Re-Orienting Whiteness

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Author: Katherine Ellinghaus | Jane Carey | Leigh Boucher

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Feng Chia University - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-04

Re-Orienting Whiteness

10.1057/9780230101289 - Re-Orienting Whiteness, Edited by Katherine Ellinghaus, Jane Carey and Leigh Boucher



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Edited by

Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, and Katherine Ellinghaus




RE- ORIENTING WHITENESS

Copyright © Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, and Katherine Ellinghaus, 2009. All rights reserved.

Photo Credits: Cover image: “Naked for Dinner.” Published in the Lone Hand, September 2, 1907. Figure 14.1: “A Gin and Piccaninny,” reproduced from the Rex Van Kivell Collection, NK10389, Courtesy of the National Library of Australia; Figure 14.2: “Portrait of an Aboriginal Mother and Child, Canning Stock Route, Western Australia, 1942,” reproduced from the National Library of Australia, nla.pic-vn4463084, with the kind permission of Roslyn Poignant; Figure 14.3: “Earthly Mother,” William Ricketts Sanctuary reprinted with the permission of Parks Victoria; Figure 14.4: “An Old Woman,” in Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, George French Angus, courtesy of the State Library of Victoria; Figure 14.5: “A Curiosity in Her Own Country,” cartoon by Phil May reprinted from the Bulletin, 1888. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61885–5 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



Chapter 10 is a slightly revised version of “Making Tasmania Home,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 28, nos 1 and 2 (2007): 1–17, published by the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright © 2007 by Frontiers Editorial Collective, Inc.

Acknowledgments 1

Re-Orienting Whiteness: A New Agenda for the Field Jane Carey, Leigh Boucher, and Katherine Ellinghaus Part I

vii 1

Historians Approaching the Study of Whiteness

2

Whiteness and “the Imperial Turn” Angela Woollacott

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The Strange Career of Whiteness: Miscegenation, Assimilation, Abdication Louise Newman

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“Whiteness,” Geopolitical Reconfiguration, and the Settler Empire in Nineteenth-Century Victorian Politics Leigh Boucher

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4

Part II

Whiteness as a Transnational Colonial Production

5

Traveling White Warwick Anderson

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The Question of Miscegenation in the Politics of English-Speaking Countries in the Early Twentieth Century Henry Reynolds

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8

17

“Being Thankful for their Birth in a Christian Land”: Interrogating Intersections between Whiteness and Child Rescue Shurlee Swain, Margot Hillel, and Belinda Sweeney “I Followed England Round the World”: The Rise of Trans-Imperial Anglo-Saxon Exceptionalism, and the Spatial Narratives of Nineteenth-Century British Settler Colonies of the Pacific Rim Penelope Edmonds

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Contents

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Contents

9

10

11

12

White is Wonderful: Emotional Conversion and Subjective Formation Marilyn Lake

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The Fabrication of White Homemaking: Louisa Meredith in Colonial Tasmania Patricia Grimshaw and Ann Standish

135

Reading the Shadows of Whiteness: A Case of Racial Clarity on Queensland’s Colonial Borderlands, 1880–1900 Tracey Banivanua Mar

149

The Deluded White Woman and the Expatriation of the White Child Margaret Allen

165

Part IV 13

14

15

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Whiteness and the Imagining/Managing of Colonial Populations

“Women’s Objective—A Perfect Race”: Whiteness, Eugenics, and the Articulation of Race Jane Carey

183

“Born and Nurtured in Darkest Ignorance”: White Imaginings of Aboriginal Maternity Liz Conor

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Rethinking “Squaw Men” and “Pakeha-Maori”: Legislating White Masculinity in New Zealand and Canada, 1840–1900 Angela Wanhalla Into the White Man’s Kingdom: Whiteness and Indigenous Assimilation Policies in the United States and Australia, 1880s–1960s Katherine Ellinghaus Part V

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Conclusion

Epilogue Jane Carey, Leigh Boucher, and Katherine Ellinghaus

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Notes on Contributors

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Index

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Part III Whiteness as a Settler-Colonial Identity

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his volume would not have been possible without the input of many people. We would like to thank all the participants of the Historicizing Whiteness conference, held at the University of Melbourne in 2006. The essays in this collection are much stronger for having been delivered in such a collegial and rigorous environment, and the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne provided essential institutional and financial support to make that meeting of minds possible. We are grateful to all the contributors for their patience and engagement with the project, and to Lindi Todd, Roger Knight, Vera Mackie, and David Goodman for their support (both intellectual and otherwise). When our enthusiasm for the task of historicizing whiteness f lagged we had only to turn to the work of these fine scholars to be reinspired. Sarah Pinto was a skilled, professional copy editor who went above and beyond the call of duty to smooth the edges of these many authorial voices. The editors at Palgrave are also due our gratitude for their enthusiasm and support for the project. All three editors of this volume were the product of the postgraduate school at the University of Melbourne between the mid-1990s and 2006. The friendships among fellow postgraduates and junior staff that we found there were unquestionably important to our development as scholars, and we were also fortunate to come into contact with a remarkable group of senior academics whose intellectual generosity shaped our own perspectives. We are better historians for being exposed to this rich environment at the early stages of our careers.



Acknowledgments




Re-Orienting Whiteness: A New Agenda for the Field Jane Carey, Leigh Boucher, and Katherine Ellinghaus

S

ince whiteness studies made its dramatic entrance into the U.S. academy in the early 1990s it has generated tremendous scholarly output. Monographs and edited collections have proliferated across and between numerous disciplines. Amongst all this intellectual activity, however, the question of whiteness and colonialism remains a significant and curious absence.1 As its Saidian-inspired title signals, Re-Orienting Whiteness emerges from our desire to address this gap by pushing “whiteness studies” toward a more sustained engagement with critical postcolonial thought and the history of colonialism. Despite their many obvious synergies, there has been remarkably little cross-fertilization between these approaches to understanding the modalities of race, past and present. 2 There is a clear need for this radical separation to be addressed. This collection offers an explicit challenge both to work on race in the United States (which has tended to elide the foundational significance of its settler- colonial origins), and to historical scholarship on British empirebuilding (which remains deeply conf licted over the significance of race)3. Our work is based on the conviction that the construction of whiteness and the phenomena of European colonialism are fundamentally interconnected, and that whiteness studies must be “Re-Oriented” to take this into account. Equally, a greater and more rigorous focus on whiteness as a racial category has much to offer to our understandings of the historical operations of colonialism and its ongoing effects. The essays presented here perform precisely these tasks. Most had their origins in a conference on “Historicising Whiteness” held in Melbourne, Australia, in late 2006.4 This gathering deliberately set out to move beyond the North



CHAPTER 1

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Carey, Boucher, and Ellinghaus

American focus that has shaped studies of whiteness. As conveners, we were taken aback by the level of interest it generated. While we were and are convinced that whiteness studies opened productive new avenues for historians interested in racialization broadly and colonialism specifically, we were caught unawares by the number of scholars who shared this view. This was close to a decade after the first major scholarly whiteness conference, the (in)famous Berkeley gathering of 1997, generated so much attention in and out of the U.S. academy.5 And the intervening years had witnessed many a dismissal of the field’s utility, particularly for historians. We wondered, at first, if the energy might have dissipated and we were simply caught in a time-lag. The depth and breadth of the work that appeared soon assuaged any such fears. This is not to say that this collection is united by an unfaltering commitment to whiteness studies. It is equally shaped by a uneasiness with the field tendencies toward ahistoricity, reification, and universalization; its ill-defined analytic vocabulary; and especially its potential simply to reinscribe white people at the center of historical narratives. And we are acutely aware that, since its emergence, the field has proven “a lightning rod for critics.”6 Indeed, alongside its rapid growth, the apparently deserved death of the field has been simultaneously announced as the latest headstone in a graveyard of academic fads.7 A key development that argues these dismissive predictions, however, is the degree to which the terms “white” and “whiteness” have already been adopted by historians, particularly those writing about European colonialism. These categories have recently been inserted alongside class, gender, and various “others.” 8 This book functions in some ways simply to highlight the significance of this quite startling analytic uptake. But it also registers a profound discomfort with the ways that whiteness has snuck through the backdoor into the historian’s toolkit, often with little definition or explanation. Its meanings are often taken for granted, as if they were self-evident. The nuanced, historically grounded, and theoretically broad-ranging approaches in this collection suggest a number of ways forward for scholars. As Matt Wray has recently observed, “whiteness studies has left childhood and is now enduring adolescence. It’s having its identity crisis right on time.”9 The time is ripe for a major reassessment of the field. In approaching this task, we wish to foreground the limitations that have resulted from the U.S.-centered nature of most whiteness scholarship. This is clearly problematic for a field that makes broad, even universal, claims to explaining the operations of “race.” Whiteness, obviously, has had far wider geographic purchase.10 We seek to decenter the United States in the area of whiteness studies, and in some ways to recognize that it was never central to begin with. So too, the isolationist tendencies of U.S. whiteness scholarship have produced its lack of engagement with work on race in other contexts, particularly the analytic frames that have emerged through attempts to theorize European colonialism. We contend that this nationally and theoretically limited approach represents in fact the major weakness of the field.11 In other words, whiteness needs to be reconciled with the major intellectual currents that have shaped research on race outside the United States.



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Re-Orienting Whiteness brings together historians of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe to historicize constructions of whiteness across the times and spaces of empire. “Transnationalizing” whiteness studies—and thus bringing it into contact with colonial history—re-orients the frames of whiteness for U.S. and non-U.S. scholars alike.12 Confronting the power and privilege inherent in the structured normativity and invisibility of contemporary whiteness requires that the historical roots of that power be interrogated, and the history of European colonialism is of more than passing significance to this project. If, as many scholars have argued, the very idea of race emerged through the colonial encounter, the seeming failure of whiteness studies to take this into account is both insufficient and unsustainable. While the colonial underpinnings of U.S. “structures of race” have frequently been elided,13 this collection functions to read the colonial back into whiteness.

The Rise of Whiteness and Its Discontents: U.S. Origins and Debates Despite its much longer tradition in black American writing,14 whiteness studies has its origins in the spate of foundational works of the early 1990s, which continue to mark and define the field.15 Where previously race had only been deployed to refer to “non-whites,” this scholarship firmly established whiteness too as a racial category and one in urgent need of interrogation. The key features of whiteness that emerged—and that do not need repetition here—were its inherent association with power and privilege, and its structural, invisible location as “the norm.” The exponential growth of whiteness studies since this time has been accompanied by almost equally numerous overviews of the field, some highly negative.16 Assessing the utility of whiteness specifically for U.S. historians in 2001, Eric Arnesen contended that it had “proven to be an inadequate tool of historical analysis.”17 Methodological weaknesses and definitional looseness, he argued, rendered it practically worthless. Indeed, he accused some whiteness scholars of providing little empirical evidence for their claims, suggesting instead they “put words into their subjects’ mouths . . . disregarded scholarly standards [and] employed sloppy methodology.” “Arbitrary and inconsistent definitions,” he concluded, meant “whiteness has become a blank screen onto which those who claim to analyze it can project their own meanings.”18 Arneson was not alone, as the flurry of similarly dissatisfied reviews indicated.19 Although not as scathing, Peter Kolchin, for example, also expressed uneasiness at the “elusive, undefined nature of whiteness,” the lack of “historical grounding” of many contemporary studies, and the “over-reliance on whiteness in explaining the American past.” 20 In assigning such overarching explanatory power to whiteness, he suggested, the field is prone to overstatement and overgeneralization, coming close to “portraying race as a ubiquitous and unchanging transhistorical force rather than a shifting and contingent ‘construction.’ ” 21 Kolchin also briefly observed that one of the “most striking features” of whiteness




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studies is the “assumption—sometimes asserted and sometimes unspoken—that the racism they describe is uniquely American and that American whiteness can be understood in isolation.” 22 The most influential U.S. scholarship, particularly that by labor historians, locates the creation of white identity entirely within historical circumstances quite specific to the United States, namely black chattel slavery and, later, mass immigration. 23 While this narrow national focus has not emerged as a prominent concern within existing critiques of the field, we argue that it is in fact of central importance. Much historical work on whiteness is even more narrowly positioned. As John Munro has outlined, it largely represents another in the series of U.S. labor history projects that have sought to answer the question Werner Sombart posed in 1906, “Why is there no socialism in the United States?,” and is primarily concerned with finding “a usable past upon which an anti-capitalist and antiracist future can be envisioned.” 24 This in part explains why it has largely ignored wider scholarship that does not share these, very particular, interests, and why many objections to whiteness studies have simply joined the long history of attempts to assert the primacy of class over race. 25 Despite pretensions to an almost universal applicability, distinct U.S. academic debates, as well as specific political projects and disavowals (particularly of the settler-colonial underpinnings of the United States), silently orient the field. In many ways, debates about whiteness have primarily ref lected a turf war over leadership in the field of labor history in the United States. The issues at stake are far too important to allow them to be subsumed within such parochial concerns.

Provincializing America: Putting the Colonial Back into Whiteness and Whiteness into the Colonial Unmooring whiteness from its foundations in U.S. pasts and presents promises to overcome many of the field’s conceptual blind spots. By foregrounding the importance of colonialism, our approach addresses the transnational dimensions of the historical trajectories of whiteness. 26 Until recently, history-writing has tended to contain the past within contemporary national borders. But the unstable fiction of race was and is always generated by processes that refuse to be enclosed within such territorial boundaries, and the global reach of whiteness cannot be explained by the simple application of U.S.-centered studies. Whiteness studies must pay far greater attention to the transnational as a field of power. As Angela Woollacott’s early work on transcolonial voyages so potently demonstrated, whiteness travelled, both discursively and materially, and its meaning was always reconfigured in these circulations. 27 As Frederick Cooper argues, the study of the pre–World War II world is often transnational precisely because empires encourage border crossings. 28 This collection explores the genealogy of whiteness once we put the transnational in, and shows how historical analysis can bring local, temporal, and spatial specificity to this project. As we are faced by a “new world” of globalized cultural, economic, and social exchange, an effective history of the ways in



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which whiteness—as a figuration of identity and power—has been transnationally molded could not be more needed. Comprehending the strategies and dynamics of racialization requires a transnational analytic frame—if only to comprehend the contexts in which local specificities were generated. Conversely, understanding global whiteness can only be achieved by simultaneously paying attention to these local specificities. Historians of the outposts of European empires are often acutely aware of the ways in which local conditions are always imbricated in transnational networks of exchange. The broad scope of this collection clearly demonstrates the far-reaching, if divergent, global currency of whiteness. Indeed, the characterization of whiteness studies as a predominantly U.S. phenomenon is somewhat misleading. It ref lects in part a tendency among U.S. scholars not to read outside of their own national historiography, or even, in the case of labor history, outside of their particular specialist area. Overviews of the field have largely failed to take note of how whiteness is being addressed in broader historical scholarship. But we suggest that some of the most productive work on whiteness has been taking place outside of the small group of scholars specifically identified with the field, particularly by those engaged in studies of colonialism and its continuing effects. Dynamics of racialization have often been maintained via the unbearable discursive weight of Othering. Like the field of whiteness studies, we seek to reverse this strategy by attending to whiteness as the sovereign—if sometimes silent—social, legal, cultural, and experiential category that the very idea of race essentially functions to privilege. Reading whiteness into the colonial in this way may prove enormously productive. Postcolonial scholarship might also benefit from whiteness studies’ explicit focus on race and racial privilege, which is, paradoxically, not necessarily central to this approach. Aileen MoretonRobinson’s pioneering work on contemporary Australian feminism was among the first to integrate insights of both whiteness and postcolonial studies and clearly established the need for such a dialogue. 29 Historians are well-placed to continue this project by showing the importance of imperial networks and processes to the operation of white power. Indeed, since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, countless historical works have explored how “white identity” was contrapuntally forged through the colonial encounter, although their terminology has been quite different. Equally, reading the colonial back into whiteness has significant implications for U.S. historiography.30 The effacement of the “colonial” in U.S. history, a reluctance to see the United States as a site of empire (whether as metropole or periphery), and the isolationist tendencies of U.S. historiography have enabled a rejection (if only via a lack of interest) of the possibilities of postcolonial theory to contribute to discussions of whiteness. As MoretonRobinson has observed, U.S. scholars have located whiteness in relation to slavery and immigration, but not the dispossession of Native American peoples. 31 This disjunction has been further fueled by the open hostility of many U.S. labor historians toward postcolonialism. By contrast, Warwick Anderson’s




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work on American rule in the Philippines strongly argues the significance of colonial contexts for constructions of American whiteness, as do Ann Stoler’s recent ref lections on the salience of postcolonial theory for approaching U.S. history.32 Moreover, although this is rarely acknowledged, many whiteness scholars do in fact draw heavily on frameworks first proposed by postcolonial theory, particularly the concept of “Othering” and its exclusionary functions. Both fields view white/European identity as a largely “empty” category, defined solely in relation to and against that which it is not (whether “savages” or slaves). With these synergies in mind, our approach attempts to resolve the hostilities and locate the many sympathies between the work of U.S. labor scholars of whiteness and scholars who approach race through the lens of colonialism.

Historians Approaching the Study of Colonial Whiteness The historians in this collection read the surprisingly discrete fields of postcolonial and whiteness studies’ together to think about how having a “colored conversation” about whiteness might be “re-oriented” and thus invigorated.33 As David Roediger has acknowledged, “the most inf luential [whiteness] studies from the early 1990s were not specialized ones that could later be deployed to create a broader narrative: Instead, studies that staked out broad claims across time and space came first.”34 The diverse array of studies presented here, with their firm empirical grounding and definitional clarity, refute Eric Arnesen’s suggestion that whiteness is nothing more than a product of some historians’ imagination. They demonstrate how we might go about exploring the particularities of whiteness in certain contexts, while incorporating the wider, global phenomena that shaped it. By exploring the specific forms of whiteness produced in colonial, and particularly settler-colonial, contexts, they foreground the impact of colonial regimes of whiteness on Indigenous peoples, offering a much-needed corrective to existing U.S. scholarship. Some suggest that addressing colonialism will redefine current formulations of the emergence of white identity. Quite simply, read together, they indicate the possibility of a history of whiteness as a globalizing force. The opening methodological and historiographical papers suggest a suite of analytic tools that are useful for historians of whiteness in U.S. and non-U.S. contexts alike. And each, in different ways, questions the usefulness of the concept. They contribute much to our understanding of how whiteness resonates with the concerns and foci of colonial/postcolonial history. Identifying the “myth of white racial purity” as foundational to constructions of whiteness, Louise Newman charts the subtle shifts in racial dynamics across time in the United States, focusing on miscegenation, assimilation, and abdication as “three distinct practices, or strategies [employed by] European settlers, immigrants and their descendants,” which paradoxically revealed “the fluidity of racial boundaries, as much as they were intended to solidify them.” She urges us “to find ways to historicize whiteness so that we come to appreciate how whiteness is a matter of place and context.” Avoiding the reifying “shorthand of speaking



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of white people,” Angela Woollacott focuses on the “specific forms of whiteness” produced in settler-colonial contexts, arguing that these have been “key sites” in the historical trajectory of this racial category. She explores the implications of acknowledging the whiteness of settler colonialism, since “in white-settler colonies, there have been specific regimes in which whiteness itself accrued legislative, regulatory and cultural substance.” Thus what is required is “grounded and contextualized analyses of the emergence and evolution of whiteness.” Noting the “lack of specificity about the racial status of the colonizer population” in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria (who were “variously termed ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ ‘English,’ ‘British,’ ‘colonist,’ or, very, very rarely, ‘white’ ”), Leigh Boucher urges us to pay closer attention to specific dynamics of racialization. He suggests a need to distinguish between whiteness as an analytic category that we apply to historical analysis and an empirical category that appears within the contexts we are studying. Such a distinction is needed because the differences between these modalities of racialization have substantive impacts on the possibilities of political inclusion and exclusion for whites and nonwhite alike. The following sections present a range of different frameworks that demonstrate how utilizing whiteness can provide significant new insights into the historical operations of race in colonial contexts. The next group of essays considers whiteness as both a transnational and a colonial product. By interrogating how whiteness and the politics of racial difference more broadly were necessarily implicated in the transnational projects of empire building, they forge a new path toward historicizing whiteness. Warwick Anderson thus proposes extremely pertinent questions when he asks “How did whiteness travel? What did it do when it arrived? And what was it not able to do?” Indeed, his chapter suggests that the geographic and political contours of the imperial project provided precisely the generative conditions for the emergence of whiteness as a marker of identity. So too, Henry Reynolds’ study of the politics of miscegenation—a “problem” all too frequently solved by local legislation—reveals how these politics relied on a transnational exchange of ideas about the white race. This exchange, moreover, followed the routes of the Anglophone empire and suggests a much wider dynamic of fear and anxiety about miscegenation. As Reynolds argues “there was a very broad consensus in the English speaking world during the first part of the twentieth century” about its dangers. The routes of empire, without question, fostered the circulation of these fears and forged specific routes and networks of exchange that shaped whiteness, as Penelope Edmonds compellingly demonstrates. Examining Charles Wentworth Dilke’s account of his tour of “Greater Britain,” she alerts us to the “spatiality of whiteness,” and reveals how practices of transcolonial travel fostered a discourse of “transimperial Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism” in the nineteenth century. This discourse, she argues, prefigured and “later intertwined and competed with discourses of whiteness and Britishness,” creating globalizing histories and identities with decidedly local impacts; the “implications” of the Anglo-Saxons’ apparently unique capacity for colonization and rule for “the expropriated Indigenous peoples of British settler colonies were profound.” So too, Shurlee Swain, Margot Hillel, and Belinda Sweeney’s account of the imperial project of “child rescue” and philanthropic tourism interrogates a body of




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literature “repeated and expanded in denominational and secular journals published across the Empire” as well as in children’s books, which was centrally “engaged in constructing and consolidating whiteness in both Britain and its settler colonies.” By propagating understandings of the innate civilization and modernity of the English, the racial narratives embedded in this literature enervated notions of whiteness across the breadth of empire. In the next section, historians interrogate whiteness specifically in the settlercolonial context, examining the complex ways in which the formation of individual identity was bound up with the project of settler-colonial expansion. Patricia Grimshaw and Ann Standish explore Louisa Meredith’s account of establishing her “home” in Tasmania as reflecting a “broader claiming of the colony as a British possession, a home for all English people,” suggesting “a wider understanding of the ways the ‘private’ could be manipulated for colonialist ends.” They demonstrate how the personal was necessarily implicated in the politics of the colonial: individual domesticity was significant in “normalizing white people’s presence and domination in the colony . . . Meredith is all the more interesting precisely because her books both adhered to expectations of appropriate female traits and fulfilled a colonizing function.” Margaret Allen’s chapter similarly interrogates how one interracial “family drama,” caught up in the implementation of the restrictive immigration regime of White Australia, can reveal the “precarious and mutable nature . . . of race, whiteness and nation.” By focusing on the individual (and, in this case, the intimate) Allen is able to reveal the ways in which notions of whiteness were always underwritten by localized dynamics of power and cross-hatched by other axes of differentiation. Whiteness, more often than not, was a strategy to differentiate people, and peopling our histories must form a crucial element of this analytic project. In part, this concern underpins Marilyn Lake’s insightful reading of the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Sitting at the intersection of the global and the local, Lake, whose work has been among the first to locate whiteness within a transnational frame, suggests the need to account for the subjective and emotional components of whiteness by paying more attention to “the emergence of whiteness as both a personal identity and global politics.” This is significant not least if, as Lake argues, by the early twentieth century a global identity of “self-styled white men” was consolidated and asserted “its dominion over the earth, if not always for ever and ever, certainly for the foreseeable future.” So too, Tracey Banivanua Mar demonstrates the importance of grounding our analytics of race in specific times and places. Examining the “Bunya Terror” in late-nineteenth-century colonial Queensland, she suggests twin dynamics of white power, “first, as the identification system for settler-society in relation to the defense of the colony from both external and internal threats; and second as the logic for an emerging structural formation of settler-society.” But she strongly urges the need to “go beyond” charting the emergence of “an articulated white identity . . . [to] a deeper analysis of the way race defined power, particularly at the structural level where privilege and disadvantage were historically embedded.” The essays in the final section move our analytic gaze once more, this time to the ways in which entire populations were rendered comprehensible—and thus manageable—by the rhetorics of whiteness. Ideas about racial difference



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are historically malleable, not only because they change over time, but because they are deployed in surprising ways to respond to the demands of maintaining particular structures of privilege and power. Understandings of whiteness and racial difference could be enacted to surprising ends or in unexpected ways. These case studies reveal the f luidity and contingency of racialization, providing intriguing examples of the tensions between the transnational and the local. Thus, Katherine Ellinghaus’s examination of legal definitions of white/ Indigenous identity in Australia and the United States reveals instances where whiteness was sometimes both unobtainable and not a privilege at all. Comparing Indigenous assimilation policies in Australia and the United States, she argues that, despite significant contextual differences, in both cases, although the rhetoric of assimilation “promised acceptance, blending in, and economic, political and social equality,” in reality “Aborigines and Native Americans were never imagined as full participants in the societies that they were supposed to be assimilating into”; they were still excluded from the “white man’s kingdom.” Angela Wanhalla similarly explores the surprising legislation enacted in New Zealand and Canada to protect the racial status of white men who “went native” by marrying Indigenous women. This contrasts with the United States, where “men on reserves forfeited their whiteness.” She argues that whiteness was nevertheless “at the heart” of the interracial marriage laws that, by preserving white male racial status, “recast [them] as potential agents of assimilation.” Liz Conor, conversely, asks how the bodies of Aboriginal women operated as potential transmitters of white identity as they gave birth to mixed descent children: “white imaginings of [Australian] Aboriginal maternity that informed the paradoxical state demands on women’s procreative capacities to expire their own race while reproducing another.” She foregrounds “the irrational premise that Aboriginal mothers could be recruited as bearers of the white race,” which was critical to the development and enforcement of the policies of biological absorption and assimilation. Jane Carey explores very different terrain—Australian women’s eugenically inspired campaigning around “white racial health.” These, she argues, reveal how “propagating a large and healthy white population” was central to “the settler-colonial project of White Australia.” Complicating understandings of whiteness as an invisible, empty category, Carey observes that “the ‘whiteness’ of Australian national identity was continually and explicitly proclaimed.” Thus, she suggests, “The relational nature of race . . . may not necessarily mean that racial beliefs are only articulated in explicit discussions of ‘others.’ Anxieties internal to whiteness were also present and . . . [sometimes] formed the major field of racial discourse.” While this collection speaks to the broad connections between whiteness and the colonizing project, most of the studies are based in British settler-colonial contexts. It thus particularly furthers our understandings of how whiteness was produced by, operated within, drove, and structured this specific manifestation of European imperialism. Indeed, we suggest that these settler colonies, and the racial discourses that were deployed to justify and support them, were critical




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sites for the historical emergence of whiteness and its later trajectories. It was these colonies that had the greatest impact on Indigenous peoples, and where racial beliefs about the capacities and entitlements of white settlers were so crucial to validating the scale of this violent expropriation. Settler colonialism was fundamentally driven by a racial politics of population—the “elimination of the native” and the propagation of a white population to replace them. It was thus structured around protecting the privileges of whiteness. Removing the Indigenous presence through violent conflict and rendering the survivors invisible or at least “harmless” to the assertion of white sovereignty was essential to this. It took considerable discursive and legislative work to inscribe settler colonies as “white spaces.” And strident assertions of whiteness were a significant component of settler colonies’ transition into autonomous nation-states. The Australian case, which several essays address, has much to offer to wider understandings of the changing historical constructions of colonial whiteness.35 Antipodean historians such as Angela Woollacott and Warwick Anderson have been drawing on the insights of both postcolonial and whiteness studies for some time. Australia’s settler-colonial origins have made postcolonial and empire studies central to understandings of this history. The Australian nation, anxious because of its distance from the northern hemisphere, has undergone countless twists and turns in its effort to sustain and claim its white identity, and enforce white sovereignty. Australia may well prove to be paradigmatic.

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Whiteness studies has had a dramatic impact and arguably has already fundamentally altered the entire field of racial research. The basic proposition that whiteness too is a racial category that needs to be interrogated has been broadly accepted. This shift is unlikely to simply dissipate. Nevertheless, it seems likely the field will be radically transformed through a broader perspective and greater integration with other approaches, particularly those developed by scholars of colonialism. Indeed, we suggest such a transformation is necessary for the potential of the field to be realized. The global reach of whiteness was and is enabled by the ways in which European empire-building necessarily transgressed national boundaries. Moreover, whiteness didn’t simply sail around the imperial globe. Rather, it was challenged and reinscribed by the exigencies and ambivalences of local contexts. This collection reveals how whiteness was differently constituted under colonial regimes, particularly settler colonies where the claiming of Indigenous lands was central, and in this process addresses how whiteness studies might be modified by critical postcolonial theory. The studies of settler colonialism, including those that firmly reposition the United States within this frame, explore how both land and labor were critical to the construction of whiteness. Indeed, since slavery too was a product of European imperial expansion, we can thus begin to see how the production of whiteness was a transnational phenomenon rooted in the histories of both colonial slavery and settler colonialism.36



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Most importantly, though, this collection reminds us that investigating whiteness is, and should be, a political contestation of what Robert Young terms the “ruthless whiteness [that leaves] so many blank spaces” in historical scholarship. The importance of taking account of the colonial dimensions of whiteness, how it was forged through the dispossession of Indigenous lands and labor, and, in settler colonies, the elimination of their very existence both bodily and discursively cannot be overstated. Such investigations are essential not only for understanding racialization in the past but also its continuing effects in the present. To borrow a phrase from Ann Stoler, the world as we know it remains “haunted” by the shadows of imperialism. Using the past to know “ourselves,” to truly understand where white power and privilege has come from, is a powerful motivation for the scholarship you will find in these pages. The charge that whiteness studies simply reinscribes white people at the center of historical narratives remains potent. Thinking whiteness without thinking Otherness (whether imagined or experienced) is a strategy destined for political and methodological vapidity. Grafting this awareness onto a field that foundationalizes one category in the ruthless play of race is an important task. Critical studies of whiteness can only be warranted if the oppression and violence it creates, its effects on those who lost the most from its operations, remains clearly and explicitly at the center of such endeavors. Re-orienting whiteness will ensure it stays on the political straight and narrow.

Notes Our thanks to an anonymous reviewer of an earlier version of this chapter for most helpful suggestions. 1. There are some significant exceptions, particularly in the works of many of the authors included in this collection. Ann Laura Stoler explores some of these interconnections in Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 46–7, 99–100, 149–64, and 177–83. 2. This point is also made in Alfred Lopez, ed., Postcolonial Whiteness: A Critical Reader on Race and Empire (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). This collection, however, is focused on literary and cultural studies of the “postcolonial world.” 3. Our thanks to an anonymous reviewer of an earlier version of this chapter for most helpful suggestions. In particular, we thank the reviewer for encouraging us to make this challenge explicit. 4. Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, and Katherine Ellinghaus, eds., Historicising Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the Construction of an Identity (Melbourne: RMIT Publishing, 2007). 5. Birgit Rasmussen et al., eds., The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 6. David Roediger, “Whiteness and Its Complications,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 52, no. 45 (July 14, 2006); available from http://chronicle.com/subscribe/ login?url=/weekly/v52/i45/45b00601.htm; accessed September 24, 2007.




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7. David Stowe, e.g., asserted that the “fad” of whiteness studies would soon begin to disappear. “Book Review,” Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): 1358–9. See also Andrew Hartman, “The Rise and Fall of Whiteness Studies,” Race and Class 46, no. 2 (2004): 22–38. 8. This is evident in the work of some of the key historians of the British Empire, e.g., Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire: The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 9. Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham/ London: Duke University Press, 2006), 6. 10. See, e.g.: Alistair Bonnett, White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives (Harlow/New York: Prentice Hall, 2000); Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Maryrose Casey, and Fiona Nicoll, eds., Transnational Whiteness Matters (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008); Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002); Angela Woollacott, “ ‘All this is Empire I Told Myself’: Australia Women’s Voyages ‘Home’ and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness,” American Historical Review 102, no. 4 (1997): 1003–29; Marilyn Lake, “White Man’s Country: The Trans-National History of a National Project,” Australian Historical Studies 34, no. 122 (2003): 346–63; Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008). 11. While Ruth Frankenberg’s foundational work included “A Note on Colonial Discourses,” this was an aside to her main analysis and has been largely ignored by subsequent American scholarship. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 16–18. 12. For an earlier discussion of some of the issues raised in this introduction, including an expanded discussion of American debates and historiography, see Jane Carey, Leigh Boucher, and Katherine Ellinghaus, “Historicising Whiteness: Towards a New Research Agenda,” in Historicising Whiteness, vi–xxiii. 13. This point is forcefully made by Aileen Moreton-Robinson in her “Preface,” to Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Aileen MoretonRobinson (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004), viii. The phrase “structures of race” is taken from Patrick Wolfe’s now seminal article arguing for attention to how dynamics of racialization are “structured” by localized material demands: “Land, Labor and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 866–905. 14. For example, the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and James Baldwin. On this tradition, see bell hooks, “Representations of Whiteness in the Literary Imagination,” in her Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 165–9; John Munro, “Roots of Whiteness,” Labor/Le Travail no. 54 (2004); available from http:// www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/54/munro.html; accessed September 20, 2007; and David Roediger, “Critical Studies of Whiteness, USA: Origins and Arguments,” Theoria 98 (December 2001): 74–6. 15. Particularly David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London/New York: Verso, 1991); hooks, “Representations of Whiteness in the Literary Imagination”; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage: Random House, 1992); Frankenberg, “A Note on Colonial Discourses”; Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. In the American labor history context, see also Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White



12

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

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Republic Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London/ New York: Verso, 1990). For some of these overviews, not all of them negative, see, e.g.: David W. Stowe, “Uncolored People: The Rise of Whiteness Studies,” Lingua Franca 6, no. 6 (September/October 1996): 68–77; Robyn Wiegman, “Whiteness Studies and the Paradox of Particularity,” Boundary 2 (1999): 115–50; Catherine Hall, “White Identities,” New Left Review 1, no. 193 (May–June 1992): 114–19; Homi Bhabha, “The White Stuff,” Artforum 36 (1998): 21–4; Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 2 (2007): 149–68. See also works by Kolchin, Munro, Hartman, Kaufmann, and Roediger cited earlier and later. Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians Imagination,” International Labor and Working-Class History no. 60 (2001): 6. Arnesen suggests “whiteness is, variously, a metaphor for power, a proxy for racially distributed material benefits, a synonym for ‘white supremacy,’ an epistemological stance defined by power, a position of invisibility or ignorance, and a set of beliefs about racial ‘Others’ and oneself ” (9). Ibid., 5 and 3. This aspect of Arnesen’s critique focuses on David Roediger’s claim that, in nineteenth-century America, the Irish were perceived as “not white,” and his use of psychoanalytic methods to explain why white workers came to identify with white supremacy. See note 15 earlier and the whiteness studies issue of International Labor and WorkingClass History 60 (Fall 2001), which contained several highly negative assessments aside from Arnesen’s, including Barbara J. Fields, “Whiteness, Racism, and Identity,” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2001): 48–56. Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” Journal of American History 89, no. 1 (2002): 157. For example, in relation to the Irish, Jews, and poor whites, he suggests: “Americans have had many ways of looking down on people without questioning their whiteness” (165). Ibid., 159 and 161. Ibid., 170–1. Some of the debate between Eric Kaufmann and David Roediger in a 2006 issue of Ethnicities revolved around the question of whether the paradigms developed in American scholarship could or should be applied to other contexts: Eric Kaufmann, “The Dominant Ethnic Moment: Towards the Abolition of ‘Whiteness’?” and “Whiteness—Too Blunt an Instrument? A Reply to David Roediger,” Ethnicities 6, no. 2 (2006): 231–53 and 263–6; David Roediger, “A Reply to Eric Kaufmann,” Ethnicities 6, no. 2 (2006): 254–62. Roediger’s most recent book argues that immigrants “learnt” specifically American formations of race and whiteness after their arrival: Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2005), especially 92, 104, 110–16, and 129. See also Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). Munro, “Roots of Whiteness.” Stowe made a similar point in his much earlier “Uncolored People.” See, e.g., Hartman, “The Rise and Fall of Whiteness Studies,” who argues for more sophisticated materially based class analysis. Two works that have begun to explore the transnational dimensions of whiteness are Moreton-Robinson et al., eds., Transnational Whiteness Matters; and Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line.




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27. Woollacott, “All this is Empire,” and To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 28. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). See also Philippa Levine, Kevin Grant, and Frank Trentmann, eds., Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, 1860–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 29. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2000). Her more recent work has focused on the construction of “patriarchal white sovereignty” as providing the legitimation of settler-colonial rule in Australia: “Writing off Indigenous Sovereignty: The Discourse of Security and Patriarchal White Sovereignty,” in Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2007), 86–102. 30. For work that repositions American history within a colonial frame, see, e.g.: Ann Laura Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); C. Richard King, ed., Postcolonial America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000); and Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887–1937 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). 31. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “Preface,” in Whitening Race, viii. 32. Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen,” in Haunted by Empire, 1–67. 33. The phrase “colored conversation” is taken from Michelle Fine et al., “Preface,” in Off White: Readings in Power, Privilege and Resistance, ed. Michelle Fine et al., second edn (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), vii–xii. 34. Roediger, “Whiteness and Its Complications.” 35. Largely due to the inf luence of Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Australian scholars have also produced the largest bodies of contemporary whiteness scholarship outside of the United States. See, e.g., The Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association Journal. 36. We thank Clare Midgley for making this suggestion.



14

Historians Approaching the Study of Whiteness



PART I




Whiteness and “the Imperial Turn” Angela Woollacott

T

he study of whiteness as a racial category emerged roughly at the same time as historians became interested in postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, and forged what became known as “the new imperial history.” Yet the two areas had different scholarly roots. Whiteness studies grew from labor history, sociology, cultural studies, and feminist theory, among other fields. Here I consider some connections between whiteness studies and the new imperial history as they have evolved, and a few of their implications for each other. Recent work has emphasized the global circulation of racial thinking, and historians of empire have located whiteness as a racial category in diverse colonial sites. Arguably, since the seventeenth century, if not before, the white settler colonies have been key sites. Relevant questions, I think, include: Has white settler colonialism been the breeding ground of specific forms of whiteness? How has the whiteness created by white settler colonialism been connected to the whiteness constructed by slavery and post-slavery societies—or that of societies shaped by both slavery and settler colonialism? How has Australian history, in particular, contributed to broader understanding of changing historical constructions of whiteness? And how might analyses of whiteness contribute to future work in Australian history? All of which, arguably, begs the question: How can we analyze and subvert whiteness without reifying it—through our seemingly inescapable shorthand of speaking of white people? Perhaps we should speak of “whitened” people? I begin with a few notes on the emergence of whiteness studies, before similarly considering the appearance of “the imperial turn,” and then moving on to the category of “settler colonialism.” I will then offer a few thoughts on how Australian history has contributed to broader understandings of historical constructions of whiteness, and conclude with a bit of speculation about how



CHAPTER 2

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analyses of whiteness, including work on other settler colonies, might help to shape our understanding of the nineteenth century in Australia.

