Geography, race and nation: Remapping 'tropical' Australia, 1890-1930.

Historical Records of Australian Science

Volumn 11, Issue 4, 1996, Pages 457-468

  Anderson, Warwick ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0342534078     PISSN: 07273061     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1071/HR9971140457     Document Type: Review

References (117)

1. J.Langdon Parsons, 'Quarterly Report on the Northern Territory, March 31, 1885', South Australian Parliamentary Papers, No.54, 1885, p. 7.
2. William J. Sowden, in The Northern Territory As It Is: A Narrative of the South Australian Parliamentary Party's Trip (Adelaide, 1882), pp. 146-147, confirmed Parsons's fears. He reported that 'with regard to the effect of the climate upon labour, there seems to be a consensus of opinion that Europeans cannot do the hewing and the drawing. That must be undertaken by coloured folk.'
3. Sir James Barrett, 'Can Tropical Australia be Peopled by a White Race?', The Margin, 1 (1925), 28-35; p. 30.
4. On the development of the new specialty of tropical medicine in Australia, see R.A. Douglas, 'Dr Anton Breinl and the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine," Med. J. Aust., i (1977), 713-716, 748-751, 784-90;
5. Lorraine Harloe, 'Anton Breinl and the Institute of Tropical Medicine', in Roy MacLeod and Donald Denoon, eds, Health and Healing in Tropical Australia and New Guinea (Townsville, 1991);
6. and Douglas Gordon, Mad Dogs and Englishmen Went out in the Queensland Sun (Brisbane, 1990).
7. More generally, see Michael Worboys, 'The Emergence of Tropical Medicine: A Study in the Establishment of a Scientific Specialty', in G. Lemaine et al., eds, Perspectives on the Emergence of Scientific Disciplines (The Hague, 1976).
8. Warwick Anderson, 'The Natures of Culture: Environment and Race in the Colonial Tropics', presented at a conference on 'Environmental Discourses in South Asia and Southeast Asia', Social Science Research Council, USA, Hilo, Hawaii, December 1995.
9. In a sense I am describing the end of the medical discourse on settlement analyzed by Conevery Bolton, 'The Geography of Health and the Making of the American West: Arkansas and Missouri 1800-1850', A conference on 'Environmental Discourses in South Asia and Southeast Asia. ibid.
10. On the history of medical geography, see Mirko Grmek, 'Géographie médicale et histoire des civilisations', Annates: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 18 (1963), 1071-1087
11. and Philip D. Curtin, 'The Promise and the Terror of a Tropical Environment', in The Image of Africa: British Ideas in Action, 1780 - 1850 (Madison, 1964).
12. For Australia, see J.M. Powell, 'Medical Promotion and the Consumptive Immigrant to Australia', Geographical Rev., 63 (1973), 449-476
13. and Helen R. Woolcock, '"Our Salubrious Climate": Attitudes to Health in Colonial Queensland', in Roy MacLeod and Milton Lewis, eds, Disease, medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion (London/New York, 1988).
14. For brief accounts of literature on climate and character in Australia, see Chris Tiffin, 'Imagining Countries, Imagining People: Climate and the Australian Type', Span, 24 (1987), 46-62
15. and Jon Stratton, 'Deconstructing the Territory', Cultural Studies, 3 (1989), 38-57.
16. On the development of biomedical science in Australia, see F.C. Courtice, 'Research in the Medical Sciences: The Road to National Independence', in R.W. Home, ed., Australian Science in the Making (Melbourne, 1988).
17. Myra Willard, The History of the White Australia Policy to 1920 (Melbourne, 1923);
18. N.B. Nairn, 'A Survey of the White Australia Policy in the Nineteenth Century', Australian Quarterly, 28 (1956), 16-31
19. and A.C. Palfreeman, The Administration of the White Australia Policy (Melbourne, 1967).
20. Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia: An Argument Concerning the Social Origins of Australian Radicalism and Nationalism (Ringwood, 1970);
21. Kay Saunders, 'The Black Scourge: Racial Responses toward Melanesians in Colonial Queensland', in Raymond Evans et al., eds, Race Relations in Colonial Queensland: A History of Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination (St Lucia, Qld., 1988 [1975]);
22. Verity Burgmann, 'Capital and Labour: Responses to Immigration in the Nineteenth Century', in Ann Curthoys and Andrew Markus, eds, Who are our Enemies? Racism and the Australian Working Class (Sydney, 1978);
23. and Ann Curthoys, 'Racism and Class in the Nineteenth-Century Immigration Debate', in Andrew Markus and M.C. Riklefs, eds, Surrender Australia? Essays in the Study and Uses of History (Sydney, 1985).
24. For example, J.A. La Nauze, Alfred Deakin: A Biography (Melbourne, 1965).
25. But see Raymond Evans, 'Keep White the Strain: Race Relations in a Colonial Setting', in Evans et al, eds, Race Relations in Colonial Queensland; and Michael Roe, 'The Establishment of the Australian Department of Health: Its Background and Significance', Historical Studies, 67 (1976), 176-192
26. On metropolitan race science during this period see Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800-1960 (London, 1982)
27. and George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny 1817-1914 (Hanover, NH, 1987).
28. For other studies of the local generation of colonial race theory, see C.L. Bacci, 'The Nature-Nurture Debate in Australia, 1900-1914', Australian Historical Studies, 75 (1980), 199-212
29. and David Johnson, 'Aspects of a Liberal Education: Late 19th Century Attitudes to Race, from Cambridge to the Cape Colony', History Workshop Journal, 36 (1992), 162-182
30. For a preliminary account of the connections of medicine, race, and settlement policy in the tropical colonial world during this period, see Warwick Anderson, 'Disease, Race, and Empire', Bull. Hist. Med., 70 (1996), 62-67.
31. On the need for such comparative studies, see Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Development in the Southern Hemisphere (Oxford, 1983).
32. Warwick Anderson, 'Immunities of Empire: Race, Disease, and the New Tropical Medicine', Bull. Hist. Med., 70 (1996), 94-118.
33. On acclimatization, see David N. Livingstone, 'Human Acclimatization: Perspectives in a Contested Field of Inquiry in Science, Medicine and Geography', Hist. of Sci., 25 (1987), 359-394
34. and Dane Kennedy, 'The Perils of the Midday Sun: Climatic Anxieties in the Colonial Tropics', in John D. MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and the Natural World (Manchester, 1990).
35. Gordon Reid, A Picnic with the Natives: Aboriginal-European Relations in the Northern Territory to 1910 (Melbourne, 1990)
36. On Queensland history, see Raphael Cilento and Clem Lack, Triumph in the Tropics: An Historical Sketch of Queensland (Brisbane, 1959)
37. and Geoffrey C. Bolton, A Thousand Miles Away: A History of North Queensland to 1920 (Canberra, 1963).
38. See also G.C. Bolton, Spoils and Spoilers: Australians Make Their Environment 1788 - 1980 (Sydney, 1981).
39. On the history of the labor trade, see Peter Corris, Passage, Port and Plantation: A History of the Solomon Islands Labour Migration, 1870-1914 (Melbourne, 1973);
40. Kay Saunders, Workers in Bondage: The Origins of Unfree Labour in Queensland, 1824-1916 (St Lucia, Qld., 1982);
41. and Ralph Schlomowitz, 'Epidemiology of the Pacific Labor Trade', J. Interdisciplinary Hist., 19 (1989), 585-610.
42. Clive Moore's Kanaka: A History of Melanesian Mackay (Port Moresby, 1985) emphasizes a continuing Pacific Islander presence. More generally, see Evans et al, eds, Race Relations in Colonial Queensland.
43. Ross Patrick, A History of Health and Medicine in Queensland, 1824-1960 (St Lucia, Qld., 1987), p. 531.
44. For more details on the sugar economy, see H.T. Easterby, The Queensland Sugar Industry (Brisbane, 1936).
45. Walter Maxwell, 'Report on the Cane Sugar Industry of Australia', Votes & Proceedings, Qld Parliamentary Papers, 1901, p. 2.
