Jacques certainly did not see the Aborigines as equal but simply different. However, unlike the French anthropologists, he did convey the sense that he had established some rapport with them and at least viewed them as people with their own concerns, culture, language, identities, history, and present suffering while in thrall to Cunningham. He began his section of the paper by giving his transcription of the Aborigines' names, as did Virchow (1884), an acknowledgement of their autonomy as individuals and foreign visitors not accorded them by Topinard.^[35] Jacques then described the dubious circumstances in which they had joined Cunningham's troupe and queried what they might have made of the study to which he and his colleague subjected them. In this and other respects, he recorded their exercise of a measure of personal agency:

Jacques compiled a comparative vocabulary of 198 words for Palm Islands and Hinchinbrook Island, together with notes relating to other Aboriginal languages, but was regretful about the quality of his linguistic observations for 'these languages that were so interesting'. He described his difficulties in trying to learn their pronunciation and included a vignette showing Aboriginal methods as teachers: 'When we had not properly understood after two, three or four tries, they leaned towards us and repeated the word several times very softly in our ear. I mention this as a proof of their intelligence and way of reasoning'. However, Jacques's conclusions about Aboriginal intelligence were mixed. He found the members of the troupe to be childlike, 'like all primitive people', their memories prodigious, their senses acute, their sense of numeracy limited, their sense of time absent — on both the latter counts he was Eurocentrically blind to other systems of quantification than Roman numerals or to other ways of reckoning time than in named days of the week, weeks, and months. He provided some details about marriage rules but concluded this discussion by remarking, with no sense of irony: 'There are still some other details in the rules which besides are rather complicated; but these we shall spare you' (Houzé and Jacques 1884-5:101, 104, 130).

A frequent point of debate among anthropologists at this time was whether different indigenous groups did or did not hold religious beliefs, seen as a mark of full humanity.^[36] The monogenists,^[37] as believers themselves and proponents of the idea of the 'human realm', sought and found religious belief in indigenous communities denied it by their opponents who engaged in sometimes facetious commentary on the moral and religious capacities of animals.^[38] Jacques maintained that the Queenslanders had no religion, in the sense of believing in a deity, but proceeded to describe their supernatural beliefs in some detail, having also retold a myth about the origin of different languages and presented it as a rival to the Biblical story of Babel. He did not, however, hesitate to question other prominent stereotypes in contemporary anthropological literature on the basis of his own observations of the Aboriginal group. Thus, he described Toby and Jenny's marital relationship as harmonious in opposition to the general view of the lowly status and ill-treatment of Aboriginal women by their husbands as pronounced by Charles Letourneau (1831-1902). In contrast to Topinard's difficulty in attributing Jenny's stunned state to grief, Jacques related another proof of marital affection by describing Sussy's grief-stricken reaction to Tambo's death (Houzé and Jacques 1884-5:102-3, 131).

One of the most persistent and titillating tropes in nineteenth-century imaginings was the cannibal savage.^[39] Here again, there is an interesting contrast between the several reports. Jacques claimed that he 'was never able to obtain a definite answer' to his inquiry whether the Queenslanders sometimes ate human flesh: 'one might have said that they were trying to avoid an embarrassing question'.^[40] Cunningham had 'assured' him that one circumstance in which it was practised was after a battle but that he thought it was not otherwise prevalent. Jacques then stated seriously that, unlike 'the Western tribes', the Queenslanders did not eat their old people but took very good care of them (Houzé and Jacques 1884-5:133). During Topinard's presentation (1885:695), Dally asked Billy about anthropophagy but reported a different answer from that given by Jacques: Billy 'admitted that he had eaten the flesh of his fellows several times'. The judgement was then pronounced that cannibalism indicated nothing about the relationship of carnivorous instincts to physical organization since Billy's and Jenny's teeth were small, neat, and worn in a circular pattern. Both reports reinvoked the spectre of cannibalism but while Jacques sought to explain it in cultural terms, Topinard and Dally invoked bestiality.

A final word is needed about the photographs which illustrate each of the two reports: those taken by Prince Roland Bonaparte and included in Topinard's presentation and those taken by the president of the Association belge de Photographie, Pierre-Alexandre de Blochouse (1821-1901), for Houzé and Jacques's memoir. In France, the evidential promise of photography meant that this new technology was welcomed by anthropologists such as Broca and a genre of racial photography quickly developed as a tool of anthropology (Dias 1994; Jehel 2000). The genre rested on a metonymical logic: one type specimen of a racial group visually stood for all, just as Jenny's and Billy's measurements in Topinard's table stood tacitly for all Aborigines when placed against figures for average European males. The subjects of such photographs were typically posed against a neutral background, preferably without clothes, and taken full face and in profile. Blochouse's photographs of Sussy, Bob, Jenny, and Toby conform to the genre except that the Queenslanders are wearing their show clothes. They might have refused to disrobe for the photographer as Jacques reported that they would not undress for him, though he declined to attribute their refusal to modesty — another human emotion denied to indigenous people by physical anthropology — but instead invoked vanity and the climate (Houzé and Jacques 1884-5:124). Although these particular photographs by Bonaparte appear to be raciological in design, they do not conform simply to the dehumanizing, objectifying genre of racial photography. They are also individual portraits with a story to them which makes them all the more disconcerting.^[41]