One of the first and most inf luential historians to study whiteness was the American labor historian David Roediger. Roediger’s insightful work on whiteness, the first book of which was published in 1991, has been founded on his passionate commitment to radical politics and activism, specifically to the possibility of workers uniting across racial barriers. Through detailed research into the labor movement in late nineteenth-century America, Roediger argues that race and class were constructed together in a way that divided workers by privileging some workers through the category of whiteness. The social rewards of whiteness were sufficient to split the American working class and thus make it more tractable for employers, especially in the crucial decades following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. In his close study of the 1877 General Strike in St Louis, for example, Roediger identified a moment of cross-racial protest that was quashed by a coalition of interests between the Europeandescended class of skilled workers, the local elite, and municipal authorities. In opting to close ranks with the local elite, skilled workers allowed racism to set limits on the potential for the labor movement to improve conditions for all workers.1 Roediger’s work was inf luential because of its detailed historical specificity and his appealing insistence that racism was not inevitable or immutable, but contingent and shifting. It is germane to recall the crucial role of David Roediger’s work for American history as we grapple with our current role as historians within whiteness studies. In Australia the field of whiteness studies was boosted in 2003 with the launching of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association (ACR AWSA). This interdisciplinary association is linked to cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and other fields. Internationally, whiteness studies has had such interdisciplinary roots. Ruth Frankenberg’s 1993 study White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness made clear how valuable a sociological approach could be for the United States. Frankenberg used detailed interviews with a small cohort of women to show variation in individual awareness of white racial privileges, as well as the operation of those privileges in specific demographic and cultural contexts. 2 Sociological and contemporary cultural criticism have also played a significant role in analyzing specific factors in the construction of whiteness in Australia. Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s substantial contributions to the field have included one of the few edited volumes on the subject, as well as a powerful critique of racism within Australian feminism. 3 Due to recent critical work, not only has the historical phenomenon of “White Australia” received valuable renewed scrutiny, but the term “whitefella” has become newly resonant. Whitefella still does not have the currency and therefore the ref lexive potency of the ubiquitous term “Pakeha” in Aotearoa/New Zealand, but it is gaining



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usage and served as the theme for a provocative look at late-twentieth-century Australian race relations.4 Disciplinary wellsprings for the study of whiteness have also included literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory, to plumb what, according to Jennifer Rutherford, are the roles of fantasy and aggression in white Australian identity.5 Tanya Dalziell’s study of settler romance fiction and gender (particularly “the Australian girl”) in the late nineteenth century explores the way whiteness was shaped in adventure stories often set in the bush. 6 In the United States, where the study of whiteness was first taken seriously, other historians quickly followed Roediger’s lead. The field soon boasted wonderful titles such as Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White (1995); Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks and What that Says About Race in America (1998); Matthew Frye Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998), and so forth.7 Whiteness studies also spawned in other disciplines. From its first emergence, the study of whiteness was applied to literature (not least by Toni Morrison8), film, and other areas of cultural production. It encompassed critical legal theory, and soon boasted not only at least one reader in whiteness studies, but from 1992 a journal titled Race Traitor edited by Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, with the motto “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.” 9 The first feminist works to reveal complicity between feminists, racism, and imperialism did not use the term “whiteness” per se, even though their work— such as Vron Ware’s inf luential 1992 study Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History—raised crucial questions about what Antoinette Burton termed feminists’ peculiar Burdens of History, that is, the contemporary legacies of racism in first-wave feminist thought and activism.10 Louise Newman’s work has been very important in raising these questions about the American women’s rights movement of the late nineteenth century. Through a detailed analysis of American feminist thought from 1870 to 1920, Newman demonstrates the central role of racism and evolutionary thought in underpinning middle-class women’s claims to expanded public roles based on their supposed white cultural superiority and moral work as civilizing agents.11 It is a real boon to Australian historiography that Jane Carey has taken up these issues in relation to the Australian women’s movement, with her current research on eugenics, whiteness, and feminism in the early twentieth century.12 So, we might well ask, what is the role of history? If some commentators worried aloud that whiteness studies was a re-privileging of the white subject (just as some also worried much the same thing about the rise of masculinity studies and the universal male subject), for many historians around the world interested in race relations, identifying white as a constructed racial category was a productive step. As Richard Dyer contends, whiteness has been constituted through dominance: “The point of seeing the racing of whites is to dislodge them/us from the position of power, with all the inequities, oppression, privileges and sufferings in its train, dislodging them/us by undercutting the authority with which they/we speak and act in and on the world.”13 Historians



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can, quite specifically, shed light on how whiteness has been constructed as a dominant and normative racial category, in specific times and cultural contexts, and therefore have a crucial role to play in whiteness studies.

In Britain, the field of cultural studies was central to the rise of critical race theory, while many historians were far more conservative. Inf luenced by Marxism, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Michel Foucault, and the subaltern studies group—such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s critiques of history, imperialism, and representation—from the 1980s cultural studies scholars developed a critical appraisal of colonialism in the modern period, its depredations in the colonies themselves, and its implication in knowledge production and the writing of history. This academic enterprise had clear contemporary political dimensions in Britain because of what Robert Young has termed “the demonstration of the relation of structures of colonialism to contemporary forms of imperialism, neocolonialism and racism.”14 Crucial to the development of this field in Britain was the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and the work in critical race theory by Stuart Hall and his student Paul Gilroy.15 It was no coincidence that one of the first British historians to use the term whiteness was Catherine Hall, Stuart Hall’s partner. In a 1992 essay, Catherine Hall referred to the varying meanings of whiteness as constructed by British missionaries in the West Indies in the 1830s and 1840s, such as one discursive rendering of it to mean “order, civilization, Christianity, separate spheres and domesticity, rationality, modernity and industry.” Equating whiteness also with the behavior of British colonizers, Hall goes on to suggest that in the same moment it could also mean “when white Anglican clergymen and planters, some dressed up as women, joined forces to burn down chapels and mission stations and lynch, tar and feather missionaries themselves.”16 Hall thus drew attention to the variability of whiteness, as well as the historical specificity of its meanings. There has been a strong school of historical thought in Britain that resists postcolonialism, the critical study of Orientalism, whiteness studies, and the new imperial history—especially the notion that the empire shaped the metropole itself. Those who defend the idea of metropolitan imperviousness to sullying by the empire, and a conceptual division between the British Isles and the colonies have been accused of imperial nostalgia. Such defenders point to the popularity of Raj nostalgia (and thus by implication the memory of the empire) among the British public, and see the new imperial history as the work of “some revisionist historians, principally across the Atlantic.”17 The eminent historian David Cannadine has specifically sought to counter the centrality of racial analysis in postcolonial histories by turning the discussion back toward class, the central category of analysis in older British social histories. Class, ritual, ceremony, and collaboration between local elites and British rulers constituted the main structure of the empire, according to Cannadine, in the book he titled



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Ornamentalism (2001) to signal its refutation of Said.18 Yet, against the weight of such resistance, there has been a growing school of British historians insisting on studying British imperialism around the globe and its ramifications. Arguably, slavery and its abolition have been foundational topics, through the work of historians such as James Walvin and Clare Midgley; so too has imperial propaganda and its presence in popular culture been a major theme, particularly in the work of John MacKenzie.19 It ought to be said, however, that there is still not a great deal of work on the historical construction of whiteness in Britain itself. Over the last fifteen years, there has been an explosion of work on the empire, with the profusion of feminist and postcolonial approaches applied to British colonialism in South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and, more recently, the white settler dominions. Playing on the epithet “the linguistic turn” used to denote the arrival of poststructuralism and deconstruction on the shores of the historical discipline, Antoinette Burton has defined the imperial turn in historical scholarship as: “accelerated attention to the impact of histories of imperialism on metropolitan societies in the wake of decolonization, pre- and post-1968 racial struggle and feminism in the last quarter century.” Further, she contends that it has not been a turn toward empire so much as a critical return to the connections between metropole and colony, race and nation, which imperial apologists and dissenters have appreciated at least since the nineteenth century, if not before. In the context of Euro-American colonial histories, then, what we might properly call the return to empire is one symptom of the pressure of postcolonial social, political, and demographic realities on the production of modern knowledge. 20 Burton’s focus was on the impact of postcolonial approaches on the study of the European and other metropoles. Yet we can also perceive an “imperial turn” in historical work on the colonies themselves, and connections across imperial locations. In relation to the history of the Antipodes, the phrase “the imperial turn” may at first glance seem nonsensical. A nonspecialist might imagine that Australian and New Zealand histories have always been necessarily contextualized through their location within the British Empire. Historians in these fields, of course, know that has not been the case. Increasingly, in fact, there has been a recent “return to empire” that has challenged the nationalist framework dominant in recent decades. Tony Ballantyne, in his study of the circulating and contingent ideology of Aryanism and connections between New Zealand and India in the nineteenth century, uses what he calls “the disruptive power of empire” and its “cross-cultural engagements.” Thus he refutes historiographical adherence to national boundaries in favor of studying “the cultural and intellectual transformations enacted by colonialism both in the colonies and in Europe itself.” 21




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For Australian history, this development is especially significant because of a powerful nationalist historiographical paradigm, built on both radical nationalism and other variants. In the 1950s and 1960s, a left-leaning nationalist framework became ascendant in Australian historiography through inf luential works such as Vance Palmer’s The Legend of the Nineties (1954) and Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend (1958), followed by the somewhat different nationalist interpretations of Manning Clark. 22 While there were variations within this paradigm, and political differences between the radical nationalists of the post–World War II period, and the New Left of the Vietnam War years, the nationalist framework became firmly entrenched in Australian historiography. Its entrenching was linked to a rejection of both conservative, pro-empire political views and an older historiography that considered Australia within its relationship to Britain. Federation became a major focus of historical scholarship, ref lecting the emphasis on severing ties with Britain and the desire to see Australia only within its own shores. Significantly, the nationalist framework shaped the feminist and labor histories of the 1970s and 1980s, such that critical perspectives also stayed within national frames. Even the emergent field of Aboriginal history largely accepted the same boundaries. Historical research sought to consider Australian subjects on their own terms, rather than as broader global phenomena, and especially not as produced through the historical relationship with Britain—with the obvious exception of Australia’s convict origins, which was the subject of much work in this period. The imperial turn has included new attention to the historical relationship between metropole and colonies, and metropole and dominion, but it has also meant raising new questions about race relations and colonialism within our shores. Becoming more aware of the empire, then, has returned our gaze not just outward but insistently inward, with new questions about the continuing structures of colonialism. For us, Ania Loomba’s warnings have had particular pertinence. Loomba has pointed out that the “post” in “postcolonialism” does not mean that colonialism has been supplanted, and that “it is premature to proclaim the demise of colonialism.” Rather, she says, we need to see postcolonialism as “the contestation of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism.”23 Thus, in the Australian context, the new imperial history has broached the territory mapped out by the field of Aboriginal history since the 1970s. In so doing, it is much indebted to and has joined forces with historians of Indigenous people in their critical approach to the history of Australian race relations. At the same time, it has brought some slightly different or renewed emphases to the historical study of race in Australia. For example, while the term “settler” has been used in Aboriginal history since the 1970s, there is now a reinvigorated interest in the meanings and workings of white settler colonialism here.

The Category of “Settler Colonialism” The very interesting recent collection on Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century (2005) edited by Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen suggests



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commonalities and differences among states that have not, to my knowledge, previously been compared. They look at Korea and Manchuria under the Japanese, the Jewish settlement of Palestine, Angola and Mozambique under the Portuguese, German settlers in occupied Poland, and the French in Algeria, South Africa, Kenya, and Rhodesia, all as case studies of twentieth-century settler colonialism. Elkins and Pedersen posit differences between these twentieth-century cases and what they term “new world states” such as America and Australia. The differences include that in the twentieth-century cases the settlers mostly did not become majority populations; and the metropole continued to wield more power, including military power. 24 The book is very useful in its broadening of the category of settler colonialism beyond the white settler colonies of the European empires. A basic question then is: Is white settler colonialism categorically different from other settler colonialisms? I think the answer must be no. Penny Edwards, in her work comparing anti-miscegenation policies and child removal in Western Australia, Burma, and Cambodia, argues against distinctions between crown colonies and settler colonies. 25 Colonialism, its racial hierarchies and their intersections with other categories, and its regulatory and discursive regimes operated in ways directly comparable across such typologies. Yet there are specificities to white settler colonial histories that offer us insights into the contingent construction of whiteness as the superordinate racial category. In white settler colonies, there have been specific regimes in which whiteness itself accrued legislative, regulatory, and cultural substance. This is where linking whiteness and settler colonialism can provide us with telling insights. Needless to say, although my focus is on the British Empire, Algeria and other non-British examples of white settler colonialism are in the same frame. And Katherine Ellinghaus’s work makes clear the value of comparing Australia and the United States in the modern period when the latter was no longer part of the British Empire. 26 As the editors of this volume argue in their introduction, whiteness studies will benefit both from being “unmoored” from its tethering to American labor and migration history, and at the same time locating its operations there as stemming from America’s settler-colonial origins. 27 While Elkins and Pedersen draw distinctions between what they call “new world settler states” and their twentieth-century case studies, it was largely in the twentieth century that whiteness was overtly enshrined and empowered. In South Africa, of course, the Apartheid regime from 1948 to 1994 articulated white racial privilege in a myriad of legal, economic, political, and social forms. The twentieth century also produced the full emergence of a legislatively entrenched White Australia, although, as Leigh Boucher argues in his essay in this section, the 1870s and 1880s were the formative imperial historical moment when “[p]olitical entitlement and competence . . . were explicitly designated as white.” 28 There is much historical reason to suggest that we should look more closely at connections between South Africa and Australia. As Fiona Paisley has




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national history cannot be so directly read as signaling “separation” from empire. In the Australian case, post-federation nationalism emerged hand-in-hand with, and not in opposition to, empire. In fact loyalty to the British Empire increased in the first decades of nationhood as strengthened race ideology provided for both a White and an Imperial Australia. 29 As Paisley suggests, contrary to what has been at least implicit in some nationalist histories, Australians’ identification with the British Empire, and the concomitant articulation of whiteness, may in fact have been most overt and marked in the first half of the twentieth century. A new book by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds locates Australia as one of several “white men’s countries” that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries together shaped a “global colour line.”30

Australian History and Historical Constructions of Whiteness Twelve years ago I sought to grapple with the historically specific construction of whiteness in the Australian colonies-dominion in my article on “Australian Women’s Voyages ‘Home’ and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness.” One problem I sought to work through in writing that piece was the complexities of Australians’ positioning in imperial hierarchies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: their simultaneous status as colonials and colonizers. I suggested that: “Occupying an in-between ranking in imperial hierarchy, Australian women sought to elide the inferiority inherent in their colonialness by emphasizing their whiteness and their economic and cultural privileging.” My focus was on the sea voyage Australian women and men took en route to England, and their status as white colonials in the imperial metropolis. It seemed to me that “while whiteness may have been so normative as to be partly invisible in Australia itself, exposure to different colonial racial structures [at the ports of call] at times compelled women to articulate notions of themselves as white that were integral to developing Australian national identity but usually tacit.” My reading of women’s records from the period—such as their accounts of their visits to Colombo, Bombay, Durban, and other ports— suggested that: “during the decades in which Australians established and first interpreted national Australian identity, the whiteness that was crucial to that identity was premised on a shared British heritage . . . , on notions of England as ‘home,’ and on belonging to the stratum of imperial rulers.”31 My own focus is now turning to the articulation of whiteness and settler colonialism within Australia’s shores, and I am excited by, and learning a great deal from, the work that has been done on that subject in recent years—as essays in this volume demonstrate. I am finding particularly useful and



argued, Australian history shows the complex relationship between colonialism, nationalism, and empire, such that

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stimulating the work that looks carefully at historically specific constructions of whiteness, racial power, and privilege in the settler-colonial context. Leigh Boucher’s work brings together careful archival research, a biographical approach, and discourse analysis. His analysis of settler-colonial men, their “othering” of Chinese and Indigenous subjects, and their construction of their own privilege and entitlements is a wonderful model of empirically grounded, specifically contextualized work on whiteness.32 Also, Penelope Edmonds’s work on nineteenth-century expressions of Anglo-Saxonism raises very interesting questions about whiteness and settler colonialism.33 Through such detailed work, we are gradually accruing informed insights into the operation and evolution of settler colonialism here in Australia, and elsewhere. A relevant question is: Can a study allow insight into whiteness without using the term? And I think the answer must be “yes.” I have in mind two studies in particular. I have greatly enjoyed reading Julie Evans’s book on Edward Eyre, race, and colonial governance. With detailed attention to the contexts of each stage of his career, and his own actions, as well as careful analysis of his writings, Evans mounts an argument that Eyre’s ultimate repressiveness in Jamaica was the product of colonialism itself. Evans traces the evolution of Eyre’s thinking and policies toward colonized peoples, and the ways in which he responded to the specific circumstances of each of his positions and the exigencies pertaining to the different colonies. This in turn builds her argument about his ultimately repressive policies being the systemic results of colonialism, that is, of the intractable opposition of imperial interests and the rights and interests of colonized peoples. Without specifically addressing whiteness, she helps us to see the contingent operations of colonial rule that directly contributed to ideas of white racial superiority and authority. 34 Like Penny Edwards’s work, Evans’s study cuts across typologies of colonies with its focus on historical specificity and organic interconnections. Another book that speaks to whiteness studies, though it does not use exactly that term, is Victoria Haskins’s One Bright Spot (2005).35 By telling the story of her great-grandmother as an employer of indentured Aboriginal domestic servants under the Aborigines Protection Board of New South Wales in the early twentieth century, Haskins presents us with a richly detailed story of individual women, their lives intertwined across racial and class boundaries. She shows in vivid detail how white women’s social and racial positioning was created through this government-run system of exploitation, and discusses the complex politics surrounding the system at the time, as well as its historical legacies. These studies and a number of others have contributed recently to our understanding of white racial privileges, power, and identities in Australian history—and by extension to the history of settler colonialism and whiteness transnationally.

Analyses of Whiteness and the Nineteenth Century in Australia The essays in this collection show that work on whiteness is providing new insights into Australian history, across a range of time periods and topics, as




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well as other national and transnational histories. As historians, we know that racial categories including whiteness have been to a large extent historically contingent, and that we must look freshly at different periods. Scholars of whiteness in the early modern period are providing really intriguing and valuable lessons for those of us who are modernists, about the quite different meanings attached to skin color at earlier moments. Roxann Wheeler’s study of racial understandings in eighteenth-century Britain reveals changing conceptions and uncertainty about racial categories. She argues that skin color, or complexion, was not the only determinant of racial status; rather, it was one determinant, but judgments also depended on a subject’s status in relation to religion (Christianity being an important component of whiteness), education, and consumerism. Colonialism itself, Wheeler contends, became an important force in changing understandings of racial hierarchies.36 In her essay in this section, Louise Newman shows how f luid ideas of whiteness were in the American colonies from the seventeenth century onward, how they varied by time and place, and how in fact the current racial category of “white” is the product of centuries of racial mixing.37 I am currently trying to educate myself about the mid-nineteenth century. For someone whose work has not much ventured earlier than the 1870s, this is a fascinating challenge. I find I am learning both from those who have focused on the Australian colonies, and those who have pursued connections and comparisons with other colonies—such as Julie Evans, and also Kirsten McKenzie in her evocative work on status, respectability, and class in New South Wales and the Cape Colony.38 As we seek to understand the construction of whiteness in Australia in the mid-nineteenth century, I suspect that work on other imperial locations— particularly, and perhaps only, other white settler colonies—will prove valuable. For example, in exploring how whiteness may have shaped social and legal hierarchies in the period following the end of convict transportation, that is, from the 1840s, Pamela Scully’s work on the period of and after slave emancipation in the western Cape Colony may offer clues. In Australia, whiteness may well have been invoked to leverage the social status of emancipated convicts, as they struggled against material challenges and social prejudice. From Scully’s work, we know that racial categories were reimagined after the emancipation of the enslaved in the 1830s, and as social and legal categories were rearticulated in conjunction with new patterns of labor and landholding. Conceptions of gender, respectability, and the family were all newly articulated to shore up a system of continuing racial hierarchy and oppression that needed new underpinnings to reflect the new legal realities. Scully shows powerfully how discourses of race and sexuality intertwined, such that, for women, “virtue” became synonymous with whiteness in a continuing subordination of black women.39 For the Australian context, similar questions could be applied to the effects of the ending of convict transportation on the linked categories of race, morality, and sexuality. Several scholars are conducting research that shows the significance of connections between, and the circulation of ideas around, the white settler colonies



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of the empire. In her study of the 1835–36 Select Committee on Aborigines, Elizabeth Elbourne argues that “debates about virtue were inf luenced by cross-cutting transnational discourses in the British world about religion, economics and gender, despite enormous variations in particular local contexts and in the local political implications of such discourses.”40 Considering New South Wales and the Cape Colony in one frame, Elbourne analyzes discussion of the virtue or otherwise of the British settler, and official plans to increase metropolitan oversight of settlers’ treatment of Indigenous peoples. Such plans envisaged elevating the morals and behavior of white settlers at the same time as bringing Indigenous people into the fold of Christianity. Metropolitan perceptions of white settlers, at least, encompassed widely separated colonies within the same discursive frame.41 Alan Lester’s work on the eastern Cape Colony in the nineteenth century emphasizes imperial connectedness. “British colonial discourses,” Lester contends, “were made and remade, rather than simply transferred or imposed . . . between Britain and settler colonies like the Cape.”42 Lester suggests that, just as the empire’s material base consisted of an articulated worldwide trade in commodities, imperial production of knowledge also f lowed between colonies and metropole and globally around the empire. “Settler newspapers and letters, . . . official dispatches and travellers’ reports,” parliamentary commissions, their “minutes of evidence” and reports, all circulated among the colonies, not least via the metropolitan and colonial presses.43 Lester finds these imperial networks illuminating for his study of the colonization of the Xhosa in the mid-nineteenth century because: During moments of imperial crisis in particular, colonial representations of the Xhosa were considered in the light of Australian settlers’ images of the Aborigine, New Zealand colonists’ constructions of the Maori, Indian officials’ notions of the “Hindoo,” West Indian planters’ portrayals of former slaves and not least, British bourgeois ideas of the labouring classes and other domestic “subaltern” groups. This circulating compendium of racialized images, Lester contends, shaped metropolitan racial discourse and images as much as those of the colonies.44 While Lester does not himself speak of whiteness, here, I think, we have important insight into the connections between settler colonialism and whiteness. A racial lexicon forged in multiple colonial sites, especially the confrontational and violent sites of settler colonialism, shaped British and hence EuroAmerican conceptions of racial hierarchy, even before the rise of so-called scientific racism. The violent struggles over land and for colonial control were narrated by the winners in multiple kinds of records that would become the colonial archive so inf luential in the later writing of histories. At the time of the creation of this circulating imperial discourse, the racial hierarchies it forged were crowned by the stratum of imperial rulers: the white settlers, colonial officials, and all who claimed British identity and status. Justifications for




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dispossession of Indigenous peoples, for colonial rule and violence, were articulated in specific ideas of white settler racial and cultural superiority. The whiteness of settler colonialism has been forged in multiple and importantly diverse sites and times. Of course, it must not be seen as any monolith, or more significant than definitions of whiteness constructed in other sites. What it illustrates is the globally circulating nature of this toxic racial fiction, its plasticity, and its historical reach. Gail B. Griffin has suggested that the work of scholars includes “the relentless destruction of innocence” about privilege and its workings in “oppressive discourses and institutions”—a destruction that meets “quite natural resistance to this ultimate loss of innocence.”45 Exploring whiteness as a constructed racial category, and the specificities of its historical links to settler colonialism, can perhaps further the work of disrupting the “innocence” of racial hierarchies, their legacies, and the continuing effects of colonialism. In such a project, whiteness studies and postcolonial studies seem likely allies. The new imperial history, while perhaps not so new as it used to be, still holds much promise for exploring the historical workings of colonialism, and has potential to develop. It can continue to learn from whiteness studies, and in turn contribute substantially to it through providing grounded and contextualized analyses of the emergence and evolution of whiteness.

Notes 1. David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness (London: Verso, 1994), especially chapter 7. Roediger’s first book on the subject was The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991). 2. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 3. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ed., Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004); Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Aboriginal Women and Feminism (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2000). 4. Duncan Graham, ed., Being Whitefella (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1994). 5. Jennifer Rutherford, The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White Australian Fantasy (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000). 6. Tanya Dalziell, Settler Romances and the Australian Girl (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2004). 7. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says about Race in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 8. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). See also Valerie Babb, Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1998).



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9. Ian Haney-Lopez, White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Mike Hill, ed., Whiteness: A Critical Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1997); David W. Stowe, “Uncolored People: The Rise of Whiteness Studies,” Lingua Franca no. 6 (September–October 1996): 74. 10. Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992); Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 11. Louise Newman, White Women’s Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 12. Jane Carey, chapter thirteen in this collection. 13. Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 2. 14. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990), 174. 15. See Kuan-Hsing Chan and David Morley, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996). 16. Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 212. 17. Geoffrey Moorhouse, “The Old Scenes Shall Rise Again . . . ,” Review section, The Guardian, October 1, 2005, 9. 18. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 19. See, e.g., James Walvin, England, Slaves and Freedom, 1776–1838 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986); Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992); John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 20. Antoinette Burton, After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 2; emphasis in the original. 21. Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 3–4. 22. Vance Palmer, The Legend of the Nineties (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1954); Russel Ward, The Australian Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1958). On Manning Clark, see John Docker, In a Critical Condition: Reading Australian Literature (Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1984), 110–17. 23. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), 7, 12. 24. Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, eds., Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Routledge, 2005), 3–4. 25. Penny Edwards, “On Home Ground: Settling Land and Domesticating Difference in the ‘Non-Settler’ Colonies of Burma and Cambodia,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, no. 3 (2003). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_ colonialism_and_colonial_history/v004/4.3edwards.html 26. See Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887–1937 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); and chapter sixteen in this collection. 27. Jane Carey, Leigh Boucher, and Katherine Ellinghaus, chapter one in this collection. 28. Leigh Boucher, chapter four in this collection. 29. Fiona Paisley, “Introduction: White Settler Colonialisms and the Colonial Turn: An Australian Perspective,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, no. 3 (2003).




30.

31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_histor y/ v004/4.3intro.html Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Angela Woollacott, “ ‘All this is the Empire, I Told Myself ’: Australian Women’s Voyages ‘Home’ and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness,” The American Historical Review 102, no. 4 (October 1997): 1006–8. See Leigh Boucher, “Masculinity Gone Mad: Settler Colonialism, Masculinity and the White Body in Late Nineteenth Century Victoria,” Lilith 13 (2004): 51–67; as well as chapter four in this collection. Penelope Edmonds, chapter eight in this collection. Julie Evans, Edward Eyre, Race and Colonial Governance (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2005). Victoria Haskins, One Bright Spot (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in EighteenthCentury British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Louise Newman, chapter three in this collection. Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1800–1850 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004). Pamela Scully, Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823–1853 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997), 175. Elizabeth Elbourne, “The Sin of the Settler: The 1835–36 Select Committee on Aborigines and Debates over Virtue and Conquest in the Early Nineteenth-Century British White Settler Empire,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, no. 3 (2003). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/ v004/4.3elbourne.html Other scholars who are embarking on research projects linking the white settler colonies include Ann Curthoys, who holds an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellowship for her project on “Indigenous Peoples, the British Empire, and self-government for the Australian colonies”; and also my own ARC-funded research project on “Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: The Cultural and Political Changes of the 1830s to 1860s in Imperial Context.” Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating identities in nineteenth-century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001), 5. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 189. Gail B. Griffin, “Speaking of Whiteness: Disrupting White Innocence,” MMLA: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 31, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 3.



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The Strange Career of Whiteness: Miscegenation, Assimilation, Abdication Louise Newman

T

he title of this chapter is taken from the title of a book written in 1955 by C. Vann Woodward, a renowned historian of race from the United States. Woodward’s book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, appeared just one year after the Supreme Court’s famous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which declared unconstitutional the principle of separate but equal that underlay segregation ever since the court’s upholding of that principle in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Woodward, in tracing the history of racial segregation in the South, was especially taken with the various ironies in this history. Although most Americans—then and now—associated Jim Crow laws with the South, Woodward pointed out that it was a system that had first emerged in northern states in the antebellum period and was only infused into southern law several decades after the end of the Civil War (not immediately afterward as many believed). Woodward also took comfort in the fact that Jim Crow seemed to be an overlay onto southern culture, not something intrinsic to the region’s history or deeply embedded in southern social custom. In other words, Woodward argued that Jim Crow as a social, political, and legal institution was of very recent vintage and from the vantage point of 1955, was vulnerable and under attack.1 Thus, in Woodward’s view, Jim Crow in the South had had a very strange career indeed, with its seemingly abrupt emergence at the end of the nineteenth century and its equally sudden demise in the middle of the twentieth century. Of course, from today’s perspective, the supposed challenge to the legal basis for Jim Crow that took place in 1954 may seem less significant to us than it appeared to Woodward’s generation. Nonetheless, a major accomplishment of



CHAPTER 3

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Woodward’s book, and the reason I have adapted his title for this chapter, is to remind us that the history of whiteness in the United States has had its own strange career (Jim Crow being just one of its manifestations) and is full of its own vagaries, nuances, and ironies. This essay attempts to grapple with some of the questions that Angela Woollacott, in the preceding chapter of this collection, encourages us to think about: “Has white settler colonialism been the breeding ground of specific forms of whiteness?” 2 The answer, it seems to me, is clearly yes, but white settler colonialism was different in different parts of the world, and the U.S. example is particularly revealing in that different groups of white settlers inhabited different parts of the country. The earliest among the European settlers (British, French, Dutch, German, and Spanish, among others) perhaps shared a belief in European superiority, but nonetheless had very different attitudes concerning those they considered their racial inferiors. For example, French Canadians who settled in Louisiana had different notions about race and racial difference than, say, the English who settled in Virginia. This is a complex history and I will touch on a few of these differences later in my chapter. Moreover, Woollacott encourages us to also consider “how . . . whiteness created by white settler colonialism [was] connected to the whiteness constructed by slavery and post-slavery societies—or that of societies shaped by both slavery and settler colonialism.” The United States is an example of the latter—a society shaped by both settler colonialism and slavery, with the two coexisting for several hundred years. In the United States, racialized slavery (of Africans) evolved out of and in contrast to indentured servitude (of European settlers) and took part in the forging of new understandings of whiteness and blackness. My subtitle, “Miscegenation, Assimilation, Abdication,” is an attempt to distill from this complex history three distinct practices, or strategies, that European settlers and their descendants in North America employed in their interactions with peoples of other races. Certainly I could have chosen other practices: segregation, sterilization, and lynching come immediately to mind. But the terms I have chosen appealed to me because they were practices that revealed the f luidity and merging of racial categories, as much as they were intended to solidify the boundaries between different races. On the one hand, these strategies could be and were employed by European whites in progressive ways; for example, to extend the political and legal privileges of whiteness (freedom, citizenship, property, and the franchise) to individuals who were culturally considered to be, or legally categorized as, nonwhite. For example, in some instances, assimilation offered a way to redefine as white individuals those who had been excluded from the category on biological or cultural grounds. Even today education and/or wealth can be used to anoint particular individuals as honorary whites and historians have shown how assimilation has brought about a racial re-categorization of whole “races,” as in the case of the Irish and Jews. At the same time, assimilation and miscegenation were also used to delineate and exclude from the white race those individuals and peoples



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who did not conform—in biological, cultural, religious, or gender terms—to emerging ideals and norms of whiteness. Once I settled on these analytical terms, however, it became immediately evident that my ordering of these terms was arbitrary. Beginning with miscegenation—or rather, the arguments over whether interracial marriage should be legal or not—would allow me to ref lect on the historical imperatives and choices facing European male settlers, suggesting that for them, the first order of business was to secure a progeny. But what if I adopted the perspective of a different group of historical subjects, say European women: the meanings of my terms would need to be rethought. How frequently did European women in the seventeenth century, either as freeborn women or as indentured servants, have sex with or marry indigenous peoples or indentured servants from Africa? And why would a European woman make such a choice, if presumably there were European men available to her? In the case of English indentured servant women, there is some evidence to suggest that interracial marriage could help them avoid sexual advances by their European masters. Moreover, historians know that such intermarriages took place, even after indentured servitude for Africans evolved into lifelong slavery, and even when, as was the case in Maryland, the decision of a European woman to marry an enslaved African meant that she would have to assume the slave status of her husband so long as he was alive. Consider the famous case of Irish Nell. In this instance, Nell’s children were racialized as black and enslaved for life (as were their descendants). Intermarriage for Irish Nell thus required an abdication of her previously unchallenged whiteness: the formerly free white woman was forced to relinquish her own freedom and that of all her descendants upon her marriage to an African man. 3 For other Euro/British settlers, abdication of whiteness may have begun involuntarily. I am thinking of the British-descended men and women taken captive by Indians in white-Indian warfare, who were then construed by their former compatriots as “lost to the race,” even though, according to historian Gary Nash, many of these captives often chose to remain in Indian societies.4 Or if I shift perspectives once again, this time from European women to indigenous peoples, how might miscegenation, assimilation, and abdication appear to them? From the perspective of indigenous peoples, interracial sex and marriage had one set of meanings upon initial contact, when indigenous peoples outnumbered European settlers by the hundreds of thousands, and when their own political sovereignty was unthreatened. But interracial marriage and assimilation carried very different meanings in the nineteenth century, once native peoples were relegated to reservations and denied U.S. citizenship, which was only offered to them on the condition that they relinquish their own forms of government, labor, and religion and agree to adopt white forms of gendered labor and marital/sexual relations. In characterizing the history of the United States in the twentieth century, historians often use the term assimilation to connote a voluntary process of foreign-born immigrants learning English, adopting “American” forms of culture, and becoming naturalized American



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citizens. But for Native Americans, assimilation could be seen as the finishing touch on the physical genocide that they experienced at the hands of European immigrants and their descendants.5 Regardless of my ordering of these terms, might it make sense to try to place these various strategies in relation to one another, as either alternatives or prerequisites, synchronous or sequential in time? For example, did Euro Americans demand a certain degree of assimilation on the part of Indians or Africans before intermarriage could be envisioned as part of an acculturation program? Or was the opposite the case: did whites believe in assimilations programs only after a certain amount of racial mixing had occurred? Were amalgamation and assimilation at odds with one another or different means to the same end? In the second half of the nineteenth century, when the lines between biology and culture were not as firmly drawn as they are today, the prevailing belief among white elites was that individuals (and thus whole races) inherited not just physical racial traits such as skin color, but cultural practices as well. These beliefs led to pressing political questions that were often articulated in socialDarwinian terms: was Christian civilization passed on from white father to white son, white mother to white daughter, along with skin color and intelligence or virtue? Might attempts to assimilate non-Christian, non-civilized “others” have the unintended effect of causing (white) civilization to regress even if it did result in the “progress” of so-called primitive (nonwhite) races? Ref lecting on these questions, I found it unhelpful to think of these as separate or discrete processes: interracial marriage, miscegenation outside marriage, efforts to assimilate nonwhite peoples into U.S. “civilization,” and abdication of whiteness (whites becoming Indianized or whites choosing to have black children) often coexisted in time, although not always comfortably. These, then, are some of the complexities that emerged as I tried to envision what it might mean to historicize whiteness in the context of U.S. history. I want now to turn to the first of my themes, miscegenation. What one legal historian has called the “anti-miscegenation regime” extended for three hundred years, from 1664 through to 1967.6 The year 1664 represents the date of the first law banning interracial marriage (in Maryland; Virginia’s first law was 1691); 1967 is the year that the Supreme Court declared such laws unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia. But, as historians know well, despite the laws that forbade it, miscegenation has been an integral part of U.S. history. How then did a notion of white racial purity emerge out of a history that has been thoroughly saturated with racial mixing? When, how, and for whom did whiteness emerge as a racial category on the American continent? How did its meanings change over time? Let me begin with the moment of initial contact between European settlers and indigenous peoples. Some historians have treated miscegenation as a strategy employed by European male settlers to facilitate their own survival in places where European women were scarce, and in some instances, to produce descendants. Spanish conquistadors, in particular, mixed with indigenous women throughout North and South America. Such mixing was facilitated by an economic system called



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repartimento, by which Indian peoples were made subject to Spanish conquerors and brought into close contact as tribute laborers. In sixteenth-century Cuzco, Peru, as historian Kathryn Burns has shown, interracial liaisons were common among the first generation of Spanish conquistadors, and the mixed-raced offspring were racialized in different ways: depending not just on physical appearance and skin color, but equally significantly on sex. Mestizo sons were racialized as non-European because they were construed as competitors with European/Spanish men, for both women and land, while the mestiza daughters could be “Europeanized” in a variety of ways. One of the more intriguing of these was by cloistering them in a monastery until they were of marriageable age, with the goal of making them suitable wives for other European/Spanish settlers. By 1650, mestizos and mestisas outnumbered Spaniards in New Spain and were to play a large role in later stages of colonization and conquest.7 In North America, each colonial settlement had its own attitudes toward interracial sex in its various forms—concubinage, prostitution, or marriage— depending on demographic and economic factors, as well as on the cultural beliefs of the particular European settlers and indigenous peoples. As historian Jennifer Spear has demonstrated, colonial administrators and missionaries in French Louisiana during the seventeenth century expressed concerned about the extensive concubinage occurring between French Canadian men and Indian women, believing that such relationships encouraged licentiousness among both partners and “retarded the growth” of the colony by discouraging European men from settling down in monogamous relationships and becoming farmers. 8 The French perceived Indian women as more sexual, more promiscuous, and more independent than European women (this must have been part of the allure). Thus, the French construction of Indian women’s sexuality conf licted with their beliefs about how to create a stable society, which was fundamentally dependent upon women’s sexual subordination and obedience to husbands. Moreover, French secular officials and religious leaders disagreed with one another over whether marriage to Indians was a desirable alternative to concubinage. French missionaries felt that mixed-race marriages could serve as a “ ‘civilising’ vehicle” leading to the “cultural colonisation” of Indian women and their children.9 Secular French officials, by contrast, did not know which form of metissage—concubinage or interracial marriage—was worse. Concubinage encouraged licentious behavior, but interracial marriage entailed the risk of losing French male inhabitants to an Indian way of life altogether. They feared that marriage to Indians would Indianize the French colonists, not Europeanize the Indians.10 As a solution to this problem, both secular administrators and religious officials in Louisiana agreed on the desirability of importing more women from France and expected that the resulting marriages would bring stability and morality to the colony. Ironically, although French officials obliged, the desired moral social order did not materialize. Between 1662 and 1673 French




