Front Burner - Front Burner Introduces: Stuff The British Stole | Season 3

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

Throughout its reign, the British Empire stole a lot of stuff. Today the Empire's loot sits in museums, galleries, private collections and burial sites with polite plaques. But its history is often messier than the plaques suggest. In each episode of this global smash hit podcast, Walkley award-winning journalist, author and genetic potluck, Marc Fennell, takes you on the wild, evocative, sometimes funny, often tragic adventure of how these stolen treasures got to where they live today. These objects will ultimately help us see the modern world - and ourselves - in a different light. This is a co-production between the ABC and CBC Canada. More episodes are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/aqZlF7l1

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, Tamara Kandaker here. We have a special bonus episode for FrontBurner subscribers from the brand new season of Stuff the British Stole from ABC Australia and CBC Podcasts. Throughout its reign, the British Empire stole a lot of stuff. Today, the empire's loot sits in museums, galleries, private collections, and burial sites with polite plaques, but their history is often messier than

the plaques admit. In each episode, award-winning journalist Mark Fennell takes you on the wild, evocative, sometimes funny, often tragic adventure of how these stolen treasures got to where they live today. These objects will ultimately help us see the modern world and ourselves today in a different light. We have the first episode from season three of Stuff the British Stole for you now. Have a listen. This podcast is a co-production of ABC Australia and CBC Podcasts. I don't think it really hit me until I was standing outside the high school just how strange today was going to be. Are you guys here for the podcast?

Sure are. Mark, by the way. What's your name? It's so weird. I've never seen a mummy before. Well, get ready to live, I guess. We're going to go into the office. so we'll see you in a bit. All right.

So I'm stepping inside the local high school of Grafton, this beautiful country town. All the buildings around here are super old, the streets lined with purple jacaranda trees. The weather here in Australia right now is so warm and sunny. Frankly, it's just showing off. Really regretting wearing pants. It's a T-shirt and shorts kind of day.

Sorry, but it just is. Hello. I'll just get you the QR over here. Yep. Hello. How are you? Oh, hi, Simon. I'm Mark.

Lovely to meet you. How are you? All right, so tell me where we are. Give me the guided tour. We are in the Grafton High School library. This is downstairs. We're about to head up to visit our mummy. It's weird when you say it like that.

Yes. Three years ago, when we started this series, someone slid into my Twitter DMs and told me about something I did not believe. Something so ludicrous. It had to be a joke. Something that Past Tense Mark, you're listening to here, is about to come face to face with.

Wait for it. We thought we'd have... Oh, Jesus! This was not the big reveal moment I thought it was going to be. I just... That is the totes masculine sound of a man looking at, well... The mummified, disembodied head of an Egyptian, of age unknown, gender unknown, all those things unknown. But it's immaculately well-preserved, considering,

and it's been sitting in our school for 100 years plus. Somehow, countless generations of teenagers have shared these unassuming red brick walls with a mummified dead body It's in a sealed glass box with a wooden base and if you sort of, you look in towards it you're looking at what is distinctly a human head but in terms of a texture that you might describe as skin

or something like that, that's completely blackened. And then look towards the mouth, you'll see what is kind of like the rubbery remnants of an upper lip and gums, and then a few really sad but ultra-realistic protruding teeth, and then kind of hollows where you would imagine the eyes should be, but then there's this really kind of, when you look at it close, this dazzling sort of gold patterning around the eyes,

and we're not sure what that is, but your eyes are definitely drawn to that, and that sort of gives it this otherworldliness. Assembled around the head for me is a group of students. So this is an assortment of Year 12 and Year 11s and these guys are all senior history students here at school. Can I just ask you what your very first, the first time you realised that there was a mummy in your school?

In junior years, we got shown it, like in Year 7. I was up here studying at the top of the library and then the librarian came out and just pulled out a whole head. I was so surprised, I didn't know we had it and I was like, that's kind of weird we have that just laying around in the library. I fully tried to avoid looking at it. That's a bit random.

It's all black and twisted. Sometimes I have to remind myself it was human. It's so real, like It's like it's all black and twisted. Sometimes I have to like remind myself it was human. It's so real like it's a human being in a box. I was a bit confused. Oh I think we should give it back. It's not something that I think we should have. It's kind of weird that we just have a head in the library. I was like why is this here? Why do we have it? Why indeed? In the days of the British Empire, things were taken. Usually they ended up in museums and galleries, but sometimes they end up in places much stranger.

