popular books about the Australian Aborigines. There was even an award-winning children's book tracing their origins. The more famous photographs of the Australian pygmies were reproduced in both the academic and the popular literature.

At the time, there was controversy about their origins but not over the fact of their existence. In 1962, the first volume of Manning Clark's History of Australia recorded their presence on its first two pages and repeated the then influential anthropological theory about their origins and their place in the waves of migration of hunter-gatherer peoples from Asia who populated the Australian continent in the millennia before the British arrived in 1788.

Yet, since then, the Australian pygmies have been totally obliterated from public memory. To test just how complete this process has been, over recent months we have questioned a wide range of friends and acquaintances. Although most were well-educated and well-read people, none had ever heard of the pygmies, not even when we used some of their other, once-familiar alternative names such as "Negritos" and "Barrineans". A few friends scoffed at the notion and demanded some evidence. They wouldn't believe us until we emailed them the photographs.

The Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia (1994), published by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, today does its best to disguise these people. It lists some of their tribes, including the Djabuganjdji, Mbarbaram (Barbaram) and Yidinjdji (Indindji), but does not mention a word about their stature. Only its entry "Rainforest Region" records the existence of "small, curly-haired people with languages which have distinctive features", but the accompanying photograph of Yidinjdji tribesmen taken in 1893 does not give any scale or point of comparison to show that these adult males were only about 140 centimetres (four feet six inches) tall.

Both the major introductory textbooks to Australian prehistory, Josephine Flood's Archaeology of the Dreamtime, and John Mulvaney and Johan Kamminga's Prehistory of Australia, still provide brief discussions of the academic debate about these people's origins. Both describe them, respectively, as having "small stature and spirally curled hair" and as a "short, slightly-built people with dark skin and woolly hair", but both decline to include photographs like those on pages 8 and 9, which immediately convey just how dramatically different from other Aborigines they are. Similarly, the latest edition of Ronald and Catherine Berndt's standard text in anthropology, The World of the First Australians, briefly discusses people from north-east Queensland who "might have negrito affinities" but does not mention their height. They dismiss any question of their difference as "purely statistical".

No one today with a lay interest in Aboriginal anthropology, and few of those doing introductory courses in the subject, would ever find out that Australia had a pygmy people. What, then, has been going on? Why would these people have been expunged from popular memory? How did the Australian pygmies become extinct in the public consciousness?

There have been two main reasons. We explain them in detail below but, briefly, they were: first, a vitriolic debate within the academic discipline of anthropology in which the view prevailed that there was nothing remarkable about these people; second, the emergence in the 1960s of the radical Aboriginal political movement, which found the existence of a pygmy people an inconvenient counter-example to one of its central doctrines. As a result, these indigenous Australians have been subject to an airbrushing from history that makes even that of the old Bolshevik leadership of the USSR in the 1930s look mild by comparison.