During the 1870s, popular scientist Professor Bruce grew accustomed to improvisation as he travelled through the Eastern colonies of Australia. While visiting the timber town of Bulahdelah, on the Central Coast of New South Wales, he lectured on phrenology in his Irish brogue within the best space set aside by town residents for the job. In a hut knocked together from slabs of Eucalyptus, the faint glow of six candles in bottles flickered over the faces of thirty or so locals. The audience crowded onto “three boards deposited on three boxes or casks, in the shape of a triangle” to watch the Professor read heads. “I have seen many entertainments in our bush villages and on stations, but never such a gloomy one,” declared a correspondent. “The more so, as I heard that this hut had been not long ago the depositary of a dead body, awaiting an inquest, and some one called it the ‘dead-house’.”1