Indifferent Inclusion

Aboriginal People and the Australian Nation

By Russell McGregor

Aboriginal Studies Press

Copyright © 2011 Russell McGregor
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-85575-779-3

Contents

Illustrations,
Acknowledgments,
Preface,
Notes on Terminology,
Abbreviations and Acronyms,
Prologue: The Crimson Thread of Whiteness,
CHAPTER 1 Preserving the National Complexion,
CHAPTER 2 Primitive Possibilities,
CHAPTER 3 Aboriginal Activists Demand Acceptance,
CHAPTER 4 Restricted Reconstruction,
CHAPTER 5 To Live as We Do,
CHAPTER 6 Assimilation and Integration,
CHAPTER 7 Enriching the Nation,
CHAPTER 8 Fellow Australians,
CHAPTER 9 After the Referendum,
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’. 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.

Managing miscegenation

Ideas of biological absorption long predated the 1930s, though earlier observers tended to assume that the merging of half-caste into white would occur ‘naturally’, without any need for state intervention. The first jurisdiction to attempt to accelerate the process was Victoria, with an 1886 Act that sought to keep full-bloods on reserves where they could conveniently expire while pushing their mixed-descent progeny into the wider community. This legislation was initiated not by the colonial government but by the Board for the Protection of Aborigines, which sought to reduce its financial commitments and to stymie the Coranderrk Aboriginal community’s increasing assertiveness against the Board’s authority. Later absorptionist programs, too, were typically instigated not by parliaments but by bodies charged with the administration of Aboriginal affairs.

In the early twentieth century, state intervention in Aboriginal lives intensified. Among the interventions, fair-complexioned children of mixed descent were commonly taken from their families and raised in institutions or foster homes to facilitate their absorption into the white population. Yet these absorptionist practices were unsystematic, their potential impact confounded by the simultaneously pursued policy of segregation. It was, after all, the high reproduction rate in segregated, more or less closed, mixed-descent communities that gave rise to the contemporary ‘half-caste problem’.

The distinctiveness of 1930s absorptionist policies lay in their attempted systematisation. Instead of merely removing fair-complexioned, mixed-descent children from their families as they happened to appear, officials would actively intervene to promote the reproduction of increasingly fair-skinned individuals. The reproductive futures of mixed-descent people would be regulated, with each successive generation becoming progressively more European in ancestry until ultimately all outward signs of Aboriginal descent were ‘bred out’ (see Plate 1). This required both the promotion of interbreeding between white and part-Aboriginal Australians, and the curtailment of unions between full- and part-Aboriginal people, these restrictions extending across several generations. It is this attribute of trans-generational reproductive management that distinguishes interwar programs of ‘breeding out the colour’ from earlier haphazard attempts at ‘merging’. It must be noted at the outset, however, that while these breeding programs were clearly set out on paper and partially put into operation, nowhere were they comprehensively implemented.

In the interwar years, intensifying state intrusions into Aboriginal lives were not always motivated by absorptionist aims. In Queensland, state intervention was arguably more intense than in any other jurisdiction, but Queensland did not pursue a policy of ‘breeding out the colour’. Western Australia did, and that state’s Native Administration Act 1936 gave Commissioner Neville greater powers over a wider range of persons of Aboriginal descent than hitherto, including legal guardianship of their children, limitations on those with whom they could legally associate and control over their choice of marital partner. ‘Breeding out the colour’ was nowhere prescribed as the objective of the Act, but it provided the mechanisms deployed by Neville to that end.

Since no government ever enshrined biological absorption in legislation, its status as policy has been disputed. The word ‘policy’ may be open to several interpretations, but if it is taken to refer to a set of objectives and a course of action endorsed and pursued by those charged with authority within an area of governance, biological absorption was surely official policy in Western Australia and the Northern Territory for most of the 1930s. However, it was a policy initiated not by parliament or any minister, but rather by senior members of the bureaucracy. That the initiative in policy-making should be so delegated is indicative of the slight importance attached to Aboriginal affairs. It is likely, too, that politicians deliberately distanced themselves from this policy initiative, for whenever proposals to breed out the colour were aired publicly, they provoked a chorus of condemnation.

