Mixed Race Studies

The Aborigines Act, 1911 [Australia]
1911-12-07
Number 1048
Source: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

An Act to make provision for the better Protection and Control of the Aboriginal and Half-caste Inhabitants of the State of South Australia.

1. This Act may be cited as ‘‘ The Aborigines Act, 1911.”
2. The Ordinance No. 12 of 1844, being an Ordinance to provide for the protection, maintenance, and up-bringing of orphans and other destitute children of the aborigines, is hereby repealed : Provided that such repeal shall not alter the effect of the doing or omission of any thing before the passing of this Act, and shall not affect any right granted, obligation imposed, liability incurred, or any offence committed by, under, or against the said Ordinance, or any proceedings commenced before or after the passing of this Act with respect to any of such matters or things…

• …10. (1) The Chief Protector shall be the legal guardian of every aboriginal and every half-caste child, notwithstanding that any such child has a parent or other relative living, until such child attains the age of twenty-one years, except whilst such child is a State child within the meaning of ‘‘ The State Children Act, 1895,” or any Act amending or substituted for that Act. (2) Every Protector shall, within his district, be the local guardian of every such child within his district. (3) Such local guardian shall have and exercise the powers and duties prescribed…

Read the entire act here.

Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal people and the Australian Nation

Aboriginal Studies Press
September 2011
288 pages
230 x 152mm; b/w Illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 9780855757793

Russell McGregor, Associate Professor of History
James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

McGregor offers a holistic interpretation of the complex relationship between Indigenous and settler Australians during the middle four decades of the twentieth century. Combining the perspectives of political, social and cultural history in a coherent narrative, he provides a cogent analysis of how the relationship changed, and the impediments to change.

McGregor’s focus is on the quest for Aboriginal inclusion in the Australia nation; a task which dominated the Aboriginal agenda at the time. McGregor challenges existing scholarship and assumptions, particularly around assimilation. In doing so he provides an understanding of why assimilation once held the approval of many reformers, including Indigenous activists.

He reveals that the inclusion of Aboriginal people in the Australian nation was not a function of political lobbying and parliamentary decision making. Rather, it depended at least as much on Aboriginal people’s public profile, and the way their demonstrated abilities partially wore down the apathy and indifference of settler Australians.

Russell McGregor is Associate Professor of History at James Cook University in Townsville. He has published extensively on the history of settler Australian attitudes toward Aboriginal people, including the award-winning book Imagined Destinies. His other research interests are in Australian nationalism and environmental history.

Contents

• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Notes on Terminology
• Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Prologue: The Crimson Thread of Whiteness
• Chapter 1: Preserving the National Complexion
  • Managing miscegenation
  • Hiding heredity
  • Opponents
  • Continuities and discontinuities
• Chapter 2: Primitive Possibilities
  • Reappraising the primitive
  • Refiguring the federation
  • Humanitarians and activists
  • A new deal
• Chapter 3: Aboriginal Activists Demand Acceptance
  • Conditional citizenship
  • Virile, capable and black
  • Representation and rights
  • Citizen soldiers
• Chapter 4: Restricted Reconstruction
  • Postwar world order
  • Challenging white Australia
  • An anthropologist discovers citizenship
  • Appreciating the Aboriginal
• Chapter 5: To Live as We Do
  • Stranded individuals
  • Avoiding ‘Aborigines’
  • Mobilising civil society
  • Attenuated identities
• Chapter 6: Assimilation and Integration
  • Assimilation through tradition
  • An expedient slogan
  • Definitions and redefinitions
• Chapter 7: Enriching the Nation
  • Respect and redemption
  • Sporting heroes
  • Indigenous wisdom
  • Appreciation and appropriation
• Chapter 8: Fellow Australians
  • Voting rights
  • Drinking rites
  • Right wrongs, write yes
  • Special assistance or minority rights?
• Chapter 9: After the Referendum
  • Dream time in Canberra
  • Land rights
  • An Aboriginal nation
• Epilogue: Unfinished Business
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index