46. Alan Birch, 'The Implementation of the White Australia Policy in the Queensland Sugar Industry, 1901-12', Aust. J. Politics and Hist., 11 (1965), 198-210
47. and Peter Corris, 'White Australia in Action: The Repatriation of the Pacific Islanders from Queensland', Historical Studies, 15 (1972), 170-175
48. For explanations that emphasize economics over ideology, see Adrian Graves, 'The Abolition of the Queensland Labour Trade: Politics or Profits?', in E.L. Wheelwright and Ken Buckley, eds, Essays in the Political Economy of Australian Capitalism, vol.4 (Sydney, 1980)
49. and 'Crisis and Change in the Queensland Sugar Industry, 1863-1906', in Bill Albert and Adrian Graves, eds, Crisis and Change in the International Sugar Economy, 1860-1914 (Edinburgh, 1984).
50. Sean Brawley, The White Peril: Foreign Relations and Asian Immigration to Australia and North America 1918-1978 (Sydney, 1995);
51. Burgmann, Capital and Labour';
52. Curthoys, 'Racism and Class'.
53. J. Ahearne, 'The Australian in the Tropics', Red Page, Bulletin (29 September 1900).
54. Ahearne was merely echoing a medical convention of the late nineteenth century. In 1893, Dr E.A. Birch had asserted that 'under the circumstances of ordinary life, a tropical climate (of which India is a type) is inimical to the European constitution'. He could cite expert opinion that European children in such a depleting climate grow up 'slight, weedy, and delicate, over-precocious' (Birch, 'Influence of Warm Climates on the Constitution', in Andrew Davidson, ed., Hygiene and Diseases of Warm Climates [Edinburgh/London, 1893], pp. 4, 5).
55. The reform Darwinist, Benjamin Kidd, was perhaps the most pessimistic of foreign commentators, and the most widely cited in Australia. 'The attempt to acclimatize the white man in the tropics', he advised, 'must be recognized as a blunder of the first magnitude. All experiments based on the idea are mere idle and empty enterprises doomed to failure' (Control of the Tropics [London, 1898], p. 48).
56. A.G. Stephens, 'The Australian in the Tropics', Red Page, Bulletin (13 October 1900).
57. 'Mitty from Mackay', 'The Australian in the Tropics', Red Page, Bulletin (24 November 1900).
58. S.J. Richards, 'The Australian in the Tropics', Red Page, Bulletin (29 December 1900).
59. Leonard Hill, 'The Working Power of the White Man in the Tropics and the Electric Fan', BMJ, i (7 February 1914), 325.
60. 'M.B.', 'Correspondence-White Australia Policy', Med. J. Aust., i (1915), 277-78, 277.
61. James F. Merrillees, 'Correspondence-White Australia Policy', Med. J. Aust., i (1915), 345-46; p. 345.
62. 'Cosmos', 'Correspondence-White Australia Policy', Med. J. Aust, ii (1915), 43-44; p. 43
63. R.J.A. Berry, 'Correspondence-White Australia Policy', Med. J. Aust., ii (1915), 93.
64. I plan to discuss elsewhere the congruence of the older style of medical reasoning with an evolutionary anthropology that was emerging in Australia during this period. The contribution of historians to this discourse on race and environment also deserves investigation, but not here. It is worth noting, though, that the liberal historian and politician Charles H. Pearson had written his influential National Life and Character: A Forecast (London, 1893) while at the University of Melbourne. In this book he predicted that 'the black and yellow belt, which always encircles the globe between the Tropics, will extend its area, and deepen its color with time'. Pearson's work influenced Theodore Roosevelt, William Gladstone, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. During the parliamentary debate on the Immigration Restriction Bill, Edmund Barton, Australia's first Prime Minister, quoted two passages from Pearson's book to justify efforts to hold back coloured races. Alfred Deakin, Australia's second Prime Minister, later praised Pearson for first warning of the 'Yellow Peril to Caucasian civilization, creeds, and politics' (quoted in J.M. Tregenza, Professor of Democracy [Melbourne, 1968], p. 234).
65. Ellsworth Huntington, Civilization and Climate (New Haven, 1915), p. v.
66. For Huntington's defence of his Australian predictions, see 'Natural Selection and Climate in Northern Australia', Economic Record, 5 (1929), 185-201;
67. and in response, C.H. Wickens, 'Dr Huntington and Low Latitudes', Economic Record, 6 (1930), 123-127
68. and R.W. Cilento, 'Rejoinder to Professor Huntington', Economic Record, 6 (1930), 127-132. (Wickens was the Commonwealth Statistician.)
