Ambiguities of race: Science on the reproductive frontier of Australia and the pacific between the wars

Australian Historical Studies

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 143-160

  Anderson, Warwick ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 68849100754     PISSN: 1031461X     EISSN: 19405049     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10314610902849302     Document Type: Review

References (111)

1. Raphael W. Cilento, The White Man in the Tropics with Especial Reference to Australia and its Dependencies (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1925), 73-74. At the time, Cilento was also acting director of public health in the Australian mandated territory of New Guinea.
2. See Marcus Clarke, The Future Australian Race (Melbourne: A. H. Massima, 1877).
3. R. Hamlyn-Harris, 'Some Anthropological Considerations of Queensland and the History of its Ethnography', Proceedings of the Royal Society of Queensland 29 (1917): 1-44, 10. Hamlyn-Harris later became Brisbane city entomologist and eradicated dengue from the metropolis.
4. Te Rangi Hiroa, 'The Passing of the Maori', Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand 55 (1924): 362-74, 374.
5. See also his 'Maori Somatology: Racial Averages', Journal of the Polynesian Society 31 (1922-23): 36-44, 145-153, 159-170; 32: 21-28, 189-199.
6. Roland B. Dixon, The Racial History of Man (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1927).
7. Stephen H. Roberts, Population Problems of the Pacific (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1927), 386, xix.
8. On Roberts, see Deryk Schreuder, 'An Unconventional Founder: Stephen Roberts and the Professionalisation of the Historical Discipline', in The Discovery of Australian History, 1890-1939, eds. Stuart Macintyre and Julian Thomas (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 125-145.
9. Felix M. Keesing, Modern Samoa: Its Government and Changing Life (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1934), 450, 457-458.
10. See also Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa, 'Half-castes Between the Wars: Colonial Categories in New Zealand and Samoa', New Zealand Journal of History 34 (2000): 98-116.
11. T. Griffith Taylor, Environment and Race: A Study of the Evolution, Migration, Settlement and Status of the Races of Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1927); and
12. Frederick L. Hoffman, 'Race Amalgamation in Hawaii', in Scientific Papers of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, ed. Charles B. Davenport (Baltimore: Williams and Williams, 1923).
13. Roberts, Population Problems, 365.
14. Henry Reynolds, Nowhere People: How International Race Thinking Shaped Australia's Identity (Camberwell, Vic.: Viking 2005), 5, 159. In the original manuscript, Reynolds included a more extensive and nuanced analysis of scientific opinion on mixed-race peoples, but the publisher unfortunately persuaded him to omit these chapters.
15. See also Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families, 1800-2000 (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000).
16. Herbert Basedow, The Possibilities of the Northern Territories of Australia, with Special Reference to Development and Migration (London: Empire Parliamentary Association, 1932), 17.
17. See Heidi Zogbaum, 'Herbert Basedow and the Removal of Aboriginal Children of Mixed Descent from Their Families', Australian Historical Studies 121 (2003): 122-138.
18. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), 186.
19. Reynolds, Nowhere People, 240.
20. Robert E. Park, 'Race Relations and Certain Frontiers', in Race and Culture Contacts, ed. Edward B. Reuter (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1934), 57-85, 78.
21. See also Robert E. Park, 'Our Racial Frontier in the Pacific [1926]', in Race and Culture: The Collected Papers of Robert E. Park (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1950), vol.1: 138-151, and
22. W. H. R. Rivers, 'The Psychological Factor', in Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia, ed. W. H. R. Rivers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 84-113, 105, 89, 90.
23. Margaret Jolly, 'Other Mothers: Maternal "Insouciance" and the Depopulation Debate in Fiji and Vanuatu, 1890-1930', in Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Postcolonial Experiences in Asia and the Pacific, eds. Margaret Jolly and Kalpana Ram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 177-212, 183.
24. Rivers, 'The Psychological Factor', 95, 104.
25. see Roy Macleod and Philip F. Rehbock, eds., Darwin's Laboratory: Evolutionary Theory and Natural History in the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994); and
26. Henrika Kuklick, 'Islands in the Pacific: Darwinian Biogeography and British Anthropology', American Ethnologist 23 (1996): 611-638.
27. Roberts travelled to Honolulu in 1925 to represent white Australia at the Congress of Pan-Pacific Peoples, sponsored by the new Institute of Pacific Relations. See Paul Hooper, 'The Institute of Pacific Relations and the Origins of Asian and Pacific Studies', Pacific Affairs 41 (1988): 67-92; and
28. Tomoko Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific: The United States, Japan and the Institute of Pacific Relations in War and Peace, 1919-1945 (New York: Routledge, 2002).
