A Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences and Queer Norfolk Collaboration
Written by Beau Brannick
Born on 31st December 1795, today would mark the 230th birthday of Anna Gurney, a disabled lesbian who was an English scholar, geologist and philanthropist from Norfolk. As a woman who dedicated her life to learning, giving back and living as a fairly open queer woman with her dedicated partner, Sarah-Maria Buxton, Queer Norfolk and the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences have collaborated to celebrate this special anniversary of Anna’s life.
As a geologist, Anna predominantly focused her research on local portions of the Cromer Forest Bed Formation. This formation was a deposit of gravel, sand and clay which was around six metres thick and exposed in the cliffs along the North and East Norfolk coast and into North Suffolk. She became the first woman to join the British Archaeological Association, which aimed to support and disseminate high-quality research in the fields of Western archaeology, architecture and art.
Throughout her life, she amassed a collection of fossils, stones and flint arrowheads, much of which she donated to the Norfolk Museum Service. However, Anna’s findings were also donated to other museums, including an elephant jaw to the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences. To be more specific, the fossil is the ‘right ramus of lower, sloping diastreme and last molar in situ’, which in everyday terms means the lower right jaw with a tooth left in place.
To mark Anna’s fantastic discovery and donation to the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, we are delighted to announce that this elephant jaw is now part of the Queer Norfolk online collection! Alongside this, the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences are running several LGBTQ+ themed activities, including fortnightly LGBTQ+ tours from Wednesday 28th January. These tours were designed with help from Layo, a student who spent a 3-week placement producing and researching the content, including a series of illustrations.
Whilst some people might peruse the Queer Norfolk website and be confused as to how a fossil could be queer, we hope that this elephant jaw shows that queerness is not limited to private or personal spaces, but actively lives in museum collections throughout the world. Sometimes the search for queer history in heritage spaces can be difficult, as these histories have a long past of being hidden or brushed aside. Through this addition, we can look differently at museum collections and ask whose lives and identities are already present within them. By pinpointing a figure from history like Anna Gurney, we can make queer histories visible within science, heritage and public spaces.
You can explore more objects relating to Anna Gurney’s life on our Archives page.
Queer Norfolk is a volunteer-led archiving project that hands ownership of queer collections back to communities, empowering people to access, discover, and contribute to local collections that reflect our shared histories.
