Imagined Destinies by Russell McGregor

Author:Russell McGregor [McGregor, Russell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Australia & New Zealand, Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9780522847628
Google: nsO0AAAAIAAJ
Publisher: Melbourne University Press
Published: 1997-01-15T04:07:44+00:00

Breed Out the Colour

Norman Tindale’s survey was the first detailed scientific investigation into the feasibility of biological absorption. By the time it was published, a policy of ‘breeding out the colour’ had already been implemented in the Northern Territory; and after a trial of almost a decade had already been abandoned. In the early 1930s, when the scheme was in its heyday, Dr Cecil Cook had proclaimed that in the Territory ‘Every endeavour is being made to breed out the colour by elevating female half-castes to white standard with a view to their absorption by mating into the white population’.65 To buttress his proposals, Cook drew on the scientific theory of the Caucasian affinities of the Aboriginal race. He drew more heavily on the anecdotal observation that apparent Aboriginal features faded rapidly with successive accessions of European blood. Most heavily of all, he drew on the fear that White Australia was under threat from the growth of a coloured community within the nation.

Cecil Cook had been appointed to the dual position of Chief Medical Officer and Chief Protector of Aborigines in February 1927. His appointment was based on his medical, not his Aboriginal, expertise.66 Perhaps it was his medical background that shaped the eugenist element in Cook’s policy. Cook was supportive of the classic eugenist proposal for the sterilisation of those designated unfit. In early 1933 he sought clarification on the question of whether he, as Chief Protector, could demand the compulsory sterilisation of those half-caste children who were classified as ‘congenital idiots’ or as otherwise ‘mentally defective’.67 However, his scheme for breeding out the colour represented quite a different strand of eugenic thought. Australian eugenists tended to emphasise nurture as much as nature, and Cook’s scheme fitted into this environmental variant of eugenic ideas. He attached little significance to racial inheritance as a cause of the half-caste problem, regarding it rather as a possible solution. Moreover, he was well aware of how his scheme differed from classic eugenic prescriptions, explicitly offering it as an alternative. The uplift and biological absorption of half-castes was, he declared, ‘the only method by which the future of this country can be safeguarded in the absence of such radical methods as sterilization of the unfit and legalized abortion’.68 Lacking these ‘radical methods’ all that could be done was to conceal the outwards signs of Aboriginal descent, by successive accessions of white blood. Again in distinction from the classic eugenist viewpoint, Cook seems to have had no doubt that such concealment of heredity was possible.

Although Cook’s solution to the half-caste problem was ultimately biological, his conception of the nature of the problem itself was sociological. He contended that

The importance of a coloured element contained within a white community is dependent upon the degree of assimilation taking place and the success or otherwise with which that coloured section adopts the social, economic and industrial standards of the white. Where the coloured individual is ‘white’ in all but colour very little conflict is likely to take place .

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