69. Griffith Taylor, The Control of Settlement by Humidity and Temperatures (Melbourne, 1916);
70. 'Geographical Factors concerning the Settlement of Tropical Australia', Proc. Roy. Geog. Soc. Qld., 32/33 (1917), 1-64
71. and 'The Distribution of Future White Settlement: A World Survey based on Physiographic Data', Geog. Rev., 12 (1922), 375-402.
72. On Taylor, see J.M. Powell, 'National Identity and the Gifted Immigrant: A Note on T. Griffith Taylor, 1880-1963', J. Intercultural Studies, 2 (1981), 43-54
73. and 'Protracted Reconciliation: Society and the Environment', in Roy MacLeod, ed., The Commonwealth of Science: ANZAAS and the Scientific Enterprise in Australia, 1888-1988 (Melbourne, 1988).
74. J.W. Gregory, 'White Labour in Tropical Agriculture: A Great Australian Experiment', The Nineteenth Century, 67 (1910), 368-80; p. 379.
75. On Gregory, see David Branagan and Elaine Lim, 'J. W. Gregory, Traveller in the Dead Heart', Hist. Rec. Aust. Sci., 6 (1984), 71-84.
76. J.W. Gregory, The Menace of Colour (London, 1925).
77. See, for example, Alfred Searcy, In Australian Tropics (London, 1907).
78. Searcy, a collector of customs at Darwin, did not believe that 'white men should actively engage in the cultivation of tropical products on the coast, or rivers, or swamps', for he was 'of the opinion that that can only be carried out by coloured labour' (p. 366).
79. F. Goldsmith, 'The Necessity for the Study of Tropical Medicine in Australia', Transactions of the Intercolonial Medical Congress of Australasia, 6th session, 1902 (Hobart, 1903), 178-79; p. 178.
80. See also G.H. Frodsham, A Bishop's Pleasaunce (London, 1915), 238.
81. Anton Breinl, 'Influence of Climate, Disease and Surroundings on the White Race Living in the Tropics', Med. J. Aust., i (1915), 595-600; p. 595.
82. A. Duckworth, 'Notes on a "White Australia"', J. & Proc. Roy. Soc. NSW, 44 (1910), 250.
83. James Barrett, in 'Tropical Australia Discussion', Transactions of the Australasian Medical Congress, 11th session, 1920 (Brisbane, 1921), 63.
84. On the development of this critique in contemporary United States tropical medicine and public health, see Warwick Anderson, 'Colonial Pathologies: American Medicine in the Philippines, 1898-1920', PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1992.
85. E. Ford, 'The Bancroft Memorial Lecture: The Life and Influence of Joseph Bancroft', Med. J. Aust., i (1961), 153-170
86. Goldsmith, 'Tropical Medicine in Australia'.
87. For a summary, see Anton Breinl and W.J. Young, 'Tropical Australia and Its Settlement', Annals of Tropical Med. and Parasitology, 13 (1920), 351-412.
88. J.S.C. Elkington, Tropical Australia: Is it Suitable for a Working White Race? (Melbourne, 1905).
89. For other accounts which touch on medical aspects of the White Australia policy, see Evans, 'Keep White the Strain', and Michael Roe, 'The Establishment of the Australian Department of Health: Its Background and Significance', Historical Studies, 67 (1976), 176-192
90. James Barrett, 'White Men for the North: The Problem of Colonization, a Plea for Research Work', Melbourne Argus, (17 September 1910), p. 4.
91. See also Barrett, The Twin Ideals: An Educated Commonwealth (London, 1918).
92. On Barrett, see Michael Roe, Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought, 1890-1960 (St Lucia, Qld., 1984), chapter 3.
93. 'Tropical Australia: Deputation from Congress to the Prime Minister," Transactions of the Australasian Medical Congress, 8th session, 1908 (Melbourne, 1909) vol. 4, pp.101, 103.