Even within the bureaucracy, misgivings were expressed. Sometimes these were on pragmatic grounds, as when JA Carrodus, Acting Administrator of the Northern Territory in 1934, stated that while the ‘effort to breed out colour’ was ‘commendable’, it would never be accomplished. ‘It will be found,’ Carrodus averred, ‘that half-castes will prefer to marry half-castes’, and Aboriginal administrations would better be served by facing squarely the fact of ‘a large natural increase in the half-caste population from the mating of half-caste with half-caste’. Sometimes ethical concerns were raised, as when HC Brown, Secretary of the Department of the Interior, pointed out the impropriety of state intervention in so private a matter as choice of marital partner.

Such misgivings notwithstanding, the inordinate powers vested in the senior administrators of Aboriginal affairs allowed Neville and Cook to pursue their ambitions with little overt official hindrance. The impediments came from elsewhere. Government parsimony was a far greater restraint than deliberate obstruction, with neither Neville nor Cook being granted anywhere near adequate funds to achieve their grand ambitions. Missionary opinion on absorption was divided but predominantly hostile, with the Australian National Missionary Conference of 1937 proclaiming its opposition. Neville represented Christian missions as the single greatest impediment to his plans; he complained that missionaries ‘allow the half-castes under their control to marry anybody’. To Neville, it was axiomatic that half-castes should have no such freedom of choice of marital partner. However, while he could prohibit ‘undesirable’ marriages, he could not compel ‘desirable’ ones, and half-caste women displayed no overwhelming desire to marry white men (or vice versa). In the eleven years of Cook’s Chief Protectorship, fewer than fifty such marriages were celebrated. Neville’s plans met with no more success. Gender sensitivities posed insuperable problems since the only interracial unions considered potentially acceptable were between half-caste women and white men. Sexual intercourse between half-caste men and white women was so repugnant as to be almost unthinkable, leaving only half the half-caste population eligible for participation in absorptionist programs.

Despite these serious — arguably insurmountable — difficulties, Western Australia and the Northern Territory persisted with the policy for roughly a decade. In other states too, absorption was an element of Aboriginal policy, though pursued less relentlessly than in these two jurisdictions. Whatever its other outcomes, it produced a bitter harvest of broken families of the kind revealed in the 1997 Bringing them home report.

Yet absorption also manifested humanitarian intentions. It was an austere and arrogant humanitarianism, but exponents of ‘breeding out the colour’ were committed to the welfare of those they sought to whiten. Neville insisted that ‘our coloured people must be helped in spite of themselves’. By ‘help’ he meant not merely the provision of economic, educational and vocational facilities, but eradication of the perceived root cause of their ostracism and disadvantage: the colour that set them apart from the national community. Whiteness, in this conception, was the greatest boon that could be conferred upon a people, both for their individual well-being and for the sake of the nation as a whole. The same combination of humanitarian solicitude with white Australian arrogance is apparent in Cook’s assertion that, for their own welfare, it was ‘absolutely essential that [the half-caste] should be given an opportunity of evolving, more or less into a white man’. In Cook’s view, there could be no smoother pathway to social advancement than the one that led to whiteness. Equally, there could be no other route to national membership.

While Neville considered half-castes worthy of help, he was convinced that full-bloods were beyond assistance. At the 1937 Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities, he explained that full-bloods constituted a ‘problem … which will eventually solve itself [since] no matter what we do, they will die out’. By this, he did not mean that they would leave no descendants, merely none of full descent. This was the pertinence of JA Carrodus’s statement that, ‘Ultimately, if history is repeated, the full-bloods will become half-castes.’ It was on this supposition that the more ardent advocates of ‘breeding out the colour’ envisaged the process eventually subsuming the entire Aboriginal race.