My name is Mark Finnell, and welcome to Season 3 of Stuff the British Stole. So I am Simon Robertson. I'm a history teacher here at Grafton High School and teach Aboriginal studies here. I've been here for about 20 years in total. Even before Simon came here as a teacher, he'd heard the mythology of Grafton High. My wife was schooled here at Grafton High School

and she told me that there was a mummy's head at Grafton and she said that she would just sit sometimes in class and just have this distinct, crystal-clear thought of, that's so weird, there's a human being sitting in the library right now and she would get these chills and it would make her feel sort of unsettled. So when I first got here my first day, I made a point of coming over and sort of acquainting myself with the mummy, as it were.

Take me back to the first moment you saw her. Like, what was that experience like? Yeah, so it was after school and the librarian at the time had left and the lights were off. It was dark and I recall I was... I'm not spiritual or anything in that sense, but I felt like I was in the presence of something that deserved to, I don't know, be listened to, be paid attention to.

And just seeing this face staring back at you was really, yeah, arresting, and that's kind of what drove my passion to at least generate learning through it. Simon isn't the only faculty member here in Grafton who's low-key obsessed with this head. The first thing that strikes you is that every single person seems to have a very different relationship with the head. I just made the assumption that schools had these as a thing. And so... Sorry, sorry, you just assumed that old schools had mummies in them.

I'm not from here, so I sort of... That is Grafton ancient history teacher Stacey Martin. Most people in Grafton have a story, or older people have a story, who went here about their experience with the mummy's head. So it's got these layers of students who visited Grafton High School who all have some sort of attachment to it. The mummy was there in 1966 when I was in Grafton High in Year 7, or first form in those days.

And so I was always aware of it. And because I was interested in history, I was interested in the mummy. Stephen Tadham taught history here from the 1970s right up until 2010. Even after more than a decade away, he's still consumed by the mysterious head in the library. Seeing the mummy's head was one of the essential rituals of being orientated into Grafton High School. Students knew it was there. Their parents, grandparents, cousins, etc. had all talked about it.

They knew it. And so that was a rite of passage. So when you went to school there and I know I'm throwing back a little bit in history here was there any sense of where it came from or did anybody was there stories around how it actually ended up in Grafton High that were floating around at the time? No the plaque on it was really just a piece of paper with some typing that was all it was known and I cannot remember a single person saying anything about it. So the head normally lives in the library's server room

because apparently it's climate-controlled, and on top of the sealed glass box with the head inside is a small faded picture frame with typewritten words. So this is the only written evidence that we have. The specimen on display is a genuine example of Egyptian mummification. Although no date can be definitively given, it is probably over 2,000 years old. The sex of the specimen cannot be determined. The specimen was donated about 1915 by the late...

Dr TJ Henry. Dr TJ Henry. He purchased it when a medical student in Edinburgh, before the end of the last century, and the head was mounted as a gift to the school... Dated 11th of the 7th, 1960. So who is T.J. Henry? Dr. T.J. Henry was a doctor in Grafton

and he built a maternity hospital. For generations, babies were born in that hospital. So is there any sense of how this guy would have come into contact with an Egyptian mummy? It says Edinburgh there. Does that make sense to you? Edinburgh was the premium place in the world to train for medicine for people in the British Empire of that time.

And remember, he was studying before there was an Australia, so he would have been a citizen of New South Wales who had gone there. And that does make sense. Right, so you've got a young doctor from the British colony of New South Wales at the tail end of the 19th century, somehow gets a hold of what is purporting to be an Egyptian mummified head and brings it back to his hometown. All right, that seems fairly straightforward. But Simon, that history teacher who first brought me up here, he's not as convinced about this T.J. Henry story.