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authorities sent more than 700 young women—most of them illiterate orphans from the Hospital General du Paris, which served as a house of detention and correction for prostitutes and vagrants—and between 1718 and 1721 another 1,215 French women emigrated. Nonetheless, by the end of the 1720s, FrenchLouisiana officials were still complaining that many of the French women were “useless and . . . do nothing but cause disorder.”11 Virginia is a convenient focus for the next part of my discussion because an analysis of its history enables us to explore how whiteness came to be associated with freedom in contrast to blackness, which became associated with enslavement. In Virginia, in contrast to Louisiana, the issues of miscegenation and interracial marriage revolved primarily around white-black liaisons, as opposed to white-Indian liaisons. Despite a shortage of English women, white-Indian marriages were a rare occurrence in Virginia, as well as in other early English settlements (North and South Carolina). Richard Godbeer attributes the rarity of such marriages to a number of factors: English sense of cultural superiority and their disdain for Indians’ “barbaric” way of life; biblical injunctions against marriage to non-Christians; English fear that Indians might use intermarriage as a means to infiltrate colonial settlements; and, conversely, English apprehension that Indian men might be jealous and resentful and so wage war on settlements in which intermarriages had occurred.12 Those among the English who valued premarital chastity were shocked by Indians’ seemingly permissive attitudes toward sex; those without such scruples worried about the alleged prevalence of syphilis. In short, English colonists feared that marriage to native women would endanger their own mores, safety, and health.13 Nonetheless, as Godbeer points out, such cultural beliefs did not prevent English colonists from having sex with Indian women, leading to sexual interactions that could be characterized as either embodying “the violence of colonial appropriation” or the “mutual and successful accommodation of different peoples.”14 As historians have pointed out, the peoples of European descent who inhabited Virginia in the seventeenth century noticed and remarked upon differences of color and often expressed a preference for lightness/whiteness, associating it with beauty and morality. Virginia planter William Byrd, writing in the early 1700s, took note of the male settlers’ “squeamish” opposition to Anglo-Indian marriages, arguing that it was due to their “aversion to the copper complexion of the natives.” Byrd himself found this view “unreasonable” and pointed out that the progeny of interracial marriages became whiter with each passing generation: “if a Moor may be washed white in three generations,” Byrd wrote, “surely an Indian might have been blanched in two.”15 But as Kathleen Brown’s study Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs (1996) reminds us, American colonists for the most part did not think of race, as we do today, in terms of color. It took over 150 years (from 1600 to 1785 or so) for racialized categories to solidify in Virginia and, as racial categories emerged, they fused together ideas of national ancestry, religion, color, gender, sexual division of labor, freedom, and slavery. As Brown describes this process, gender distinctions between “good” and “wanton” women eventually



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hardened into and overlapped with racial distinctions as we have come to understand them: virtuous women (good wives) became identified with freeborn women of English descent (known for their domestic labor, obedience, chastity, and submission) and this group of women eventually became distinguishable from women of African descent, with the implication of wantonness and enslavement.16 Many historians, Brown included, have commented on the crucial importance that legislation played in this process of racialization. In 1662, the Virginian legislature made enslavement inheritable, establishing the principle that the status of the child would follow that of the mother. Historian Kathleen Wilson has pointed out that this legislation contravened usual patriarchal practices,17 but Martha Hodes has done a great job in speculating why legislators might have chosen to do so. Perhaps “the most compelling reasons,” Hodes writes: are the question of who could care for the enslaved children of a free white woman; the fact that paternity was too often difficult . . . to prove; the fact that [having the child follow the status of the father] might encourage masters to coerce white women into sex with enslaved men . . . to produce more slaves; or perhaps such laws would have left too little distinction between white women and black women if either one could produce enslaved offspring.18 The legislation of 1662 was intended to clarify the relationship between English men and their mixed-race offspring, making those children their property rather than their heirs. But the legislation also led to the creation of two different groups of mixed-race offspring (legally speaking): the free children of European women who had children with black men; and the enslaved children of European men and black women. Thus, the legislation had the undesirable effect (undesirable from the perspective of ruling whites) of destabilizing the system of racialized slavery that was slowly evolving; by producing mixed-raced people who were free, but indistinguishable in color and appearance from mixed-race people who were enslaved. To address these consequences, the Virginia legislature passed a new law in 1691, noting that it found sexual liaisons between white mothers and black men “spurious,” even the more so if these relationships were sanctioned by marriage.19 Although the 1691 law condemned all marriages between whites and nonwhites (not just those between white women and black men) its main intent was to target and punish white women (not white or black men). If the white woman was unmarried and her child illegitimate, the woman was fined for giving birth to the mixed-race child; and if she could not pay the fine, the church wardens were to auction her off as an indentured servant for five years. If she were already an indentured servant, her sale was to take place after she had completed her current indenture so as not to deprive her current master of her labor. There was no punishment for the black father, but the mixed-race child




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was taken by the church wardens and bound out as a servant until thirty years of age. If the white woman had married the nonwhite father (a free black or Indian man; enslaved blacks could not marry) then she was banished from the colony, along with her husband and child. Because of the banishment provision, there was now a severe disincentive for white men to marry free black women, but there was nothing to discourage white men from continuing to have sexual relations with enslaved black women. Any mixed-race offspring from the latter liaisons would continue to follow the status of the enslaved mother, just as it had previously under the 1662 law. The principles behind these rules persisted up through the Civil War with one notable change: in 1785 the Virginian legislature, perhaps inf luenced by the struggle for freedom embodied in the American revolution, expanded the category of whiteness, rather than further restricting it, by making it possible for someone who had less than one-quarter African ancestry to be considered white. (The fraction previously had been set at one-eighth African ancestry). 20 By the end of the eighteenth century in Virginia, the transition from indentured servitude to racialized slavery was complete. The presumption now was that white people were free and black people were enslaved, even though there were exceptions in both cases: there were black people who were free (because they descended from free blacks who had arrived as indentured servants, finished their contracts, and had freeborn offspring; and because some white slaveholders manumitted black slaves). There were also white people who were enslaved. This fact is much less widely appreciated but historians know of it because descendants of white women (who had less than a quarter Negro blood) petitioned for their freedom—not on the grounds that they were white—but on the grounds that their status should be changed to follow the status of their freeborn white female ancestor. Moreover, in Maryland, white female ancestry was not sufficient to prevent “white” people from being held in slavery: again historians cite the famous case of Irish Nell, a woman legally recognized as white, who had had to assume the slave status of her African husband in the seventeenth century, and whose eighteenth-century descendants petitioned for their freedom on the basis that their Irish great-grandmother was born a free white woman. Under slavery in the United States, miscegenation proliferated in the south, most notably between white men and enslaved African women. One of the vagaries of this strange career of whiteness, then, is that miscegenation between white men and nonwhite women, which in the seventeenth century had occurred in the context of the scarcity or absence of white women, was occurring in the eighteenth century not as a substitute for but in conjunction with marriage to white women. For white men, miscegenation became one of the privileges that stemmed from their race and sex; that is, one aspect of their control over the sexuality of all the women in their household: wives, servants, slaves, daughters. In the south, miscegenation was enmeshed in attitudes about white men’s right to sexually control all their female dependents, but also stemmed from their beliefs about slave women’s wantonness and promiscuity.



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Another nuance worth noting is that miscegenation between white women and black men continued to occur under slavery as well; but when found out, white women found both their sexual and racial purity impugned. That is, they were stigmatized and ostracized in ways that white men were not—forced to abdicate their whiteness, if you will. At other times, white women relinquished their white privilege voluntarily by continuing to have sex with black men, sometimes leaving white husbands to reside in the slave quarters with their mixed-race children. Although these instances were rare, they are extremely intriguing, in particular for what they imply about white women’s willingness to abdicate their whiteness. Sometimes these reasons had to do with sexual desire; young white women left older white husbands to reside and sleep with younger and more attractive slaves. Finally, the history of Virginia enables us to consider how whiteness became, in the words of Peter Wallenstein, “a far more exclusive property by 1930 than it had been a half century before.” 21 As we have already seen, Virginia first used one-eighth but later adopted one-quarter as the fraction to be used to determine the boundary between black and white; that is, people were considered to be legally black (no matter how white they looked or behaved) if one of their grandparents was black. However, by 1910, Virginia was using the fraction of one-sixteenth to set the boundary between white and black (now if one had one great-great-grandparent who was black, then one was also designated as black); and by 1924, the state legislature went all the way, adopting what is now called the “one-drop rule,” which had the intended effect of re-categorizing as black, white people who had any black ancestry at all. This narrowing of the category of whiteness, along with the fact that laws banning interracial sex and marriage were much less harsh on blacks before the Civil War than they were to become afterward, does not mean that Virginia became more racist after the Civil War than it had been before. Rather it shows how the mechanisms delineating the boundary between whiteness and nonwhiteness differed in these two eras; how after slavery was abolished, law had to be increasingly employed to define whiteness and set the racial boundaries between who was white and who was not, punishing behavior that threatened that boundary. Historians have pointed out how varied and arbitrary such definitions of whiteness were, how individuals could be defined as white and live among whites in one State, but find themselves reclassified as black should they move to another. Clearly many white-looking people with black (or other nonwhite) ancestry passed into whiteness without authorities noticing or revoking their whiteness. However, in other instances, white people of mixed-raced ancestry (who thought of themselves as white) could find themselves disinherited if relatives saw fit to challenge their racial status. The history of whiteness becomes even more complicated when we examine how other States in other regions of the country—California or Texas, for example—constructed whiteness: anti-miscegenation legislation in western states banned marriages between white peoples and certain racial groups but




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not others. 22 But rather than try to make sense of why certain intermarriages were permitted and others not, I want to stress a different, albeit related point: whiteness was a f luid, racially hybrid category from the very beginning of U.S. history. Yet, by the mid-nineteenth century, that historical reality was being forgotten: whiteness and mixed-raceness had become antithetical terms. By 1924, as the one-drop rule indicated, whiteness was formally declared to be a category of racial purity (no mixing whatsoever). Let me now skip forward to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in an attempt to deal with the last of my themes: abdication. In the introduction to his book Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (2002), historian David Roediger speculates about the future, wondering “whether and how nonwhiteness is possible, both for those currently identified as white and for those who may be . . . coerced into whiteness in the future.” 23 And in his conclusion, Roediger seems to suggest that one possibility is to continue on a path set by the twentieth century’s expansion of the category. As Roediger cautiously ref lects, there “is a temptation to regard the opening up of whiteness in the twentieth century as on balance a positive thing, certainly as preferable to continuing anti-immigrant racism against Greeks, Italians, Jews, Poles and others.” 24 While I think few scholars would dispute the point that expanding the category of whiteness to include certain European ethnicities under the term “Caucasian” is preferable to further restricting the category, two problems still persist: first, whiteness, even if more encompassing, continues to exclude those deemed to be outside its boundaries; second, and more significantly, expanding the category does not weaken the racist assumptions that lies behind the ideology of white supremacy, nor does it dismantle the system of racial inequality that currently exists. One obvious alternative—to abdicate whiteness or to become a “race traitor” 25 —is also problematic, if only because abdication for any particular individual isn’t really possible unless the white person is fully committed to passing in reverse. How does one shed one’s whiteness as one walks down the street, hails a taxi, goes into a grocery store, buys a house, or applies for a job? The call to individuals to abdicate their whiteness strikes me as premature, even disingenuous—a way for white people to have their cake and eat it too, to be white when it is advantageous to be white, and to be something else when there is something to be gained from not being white. Another alternative is to somehow abolish the category of whiteness altogether—empty it of its current meanings and remove the economic, political, and social advantages that it conveys. 26 This approach requires radical reforms in law, culture, politics, and the economy, to eliminate what Cheryl Harris has termed the “property of whiteness.” 27 Where to start? How can we, as historians, work to facilitate this goal? 28 Ironically, to abolish the category we must fully focus our attention on it. To allow whiteness to remain an unmarked norm makes it difficult, if not impossible, to develop truly effective antiracist forms of white identity. So, let us study how white peoples have been



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seen by peoples of color. 29 Let us analyze, in great historical detail, the ways in which whiteness operates, along with other categories, such as gender, class, and religious affiliation, to empower particular groups and individuals and to disempower others.30 Let us continue to train ourselves to see whiteness as a category that imbues its subject with particular freedoms and privileges. Let us be willing to consider how white peoples, even well meaning ones, are complicit in sustaining a system of racial inequality. Let us understand why so much of white liberal discourse about race during the twentieth century has been “color blind”—that is, has espoused universalist ideals of racial equality (of the “all men are created equal” variety) and understand how this discourse has contributed to the strengthening of a political, economic, and social status quo grounded in racial inequities.31 A second step toward deconstructing whiteness has involved emphasizing ethnic or class differences among whites, in order to undermine any notion that white identity is a singular, or unifying, locus of privilege and power. For example, scholars such as Annalee Newitz and Matt Wray, who have studied the discourse of “white trash,” have argued that the term “is a way of naming actually existing white people who occupy the economic and social margins of American life, and it is a set of myths and stereotypes that justify their continued marginalization.”32 These recent theoretical and historical analyses of white trash have been extremely useful because they permitted the articulation of racial disempowerment and whiteness together. But again we need to be careful not to overextend this insight. Just because poor whites face economic discrimination and political ostracism in ways that middle-class whites do not, it does not mean that they do not also benefit from the privileges and freedoms that accompany whiteness in ways that poor blacks do not. Nor should we permit these analyses to undermine multiculturalist agendas such as affirmative action and social welfare programs in the mistaken belief that addressing class discrimination will also take care of racial discrimination. We know that whiteness needs to be understood as a social construction—a set of social meanings that are attributed to particular peoples at particular moments of time. Historicizing whiteness can help us understand better how that process of social construction took place—and keep our attention on the strangest element of this history: how race-mixing, a fundamental reality of the peopling of the United States, could be so forgotten, so marginalized, so stigmatized that it is not now widely known. For after all, the history of whiteness in the United States has been a history about how folks of different ethnic/ national origins have gone about forging a racial commonality. In sum, I encourage all of us working in the field today to find ways to historicize whiteness so that whiteness can no longer be taken for granted as an unmarked norm. I encourage us to find ways to historicize whiteness so that we come to appreciate how whiteness is a matter of place and context: an individual (or a group) can be more white, or less white than another individual or group, white in certain circumstances and not in others. I encourage us to find




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ways to historicize whiteness so that we come to recognize the privileges that accompany whiteness, even while we remember that not all people designated as whites enjoy these privileges. Most of all, I encourage us to find ways to historicize whiteness so that we might work to change our perspective and our language and begin to speak of white peoples, all white peoples, as a mixed race; a product of miscegenation and assimilation, as indeed our history shows. To do otherwise is to perpetuate the myth that whiteness entails racial purity. Once it is well understood that white peoples in the United States are a mixed race, the category of whiteness will cease to have the meanings it now carries, and the abolition of whiteness—that utopian desire to abdicate whiteness— may then become possible. At that historical juncture, perhaps, we may be able to say with pride, along with Jane Lazarre, author of Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons (1996), “I am no longer white. However I may appear to others, I am a person of color now.”33

Notes 1. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, third edition, 1974 [1955]). 2. Angela Woollacott, chapter two in this collection. 3. Irish Nell is well known to historians of this period. See Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth Century South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). 4. Gary B. Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Martha Hodes (New York and London: New York University Press, 1999), 20–21. 5. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence, University of Kansas, 1995). 6. Peter Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage and Law—An American History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 7. Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 7 and 15–18. 8. Jennifer M. Spear, “ ‘They Need Wives’: Metissage and the Regulation of Sexuality in French Louisiana, 1699–1730,” in Hodes (ed.) Sex, Love, Race, 35–59. 9. Ibid., 40. 10. Ibid, 41–2. 11. Ibid., 50. 12. Richard Godbeer, “Eroticizing the Middle Ground: Anglo-Indian Sexual Relations Along the Eighteenth-Century Frontier,” in Hodes (ed.) Sex, Love, Race, 91–111. 13. Ibid., 92. 14. Ibid. 15. Quoted in ibid., 94. 16. Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 17. Kathleen Wilson, “Gender, Empire and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century,” in Gender and Empire: The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford University Press, 2004), 14–45.



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23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

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Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 30. Wallenstein, Tell the Court I Love My Wife, 16. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 4. Peggy Pascoe has made the intriguing suggestion that laws were applied most stringently to groups like the Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos, whose men were thought likely to marry white women and applied less stringently to groups like Native Americans and Hispanics whose women were historically likely to marry white men. See Peggy Pascoe, “Race, Gender and Intercultural Relations: The Case of Interracial Marriage,” Frontiers 12, no. 1 (1991): 7. David R. Roediger, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Past (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2002), 26. Ibid., 240. Noel Ignatiev, “Abolish the White Race by any Means Necessary,” Race Traitor 1 (Winter 1993), http://racetraitor.org/abolish.html. Noel Ignatiev was among the first to propose this solution. Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 10, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. The best discussion of abolishing whiteness that I have found is David Roediger’s “Introduction: From the Social Construction of Race to the Abolition of Whiteness,” in Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History, ed. David Roediger (London: Verso, 1994), 1–17. There are hundreds of works, but David Roediger has edited an extremely useful anthology titled Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to Be White (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), and this collection is a good place to begin. Hazel Carby’s Reconstruction of Womanhood, published in 1987, reminded white scholars that white people were also raced individuals: Hazel Carby, Reconstruction of Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). See Peggy Pascoe’s brilliant article, “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American History 83, no. 1 (June 1996): 44–69. Annalee Newitz and Matthew Wray, “What is ‘White Trash’? Stereotypes and Economic Conditions of Poor Whites in the United States,” in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York/London: New York University Press, 1997), 172. Historical dictionaries ascribe the origin of the term “white trash” to black slaves; it originated as a black-on-white labeling practice of the early nineteenth century and was quickly appropriated by upper-class whites (by 1855). The terms white trash and poor white trash remained in use by blacks and whites throughout the nineteenth century. Today, the term white trash seems more widespread and is often used to denote an explicitly economic as well as racial identity. Jane Lazarre, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of a White Mother of Black Sons (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), 135.







“Whiteness,” Geopolitical Reconfiguration, and the Settler Empire in Nineteenth-Century Victorian Politics Leigh Boucher

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n 1858, Victorian liberal parliamentarian Thomas McCombie published his History of the Colony of Victoria.1 This colony, in twenty years of startling historical change, had progressed from functioning as an administrative satellite of New South Wales to self-governing “independence” with complete (white) manhood suffrage. To describe a geopolity territorialized as a self- governing British colony only two decades after formal colonization began, McCombie deployed a narrative of manly liberal development to explain how “the bureaucratic style of government [had] been thrown aside and an entirely new order of things had developed. [Victoria had] passed from a perfect despotism . . . to the opposite point of extreme democracy.” 2 If, as James Levine argues, ideas about manhood provided the bedrock for dynamics of political incorporation in nineteenth-century British liberal thought, it should come as no surprise that McCombie’s historical “colonists” embodied a suite of manly and respectable political competencies.3 Furthermore, for McCombie, the Victorian colonist was discursively cohered via a spectral contrast with the “helpless aborigine [who] wasn’t fit to have a political existence”; as Uday Mehta so compellingly describes, access to the (hu)man rights and entitlements of liberal thought in the nineteenth century was always modulated by the idea of race. McCombie’s History thus mobilized ideas about racialized political competency to both concretize a particular ordering of territory and governance and to organize political entitlements within this colonial state.



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Just under four decades later, George Turner, liberal premier of Victoria, attended the Colonial Conference in London. The contradictory rights of British subjects within the wider imperial polity cast a particular hue over this meeting. As the published proceedings obliquely expressed it, the various premiers and imperial administrators engaged in a “full exchange of views” about both colored immigration and practices of naturalization across empire.4 This was another episode in debates about the territorial purchase of an apparently racially unspecified imperial citizenship, the racial specificities of intra- colonial immigration regulations, and the relationship between territory and governance in the settler-colonial empire. For Turner, the unique racial arithmetic of the dominions’ colonies signified their status as “white man’s countries,” and the apparently racially unspecified entitlements of imperial subjecthood wouldn’t stop these colonies pursuing an immigration policy to maintain this racial congeniality.5 The liberality of the Australian colonies—and their inevitable federation—was enabled by the shared racial heritage of this Greater British world. Adding color to the white body politic would only serve to halt, if not reverse, their apparent progress. In the turn to transnational models of historical analysis, many historians have convincingly suggested that grammars of racial difference were constantly (re)constituted by their articulation across myriad imperial and international borders. Unsurprisingly, McCombie’s and Turner’s racial arithmetics necessarily “braided together” knowledge from across the settler empire. 6 If, as Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds suggest, a specifically “white” identity emerged as a global/transnational signifier in the late nineteenth century, it is also important to remember the types of borders this signifier crossed and the variegated transterritorial geopolitical communities it animated.7 At both these moments certain types of borders mattered, both materially and imaginatively. So too, historians of the British settler empire more broadly have recently begun to analytically entangle the histories of immigration and colonialism through the deployment of “whiteness” as a category of analysis in colonial contexts. In part, then, this chapter is an attempt to think through the different conceptual vocabularies of whiteness studies and postcolonial theory, and consider the implications of these distinct genealogies of theoretical knowledge. While paying attention to the constitution of the figure at the apex of racialized hierarchies of political and social entitlements is important, I propose an analytic distinction between the different discursive strategies that maintain these always-uncertain relations of power. The following discussion, then, is rather sharply divided. In the first sections, I consider how settler-colonial historians might engage in a project of writing a “transnational” history of whiteness that attends to different strategies of racialization and acknowledges both the historical contingency and importance of specific geopolitical configurations. In the concluding section, I will attempt to analyze the two historical moments that opened this chapter with these sets of theoretical, historiographical, and political concerns in mind. This historical analysis is animated by a central set of questions: how were



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Whiteness and Postcolonial Studies: Correspondent Conceptual Models? Whiteness and postcolonial studies would seem to make happy bedfellows precisely because these fields share a commitment to denaturalizing dynamics of racialization and the relationships of power they enable. These two analytic domains have, however, developed as largely discrete conceptual endeavors with largely distinct genealogies of contestation and development. However, the category of whiteness offers historians interested in the relationship between settler-colonial rule, systems of racial difference, and settler identity tempting bounty; might it be a perfect analytic fit to the settler-colonial encounter? In fact, the “fit” between postcolonial analytics and settler-colonial contexts is not straightforward. As Antoinette Burton points out, the bulk of postcolonial “metatheory” has been produced about the African and South Asian contexts;8 the accepted genealogy of postcolonial thought, from anticolonial discourses in Africa and Asia to Said via psychoanalysis and Foucault, is oriented by a particular historical narrative of imperial expansion, control, contestation, and departure in those contexts. Perhaps equally emblematically, Ranajit Guha suggests the way around our understanding of empire as a “sort of machine” is to remember the “scale . . . of unimaginable and uncomfortable . . . immensities” that greeted the colonizers gaze.9 For Guha, and for much postcolonial theory, these immensities are as much corporeal as they are spatial; in the postcolonial theoretical imaginary, colonized bodies outnumber the colonizers. However, nineteenth-century settler colonies were gripped by anxieties directed toward an(Other) population. If the Manichean binary of colonizer/colonized was always and already racially coded as white/nonwhite, the specter of the nonwhite colonizer demanded a reconfiguration of strategies of racialization. Partha Chatterjee’s “rule of colonial difference” offers little insight into perhaps the most prominent racial problem of the late-nineteenth-century settler empire, namely, the nonEuropean immigrant.10 Perhaps because settler contexts are equally (if not more) characterized by anxieties about a mass of nonwhite colonizers as they are by anxieties about a mass of politically disruptive colonized subjects, or because the numerical relationship between white-settler and Indigenous bodies orients the scales of discursive attention in different ways, a body of Australian scholars have grafted whiteness studies onto a corpus of postcolonial knowledge. Precisely because whiteness studies gives analytic weight to the sovereign category of racialized power relations (much like the numerical relations of settler colonies) and often assumes a “gallery of racial others’ ” rather than a constitutive colonial binary



different geopolitical communities racialized within political debate, how did these dynamics of racialization modulate political and territorial entitlements, and what kinds of borders were energized and transgressed in these discursive eruptions?

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(which offers a way to consider how debates about nonwhite immigration and strategies of colonial racialization were mutually encoding), whiteness studies seems to offer a useful corrective to the limitations produced by the historicopolitical genealogy of postcolonial knowledge.11 One of the fundamental assumptions of this emergent analytic field— generated, perhaps, by its U.S. lineage—is that white racial power maintains its legitimacy through a ruthless absence of color and meaning. Precisely because, as Richard Dyer and others argue, whiteness maintains its privilege and power through a cultivated absence of color, culture, and ethnic specificity, the central analytic strategy of whiteness studies turns on an attempt to conceptualize a form of racialized identity that disavows any racial designation.12 Unsurprisingly, in Australia, the specter of the White Australia Policy looms large over the field of whiteness studies. There is, however, a dramatic analytic inconsistency within this analytic application; the production of a “white Australia” at the turn of the nineteenth century wasn’t characterized by an absence of color. Indeed, the whiteness of Australia was made coherent by a set of discourses that explicitly specified the Australian nation as a white political community. Jane Durie argues that scholars need to conceptualize “whiteness as a signifier of dominance.”13 I am suggesting, however, that we need to clarify whether this is a signifier generated by our conceptual vocabulary or by the contexts we are examining. If we analytically deploy the category of whiteness into contexts where it is designationally absent, who or what historical designation are we talking about? Drawing a clear distinction between whiteness as an empiricallyoccurring designation or as an analytic category might offer different ways of conceptualizing racialized privilege. There is no question that in certain times and places, political communities (minority or otherwise) have explicitly imagined themselves in a rhetoric of whiteness as a means of securing political incorporation.14 In contrast, however, political entitlements—particularly in the liberal tradition—have often been articulated in the universalizing tropes of western modernity. In this historically persistent modality of racialized thought, exclusion occurs via a racialized attribution of incompetence. Precisely because, as Judith Butler describes, “the human is understood differentially” on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, and class, “certain humans are recognized as less than human” and thus less able to access so-called human political rights.15 Whiteness in these contexts is most certainly an absence: it is the empty signifier “man.” Historical accounts of racialization might usefully distinguish between these strategies of specified privilege (which would necessarily incorporate a genealogy of the “white race” as an empirically occurring designation) and the moments when racialized hierarchies of political entitlement are maintained via “strategies of exclusion.”16 On the one hand, then, studies of empirical whiteness would interrogate its emergence as a specific designation with attendant specifying functions, whereby the attribution of whiteness explicitly legitimates specific privileges. On the other, studies of analytic whiteness would seek to bring to the surface the operation of power that operates via



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racialized exclusions from political, emotional, or social norms. This is not to suggest, however, that I am arguing for naïve empiricism in the project of historicizing whiteness. Rather, I am asking for some historical specificity about the strategies and imperatives of racially coded power relations. Perhaps the different historiographic utilities of whiteness studies and postcolonial theory have been produced by their particular historical and political contexts. In the settler empire, however, perhaps neither/both of these frameworks “fit.”

Transnational Histories and Geopolitical Specificity Historians are, of course, interested in both the temporal and spatial specificities of their analytic domains; in one sense transnational histories are a corrective response to the historico-spatial limitations of the “narrative contract” between twentieth-century historical writing and the nation-state.17 For transnationally oriented historians, “bundles of relationships” and the complex f low of bodies, ideas, and capital across the globe have been fundamental to the production of particular economic, social, and cultural situations, national or otherwise.18 Indeed, as discourses about late-twentieth-century globalization have reverberated throughout the western academe, historians have sought to analyze a much longer genealogy of globalized change and exchange. Many historians, in an attempt to dislodge dominant narratives of U.S. exceptionalism, for example, have undermined the opacity of U.S. historical borders.19 Historians of the British Empire in particular have leapt aboard the “global” and transnational bandwagons to provide accounts of the British Empire as a globalizing force for transcolonial and transnational circulations of people, ideas, and capital.20 Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose, among others, argue that British “national and local [contexts] were imbricated in a world system fashioned by imperialism and colonialism.”21 Indeed, apparently “exceptional” British and U.S. national historiographies have been seriously challenged by transnational scholars who disrupt the assumption that Europe (and, for some, the United States) is always and already the birthplace of knowledge, culture, and power. Indeed, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call to “provincialise Europe” was, in one sense, a call for a transnational history of modernity’s origin.22 These are important political and historiographical projects; they attend to the capacity of historical processes to unfold across and between national boundaries. Ironically, however, these nation-centered critiques tend to stabilize the very borders they are attempting to fracture. The “dance of flows and fragments,” to paraphrase Frederick Cooper,23 that many globally and transnationally oriented historians depict are conceptually stabilized by a critique of national analytic geographies. It is worth remembering, however, that the national-borders that transnational historians are incohering are relatively recent phenomena; this is a project determined to unmake the connection between historical writing and twentieth-century nation-states. At a fundamental level, histories of nineteenth-century empires challenge the nation-state




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both because of their unevenly “globalized” circulations of capital and culture, and because their constitutive borders weren’t always national ones. So too, the imagined and governed borders of these empires and colonies didn’t necessarily correlate with the boundaries of twentieth-century nation-states.24 Sometimes histories of colonialism aren’t transnational, they are simply imperial. As Duncan Bell argues, various modalities of political thought in the second half of the nineteenth century attempted to grapple with the present and future shape of the global order. 25 The territorial boundaries of the British Empire, both internally and externally, were a problem to be politically managed rather than a stable organizer of political, economic, and cultural exchange. Politicians in the metropole and the peripheries asked: what was the relationship between different forms of colonies? Which colonies should be geopolitically connected, and what form should this connection take? Which spaces of empire were to be “self-governed”? And who was the “self ” imagined as the constituency deserving of home rule? While twentieth-century discourses of national sovereignty have tended to animate notions of national imperviousness and autonomy (precisely the tropes transnational historians are arguing against), the borders of the nineteenth-century imperial world were managed by a recognition of their intra-imperial infirmity and undermined by their inter-imperial ambiguities. 26 These questions constituted an unstable ground upon which forms of political membership, belonging, and entitlement were managed by equally unstable grammars of racial difference. A transnational history of whiteness rightly decenters the nation, but also needs to attend to the ways in which the graduated sovereignties of intra-imperial borders both fostered certain networks of cultural circulation and forged discrete transterritorial communities that deployed racialized rhetorics to solidify certain boundaries whilst transgressing others. An important element of the transnational historical project, then, must include an attempt to think through how non-national (rather than transnational) forms of geopolitical management and exchange generated historical change. At particular moments specific kinds of borders did territorialize political possibilities in particular ways, even while, perhaps, drawing on circuits of knowledge production that stretched beyond them. While the tremendous political and intellectual purchase of transnational historical writing opens out the capacity to connect previously isolated historiographies, it is worthwhile to consider how geopolitical borders were imagined and policed. At certain moments nation-states certainly didn’t matter, not because their boundaries were transgressed, but because their borders didn’t exist or were understood differently. Questions about the relationships between race, territory, and forms of governance shaped the political careers of Thomas McCombie and George Turner. McCombie (in the 1840s and 1850s) and Turner (in the 1890s) were politicians crucially involved in the machinations of geopolitical reconfiguration in the nineteenth-century British Empire. While these two points of solidification seem to constitute a narrative of teleological political development—from



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settlement to colony to nation—the outcomes of these debates were far from certain; the simple fact that campaigns were required to achieve them should unsettle any whiggish narrative of inevitable reform. Moreover, these colonial, imperial, and national territories and populations were, of course, continuously reimagined in the changing grammars of racial difference that reverberated through the empire throughout the nineteenth century. At a local level, the racial constituency of the Victorian population was both a figurative problem to be managed and a concrete policy to be developed; at the same time as McCombie and Turner described the Victorian body politic in transnationally produced grammars of race, they justified their respective racialized polices of political and territorial inclusion and exclusion. In the context of these globalized grammars of difference and their local articulations, McCombie and Turner also animated particular transterritorial political communities: communities that, inevitably, recast the racialized geographies of empire and the borders that managed its coherence. While McCombie was primarily concerned with the internal problem of Indigenous presence, for Turner the specter of the non-European immigrant threatened to unmake the racialized logics of territorial and political entitlement. It is to their respective contestations of geopolitical structure, their variegated imaginings of territorially bounded political communities, and their management of territorial and political entitlements that I now turn with the hope of paying attention to how their political projects were shaped by specific dynamics of racial specification or exclusion.

Racialization, Whiteness, and Imperial Geopolitics in Nineteenth-Century Victoria By the 1850s, McCombie was well known in Victorian political life. As the editor and primary contributor to one of the first Victorian daily newspapers in the 1840s, McCombie’s mode of Scottish liberalism cast a particular hue over the representational life of the colony. Together with a group of “Scots radicals,” who, as Cliff Cumming points out, were so crucial to the political machinations of early-colonial Victoria, McCombie earned a degree of infamy by mischievously nominating colonial secretary Lord Grey as the sole Melbourne representative to the Sydney based colonial government to demonstrate the apparent need for local self-rule. 27 The single other “problem” to occupy as much space in McCombie’s voluminous published and political output was an explicitly racialized one. Unlike his discussions of the character and political entitlements of the Victorian population, which displayed an apparent lack of racial specificity—but more on that in a moment—McCombie was an enthusiastic contributor to the construction of ethnographic knowledge about and policy regarding the so-called Aboriginal problem in colonial Victoria. As a perhaps largely forgettable parliamentarian, McCombie’s ambivalently recognized political significance in the reconfigured colony was produced by his continued attempts to obtain what he termed a “measure of justice” for the




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Indigenous population; he chaired the 1859 Select Committee appointed by the Victorian parliament to enquire into the condition and racial character of Victorian Indigenous population. 28 Eventually, his recommendations provided the framework for the first “protection” act in Victoria, an act that solidified their social exclusion and legislative discrimination in the colony. McCombie’s political and literary career, then, embodied the intersections between the constitution of racial knowledge, the management of racialized hierarchies of political entitlement, and the organization of territory within empire. Indeed, McCombie mobilized notions of humanitarian obligation that had a transterritorial heritage and orientation. In McCombie’s political rhetoric, temporally and geographically removed audiences provided support for his attempts to prompt the disbursement of “British duty.” McCombie reminded his fellow colonists that these audiences would judge the treatment of the Indigenous populations as a crucial indicator of the colony’s “character”; he had “been in correspondence with gentlemen of high attainment and from British societies in reference to it.” 29 However, McCombie was, in fact, in regular contact with the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BA AS), perhaps characterized by a much less “benevolent” set of concerns. McCombie had been a key correspondent for the BA AS in Victoria since the mid-1840s, and as editor of the Port Phillip Gazette published their ethnographic survey in an attempt to collect information about the “aboriginal race of Victoria.”30 McCombie would finally secure this ethnographic information in his role as select committee chair in the late-1850s and his ethnographic imagining of the “Victorian Aborigine” and “his” political (in)capacities circulated to other locations in the settler empire.31 The analytic connection so crucial to postcolonial theoretical vocabularies— namely between the production of myriad knowledges about colonized subjects and the maintenance of racially coded hierarchies of territorial and political entitlement—is not purely an analytic one. Indeed, McCombie himself represented the collection of ethnographic information about his racialized objects as a crucial project to assess the political capabilities of his Indigenous charges. Alongside his involvement with the Merri Creek School for Aboriginal Children, the collection of information about the local population provided him with the rhetorical means to “ascertain whether they [were] fit to have a political existence.” 32 The “experiment” of a small school for Indigenous children removed from their communities, in combination with this body of empirical knowledge about their racial character, would for McCombie “answer the long disputed question—is it possible to civilize the Aboriginal population of this continent?”33 The apparent failure of the school and McCombie’s ethnographic portraits suggested that even though “we have no reason to believe them incapable of learning . . . they must go through gradations before they can be placed on political equality . . . [they are not] a race capable of caring for themselves [at present].”34 In the 1850s, the apparent helplessness of the indigene provided even more rhetorical support for McCombie’s attempts to produce some kind of legislative



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response to the Aboriginal problem. The colonists, with their recently acquired knowledge of Indigenous political (in)capacities, were newly obligated to figure out the best “means of alleviating their absolute wants.” 35 Furthermore, a fundamental indicator of their “social and moral progress towards . . . becoming a great and civilized” colony would be the treatment of the Indigenous population.36 Indeed, between the late 1840s and 1860, the internal management of political entitlement and the external geopolitical orientation of the colony of Victoria was drastically reorganized. Not only was the colony itself constituted as a coherent unit within the imperial geopolity—with a specific modality of sovereignty—but the hierarchy of political entitlement and enfranchisement within this polity was reordered. After the initial liberal reforms of the early1850s (with an already wider reaching franchise than “home”), the combination of the gold rush rebellion (and the subsequent extension of limited voting rights to the mining population) and the inf lation in land prices (with a unintentional effect of bringing the ten-pound franchise into the grasp of a previously excluded population), 37 the Victorian colony was characterized, according to McCombie, by an “early and extreme state of freedom.”38 The need for colonial self-rule had been a running theme through McCombie’s contributions to the Edinburgh Simmond’s Colonial Magazine throughout the late 1840s. His “sketches” of the colonial situation for the “pleasure of the readers at home” were littered with references to the “manly . . . respectability” of the colonists in Port Phillip.39 Indeed, in a context where the extension of the franchise in the metropole had been crucially modulated by racialized notions of middle-class respectability and political competence, McCombie mobilized precisely these tropes in order to argue for Victorian separation and independence.40 In his various arguments for a “new system of representation and government for the colonies,”41 McCombie stridently argued that these colonists were “ready for the duties of citizenship.”42 He continued, “the colonists see themselves as born for no higher aim than to till the soil, and this is that most honorable of callings.”43 In this way, McCombie engaged in a project of imagining the responsible character of the local population. The language he used to do so, however, was remarkable malleable. The population itself could be either “Anglo-Saxon,” “English,” “British,” “colonial,” or, very rarely, “white”, demonstrating a surprising lack of specificity about the racial status of the colonizer population. While Stoler has suggested that campaigns for colonial political reform “cultivated and clarified notions of whiteness” that were specific to the colonizers’ political rhetoric,44 in Victoria in the 1850s this clarification occurred, for the most part, via the attribution of racial characteristics to Other populations. When read in counterpoint to his representation of Indigenous political incapacities, there is little question that McCombie’s arguments for self-government hung upon a racialized conception of manly political competence. McCombie, then, was a Victorian politician whose dominant political concerns—namely, the relationship between the imperial center and its colonial periphery, and the treatment of the Indigenous population at that