Chapter 1: Preserving the National Complexion

After the First World War, Australians began to notice a new trend among the Aboriginal population. Within their own enclaves, people of mixed descent were reproducing faster than white Australians. Remarking on this trend, demographer Jens Lyng observed in 1927 that ‘the idea of the White Australia ideal eventually being shattered from within cannot be dismissed as altogether absurd’.1 Lyng’s wording was guarded, and there is no evidence to suggest that the Australian public was alarmed by half-caste reproduction rates or fearful that it posed a threat to the national ideal. Some administrators of Aboriginal affairs were alarmed and fearful, however — or at least their statements on the issue were alarmist and fear-provoking. Two administrators in particular — Western Australia’s Chief Protector of Aborigines (later Commissioner of Native Affairs), AO Neville, and the Northern Territory’s Chief Protector of Aborigines, Cecil Cook — elevated the ‘half-caste menace’ to their highest priority.

Neville’s and Cook’s solution to the half-caste problem was biological absorption, colloquially called ‘breeding out the colour’. This entailed directing persons of mixed descent into marital unions with white people, so that after several generations of interbreeding all outward signs of Aboriginal ancestry would disappear. It held an incongruent array of aims and means. Absorption promised to resolve the supposed problems resulting from racial intermixture by encouraging still more intermixing. It aimed to uphold the ideal of white Australia but flew in the face of popular notions of white Australia as a doctrine of racial purity. While racist in many ways, absorption simultaneously defied prevalent racist assumptions of hybrid inferiority. It parallelled eugenicism in certain respects, but also clashed with eugenic principles. It was inspired partly by humanitarian welfarism, but evinced profound disdain for the subjects of its welfare interventions.

Despite these myriad inspirations and aspirations, absorption’s primary objective was accurately stated in its colloquial designation. It aimed to ‘breed out the colour’ — to physically transform persons of Aboriginal ancestry into white Australians and thereby bleach out the as yet small coloured stain in the national fabric. Half-castes must become white since whiteness was the essential qualification for national membership. Breeding the colour out of persons of Aboriginal descent was equally a program of breeding them into the community of the nation. This chapter argues that biological absorption in the interwar years should be understood in the context of a strongly ethnic conception of Australian nationhood, whereby myths of blood kinship provided the core of national cohesion. It also argues that while absorption was a variant of assimilation, it was in crucial respects different to the social assimilation which some critics were beginning to advocate in the 1930s, and which came to the fore after the Second World War…

Read the entire chapter here.

Double Native: A moving memoir about living across two cultures

University of Queensland Press
2012-01-03
304 pages
ISBN: 978 0 7022 3917 5

Fiona Wirrer-George Oochunyung

Growing up ‘on country’ on the west coast of Queensland’s Cape York Peninsula in the 1970s and ’80s, Fiona Wirrer-George Oochunyung had an idyllic traditional life. At the age of 16, she decided to pursue her dream of performing and moved to Sydney to attend the NAISDA Dance College. There she studied with the legendary Page brothers before they founded Bangarra Dance Theatre and met her future husband and father of her three daughters.

But the missing piece of her life was her father. As a young woman, she finds her father and carves out a fragile relationship with him. This inspires her to better understand her Austrian ancestry and how it meshes with her Indigenous identity.

Fiona Wirrer-George Oochunyung is the model of a modern woman: mother and professional; performer and creator; teacher and student, urban dweller and remote community inhabitant. As such she shares the joys and challenges that come with growing up in a divided community and carving out a career as a solo parent.

Double Native is a powerful and candid memoir that offers a rare insight into the burgeoning years of the contemporary Indigenous dance movement and what it means to straddle two cultures.

The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia

Melbourne University Publishing
March 2002
364 pages
235 x 154 mm, 25 b/w illustrations & 4 maps
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-522-84989-9

Warwick Anderson, Research Professor of History
University of Sydney

Winner of the Australian Historical Association W.K. Hancock Prize 2004

In this lucid and original book, Warwick Anderson offers the first comprehensive history of Australian medical and scientific ideas about race and place.

In nineteenth-century Australia, the main commentators on race and biological differences were doctors. The medical profession entertained serious anxieties about ‘racial degeneration’ of the white population in the new land. They feared non-white races as reservoirs of disease, and they held firm beliefs on the baneful influence of the tropics on the health of Europeans.