What do you think of the narrative that's presented on the plaques? Does it ring true to you? He's not as convinced about this T.J. Henry story. What do you think of the narrative that's presented on the plaques? Does it ring true to you? No, not necessarily. What it's missing is the story of Sir Grafton Elliot Smith. Yes. You see, this old colonial town has another rather significant link to Egypt, a man known as Grafton Elliot Smith. Who was, for a long period, the world's foremost Egyptologist,

who was born in Grafton, named after Grafton, founded the Cairo Museum of Anatomy, was said to have studied upwards of 6,000 mummies during his life, had that distinct connection to Grafton, visited Grafton in 1914, around 1914-1915, to put on sort of a lecture tour, showed lantern slides of his excavations and his mummies. And the fact that the mummy appears at Grafton High School at about that exact same time tells us that maybe, and this is just me maybe-ing, Sir Grafton Elliot Smith did bring along some curiosities with him to show off, as it were, and decided while he was here

back in his hometown, maybe to give this. So Simon is right. There are these reports of Grafton Elliot Smith coming back to the town, putting on this big presentation. And everyone oohs and aahs and gasps as they see bits and pieces of mummies revealed and goes through the mummification process. To think that somehow or other

TJ Henry gifts a mummy at that same time and Grafton Elliot Smith isn't involved just doesn't make sense. Looking at the faces around this room, you can see everyone's just reaching for what is the most plausible explanation for how this thing ends up here in Grafton. Actually, I'm thinking about what you guys are saying and I'm just sort of like, would it be more likely a person who's a medical student who would have access to purchasing a severed head that has been mummified

than a person who, as an Egyptologist, who might have more of a perspective of preservation. Just the purchase of it by a medical student in Edinburgh, I mean, it's not impossible. It just doesn't ring true. It just doesn't have the feel of genuineness. It just seems a bit too convenient. Does it have to go straight from one of them to the school? Like, could one of them gift it to the other one

and then it comes to the school and someone else? No, I think that's highly feasible. Do we know who wrote the plaque or where the information for any of that came from? No, that's the thing. There is no proof of any of this chain, that it was Dr Henry that bought it at Edinburgh. There's no proof that he bought it to Grafton.

There's no proof that he donated it to the school. There's no proof of any of this except that little label. Right. Looks like we've got an old-school mystery here. The famed Egyptologist, the local doctor, and the only clue, a piece of paper written decades after the head arrived here in Grafton. So, if that piece of paper is correct, and Dr TJ Henry did bring this head back from

Edinburgh, my question is this. Why were there Egyptian mummified remains in the UK in the first place? Were there Egyptian mummified remains in the UK in the first place? So Britain and France are vying for domination of Egypt. In the 19th century, we get French soldiers, British soldiers being posted there. They're bringing stuff back with them when they return. So they're bringing back mummified hands or scraps of mummy cloth.

Eleanor Dobson is an academic who specialises in a particular kind of mania that consumed Britain, France, a whole host of nations, really, back in the 19th century. It was called, and I swear I did not make up this term, Egyptomania. Egyptomania in its broadest sense is a term people use to define a kind of popular seizing of ancient Egyptian tropes and iconography and basically stereotypes as well. So it's despotic pharaohs and it's mystical hieroglyphs and it's mummies coming back from the dead. I think it's a version of ancient Egypt that's not historical,

it's not kind of historically based, but it's one that is more that kind of fantasy packaging of Egypt that people love to indulge in. As part of this, rich people across Europe and America could have mummy unwrapping parties. They were ultra kind of theatrical affairs. Even the medical men who were doing these things would kind of drape the lecture halls with kind of hieroglyphic banners

to create a sense that this is theatre, not science. If I was traipsing around the United Kingdom sort of at the turn of the century, 1900, how easy would it have been to get access to part of a mummy? I think quite easy. I think they were just so accessible. You know, a whole mummy is a different matter. To get a whole mummy from Egypt intact is costly. It requires greater care. The more transportable something is, the more

there are in the UK. So to buy a head or to buy a hand or to buy a foot will be much more affordable and easy than it would be to buy a whole body. If I was to say to you the name Grafton Elliot Smith, what does that name mean to you? Grafton Elliot Smith was an anatomist. He examined loads of royal mummies in Cairo, in the Cairo Museum, and determined, I think, in some cases, kind of causes of death. So almost a kind of mummy autopsy. Right.

Okay, so the reason I bring up Grafton Elliott Smith is because we have some records of him coming and doing a speaking tour around about the time where this head might have appeared. Like, it's weird, right? It's really weird. Is there a date for when it appears at school? 1915? Why do you ask?