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periphery— forced him to consider the ways in which these territorially bounded “populations” should be governed and geopolitically organized. Furthermore, the political rhetoric he deployed to agitate for a reorganization of the policies that managed these problems was, unsurprisingly, constituted by and constitutive of understandings of racial difference. There is no question that McCombie’s understandings of racial difference, geopolitical organization, and individual political entitlement were modulated by transcolonial and intra-imperial forms of knowledge and exchange; the genealogy of his ideas stretched elastically across various nodal points of empire. Most obviously, McCombie’s unwillingness to racially specify the “rights and duties of citizenship” in the colonies echoed the traditions of liberal practice in Britain and its tendency to disavow the racial specificity of their application; in the imperial polity, there was little space for the admission that British subjecthood was hierarchically modulated by race.45 However, the exigencies of settler-colonial rule demanded the brutal exclusion of specific populations from territorial and political entitlements; just as settler colonialism was organized by an exclusive claim to territory by the colonizer population and a subsequent denial of Indigenous sovereignty, so too, these racialized grammars of difference expelled the Indigenous populations from the rights and duties of citizenship within the liberal body politic. In a powerful combination of developmental theories of racial difference and hierarchies of political competence, McCombie endlessly deferred the prospect of Indigenous political inclusion. Equally importantly, however, McCombie deployed these ideas to argue for specific types of territorial integrity and autonomy. While the parameters of racial thinking and political recognition might have crossed borders, they were used, at least by McCombie, to reterritorialize empire and imagine populations within it. The granting of responsible government to the southeastern Australian colonies might have momentarily stabilized coterminous forms of sovereignty in this region (as self-governing colonies), but territorial reorganization continued to de/restabilize the imperial polity in the thirty years that followed. Geopolitical structure, political incorporation, and competing strategies of racialization formed an unstable figurative triad within which political debate about and across empire took place. Debates about the racialized reach of imperial citizenship and the possibilities of imperial/national federations reverberated in the political landscapes of empire throughout the nineteenth century. Indeed, public debate about Australasian federation began to gain momentum in the 1880s and the discussions of imperial federation that had reverberated at the edges of imperial policy making since the 1830s gained increasing support in the metropole and settler periphery from the 1870s.46 Debates about the reach and implicit racial codings of imperial citizenship similarly refused to disappear from the metropolitan political landscape.47 In a similar way, debates about irreconcilable strategies of immigration restriction and citizenship in the various colonial peripheries indicated the inevitable reconfiguration of imperial conceptions of political membership. This was precisely the nexus of political instabilities that shaped the debates of the colonial conferences in the 1890s and 1900s. George Turner, then



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premier of Victoria, attended the colonial conference in 1897 uncertain of precisely the outcomes he could expect. Like McCombie he was centrally involved in the racially encoded debates about geopolitical structure and political inclusion over the course of his career as a liberal politician in Victoria (and Australia) between 1880 and the 1900s. And like McCombie, Turner was a figure whose political identity centered around notions of respectable, responsible liberal manhood; according to Alfred Deakin, “in dress, manner and habits [he was] exactly on the same level as the shopkeepers and prosperous artisans . . . [so too] in his uprightness, straightforwardness, domestic happiness and regularity of habits.”48 Importantly, Turner’s Victorian government recrafted the immigration laws of the colony in order to maintain the racial constituency of the body politic, and, like most representatives to the first Australian parliament in 1901, he firmly supported the exclusion of troubling racial others from the newly territorialized Australian nation-state. These imperial conferences must be understood, at least in part, as a response to increasingly “independent” forms of governance in the settlercolonial periphery. In one sense, however, they also drew on a language of imperial commonality and unity to draw colonial politicians back into the imperial fold. Turner, like most colonial politicians of the late nineteenth century, expressed a firm commitment to the continued (if not increased) unity of empire. Turrner’s major reservation was, unsurprisingly, that the geopolitical reconfiguration of the Australian colonies currently underway—namely, Australian federation—needed to be completed first.49 The overtures of Turner (and the colonial conference more broadly) toward closer imperial ties were crucially supported by a modality of racial thought that specified an Anglo-Saxon empire as a discrete cultural and geopolitical unit. Whether in pro-imperialist declarations of expansionist pride in the metropole, or explicitly racialized declarations of trans-territorial racial commonality in the colonies, the dominion empire garnered potent cultural and political purchase in the late nineteenth century. The solidification of the dominion empire as a coherent cultural and political figuration was made possible by figures such as Charles Dilke and John Seeley in the 1880s who, in specific ways, argued that the “expansion of England” into the settler colonies represented a fundamental expansion of the English state rather than the control of external territory by that nation. As Penelope Edmonds argues in this collection, Anglo-Saxonism provided a powerful connection between the settler colonies. As Robinson remarked at the Royal Colonial Institute in 1875 in his discussion of Natal, the settler colonies were, in their “political and social character . . . emphatically Anglo-Saxon [because they demonstrated] a love of manly work and responsibilities.”50 The AngloSaxonist specificity of British political and social life was crucial to Turner’s imagining of the Victorian population. While eschewing the works of liberal philosophy, he nonetheless carried the works of James Bryce—an ardent AngloSaxonist—with him to Victorian parliament. So too, his solution to the 1890s depression in Victoria was to create Anglo-Saxon “village-communities” in rural Victoria.51




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The alignment between settler and metropolitan political concerns was, however, less smooth than the descriptions of a great Anglo-Saxon settler empire might have implied. Moreover, political debates between the Australian colonies regularly demonstrated how a commonality of racial stock was no guarantee of political unity. However, there was one concern common to most institutions of devolved governance in the settler-colonial periphery, namely, how to maintain the racial integrity of the territorially bounded populations to which they apparently referred. As Robert Huttenback describes, politicians across the empire communicated with each other about this problem of racial constituency and various legislative solutions circulated around the imperial polity.52 At the colonial conference in London in 1897, the settler-colonial premiers almost uniformly asserted a commitment to keeping the dominions white. Indeed, in this forum—as in the local colonial debates—the subtleties and contradictions of Anglo-Saxonist thought were molded into that potent appellation of racial specificity. Like the emergent discourses of explicitly designated whiteness that had emerged in local colonial debates from the 1880s, the settler empire was politically imagined as a racially united set of territories and populations. As the premier of New Zealand expressed it in 1907, the settler empire was a “white man’s country” and the local governments would enact legislation to ensure they remained so.53 These assertions in 1907 were certainly not new; at the 1897 conference New South Wales premier George Reid and Turner affirmed that “we are sternly resolved there shall be a white Australia, and we feel the sooner we put up this barrier the better for all parties.”54 The discussions about immigration policies and restrictions at the colonial conference took place against the backdrop of a wider discussion of the ambiguities of citizenship legislation across empire. Indeed, Chamberlain had placed these items on the agenda precisely because the explicit racialization of political entitlements and immigration policies at the settler-colonial peripheries contradicted the myth of an unraced British subjecthood. Chamberlain proposed a simple solution to the problem: to adopt the “Natal formula” currently in operation in the South African colonies. As Turner assured his fellow Victorian parliamentarians upon his return in 1898, the language test would “only be applied to colored people . . . [there was] no need to apply the test to whites.”55 Turner’s confidence that territorial entitlement in Victoria should and would be specified by whiteness was echoed across the settler-colonial empire. Indeed, the legislative strategy for keeping the colonies white was, like the commitment to a white man’s country, passed along a trans-territorial network of politicians and officials. This community of colonizers was, however, both a network of discursive exchange and a political figuration in nineteenth-century imperial politics. In the context of a geopolitical structure constantly under revision, the dominion colonies were united by their racialized designations. The white man’s empire of the late nineteenth century, then, specified its racial privilege. Whether as Anglo-Saxon or white, colonial politicians mobilized discourses of racial specificity to manage the racial constituency of their



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populations. This marked a significant shift for the dynamics of racialization in the settler-colonial polity. Rather than excluding specific races from political entitlement according to their apparent civilizational and political incompetency, the recognition of whiteness became a key modulator of territorial and political entitlement. Even while legislation apparently effaced racial specificity, the cultural purchase of discourses of whiteness made the racial exclusivity of territorial and political entitlements all too apparent.

Coda Whiteness studies and transnational historical analysis represent two of the more productive analytic developments in the historical interrogation of settler colonies in recent years. At the start of this chapter, I tried to suggest that there were concrete historical, political, and methodological reasons for this analytic purchase that, contrary to accusations of faddism or academic opportunism, offer historians of the settler colony important ways to orient their discussions of racialized hierarchies of power and entitlement. I have tried to suggest that the interventions of transnational models of historical analysis shouldn’t only apply to moments when national borders were crossed, but should also pay attention to the different kinds of borders that structured political debate, contestation, and imagination. While we might think that understanding the network of trans-territorial exchange in the nineteenth century requires attention to the ways in which borders were crossed, for many nineteenth-century politicians an interlocking and malleable system of coterminous sovereignties meant that some borders were more important than others; particular territories were bound together (and thus bordered) by the invocation of particular racial commonalities and by forms of imperial governance and sovereignty. We don’t need to “read against the grain” to understand how the southeastern Australian colonies were connected to other nodal points in the empire; these connections were fostered by a body of knowledge that asserted trans-colonial commonality. While whiteness studies asks us to pay attention to the silent and invisible category at the apex of racialized hierarchies of power, it is also important to remember that at specific moments, racialized entitlement operates via the specification of privilege rather than the exclusion of difference. Indeed, precisely because designations of whiteness emerge at particular times, this demands a more robust historicization of the dynamics of racialization.56 As Louise Newman’s chapter in this collection suggests, incorporations into and expulsions from the category of whiteness are complex processes. These forms of racialized hierarchy and entitlement differently managed the racial constituency of particular territorially bounded populations. Paying attention to these different strategies of racialization is important because they opened out different boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. When Thomas McCombie negated the possibility of Indigenous political inclusion in the 1850s, the dynamics of racialization he employed functioned




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to defer rather than reject Indigenous political rights. Precisely because the rhetorics of racialization he deployed were developmental and exclusionary, according to the logic (if not the intent) of his political rhetoric the Indigenous population of Victoria might, one day, have found a niche to move the system. This was precisely the niche that Indigenous political activists sought in the late 1870s. When the residents of Coranderrk mission station in Victoria engaged in a sustained protest at their treatment by the colonial state, a petition to the chief secretary from the Kulin argued that “we are not children for the board to do with as they like any longer.”57 These Indigenous petitioners thus demanded political and, indeed, existential entitlements in precisely the language of liberal inclusion and exclusion that marked out the category of settler in McCombie’s writings; they spoke as politically mature and civilizationally competent fellow humans. Because the racialized exclusions of settler-colonial entitlement had been written in a language of universally attainable competencies, Indigenous protestors could make concrete claims on these entitlements in precisely the language that had originally justified their exclusion. When political competency was designationally ambiguous, Indigenous peoples could make a claim upon it. However, the 1870s and 1880s were also the decades when the racially designated settler empire emerged as a coherent (although contested) geopolitical unit and potent figurative referent. In the face of a troubling population of non-European colonizers, colonial politicians mobilized emergent discourses of whiteness to manage settler-colonial populations. Political entitlement and competence—at least at this moment—were explicitly designated as white. It should come as no surprise, then, that when female suffragists argued for political incorporation, they deployed a rhetoric of racial specificity to do so; as they earned the right to vote it was simultaneously reconfigured as racially exclusive, and thus incompatible with Indigenous racial membership.58 Perhaps this explains that the Kulin claims weren’t recognized. I don’t raise these decidedly “local” examples of the politics of whiteness to undermine the trans-territorial imagination of whiteness I previously outlined. Rather, perhaps the most important task a history of undesignated racial privilege and/or specified whiteness can fulfill is to consider the implications these strategies of racialization had on local populations; lest we forget, the most productive critical maneuvers in historical writing have been generated by precisely those voices that white knowledge functions to silence.

Notes Thanks to Sarah Pinto, Steven Angelides, and Jane Carey for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. Vital research was made possible by a fellowship at the Centre for Research in History and Theory at Roehampton University. Thanks to John Tosh and the Centre for providing this invaluable opportunity. 1. Thomas McCombie, The History of the Colony of Victoria from Its Settlement to the Death of Sir Charles Hotham (Melbourne: Sands and Kenny, 1858). 2. McCombie, History, 1.



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3. John Vincent, The Formation of the Liberal Party, 1857–1868 (London: Constable, 1966). 4. Maurice Ollivier, The Colonial and Imperial Conferences from 1887 to 1937 (Ottawa: Queens Printer, 1954). 5. “Report of a Conference between the Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, M.P. (Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Colonies) and the Premiers of the Self-Governing Colonies of the Empire, at the Colonial Office, Downing Street, London, S.W., in June and July 1897; with Appendices,” in Records of the Colonial Office, Commonwealth and Foreign and Commonwealth Offices, Empire Marketing Board, and Related Bodies (London: National Archives, 1897). 6. The phrase “braided together” is from Tony Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race (New York: Palgrave, 2006). 7. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2008), 1–15. 8. Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 9. Ranajit Guha, “Not at Home in Empire,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (1997): 348. 10. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 11. The phrase “gallery of racial others” is from George Lipsitz, “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the White Problem in American Studies,” American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1995): 374. 12. For a discussion, see Ross Chambers, “The Unexamined,” in Whiteness: A Critical Reader, ed. Mike Hill (New York: New York University Press, 1997): 187–203. 13. Jane Durie, “Speaking the Silence of Whiteness,” Journal of Australian Studies 79 (2003): 138. 14. See, e.g., Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race (London; New York: Verso, 1994). 15. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004); emphasis in the original. 16. Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), 1–19. 17. The phrase “narrative contract” is quoted by Antoinette Burton, “Introduction: On the Inadequacy and the Indispensability of the Nation,” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003): 1–25. 18. Eric Wolfe’s “bundles” are discussed in Ballantyne, Orientalism and Race. 19. Perhaps the best example of this kind of work in recent years is the collection of essays in Ann Laura Stoler, Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). 20. Phillippa Levine, Kevin Grant, and Frank Trentmann, Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, 1860–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 21. Sonya O. Rose and Catherine Hall, “Introduction,” in At Home with the Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006): 1–31. 22. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 23. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 24. As Donald Denoon argues, the Australian colonies were often imagined as part of a wider pacific community that incorporated New Zealand. Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).




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25. Duncan Bell, Victorian Visions of Global Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 26. For a discussion of the complexities surrounding economic treaties between European nations and their empires, see Luke Trainor, “The British Government and British Imperial Unity,” The Historical Journal 13, no. 1 (1970): 68–84. 27. Cliff Cumming, Port Phillip Presbyterians: The Continuing Scottish Connection (London: Australian Studies Centre, Institute for Commonwealth Studies, 1993), 8. 28. Select Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Condition of the Aborigines of Victoria (Melbourne: George Fairfax, 1858). 29. The Victorian Hansard Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the Legislative Council and Assembly of the Colony of Victoria: Volume 4 (Melbourne: W. Fairfax, 1856–1865). 30. Port Phillip Gazette, April 4, 1845. 31. For a discussion of this distribution, see Liz Conor, chapter fourteen in this collection. 32. Port Phillip Gazette, February 17, 1847. 33. Select Committee, 20. On civilization and Christianisation, see Port Phillip Gazette, May 25, 1847. 34. Port Phillip Gazette, December 18, 1849. 35. Select Committee, 1858, ii. 36. Quoted in The Argus, August 11, 1856, 5. 37. There is an extensive historiography that discusses the development of colonial democracy in Victoria. Usually, however, this material is much more concerned with the agitations of miners according the central concerns of Chartism: Paul A. Pickering, “A Wider Field in a New Country: Chartism in Colonial Australia,” in Elections: Full, Free and Fair, ed. Marian Sawer (Sydney: The Federation Press, 2001): 28–45; Marian Sawyer, “Peacemakers,” in Elections, 1–26. 38. McCombie, History. 39. Thomas McCombie, “A New System of Government and Representation for the Colonies,” Simmond’s Colonial Magazine and Foreign Miscellany (1845), 269; “Australian Sketches: No V—the Scenery and Society of New South Wales,” Simmond’s Colonial Magazine and Foreign Miscellany (1846), 326. 40. On the complex discourses of racialized middle-class respectability in the metropole in the 1830s, see Catherine Hall, “The Rule of Difference: Gender, Class and Empire in the Making of the 1832 Reform Act,” in Gender Nations: Nationalisms and the Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000): 107–35. 41. Thomas McCombie, “The Port Phillip Colonists and Their Superintendant,” Simmond’s Colonial Magazine and Foreign Miscellany (1849), 33. 42. Thomas McCombie, “Emigration and Prison Discipline Considered,” Simmond’s Colonial Magazine and Foreign Miscellany (1847), 462. 43. McCombie, “The Port Phillip Colonists and Their Superintendant,” 35. 44. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 45. Sonya O. Rose and Keith McClelland, “Imperial Citizenship,” in At Home with the Empire, passim. 46. For a discussion of the various proposals for Imperial Federation, see Ronald Hyam and Ged Martin, eds., Reappraisals in British Imperial History (London: Macmillan, 1975).



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47. Pat Thane, “The British Imperial State and the Construction of National Identities,” in Borderlines: Gender and Identities in War and Peace, ed. Billie Melman (London: Routledge, 1998): 29–45. 48. Alfred Deakin, The Federal Story (Melbourne: Robertson and Mullins, 1944), 49. 49. Ollivier, The Colonial and Imperial Conferences, 132. 50. J. Robinson, “The Relations of the Colonies to the Mother Country,” Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute 6 (1875): 59. 51. The Victorian Hansard Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the Legislative Council and Assembly of the Colony of Victoria: Volume 35 (Melbourne: John Ferris, 1866–1958): 423. 52. Robert Huttenback, Racism and Empire: White Settler and Colored Immigrants in Britain’s Self-Governing Colonies, 1830–1910 (London: Cornell University Press, 1976). 53. “Confidential Papers Printed in Connection with the Colonial Conference, 1907” from Records of the Dominions Division (Colonial Office, Dominions Division, 1907–1925) Series 1 National Archives, Kew, CO 885/18. 54. “Report of a Conference between the Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain, M.P. (Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Colonies) and the Premiers of the Self-Governing Colonies of the Empire.” 55. The Victorian Hansard Containing the Debates and Proceedings of the Legislative Council and Assembly of the Colony of Victoria: Volume 37 (Melbourne: John Ferris, 1866–1958): 395. 56. The historical narrative that is emerging about “whiteness” in much scholarship— namely, that the “white race” solidified in some kind of global context in the late nineteenth century—certainly seems to fit with broader understandings of the “hardening” of racial categories of the course of the nineteenth century. What remains to be interrogated, however, is the relationship between these two developments. Did whiteness emerge in the context of this hardening, or, as a response to it? 57. Quoted in Diane Barwick, Rebellion at Coranderrk (Canberra: Aboriginal History Inc., 1998), 67. 58. See Patricia Grimshaw, “A White Woman’s Suffrage,” in A Woman’s Constitution? Gender and History in the Australian Commonwealth, ed. Helen Irving (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1996): 179–85.







Whiteness as a Transnational Colonial Production



PART II




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riting at the start of the twentieth century, the African American scholar W. E. B. DuBois seems deftly to have anticipated the current interest in imperial dimensions of racial formation and emergent strategies of whiteness. Soon after the annexation of the Philippines and Puerto Rico doubled the “colored” population under the sovereignty of the United States, DuBois observed: “This is for us and the nation the greatest event since the Civil War and demands attention and action on our part. What is to be our action toward these new lands and toward the masses of dark men and women who inhabit them?” If the problem of the coming twentieth century was the “problem of the color line,” then surely it would trace these imperial contours.1 It is within the setting of the American empire, then, that we must view DuBois’s comments some ten years later, when he discerned that the “world in sudden emotional conversion, has discovered that it is white, and by that token, wonderful.” The souls of these assertive, cosmopolitan white folks puzzled him—“not, mind you, the souls of them that are white, but the souls of them that have become painfully conscious of their whiteness; those in whose minds the paleness of their bodily skins is fraught with tremendous and eternal significance.” 2 What concerned him most were the souls of those whose proclamation of whiteness would come to etch more deeply the national and imperial color lines. DuBois was pointing to the emergent white man as a boundary subject, as a position for negotiating or asserting affinity and difference, as a point on the color line where respectability and disreputability could be determined. At the end of the twentieth century, Homi K. Bhabha echoed DuBois when he argued that whiteness was more a “strategy of authority” than any “authentic or essential ‘identity.’ ”3 James Baldwin also suggested as much when he wrote “there is, in fact, no white community”—rather there are specific ethnic communities, whether English, French,



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German, or some European blend. “The people who, as they claim, ‘settled’ the country became white,” Baldwin continued, “because of the necessity of denying the Black presence, and justifying the Black subjection.”4 Although Matt Wray in Not Quite White urges us to examine the shifting boundaries of whiteness, he implies that they delimit some hinterland of an experienced or imagined white social category—when in fact the boundary might constitute the sum of it.5 It may be worth considering further the white man as a remarkably adaptable boundary subject, a livelier version of what so ciologists call “boundary objects.” According to Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, such “boundary objects are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They are weakly structured in common use, and become strongly structured in individual-site use.”6 The figure of the white man therefore might mark the color line at any number of national and imperial sites. At certain points, some folks can strategically deploy their whiteness without always living it. The concept of a “boundary subject” may help to explain how whiteness can so often seem invisible, or an empty signifier—even though, at unsettling sites and moments of anxiety, it will be asserted stridently or forcefully rebuffed.7 Whiteness can make boundaries work around the world (it is, after all, the color line), though it may make surprisingly little happen within them. It is thus strategically and analytically distinct from those other racial identifiers that have sometimes appeared synonymous, such as British and Anglo-Saxon. Neither of these figurations has proven quite so adaptable to places of racial conf lict and stress, neither is as robust and inclusive, nor possesses such a conveniently loose structure, as whiteness. Fixed more securely and less mobile, “British” and “Anglo-Saxon” in contrast have proven perhaps more powerful in framing ordinary subjectivity, organizing ethnic affiliation, and setting political agenda—at apparently bounded and comfortable sites, at least. To be sure, “white” can do all these things too, but mostly on the fraught margins of European advance. Accordingly, whiteness has been the most sensitive marker or tracer of social stress and anxiety in settler nations and colonies. 8 Within the boundary, behind the color line, it is generally invisible and sometimes even inoperable. What I want to do in this essay—in a very brief and tentative fashion—is explore the historical operations of whiteness, distinguishing its functionality from that of related categories such as British and Anglo-Saxon.9 How did whiteness travel? What did it do when it arrived? And what was it not able to do? At this stage, it is impossible to answer these questions fully. The best I can manage here is to sketch out some issues that might be addressed less abstractly and in more detail by future studies of whiteness as a boundary strategy.

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We should begin by asking when and where “white” became such a telling point of distinction. For example, in the Australian colonies during most of the



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nineteenth century, British was the preferred designation for the new settlers in the southeast of the continent, though recourse to white was not impossible. The colonizers found even cultivable territories and temperate climates could test British fiber and sensibility from time to time, though never really imperil them. Moreover, the native peoples seemed to be withering away with contact. Southern Australia thus appeared a proper place for British bodies and mentality. It was not until the 1880s, when the settlers came to feel serious competition from Asians and experience profound discomfort and unease in the tropical north of the country, that their whiteness was asserted far and wide. “White Australia” was a proclamation of possession in adverse circumstances, an extension of foreign bodies into liminal spaces, in conf lict with colored peoples. Additionally, the designation had the advantage of mobilizing the Irish and other Europeans on the frontiers of settlement. While not a properly British territory (with its very specific environmental furnishings), the Australian tropics might become subject to white control and occupation. In the insulated salons of Melbourne and Sydney, however, British and even Anglo-Saxon continued to command respect, as they implied for many a more complete way of life and form of government.10 Where did the white man emerge? His genealogy remains surprisingly obscure, but Theodore Allen suggests white identity served as a mark of social distinction, and a means of excluding African Americans, in colonial Virginia as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century. During the rest of that century, when Virginians ventured out to the frontier, they usually went as whites.11 Yet Alexander Saxton argues it was not until the early nineteenth century, with the rise of Jacksonian Democrats in the United States, that “white racism moved to center stage in Democracy’s legitimating synthesis”—to constitute the boundaries of the “white republic.”12 Certainly after the 1830s, “white” became a remarkably common self-representation in the southern United States and the Caribbean. It was a time of heightened racial conf lict in an environment that felt especially inhospitable to settlers of European ancestry. In tracing the origins of “white trash” to the southern states during this period, Wray might actually have located the beginnings of white as a popular identifier and positive self-marker.13 For centuries used as an adjective, white began to surface more commonly then as a noun connoting membership of a collective, or as a corporate type. By the 1850s, talk of the white vote and white blood abounded. Perhaps it was from the southern United States that whiteness spread like an invasive species. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have already documented the passage of one of the key technologies for differentiating whiteness, the dictation test, from Mississippi to South Africa and Australia during the latenineteenth century.14 It is likely that other racial ideas and practices followed similar routes. As DuBois suggested, many settler societies discovered and asserted their whiteness toward the end of the nineteenth century. Australia and South Africa were among the more prominent of the new ecological niches in which whiteness took root and f lourished. This white proliferation took place just as racial



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competition sharpened, as Asians and Africans increasingly resisted European colonialism, and as Europeans moved to occupy the tropics, a place once regarded as inimical to their type. At racial borderlands, the white man represented a pragmatically mutable and negotiable character. He became a boundary subject that generated speculation and discussion, literary, scientific, and popular. What sort of man was the white man? What were his capacities and limits? What did the white man want? For multiple parties, the white man proved good to think with.15 What whiteness offered in flexibility, it could withhold in definition and validation. Although whiteness was frequently conjugated with capacity for civilization, it did not usually imply any particular political program, in contrast to Anglo-Saxonism. For nineteenth-century literary travelers such as Charles Dilke, chasing “Greater Britain” around the globe, Anglo-Saxon heritage was a distinct package of hereditary propensities, institutions of government, and cultural forms, altogether readily differentiated from French or German styles.16 For President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States, Anglo-Saxons were inevitably vigorous, self-governing people, independent in character, and republican in sentiment.17 Anglo-Saxonism evidently exerted its own transnational attraction early in the twentieth century, as Paul Kramer and Marilyn Lake have argued so convincingly.18 Yet the appeal of this fairly standard assemblage in the United States and Australia rarely extended far beyond political circles in Boston, New York, Washington, and Melbourne. Anglo-Saxon worked less well in tropical Australia, or in colonies like the Philippines and Puerto Rico—in these places, white types were generically triumphant, so it seemed. Indeed, the same person might be robustly white in Darwin or Manila, and proudly Anglo-Saxon in Melbourne or New York—when necessary, of course, one could proclaim whiteness in these “civilized” cities too, but no one, so far as I can tell, ever tried the AngloSaxon gambit on racial borderlands. Whiteness functioned at sites of corporeal unease and conf lict with others to consolidate and justify claims of privilege and possession. It was a maneuver along perceived borders that betrayed anxiety, even as it displayed pride or confidence or solidarity. Whiteness became linked intimately to estimates of civic status, intellectual achievement, and moral standards. A form of registration and communicability, it was additionally a measure of sovereignty and a proxy for self-government. In this sense, the category worked as a gate-keeping mechanism, as a means of assessing and surveying white and nonwhite populations. Just as Anglo-Saxon recognized civic attainment, white implied certain broad embodied capacities and potential cultural trajectories, all available for political agitation, literary speculation, and scientific investigation. Whiteness allowed gradations of sovereignty, and provided an entry point for the disciplines required for the eventual achievement, or maintenance, of self- government. In thus summoning up and projecting subjectivity, it operated as a differentiated strategy for mobilizing and managing populations—white and other—across the world in the early twentieth century. Whiteness, in other words, emerged as an inherently biopolitical formation, organized around the discipline of individual bodies and the surveillance and regulation



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of populations. Unlike other more expressive filiations such as Anglo-Saxon and Briton, whiteness operated most effectively through personal hygiene, restriction of contact, and control of sex and reproduction.19 These operations were adaptable enough to allow the production of probationary whites, liminal whites, degenerate whites, deferred whites, and part whites—they offered a precisely adjustable mechanism of sliding scales and thresholds. In some circumstances, southern Europeans or others from the Mediterranean littoral might be classed as whites; at other points, they could be excluded. Sometimes, women, children, the elderly, the poor, homosexuals, and others on the social margins might seem dubiously white, at risk of heading off course, threatening white prestige. In settler states like Australia, plans were made to absorb biologically the indigenous people into the white population, making them whites with a “dark strain” running through them.20 In other settings, absorption was rejected in favor of segregation, and miscegenation was officially forbidden.

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The emerging white man often seems a melancholy or nostalgic character. Frequently a troubled soul, he could be more an itinerant than cosmopolitan, a figure of pathos as much as hubris. Emerging at sites of environmental stress and group conf lict, he appears always in f lux, always becoming, imperiled, anxious, messing up, and breaking down. Prone to outbursts of anger and frustration,and often full of self-pity and nervousness, the white man rarely presented a compelling model of self-possession and control. Few diasporic whites would have recognized as their own the commanding, hardy white bodies and mentalities that politicians and scientists were busily constructing and mobilizing. Take, for example, the “tropical white man,” invented in tropical medicine circa 1910. Scientists in laboratories in places like Manila and Townsville examined men of European descent, recording their body temperatures, testing their blood, assessing perspiration and metabolism and other physiological functions, to determine if whites would degenerate in conditions of moist heat. Physicians studied them working hard on the Townsville waterfront and performing drills on the Philippine parade grounds. Marshaled in hundreds of scientific papers, the scientific data proved for the first time that white male bodies were robust and resilient enough to thrive anywhere, even in supposedly “unnatural” and unsuitable places like the tropics. The white male body, usually belonging to some colonial functionary or nation-builder, was thus biologically projected across the globe around 1910. Yet few white men seem to have experienced any sense of durability and insulation, and fewer still would have recognized the masses of scientific data as representing their own frail bodies. Instead, most whites in the tropics continued to feel uncomfortable and vulnerable. They frequently succumbed to “tropical neurasthenia,” or went “troppo”, becoming nervy and unmanned in stressful circumstances. The tropical white body—to say nothing of its soul—was not one to be easily inhabited. 21



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The “sovereign” white subject found himself still longing for old attachments and familiar objects. Whiteness often proved a poor substitute for more homely connections and complex identifications. Melancholy, as Sigmund Freud suggested in the early twentieth century, is a pathological condition where the subject cannot accept a substitution for the loss of an object, leading to self-reproach, the expectation of punishment, and the impoverishment of ego.22 For all his assertion and pride, the white subject remained prone to nostalgia, dissatisfaction, and ambivalence—painfully conscious of his whiteness, as DuBois observed. Perhaps in gaining a world the white man might even lose his soul.

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This essay is merely a preliminary reconnoiter of some of the English-language terms used to describe people of European ancestry in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is an exercise in tracing what Leigh Boucher calls “empirical” whiteness in the “British world,” not in assembling its analytic framework. 23 As such, it demands attention to self-markers and self-images, and requires sensitivity to distinctions between cognate representations such as Anglo-Saxon and British. It argues, in an admittedly sketchy fashion, that the emergent white man might profitably be regarded as a f lexible, biopolitical boundary subject, as a disciplinary formation on racial borderlands—or, as Baldwin and Bhabha noted, a strategy of authority, not an essential identity. As racial formation, visible whiteness is a piquant example of what Edward W. Said called “late style.” Questioning the “accepted notion of age and wisdom in some last works . . . ref lect[ing] a special maturity, a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity [or] a miraculous transfiguration of common reality,” Said wondered: “What of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction?” 24 Whiteness proliferated late, after almost a century of the fabrication of different forms of racial classification and racialized practice; it began to fall apart within fifty years, in the senescence of race science; and to the historian it continues to demonstrate “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” Of course, DuBois was saying all that as long ago as 1910.

Notes 1. W. E. B. DuBois, “The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind,” AME Church Review 17 (October 1900): 95–110, 95. 2. W. E. B. DuBois, “The Souls of White Folk,” Independent (August 18, 1910), 339. For an extended analysis of this article, see Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008). 3. Homi K. Bhabha, “The White Stuff,” Art Forum 36 (May 1998): 21. 4. James Baldwin, “On Being ‘White’ . . . and Other Lies” [1984], in Black on White: Black Writers on What it Means to be White, ed. David R. Roediger (New York: Schoken, 1998), 177–80, 178.



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5. Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 6. Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations,’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39,” Social Studies of Science 19 (1989): 387–420. 7. On the invisibility of whiteness, see Richard Dyer, “White,” Screen 29 (1988): 44–64; and Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). On the emptiness of whiteness, see Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, eds, Race Traitor (New York: Routledge, 1996); and David Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History (New York: Verso, 1994). 8. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Radhika Mohanram, Imperial White: Race, Diaspora, and the British Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 9. The resort to “Caucasian” in the United States during the twentieth century adds further complications: see Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Bruce Baum, The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 10. Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002). On Britishness, see Neville Meaney, “Britishness and Australian Identity,” Australian Historical Studies 32 (2001): 76–90; and Carl Bridge and K. Fedorowich, eds, The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (London: Routledge, 2003). 11. Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race. Volume 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (London and New York: Verso, 1997). Winthrop D. Jordan (White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 [Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1968]) offers a similar chronology, but a different explanation. 12. Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London and New York: Verso, 1990), 386. Thus James Fenimore Cooper refers to red-skins and whites in The Last of the Mohicans (1826), which takes place near Lake Champlain, not the South. 13. Wray, Not Quite White. 14. Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line. 15. This remains the case in recently independent countries such as Papua New Guinea, once an Australian territory. See Ira Bashkow, The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Identity in the Orokaiva Cultural World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Warwick Anderson, The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 16. Charles W. Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866 and 1867, 2 vols (London: Macmillan and Co., 1869). See also Penelope Edmonds, “White Spaces? Racialised Geographies, Anglo-Saxon Exceptionalism and the Location of Empire in Britain’s Nineteenth-Century Pacific Rim Colonies,” in Historicising Whiteness: Transnational Perspective on the Construction of an Identity, eds Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, and Katherine Ellinghaus (Melbourne: School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne, 2007), 363–74.



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17. Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); and Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, eds, Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997). For Australia, see Peter Cochrane, “Anglo-Saxonness: Ancestors and Identity,” in Communal/Plural: An Inquiry into the State of Anglo-Saxonness within the Nation, eds, Ghassan Hage, Justine Lloyd, and Lesley Johnson (Kingswood, NSW: University of Western Sydney-Nepean, 1994): 1–16. 18. Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States & the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Marilyn Lake, “Whiteman’s Country: The Transnational History of a National Project,” Australian Historical Studies 122 (October 2003): 346–81. See also Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line. 19. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire. 20. Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997); and Anderson, Cultivation of Whiteness. 21. Anderson, Cultivation of Whiteness; and Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 22. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) in Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957). 23. Leigh Boucher, “ ‘Whiteness’ Before ‘White Australia’?,” in Boucher, Carey, and Ellinghaus (ed.), Historicising Whiteness, 16–25. 24. Edward W. Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 7.