29. On diffusionism, see Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), and
30. 'The British Tradition', in A New History of Anthropology, ed. Henrika Kuklick (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 52-78.
31. With adequate distribution of choroquine and penicillin, populations soon increased ('Historical Epidemiology in Papua New Guinea', Papua New Guinea Medical Journal 20 [1977]: 102-109).
32. Similarly, the demographer Norma McArthur in 1967 attributed Pacific population decline solely to 'shattering epidemics of unfamiliar diseases' (Island Populations of the Pacific [Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1967], xvi). By the 1950s, all island populations were increasing rapidly.
33. On the British, see Arthur Keith, Nationality and Race from an Anthropologist's Point of View (London: Oxford University Press, 1919), 10.
34. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Helen Zimmern (London, 1967), 197. Most of Nietzsche's contemporaries, however, asserted German racial purity.
35. See Léon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe, trans. Edmund Howard (London: Chatto Heinemann, 1974).
36. Lucy Bland, 'White Women and Men of Colour: Miscegenation Fears in Britain After the Great War', Gender and History 17 (2005): 29-61;
37. J. W. Gregory, The Menace of Colour (London: Seeley Service 1925); and
38. R. Ruggles Gates, 'The Case for Racial Crossing', Nature 139 (1937): 1087-1088.
39. The scientific investigation of mixed-race populations has excited little historical attention. For brief overviews of the science of race mixing, see William B. Provine, 'Geneticists and the Biology of Race Crossing', Science 182 (1971): 790-796; and
40. Paul Farber, 'Race-mixing and Science in the United States', Endeavour 27 (2003): 166-170.
41. Franz Boas, 'The half-blood Indian [1894]', in Race, Language and Culture (New York: Free Press, 1940), 138-148; and
42. Albert E. Jenks, 'Indian-white Amalgamation: An Anthropometric Study', University of Minnesota Studies in the Social Sciences 6 (1916): 1-24, and
43. 'Assimilation in the Philippines, as Interpreted in Terms of Assimilation in America', American Journal of Sociology (1917): 773-791.
44. Charles B. Davenport, 'Notes on the Physical Anthropology of Australian Aborigines and Blackwhite Hybrids', American Journal of Physical Anthropology 8 (1925): 73-94.
45. See Charles E. Rosenberg, 'Charles Benedict Davenport and the irony of American eugenics', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 15 (1983): 18-23; and
46. Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
47. T. Griffith Taylor and F. Jardine, 'Kamilaroi and white: a study of racial mixture in New South Wales', Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of NSW 58 (1924): 268-292.
48. Davenport and Steggerda were worried that Jamaican hybrids, inheriting the short arms of whites and the long legs of blacks, would have trouble stooping and picking things off the ground; browns became 'muddled and wuzzle-headed' (Race Crossing in Jamaica [Washington DC: Carnegie Institution, 1929], 469).
49. See also Charles B. Davenport, 'Effects of Race Intermingling', Proc. American Philosophical Society 130 (1917): 364-368.
50. For contemporary critiques, see Karl Pearson, 'Race Crossing in Jamaica', Nature 126 (1930): 427-428; and
51. William E. Castle, 'Race Mixture and Physical Disharmonies', Science 71 (1930): 603-606.
52. For South Africa, see H. B. Fantham and A. Porter, 'Notes on Some Cases of Racial Admixture in South Africa', South African Journal of Science 24 (1927): 484-485.
53. See also Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
54. W. E. B. Dubois, 'Miscegenation [1935]', in Against, Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887-1961, by W. E. B. Dubois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 90-102, 99.
55. Melville J. Herskovits, 'Variability and Race Mixture', American Naturalist 61 (1927): 68-81,
56. and 'Social Selection and the Formation of Human types', Human Biology 1 (1929): 250-262. Herskovits believed a distinct new human type was emerging.
57. See also E. B. Reuter, The Mulatto in the United States (Boston: Badger, 1918), and
58. Race Mixture: Studies in Intermarriage and Miscegenation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931).
59. Earnest A. Hooton, 'Progress in the Study of Race Mixtures with Special Reference to Work Carried on at Harvard University', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 65 (1926): 312- 325, 312.