He's definitely doing autopsies of the mummies in the Cairo Museum a tad earlier than that. So it marries up nicely with when he's examining mummies in the Cairo Museum a tad earlier than that. So it marries up nicely with when he's examining mummies. What is the legality of taking mummies from Egypt at that particular point in history? By that point, definitely not okay. So there are rules in place, laws in place at that time that mean excavators working in Egypt can't take stuff out of Egypt anymore. That's not to say that the stuff doesn't get out, and it absolutely does, and there's evidence human remains were definitely leaving Egypt, despite the fact that it was illegal. I'm assuming there's no prominence, but I expect because it's a head, it probably came from a mummy

pit. In the 19th century, there's stories about people uncovering mummy pits, and there are so many of them. Why do you say mummy pit? Why does that seem likely to you if somebody's found in a tomb and is and is understood to be a pharaoh or a member of a royal household more care is taken in um in excavating their body so you tend not to see them distributed as body parts the very fact that they have been decapitated and just their head has been removed implies that there's not that kind of high status. Can I ask, there's one little detail about the skull that I haven't mentioned.

Around the eyes, you can see little glints of gold. Now, I suppose that can be put on months and years after their past. Does that signify anything to you at all? I mean, that complicates matters because I think, you know, if you're going to apply gold leaf to the remains, that implies they're somebody of a higher social status. That makes it all the more unusual that it's just the head that has been removed and preserved. But it wouldn't be beyond, let's say, like 19th century excavators and antiquities dealers to maybe put that on themselves.

Yeah. Right, so the head just gets more and more mysterious and the timing for Grafton Elliot Smith, yeah, seems kind of plausible for him to get a skull like this. But it turns out that our other candidate, Dr TJ Henry, he has another surprise connection to Egypt. Hello? Hi, is this Tony Henry?

Yes. Hi, Tony. My name's Mark Fennell. I'm calling from the ABC. How are you? Mark, is this Tony Henry? Yes. Hi, Tony. My name's Mark Fennell. I'm calling from the ABC. How are you? Mark, good. So you are the grandson of Dr TJ Henry from Grafton, is that right? Yes.

My father was his youngest son. So the reason I'm calling you is because in Grafton, in the high school library there, is a human head that, according to the plaque, is an Egyptian mummy head. And the only name on that plaque is your grandfather, T.J. Henry. Do you know anything about this skull? Well, no, I've never heard anything about it. But the only thing I can sort of come up with was he volunteered

as a captain at the First World War and he was assigned to Egypt Hospital there. Now, those Australian station hospitals in Egypt during World War I, they were packed, but perhaps not for the reason you might think. So as part of the British Empire, Australians and New Zealanders were sent to Egypt to train for war. You can see these pictures of them standing at the base of the pyramids. They also seem to have gotten into massive amounts of trouble. There are records in 1915 of Australian diggers involved in riots, looting,

and thanks to the booming number of brothels in Cairo, there was a huge outbreak of what was then called venereal disease. The Australian station hospitals had literally hundreds of beds filled with soldiers with sexually transmitted infections. And so, yes, doctors like TJ Henry, they were needed. And Tony, his grandson I'm talking to here, has spent years reading over his grandfather's records. He kept a journal throughout his life. And there's nothing in there about collecting a mummy skull

or giving it to this high school in Grafton? No, no. I've got mountains of information, but I don't have anything about the skull. This is the first I've heard of it, as a matter of fact. It's never been part of, talked about in the family or anything to my recollection. So, yep, can't help you. Out of curiosity, in those journals, is there ever any mention

of a guy by the name of Grafton Elliot Smith? Not that I can recollect. The crumbs left behind by these two men, Grafton Elliot Smith and TJ Henry, are few and far between. But they do both point to one place. to one place. So I'm outside the Egyptian museum in Cairo, in Tahrir, which has... There are the names of the main kings of the Egyptian dynasties

and the Europeans, who like to refer to themselves as those who have discovered Egypt. Welcome to Cairo, Egypt, with the best possible guide. So I'm Heba Abdelgawet. I'm a heritage specialist and museum researcher and curator. Growing up in Egypt and in Cairo specifically, there is no way around it. You would become interested with history in general. Except the problem for Heba is that a lot of Egypt's history isn't here in Egypt.

There is nearly a piece of ancient Egyptian history in every major capital, in every major city around the world. And there are hundreds of thousands of Egyptian objects in 350, I wouldn't say just institutions, because they ended up in the weirdest places in the world, like someone's garage or someone's attic. Or potentially someone's school. So the whole story that a doctor like TJ Henry might have picked up a mummified head either on deployment in Cairo or while traipsing around the UK, yeah, that could not be less surprising to Heba.