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The Question of Miscegenation in the Politics of English-Speaking Countries in the Early Twentieth Century Henry Reynolds

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n 1902 James Bryce delivered the prestigious Romanes lecture in Oxford. He was a man of many talents—historian, jurist, and politician; world traveler and author of the magisterial study The American Commonwealth. Bryce’s lecture “The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind” was inimitably global in its sweep and sober in its song. Bryce had, for many years, been considering the social consequences of the revolution in communications brought by the trains, steam ships, and the telegraph, and by the contemporaneous expansion of the great European empires. The situation was unprecedented. All parts of the world had been explored and all the races of mankind were in contact. The early twentieth century stood “eminent and peculiar in this” because it marked the completion of a process by which all the races had been effected, and all the backward ones placed in a more or less complete dependence on the more advanced. The new and radical closeness of contact—“so much closer and more widespread than ever in the past”—had created a unique situation. The, by now, inescapable contact between the races had created a “crisis in the history of the world,” which would “profoundly effect the destiny of mankind.”1 What Bryce feared was that there would be extensive intermarriage or “race fusion” of the kind already seen in the Ottoman Empire and the South American republics. He had no doubt that miscegenation was bad in principle and perilous in practice. The mixture of whites with “negroes” and “hindus” seldom showed “good results.” The two general conclusions from global experience were that when “races of



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The matter ought to be regarded from the side neither of the white race nor of the black, but of the future of mankind at large. Now for the future of mankind nothing is more vital than that some races should be maintained at the highest level of efficiency, because the work they can do for thought and art and letters, for scientific discovery, and for raising the standard of conduct will determine the general progress of humanity. If therefore we were to suppose the blood of the races which are now most advanced to be diluted, so to speak, by that of the most backward, not only would more be lost by the former than would be gained by the latter, but there would be a loss, possibly an irreparable loss, to the world at large. Given the universal importance of the matter of racial mixture Bryce concluded that it might be doubted “whether any further mixture of Advanced and Backward races is to be desired.” 2 Bryce’s lecture was seen as a masterful statement of widely shared views and was cited many times over during the following twenty years. As an American admirer phrased it, the Englishman had put his finger on the complex problem of how to facilitate global cooperation without promoting “the mongrelisation of the world’s people.” 3 There was a very broad consensus in the Englishspeaking world during the first part of the twentieth century about the danger of miscegenation linking scholars in many disciplines—biology, geography, sociology, anthropology, and political science. The power of this conviction can be illustrated by the difficulties faced by the proponents of racial equality when attempting to counter the charge that their views implied that interracial marriage would necessarily follow.4 Gustav Spiller was the driving force behind the Universal Races Congress in London in 1911 and delivered a paper entitled “The Problem of Racial Equality.” Having taken what for the time was a radical stand if favor of equality, he felt obliged to provide a preemptive answer to presumed critics, observing: Is it, then, to be inferred, we may be asked in astonishment, that we should encourage indiscriminate miscegenation, free intermarriage between white, black and yellow races? The inference need not be drawn, since we may say that, just as in parts of Europe, for instance, Protestants, Catholics and Jews live together amicably while yet intermarrying very rarely, so the equality of the human races might be universally acknowledged, and yet intermarriage not take place.5 The English colonial administrator and explorer Sir Harry Johnston reacted in a similar way in an article, “Race Problems in the New Africa,” published in



marked physical dissimilarity” intermarried the average offspring was apt to be “physically inferior to the average of either parent stock” and far below the mental level of the “superior.” Bryce believed that he had identified a question that had implications for the future of civilization itself, declaring that:

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Foreign Affairs in 1924. Having proposed a series of liberal reforms for the continent, he too felt the need to address expected criticism, writing: “Then comes the crucial question: ‘So you approve of miscegenation?’ Well, no I cannot say I approve of our losing our pink and white Complexions and our position as the highest race.”6 So great was the fear of miscegenation that reformers who wanted to liberalize racial policies felt it necessary to disown any suggestion that they favored intermarriage. This was well illustrated in the case of the liberal South African scholar R. F. A. Hoernle. In an article “Race Mixture and Native Policy” published in 1934, he explained how fear of miscegenation lay at the heart of his country’s policies of segregation. Their proponents, he observed, argued that: If we civilize the native and let him acquire skill, if we let him enter the learned professions, we cannot in the end refuse him political equality if we grant him political equality, we cannot deny him social equality; if we grant him social equality, we cannot in the end avoid race-mixture. Fear of race mixture, Hoernle observed, was at the heart of South African racial policies. But in order to break down the structure of segregation the “barrier against race mixture” was “worth maintaining,” because while the visceral fear of intermarriage persisted no change was possible.7 The Canadian scholar T. H. Boggs adopted a similar position. While wishing to advance the position of “Orientals” in British Columbia and grant them all the rights of citizenship, he was convinced that this could only be done if there was “rigid exclusion of all Oriental immigration, even to the total future exclusion of all Asiatics.” Boggs believed that exclusion was essential “so long as racial assimilation through intermarriage is not feasible.”8 Another telling illustration of the persistence of fears of intermarriage between “races” considered “widely separated” can be found in the caution adopted in the 1930s by some of the leading advocates of racial tolerance. In their celebrated book We Europeans, published in 1935, J. S. Huxley and A. C. Haddon attacked the vast “pseudo-science” of racial biology associated with the rise of Nazi Germany. They declared that “for existing populations, the word ‘race’ should be banished.” But the two crusaders were not so sure about “very wide crosses” that they feared might give: “biologically ‘disharmonious’ results in later generations, by producing ill-assorted combinations of characters. Characters may be unduly exaggerated by the coming together of unfamiliar genes, or characters adapted to one environment may be forced to co-exist with those adapted to another.” 9 J. B. S. Haldane was another prominent and outspoken opponent of German racial policies who continued to be doubtful about the wisdom of “racial crosses,” writing in 1938: I would urge the extraordinary importance of a study of the effects of race crossing for the future of the British Commonwealth. Until such a



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Hostility to miscegenation was most pronounced in the United States and reached a peak of intensity in the early twentieth century. By the early 1930s twenty-nine of the forty-eight states had legislated to prohibit the marriage of whites and Afro-Americans. Many of the western states also banned marriages between Europeans and Asians. These laws were enforced with punitive jail sentences. The prominent American scholar E. B. Reuter observed in 1931 that popular opposition to miscegenation was equally strong in those states without specific legislation. He reported the comments of a senior Massachusetts official who observed that interracial marriages were rare “chief ly because of the violent opposition of the public” toward them.11 The Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal found that white opposition to miscegenation was almost universal. It was held “commonly, absolutely, and intensely.” During his travels around the country he found that “nine out of ten liberal minded, cosmopolitan northerners were opposed to amalgamation” even in the future, fearing it as producing an “inevitable deterioration.”12 South Africa developed its own homegrown policies against miscegenation. Prime Minister Jan Smuts declared in 1917 that there must be “no intermixture of blood between the two colors.”13 His political rival, J. B. Herzog, was equally determined to prevent the emergence of a “mixed race by miscegenation.”14 In 1927 Herzog’s government passed The Immorality Act that banned sexual contact across the color line. In Australia a series of Protection Acts passed in the different states between 1897 and 1916 gave government officials power to control Aboriginal marriages. The detail of policies differed but there was a general understanding that controls should be exercised in such a way that would protect White Australia. Immigration restriction, introduced in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States between 1901 and 1924, was motivated by fear of miscegenation, expressed volubly and insistently by members in all the relevant legislatures. When the Immigration Restriction Act was introduced in the first session of the new Australian federal parliament in 1901, it inspired speeches from almost all the members and senators. Many of them spoke of the dangers of racial mixture, of their horror of “piebald populations,” of “mongrels,” and corruption of the blood. A typical comment was made by G. B. Edwards who declared that: Racial contamination would proceed from the lowest strata of society and filter up until it comes to the highest, permeating the whole nation. That is what we have to fear. I do not fear that my people or my friends will mix with the inferior races, but I do fear that my descendants, in



study has been accomplished, and it is a study that will take generations to complete, we are not, I think, justified in any dogmatism as to the effect of race crossing. It may not be desirable to forbid it, but there can be very little reason, I think, to encourage it as between the widely different races of mankind.10


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A colleague observed that nothing good ever came from “hybridization,” which resulted in offspring that reproduced the “vices of both parents with the virtues of neither.” It was essential to preserve “our civilization intact and uncontaminated” safe from a “mongrel breed.”16 Immigration restriction legislation in the sister Dominions, New Zealand and Canada, was greeted with similar sentiments and comparable rhetoric. There was little opposition in either parliament, the consensus being that miscegenation presented a grave danger to both race and nation. New Zealander E. Kellett explained in 1920 that the evil of the “mixed breed” could be seen on nearby Pacific islands and “it was time we stopped it absolutely.” J. Q. Young declared that amalgamation tended to weakness, a fact verified by “half-breed raced all over the world.” His colleague J. A. Hannan argued that any racial intermarriage would inevitably lead to a “sad deterioration of the race.”17 In May 1922 members from British Columbia moved a motion in the Canadian House of Commons calling for the exclusion of all “oriental Aliens.” In providing his justification W. G. McQuarrie explained that Chinese and Japanese migrants could never be assimilated because it could only be accomplished with intermarriage. But the differences between the races made that objective unthinkable: it was unnatural and had never produced anything but degradation for both parties.18 Following the debate on McQuarrie’s motion the House passed legislation that virtually closed Canada to non-European migration. The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 was more complicated than earlier legislation in Canada and New Zealand and was constructed around a quota system. But the sentiments and the rhetoric were familiar. In a paper prepared for the House Committee on Immigration, the New York lawyer John Trevor argued that non-European migrants presented an insoluble problem for the Republic. Either they would form separate colonies within the nation or there would be assimilation by way of miscegenation, which was a perversion of the natural law and therefore an “unthinkable solution to the problem.”19 All the evidence we have suggests that politicians in the United States and the British Dominions were ref lecting public opinion in their intense hostility to miscegenation. This was certainly the conclusion reached by two American scholars who carried out extensive interviews in California in 1913 at the height of the crisis brought about by the decision of the State legislature to prohibit the purchase of land by Japanese migrants. H. A. Millis, professor of economics at the University of Kansas, carried out a survey of opinion in the state addressing public meetings and conducting extensive private interviews. He found that the primary objection to the Japanese was the conviction that they could never be assimilated and that any suggestion of intermarriage was totally unacceptable. 20 The other survey was conducted by the missionary-scholar Sidney Gulick. He too found that the question of land ownership was secondary to the



future days of the Commonwealth, may be largely contaminated with them.15

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matter of miscegenation. After conducting many interviews he concluded that the strongest cause of white hostility was the fear of intermarriage and the production of “mongrel offspring.” Any thought of miscegenation was “utterly obnoxious.” In his many conversations the clinching argument was invariably the retort: “Would you let your daughter marry a Jap?” This, Gulick observed, was the” storm-centre of our problem.” 21 The way in which the land question in California was entwined with the problem of intermarriage was well illustrated by evidence given to a state government enquiry into Japanese ownership of farms. The most inf luential and much quoted testimony was provided by a local white farmer Ralph Newman, who declared: Near my home is an eighty-acre tract of as fine land as there is in California. On that land lives a Japanese. With that Japanese lives a white woman. In that woman’s arms is a baby. What is that baby? It isn’t white. I’ll tell you what that is. It is the germ of the mightiest problem ever faced in this state; a problem that will make the black problem of the south look white. All about us the Asiatics are gaining a foothold. They are setting up Asiatic standards. From whole communities the whites are moving out. Already the blood is intermingling. 22 When they were talking about domestic politics for local audiences the politicians in the English-speaking countries were both frank and emphatic about their fear of miscegenation. But when it came to international relations matters were much more complicated. At the very time that racial fears grew the public avowal of them became more problematic. The sudden and unexpected rise of Japan, emphasized by the treaty with Britain in 1902 and the defeat of Russia in 1905, made it very difficult to talk openly about racial inferiority. The same was true with the rise of colonial nationalism and particularly in India. With racial inferiority out of reach as a justification for immigration restriction in international exchanges the argument became one of the danger of mixture itself even among “ races” equal in every other way. The peoples of Asia and Europe should mix but they must not mingle. Rudyard Kipling’s famous lines “East is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet” were quoted, and indeed misquoted, many times over. In his 1912 book Empires of the Far East Lancelot Lawton noted that the famous lines were brought forth “a thousand times” to support the view that the mingling of the “races of East and West and a fusion of their blood is neither possible or desirable.” 23 American politicians faced the problem of dealing with the international consequences of domestic racism at the time of the Californian schools crisis in 1906. Relations with Japan were tested when the San Francisco city authorities banned Japanese children from local schools. President Theodore Roosevelt was anxious to maintain good relations with the Japanese and he was shocked by the vulgarity of West Coast rhetoric. But he came to appreciate the fears and



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sentiments of the Californians. In his autobiography he declared that it was “eminently undesirable that Japanese and Americans should attempt to live together in masses.” They should keep from “mass contact and intermingling.” 24 Prominent members of the American foreign policy establishment were more open in their views about miscegenation. A. C. Coolidge was a distinguished Harvard scholar and founder of the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs. A series of lectures delivered at the Sorbonne was collected and published in 1908 as The United States as a World Power. In a chapter on “Race Questions” he dealt with the problem of intermarriage, which had been thrown into sharp relief by the new international status of the Japanese who had shown themselves to be “virtually one of the white peoples.” But despite that the “instinct of aversion” was always there. Coolidge was by no means sure that the children of parents “racially far apart” would be “satisfactory.” He argued that the popular view that people of mixed descent inherited the worst characteristics of both parent races had much to commend it and drew on the experience of breeding dogs. “May not something of the same sort hold true of human beings,” he asked, rhetorically? 25 Australian leaders, suffering from a perpetual sense of both isolation and vulnerability, were even more anxious than their American counterparts about the threat of miscegenation. W. M. Hughes told an American audience in 1924 that “east and west could not meet and live together as one people.” It was, he explained: “our thought as it is plainly yours that they must only mingle, if they must, and not blend, for blending would spell disaster to our race, disaster, grim and irretrievable.” 26 At the time Hughes was out of office with greater freedom to voice his fears and anxieties. But such concerns were expressed in a vital meeting between Australian and Japanese officials in 1919. Major E . L. Piesse, director of the Pacific Branch in the prime minister’s department, met with senior officials of the Japanese Foreign Office on Christmas Day. Although arranged by the British Embassy it was one of the most important meetings in Australian diplomatic history. Among a number of issues discussed Piesse referred to the “racial aspect” of the bilateral relations, while wondering if perhaps it was “impertinent even to mention this aspect.” There was, he observed, “no question about the relative superiority of races.” Few Australians would presume to say they were justified in thinking that the “white race was superior to the coloured races of the Far East.” However there were differences and Australians thought that at the present state of the world it would be better if the two peoples did not mix racially. In justifying the White Australia policy Piesse explained: If the Japanese came to Australia in large numbers, they would either marry with their own women, or they would inter-marry with us. If they inter-married, we do not know what the racial result would be. It might be an improvement on either side of the racial stock or it might not and the results are so doubtful we prefer not to try the experiment. 27




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The British officials who accompanied Piesse were taken aback by his frankness. They had long realized that the racial composition of the Empire required them to proclaim that the common law and British administration was color blind, however, much practice gave the lie to these protestations. In private it was a different matter. In 1908 at a time when the future of South Africa was being discussed the outgoing secretary of state for the colonies, Lord Elgin, wrote a private letter to his successor, the Earl of Crewe. Referring to the question of race Elgin remarked that it was often argued that the native subjects of the king “had a right to same treatment as all others” But he doubted whether “nature itself so permits.” He observed that Britain had absorbed many European migrant communities and their descendants had “become as ourselves.” But, he wondered: is that conceivable in the case of coloured races? So far as I know, there is no historical foundation for any such proposition. I do not venture to propound any scientific theories, but the half-caste (certainly the Eurasian in India in my experience) does not hold out much expectation of favorable results. 28 Far more extreme views were embodied in a Foreign Office memo on the subject of “Racial Discrimination and Immigration” written in 1921. While some economic issues were involved, in essence the question was a racial one, the official F. Ashton-Gwatkin declared: The white and coloured races cannot and will not amalgamate. One or the other must be the ruling caste; and countries where the white population is in power have determined from a sure instinct for self preservation that they will never open their doors to the inf lux of a coloured race, which might eventually become dominant. 29 Such discussion of questions of race and miscegenation was commonplace in the English-speaking world in the first forty years of the twentieth century, fortified by both expert commentary and popular prejudice. There is no doubt the fear of racial mixture influenced domestic legislation and foreign policy decision making. But by the 1940s it became increasingly difficult to publicly promote such ideas. The example of Nazi Germany was a stark warning to any public figure still using the racial rhetoric of the 1920s and the rapid de-colonizing of the non-European world presented a definitive challenge to lingering ideas of white supremacy. It is much harder to determine when ideas have become discredited or outmoded than when they are in the ascendancy. Often they simply slip almost unnoticed out of public discourse. Those who cling to them are increasingly less likely to publicly express ideas that have manifestly become unfashionable. They are likely to be kept for diaries or confidential correspondence. This was true of Henry Stimson, the U.S. secretary for war, who wrote in his diary in



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Notes 1. Bryce was responding to the same developments in the work of Charles Dilke and his old friend and contemporary Charles Pearson that Penelope Edmonds discusses in chapter eight of this collection. 2. James Bryce, The Relations of the Advanced and Backward Races of Mankind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 26. 3. Ulysses G. Weatherly, “Race and Marriage,” The American Journal of Sociology 15, no. 4 (January 1910): 450. 4. Warwick Anderson shows in chapter five of this collection that there was considerable critical debate on the question in the 1920s and 1930s. But expert opinion was one thing, political discourse quite another. 5. Gustav Spiller, “The Problems of Race Equality,” in Papers on Inter-Racial Problems: Communicated to the First Universal Races Congress (London: P. S. King, 1911), 30. 6. Harry H. Johnston, “Race Problems in the New Africa,” Foreign Affairs 2, no. 4 (June 1924): 611–12. 7. R. F. Alfred Hoernle, “Race-Mixture and Native Policy in South Africa,” in Western Civilization and the Natives of South Africa, ed. I. Schapera (London: Routledge, 1934), 264–5. 8. Theodore H. Boggs, “The Oriental on the Pacific Coast,” Queens Quarterly 33, no. 2 (1926): 320. 9. Julian S. Huxley and Alfred C. Haddon, We Europeans (London: Cape, 1935), 281. 10. J. B. S. Haldane, Heredity and Politics (London: Allen & Unwin, 1938), 172. 11. Edward Byron Reuter, Race Mixture: Studies in Intermarriage and Miscegenation (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931), 101. 12. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, second edn (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 57. 13. W. K. Hancock, Smuts: The Fields of Force 1919–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 113. 14. L. E. Neame The History of Apartheid: The Story of the Color War in South Africa (London: Pall Mall Press, 1962), 40. 15. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, vol. 4 (1901), 5922. 16. Ibid., 5140. 17. New Zealand Parliamentary Debates, vol. 187 (1920), 905–24. 18. Canadian Parliamentary Debates (1922–3), 497 and 1509. 19. John Bond Trevor, “Japanese Exclusion: A Study of the Policy and the Law,” in The Reference Shelf, comp. Julia Emily Johnson, 111, no. 4 (New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1925), 125–6. 20. Harry Alvin Millis, The Japanese Problem in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1915), 251–2. 21. Sidney L. Gulick, The American Japanese Problem: A Study of the Racial Relations Problem of the East and West (New York: Scribners, 1914), 118.



1942 that social equality was unattainable because of the “impossibility of race mixture through marriage.”30 Sir Allen Lascelles, principal private secretary to King George VI, noted in his diary at much the same time that: “No white man can endure the thought of mixed marriages; and nature herself condemns such marriages by the almost invariably inferior quality of their fruits.” 31

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22. Elk Grove Citizen, April 10, 1913, in E. P Penrose, Californian Nativism: Organized Opposition to the Japanese, 1890–1913 (San Jose: R & E Associates, 1973), 93. 23. Lancelot Lawton, Empires of the Far East, 2 vols (London: Grant Richards, 1912), 2: 748. 24. Thoedore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography (London: Macmillan, 1913), 414. 25. Archibald Gary Coolidge, The United States as a World Power (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 64–6. 26. The Los Angeles Examiner, June 1, 1924. 27. Edmund Leolin Piesse. Papers. Australian National Library. MSS 882/5/41, 49–50. 28. Ronald Hyam, Elgin and Churchill at the Colonial Office, 1905–08 (London: Macmillan 1968), 377. 29. Foreign Office. MS 371/6684, October 10, 1892. British National Archives 4212/223/23. 30. Christopher G. Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941–1945 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), 6. 31. Quoted in Richard Davenport-Hines, “Marques Mes Mots,” Times Literary Supplement, February 9, 2007, 24.



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“Being Thankful for their Birth in a Christian Land”: Interrogating Intersections between Whiteness and Child Rescue Shurlee Swain, Margot Hillel, and Belinda Sweeney

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eading whiteness into texts that are not overtly about race,” Ruth Frankenberg writes, “is essential if we are to disrupt whiteness as the unchallenged racial norm.”1 The sources that provide the basis for this chapter, the literary and journalistic output of the nineteenth-century child rescue movement, were certainly not overtly about race. They were, however, engaged in constructing and consolidating whiteness in both Britain and its settler colonies. It is the central role of such literature in the imperial dissemination of ideas about whiteness that we aim to investigate. Thomas Barnardo (1854–1905), founder of Dr Barnardo’s Homes (1868), Thomas Bowman Stephenson (1838–1912), founder of the Wesleyan National Children’s Homes (1869), Edward de Montjoie Rudolf (1852–1933), founder of the Anglican Waifs and Strays Society (1881), and Benjamin Waugh (1839–1908), secretary of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1889) constitute a distinct subset of the much larger group of English “slummers” identified by Seth Koven. 2 They were supported in their literary effort by an array of writers, artists, and poets who incorporated the genre of child rescue in their work. Their poignant tales were published alongside the regular offerings of staff writers and contributors, and filled the pages of the journals month after month.



CHAPTER 7

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Swain, Hillel, and Sweeney

Designed primarily to guarantee continuing financial support, Barnardo’s Night and Day and Young Helpers’ League Magazine, Stephenson’s Children’s Advocate, Highways and Hedges, and Our Boys and Girls, Rudolf ’s Our Waifs and Strays and Brothers and Sisters, and Waugh’s The Child’s Guardian and the Children’s League of Pity Paper also functioned to alter national sensibilities in relation to poverty and race. Hence they constitute a rich archive for scholars interested in the concept of whiteness. The message that they propagated was repeated and expanded in denominational and secular journals published across the Empire, and a range of books written for children around the child rescue theme. With titles such as The Little Orange-Sellers, Lost! Stolen! or Strayed!, or Froggy’s Little Brother, these books and the articles and poems found in the magazines were intended to cultivate pity and charity in their child readers. Much has been written in recent years about the role of the ref lexive relationship between empire and metropole in the shaping of English identity. Nineteenth-century missionary organizations played a key role in this process. The reading material they circulated to an increasingly literate public and the rallies they organized constituted a popular form of amusement.3 Their inf luence, however, spread well beyond the realm of entertainment and disseminated representations of foreign peoples to a substantial proportion of the population. “Religious belief provided a vocabulary of right,” Catherine Hall has argued, “the right to know and to speak that knowledge, with the moral power that was attached to the speaking of God’s word. One of the issues on which they spoke was what it meant to be English.”4 In this discourse race was foundational.5 Moving freely between the self and the other, missionaries had an inf luence “at home” equally significant to that which they had in the countries to which they were sent. 6 Their literary production was critical in shaping ideas about race, constituting “a significant part of the popular material, which helped shape and sustained imperial mythologies well into the twentieth century.” 7 Narratives of the conversion of “the sons and daughters of the heathen” served also, Frank Prochaska has argued, to convert “the sons and daughters of England . . . to an imperial Christianity.”8 Metaphors derived from foreign missions provided a vocabulary that could be readily transferred to the endeavors of missionaries at home.9 To Victorian Evangelicals, Susan Thorne has argued, home and foreign missions were not separate undertakings but “two fronts of the same war, separated by geographic happenstance and little more.”10 By constituting the residents of the inner city as a foreign, heathen other, urban missionaries increased the attractiveness of their endeavor while undermining any radical potential it might have had. In the process, they rendered “evangelical religious practice a principal site at which conceptions of race emanating from the colonies entered metropolitan social discourse.”11 The child rescue movement was located within this larger missionary enterprise, its leaders active participants in “the competition for bodies and souls” both at home and abroad.12 Despite a primary concern with conversion and salvation, their literary output also functioned to ref lect and



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refract developing discourses around poverty and race. The images of otherness derived from the foreign missions were readily applied to the children of the poor.13 The cultural practices of the other constituted by child rescuers—such characteristics as starved, emaciated bodies, speech, and physicality—operated also to affirm the Empire, and the privilege implicit in whiteness. This privileging of whiteness is particularly apparent in much of the children’s literature of the time, which reinforced notions of the “might and right” of the British Empire while exhibiting a fascination with the other.14 Juvenile literature operated as a critical adjunct to the British imperial enterprise. Nationalist and imperial thinkers privileged the “ideological incorporation of boys and girls over the incorporation of the adult citizenry.” The literature that they produced offered working-class youth a valued place in imperial England while simultaneously constructing social and political limits to such service.15 And yet, central to such literature was the representation of the other. In her analysis of colonial children’s literature, Kathryn Castle contends that imperial subjects constituted the “ ‘supporting cast’ in the story of Empire,” the depiction of which gave substance to assumptions about class hierarchy in the metropole.16 Thus while missionary literature constructed Englishness for adult and child readers, children’s literature offered to young readers ways of relating to the imperial world. R.M. Ballantyne, an occasional contributor to Our Waifs and Strays, is best known for his book The Coral Island (1911), a work in which images of indigenous people are used to justify imperialism and missionary endeavor. Indeed, the subtitle, Views of Missionary Endeavour, makes Ballantyne’s intentions clear. The English travelers, young men and boys, are portrayed as heroes and rescuers, civilized and manly in contrast with the “savages.” After being told that the practice of the sacrifice of babies in the south sea islands ceases when missionaries arrive, one of the protagonists declares “God bless the missionaries . . . God bless and prosper the missionaries till they get a footing in every island of the sea.”17 Harry’s Trip to India (n.d.), written by the Rev. W. J. Wilkins, is less a boy’s own adventure than Ballantyne’s work, but shares a call to young men to become missionaries. Here, the non-Christian other is represented to young British readers as misguided, contemptible, often risible, and at times unredeemable. Much is made of the sacrifices many Indians, frequently children, have made in order to embrace Christianity, sacrifices that move Harry “to yield up heart and life to his Saviour and Lord.”18 As a missionary, Harry plays his part in rescuing the heathen in far-f lung parts of the British Empire. The rescue is constructed as both spiritual and corporal, with orphaned Hindu children a particular target. “Hinduism finds it easier to allow a child of unknown caste to die than to provide it with a home,” the reader is informed. “And so it happens that little helpless children are left to perish until the police find them, and hand them over to Christians to care for. In this way, many have been rescued from death, and have early learnt of a loving father in Heaven.”19



Whiteness and Child Rescue

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Bessie Marchant, a prolific and popular writer with a larger female audience than either Ballantyne or Wilkins, was widely read in all English-speaking countries. Richard Phillips argues that Marchant “challenged constructions of ‘women’s place’ in order to challenge the male domination of emigration to British colonies and dominions.” 20 However, like other British evangelical writers, she does not contest notions of white superiority, or the importance of bringing Christianity to the heathen. In her books, white immigrant children are depicted as inherently superior to the “natives.” In The Black Cockatoo (1910), the white children scare a group of Western Australian Aboriginal men away from the “cultivated land” on the “plantation” belonging to the children’s parents. 21 White settlement and this sense of ownership are justified by “using” land neglected by the Aborigines. Adult Aborigines are infantilized both as an inherent part of, and support for, the dominant white ideology. The book also contains a strong message about the desirability of “rescuing” indigenous children. When the two white children are captured by “cannibal blacks,” they are helped to freedom by an Aboriginal girl who, as she already speaks some English, is seen as a redeemable other. She receives what the Religious Tract Society clearly constructs as the ultimate reward and is Christianized, allowing her to make the final rejection of her culture and her people. She is, we are told, “quick to respond to the teaching she received,” thus justifying the generosity of the gift bestowed on her. 22 The mixture of dread and fascination with the “other” was a feature of “imperial” literature. Fear of white capture and enslavement by natives were prominent themes, pointing to persistent anxieties about the inversion of the “natural order.”

Barnardo and the Beni-Zou-Zougs “Who is Hadj Ali Ben Mahomet, and what has he or his Troupe to do with US this happy Christmas Day?” 23 So began the feature article in the December issue of the Barnardo magazine Night and Day in 1881. The story, “as bad as any of African slavery,” was set “in the City of Constantinople itself,” where the British consul-general and an English barrister had discovered “a number of London boys in the care of an Arab acrobat, who treated them as though they were really his slaves” and called upon Barnardo for help. Readers were promised a thrilling story of the rescue from “heathenism and misery” of “these innocent little fellows . . . through the all-powerful influence which England exercises.” The boys, Night and Day alleged, were “living in a state of slavery,” “isolated from the world.” “They were ill-treated,” “not allowed to speak their native language, which most of them had consequently totally forgotten,” “had no regular communication with their parents,” “received no sort of education,” and “had never been inside a Church or a Mosque,” nor ever “received wages.” 24 Legally indentured by their parents, they had been touring for some time, but their situation was constituted as abusive because it reversed established racial hierarchies. “The Arabs do hardly anything but domestic work . . . The English boys did all the rest.” The celebratory tone of the article is undiminished by its ending, even



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though only eight of the fourteen boys agreed to be “rescued” and they included “a half-caste, dark skin and curly black hair aged 13 ½,” and “a fair-haired boy and an unmistakable cockney . . . the most backward of the lot.”25 Why was the story of the Beni-Zou-Zougs so important to Barnardo and his supporters? The answer lies in consideration of the concept of whiteness, and in particular the performance of whiteness, the means by which “white dominance is rationalized, legitimized, and made ostensibly normal and natural.” 26 Whiteness, Ruth Frankenberg argues, has three elements: “a location of structural advantage, of race privilege . . . a place from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and at society . . . [and] a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed.” 27 Mission literature consistently encoded the practice of whiteness, designating non-European societies as “primitive” in order to reinforce the superiority of the colonizing nation.28 Nevertheless, the comparisons that missionaries drew between the urban poor and the “tribes” and “savages” of foreign lands did not undermine the implicit advantages of whiteness that the former enjoyed. 29 It was the threat posed to white privilege by urban degeneracy, rather than the denial of privilege, that such comparisons signified. “Whiteness,” Catherine Hall writes, “should mean order, civilization, Christianity, separate spheres and domesticity, rationality, modernity and industry. Those moments when whiteness meant something quite other were terrifying.”30 Hall’s understanding of whiteness offers a theoretical approach to the multiple problems of the Beni-Zou-Zogs. Their status as the slaves of a nonwhite man, performing rather than issuing orders, threatened to undermine whiteness generally; a threat only partially erased by the fact that they had not been reduced to doing the domestic work, a role consigned to Hadj Ali Ben Mahomet’s Arab employees.31 Susan Thorne has argued that shared whiteness within missionary organizations operated against concern for the English poor. The “characteristics that the poor had in common with the missionary middle classes—their race or national heritage—constituted benefits whose apparent waste served merely to indict more fully their possessor.”32 However, for children, it was this shared whiteness that rendered them salvageable. The English poor, it was argued, were less vicious than the poor of other nations. Redemption, however, was dependent on removal. English children, depicted as victims of “bad or unfortunate parentage,” could be reformed by traveling to an improved environment where the advantages attached to whiteness could once again f lourish. 33 Even the somewhat ambiguous Beni-Zou-Zougs, safely ensconced in Barnardo’s East End shelter, could be transformed into sturdy British laborers.34

Travel Narratives In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the increasing facility of travel collapsed the physical and imagined space between metropole and colony. The leaders of the child rescue movement took advantage of this new mobility, blending travel with fund-raising as a way of spreading their message throughout the Empire. In turn, their reports refracted images of Empire to




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their supporters at home. In recent years, postcolonial scholars have explored the ways in which travel writing functioned both to assert the moral superiority of Englishness and to construct an English ethnic identity. 35 Such writing, Mary Louise Pratt argues, “treats the relations among colonizers and colonized, or travelers and ‘travelees,’ not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power.” 36 But the “otherness of colonized persons was neither inherent nor stable; his or her difference had to be defined and maintained.”37 Travel writers joined missionaries in this gatekeeper function, encoding the inferiority of the other “through the filter of a set of assumptions . . . which seesawed on the ambivalence of racial difference.” 38 Such discourses provided a readily accessible vocabulary for both urban missionaries and social investigators seeking to develop new understandings of the rapidly changing inner cities at home. “The valorization of the black other—as either a savage or a utopian figure,” Gikandri argues, provided “the mirror in which Englishness ref lects on its own identity and the potential threat to the givenness of its social and cultural construct.”39 An early story in the National Children’s Home magazine, the Children’s Advocate and Christian at Work, located itself clearly within this literary genre. Ostensibly a missionary tale set in the mythical location of Nodlon, it goal was to describe the “little savages” who lived there. The story retains race at its core, for “missionary books,” its author writes, “generally tell amongst the first things about their boys and girls, what colour they are.” Yet the answer, in this case, is far from clear. “I never saw two alike; I have seen some nearly white, but not as white as you are, others almost as black as a little nigger, and others with patches of white and black all over, mixed with a little yellow or brown or some other hue.” But the sting comes in the tail, for these colors, readers are informed, although “laid on very thickly . . . will wash off ! . . . where can you find many other little heathens who will wash white?”40 Here, the parallel drawn between the “savage at home” and the “savage abroad”—the equation of “Darkest England” with “Darkest Africa”—functions to scandalize and shame the reader. Whereas in the first half of the nineteenth century, Susan Thorne argues, the symmetry of representations of poor and colonized peoples was used as a justification of class and racial subordination, the threat to the privileges of whiteness was clearly uppermost for child rescuers fifty years later.41 Like Mayhew, they understood it as pertinent to convince their readers that poor residents of London and other urban centers “were of English society though separate from it, related to the middle class but a ‘race’ apart from it, fellow inhabitants of the same city but members of a different ‘tribe.’ ”42

Child Rescuers on Tour The consolidation of this “similarity in difference” was increasingly central when child rescuers, embarking on their own world tours, reported their encounters with the colonized other. Unlike the later physical anthropologists



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and human biologists who, Anderson argues, set out to interrogate the boundaries of white embodiment and civilization, these travelers were constantly alert to the immutability of racial difference.43 They were traversing a world in which, as Reynolds observes, the supposedly backward races had been “placed in a more or less complete dependence on the more advanced,” and felt content with what they saw.44 “I can’t help feeling, as I see all these strange, heathen people around me,” wrote Bowman Stephenson, “that English boys and girls ought to be thankful . . . for their birth in a Christian land.”45 Writing from Canada, he expressed his surprise at encountering an “Indian baby . . . [who] crowed, and smiled, and kicked just as heartily as though his face had been white.” The baby’s father was described as “a nobleman, though only an Indian.”46 From Melbourne, he described a people who used to lie under miserable huts: I need hardly tell you that . . . [they] were not white people. They were black, and they were amongst the very lowest and most degraded races that have ever been found . . . There are still some few of these wretched people left but they are very seldom seen in Melbourne; and if one of them does come into the town he has to be dressed like an Englishman.47 A final stop in Tasmania allowed him to ref lect on the “sad” but inevitable decline of the “great tribes and nations of red men and black men . . . fading away before the white races.”48 Barnardo, writing from Manitoba in 1891, commented on the coexistence of “the signs of modern life with proofs of the most advanced civilization in the shape of the electric light, tramway lines, railways, and fine hotels” and “groups of Red Indians clad in blankets or in grotesque oddments of European culture.”49 In an unconscious echo of Charles Dilke, Benjamin Waugh labeled the article detailing his 1904 world trip as a report on the “progress of the race.”50 This racialized discourse was echoed within children’s literature. Stephenson’s assumptions about the advantages of Englishness were later spelt out by Robert Louis Stevenson in his poem Foreign Children (1986): Little Indian, Sioux or Crow, Little frosty Eskimo, Little Turk or Japanee, O! Don’t you wish that you were me? You have sent the scarlet trees, And the lions over seas; You have eaten ostrich eggs, And turned the turtles off their legs. Such a life is very fine, But it’s not so nice as mine; You must often, as you trod,




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Have wearied not [sic] to be abroad.

Similarly in The Young Folks of Hazelbrook (n.d.), a young “crippled” girl is informed that she, in fact, has many blessings, one of the most important “is the being born and living in dear happy England.”52 Yet such observations elicited no empathy with indigenous peoples, but served only to reinforce contemporary assumptions about their “inevitable decline.” Books for children supported this “dying races” theory. In E. Harcourt Burrage’s The Wurra Wurra Boys (1903), for example, the comically named Bucko Boy is described as “one of a race of blacks fast dying out” whose only hope is to embrace whiteness.53 After he has defeated that stock figure of such fiction, a bushranger, Bucko Boy is described as “uncommon black outside . . . but white as a lily inside.”54 He, like the girl in Marchant’s work and other Aborigines in this situation, will, however, always remain a second-rate white. Reports of the “degraded state of the heathen abroad,” Barnhart has argued, acted to “confirm Britain’s status as a ‘chosen’ nation, and . . . to highlight the cultural and moral supremacy of Britons . . . thus reinforcing hierarchies of difference that were crucial to imperial expansion.”55 Such reports also functioned to resolve any doubts about the legitimate ownership of colonized land. By naming the other as inferior, the incoming settlers were able to claim the resulting nations as white.56 At best, readers were urged to support missionary societies “which are endeavouring to save the remnants of these people from destruction, by introducing better habits and customs, and especially by teaching them the Gospel, which, if they must perish from the earth, will open to them a better life hereafter.”57

Building a “Brighter Britain” More compelling in such travel narratives is the celebration of settler success in the new colonies, read as evidence of white superiority and hence spatial entitlement. Travel reinforced in each of these child rescuers, a confidence in what Edmonds has described as the “imagined transcolonial Anglo-Saxon community.”58 Speaking in Natal, Dr Stephenson’s descriptions of the areas in which he worked “opened out vistas of life and labour so foreign . . . that to many of his hearers he must appear to have been introducing them into a new world.”59 In the South African colonies, “the ‘happy hunting grounds’ of the savage,” he assured his audience “such squalor and want . . . are unknown quantities.”60 Yet “outcast London” could contribute to “the salvation of this colony from the ominous consequences of undue disparity between the white and black populations.” “Several thousands of British-born colonists, all in the flower and



You have curious things to eat, I am fed on proper meat; You must dwell beyond the foam, But I am safe and live at home.51

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strength of their youth . . . all moulded to the conditions of the country to which they would henceforth belong” were available for emigration.61 Stephenson was far from alone in embracing this solution. In the literature of the child rescue movement, the colonies of settlement constituted a “brighter Britain” that residents of “Darkest England” could embrace and redeem. 62 As Stephenson wrote in 1883, “I would like every English child to think about Australia, not as a wild and savage and half-heathen country, but as the home of great and intelligent and prosperous English communities.”63 Canada, it was argued, was an “Englishman’s birthright” and should not be left to the “alien and inferior races.”64 This heritage, however, could be claimed by the “transportation” of a “cargo of England’s young blood” organized by the child rescue movement. 65 As a writer in Our Waifs and Strays magazine urged: Take them away! Away! Away! The bountiful earth is wide and free, The New shall repair the wrongs of the Old— Take them away oe’r the rolling sea!66 Emigration was depicted as a gift from a mother to a daughter, a way of strengthening family ties. 67 The value of the gift, a later advocate of child emigration warned, would be recognized in the future when in colonies “sparsely peopled with white emigrants . . . white men may be the hunted.”68 Above all, emigration is depicted in the child rescue literature as a process of cleansing, the means by which “swarm . . . from our crowded hives” become “worthy son[s] of Britain.”69 Armstrong’s Lost! Stolen! Or Strayed! features a key character who is building the “prosperous English communities,” saying that “he could never be too thankful that he had been led to go to Australia; and that he felt far more of a man, leading the hard and useful life on his master’s place, than he had ever felt in his old one.” 70 For the children who stayed in a Britain still regarded as uniformly white, there was little opportunity to rise above their class. Yet, in the colonies, the privilege/deployment of whiteness was transformative. In such locations the “heathens who could be washed clean,” became the saviors as well as the saved: If we can take and train even a few girls to be pure, godly young women, and start them as good servants, good wives, good mothers, they will be some of the very best missionaries, and every Kaffir woman who lives near will learn to reverence, love, and follow the pure life of her white mistress or friend.71 By emphasizing their whiteness and their affiliation with “the stratum of imperial rulers” in the more racially diverse colonies, child migrants were depicted as having the opportunity to triumph over the disadvantages of their origins.72




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Waifs on Parade

Yours is the happier fate, ye rising race— Though for the instant parting’s pang be sore; To laugh to scorn the impotence of space, And with Affection’s links bind shore to shore.73 Barnardo took the process further, sending parties of boys on fund-raising trips across the Empire and beyond, entering into what Roslyn Poignant has described as a “show-space . . . a zone of displacement for the performers and a place of spectacle for the onlookers.” 74 An 1893 tour of North America ended in tragedy when the party was involved in a train accident and two boys were killed.75 However this was the one exception in an otherwise highly successful enterprise. The sixteen-month Australasian tour of “eight musical boys” suitably attired in tropical dress, which had ended in the previous year, was met with universal acclaim. The reports of the tour, however, conformed to the familiar pattern. First came the assurance that the colonies offered a superior environment to that available to poor children in the Mother Country. “Sympathy has been manifested with the waifs from every quarter. Truly the Australians may say, ‘Whom having not seen we love,’ for the evidence concurs from all over that vast Continent, that Waifs, as we know them, simply do not exist.” 76 But this was quickly followed by the assertion of the whiteness that constituted the preeminence of the traveling boys. “Some of our meetings were specially memorable,” wrote the deputation secretary, the Rev. Walter J. Mayers, citing, as an example, crowds “composed of Chinese in Melbourne, and of Maoris at Otaki in New Zealand. Often we invited men, women, and children belonging to the aboriginal tribes, and though they understood but little of the talk, they liked the pictures and applauded the music.” 77 A later tour of “ten musical boys” again emphasized the centrality of a shared whiteness to the reciprocal relationship developing between metropole and colony. The concerts across Australia raised eighteen thousand sovereigns to fund a hospital at Barnardo’s Barkingside village. Speaking at the laying of the foundation stone, Australian parliamentarian Sir George Reid declared: Is it not a grand thing that the children of this great Mother of Nations shall, in the most distant hemisphere, at the farthest outposts of civilisation and enterprise, respond freely to the noble inspirations which have created these marvellous Institutions? You see now, in the beginning of this structure . . . a demonstration of the links which bind this great race together, however far its members may be scattered.78



The transformative potential of emigration was celebrated as each new party embarked, farewelled with hymns and poems celebrating their journey from “darkness” to the “light”:

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The ten musical boys were not the only group to visit Australia on a fundraising mission in the early years of the twentieth century. In August 1900, the Victorian Salvation Army’s chief publication, the War Cry, announced the arrival of the “Indian boys,” a six-month children’s tour that the Army anticipated would raise capital for the pitiable “teeming millions” in India.79 India’s famine had featured prominently in colonial reports; news sources in the metropole and its colonies carried narratives of death and despair that invoked images of children “cast away by the roadside by those who could not bear to see them die.” 80 The constitution and repetition of “difference” was central to the ways the “fellow-subjects” were represented during their tour. Before the boys arrived, the War Cry eagerly enquired: “what stories they will have to tell, what weird, and yet sympathetic songs they will sing?” Early reports of the Indian contingent in rural towns documented for a broad audience the widespread public “interest” the touring party inspired. In the Victorian Wimmera, readers were informed, “small Horsham youngsters” “screamed and f led away quite scared.” 81 In cities and towns throughout the colonies, the Indian boys, each “in their Oriental robes, [with] dark skins, black, glistening eyes, and pearly white teeth” performed the colonial fantasy for their imperial spectators. Before crowds of onlookers, they “marched, sang, played their cymbals and drums, and danced in Indian fashion”; they “prayed, testified, begged in good style, and kicked their scantily-clothed limbs about with all the frolicsome fun and life and spirit of a picnic.” 82 However, although the Indian adjutant Daya Ratna claimed that the children’s testimonies on the conversion of heathen never failed to arouse affection in their audience, their treatment by Australian Salvationists conveys another story. 83 In Victoria, Ratna lamented, they had “somehow got the notion that [the children] would only sit on the f loor, eat with their fingers, and that only very little, and show wry faces to anything except rice and Indian curry.” He urged colonial Salvationists to “look away from colour” and allow the children to “eat and drink a la Australia.” Australians were nevertheless reluctant to provide a “table and chairs, and a white tablecloth, and knives and forks and spoons, and a lot of buttered scones, and ‘jammed’ bread and nice tea.” 84 More than four weeks into their tour, Ratna again reminded readers that his Indian boys enjoyed “porridge, and potatoes, and eggs, and all plain Australian food, and sit at table as do Australian youngsters.” 85

Conclusion Salvation Army founder General William Booth, one of the most prolific propagators of the Darkest England/Darkest Africa comparison and a vocal advocate of the emigration solution, positioned himself outside the implicit racism of Empire. He was, he proclaimed, “a Christian first and an Englishman afterwards.” 86 Yet, “Englishness” and nineteenth-century Christianity, as they were deployed in child rescue work, were mutually constitutive. Discourse about child rescue in each of its colonial and national incarnations was beholden




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to specific conceptions of race embedded in nineteenth-century missionary practice. Booth’s analysis of the mission needs of India was thus constructed largely in racial terms. “Who among the whiteskins can compete with the natives who consider themselves well paid if they get sixpence a day?” he asked. 87 Yet he saw the adults as being beyond saving, advocating instead the early removal of their children. “They are docile, industrious, and willing to learn if they are taken soon enough . . . The work must begin with the young.”88 Any such “work,” however, had limited transformative potential for, unlike the “little savages of Nodlon,” the natives could never be washed white. Whereas Barnardo’s traveling “musical boys,” the rescued Beni-Zou-Zougs, and the young heroes of children’s fiction could appeal to a shared whiteness to educe sympathy from supporters of both mission and empire, the Indian boys touring party elicited nothing but curiosity and pity. Philanthropic tourism, while contributing to the authentic depiction of the other, served to solidify rather than contest the fundamental racism on which such depictions were based.