60. See also his 'Race Mixture in the United States', Pacific Review 2 (1921): 116-127, and
61. Up from the Ape (London: Allen and Unwin, 1931).
62. L. C. Dunn, An Anthropometric Study of Hawaiians of Pure and Mixed Blood (Cambridge MA: Peabody Museum, 1928), 2.
63. See also his 'Some Results of Race Mixture in Hawaii', in Scientific Papers of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, ed. Charles B. Davenport (Baltimore: Williams and Williams, 1923).
64. See also Louis R. Sullivan, 'The Racial Diversity of the Polynesian Peoples', Journal of Polynesian Society 32 (1923): 79-84.
65. H. L. Shapiro, The Heritage of the Bounty: The Story of Pitcairn Through Six Generations (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936). Shapiro was able to land and investigate the Pitcairners in 1934.
66. Hooton, 'Progress in the Study of Race Mixture', 319.
67. Dixon, Racial History, 518.
68. William E. Castle, 'Biological and Social Consequences of Race-crossing', American Journal of Physical Anthropology 9 (1926): 145-156, 151, 147.
69. Edward M. East was slightly more cautious, asserting 'intercrossing between closely related race-stocks, followed by those periods of more or less intensive inbreeding which are inevitable because of society's stultification, has promoted race progress' (Mankind at the Crossroads [1924], 128n).
70. Herbert Spencer Jennings, The Biological Basis of Human Nature (London: Faber and Faber, 1930), 276.
71. Park, 'Race Relations', 78.
72. Norman B. Tindale, 7 October 1936, in Journal of Anthropological Visit to United States and Europe, 1936-7, Tindale collection, AA 338/1/46/1, South Australian Museum Archives, vol.1, 383. Tindale also visited S. D. Porteus in Hawaii and Griffith Taylor at Toronto.
73. Birdsell to Hooton, 13 February 1939, Hooton papers, box 22. For a more detailed account of the expedition, see Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2006), chapter 8.
74. Norman B. Tindale, 19 January 1939, in Harvard and Adelaide Universities' Anthropological Journal, 1938-1939, 2 vols., Tindale collection, AA 338/1/15/1, South Australian Museum Archives, vol.2, 69 (insert).
75. Norman B. Tindale, 'Survey of the half-caste problem in South Australia', Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, South Australian Branch 42 (1940-1941): 66-161, 67, 68, 124.
76. Birdsell to Hooton, 4 July 1938, Hooton papers, box 22. See also Joseph B. Birdsell, Australian Daily Field Journal, 1938-1939, 2 vols., Birdsell collection, AA 689, South Australian Museum Archives.
77. Anon., 'Do Not Isolate Them - Help Them', Adelaide Mail (8 July 1913), clipping attached to
78. Tindale, Harvard and Adelaide Universities' Anthropological Expedition Journal, vol.2. 57 Birdsell to Hooton, 27 October 1950, Hooton papers, box 3, folder 7: Birdsell.
79. J. B. Birdsell, Human Evolution: An Introduction to the New Physical Anthropology, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Rand McNally College Publishing, 1975), 533.
80. J. B. Birdsell, Microevolutionary Patterns in Aboriginal Australia: A Gradient Analysis of Clines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), n.p.
81. A. P. Elkin, 'The Practical Value of Anthropology', Morpeth Review 1 (1929): 23-33.
82. On Elkin, see TiggerWise, The Self-Made Anthropologist: A Life of A. P. Elkin (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1985).
83. For Elkin's diffusionism, see A. P. Elkin and N. W. G. Macintosh, eds., Grafton Elliot Smith: The Man and his Work (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1974); and
84. Russell McGregor, 'Assimilation as Acculturation: A. P. Elkin and the dynamics of cultural change', in Contesting Assimilation, ed. Tim Rowse (Perth, WA: Curtin University Press, 2005), 169-183.
85. See also Geoffrey Gray, 'From Nomadism to Citizenship: A. P. Elkin and Aboriginal Advancement', in Citizenship and Indigenous Australians: Changing Conceptions and Possibilities, eds. Nicolas Peterson and Will Sanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 55-78.
86. Both Roberts and Elkin expressed some reservations about miscegenation. Roberts praised crosses with Polynesians but wondered sometimes about the advisability of mixing with Melanesians and Papuans. Elkin speculated that the 'culture potential' of certain groups might limit their amenability. On racial 'culture potential', see G. Pitt-Rivers, 'The Effect on Native Races of Contact with European Civilisation', Man 27 (1927): 2-10.