We've had thousands of cases like this all over the world. We do not even have an inventory of the amount of human remains that exist all over the world, the amount of mummified Egyptian human remains that exist all over the world. Detailed documentation doesn't exist. And because of how they were smuggled illegally, many of them are not accounted for, and they could have been resold once again within the UK itself. So that's very common. How do you feel about that? It's usually mixed emotions. There is a feeling of pride in how the way the people look at ancient

Egypt and the fascination I could see in their eyes. But there is equally the feeling of distress, disappointment, and at times depression in the way that there are parts of me that are all over the world, but I'm always invisible. I'm not there. I'm not part of the story. Me and the rest of contemporary Egyptians, we are totally unseen, are totally stigmatised and stereotyped. So for me, the fascination with ancient Egypt led to us becoming more and more invisible.

It's disheartening. And it's through Egyptian eyes that Heber wants the world to see this head. And so far it's been talked about like a specimen or a learning tool, a curiosity, but put yourself in the shoes of that person. What did they believe would happen to them as they passed into the darkness? Mummification was not because of an obsession with death. It was an obsession with life, actually.

The act of mummification was intended to transform the body into a divine status, into a sacred status, because the whole point of mummifying was to preserve the body in order to ensure that it arrives safely to the afterlife and enjoys life in the afterlife. They would take everything except the heart, because this is the way you measure a person's mark in life through the afterlife. They would take everything except the heart because this is the way you measure a person's marking life through his heart. How kind and good was his heart was the bar through which he could reach the afterlife. A preserved body means that the soul could be alive and join the

others in the afterlife. That was the main aim of it. For them, the body was never to be revealed after death. It shouldn't be put in a showcase and displayed for people to gaze at. The whole process of unwrapping the body totally defies what the ancient Egyptians believed in, and this is not what he or she signed for. This is not what they signed for. There's a particular thing about this that's egregious in a way that I don't think people understand, which is it's not just taking of culture. It's also you're interrupting

the fundamental beliefs of the people who, when they died, they had an expectation of what would happen to them. And that's the thing that's being desecrated, right? Exactly. Exactly the case. Because for the ancient Egyptians, something as simple as erasing someone's name from the tomb would disrupt the journey to the afterlife. That was one of the ways, for example, of taking revenge at someone, just erasing his name written on the wall. So imagine if erasing the name from the wall is in itself a disruption of someone's journey to the afterlife, how would be fiddling with the whole body and disrupting the whole mummified divine sacredness of the body itself?

Heber tends to think that this wasn't a person found in a mummy pit, but in fact, this gold speckled head belonged to someone quite important. The deceased here was from high status. To be able to afford mummification at the first place, it means that he was of a high status. It was only the rich who could afford mummification. And having traces of gold reaffirms the divinity and the sacredness of the body itself. If it is a person of high status, is it strange that the head is detached from the body? This again could have happened in modern times, det head is detached from the body? This again could have happened in

modern times, detaching the head from the body. This is of a modern making. That couldn't have been how it was in ancient times. There was tomb robbery in the past, even in ancient Egyptian times, but they would never fettle with the mummy itself. They would never fettle with it. They would just leave it aside, stack it somewhere, but they wouldn't dismember it. That was totally against ancient Egyptian beliefs. They wouldn't dismember the body, even ancient tomb robbers. So it must have been a modern practice. Detaching, they are commodified.

They are objects. They are seen as artifacts. They are not seen as human beings. Even the word mummy itself makes them an object. They are mummified human remains. And that's something that we need to remember. They are human first and they went through the process of mummification. They are never artifacts. They are not objects. They are people just like me, you and everyone else. I think the issue is that the way ancient Egypt became a fascination, became a mania that is so dehumanised,

made people forget that this could have been your family member. There is one part of this story I haven't told you yet. It's an important detail. You see, about 10 years ago, the staff and students at Grafton High made a decision. It was time to give the head back to Egypt. And we did attempt to return it and we wrote letters to the Egyptian consulate in Canberra.