Notes 1. Ruth Frankenberg, Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 22. 2. Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). The principal child rescuers are profiled in Margaret Weddell, Child Care Pioneers (London: The Epworth Press, 1958), and the general story of the movement is best told in Hugh Cunningham’s The Children of the Poor: Representations of Childhood since the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 3. Gareth Griffiths, “Popular Imperial Adventure Fiction and the Discourse of Missionary Texts,” in Mixed Messages: Materiality, Textuality, Missions, ed. Gareth Griffiths and Jamie S. Scott (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 51–66. 4. Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), 207. 5. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 8. 6. Isabel Hofmeyr, “Inventing the World: Transnationalism, Transmission and Christian Textualities,” in Griffiths and Scott (ed.), Mixed Messages, 20. 7. Griffiths, “Popular Imperial Adventure Fiction,” 52. See also Jeffrey Cox, “Master Narratives of Imperial Missions,” in Griffiths and Scott (ed.), Mixed Messages, 8; Susan Thorne, “ ‘The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable’: Missionary Imperialism and the Language of Class in Early Industrial Britain,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 239. 8. F. K. Prochaska, “Little Vessels: Children in the Nineteenth Century English Missionary Movement,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 6, no. 2 (1978): 114. 9. Deborah Epstein Nord, “The Social Explorer as Anthropologist: Victorian Travelers among the Urban Poor,” in Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art and



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10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

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Literature, ed. William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987), 124. Thorne, “The Conversion of Englishmen,” 240. Ibid., 241. Frank Prochaska, Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain: The Disinherited Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 13. Cunningham, The Children of the Poor, 6; Catherine Hall, “Going a-Trolloping: Imperial Man Travels the Empire,” in Gender and Imperialism, ed. Clare Midgley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 180. As Nicholas Thomas has persuasively argued, colonial discourse was/is not simply a global and transhistorical logic of denigration, but employs a range of romantic, sentimental, and exotic images of others. See Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994). Troy Boone, Youth of Darkest England: Working-Class Children at the Heart of Victorian Empire (New York: Routledge, 2005), 4. Kathryn Castle, Britannia’s Children: Reading Colonialism through Children’s Books and Magazines (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 6, 10. R. M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island (London and Melbourne: Thomas Nelson and Sons,1911), 124. Rev. W. J. Wilkins, Harry’s Trip to India (London: The Religious Tract Society, n.d), 45. Ibid., 111. Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 91. Bessie Marchant, The Black Cockatoo: A Story of Western Australia (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1910), 65. Ibid., 281. T. J. Barnardo, “The Beni-Zou-Zougs,” Night and Day 5, no. 56 (1881): 215. Ibid., 216. Ibid., 218. Frankenberg, Displacing Whiteness, 3. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1. Hofmeyr, “Inventing the World,” 33. Linda Mahood and Barbara Littlewood, “The ‘Vicious Girl’ And The ‘ Street-Corner’ Boy: Sexuality and the Gendered Delinquent in the Scottish Child-Saving Movement, 1850–1940,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4, no. 4 (1994): 552. This critical tradition in the analysis of urban explorers originated in Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). Hall, White, Male and Middle-Class, 212. For a fuller discussion of the Beni-Zou-Zougs, see Lydia Murdoch, Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare and Contested Citizenship in London (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 30–2. Thorne, “The Conversion of Englishmen,” 250. Denis Crane, “In the Path of the Sun: Canadian Homes for British Boys,” Highways and Hedges 27 (1914): 24–6.




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34. For a discussion on an Australian child rescue organization involved in a similar campaign, see Dorothy Scott and Shurlee Swain, Confronting Cruelty: Historical Perspectives on Child Abuse (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 44. 35. Simon Gikandri, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 85; Hall, White, Male and MiddleClass, 208–9; Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, 5; Tim Youngs, Travelers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850–1900 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 3. 36. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 7. 37. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 7. 38. Hall, White, Male and Middle-Class, 236–7. 39. Gikandri, Maps of Englishness, 105. 40. F. Horner, “The Little Savages of Nodlon,” The Children’s Advocate and Christian at Work (January 1873): 3; emphasis in the original. 41. Thorne, “The Conversion of Englishmen,” 248. 42. Nord, “The Social Explorer as Anthropologist,” 132–3. 43. Warwick Anderson, chapter five in this collection. 44. Henry Reynolds, chapter six in this collection, 73. 45. T. Bowman Stephenson, “Letters to My Little Friends, No IX,” The Children’s Advocate 3, no. 35 (1882): 161–3. 46. T. Bowman Stephenson, “Letters to My Little Friends, No. III,” The Children’s Advocate 3, no. 27 (1882): 35–6. 47. T. Bowman Stephenson, “Letters to My Little Friends, No. XI,” The Children’s Advocate 4, no. 38 (1883): 19–21. 48. T. Bowman Stephenson, “Letters to My Little Friends, No XIII,” The Children’s Advocate 4, no. 41 (1883): 66–8. 49. T. J. Barnardo, “My Colony over the Sea: The Golden Bridge,” Night and Day 15, no. 149 (1891): 12. 50. “The Children’s Friend: After a World-Wide Tour,” The Child’s Guardian 18, no. 9 (1904): 102. For details of Dilke, see Penny Edmonds, chapter eight in this collection. 51. Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Puffin, 1986), 49. 52. Anon., The Young Folks of Hazelbrook (London: RTS, n.d), 31. 53. E. Harcourt Burrage, The Wurra Wurra Boys (London: Collins, 1903), 7. 54. Ibid., 12. 55. William C. Barnhart, “Evangelicalism, Masculinity and the Making of Imperial Missionaries in Late Georgian Britain, 1795–1820,” The Historian 67, no. 4 (2005): 730. 56. Frankenberg, Displacing Whiteness, 6, 8–9. 57. Stephenson, “Letters to My Little Friends, No XIII,” 66–8. Barnardo made a similar trip in 1885. For his first impressions of Canadian indigenous peoples, see T. J. Barnardo, “Personal Notes,” Night and Day 9, nos 93 and 94 (1885): 24–5. 58. See chapter eight in this collection, 100. 59. “Emigration of Children to South Africa,” The Children’s Advocate 3, no. 34 (1882): 150.



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60. Ibid., 151. 61. Ibid., 152. 62. Rev. W. J. Mayers, “My Tour In ‘Brighter Britain,’ ” Night and Day 16, no. 165–8 (1892): 165–8. This contrast had a long history among advocates of emigration. See Robert D. Grant, Representations of British Emigration, Colonization and Settlement: Imagining Empire (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), chapter 6. 63. T. Bowman Stephenson, “Letters to My Little Friends, No. XV,” The Children’s Advocate 4, no. 44 (1883): 115–17. 64. Denis Crane, “In the Path of the Sun: Canadian Homes for British Boys,” Highways and Hedges 26 (1913): 156–7. The notion of Christian providentialism as both a motivation and justification for empire was well established by this time. For a recent discussion of this concept, see John Gascoigne, “The Expanding Historiography of British Imperialism,” The Historical Journal 49, no. 2 (2006): 586. 65. J. C. Maillard, “A Trip to Canada with Our Young Colonials,” Our Waifs and Strays 10, no. 263 (1906): 218–20. 66. “The Departure of the Innocents,” Our Waifs and Strays 1, no. 40 (1887): 3. 67. “Why Emigrate?” Our Waifs and Strays 13, no. 323 (1912): 294–5. 68. Vanoc, “Our Handbook: The New Emigration: The Oxford Movement,” Referee, May 8, 1910. For a further discussion of such fears, see Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 88. 69. T. J. Barnardo, “Westward Ho!” Night and Day 13, no. 132–3 (1889): 34–7. 70. Jessie Armstrong, “Lost! Stolen! Or Strayed!” (London: RTS, n.d.), 32. 71. Margaret West, “Work at Grahamstown,” Our Waifs and Strays 1, no. 15 (1885): 6. 72. Angela Woollacott argues that women from settler colonies were able to achieve a similar rise in status when traveling in other colonized areas. Angela Woollacott, “ ‘All This Is the Empire, I Told Myself ’: Australian Women’s Voyages ‘Home’ and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness,” American Historical Review 102, no. 4 (1997): 1008. The reality for child emigrants, of course, fell far short of the promise. For a discussion of the outcomes of child emigration to Canada, see Joy Parr, Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869–1924 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980). 73. W. M. A., “Untitled,” Night and Day 18, no. 180 (1894): 53–4. 74. Roslyn Poignant, Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press: 2004): 7. 75. T. J. Barnardo, “Through Shade and Sunshine: Some Canadian Experiences,” Night and Day 17, no. 176 (1893): 83–7. 76. “Our Australasian Deputation,” Night and Day 16, no. 162 (1892): 45. 77. Mayers, “My Tour In ‘Brighter Britain,’ ” 97. 78. Sir George Reid, “The New Australasian Hospital,” Night and Day 33, no. 254 (1910): 53. 79. “Untitled,” War Cry, August 4, 1900, 3. 80. “Indian Famine Fund: Disease More Acute Than Ever,” War Cry, February 6, 1897, 4; “The Indian Famine: Our Starving Fellow-Subjects,” War Cry, July 21, 1900, 5. 81. Adjutant Daya Ratna, “The Indian Famine Contingent,” War Cry, August 25, 1900, 3. 82. “The Indian Boys: At Melbourne City Corps,” War Cry, September 1, 1900, 4. 83. Adjutant Daya Ratna, “India’s Help to India: The Tour of the Eastern Representatives in New South Wales and Queensland,” War Cry, October 27, 1900, 4.




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84. Ratna, “The Indian Famine Contingent,” 3. 85. Daya Ratna, “The Indian Famine Contingent: Notes by Adjutant Daya Ratna,” War Cry, September 8, 1900, 11. 86. “From Brightest Australia Back to Darkest England: The Return of General Booth,” Review of Reviews 5 (1892): 301. 87. Ibid., 302. 88. Ibid.


“I Followed England Round the World”: The Rise of Trans-Imperial Anglo-Saxon Exceptionalism, and the Spatial Narratives of Nineteenth-Century British Settler Colonies of the Pacific Rim Penelope Edmonds

I

n 1868 Charles Wentworth Dilke published a travelogue of his tour of North America, India, and Britain’s Pacific colonies titled Greater Britain: A Records of Travel in English-Speaking Countries during 1866 and 1867. The book was the result of a global tour by which Dilke sought to chart the progress of the Anglo-Saxon race around the globe.1 In this work, which would become highly inf luential in Britain, the young Dilke proffered his impressions and meditations on British imperial expansion and race. In Dilke’s “sketches of Saxondom” around the globe he announced confidently, “The Englishmen founds everywhere a New England—new in thought and soil.” Of his journey through British settler colonies in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand he declared that he had “followed England round the world . . . [and] If I remarked that climate, soil, manners of life, that mixture with other peoples had modified the blood, I saw, too, that in essentials the race was always one.” Largely eschewing the dislocations and displacements of empire and the enduring presence of many colonized Indigenous peoples, Dilke was convinced the AngloSaxon race would prevail, believing in its “grandeur . . . girdling the earth, which it is destined, perhaps, to overspread.” 2 This chapter problematizes the tendency of scholars to uncritically apply ideas derived from late-twentieth-century notions of whiteness and its operations



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Penelope Edmonds

retroactively onto the nineteenth century, and suggests instead that a developing and pervasive trans-imperial Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, embraced both at metropolitan and at colonial levels, may be charted during this period. The rise of globalized narratives of Anglo-Saxonism such as Dilke’s, and their spatial purchase, may be traced in tandem with emergent and circulating ideas of Britishness and whiteness by the late nineteenth century. I argue for a reappraisal of discourses of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism during the mid-to-late nineteenth century, examining a range of writers who promoted narratives of an imagined trans-colonial Anglo-Saxon community at colonial and metropolitan levels. Specifically, the chapter interrogates the rendering of Britain’s mid-nineteenth-century Pacific rim settler colonies, British Columbia on the Pacific Northwest Coast and Victoria, southeastern Australia, as Anglo-Saxon or white spaces, part of an imagined spatial and racial polity spanning oceans, and the contestations and refutations of this by Indigenous peoples and others at the local level. Here are explored the powerful racial narratives of British empire- and colonybuilding during the mid-to-late nineteenth century, and the unmooring of such narratives both in the metropole and at the unruly edges of empire. I question: Whose colony was white or Anglo-Saxon? And, what were the fissures in or subversions of such an imagined racial polity? British Columbia and Victoria were not Anglo-Saxon or white as many wished and imagined but were instead new, hybrid sites. Rather than places of dominance and control, these were often sites just as “at home” where Britain struggled to command its own narrative identity.

Historicizing Whiteness: A Reappraisal of Anglo-Saxon Exceptionalism in the Colonies and Metropole Many writers have charted the various manifestations of whiteness and its operations. Homi Bhabha has argued that whiteness, rather than being an “authentic or essential identity,” is a “strategy of authority.”3 For writers such as Paul Gilroy and bell hooks, “whiteness has been and still is often experienced as terror.”4 For others, whiteness is a global product, not a color at all but a set of political relations. And, for Cheryl Harris, whiteness is property.5 The universality, normativity, and invisibility of contemporary modes of whiteness have been articulated by a range of scholars for well over a decade. There is no doubt that this field has prompted great insights. Yet, there are also problems, particularly a lack of detailed scholarship that historicizes the operations of whiteness in specific times and localities. Emerging from the very particular racial polemics of the United States and the critical legal and race theory fields, much whiteness scholarship has been centered on African American/ white dichotomies, and has only recently begun to address the construction of whiteness in relation to Native American peoples and others. Further, while there is an emerging body of literature that deals with the subject of whiteness and settler colonialism, little attention has been given to the spatiality of whiteness in settler colonies and changes in such discourses over various time periods. In addition, although space and place are always implicit in colonial discourse as empire cannot be separated from its spatial inscription, unresolved



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tensions exist in the field between the configuration of racialized bodies and identities as “white,” for example, and spaces or property as similarly racially inscribed. If, as Homi Bhabha suggests, whiteness is a “strategy of authority” rather than an authentic or essential “identity,”6 it is also observable that whiteness as a “strategy” may be authorized through (constructed) environments, geographies, and spaces. But how have such spaces been imagined in specific times and places? The spatiality of whiteness, its imagining, and sometimes violent materialization as a racialized phenomenon is therefore of central interest to this chapter. Whiteness concerns not only identities, but is vitally implicated in the operations of power through environment and space, and in the colonizing imperatives that have marked settler space out as white or Anglo-Saxon. Just as bodies are racialized, so too are spaces. Just as bodies are places of violent racial inscription, so too is space. Lest one believes “space” is too slippery and abstract, it is apposite to consider the long histories of segregation, the creation of legitimate and illegitimate spaces, the policing of those spaces, and the often violent and material inscriptions of race perpetuated in settler colonies in both cities and the borderlands. It is vital to consider both bodies and spaces, polities and geographies, as mutually co-productive, for settler colonialism concerns not only the taking of land, but also the collapse of space, and the concomitant reorganization and creation of new spaces and identities. As Judith Butler has rightly observed, bodies and spaces are mutually imbricated.7 Such rethinking has been crucial to feminist and post- or counter-colonial theories, where contestations surrounding the purification of space not only concern the control of space, but the mutual violations of bodies and spaces.8 Crucially, settler colonies—in this case the British colonies around the Pacific Rim—were formed through the rapid reorganization, regulation, and governance of bodies and spaces as new colonial polities were formed, creating plural modernities, each interacting differently with diverse Indigenous populations. In short, racialized geographies are as important as racialized bodies, for they operate together, and must be understood as such in investigations of the colonial past.

Britain’s Pacific Settler Colonies and Anglo-Saxon Exceptionalism Highlighting the series of intrinsically spatial strategies of dispossession that the West has visited upon colonized societies, Edward Said stated that it is difficult to think of colonialism “without important imaginative and geographical processes at work in the production as well as the acquisition, subordination, and settlement of space.” 9 In the early nineteenth century, Europeans imagined two extremities of empire on each side of the Pacific Ocean in powerful ways. Port Phillip, southeastern Australia, later the colony of Victoria (1851), and Vancouver Island on the Pacific Northwest Coast (later to join with the colony of British Columbia in 1866) were each imagined as “Edens,” land gifted to Europeans by Providence. Men of empire sought to possess these Indigenous lands, first, by imaginatively producing a space that could be appropriated, then, by reaping material rewards from the opening of these “new” lands



Trans-Imperial Anglo-Saxon Exceptionalism

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through surveying, mapping, allotment, and speculation. Such processes were vital to the “anticipatory geography” of colonization.10 Importantly, such imaginative spatial processes produced an anticipatory, racialized space. By the 1850s, the gold rushes of southeastern Australia (1851) and the Pacific Northwest Coast (1858) radically altered the towns of Melbourne, in the colony of Victoria, and Victoria, Vancouver Island. Both became gateways to the goldfields through which thousands of miners, men, women, and children from diverse places passed. These immigrant colonies interacted with the diverse Indigenous peoples who lived there, reorganizing space and culture. In the fort town of Victoria, Vancouver Island, promoters and speculators, bourgeois metropolitans, and city builders wished to create a British civic space and imagined a new world city of wealth, civilization, and increased settlement. In 1859, at the height of the Fraser River gold rush, Alexander Morris delivered a lecture to an enthusiastic crowd: In the rapid planning of the Anglo-Saxon civilisation, the finger of providence was manifest . . . The discoveries of gold had singularly been the precursors of the mixed races, which for want of a better name were the Anglo-Saxon race. Thus the discovery of gold in California, next Australia . . . and now the discovery of gold in Columbia had planted a new centre of light and civilisation on the Pacific . . . Vancouver’s Island . . . [is] a sort of England attached to America . . . who could doubt the reality of the great British empire of the North . . . it would yet be realised if the people of British North America were only true to themselves and their manifest destiny.11 The Pacific gold rushes were deemed to be material proof of the imperial destiny of a specifically imagined racial group, the Anglo-Saxon race. Such racialized narratives of expropriation, settlement, and manifest destiny linked British white settler colonies, and gesturing between them became common through trans-imperial networks. Victoria’s town promoters imagined their city on the Northwest Coast as a future hub of the British Empire in the Pacific, dominating trade with Asia. In 1862, no doubt in a similar mood of gold-rush optimism, R. C. Mayne wrote: “the least experienced eye could see the capabilities of the site of Victoria for a town, and that it was capable, should the occasion ever arise, of springing into importance as Melbourne or San Francisco had done.”12 In the mid-nineteenth century, these Pacific Rim settler colonies were often framed as British cognate spaces, as a “sort of England” or as “Great Britains” reduplicated in other hemispheres, only underlining the imagining of an expanding, Anglo-Saxon polity around the Pacific. The descriptor white is frequently used by historians as a fashionable shorthand, and often with imprecise liberality when considering these midnineteenth-century British colonies. Whiteness theory, which seeks to analyze current societal operations of the United States, cannot be seamlessly and



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uncritically projected backward in the analysis of mid-nineteenth-century British settler colonies. Rather, I suggest that understandings of whiteness, especially in such colonies, must be historicized around the organizing and very self-conscious transnational and racial discourse of Anglo-Saxonism, which was increasingly prevalent from the mid-to-late-nineteenth century.13 In considering the creation of these colonial sites on the Pacific Rim at this time, the term “Anglo-Saxon” was regularly in use, although terms such as “British” and “white” were increasingly prevalent and often used interchangeably in racial discourse at that time, slippages that should be noted. As Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have rightly documented, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an overt and vigorous transnational discourse of whiteness, of “whiteman’s land” and “white labour,” had formed throughout British settler colonies, perhaps eclipsing ideas of Anglo-Saxonism.14 In this chapter I look instead to the mid-nineteenth century, and argue for closer historical scrutiny and specificity by attending to the language used by many writers at this time, which reveals a developing and pervasive discourse of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism in regard to both Britons “at home” and to Pacific settler colonies.

Anglo-Saxon Exceptionalism in Britain Accelerating ideas of the uniqueness of the “Anglo-Saxon race” had crystallized for Britons by the mid-nineteenth century. In a gradual shift from ideas of difference created through environment to those of inherently corporeal and unique “racial” attributes, British superiority was deemed to be not the result of anything as easily definable as “education, climate . . . economics or geography, it was due rather to the unique attributes of the British race,” writes Robert Huttenback.15 With roots stretching back at least to the 1840s, the circulation of ideas of Anglo-Saxon domination, of a global brotherhood of Englishspeaking races, and prophesies of a great racial conf lict from which “Saxondom will rise triumphant” had developed.16 During this period, Anglo-Saxonism became an “identity” that transformed into an “originary myth” of “vigorous emotive power,” write Allen Frantzen and John Niles.17 In 1846 in an article titled the “Destiny of the Anglo-Saxon Race,” the Manchester Examiner noted that there were a people who were “eminently fitted” to exploit the resources of the earth, through their “industry, mechanical genius, energy and maritime states,” and would turn them to every possible advantage: before another half century has elapsed, the Anglo-Saxon race will amount to 140 millions, and why should it not, with an unlimited extent of territory on which to settle, and no human cause conceivable threatening it with repression? . . . It is therefore obvious that the Anglo-Saxon race is called to play an extraordinary part in the civilisation of the world.18




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The Examiner judged that the Anglo-Saxon race was providentially entitled to settle unlimited “territory,” and that this race possessed a specific vocation in human history: it would play an “extraordinary part.” Such apparently divinely ordained expansionism operated on the politics of denial. Disavowing the presence of many Indigenous peoples who inhabited these lands, and thus the operations of settler colonialism based on displacement and replacement, there was “no human cause” that would repress such Anglo-Saxon enthusiasm. Despite the aspirations of those hopeful to promote ideas of Anglo-Saxon solidarity at home, however, not all at the time took Britain for an homogenous group. Composed of the “nations” of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, Britain would always be a place of multiple identities, and as Geoffrey Searle has noted, “most English nationalists knew full well they were a mongrel people.”19 Searle has described this as Britain’s “multinational face,” and has pointed to the “casual eliding” of England with Britain that occurred, such slippages often overriding these other nations. Ireland, with its desire for home rule and its Catholicism, was the least integrated into the “British state” and was, of course, considered to be “troublesome.” 20 The notable rise of an AngloSaxonist enthusiasm was partly a reaction to the development in the mid-tolater nineteenth century of a Pan-Celtic movement in Ireland and Scotland, with connections to Manx, Cornish, and Breton enthusiasts. English patriots therefore sought to promote a version of “true Englishness,” manifesting in a revivifying of the country’s Anglo-Saxon heritage. 21 Literature, aimed at both adults and juveniles, ideologically incorporated its readers as a superior race and operated as a critical adjunct to this British imperial enterprise at home and abroad, as noted in chapter seven. Accordingly, Searle observes: Scholars were also working to retrieve Anglo-Saxon (aka Old English) texts. And school children were encouraged by their reading primers to think of themselves as belonging to a blue-eyed, fair haired people, and told that the Queen was “the descendant of the Saxon chiefs who settled in Wessex more than 14 centuries ago.” 22 In 1852 The Freeman’s Journal of Dublin published an article that contested this burgeoning “Anglo-Saxon theory” with its constructed historical genealogy. 23 Speaking at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, John McElheran argued “I appeal to history, but more to existing facts, against the popular theory that England is Anglo-Saxon, and therefore great . . . Britain was decidedly not Anglo-Saxon. Signatures to the very earliest charts are numerously Celtic.” McElheran continued, the “Saxons can be considered in no other light than as an army encamped in an enemy’s territory.” Drawing attention to colonizing forces, and referring no doubt to the very recent Irish famine of the 1840s and the death and mass emigrations that had ensued, he stated, “It is impossible to uproot a people. The Irish were reduced to a skeleton, and now they are spreading over the earth.” McElheran objected to the belief that had grown that “England is almost exclusively inhabited by Anglo-Saxons who utterly exterminated the ancient Britons.” Yet, England, he assured his listeners,



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was “becoming more Celtic every generation.” While he conceded that the English were perhaps a “strange conglomeration” of races “defying analysis,” he concluded there were but “two prevailing races that seem to flow together without assimilating, dark and fair, Briton and Saxon, Celtic and Germanic.” Others, however, viewed Anglo-Saxonism and Englishness in different, less corporeal terms. For some nationhood could be assessed through a linguistic test. “Everyone who speaks English as his mother tongue has the right to be called English,” declared the journalist St Loe Stratchely. While others viewed “Englishness” as a set of values often associated closely with Christian values. English “character” was often invoked, but had vaguer meanings. 24 There were other internal and external forces that gave rise to this metropolitan and trans-colonial Anglo-Saxonism. Anglo-Saxonism was partly borne of ethnic rivalries at home, but its emergence must be viewed also within broader mid-to-late-nineteenth-century changes in communication technologies, the unprecedented movement of peoples, and internal and global political challenges for Britain and its colonies, which led to the appeal for a “Greater Britain” and later to ideas of imperial federalism. Anxieties concerning Britain’s place in the world, the emergence of competing global powers such as Germany, Russia, and the United States, as well as Britain’s colonies seeking independence and ultimately the granting of responsible government were all perceived as threats. Duncan Bell has described the political tensions at home and abroad that gave rise to fears that Britain was “in danger of forfeiting its greatness.” 25 Technological shifts and, importantly, immigration and emigration, especially colonization, radically altered Britons’ own self-conceptualization. Emigration created a “new polity or diaspora,” writes Searle. It created a sense of the “Englishman’s belief that he belonged to a people that were virile and progressive because they were outward looking, actors on world stage.” 26 No doubt too, such sentiments promoting Anglo-Saxon unity were also fueled by widespread fears concerning the increased movement and contact of peoples, and the blending of races, or miscegenation, which reached a peak by the early twentieth century, as Reynolds has outlined. 27 In The Idea of Greater Britain, Bell explores the “languages employed in imagining the settler empire as a single transcontinental political community, even as a global federal state.” During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the changes, threats, and challenges described earlier remade Britain’s national consciousness. As Bell notes, a “strong and vibrant Greater Britain was one of the most prominent solutions offered to the crisis of confidence in national supremacy.” 28 Frequently such ideas of a Greater Britain were constructed around the racial and political community of a transcontinental Anglo-Saxonism. Despite the challenges to and ruptures within the notion of an homogeneous and bodily Anglo-Saxonism, Bell notes that during the latter decades of the nineteenth century ideas of an “Anglo-Saxon empire” grew, and “grandiose visions of colonial unity found emotive and symbolic expression in poetry, prayer, song, and major architectural projects, as well as through the more conventional media of political thought.”29 By 1896, for example, in desire for the unity of “the English speaking world,” a celebration occurred in London for the 120th Anniversary of American




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Independence day, displaying both flags, and with the motto adopted from Wordsworth, “We must be one who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spoke.”30 By this time, some writers influenced by social Darwinism and the continental racial theorists had “discovered the roots of Anglo-Saxon genius as far back as the fifth century,” writes Huttenbuck. To be Anglo-Saxon was to possess a race and a selfconsciously historicized genealogy. From this flowed the conviction that the AngloSaxon race “possessed a special capacity for governing itself (and others) through a constitutional system which combined justice and efficiency.”31 The implications of this for the expropriated Indigenous peoples of British settler colonies were profound. In such colonies of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, myths of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism were mobilized in tandem with an increasing bourgeois metropolitanism, a growing trend of city- and colony-building, and the rapid regulation and segregation of bodies and spaces along increasingly hardening racial lines.

Dilke’s Sketches of “Saxondom” in Southeastern Australia and the Canadas Charles Wentworth Dilke began his world tour in June 1866, which he “hoped would yield material for his work on radicalism and ideal commonwealths.”32 Dilke aimed to chart the progress of the Anglo-Saxon race around the globe. An examination of his writings, as an Anglo-Saxon enthusiast of the mid-tolate nineteenth century, instructively throws into relief some of the differences between Anglo-Saxonism and modern, later-twentieth-century constructions of whiteness in these settler colonies. For Dilke, the colony of Victoria was the “wealthiest of all the Australian nations.” In Dilke’s mind its economic success was entirely due to the “strong vitality of Melbourne men,” rather than the almost unprecedented rapidity of the removal of Aboriginal people from the land, and the size of the Victorian gold rush.33 Echoing popular notions of racial fitness, Dilke attributed such imperial success to the “unsurpassing vigour of the Victorians,” and the fact that they were “far more thoroughly British” than the citizens of Sydney, the rival capital.34 Inviting a racialized environmentalism even between Australia’s colonies, and thus linking bodies with spaces, he argued that Sydney people were mere “cornstalks” reared in semi-tropical climates, but the Victorians were “ full blooded English immigrants, bred in the more rugged climes of Tasmania, Canada, or Great Britain.”35 Victoria, he proclaimed, was a “model colony.” Evoking ideas of contiguous imperial spaces, he observed that “in many senses Melbourne is the London, and Sydney is the Paris of Australia.”36 Dilke was convinced that “the Englishmen founds everywhere a New England—new in thought and soil.” 37 Just as Anglo-Saxonism became an identity that transformed into myth, it was also an identity that had an expansive global purview. No matter of geography, climate, or way of life, or even the “mixture with other peoples,” dissuaded him that in “essentials the race was always one.” 38 Dilke’s Anglo-Saxonism concerned bodily strength, superiority, and a racial purity that could withstand rugged (but perhaps not tropical)



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environments. Yet, Anglo-Saxonism too was cross-cut by contradictions. Dilke saw the race as “one,” but others such as Alexander Morris described the AngloSaxons as a “mixed race,” with various branches, and environment also could temper the power of this group. The operations of race in Dilke’s imagination were based on a scale of civilization. He was largely negative about Australian Aboriginal people, as well as the “Red Indians” of America, whom he described as “debased” and soon to be wiped out by “war and whisky.” As Bell notes, Dilke’s Greater Britain was characterized by a “cruel condescension,” epitomized by Dilke’s comment “the gradual extinction of the inferior races is not only a law of nature, but a blessing to mankind.”39 Ignoring the very real dislocations and displacements of empire, and the many Indigenous peoples and those of mixed descent who managed to survive colonialism, Dilke was convinced that the Anglo-Saxon race would prevail, predicting that the “dearer” race would “destroy” the “cheaper races” and “Saxondom would rise triumphant from the struggle.”40 Dilke sought a coherent narrative of AngloSaxonism throughout the globe, and had faith in its totalizing power. As noted, terms such as “white,” “whitemen,” “Britain,” and “Anglo-Saxon” were common parlance by the 1860s and 1870s. As Lake and Reynolds and several other scholars have shown, ideas of “Britishness” or “Anglo-Saxonism” predominated in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century, with notions of “whiteness,” “whiteman’s land,” or “whiteman’s province” gaining greater purchase by the latter part of the nineteenth century.41 Indeed, British Columbia came to be known as the whiteman’s province in the early twentieth century. By 1908, Australia’s Bulletin magazine had on its masthead the now infamous declaration: “Australia for the White Man.”42 By this time, as Lake suggests, white and whiteman pertained to an overt, transnational white identity forming within and between these British settler sites.43 The particular purchase of an earlier discourse of Anglo-Saxonism in the mid-nineteenth century, however, requires attention, as the reach of this discourse is often overlooked in favor of easy approximations with current ideas of whiteness. During the mid-to-late nineteenth century Anglo-Saxonism and emerging ideas of white trans-imperialism were sometimes competing and at others highly complementary as developing discourses; this was a transitional period characterized by multivalent racialized discourses. Yet, the anatomy and operations of a later-twentieth-century whiteness operating around the concerns and polemics of the United States and nineteenth-century discourses of Anglo-Saxonism in these settler societies operate in distinctly divergent ways. Current theory characterizes whiteness as an invisible, privileged, normative, and taken-for-granted category, a strategy of power in the world. Anglo-Saxonism in the mid-to-late nineteenth century was constructed very differently. For English speakers in Britain and its colonies, Anglo-Saxonism grew in discursive, imaginative, and mythic power, and became increasingly overt, self-conscious, and rhetorical. Anglo-Saxonism was not a naturalized and invisible discourse; it was constructed as superior, exemplary, and unique. It was not diffuse or unseen, but was frequently anchored in images of corporeal vigor, expressed so effectively by




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writers such as Dilke. In unstable frontier locales characterized by Indigenous dispossession and mixed-race relationships, especially on the Pacific Northwest Coast with its early history of fur trade relations between French, First Nations peoples, and Métis, Anglo-Saxonism was neither universal nor normative—it was indeed exceptional. In the 1860s, Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism had reached new heights, and proponents such as Dilke would write lavishly of “Anglo-Saxon energy,” of the “grandeur” of the Anglo-Saxon race and its spatial reach girdling the earth.44 Dilke’s views, of course, represented the extreme end of a rampant Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, but they do proffer a sense of a discourse that was growing by the 1860s, and was harnessed enthusiastically in the colonies. In colonial outposts such as British Columbia, colonists who were outnumbered by many thousands of First Nations peoples experienced a lack of control and homogeneity, and it is little wonder that such noisy and strident proclamations of the exceptional features and abilities of an imagined group, the Anglo-Saxon race, were made. Just as in Britain where the rise in Anglo-Saxon enthusiasm was partly a response to a threatening Pan-Celtic movement, such claims of Anglo-Saxon vigor and endurance, I suggest, were employed in the unstable frontier periods of the Pacific Northwest Coast and southeastern Australia, and significantly served to prefigure settlement. After the so-called closure of the frontier and increased settlement came a new set of power relationships—those of internal colonialism. By the time of the formation of nation states in the late nineteenth century, when British Columbia joined the Dominion of Canada in confederation as a province in 1871, and the Australian colonies federated in 1901, explicit and interconnected discourses of whiteness, white labor, and of white Dominions prevailed. By the middle of the twentieth century, these nations emerged as modern, postwar states dependent on the production of Indigenous peoples as politically and economically subordinate racial groups through increased levels of regulation, administration, and missionisation. Only then did the gradual operation of a discourse of familiar whiteness in its later modern, twentiethcentury sense, as taken for granted, normative, or invisible begin. In the mid-nineteenth century, Anglo-Saxon polities were imagined triumphantly in the colonies, but in reality they were often fragile and uneasy. In 1865 Matthew MacFie conducted a survey of the “varieties of race represented in Victoria,” Vancouver Island, applying an intricate system of taxonomy to the streetscape. MacFie determined that one could “calculate upon twenty-three crosses, in different degrees, resulting from the blending of the Caucasian, the aboriginal American, and the Negro.”45 He marveled that there could be found in Victoria “almost every tribe and nationality under heaven,” a result of “illicit commerce between the various races.” His prognosis was fearful, one that spelt the demise for the Anglo-Saxon race. In 1871, when British Columbia joined the Dominion of Canada, a census was called of its constituents. This census of Victoria reveals the lived, mixed streetscape, the object of MacFie’s taxonomic concerns.46 Rather than McFie’s “23 crosses,” however, the Victoria census was categorized into “white,” “native,” “Chinese,” and “coloured.” Perhaps these four equally illusory categories were all that the foot police who knocked on



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doors collecting such information could handle. Victoria was a site that such anxious taxonomies could not master. In British Columbia, as Adele Perry has shown, bourgeois metropolitan narratives of racial purity were confounded at empire’s unruly edges by mixed-race relations as Indigenous peoples and settlers sought to define themselves and their spaces and refute such moralities.47 In Melbourne, with a vastly bigger population of British immigrants and a much smaller population of Aboriginal people who had largely been sequestered in remote mission stations by the 1860s, commentators such as Dilke saw the face of Britain they wished to see. This was regardless of the prevalence of mixed relations and shared spaces that were increasingly glossed over. Yet, for some Britons seeking a mirror of their own identity, the colonies caused confusion and anxiety. Rather than being places of Anglo-Saxon triumph, confidence, and sameness, such British imperial realms were “spaces of bewilderment and loss which continued to trouble and confounded many of England’s subjects.”48 Metropolitan narratives of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism often foundered on the shores of these Pacific colonies. Instead, these emerging urban spaces were transactional contact zones. Where was the location of this Anglo-Saxon empire, and which colonies were in fact Anglo-Saxon or white?49 Victoria, southeastern Australia, and British Columbia during the mid-to-late nineteenth century were not white or Anglo-Saxon hubs of empire as many wished and imagined, but were instead new, unstable sites. Rather than places of dominance and control, these cities were sites where Britain struggled to command its own narrative identity through the regulation of bodies and spaces. Just as Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism was fissured and contested in Britain, the colonies were often places of anxiety and bewilderment, uneasy emergent colonial modernities for both newcomers and Indigenous peoples alike. Dilke’s Greater Britain became a catch phase in debates regarding imperial expansion and colonial unity, and the book ran to eight editions, but it could mean many different things to different people, and this was at once the source of appeal and its main weakness.50 This highly inf luential travelogue had an impact on many. In the 1870s and 1880s writers such as Goldwin Smith had called for a “reinvigorated global Anglo-Saxon community.” Smith was a proponent of colonial emancipation, and believed that the formal ties of empire should be replaced by “global bonds of tradition and race.”51 As Smith wrote, “when our colonies are nations, something in the nature of a great Anglo-Saxon federation may . . . arise out of affinity and natural affection.” As Bell observes, Smith’s ideas of “natural unity” were based not on imperial dominance but on the “bonds of race and culture.” Smith looked to “blood and sentiment” to join the English-speaking peoples around the globe. Such beliefs of Anglo-Saxon unity, writes Bell, “served also as the theoretical foundation for a federal Greater Britain.”52 Historian J. R. Seeley in his Expansion of England in 1883 used the phrase Greater Britain consistently, and this became the most inf luential account of colonial unity in the late Victorian age. In 1886 the historian J. A. Froude named this imagined polity “Oceana” in a “deliberate republican echo of James Harrington’s utopian vision” of 1656.53 Others suggested the




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An “Oceanic Britain”: Élisée Reclus and the Creation of Imperial Spaces and Identities In 1898, two years shy of the close of the nineteenth century, the French geographer and anarchist Élisée Reclus published his multivolume work The Earth and its Inhabitants, on peoples, geography, and empire.56 Reclus noted the annexation of “half of the planet to the other half.” The “world,” which had been incomplete . . . [is] suddenly revealed in its entirety, and universal history, in the strict sense of the term, henceforth begins for all the races and peoples of the earth . . . Henceforth the earth knows no limits, for its centre is everywhere or anywhere on the planetary surface, and its circumference nowhere.57 Reclus argued that it was the Anglo-Saxon race that had annexed the lands around the Pacific Rim. He wrote that it was “unquestionably” the British and American branches of the Anglo-Saxon race that seemed “destined” to create an Oceanic Britain.58 Reclus’ depiction of the Pacific as an “Oceanic Britain” was part, as shown, of an existing and common lexicon expressed by many others on Anglo-Saxon expansionism and of contiguous imperial space. Theories of race and the apprehension of difference appeared repeatedly in the work of geographers in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Reclus was perhaps ahead of his time as he rejected a hard taxonomy of race expressed by writers such as Joseph Gobineau.59 As a Frenchman, Reclus’ use of the term AngloSaxon perhaps ref lects a differentiation from a Gallic self, an ethnicity, rather than a race with a constructed genealogy. Further, his description of “branches” is distinct from the language used by Dilke, for example, for whom the AngloSaxon race would always be one. Reclus used the terms Anglo-Saxon, British, and English at various points in his writings, and again, the distinctions between slippages of meaning and context require further examination. Significantly, Reclus linked the creation of spaces with the creation of bodies. Reclus wrote of the British (male) subject as a universal subject traveling the globe, who moved between London, South Africa, and Sydney: during his long voyage of nearly 16,000 miles across half the circumference of the globe, the civis Britannicus touches English territory alone; everywhere he sees his social and political institutions firmly established,



“United States of England,” or “Federal Britain.” The nuances of the debates were many, and more complex ideas of imperial federalism were not always synonymous with those of Greater Britain.54 Significantly, a prominent feature of many metropolitan debates regarding Greater Britain was the lack of consideration for Indigenous peoples within this imagined polity, and the violence and expropriation from land that so many had suffered to create it.55


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Reclus expressed powerful ideas of a contiguous British imperial space forming over the globe that, due to colonialism’s rapid expansion, would ensure that all humankind in their various temporal and historical stages would in the rapid blink of an eye wake up with “self-consciousness” and become the civilized subjects, the civis Britannicus, or British citizens of universal history. Thus space, history, and subjectivities conf late in Reclus’ observations of a “centre that is everywhere” and a “circumference nowhere,” revealing a faith in the transformative power of imperialism and global capital. Perhaps the first dissident geographer, Reclus, a positivist and anarchist, “understood the globe as an historically and spatially interrelated system,” writes Marie Fleming. 61 Implicit also in Reclus’ notion of “universal history” was the idea of a western linear sequence of history, a western historicizing narrative, a trajectory that would sweep all peoples and races up in its path. Importantly, this western linear narrative was spatialized. Further, Reclus’ imagined civis Britannicus was a distinctly masculine identity constructed and enabled entirely by the dominance of such a British globalizing modernity. Civis Britannicus was not normative or invisible—he was an exceptional subject, with a global purview and spatial entitlements that few other men or women could possess at that time. With his spatial mobility he could travel “from hemisphere to hemisphere” but “scarcely feel” that he had left his native land. This was the British (male) imperial subject exemplified, one who might pursue “England round the world” just as Dilke had. Civis Britannicus was a subject who was at once unique, and yet he was also configured as potentially empire’s everyman, the subject of universal history. Defined by and made through his global entitlements, civis Britannicus could make trans-global journeys between British colonies, where he (not Indigenous peoples) would be configured as native. Again, highlighting the mutual imbrication of colonial bodies and spaces, civis Britannicus was British trans-imperialism in human frame, the imagined personification of the AngloSaxon race that had annexed the lands around the Pacific. Such imaginings exemplify the peak of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism.