No advocate was more ardent than Neville. At the 1937 conference — which marks the peak of official endorsement of absorption — he posed a rhetorical question that encapsulated the zenith of absorptionist fervour: ‘Are we going to have a population of 1,000,000 blacks in the Commonwealth, or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there ever were any aborigines in Australia?’ It was an extreme expression, and perhaps not meant to be taken literally. Neville wrote several books and many articles on Aboriginal issues, which were surely a way of memorialising rather than ‘forgetting’ them. Yet his rhetoric calls to mind Ernest Renan’s remark about nationhood being founded as much on selective forgetting as it is on remembrance of the past. At the 1937 conference, Cecil Cook also raised the scaremongering scenario of ‘a large black population’ in the Northern Territory, rapidly reproducing and threatening to ‘swamp the white’. Although more circumspect than Neville, Cook also proffered absorption as the only viable prophylactic. Other officials at the 1937 conference were broadly in agreement, although there were differences of opinion about how far the state could go in pursuit of this end.

The only significant discordant voice at the 1937 conference was Queensland’s Chief Protector, JW Bleakley. He maintained that ‘the half-breed … cannot happily be absorbed into the white race’ and that while a minority of ‘crossbreeds’ could take their ‘place in the white community’, the vast majority would be ‘more happily absorbed by their mother’s people in circumstances where they can be given vocational and domestic training to take their part in the development of a self-contained native community’. Bleakley’s regime in Queensland represented the acme of authoritarian paternalism towards Aboriginal people. Yet he insisted that ‘we have no right to attempt to destroy their national life. Like ourselves, they are entitled to retain their racial entity and racial pride.’ Bleakley sought to protect and control Aboriginal people as an ethnic minority, whose membership included most (though not all) persons of mixed descent. Proponents of ‘breeding out the colour’, on the other hand, aimed at preventing the perpetuation of such a minority.

Above all else, ‘breeding out the colour’ sought to maintain ‘an All White Australia’. The nation was to be white not merely in a metaphorical sense, but physically, tangibly, epidermically white. As a Western Australian advocate of absorption, Dr Cyril Bryan, stated, ‘the continued infiltration of white blood will finally stamp out the black colour, which, when all is said and done, is what we object to’. At least some absorptionists, including Cook, were astute enough to acknowledge that ‘colour’ in itself was trivial, assuming significance only through specific sociocultural circumstances. This in no way diminished his commitment to changing the colour rather than the circumstances, for the sociocultural context in which whiteness assumed such significance was Australian nationhood itself.

The white Australia imperative was particularly overt in one line of argument pursued by Cook. On several occasions, he drew attention to ‘the very grave problem’ of interbreeding between half-castes and ‘alien coloured races’ — that is, Asians. The ‘multiplication of multicolour humanity by the mating of Halfcastes with alien coloured blood shall be reduced to a minimum,’ he declared. The most effective way of doing this was to ensure that half-caste women were safely married to white men. Cook was quite candid about this, stating that part-Aboriginal women ‘must be married to men substantially of European origin’ in order to control ‘the propagation of the hybrid [of] alien coloured’ ancestry. Advertising the virtues of his policy, he explained that the ‘success achieved by encouraging the marriage of half-castes to whites has curtailed the birth rate of hybrids of coloured alien paternity’. In this rendition, reproductive control was directed primarily at stifling an Asian infusion into the nation, and half-castes were merely the conduits through whom Asian blood could flow. Cook’s arguments highlight the fact that his and other absorptionist strategies were directed against colour — any colour other than white — rather than against Aboriginality per se.

Colour — or its absence — was vital because a nationalism that emphasises ethnicity necessarily puts a premium on shared descent. What matters for ethnic cohesion is not the veracity of the claimed common descent but its plausibility, so the binding power of myth can cohere the group. Absorption strove for this plausibility. If all Australians were white, they could be attributed a shared origin, history and descent. A coloured minority could not be attributed these shared characteristics, since their discordant origins and descent would be on permanent public display. To be brought within the fold of the mythic community of descent, their colour had to be ‘bred out’. If nationhood was to be conceived in potently ethnic terms, the incorporation of new members must depend on their shedding all attributes — biological as well as cultural — that could set them apart as an alternative ethnic community. On these assumptions, absorptionists sought to maintain the ethnic constitution that had been founded at Federation. Their program entailed the sacrifice of racial purity, but that was an inevitable cost of including a racial minority in an ethnically oriented nation.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Indifferent Inclusion by Russell McGregor. Copyright © 2011 Russell McGregor. Excerpted by permission of Aboriginal Studies Press.
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