9 - Divinatory Science in the City and the Bush

Summary

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, phrenology as folk science featured prominently in two contrasting sites: the city, with its nooks of seamy thrills; and the bush, the stomping ground of itinerant male labourers. While phrenologists had long taken rooms in city markets and arcades, their work transformed by century’s end into a mystical hybrid of bumps, clairvoyance, palmistry and even tea-leaf reading. Urban diviners emerged concurrently with another archetype: the bush phrenologist of the new, masculinist ‘radical nationalist’ literary tradition. Bush phrenologists – real and imagined – echoed the resourcefulness of city diviners, switching between occupations and combining heads with palmistry and even water divining. But while urban divination was feminised and stigmatised, the male bush phrenologist often escaped the mark of perceived irrationality and exemplified a muscular identity. When pitted in court against working-class women or girls reporting assault, even the most disreputable bush phrenologist benefited from legalistic misogyny.