Mixed Race Studies

White Without Soap [Review]

Australian Womens Book Review
Volume 23.1&2 (2011)
pages 16-18

Jean Taylor

Marguerita Stephens. White Without Soap: Philanthropy, Caste and Exclusion in Colonial Victoria 1835–1888, A Political Economy of Race. Melbourne: Melbourne University Custom Book Centre, 2010.

As it says on the frontispiece, White Without Soap was a PhD thesis in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne in November 2003. Usually, if a PhD thesis is to be published, the writer works on the thesis to make it more accessible for the general public to read. Jennifer Kelly’s Zest For Life, which gives a positive view of lesbians’ experiences of menopause, springs to mind as an example of a rewritten PhD thesis that was published by Spinifex Press in Melbourne in 2005.

However, I read Marg’s thesis not long after she had received her PhD and was mightily impressed. Not only with the academic language and the rigorous intellectual enquiry she brought to bear on this important subject and the research she did into this brutal aspect of Victoria’s past, but also as a reminder of the despicable treatment of Aboriginal people, and the ways in which we non-Aboriginal people still have a lot to learn in terms of our interaction with and our understanding of the Indigenous people of this country.

As Marg puts it in the Abstract:

The thesis explores the connections between nineteenth century imperial anthropology, racial ‘science’, and the imposition of colonising governance on the Aborigines of Port Phillip/Victoria between 1835 and 1888.

These supposedly scientific facts included the observation by a Polish traveller, Count Paul Strzelecki, that after an Aboriginal woman had a child by a European, she was then unable to bear children by an Aboriginal man. This is a plainly ludicrous suggestion, but one that Marg uses to point out just how assiduously and insidiously science was used to discredit Aborigines as a race-women in particular-and to justify the annihilation of the Aboriginal people and the confiscation of their land by the so-called superior European invaders…

…The Kulin Nation people-comprised of five language groups, Woiwurrung, Boonwurrung, Daungwurrung, Wathawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung-had survived in Central Victoria for tens of thousands of years before the European invasion in 1835. It went without saying that they were more than capable of conducting their own affairs. By 1859 Aboriginal people were in despair about their land being stolen, so that they had nowhere to hunt and gather food, and, therefore, no way to feed themselves as they had been doing since time immemorial. They petitioned the government of the time for some land they could call their own, where they could grow crops to support themselves, raise their children, and be relatively safe from murderous settlers.

Marg tells us that the government of the time had another agenda:

By the 1860s children of mixed decent, and girls in particular, had become the principal objects through which the colonial government justified the round up of the Victorian clans, and their concentration on “mission stations”.

Read the entire review here.

White Without Soap: Philanthropy, Caste and Exclusion in Colonial Victoria 1835-1888, A Political Economy of Race

University of Melbourne Custom Book Centre
2010
318 pages
Paperback ISBN: 0980759420, 9780980759426

Marguerita Stephens

Explores the connections between nineteenth century imperial anthropology, racial ‘science’ and the imposition of colonising governance on the Aborigines of Port Phillip/Victoria between 1835 and 1888. Based on the dissertation of the same name.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• The View from Coranderrk
• Note on Language
• Map
• Introduction: Imperial Economies of Race
• Chapter One: From Philanthropy to Race 1835-1848
• Chapter Two: Colonising the Body: Infanticide and Governance
• Chapter Three: Colonising the Body: A Species Apart
• Chapter Four: Citizens, Rebels and Ambiguous Identities in the Ethno-Zoo
• Chapter Five: The Coranderrk Dormitory: Gender, Caste and Extinction
• Chapter Six: ‘You can make them white here without soap’
• Conclusion: ‘Yarra, my father’s country’
• Bibliography

INTRODUCTION: Imperial Economies of Race

In the expansionary movements of the European nation stales in the nineteenth century, race and empire were mutually constituted. ‘It was’, wrote Catherine Hall, ‘colonial encounters which produced a new category, race’.1 The idea of race raised colonialism to a biological imperative. The idea of race, and the ability of individuals to perceive the marks and differentials of race, have a history of their own. What follows is a history of how Europeans in one colonial encounter came to think that race mattered and how they produced specific categories of race that gave scientific and moral warrant to their rapacious colonising. It is a political economy of race.