Gradually these matters became the province of public health and biological science. In the 1930s anthropologists claimed ‘race’ as their special interest, until eventually the edifice of racial classification collapsed under its own proliferating contradictions.

The Cultivation of Whiteness examines the notion of ‘whiteness’ as a flexible category in scientific and public debates. This is the first time such an analytic framework has been used anywhere in the history of medicine or of science. Anderson also provides the first full account of experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s on Aboriginal people in the central deserts.

This very readable book draws on European and American work on the development of racial thought and on the history of representations of the body. As the first extensive (and entertaining) historical survey of ideas about the peopling of Australia, it will help to reshape debate on race, ethnicity, citizenship and environment.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The Temperate South
  • 1. Antipodean Britons
  • 2. A Cultivated Society
• The Northern Tropics
  • 3. No Place for a White Man
  • 4. The Making of the Tropical White Man
  • 5. White Triumph in the Tropics?
  • 6. Whitening the Nation
• Aboriginal Australia
  • 7. From Deserts the Prophets Come
  • 8. The Reproductive Frontier
• Conclusion: Biology and Nation
• Notes
• Bibliography of Works Cited
• Index

An Estimate of Assimilation Rate of Mixed-Blood Aborigines in New South Wales

Oceania
Volume 32, Number 3 (March, 1962)
pages 187-190

J. Le Gay Brereton

Some anthropologists have suggested that the Aboriginal population of New South Wales (very largely mixed-bloods) will prefer integration to assimilation. It is therefore important to obtain some estimate of the rate of assimilation in recent years (Elkin, 1960; Bell, 1960).

Assimilation here is taken to have occurred if mixed-bloods (1) no longer mix predominantly with mixed-bloods but find their friends as much or more among white Australians ; (2) live in houses typical of white Australians, dispersed among white Australians, at a standard of living like that of white Australians ; and (3) for purposes of census regard themselves as white Australians, and not mixed-blood or Aboriginal Australians.

An estimate of crude birth-rate and death-rate of mixed-bloods was made from published records of Stations in the Reports of the Aboriginal Welfare Board for the years 1944 to 1959. The birth-rates and death-rates were calculated for each year and the variation analysed by the linear regression of these rates on time. No trend was demonstrable for birth-rate, but the death-rate showed a fall which was significant (P<0.01). The average birth-rate and death-rate over the whole period was 41.8748 and 13.2056 per 1,000 persons per year, giving a crude net increase of 28.6692. No countries have a higher rate than this except Mexico (34.0 persons per 1,000 persons per year) (Commonwealth Year Book, 1959). Although it has been shown that the erode death-rate is falling, it will be assumed that the life table is fixed; in this way the population capacity to increase is underestimated. The crude net increase (28.6692) is not an ideal figure for estimating the growth of the population. It would be better to use the true rate of natural increase (Dublin and Lotka, 1925). However, this cannot be calculated owing to the lack of reliable life-tables and age-specific fecundities for the mixed-blood population. Nevertheless calculations were made using various life-tables and age-specific fecundities, and a standard mean length of a generation (28.5 years). These results are set out in Table 1. They show that to obtain a crude birth-rate as high as 23.0 live births per 1,000 persons per year, a population must have a good survival rate, and in contrast to most high age-specific fecundity schedules, high fertility in the 15-19 and 20-24 years age classes.  The crude birth-rate on stations is considerably higher than this,…

Migration and Race Mixture from the Genetic Angle

The Eugenics Review
Volume 51, Number 2 (July 1959)
pages 93-97

Sir Macfarlane Burnet, O.M., F.R.S., Director
Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research

This paper was prepared at the request of the Department of Immigration for discussion by delegates at the Australian Citizenship Convention. The views expressed in it are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Department.

From the long-term point of view, immigration is chiefly important to Australia for the overall changes that it will eventually make in the genetic character of our population. Every growing country that receives substantial immigration from other parts of the world is in a sense a melting-pot from which new combinations of body-build, of skin colour, and even of personality, may eventually emerge. The process is immensely complex and can only be described in broad outline. In many ways our description can be no more than an attempt to interpret the human observations in terms of genetic ideas that have been developed from the study of such very different animals as fruit ffies and mice. Yet the very fact that basically similar gentic laws are evident in the behaviour of mice, of fruit flies, and of bacteria, makes us confident that they are equally applicable to man…

…Advantages and Disadvantages of Race Mixture

Extensive reading has failed to locate a single example where it can be shown that hybrid races or individuals living under circumstances where no social disability attached to their condition, were demonstrably inferior to both parents. Where healthy typical individuals of each race are concerned, the offspring can be expected to show greater physical health than either and-though here the evidence is slighter-a greater likelihood of exceptional mental ability.