That was 2011. And when they got a response? Egypt said they didn't want it. The reasoning that was given to us at the time was basically from Egypt, the consulate, that they just weren't interested. Why do you think the Egyptian consulate said no, they didn't want this particular skull back? Can you think of any reason why they would have not bothered with it? Because by law, if there is no paperwork, the state itself would not accept any

object or any mummified human remain. I totally understand that they have communicated with the consulate, but until we can prove the legality of it being Egyptian, how it left Egypt, and why is it there? This is how the law operates. So the state of Egypt couldn't accept a skull, even if they wanted to. That's when the staff and students of Grafton High had another idea for somewhere else

that might see the value in the head. So as we walk around, in chronological order, the oldest coffin we have on display here is about 1000 BC, but the body contained inside this coffin... At the heart of all of the green grass and sandstone buildings that make up Australia's oldest university, Sydney University, there sits this very stark grey concrete box. This is a very new museum, literally opened in 2022.

Inside, it holds some things that are very, very old. So we're at the Chow Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney. And my tour guides are Candice Richards and Melanie Pitkin. They're both curators at something called the Nicholson Collection. So the mummy room consists of three Egyptian mummified human remains. As you enter, you are struck by the late... And this is one of the oldest and largest clusters of ancient artefacts in Australia. And we are surrounded by them. There's Egyptian tools, And we are surrounded by them.

There's Egyptian tools, there's carvings, and yes, there are mummified remains. We do believe that displaying human remains does advance scientific understanding and change our appreciation for how people lived and died thousands of years ago. And so you can see why the staff and students at Grafton High thought, all right, well, if Egypt itself doesn't want the head, maybe the biggest collection of Egyptian remains in Australia,

this Nicholson collection, maybe they want this person. And the Nicholson Museum said they didn't want it. And the reasoning from the Nicholson Museum was cost, basically, that they couldn't afford to rehouse it, to study it, to do all those things that we were suggesting because they didn't have the funds. But what my query is now, 10 years later, the way that the narrative has shifted on ownership,

repatriation, all those things, I'm just curious now if it would have a different outcome. It seems when Grafton High did make that offer to Nicholson, it was a verbal offer, so nobody here at Nicholson's got any records of it. But if the offer is still standing, it'd be a complicated transaction without all the paperwork proving

how it got to Australia in the first place. Part of that is checkling for genuity, understanding what kinds of material, and also discussing provenance and legal ownership chains. The skull is in limbo. I mean, we still don't even really know if it's an Egyptian skull, if I'm being honest with you. But there has been one useful thing about visiting the museum today.

It's that the Nicholson collection has a lot of references to one very familiar name. So Grafton Elliot Smith is actually a graduate from the University of Sydney. He trained here as a medical doctor in the late 1800s. He's most well known in Egyptology circles as one of the first to use x-ray analysis of mummified remains. And so this material here that we have on display are a series of the bandages that he, Grafton Elliott Smith, and his wife Kathleen sent back from Cairo. Is it plausible to you that Grafton Elliott Smith would have come back to his hometown and brought a human mummified head back with him? Does that sound like the sort of thing that the guy that sent this sort of stuff back home would have done?

I would suggest that it's not that plausible that he brought it back and that's partly because there's no record of him doing so. He's a very well-known and well-studied figure and so if he was to bring home to Australia ahead, it's unlikely it would have ended up in Grafton at a public school for lots and lots of different reasons, mainly from his movement. There would be a lot more evidence

if it was from Grafton and Elliot Smith himself. In fact, of the two theories available to us, these two Egyptologists in front of me, they back the version on the plaque with Dr TJ Henry buying it in the UK. It's highly likely that, yes, he bought it in Edinburgh. You could buy mummified remains, especially in around that 1900s, in antique shops

and places like England and Scotland have a huge amount of dispersed Egyptian remains and things do find themselves in antique shops and on kind of different ways of being sold. So it's quite possible that that is an accurate reflection. I wouldn't doubt it. You grew up in the country in Cessnock. So this head sits in a library in a country town public high school and it's been there for a very long time. And generation after generation of history teachers have been using it to get teenagers,

famously the most engaged people in the planet, to engage with history, to engage with a history that's really far away from them. If the Egyptian government don't want it back, if somewhere in the records of the Nicholson collection they didn't want it here, If it's serving that purpose for generations of country kids that probably don't always get to come here, is that worthwhile? Is it doing a job there? It is doing, I mean, you are right, it is doing a job. Whether that's like, whether you can do that job using somebody's actual human skull, or whether you can do that job using somebody's actual human skull or whether you can do that job in another way might be the question. And that is a question that the teachers at Grafton High