The Demise of Greater Britain? Throughout the 1890s, many began to doubt the Anglo-Saxon triumphalism that had been expressed by so many writers, and celebrated through prose, poem, and political debate. Writing from Melbourne, in the Colony of Victoria, in 1893, Charles Pearson expressed grave concern about the “continuous progress” of the Anglo-Saxons. Instead, as Oscar Falnes observed, Pearson predicted limits to presumptions of Anglo-Saxon progress, and argued that within another century the expansion of the “superior” races would be circumscribed. 62



everywhere he hears the familiar sounds of his mother tongue; he moves from hemisphere to hemisphere, but scarcely feels that he has quitted his native land. 60

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In the future there would be great changes to what Pearson called the “the Black and Yellow belt” from China to tropical America, which would be “teeming with life, developed by industrial enterprise, fairly well administered by native governments, and owing the better part of carrying trade of the world.” The colored peoples of China, Africa, and South America would be “represented by f leets in the European seas, invited to international conferences, and welcomed thus as allies in the quarrels of the civilised world.”63 Pearson’s predictions stood in stark contrast to those who had promoted Anglo-Saxon energy and supremacy. He warned that colonized and colored peoples would begin to supplant Anglo-Saxons as “dynamic historical agents,” note Lake and Reynolds. 64 Instead of a bright future of Anglo-Saxon authority, Pearson suggested that the optimum period of Anglo-Saxon dominance might be giving way to the cycle of human change and progress. 65 Of great threat, wrote Pearson, was that “while the lower races are raising themselves to the material level of the higher, the higher may be assimilating to the moral and metal depression of the lower.”66 Civis Britannicus was under threat. In Pearson’s words, Anglo-Saxons would be “elbowed and hustled, perhaps even thrust aside by peoples we looked upon as servile, and thought of as bound always to minister to our needs.”67 Pearson’s writings, which were inf luential to a new set of thinkers, thus provided “a new discursive framework in which changing world forces would be discussed,” observe Lake and Reynolds. By 1890 Dilke, too, had made a reappraisal of Anglo-Saxon dominance in his book the Problems of Greater Britain. 68 In this treatise on the “present position of Greater Britain,” Dilke directed attention to the relations of the Englishspeaking countries with one another. Of major concern, however, was the rise of other global powers and the “vulnerability of the United Kingdom” should the “enormous forces of European militarism . . . crush the old country and destroy the integrity of our Empire.” Dilke noted, with some prescience, “It is conceivable that within the next few years Great Britain might be drawn into war, and receive in that war, at the hands of a coalition, a blow from which she would not recover.”69 At the close of the nineteenth century, London held another of its large international exhibitions, titled the “Greater Britain exhibition.” Such a show, however, may have been largely optimistic posturing. Ideas of a Greater Britain, imperial federalism, and the bonds of Anglo-Saxon blood and sentiment had by this time been greatly tempered by new threats and political circumstances.

Conclusion From the mid-nineteenth century, in both metropole and British Pacific colonies, an imagined trans-imperial Anglo-Saxon community was regularly invoked. Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism often operated as a mobilizing racial discourse, one that at times augured invasion and settlement of new (and old) lands, and later intertwined and competed with discourses of whiteness and Britishness. In both colonial and metropolitan realms, however, Anglo-Saxonism



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was neither homogeneous nor universally accepted, but frequently unstable and contested. Rather than places of homogeneity and control, the colonies of British Columbia and Victoria were sites like their metropolitan counterpart, where Anglo-Saxon enthusiasts struggled to construct a cohesive narrative identity of race. Colonized peoples in both metropolitan regions and Pacific peripheries subverted claims of Anglo-Saxon unity and dominance. Nevertheless, the idea of a Greater Britain, a triumphant Anglo-Saxon polity spanning oceans, remained a seductive, potent, and multivalent discourse, especially in political rhetoric for the major part of the nineteenth century. Modern mid-twentieth-century ideas of whiteness may not be projected backward seamlessly onto the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, if whiteness is a global product, not a color at all but a set of political relations, then the historical specificity of those political relations and the ends they served in colonial discourse across empire must be made clear.

Notes 1. Charles Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866 and 1867, 2 vols (London: Macmillan and Co., 1868). 2. Ibid., 68 and preface. 3. Homi Bhabha, “The White Stuff,” Art Forum 36, no. 9 (May 1998): 21. 4. David R. Roediger, “Critical Studies of Whiteness, USA: Origins and Arguments,” Theoria 98 (December 2001): 82. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 174; and bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 172. 5. Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1709–91. 6. Bhabha, “The White Stuff,” 21. 7. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), ix and 33. 8. Ibid., 29. 9. Edward Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (Winter 1989): 218; Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (London: Blackwell, 1994), 168. 10. Daniel Clayton, Island of Truth: The Imperial Fashioning of Vancouver Island (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000). 11. Alexander Morris, lecture, reported in The British Colonist, July 13, 1859; my emphasis. 12. R. C. Mayne, Four Years in British Columbia and Vancouver Island: An Account of their Forests, Rivers, Coasts, Gold fields, and Resources for Colonisation (London: John Murray, 1862), 31. 13. See Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, eds, Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997). 14. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2008). 15. Robert A. Huttenback, Racism and Empire: White Settlers and Colored Immigrants in the British Self-Governing Colonies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), 15.




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16. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 368. 17. Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles, “Introduction: Anglo-Saxonism and Medievalism,” in Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, 5. 18. “Destiny of the Anglo Saxon Race,” Manchester Examiner, April 11, 1846. 19. Geoffrey Searle, A New England? Peace and War 1886–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 1 and 12. Quotes A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945 (Oxford, 1965), 12. 20. Ibid., 8, 10, and 16. 21. Ibid., 11. 22. Searle, A New England? 11. 23. “The Anglo Saxon Theory,” Freemans Journal, September 15, 1852. 24. Searle, A New England? 12. 25. Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007), 182. 26. Searle, A New England? 22 and 23. 27. Henry Reynolds, chapter six in this collection. 28. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 1 and 2. 29. Ibid., 5. 30. “Independence Day,” The Daily News, July 6, 1896. 31. Huttenback, Racism and Empire, 15. 32. “Dilke, Sir Charles Wentworth (1843–1911),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 4 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1972), 74–5. 33. Ibid., 106, 21, and 23. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 23; my emphasis. 36. Ibid., 25 and 23. 37. Ibid., 68. 38. Ibid., preface; my emphasis. 39. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 115. Quotes Dilke, vol. 1, 130 and 123; and vol. 2, 225. 40. Ibid., preface. 41. Marilyn Lake, “Whiteman’s County: The Transnational History of a National Project,” Australian Historical Studies 122 (October 2003): 346–81. 42. This masthead was only removed in 1961. 43. Lake, “Whiteman’s Country.” 44. Dilke, Greater Britain, 68. 45. Matthew McFie, Vancouver Island and British Columbia: Their History, Resources and Prospects (London: Longman, Green et al., 1865), 379. 46. Census for the year 1871 in the Esquimault charge book, 1862–66, Police and Prisons Department, Vancouver Island, BCA, GR 0428. British Columbian Archives, Victoria, British Columbia. 47. Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). 48. Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 3 and 4. Baucom quotes Franz Fanon. 49. I wish to acknowledge Adele Perry’s “Whose World Was White? Rethinking the ‘British World’ From and Edge of Empire,” in Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures, ed. Kate Darian-Smith, Patricia Grimshaw, and Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 133–52.



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50. “Dilke, Sir Charles Wentworth (1843–1911),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, 74–75; Bell, 7. 51. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 181 and 184. 52. Ibid., 184, 185, and 186. 53. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 8, quotes J. A. Froude, Oceana (London: Longman Green, 1886); and James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, ed. J. G. A. Peacock (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992 [1656]). 54. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, 8. As Bell notes, “while virtually all federalist employed the language of Greater Britain, not all of the proponents of Greater Britain were federalists,” 12. 55. See also ibid., 115. 56. Élisée Reclus, The Earth and its Inhabitants: Oceania (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1898). 57. Ibid., 5; my emphasis. 58. Ibid., 39. 59. Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau is best known for his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (Paris: Librairee De Firmin Didot Freres, 1853). 60. Reclus, The Earth and its Inhabitants, 353. 61. Marie Flemming, The Geography of Freedom (Montreal: Black Rose Press, 1988), 115. 62. Charles Pearson, National Life and Character: A Forecast (London, 1893); Oscar J. Falnes, “European Progress and the ‘Superior’ Races: As Viewed by a fin-de-siècle Liberal,” Journal of the History of Ideas 15, no. 2 (April 1954): 312–21. 63. Falnes, 314. Quotes Pearson, 67–8, 89–90, and 137–38. 64. Lake and Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line, 76. 65. Falnes, “European Progress and the ‘Superior’ Races,” 313. 66. Pearson, National Life and Character 101. 67. Falnes, “European Progress and the ‘Superior’ Races,” 319. 68. Charles Wentworth Dilke, Problems of Greater Britain (London: Macmillan, 1890). 69. Ibid., preface, viii, and introduction.







Whiteness as a Settler-Colonial Identity



PART III




White is Wonderful: Emotional Conversion and Subjective Formation Marilyn Lake

This New Fanaticism In 1910, in an article in the New York Independent, “The Souls of White Folk,” the African American activist and historian W. E. B. Du Bois announced a new discovery: the emergence of whiteness as both a personal identity and global politics. The world, he noted, was being swept by a new religion: “the world in a sudden emotional conversion, has discovered that it is white, and by that token, wonderful.”1 DuBois was especially struck by the emotion, the passion— the new fanaticism—that seemed to inform this sudden conversion experience. He also noted its binary logic: the division of the world into white and notwhite and its “astonishing” corollary: “I am white and you are nothing.” 2 “The Souls of White Folk” has not received the attention of some of DuBois’ other writings in histories of race relations. Given the burgeoning interest in formations of whiteness, the article has been surprisingly little discussed in the historical literature, yet as I shall be arguing in this chapter, it is particularly useful for thinking about whiteness as a subjective formation and mode of identification, rather than as the product of a history of ideas. Most histories of “race” offer an account of racial thought, a version of intellectual history, rather than a history of subjective formation and the production of a sense of self. And in many histories of race thinking, the ideas remain abstract and free f loating with little suggestion of how the discourses themselves produced the human subjects who spoke them. 3 As the essay by Patricia Grimshaw and Ann Standish in this collection (chapter ten) demonstrates, the personal potencies of whiteness were produced by the processes of subjective identification they enabled.



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High in the tower where I sit beside the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that puzzle men more than the Souls of White Folk. Not, mind you, the souls of them that are white, but souls of them that have become painfully conscious of their whiteness; those in whose minds the paleness of their bodily skins is fraught with tremendous and eternal significance.4 In pondering on the reasons for this strident identification with whiteness, DuBois suggested that its emotional and psychic dynamics could be located in the apprehension of imminent loss. Whiteness was fundamentally proprietorial: an assertion of the rights to property and power. “At times,” he wrote, “I have an unholy desire to laugh and to ask with seeming irrelevance and certain irreverence: ‘But what on earth is this whiteness, that one should so desire it?’ Then always, somehow, some way, silently, but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”5 From the late nineteenth century, the mobilizations of colonized and colored peoples around the world—their power symbolized by the “triumphant ‘Banzais’ ” (DuBois’ words) of the Japanese following their victory over Russia in 1905—stirred new anxieties and a powerful sense of threat. 6 As Tracey Banivanua-Mar’s chapter (eleven) in this collection suggests, expressions of whiteness at the turn of the century were most often both defensive and aggressive. DuBois’ observations help us see the formation of whiteness in the early twentieth century as a counter-mobilization that did not rest on new theories of racial difference, or reinvigorated systems of racial classification, but rather fears of humiliation and the apprehension of loss, a mobilization encouraged by that most eloquent prophet of white man’s decline, Charles Pearson, who referred to the strength of what he called “the feeling of caste” to his own sense of self. In his book National Life and Character: A Forecast, first published in 1893, Pearson, a colonial liberal and former professor of history at King’s College in London, gave eloquent expression of the apprehension of postcolonial loss in words that resonated around the world: The day will come, and perhaps is not far distant, when the European observer will look round to see the globe girdled with a continuous zone of the black and yellow races, no longer too weak for aggression or under tutelage, but independent, or practically so, in government, monopolising the trade of their own regions, and circumscribing the industry of



What DuBois saw at the beginning of the twentieth century was an eager embrace of “whiteness” as a mode of identification that was personal in its impact, but transnational in its reach and all the more powerful for that. Whiteness had invaded white folks’ emotions and minds, affecting their consciousness and their sense of who they were. In his essay, DuBois wrote as a puzzled witness to this sudden swirling madness:

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“It is idle to say,” Pearson added, “that if all this should come to pass our pride of place will not be humiliated.” Having struggled among themselves for supremacy, the white men of the Aryan races would suddenly wake to find themselves “elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down upon as servile, and thought of as bound always to minister to our needs.” The solitary consolation, wrote Pearson, was that the changes were inevitable. “Yet,” he added, “in some of us the feeling of caste is so strong that we are not sorry to think we shall have passed away before that day arrives.” 7 For the majority of white men, however, the acquiescence counseled by Pearson was out of the question. Theodore Roosevelt issued a call to arms, urging his fellow white men, the white men of America and Australia, to embark on a course of national reinvigoration and imperial expansion. The Asiatic races, he fulminated, had to confine themselves in their own countries. In 1908 he invited Canadian politicians to visit him in Washington and responded warmly to the invitation from Australian prime minister Alfred Deakin, to detour the U.S. Navy, about to embark on its tour of the Pacific, on a special visit to Melbourne and Sydney. The Canadian minister for labor and future prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King reported that when he attended the annual dinner of the Gridiron Club, the Washington-based organization of newspaper men, in January 1908, Roosevelt had stated that “the time was approaching when it might be desirable to substitute the ‘big stick’ for politeness in dealing with Japan” and that “the f leet had been sent round the Pacific for a purpose!” The president, he said, “took up the position, with characteristic vehemence, that the brown and white races cannot assimilate, that they must keep to their respective areas and that this is a question on which all the white races must stand together.” Mackenzie King formed the impression that unless Japan acted to restrict the emigration of her people, the United States would legislate to exclude them and that if Japan resorted to hostile measures in response, then the United States was prepared for war. 8 Addressing a deputation of politicians from British Columbia, Roosevelt told them that United States and Canadian interests were “identical.” “Gentlemen,” he was reported to have said, we have got to protect our working men. We have got to build up our western country with our white civilization, and (very vehemently) we must retain the power to say who shall or who shall not come to our country. Now it may be that Japan will adopt a different attitude, will demand that her people be permitted to go where they think fit, so



the European . . . [They will] be represented by f leets in the European seas, invited to international conferences, and welcomed as allies in the quarrels of the civilised world.

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Whiteness was an assertion of rights, a defensive but defiant claim to power and control over four continents. One contemporary commentator, “Viator,” writing in the British Fortnightly Review in 1908, worried about the dangerous consequences of white men’s presumption of “dominion over the whole earth”: The whites are a minority compared with the more Eastern races. Yet they claim to reserve for settlement, development or political control three of the other Continents in addition to Europe. The whites claim to dominate wherever they please in North and South America, in Australia and now in Africa. And at the same time they claim every form of equality in Asia which they think worth demanding. But they affect to pen up within the limits of Asia something like half the whole number of mankind . . . Is Asia . . . to be debarred from expansion?10 White arrogance would surely provoke pan-Asian resistance, he predicted, which might well result in the very outcome the white man so feared. “Viator” attributed much of white men’s stridency to the impact of Charles Pearson’s National Life and Character. That book, he said, constituted an act, as well as a treatise: it “shook the self-confidence of the white races and deprived them of the absolute sense of assured superiority which had hitherto helped them dominate . . . As white self-confidence was shaken, Asiatic self-consciousness was quickened by National Life and Character.”11 And Asiatic assertion provoked in turn new mobilizations of whiteness. Dubois’ essay “The Souls of White Folk” alerts us to the importance of subjective processes of identification, at once personal and global, to the changing dynamics of racial politics in the early twentieth century. Most histories of race relations have by contrast documented a history of ideas about race, providing an account of racial thought whose focus is usually on the changing categorizations of races, the role of leading thinkers such as Blumenbach, Gobineau, Darwin, Knox, and Huxley, for example, and the shift from so-called scientific to cultural racism back to biological racism in the late twentieth century. These histories of race relations are largely about what people thought, rather than about what people felt.12 In the remainder of this essay, I look at two historical moments, in 1898 and 1908, when the Australian population engaged in popular outbursts of emotion that constituted key moments in their affirmation of their identity as white. In both cases, these voluble outpourings were expressions of solidarity with their “American cousins” or “brethren.” Australians made declarations of their racial identity through identification with their “kinfolk,” the white men of the “great republic” of the United States. The first occasion was the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898; the second occurred just ten years later, with the arrival of the U.S. f leet on its Pacific tour. It is in this decade that,



I thought it wise to send that f leet around to the Pacific to be ready to maintain our rights.9


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according to DuBois, the world “discovered that it was white and by that token wonderful.” The advent of White Australia as a new nation on the world stage was emblematic of the mass conversion.

In 1898, as it became increasingly evident that the conf lict between the United States and Spain over Cuba would end in war, Australians went wild with enthusiasm for the American cause. For many weeks between February and April newspapers ran “large frantic headlines,” special editions were printed, and a dramatically increased number of editorials gave pride of place to the meaning of the unfolding drama in the Caribbean and the Philippines. Crowds gathered in the streets and theater programs were disrupted by the singing of American anthems. Australian cities buzzed with excitement.13 Throughout April, headlines in the liberal Melbourne newspaper the Age eagerly anticipated the event: “On the Verge of War!,” “War Practically Declared,” “The Impending War.”14 With hostilities imminent, crowds gathered outside newspaper offices until late hours. The U.S. consul general Col. George Bell reported to his government from Sydney on this surprising excitement: “One can almost imagine himself to be in some of our own States, whilst watching the vast crowds that stand for hours in front of the bulletin boards at the Newspaper offices.”15 In Melbourne too, people milled about in city streets, waiting in the hope of hearing word of the outbreak of hostilities between America and Spain—evidence it was thought, of “the keen interest with which the impending conf lict between Spain and America is regarded by all classes.”16 Finally, the news arrived: “WAR!” the papers announced with relief. “Ultimatum to Spain. The Notice to Quit. Signed by President McKinley. War Begins at 6AM Saturday.”17 The U.S. Congress had finally forced war on the hesitating president. Around the country, Australians cheered in an astonishing outpouring of emotion. Theater audiences responded to announcements of the news with prolonged applause. In Perth, at the Cremorne Theatre, cheers for America accompanied the orchestra’s playing of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”18 In Sydney, the unfurling of the U.S. f lag, in the production of the “White Squadron,” at the Lyceum Theatre, prompted a “great outburst of applause, which lasted several minutes.”19 In Adelaide, during the interval of “The Royal Divorce,” the outbreak of hostilities was announced from the stage and the orchestra played the “Star Spangled Banner,” “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” and the British anthem “God Save the Queen.” The audience, it was reported, “enthusiastically demonstrated sympathy with the United States.” 20 Meanwhile, Australian men and women rushed to the U.S. consulate in Sydney, or wrote personally to the Consul, to offer their services as soldiers and nurses. Colonel Bell reported that he had been “inundated . . . every day” by Australians wanting to enlist, but the Australian colonies, following Britain, were officially neutral. 21 Special supplements to government Gazettes were



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printed advising Australians that British subjects should take care not to breach the Neutrality and Foreign Enlistment Act. They could not enlist in a foreign nation’s army to fight a war with a country “at Peace with Her Majesty” as Spain remained. 22 Official neutrality meant that colonial politicians had to be discreet in their expressions of sympathy for the United States, but no such consideration impeded the efforts of proprietors of the daily press or the people in the street or the crowds in theatres. Historians have been at a loss to explain the excitement. Raymond Wellington, writing in the middle of the Vietnam War, confessed to finding the excessive nature of the response something of a mystery: the “uncritical admiration” for the American cause was “difficult to understand.” 23 Other historians have tended to ignore the pro-American fervor, preferring to cast Australians as enmeshed in imperial feelings of British race patriotism, but such representations of Australian sentiment obscure the racial identification with Americans, their “brother Anglo-Saxons” in the words of the Sydney Morning Herald. 24 Between Australia and the United States, editorialized the Age in April 1898, there was a “feeling of mutual friendship and confidence, founded upon the sense of kinship in blood, language and ideas.” 25 In considering the consequences of American intervention into Cuba, the Age pointed to the impossibility of “negro government with the instability and decadence that have marked such movements in Hayti [sic] and Liberia.” 26 The point was reiterated the following week, invoking the powerful historical memory of the “bitter experience of republics run by negroes and mulattoes in Hayti.” Creating another larger “black republic at their very door” was unthinkable for the Americans, but nor were the mixed-race Cubans welcome as U.S. citizens. 27 By early May 1898, reports arrived of the war in the Philippines, the battle in Manila Harbor, and the “Brilliant American Victory.” The same question arose: Who might henceforth govern the Philippines? Once again it was assumed that Filipinos were quite unfit for such responsibility: “the mixed races of the Philippines are little superior to the islanders of the South Seas, and that they have a good deal to learn before acquiring that spirit of respect for law to a free and self-governing people.” 28 Indeed, ventured the Age leader writer, the leaders of the Filipino independence movement belonged to “a lower scale in life.” 29 The overriding issue, advised the newspaper, was the capacity of different races for self-government: The problem about the future is not so much as to when the Spanish forces will be driven out of Havana as to what sort of government will take their place. The Americans profess to have already discovered that the Cubans are as yet quite unfit for the task of self-government. Indeed, on inspection, Cubans were found to be “only slightly removed from barbarism.”30 Only white men were fit for the tasks of self-government and of governing others.



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The conservative Argus newspaper agreed: the prospect of Cuban independence revived the fear of “a second Hayti” and the fact that the population largely comprised “half-breeds” rendered them incapable of running their own country.31 If it became independent, warned the Age, Cuba would be ruled by “men of colour or of mixed blood”: “What may be expected from them is only too plainly indicated in the neighbouring Republic of Hayti, now unhappily decivilised altogether, politically rotten, financially bankrupt, and with social conditions unspeakable. Can this be permitted in Cuba?” 32 The racial composition of the populations of Cuba and the Philippines became an important issue in determining their fitness for independence and there were several attempts to quantify their racial composition. Thus the one newspaper calculated: The population of Cuba itself numbers 1,600,000 persons. In the west the greater number are of purely Spanish origin, but in the east there are many Creoles, and also Negroes, as well as persons of Spanish extraction. Anglo-American and German settlers have left their racial characteristics among the population in the north of the island, while American Indians from Mexico are to be met with in the south-west.33 An American authority, Dr Kneeling, was cited to explain the racial mixture of the Philippines: Of the nearly 300,000 people in the province, the greater part are Tagalags—mostly labourers, agriculturalists and boatmen. There are at least 25,000 Chinese, petty merchants, mechanics and manufacturers, many mestizos, or half breeds between the two, with the physical type and vices of both races, not more than 5000 Spaniards, peninsular and Philippine, with about 500 other Europeans. 34 This promiscuous mixture, it was agreed, rendered Filipinos unfit to govern themselves. On this point white men in Australia and the United States agreed. As Theodore Roosevelt put it in his essay “The Strenuous Life” (1902), instead of good government in the islands there would be “savage anarchy”: Their population includes half-caste and native Christians, warlike Moslems and wild pagans. Many of their people are utterly unfit for selfgovernment, and show no signs of becoming fit. Others may in time become fit, but at present can only take part in self-government under a wise supervision, at once form and beneficent. We have driven Spanish tyranny from the islands. If we now let it be replaced by savage anarchy, our work has been for harm and not for good.35 This preoccupation with the distinction between peoples fit for self- government and those not fit served to reinforce Australian political leaders’ sense of




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Self-government is not an art which comes by nature and instinct to any people. It requires training and preparation; and the interests of the world’s civilisation will demand that neither the Philippines nor Cuba shall be handed over to the unregulated passions of people only a few degrees removed from savagery.36 In discussing how the United States ought to govern its new possessions, Australians identified as white men faced with the responsibilities of selfgovernment and the government of others including Australian natives and Pacific Islanders. The Spanish American War occurred in the years immediately preceding Australian federation, which was conceptualized as an extension of white Australians’ right of self-government. Aborigines continued to be cast as a race in need of protection, unfit to take their place in the new Commonwealth as equal citizens. Pacific Islanders would be deported and “Asiatics” were barred from immigration. The new Commonwealth of Australia resolved, in the words of Prime Minister Edmund Barton, “to make a legislative declaration of our racial identity.” 37 White Australia nailed its colors to the mast as an act of solidarity with white men across the world and an example for them to emulate. Their self-confidence was badly shaken when just four years later, in 1905, Japan, the ascendant Asian power, inf licted a crushing military defeat on Russia, a European power. The Japanese naval victory at Tsu-shima dismayed white men around the world, but galvanized colonized and colored peoples everywhere, from Africa, to Asia, to the Americas. Conf lict between Americans and Japanese in California over immigration and school segregation exacerbated international tensions, which found some resolution in the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907. In Canada, agitation against Asian immigration to the west coast also led to the enactment of a similar agreement in that British Dominion.

Fellow Feeling and Ecstatic Passion Roosevelt nevertheless determined, as we have seen, to dispatch the United States to the Pacific Ocean. When an invitation arrived from Australian prime minister Alfred Deakin, the American president decided to extend its voyage south to Australia and New Zealand. This had not initially been part of the plan, but Roosevelt needed no persuading. In his Autobiography he recalled: It was not originally my intention that the f leet should visit Australia, but the Australian Government sent a most cordial invitation, which



themselves as white men, who shared a long Anglo-Saxon training. The Age newspaper emphasized the historical preparation necessary for selfgovernment:


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That fellow feeling would be fully reciprocated when the Fleet arrived in Sydney. In his anonymous column in the London Morning Post, Prime Minister Deakin explained the invitation to the United States in terms of Australia’s interest in the “colour question”: The invitation, though hospitable, was given in deadly earnest and is being warmly pressed on other grounds that are not mentioned. For Australia the entrance of a f leet under the Stars and Stripes into the Pacific is an incident of the utmost significance. Whatever the immediate cause of its going there may be, the act is popularly associated with the racial disputes which recently became acute in the West of the Dominion and of the great Anglo-Saxon Republic. Nowhere in the Empire and perhaps nowhere outside the Southern States of the Union, is the import of the colour question more keenly realised than in the Commonwealth. The ties of kinship are potent too . . .”39 In New York, a report on the effusive Australian welcome to the U.S. Fleet to Australia in the Independent, the same journal that would publish DuBois’ “The Souls of White Folk” two years later, told readers of the Australian prime minister’s “ecstatic passion” as he announced the visit to the public: “Mr Deakin is an orator, a scholar, an emotional man. In fervid words and trembling with ecstatic passion he broke the news to his audience.” The journalist, W. R. Charlton, attempted to explain “the unexampled warmth of the welcome”: “It is delightful to us to say—whether it be delusion, half-truth, or the truth-absolute—that the Americans are our kinsmen, blood of our blood, bone of our bone, and one with us in our ideals of the brotherhood of man.”40 It was estimated that some four hundred thousand people lined the shores of Sydney harbor to greet the sixteen battleships. Commentators vied with each other in conveying the significance of the occasion. All agreed it was “historic,” an event “unmatched in history”: To the thousands of expectant watchers, whose eyes were strained across the rolling seas from the glimmering of dawn, the outlines of the American battleships appeared faintly though the morning haze like the towers and turrets and minarets of some majestic city . . . Sydney had obtained only forty winks or had not slept at all. Torrents of humanity were sweeping through the streets at daybreak, racing for the cliffs upon the outer harbour . . . Everything that went on wheels—trams, cabs,



I gladly accepted; for I have, as every American ought to have, a hearty admiration for, and fellow feeling with, Australia, and I believe that America should be ready to stand back of Australia in any serious emergency.38

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The week of high carnival that followed was, to Prime Minister Deakin’s mind, “without precedent in the history of Australia.”42 In his autobiography, Roosevelt again emphasized the fellow feeling that bound the two Pacific democracies: “the reception accorded the f leet in Australia was wonderful, and it showed the fundamental continuity of feeling between ourselves and the great commonwealth of the South Seas.” The visit of the American Fleet to Australia was a hugely popular success, and also endowed by commentators with momentous geopolitical significance. Newspapers around the country competed with each other in explaining the feeling of racial kinship.43 “Relations we are—blood relations—we and the Americans,” observed the Age in Melbourne. “We are more than cousins. We are brethren in thought, in speech, in aspiration.”44 In Brisbane, the Courier Mail advised: “The presence of the United States fleet gives the opportunity for the peaceful development of the interests of the white races in the Pacific,” while in Adelaide, the Register was pleased to note: “The remoteness of Australia from the Great Powers, the comparative fewness of her population, and the feeling that their nearest neighbours are the teeming millions of Asia . . . are the cogent reasons why any large body of progressive whites would be treated with delight.”45 There was also agreement between political parties on the importance of the event. Although a minority of socialist papers opposed the United States as a capitalist danger to Australia, members of the Labor party joined in the effusive greeting of these representatives of the white race. “An epoch making-event has occurred,” wrote Arthur Griffith, “which goes a long way to neutralise the effect of Tsu-Shima” (where the Russian f leet was destroyed by the Japanese): A great Anglo-Saxon democracy, Britain’s eldest-born daughter and the wealthiest and most advanced nation in the world, the United States of America has leapt full-armed into the gap, and by the transference of the Great White Fleet from the Atlantic to the Pacific, has f lung down the gauntlet to the Mongol and challenged the naval supremacy of Japan, and by its visit to Australia has given notice to the yellow races that they will have to stop in Asia.46 In Sydney, the prime minister’s greeting to the men and officers of the Fleet paid tribute to Americans’ racial kinship. He bade the sailors thrice welcome: “as guests . . . as the honoured representatives of a mighty nation [and as] blood relations.”47 Admiral Sperry, knowing how to f latter his hosts, returned the compliment, greeting them at a press luncheon in Sydney as a “white man to white men, and may I add, to very white men.”48 In his report in the New York Independent, W. R. Charlton reinforced this message of absolute whiteness,



coaches, bicycles, motors—tore along, double weighted with human burdens . . . It was the sparkling harbour that formed the setting for the inspiring panorama of the day—a day whose glories, unmatched in the history of the Australian people, will live long in memory.41

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assuring his readers that Australia was not a land of “niggers”: “No; the wretched aboriginal, with his nullah, his boomerang and his firestick is a curiosity that many Australian children have never seen and will never see. His bones are in the sands of the shore or in the sinuous hold of the far extending roots of the bush trees.”49 The future lay with the white man. What DuBois saw clearly was the advent of whiteness as a new mode of personal and political identification, whose dynamics were both psychic and transnational. Importantly, he noted that the stridency of whiteness was born in the apprehension of loss, which gave rise to novel geographical/political formulations such as the proposition that territories in the “temperate zone” must be maintained as “white men’s countries.” Even territories populated by a largely black population, such as the colonies and republics of South Africa, were claimed as white men’s domain. In 1910, these erstwhile British colonies and Boer republics were federated into a “White Man’s Union.”50

This New Religion of Whiteness For DuBois, the increasing stridency of white men’s claims and the desire for whiteness were precisely linked to their anxieties about losing proprietorial control. The passionate claims made in the name of whiteness were extraordinary, yet it was clear that nations were coming to believe in them daily. “Wave on wave, each with increasing virulence, is dashing this new religion of whiteness on the shores of our time. Its first effects are funny; the strut of the Southerner, the arrogance of the Englishman amuck, the whoop of the hoodlum who vicariously leads your mob.”51 But then it was evident that these white men were in deadly earnest. In insisting on the global dynamics of the phenomenon he witnessed, DuBois pointed to the emergence of an imagined community that was transnational in its reach. And he recognized that this community had been stirred into existence by the geographical mobility and political mobilization—the demands for equal access and equal rights—of colored and colonized peoples around the world: “Do we sense somnolent writhings in black Africa, or angry groans in India, or triumphant ‘Banzais’ in Japan? To your tents O Israel! These nations are not white. Build warships and heft the ‘Big Stick.’ ”52 DuBois saw the increasingly virulent articulation of whiteness as the response to anticolonial movements and the apprehension of sudden loss of power, prestige, and place in the world. In “The Souls of White Folk,” DuBois noted that whites might remain courteous or philanthropic, so long as not-whites knew their place and kept to it. But when the black man begins to dispute the white man’s title to certain alleged bequests of the Father’s, in wage and position, authority and training; and when his attitude toward charity is sullen anger rather than humble jollity; when he insists on his human right to swagger and




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In insisting on the transnational dynamics of whiteness as a politics, DuBois also pointed to the significance of binary thinking to the ascendancy of whiteness as a mode of identification: the division of the world into white and notwhite, the lumping together of a multiplicity of nationalities and religions and peoples (Muslims, Negroes, Indians, Japanese, Chinese, Pacific Islanders) into the expanding category of not-white. Before this, much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century race thinking had elaborated various taxonomies and classification schemes and a multiplicity of racial types, such as Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, Mediterranean, Slav, Malay, Asiatic, Negro, and Australoid. By the turn of the century, however, the ascendancy of the figure of the white man was evident in his power to divide the world into white and not-white, a dichotomy enforced through the technologies of the passport, the census, and education/literacy test, deployed as instruments of border control and exclusion, a strategy fiercely contested by Japan, which claimed equal status with the Powers of Europe. In Australia, Consul Eitaki wrote several notes of protest to the Australian government about the foundational Immigration Restriction Act: The Japanese belong to an Empire whose standard of civilization is so much higher than that of Kanakas, Negroes, Pacific Islanders, Indians or other Eastern peoples, that to refer to them in the same terms cannot but be regarded in the light of a reproach, which is hardly warranted by the fact of the shade of the national complexion . . . 54 He protested in vain. Australians were pace-setters in dividing the world into white and not-white and they shaped British imperial policy in turn. Thus the French government sought a lead from the British Foreign Office as to whether the Japanese were to be treated as white or not. Based on policy in the white dominions, the answer was “No.” The stark and unforgiving dichotomy of white and not-white was also resisted by diasporic Indians around the world who repeatedly invoked the nonracial status of “British subject” in defense of their rights and mobility, but to little avail. The British imperial government was not to be relied on. It had already laid the ground for the dissolution of the equality of status of all British subjects through its division of colonial peoples into those deemed fit for self- government and those not, or not yet, including Indians, for whom representative government was always a promise, always deferred. The gift of self-government thus came to be a crucial marker of whiteness. Hence, Australian political leaders constantly intoned the mantra of their self-government and resisted all encroachments on it. White men were not just eligible to govern themselves, however; they were also qualified to govern others.



swear and waste—then the spell is suddenly broken and the philanthropist is apt to be ready to believe that Negroes are impudent, and the South is right, and that Japan wants to fight us.53

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In 1906, Alfred Deakin writing in the London Morning Post endorsed New Zealand prime minister Richard Seddon’s view that the Empire, “though united in the whole was divided into two parts, one occupied wholly or mainly by a white ruling race, the other principally occupied by coloured races who are ruled.” “Australia and New Zealand,” he said, were determined “to keep their place in the first class.”55 One way to do this was to identify with republican Americans: “our kinsmen, blood of our blood, bone of our bone.” White men ruled; the meaning of white manhood was constituted in the relations of rule, and whiteness, as DuBois noted, was the measure of manhood.56 Republican discourse also rested on racial distinctions. The distinction between white and not-white had been enshrined in the U.S. naturalization law of 1790 that restricted eligibility for naturalization or citizenship to “free white persons.” Applicants thus had to be classified as white or not-white, as Chinese gold-seekers in California found when a law of 1854 targeted them by imposing a tax on those alien miners ineligible for naturalization. In Impossible Subjects, Mai Ngai has documented the numerous court cases in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that were called on to determine whether Chinese, Japanese, Sikhs, Indians, Armenians, and others were white and thus eligible for naturalization and the privileges of citizenship.57 In the case of Takao Ozawa, in 1922, the Supreme Court stated in circular argument that Japanese could not be considered Caucasian, because they were not white, and they could not be white because they were not Caucasian. In the case of Bhagat Singh Thind, in 1923, the Court rejected Thind’s claim as ridiculous: “In the popular conception he is alien to the white race and part of the white man’s burden . . . Whatever may be the white man’s burden, the Hindu does not share it, rather he imposes it.”58 The ascendant figure of the white man, defined both by his republican right to self-government and his imperial burden of rule over others, was produced in the convergence of imperial and republican discourses in the English-speaking world at the end of the nineteenth century, a convergence given political expression in the burgeoning discourse of Anglo-Saxonism, exemplified as Paul Kramer has shown in the U.S. occupation of the Philippines.59 By 1910, white men were both the republican proprietors of self-governing white men’s countries and the imperial bearers of white men’s burdens in others. Hence the eagerness of the first parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 not just to deport Pacific Islanders and prevent the immigration of Asians to their self-proclaimed white men’s country, but to extend Australian control over New Guinea and assert an “Australian Monroe Doctrine” (as they significantly liked to call it) over the Pacific. We are still there today, of course; the desire lives on. In high political terms, this convergence of imperial and republican discourse in the production of white manhood was exemplified in the Anglo-American rapprochement of the late 1890s, proclaimed by British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain (who was married to an American) that celebrated Anglo-Saxon traditions and the glory of English-Speaking peoples: in this context the “white man” was the Anglo-Saxon rendered into the vernacular. The Anglo-American rapprochement




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was underpinned by and promoted the racial solidarity of self-styled white men, who asserted dominion over the earth, if not forever, then at least for the foreseeable future. Anything else spelt humiliation. One of DuBois’ great insights in “The Souls of White Folks” was the interconnection between global politics and personal whiteness and the ways in which gendered and racialized subjectivities were formed in specific geopolitical historical contexts. People’s sense of themselves was shaped by the discourses of high politics and international relations as well as familial and ethnic identities. These relations of rule, and importantly the anticolonial challenge to them, saw the production of a particular racialized gendered type called the white man, who was said to be characterized by requisite qualities for rule such as uprightness, integrity, self-discipline, stoicism—all the things actual white men in the field—anxious, frangible, insecure, prone to temptation—often were not. Yet it was a discursive production with which self-styled white men identified—as James Hevia points out in his book about the British in China, English Lessons (white men don’t kowtow)—and as Warwick Andersen has also noted in his recent book on the Philippines, Colonial Pathologies (2006). 60 White men’s personal identifications and desires constituted a major dynamic in the spread of this “new religion,” as DuBois termed it, around the globe. In 1912, an old friend of Liberal leader Alfred Deakin wrote to him to recommend a young man for preselection for the Liberal Party: “I have known Bartlett ever since he was a boy, and have found him absolutely a white man in every way and completely incorruptible, either by snobbery or anti-snobbery—you will understand what I mean.” By then, this understanding of what it meant to be a white man had become common sense. In conclusion, in this chapter I have taken a cue from DuBois’ perceptive essay “The Souls of White Folk” to make two main suggestions for the project of historicizing whiteness. One is that we bring historiographical domains previously kept separate—global politics and the production of personal subjectivities—into the same analytical frame and bring research in these fields into connection and conversation; and second, that in historicizing whiteness we analyze the dynamics of emotional identification that animate the formation of racialized subjectivities. There were many who spoke the gospel of whiteness, in the first decades of the twentieth century, when white folks became, as DuBois put it, “painfully conscious of their whiteness,” when their “feelings of caste” were mobilized to claim ownership of the earth, always.