87. Elkin to Te Rangi Hiroa, 9 June 1937; Te Rangi Hiroa to Elkin, 10 July 1937; Elkin to Te Rangi Hiroa, 4 August 1937; folder 54, series 41, A. P. Elkin papers P130, University of Sydney Archives. On the impact of the conference, see A. P. Elkin, 'Native Education, with Special Reference to the Australian Aborigines', Oceania 7 (1936): 459-500.
88. Tim Rowse, 'The Modesty of the State: Hasluck and the Anthropological Critics of Assimilation', in Paul Hasluck in Australian History: Civic Personality and Public Life, eds. Tom Stannage, Kay Saunders, and Richard Nile (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998), 119-132;
89. Russell McGregor, 'Wards, Words, and Citizens: A. P. Elkin and Paul Hasluck on Assimilation', Oceania 69 (1999): 243-259; and
90. McGregor, 'Assimilation as acculturation'.
91. See also Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880-1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997).
92. A. P. Elkin, 'Anthropology and the Future of the Australian Aborigines', Oceania 5 (1934): 1-18, 18.
93. A. P. Elkin, 'Civilised Aborigines and Native Culture', Oceania 6 (1935): 117-146, 145.
94. Elkin, 'Practical Value of Anthropology', 26.
95. See also Jens Lyng, 'Racial Composition of the Australian People', in The Peopling of Australia, eds. P. D. Phillips and G. L. Wood (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1928), 163.
96. Marie Reay, 'A Half-caste Aboriginal Community in North-western New South Wales', Oceania 15 (1944-1945): 296-323;
97. R. M. and C. H. Berndt, From Black to White in South Australia (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1951); and
98. Catherine H. Berndt, 'Mateship or Success: An Assimilation Dilemma', Oceania 23 (1962): 71-89.
99. Xavier Herbert, Capricornia (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1996 [1938]), 238.
100. On Herbert's relations with Cecil Cook, see Suzanne Saunders, 'Another dimension: Xavier Herbert in the Northern Territory', Journal of Australian Studies 26 (1990): 52-65; and
101. Fiona Probyn-Rapsley, 'Some Whites are Whiter then Others: The Whitefella Skin Politics of Xavier Herbert and Cecil Cook', JASAL (2007): 157-173.
102. Elkin to minister of the interior, 8 March 1937, Commonwealth Record Series A1, 37/1718, Australian Archives, Canberra, quoted in McGregor, Imagined Destinies, 217.
103. The careers of E. W. P. Chinnery and S. G. Middleton suggest a more direct Melanesian influence on the management of Aboriginal Australian populations. Chinnery was the government anthropologist in New Guinea in the 1920s and from 1939 directed the Department of Native Affairs in the Northern Territory of Australia. Middleton, after working in New Guinea, took charge of Aboriginal welfare in Western Australia. I admit to playing fast and loose with the notion of the 'oceanic feeling', which Sigmund Freud described in 1929 as 'a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole' (Civilization and its Discontents, trans. Joan Rivière and James Strachey [London: Hogarth Press, 1973], 2). But the intimation of a connection with the world - the lack of usual of ego defences - is perhaps the psychological precondition for refusing to stigmatise other peoples.
104. My argument also relates closely to Margaret Jolly's distinction between Asia-Pacific and Oceanic imaginaries: see her "Imagining Oceania: Indigenous and Foreign Representations of a Sea of Islands," Contemporary Pacific 19 (2007): 508- 545, and
105. "The South in Southern Theory: Antipodean Reflections on the Pacific," Australian Humanities Review 44 (2008): 75-99.
106. A. P. Elkin, 'Is White Australia Doomed?' in A White Australia: Australia's Population Problem, eds. W. D. Borrie et al. (Sydney: Australasian Publishing Co., 1947), 195-206, 197, 198.
107. A. P. Elkin, 'The Future of the Australian Aborigine', Current Affairs Bulletin 1 (1948): 15.
108. As well as Scott and Dyason (who were brothers-in-law), this group included Frederic W. Eggleston, John Latham, andWilliam Harrison Moore. See also Leonie Foster, High Hopes: The Men and Motives of the Australian Round Table (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 1986).
109. J. Macmillan Brown, Peoples and Problems of the Pacific, 2 vols. (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1927), vol.2, 260. Brown, the chancellor of the University of New Zealand, came on board at Auckland.
110. See J. Macmillan Brown, The Memoirs of John Macmillan Brown (Christchurch NZ: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1974).
111. J. Macmillan Brown, 'An Ancient Race-blending Region in the Pacific', Journal of Race Development 5 (1914): 151-159, 159, 152.