94. In 1903 the University staff included five felows of the Royal Society, but they were over-burdened with teaching and had little research equipment. When Richard Berry took up his post in the anatomy department in 1906 he complained that the building 'contained literally nothing, not even a skeleton, though later I discovered quite a lot in the cupboard'. Like many others, he felt that 'research was practically deleted from university work' (quoted in K.F. Russell, The Melbourne Medical School, 1862-1962 [Melbourne, 1972], p. 104).
95. Lori Harloe, 'White Man in Tropical Australia: Anton Breinl and the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine', BA(Hons) thesis, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1987;
96. Harloe, 'Anton Breinl; Douglas, 'Dr Anton Breinl'; and Robert Douglas, 'One Day in the Medical Life of Queensland: The Opening of the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine', in John Pearn, ed., Pioneer Medicine in Australia (Brisbane, 1988).
97. William McGregor, 'Some Problems of Tropical Medicine', Lancet, 4024 (13 October 1900), 1055-1061
98. McGregor had previously been Governor of Nigeria.
99. See R.B. Joyce, Sir William McGregor (Melbourne, 1971).
100. Douglas, 'Dr Anton Breinl, and Lori Harloe, 'From North to South: The Translocation of the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine', in Pearn, ed., Pioneer Medicine.
101. Anton Breinl, 'The Influence of Climate, Diseases and Surroundings on the White Race Living in the Tropics', in J.W. Springthorpe, ed., Therapeutics, Dietetics and Hygiene (Melbourne, 1914), vol.2, p. 996. Elsewhere in his remarkable textbook-which mixes the latest physiology with the race theories of Charles Pearson and Houston Stewart Chamberlain-Springthorpe, a lecturer in the Melbourne Medical Faculty, implied that results were already available: 'Contrary to previous beliefs', he reported, 'the acclimated non-alcoholic European can maintain mental and bodily activity without any inhibitory influence' (vol. 1, p. 214).
102. 'Tropical Australia Discussion', Transactions of the Australasian Medical Congress, 11th session, 1920 (Brisbane, 1921), 39-69; p. 45.
103. See also A. Grenfell Price, White Settlers in the Tropics (New York, 1939);
104. R.W. Cilento, The White Man in the Tropics with Especial Reference to Australia and its Dependencies (Melbourne, 1925)
105. and 'The Conquest of Climate', Med. J. Aust., i (8 April 1933), 421-432
106. (Cilento was a later director of the AITM.) The physiological research of the AITM generally replicated the work of the American Bureau of Science in the Philippines: see Warwick Anderson, '"Where Every Prospect Pleases and Only Man is Vile": Laboratory Medicine as Colonial Discourse', in Vicente L. Rafael, ed., Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures (Philadelphia, 1995).
107. W.A. Osborne, 'Physiological Factors in the Development of an Australian Race', Transactions of the Australasian Medical Congress, 11th session, 1920 (Brisbane, 1921), 71-82; pp. 76, 72.
108. 'Tropical Australia Discussion', p. 45.
109. J. H. L. Cumpston, 'Presidential Address: Public Health and State Medicine', Transactions of the Australasian Medical Congress, 11th session, 1920 (Brisbane, 1921), 77-87; p. 77.
110. J.H.L. Cumpston, in 'Tropical Australia Discussion', Transactions of the Australasian Medical Congress, 11th session, 1920 (Brisbane, 1921), p. 49.
111. Sir James Barrett, 'The Problem of the Settlement of Tropical Australia', in Twin Ideals, vol.2, pp. 286-91; p. 288.
112. See also Sir James Barrett, 'Tropical Australia', United Empire, 16 (1925), 37-43.
113. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, 1991).
114. Anton Breinl, 'The Object and Scope of Tropical Medicine in Australia', Transactions of the Australasian Medical Congress, 9th session, 1911 (Sydney, 1913), vol.1, pp. 524-35; p. 526.
115. See also his 'Facts and Figures regarding Health and Disease in Northern Australia', Transactions of the Australasian Medical Congress, 11th session, 1920 (Brisbane, 1921), 558-569
116. Sir James Barrett, 'Tropical Australia', Australian Quarterly, 24 (14 March 1934), 64-72; p. 72.
117. C.E.W. Bean, The Dreadnought of the Darling (London, 1911), p. 318.