This study is concerned with the multilateral connections between developments in the science of race across the European imperial domain and the operations of colonial policy in one location, that of Port Phillip, later Victoria, in south-eastern Australia in the middle and late nineteenth century. Specifically, it is concerned with the interactions between anthropology and the practical management of the Victorian government’s Aboriginal station Coranderrk, onto which the Kulin people, on whose land the colonial settlement of Melbourne was established in 1835, were gathered in 1863. It is concerned with the prominence of the Australians, particularly those from the south-eastern comer of the continent, in the formulation of European concepts of race, and with the daily lives of those on whom the ethnological gaze fell so heavily. It is concerned with the circularities of colonial theory and colonizing practice which produced the extinguishing Aboriginal body and the imperial fantasy of terra nullius. Colonialism and anthropology formed an hermetic ideological coupling of power and knowledge in which European desire, be it sexual or territorial, was projected onto the colonised with such force and effect that it delivered them up as objects who entreated their own colonization. It is with the twists and turns in this multidirectional relationship between theories of race and the practical expressions of colonial power through the categories of race that this study is concerned.

In the following chapters I explore how anthropology projected imminent Aboriginal extinction as an effect of biology and culture, rather than as an effect, and an animating ambition, of colonial practice. I also explore the complicity of humanitarian philanthropists in the production of the ‘ideological dissimulations’ encapsulated in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s provocative formula: ‘white men are saving brown women from brown men’ with its slippery and readily mutable verb. In south-eastern Australia, white men produced and reinforced colonizing power through the purported rescue of brown women, whose cthnologically-predicated ill-treatment by brown men provided the singular event that permitted the suspension of the letter of the law in order to impose ‘not only a civil but a good society’.

From the generalised rape, abuse and exploitation of the sexual labour of Aboriginal women and girls by colonists on the frontier in the late 1830s, to the emphasis laid by the Victorian Board for the Protection of Aborigines (BPA) on the seizure of Aboriginal girls from their kin in the 1860s and 1870s, to the Board’s determination in the 1880s to bring ‘finality’ to the Aboriginal ‘problem’ by steering young Aboriginal women into marriages with white men, the exercise of power over Aboriginal women was the most crucial vector of colonial power. In Victoria, as in so many other colonial sites, the control of female sexuality and reproduction was, as Anne McClintock argues, crucial to the ‘transmission of white, male power’.

White Without Soap: Philanthropy, Caste and Exclusion in Colonial Victoria 1835-1888, A Political Economy of Race

University of Melbourne
November 2003
328 pages

Marguerita Stephens

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History

The thesis explores the connections between nineteenth century imperial anthropology, racial ‘science’, and the imposition of colonising governance on the Aborigines of Port Phillip/Victoria between 1835 and 1888. It explores the way that particular, albeit contested, images of Aborigines ‘became legislative’. It surveys the declining influence of liberal and Evangelical ‘philanthropy’ at the end of the 1830s, the pragmatic moral slippages that transformed humanitarian gestures into colonial terror, and the part played by the Australians in the emergence of the concept of race as the chief vector of colonial power. The thesis contrasts the rhetoric of the British Evangelicals with governmental rationalisations in connection with Major Lettsom’s murderous raid on the Kulin on the outskirts of Melbourne. It then probes two mid century ‘scientific’ discourses – one concerning the purported infertility of Aboriginal women in connection with white men (a thesis that captivated Social Darwinists but was belied by the ubiquitous presence of children of mixed descent); the other concerning the purported propensity of the Australians to wantonly destroy their own offspring – to illustrate how self-serving misinterpretations of the effects of colonisation, and of Aboriginal cultural practices, presented the Kulin as less than human and underwrote the removal of their children into ‘protective’ incarceration. It explores how a policy originally intended to ‘domesticate’ and transform the children of the Kulin into model citizens turned into a project designed to eradicate the Aborigines of Victoria by ‘breeding them out’. It considers the contestations between humanitarians and racialists at the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines and how, in the 1870s, an arcane theory that the Aborigines were of Caucasian origins came to underwrite an intentionally genocidal ‘absorption’ policy that deployed the arithmetics of caste. Throughout the thesis, the determination of the Kulin survivors to adapt to the new circumstances, their efforts to farm the Coranderrk station lands as independent, free farmer-citizens, their resistance to the Board’s efforts to ‘board out’ their children and dispossess them of every acre of land in the colony, is juxtaposed against representations of the Aborigines as primitives, savages, as less than human and inherently bound for extinction on the one hand, and as a people passively awaiting the remedy of being made ‘white without soap’ on the other.

Read the entire dissertation here.