Serious attempts have been made to show that where different racial groups mingle, there the likelihood of an outcropping of genius is highest. Kretchmer considered that where the Alpine race containing Neanderthal genes made contact with Nordics in the German speaking parts of Europe, there had appeared an exceptional number of outstanding men. Toynbee generalized that “the geneses of civilization require creative contributions from more races than one”. It seems to be the general rule that there is a lag period of a few centuries between the beginnings of race mixture in a given region and the full flowering of a new culture or civilization.

There are potential genetic disadvantages of race mixture and it is probably true that particularly in later generations than the primary hybrid, occasional individuals with discordant characters, e.g. teeth over-large for the jaw that carries them, can be seen. It has not been shown decisively that such discordancies are more frequent than in people not descended from recent racial mixture…

Read the entire article here.

Racial Ambiguity and Whiteness in Brian Castro’s Drift

Journal of the European Association of Studies on Australia
Volume 2, Number 2, 2009
pages 113-126
ISSN 2013-6897

Marilyne Brun, Lecturer in Postcolonia Studies
Université Nancy 2

This article focuses on Drift, the fifth novel of contemporary Australian writer, Brian Castro, and concentrates on the ambiguous racial inscriptions of some of its characters. While white experimental British writer B.S. Johnson progressively becomes darker in the novel, his desire to escape his whiteness is complicated by another extreme, the albinism of Tasmanian Aboriginal Thomas McGann. This article discusses one essential aspect of these surprising fictional representations: the critique of whiteness that they articulate. The racial ambiguity of the two main characters offers a subtle reflection on Tasmania’s colonial legacy. Yet beyond Castro’s exploration of the contingencies of the Tasmanian context, the characters‟ racial ambivalence destabilises conventional representations of whiteness. The novel both exposes the metonymic nature of whiteness and critiques the specific modes of reading the body that are involved in preoccupations with whiteness.

Read the entire article here.

Dreams and Nightmares of a White Australia: Representing Aboriginal Assimilation in the Mid-twentieth Century

Peter Lang Publishing Group
2009
257 pages
Weight: 0.410 kg, 0.904 lbs
Paperback ISBN:  978-3-03911-722-2
Series: Studies in Asia-Pacific “Mixed Race” (Volume 3)

Catriona Elder, Professor of Sociology
University of Syndney

By the mid-twentieth century the various Australian states began changing their approaches to Aboriginal peoples from one of exclusion to assimilation. These policy changes meant that Aboriginal people, particularly those identified as being of mixed heritage, were to be encouraged to become part of the dominant non-Aboriginal community—the Australian nation.

This book explores this significant policy change from a cultural perspective, considering the ways in which assimilation was imagined in literary fiction of the 1950s and 1960s. Drawing on novels from a range of genres—the Gothic, historical romance, the western and family melodrama–it analyses how these texts tell their assimilation stories.

Taking insights from critical whiteness studies the author highlights both the pleasures and anxieties that the idea of Aboriginal assimilation raised in the non-Aboriginal community. There are elements of these assimilation stories—maternal love, stolen children, violence and land ownership—that still have an impact in the unsettled present of many post-colonial nations. By exploring the history of assimilation the author suggests ideas for a different future.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• CHAPTER 1: Writing a story of mixed-race relations in ‘white Australia’  (first 3 pages)
• CHAPTER 2: Mapping a ‘white Australia’: political and government responses to the ‘half-caste’ problem
• CHAPTER 3: Blood: elimination, assimilation and the white Australian nation in E. V. Timms’ The Scarlet Frontier
• CHAPTER 4: Making families white: Indigenous mothers, families and children in Gwen Meredith’s Blue Hills: the Ternna-Boolla Story
• CHAPTER 5: Haunted homes: children, desire and dispossession in Helen Heney’s The Leaping Blaze
• CHAPTER 6: Scopic pleasure and fantasy: visualising assimilation and the half-caste in Leonard Mann’s Venus Half-Caste
• CHAPTER 7: Dead centre: frontier relations in Olaf Ruhen’s Naked Under Capricorn
• CHAPTER 8: Conclusion
• Bibliography