are still struggling with. From my perspective as a teacher teaching ancient history, I just see it as the most valuable source that we can have. We don't get much of this up here. We don't have the resources to, you know, go to the Nicholson Museum, go to the Australian Museum. We can't do that at the drop of a hat for an excursion for the day. You know, it's a logistical nightmare to do those things for us. So to have something here where we can take a little incursion to the library and see something to give like tangible

evidence of the things we talk about in class. I don't think that... I don't know. I'm really torn. From a human perspective, this should not be here. But from a teacher perspective, I'd never want to see it leave. And if it was gone and it just sat in some museum, it'd be a speck in amongst thousands of other objects that people would just glance over

and the quantity makes them insignificant. But it isn't insignificant to the students and staff of Grafton High. In fact, it's an open mystery. We still know so little about this head, even if it's Egyptian. So for the last few months, we've been calling different universities to see if they would help us answer some of those questions. And finally, someone agreed. I'm Dr Janet Davey in the Department of Forensic Medicine at Monash. My name's Lauren Gregg. I'm the Head of Clinical Services at Siemens Healthineers Australia New Zealand.

So what is this machine called? It's just a CAT scanner. Just a CAT scanner, OK, right. Last week, for the first time ever, we had the Grafton head scanned. Yeah, so we're seeing a, yeah, sort of a 3D image of the skull emerging here. The eye sockets and the nasal cavity and the... Oh, that's the teeth, OK.

Maybe four teeth. OK, cool. So, have we got a genuine Egyptian mummified human? It's the real thing. Is it provable that it's definitely from Egypt or is it possible it's mummified from some other part of the world? No, it's ancient Egyptian. It's got gold leaf on it. It's got all the hallmarks of being an ancient Egyptian mummy. And that gold leaf, it seems, is the key to even what era of Egypt too. And this is typical of mummies from the Greco-Roman period. So after Alexander the Great and then of course Cleopatra the Seventh up to the early Christian era,

gold leaf was not uncommon. Do you think it should stay at the school, the two of you? I mean they've done a pretty good job of looking after it right up until now so and they were generous enough to share it with us. So, I mean, the school, I'm sure the school will make a really good decision about what to do with it, but they've been doing a great job so far. As good a job as the school may have done, it's also now irrefutable that this head is part of a legacy of looting and plunder from Egypt.

And for Heba back in Cairo, that is something that should never be forgotten. I always feel that I do have the responsibility, being Egyptian and being a specialist and knowing the inside out of the colonial history. I want to die knowing that I've tried to make the world see us. Which brings us back to that Australian country town, Grafton, and a room full of students who have arranged themselves

to debate their next move. OK, so we've got six students arranged, three affirmative and three negative. And the contention, the topic in contention, is that the Grafton High mummy head should be kept at Grafton High School and so the first speaker is affirmative and it's Oscar. Um I guess we could ask where should we return this mummy to? It's meant to remain here and it is arguable that it's just as much our history as it is back in Egypt. It's not only a matter of

should a yes or no should they go home or not, should they be displayed or not. We can never correct the wrongs because the harm is done. But we, Australians and Egyptians, we need to go through this whole healing process. But I think ones like these should be used instead to foster debate about colonisation, about culture, about ownership, about ancient civilisations. Again, it has much more educational value here.

People should know about it in the school. It connects you to your past. I think that's invaluable when it comes to teaching and learning about history. What are our obligations? What should we do? What can we do? How do we serve ourselves best? How do we serve this human being best? And that's kind of it, isn't it? There'll never be an end to all of

the questions around this head. Who brought it here? Why is it in Australia? Who even is it? We can try to answer those questions, definitely, but ultimately, I'm left with just one. Do we need answers in order to do what's right by this person? They might never find their way back home, but they can still find peace. Stuff the British Style is produced by Zoe Ferguson, Leah Simone Bowen and Eunice Kim. It was written, edited and created by me, I'm Mark Finnell. The sound mixing was by Martin Peralta.

The executive producer is Amruta Sleeve, ABC RN, and Cecil Fernandez at CBC Podcasts. Very special thank you to Fadi Rafat in Cairo and Nick Parmenter. This is a production of ABC RN in partnership with CBC Podcasts. That was an episode from Stuff the British Stole. You can head over to their podcast feed right now for more episodes. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.