Visibly Different: Face, Place and Race in Australia

Peter Lang Publishing Group
2007
186 pages
Weight: 0.330 kg, 0.728 lbs
Paperback ISBN: 978-3-03911-323-1
Series: Studies in Asia-Pacific “Mixed Race” (Volume 2)

Edited by:

Maureen Perkins, Associate Professor of History, Anthropology and Sociology
Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia

What does an Australian look like? Many Australians assume that there is such a thing as an ‘ethnic’ face, and that it indicates recent arrival or refugee status. This volume contains nine life narratives by Australians who reflect on the experience of being categorised on the basis of their facial appearance.

The problem of who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’ is at the heart of some of the most important challenges facing the contemporary world. Assuming that facial appearance and identity are inextricably linked makes this challenge even harder.

The introduction by the editor provides the theoretical framework to these narratives. It discusses the relevance to notions of belonging and identity of the term ‘mixed race’, and concludes that we are all mixed race, whether we look white, black or ‘ethnic’.

Table of Contents

• Maureen Perkins: Visibly Different: Face, Place and Race in Australia
• Jan Teagle Kapetas: Lubra Lips, Lubra Lips: Reflections on my Face
• Jean Boladeras: The Desolate Loneliness of Racial Passing
• Lynette Rodriguez: But Who Are You Really?
• Wendy Holland: Rehearsing Multiple Identities
• Christine Choo/Antoinette Carrier/Clarissa Choo/Simon Choo: Being Eurasian
• Glenn D’Cruz: ‘Where Are You Coming From, Sir?’
• Farida Tilbury: Hyphenated Realities: Growing up in an Indian-American-Bruneian Baha’i in ‘Multicultural’ Australia
• Hsu-Ming Teo: Alien Asian in the Australian Nation
• Ien Ang: Between Asia and the West.

‘Breed out the Colour’ or the Importance of Being White

Australian Historical Studies
Volume 33, Issue 120 (2002)
pages 286-302
DOI: 10.1080/10314610208596220

Russell McGregor, Associate Professor of History
James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

This article examines inter-war proposals to ‘breed out the colour’ of Aborigines of mixed descent. Positioning these proposals in the context of contemporary Australian nationalism, scientific discourses and administrative practice, the article concludes with a discussion of their alleged genocidal intent.

In Australia between the wars, ‘breeding out the colour’ was propounded as a solution to the ‘half-caste problem’. It was a perverse proposition. The supposed problems deriving from miscegenation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians would be remedied by instituting still more comprehensive regimes of miscegenation. But now miscegenation would be managed. And the perversity of absorption did not end there. It was a nationalist project, aspiring to keep Australia white; but it flew in the face of commonly understood notions of White Australia as a doctrine of racial purity. Absorption was intensely racist but at the same time defied prevalent racist assumptions of ‘hybrid inferiority’ and demands for the segregation of ‘half-castes’. It was in certain respects a eugenist strategy, but in others dashed with eugenic principles, Absorption held a component of humanitarian welfarism; it also evinced a profound disdain for the subjects of its welfare interventions, a disdain that could extend to the attempted eradication of all vestiges of Aboriginality. This aticle explores these multiple and conflicting imensions of schemes to ‘breed out the colour’ in the Inter-war years.

For all its myriad inspirations and aspirations, ‘breeding out the colour’ was above all just that: a stratagem to erase ‘colour’, to bleach Australia white through programs of regulated reproduction. So committed were its proponents to the process of whitening that one could imagine that they took whiteness as an end in itself, a taken-for-granted good. Perhaps they did. Whiteness was a potent signifier: of virtue, of racial superiority, above all in this context, of national membership. Breeding the colour out of persons of Aboriginal descent was equally a process of breeding them into the community of the nation. Inter-war programs of biological absorption should be understood, I argue, in the…

Read or purchase the article here.