Notes 1. W. E. B DuBois, “The Souls of White Folk,” Independent, August 18, 1910, 339. 2. Ibid. 3. Marilyn Lake, “On Being a White Man, Australia, circa 1900,” in Cultural History in Australia, ed. Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003), 101–12. 4. Lake, “On being a White Man,” 101–12. 5. Ibid.



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6. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008), 166–8. 7. Charles Pearson, National Life and Character: A Forecast (London and New York: Macmillan, 1893), 85. 8. Governor General to Secretary of State, February 2, 1908, CO 886/1/85; received February 17, 1908, CO 886/ 1/86. United Kingdom National Archives. 9. Report of Interview with Roosevelt, February 10, 1908, Enclosure, CO 886/1/102. 10. Viator, “Asia Contra Mundum,” Fortnightly Review, February 1, 1908, 194 and 196. 11. Ibid., 185. 12. See, e.g., Henry Reynolds, “Racial Thought in Early Colonial Australia,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 20, no. 1 (1974): 45–53; Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960 (London: Macmillan, London); Andrew Markus, Australian Race Relations 1788–1993 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 1–17; Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Centre Press, 1996); Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (London: Macmillan, 1996); Charles Hirschman, “The Origins and Demise of the Concept of Race,” Population and Development Review 30, no. 3 (2004): 385–415; Alana Lentin, “Replacing ‘Race,’ Historicizing ‘Culture’ in Multiculturalism,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 4 (2005): 379–96. 13. Bulletin, quoted in Raymond Wellington, “Australian Attitudes to the SpanishAmerican War,” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 56 (June 1970): 112. See also L. G. Churchward, Australia and America 1788–1972: An Alternative History (Melbourne: Alternative Pub. Cooperative, 1979), 97. There was some support for the Spanish in the Australian Catholic community, but as Wellington points out there was far less opposition to the war in Australia than in other countries, including the United States. 14. Age April 13, 18, and 19, 1898. 15. George W. Bell, Report, Public Feeling Respecting the War, May 1898, United States Consular Records; see also Age April 22, 1898. 16. Age April 25, 1898. 17. Age April 21, 1898. 18. Age April 25, 1898. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Bell, Report, Public Feeling Respecting the War. 22. Ibid. 23. Wellington, “Australian Attitudes to the Spanish-American War,” 118. 24. Sydney Morning Herald April 23, 1898. 25. Ibid. 26. Age April 14, 1898. 27. Age April 22, 1898. 28. Age July 25, 1898. 29. Age May 2, 1898. 30. Age July 25, 1898. 31. Argus April 12, 1898. 32. Age August 6, 1898.




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33. Argus April 12, 1898. 34. Age May 4, 1898. 35. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” in The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (London: 1902), 17–18. 36. Age July 25, 1898. 37. Edmund Barton, untitled speech on federation, Barton papers MS 5/977. National Library of Australia. 38. Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” 598. 39. Alfred Deakin, Morning Post April 14, 1908, quoted in Federated Australia: Selections from Letters to the Morning Post 1900–1910, ed. J. A. La Nauze (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1968), 229. 40. Independent October 8, 1908, 813–15. 41. Age August 21, 1908. 42. Sydney Mail August 26, 1908. 43. Ruth Megaw, “Australia and the Great White Fleet, 1908,” Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 56 (1970): 121–6. 44. Age August 17, 1908. 45. Quoted in Megaw, “Australia and the Great White Fleet, 1908,” 127. 46. Ibid., 129. 47. Alfred Deakin Papers, MS 1540/15/3906. 48. Age August 27, 1908. 49. W. R. Charlton, “The Australian Welcome to the Fleet,” Independent, October 8, 1908, 817. 50. David Philips, “Towards ‘a White Man’s Union’: The Denial of the Indigenous Franchise in South Africa, 1902–1910,” in Selective Democracy: Race, Gender and the Australian Vote, ed. John Chesterman and David Philips (Melbourne: Circa Books, 2003): 38–49. 51. DuBois, “The Souls of White Folk,” 339. 52. Ibid., 340. 53. Ibid. 54. H. Eitaki, Consul for Japan, to Prime Minister Edmund Barton, May 3, 1901, CO 418/10. United Kingdom National Archives. 55. Deakin, Morning Post, 184. 56. So too, the racial encoding of manhood is demonstrated by the work of Margaret Allen in this collection (chapter twelve), any non-white claims to masculine competence were frequently disavowed. 57. Mai N. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 38–46. 58. Ibid., 45. 59. Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States & the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 60. James Hevia, English Lessons The Pedagogy of Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century Durham (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 99–103; Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).



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The Fabrication of White Homemaking: Louisa Meredith in Colonial Tasmania Patricia Grimshaw and Ann Standish

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hen Louisa Meredith, a British-born-and-bred writer recently married to her Tasmanian-reared cousin, arrived in Tasmania in 1840 after a year spent in New South Wales, she was pleasurably struck by the colony’s discernible similarities to Britain. “I am often glad that I spent the first year of my antipodean life in New South Wales,” she wrote, “for now many things which I should not have observed had I arrived here in the first instance, are sources of great delight to me, as being so much more English than in the larger colony, and I could fancy myself some degrees nearer home.”1 Although Meredith never returned to England, it would remain “home” for her until her death in 1895. In the 1840s Tasmania, however, offered the possibility of creating a new home in the Australian colonies, one that came as close as might be hoped to Meredith’s English ideal. The preference Meredith felt for Tasmania over New South Wales was based on a number of factors. Being so much further south, Tasmania’s climate was cooler and more appealing. This in turn meant the landscape was greener and less harsh and that the cultivation of English plants had been more successful during the forty years of British settlement. The current governor and his wife, Sir John and Lady Jane Franklin, were influential in their attempts to encourage the enjoyment of art, literature, and science among the white settlers. Finally, by the time Meredith arrived there, the island’s Indigenous population no longer represented a threat: those Aborigines not felled by disease or violence had been forcibly removed to settlements on outlying Flinders Island during the 1830s.2 Tasmania, then, displayed visual reminders of Britain in its landscape, was developing cultural institutions that mirrored British counterparts, and offered



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uncontested access to land for cultivation. All these conditions rendered it dear to Meredith’s heart. This chapter explores Meredith’s writing on life in Tasmania in the 1840s to indicate how her presentation of turning the wilderness into English norms asserted the legitimacy of white incursion onto Aboriginal land. We look particularly at her book My Home in Tasmania during a Residence of Nine Years (1852) to illuminate the ways Louisa Meredith embraced and publicized the potential of the colony as a site for recreating a sense of England. This book, in which Meredith presents an account of her family’s attempt to establish a settled home in Tasmania, also ref lects broader claiming of the colony as a British possession, a home for all English people. Although she depicted herself as acting within the framework of the womanly role of “homemaker,” Meredith’s actions can also be interpreted as part of the wider, masculine, colonizing processes operating in Tasmania during this period, revealing complicity in the displacement of other people from their homes.3 An exploration of Meredith’s work shows how notions of domesticity were significant not only in relation to one white family establishing a home in Tasmania, but to normalizing white settler presence more widely throughout the colony.

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Louisa Meredith had been born Louisa Twamley in Birmingham in 1812, the daughter of a moderately well-to-do tradesman and a mother from a family slightly higher on the social scale, who raised the child to ladylike accomplishments and education.4 She became an avid reader and an artist, painting portraits and sketching, with an intense interest in plants, especially wild f lowers. Also, she began writing poetry. By the late 1830s she had published two books of illustrated nature notes, An Autumn Ramble by the Wye and The Romance of Nature; or, The Flower Seasons Illustrated.5 In April of 1839 she married a cousin who was visiting Britain, Charles Meredith, whose father had migrated from Britain to Tasmania (then Van Diemens Land) in 1820 to take up land on which his growing family of sons would presumably also settle. Later that year, the couple set sail for the Australian colonies, initially to New South Wales, where their first son was born, and then on to Tasmania. Capitalizing on both her own existing reputation as an author and the growing market for information about the Australian colonies in Britain, Louisa Meredith wrote and published an account of her experiences in New South Wales. Notes and Sketches of New South Wales during a Residence in That Colony from 1839 to 1841 (1844) was highly critical of all things colonial. In typically acerbic commentary, Meredith dismissed the town of Sydney as hot, glaring, and dusty, its inhabitants as pretentiously imitative of British social customs and, in the case of emancipated convicts, although possibly wealthy, lacking in taste and education. Drunkenness was rife among the white lower classes, while the Indigenous population was considered savage, with the men particularly brutal toward their women. The native f lora were in general monotonous; it



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was, nevertheless, only in the natural offerings of the colony that Meredith found aspects to praise and enjoy. The success of Notes and Sketches of New South Wales encouraged her to follow with My Home in Tasmania, a two-volume ref lection on the first few years of her life in that colony. 6 Later, Over the Straits: A Visit to Victoria (1861), an account of a trip to Victoria during the gold rush, would join her list.7 Meredith would write and illustrate a number of other books, most focusing on the f lora and fauna of Tasmania, the success of which led to her being awarded later in life, when widowed, a civil list pension of one hundred pounds a year for her contributions to art, science, and literature in the colonies. 8 The three books mentioned here, however, fit most closely within an established formula for writing about and describing colonial life, albeit tinged with Meredith’s distinctive style. In short, they are travel narratives: they focus on a voyage, followed by overland journeys, enlivened with social observations and commentary on the passing landscape. Louisa Meredith was far from alone in publishing such narratives of life in the Australian colonies, but she was one of the first women to do so. While her gender did not entail a wildly different approach to her subject matter, it did mean a subtle shift in the narrative voice.9 The travel narrative had risen in popularity as a literary genre during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as travel itself became more common; in Europe, imperial expansion meant more people who traveled in the service of empire were publishing accounts of their experiences. At the same time the market for such accounts was also growing. Mary Louise Pratt has argued that travel writing “produced ‘the rest of the world’ for European readerships at particular points in Europe’s expansionist trajectory.”10 While this assertion may place more importance on the travel narrative as an ideological tool than it perhaps deserves, there is no doubt that the published accounts of explorers, adventurers, and, later, colonial administrators offered readers a view of the world beyond Europe as one very much available for domination. Such accounts also offered records of cross-cultural encounters, but records deeply skewed toward showing the author, and their home culture, as superior. The travels, after all, were aimed at gaining strategic territory for the appropriation of natural resources, control of trade routes, and exploitation of indigenous populations for their labor, and the travel writings operated in justifying and affirming these activities. These ends, however, were rarely alluded to directly in the nineteenth-century travel narrative, which focused on describing the strange, exotic, and fantastic sights available in foreign lands. Traveling suggested passing through: the viewer had a f leeting, temporary interaction with the land and its people. The author of travel narratives posed as an objective observer, standing outside and not inf luencing the scenes reported. But there is no doubt travel writing of this period was a colonizing genre. It used a voice of authority, illustrative of the power the authors had over the lands they surveyed and, in many cases, through the claim of their nationality, the populations of those lands. The fact that the travel narrative by definition required a journey at its center also meant it was



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a genre driven by constant movement and changing experience. Adventure, danger, discovery, and exploration are central elements of such accounts, as well as conquest, and if not actually present could often be invented.11 Travel writing, then, was a genre that sat more easily with preconceived notions of masculine behavior and experience than with those of the feminine. Women writers, however, adopted and adapted the genre to their own advantage. Sara Mills has usefully explored women’s approach to the genre, arguing that the differences between men’s and women’s travel writing “is not a simplistic textual distinction between men’s writing on the one hand and women’s writing on the other, but rather a series of discursive pressures of production and reception which female writers have to negotiate in very different ways from males.”12 In the context of settler colonies such as Australia’s, where the economic value to the colonizing nation came through appropriation of the land rather than through exploitation of the Indigenous population for cheap labor, specific discursive pressures can be identified. Rather than a narrative of temporary passage, a narrative that encompassed notions of home as well as the Other was needed. As the example of Louisa Meredith shows, women were particularly well placed to adapt the existing conventions of the genre in this way. By maintaining the scaffolding of the travel narrative—a journey, landscape description, observations of novel flora and fauna, hints of danger and adventure—but weaving in domestic detail, an emphasis on the familiar, and an understanding of the land as fundamentally unpopulated, Meredith wrote books that both adhered to expectations of appropriate female traits and fulfilled a colonizing function. Meredith’s version of the travel narrative conveyed a domestic vision, stressing the civilizing qualities not only of the British generally, but the British family woman in particular. For this purpose, her status as a white wife and mother were central. Personal details are sparse in Notes and Sketches of New South Wales, but those that exist reinforce the importance of the wifely role. That Meredith was emigrating at all was to support her husband; her social commentary, particularly in relation to servants, was made in the pursuit of good household management. My Home in Tasmania offers more acknowledgment of personal circumstances, a conscious decision on Meredith’s part, as she noted in the preface: Lest the minute, perhaps trif ling detail entered into in some parts, may seem inclining towards the egotistical, I should perhaps remark that I have been induced to adopt a more personal narrative and identify ourselves with the simple realities around us . . . because I have found from my own feeling in the perusal of works of somewhat similar character that the interest of such unvarnished histories is proportionally enhanced according to the degree of identity preserved by the narrator.13 Again, the personal details that emerge are carefully controlled, displaying little more than the family’s social and cultural superiority to most of those



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between the care of my household and our dear children; and besides these there were chickens, and ducks, and turkeys to rear; butter, cream, cheeses, and other country comforts to make; calves to pet; mushrooms to seek, and convert into ketchup (these being frequently very abundant and fine); and a whole catalogue of pleasant busy little idlenesses to indulge in, that carried one week after another with reproachful celerity.14 Later, she commented that she could not possibly sit down to write while she still had her garden to tend to and so much else to do.15 Meredith’s writing ventures were by no means simply a leisure pursuit: she intended to, and she did, make money by them to assist the household’s creaking economy, especially when the hoped-for inheritance from the estate of Charles Meredith’s father, George Meredith, did not equal expectations. She does not of course allude to such affairs within her books. Rather, her writing about the pioneering life stressed the supportive qualities a wife needed to sustain a husband’s work and spirits to make good in the new settlement. Seldom called upon to perform the onerous physical labor that was the fate of some pioneering women, Louisa Meredith nevertheless undertook the sewing, by hand, for herself and her growing family of three young sons, no mean feat. But Louisa also taught her sons Latin, and in economic terms this was both symbolic of her strategies and equally important as other labor in sustaining the family’s sense of class. Louisa Meredith’s enormous contribution to the family enterprise lay in the manifold tasks of keeping up middle-class standards on a shoestring budget, securing them a place within the circles of the gentry, acknowledged as part of the elite by governors and their ladies alike. As ref lected in her books, such contributions had the added benefit of appealing to female readers in Britain. Her example shows how using the idea of the domestic, the familial, and the feminine in their work could enable women writers, perversely, to enter into public discourse. Such writing also provides us with a way into looking at white women’s involvement in the colonizing processes, an involvement that has often been hidden. Scholarship surrounding the issues of women’s involvement in the colonial project more broadly has centered on the question of whether white women in varying colonial contexts have been witting or unwitting accomplices of colonizing men and hence colluded in the imperial processes or have proved themselves to have empathy with local indigenous people. Some, such as Claudia Knapman, Helen Callaway, and Chilla Bulbeck, have tended to argue that colonial women can be seen to have particular sympathy with indigenous peoples, especially the women, recognizing a common status with them as colonized subjects of a patriarchal society.16 Such a reading has been perceived by others as overly optimistic and as ignoring the active participation of white women in the processes of colonialism. Jane Haggis’ overview of literature in the field up to the mid-1990s points to the growing recognition



around them and the narrator’s own role in maintaining the family. Her time, she wrote at one point, was fully occupied

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that white women were in fact complicit in many aspects of colonial rule.17 The specificity of this complicity has also been made apparent in books by Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, Antoinette Burton, and Adele Perry focusing on intersections of gender and race in various colonial societies.18 The growth in the field of whiteness studies, particularly recent attempts to insert whiteness into the analysis of settler colonialism and “read the colonial back into whiteness” (as discussed by Jane Carey, Leigh Boucher, and Katherine Ellinghaus in the introduction to this volume), has produced works focusing on deconstructing the racialized qualities of whiteness, ensuring the issue is not reduced to the polarity of empathy versus hostility. In the Australian context, recent scholarship such as the collection edited by Anna Cole, Victoria Haskins, and Fiona Paisley has attempted to delineate further the many complexities of white women’s role in the colonial society, noting particularly the nuances involved in relations between white and indigenous women.19 Taken together, this scholarship highlights the fact that most colonial women accepted as given their right to livelihoods and homes on erstwhile Aboriginal lands. It is this very acceptance, this sense of the superiority of the British agendas, that historians must interrogate alongside other concerns in white women’s lives that are of historical importance and relevance. In the history of Tasmania, as for all other Australian colonies, the addressing of issues of race in colonial history continues to be a significant challenge.20 The published writing of an individual woman such as Louisa Meredith offers one way of seeing how white settler women not only contributed to colonial processes but used the opportunity of their situation in the colony to make personal gains—not just through their alignment with colonial men but through their own initiative. A woman of talent who managed through persistence and resilience to make a name for herself in science and the arts, in an environment where it was difficult for a female to undertake such activities. Meredith wrote with verve and acuity of white colonial settlement. Her writings must also be considered as part of a construction of an imperial discourse that legitimated the white invasion and settlement of Aboriginal lands. For Louisa Meredith, showing how her family moved freely around the island, relating her own domestic tasks, and detailing how women colonists managed to transform various parts of this “new country” into homes reminiscent of the old was directed at showing how the land could be taken up and used by British settlers. For Tasmanian colonists, she attempted a different feat: to explain and excuse the near-annihilation of an entire Indigenous people. Although references to Meredith’s family circumstances do not dominate the narrative of My Home in Tasmania, those that do stress her role as wife and mother. The domestic quality is further underlined by the book’s focus on making a home. Although the title of the book suggests a single home, the book actually follows the Merediths through several homes. The journeys that make the book a travel narrative take the family from place to place within the island, as Charles Meredith, apparently quite incompetent as a farmer and in financial matters, pursued varied employment. In each of these residences, Louisa Meredith either celebrated or sought to impose the British aesthetic that made it home to her.



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A large, well-built, cheerful-looking house, with its accompanying signs of substantial comfort in the shape of barns, stockyard, stabling, extensive gardens, and all other requisite appliances on a large scale, is most pleasant to look upon at all times but when our glimpses of country comfort are so few and far between as must be the case in a new country, and when one’s very belief in civilization begins to be shaken by weary travelling day after day through such dreary tracts as we had traversed it is most delightful to come once more among such sights and sounds that tell of the Old World and its good old ways . . . 22 She was particularly impressed by the “large garden and orchard, well stored with the f lowers and fruits cultivated in England.” 23 Similar gardens and orchards were to feature heavily in her own homes. Louisa and Charles Meredith with their baby son stayed at Cambria while working out their future movements. Subsequently they purchased a twelve-hundred-acre corner of Cambria on which to build their own estate. This property, named Spring Vale, they expected would be their permanent home for a considerable time. While it was being built, they took up residence nearby, Louisa working to ensure that, though temporary, it was as home-like as possible: In May, 1841, we temporarily set up our vagrant household gods in a house then vacant at Riversdale, which, being within three miles of Spring Vale, formed a convenient abode for us during the erection of our own cottage. Once again I was busily and pleasantly occupied in making a new place look as much like an old home as possible. The favourite pictures of dear old faces soon peopled the strange walls with loved familiar looks. The rooms were large and good, and though at first not too amply furnished, had a cheerful and cosy aspect. 24 In the meantime, the site for Spring Vale was being transformed from bush land to another ref lection of the old land. Louisa noted that “each time that I rode or walked up from Riversdale, some evident improvement was visible, in clearing, fencing, draining, or building; and, as spring advanced, the sheep and cattle feeding in the deep, long, green grass of the marshes, and the pretty little soft white lambs skipping about, looked like a bit of England.” 25 Creating the English aspects of Spring Vale required considerable effort, for the house was on a rocky bank that made constructing a f lower garden close to



The first of these homes was the Meredith family estate, “Cambria,” in Great Swan Port near Oyster Bay on the east coast. Established by George Meredith in the 1820s, Cambria commanded an “extensive view of large tracts of both ‘bush’ and cultivated land.” 21 To Louisa, arriving after the long overland journey from Hobart, it seemed all that could be desired in a colonial dwelling:

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it a laborious task: “Many cart-loads of stones and rocks had to be carried away, and a quantity of rich earth and manure carted in.” 26 It was all worth it, however, when “the borders were then laid out on a very simple plan, and edged with thyme, almost the only substitute here for the bright, clean, neat boxedging used in England. Roses of various kinds, geraniums, and a host of other good old f lowers were soon planted.” 27 But although the home “had assumed a tolerably civilized aspect by the summer of 1843–4,” the family was unable to enjoy it. Charles Meredith had suffered yet another financial setback, which necessitated their leaving the property in the hands of tenants and overseers while Charles accepted a position elsewhere. It was a blow to leave, Louisa wrote, “just as the pretty and loved home of our creation was assuming an appearance, and a reality too, of comfort and completeness, and all the rough and arduous work of a new place was merging into mere pleasant cheerful occupation.” But there was no question that her place was with her husband, even though she “felt as though there was some evil spell upon us, dooming us always to go on wandering, as if for us earth had not a home.” 28 There followed two more homes—or dwellings at least—before the Merediths could return to Spring Vale. Near Port Sorrell, “a newly formed and remote district” further north on the east coast where Charles Meredith was offered the position of police magistrate, they rented a house that Louisa christened “Lath Hall.” It was run down, and she found the district poor and unappealing, even with the addition of English cottage f lowers. After a visit to Hobart, the family returned to Port Sorrell, but this time to a home named Poynston, after her husband’s birthplace in Wales. Although Poynston was an improvement on Lath Hall and the area offered much of interest for one as keen on natural history as Louisa, she delighted finally to return to what she hoped would be their permanent home. The final pages of My Home in Tasmania recorded a vision that encompassed both the central driving force of settler colonialism—the appropriation of land for financial gain—and the by-product of that driving force, the transformed appearance of the landscape. Louisa Meredith describes the view from the front window of Spring Vale, now reclaimed from neglectful tenants, featuring “noble hollyhocks, carnations, tiger lilies, and other autumn f lowers. A hawthorn hedge and some graceful white-blossomed acacias . . . sweet fields of clover . . . pet lambs and horses.” 29 Further on could be seen “our fine dairy of beautiful cows, and our busy hives of good little bees, fully realize to us that scriptural picture of rural luxury—‘A land f lowing with milk and honey.’ ” 30 As it happened, the appearance of settling was for the Merediths an illusion. They would continue to travel through Tasmania at various stages over the next fifty years as Charles Meredith’s financial fortunes suffered sporadic setbacks. But the vision of successful enterprise, a reward for hard work and frugal living, made a pleasing closing chapter for the book and reinforced the message that had been related throughout. Overall, the book recorded Meredith’s efforts to recreate, as close as possible, the pastoral bliss of the English countryside, all the things that meant



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home: the plants, the animals, the allocation of space. In doing so, she could not entirely overlook the fact that the island was thousands of miles from England and was once inhabited by people other than white English settlers. In acknowledging the previous presence of an Indigenous population, she could do so only within a very limited context: for instance, she was particularly maddened by the “absurdity of giving to new little settlements like this the names of old-world places of renown.”31 She observed that she knew “only three native names of places in this island—Ringarooma and Boobyalla on the north coast and Triabunna on the east.” In New South Wales, by contrast, many of the settlers had shown “the good sense and taste to preserve the aboriginal names, which are always significant . . . these are preferable to the reiterated old names, and at any rate excite no ridiculous comparison between great old things and little new ones.”32 This was surely more a commentary on the pretentiousness of colonial naming than an argument for preserving Aboriginal heritage. Her frequent allusions to the “colonial” aspect of the society were in Meredith’s worldview comparative comments on Britishness abroad: the second-rate cultural events, the pitfalls of social interaction in a place where few other settlers are seen as her equal, and the difficulties of finding any servants suitable for her family. The other aspect of things colonial—that colonization involved the displacement of an Indigenous population from lands they had lived on for many thousands of years—was distinctly more problematic. Louisa Meredith arrived in the colony able to take advantage of the efforts of the first arrivals. These previous settlers included her father-in-law, George Meredith, and her husband, Charles, who from an early age had been set to work on his father’s property. Both had been witness to the dispossession of the first inhabitants, whose sporadic resistance had been quelled. That Louisa Meredith could traverse the island recreating images of England was possible in large part because of the violent skirmishes, the so-called Black Wars that had been waged on the Tasmanian frontier before her arrival, resulting in the expulsion of surviving Aborigines to the seaboard margins.33 Meredith includes in her book a report of her husband’s account of the Black Wars: Although from personal observations I know nothing respecting them, Mr Meredith’s long and disastrous experience of their character and habits enables me to give some particulars, which may possibly tend to a more correct estimate being entertained at home of the strife so long existing between them and the colonists.34 Citing Charles Meredith’s own notes and her transcriptions from the narratives presented to her orally, she produced an account in Charles’s name. Considerable error prevailed, she began, about the cause of the hostility between the Aborigines of the island and the white population. The general impression prevailed that the violence arose from white settlers’ unprovoked acts of aggression, but nothing could be further from the truth.




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The deadly enmity exhibited by the natives, through a series of years, towards the colonists and their servants was, in the first instance, unprovoked by the white population. I remember distinctly the first act of violence of that long and fearful tragedy—it was perpetrated by the natives, under the direction of “Mosquito,” a native of Sydney, who had been tried there for the cruel murder of a white woman . . . Constantly friendly intercourse took place between the two races until November, 1823, when the Oyster Bay tribe, having Mosquito as their head, committed a cool and unprovoked murder at the stock station of Mr Sylas Gatehouse, at Grindstone Bay, on the east coast.35 As Charles Meredith’s detailed account of the attack ran, continued Louisa, one of Gatehouse’s servants was killed, along with one other servant who worked for George Meredith, Charles’s father. I have been somewhat minute in the detail of this transaction, because it was in fact the commencement and the cause of that deadly feud that ever existed between the natives and the white people on this side of the island. The former murdering numbers of the latter, both old and young, male and female, with indiscriminate fury, and, owing to their extreme cunning, activity, and healthy cat-like nature, retaliation was all but impossible. I know of only one instance, at which a native lost his life by the hands of a white man.36 Louisa Meredith further related how George Meredith once sent two men to look for three lost horses. Aborigines chased the men and one Aborigine was shot and killed. The horses were found dead, speared. This, Charles had assured his wife, constituted the sole instance of the death of a native at the hands of white men. The natives, under the guidance of Mosquito, commenced and carried on what they intended should prove a war of extermination, of both man and beast. They spared neither age nor sex; the aged woman and the helpless child alike fell victims to their ferocity; and the feelings of the whites towards them in consequence may easily be imagined.37 It was erroneous to believe that white people had been the aggressors; so wrote Louisa. “British farmers and country gentlemen, not usually considered a desperately ferocious and bloodthirsty class,” were blameless. The colony owed an enormous debt of gratitude to Mr. George Augustus Robinson for his capture of the Aborigines; he thereby “saved the lives of thousands of defenceless persons,” and restored prosperity to the colony that had been steadily undermined by the ongoing hostilities.38 Refuting any suggestions that this colonial prosperity had come about through British aggression against Aborigines,



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Meredith expressed the hope of making known “the real state of affairs as formerly existing between the Aborigines and the colonists, which is so greatly misunderstood in England.” 39 But in arguing the innocence of white settlers based on her husband’s accounts, Louisa Meredith maintained silence about the members of the Meredith family’s personal involvement in frontier violence. Indeed, she might have been less grateful to Protector Robinson if she had known of entries he had made in his diary during the 1830s. Charles Meredith’s oldest brother, named George after his father, had met a violent death in “mysterious” circumstances across the Bass Strait in the Port Phillip District (later the Colony of Victoria). Robinson knew the details: George Meredith had been involved in a nefarious trade, kidnapping Aboriginal women, some from near Kangaroo Island, some from Port Phillip, and selling them to sealers on the islands off the coast of Tasmania to serve as forced labor and sexual partners. Hence arose his death at the hands of Aboriginal men. On May 9, 1836, Robinson wrote in his diary that he had sought magisterial powers over all the islands in the straits to remove women held against their will. A white man living on Flinders Island of the name of Proctor, who was married to an Aboriginal woman, informed Robinson of this tragic business. “Proctor informed me that the New Holland women was [sic] brought to the islands by George Meredith, that Munro has one, Baily has one, and the other sealer the last.”40 Further: “George Meredith was speared by the natives on the coast of New Holland, no doubt in retaliation for the injuries he had done to them. This was a just retribution. Many aggressions had been committed by the Merediths on the natives at Oyster Bay.”41 Thus Robinson accused Charles Meredith’s father and other men of the Meredith family of ill-treating certain Aborigines. This throws further light on Charles Meredith’s stories of Aborigines’ “unprovoked attacks” and on his brother George’s eventual death at the hands of Aborigines.42 Although few white settler women witnessed the direct hostilities between white men and Aborigines and fewer still wrote about them, it seems Louisa Meredith could not miss the opportunity to present the settlers’ version of the hostilities to an English audience. In 1890 she was still at work with her pen, describing Aborigines in racist and derogatory terms. The Tasmanian Aborigines were surely the very lowest creatures in human form. Their countenances as shown by the excellent photographs of the last four, made at my suggestion for the Melbourne Exhibition many years ago, bore a curiously close resemblance to pug dogs, and they possessed all the animal instinct and adroitness for self-preservation and concealment.43 Such racism might be read as her attempt to justify the aggression of white settlers against Aborigines and to exonerate the intruders from blame for the natives’ demise. But the implicit contrast that Meredith makes between the Indigenous people—portrayed as sly, animal-like, and savage—and her own family reinforced white people’s own sense of entitlement to the land. The signs




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of domesticity that Meredith sought to establish at her various Tasmanian homes were symbols of proper living. The pretty cottage gardens with English flowers, the sheep and cattle grazing in the fields, the curtains at the windows, the family pictures on the walls—all reinforcing her own perceived social status—were used to distinguished herself and her family as civilized, even if domiciled in a place at the ends of the earth, far from the metropole and its sophistication. Reading colonization through the prism of Louisa Meredith’s publicly presented domestic persona allows for a wider understanding of the ways the “private” could be manipulated for colonialist ends. In fact, promoting the prosperity and safety of the colony for good solid British settlers was part of the justification Meredith used for the publication of My Home in Tasmania, and, indeed, for the amount of domestic detail she includes in it. “No general descriptions would so well tend to show the truth,” she wrote, “as the veritable chronicle of everyday life, in our solitary yet cheerful country homes, that stand all day with open doors, and all night without a shutter or bar or bolt to the windows, as innocent of lawless intrusion as dwellings of a like isolated and homely character would be in any part of Britain.”44 Safely conquered, Aborigines and their past could now add local color, it appeared, to the Tasmanian domestic scene, and the island in its entirety could be made into home. It seems indeed ironic that Louisa Meredith (echoing her previous argument for the preservation of Aboriginal place names) named her final family home in Orford, “Malunnah,” meaning “nest.”45 In her account of making Tasmania home, Louisa Meredith certainly never questioned her right to do so. Rather, she contributed strongly to establishing the mythology of the white pioneer woman as a domesticating force and in normalizing white people’s presence and domination in the colony of Tasmania. My Home in Tasmania shows that what was for women writers of this period almost a necessity—the need to highlight the domestic qualities of their enterprise—proved to be a particularly fruitful way of adapting the imperialist qualities of the conventional travel narrative to the interests of settler colonialism. The notion of “travel” drives the narrative, but it is travel in pursuit of home. Tasmania is rendered safe, the Indigenous people have been justifiably removed, and, while perhaps there might be a hint of adventure, there is no actual threat, not even to a white woman. The dangers alluded to are, like the Indigenous people, part of Tasmania’s past, throwing into contrast the safety and civilization of Meredith’s present. The violence, destruction, and dispossession of settler colonialism are papered over with a vision of a recreated England.

Notes An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Making Tasmania Home: Louisa Meredith’s Colonizing Prose,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 28, nos 1 and 2 (2007): 1–17. 1. Louisa Meredith, My Home in Tasmania during a Residence of Nine Years, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1852), 26.



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2. For the history of Tasmania during this period, see Lloyd Robson, A History of Tasmania, vol. 1 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1983); and Alison Alexander, ed., The Companion to Tasmanian History (Hobart: Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies, University of Tasmania, 2005). 3. Meredith, on a domestic level, was asserting “rights to property and power,” the fundamentally proprietorial quality of whiteness identified, as Marilyn Lake shows in this collection, by W. E. B. Du Bois in the early twentieth century. Marilyn Lake, chapter nine in this collection. 4. For biographical information on Louisa Meredith, see Vivienne Rae-Ellis, Louisa Anne Meredith: A Tigress in Exile (Hobart: St. David’s Park Press, 1990). 5. Louisa Twamley, The Romance of Nature; or, The Flower Seasons Illustrated (London: Charles Tilt, 1836); and An Autumn Ramble by the Wye (London: Charles Tilt, 1839). 6. Louisa Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales, during a Residence in that Colony from 1839 to 1841 (London: John Murray, 1844) and My Home in Tasmania. 7. Louisa Meredith, Over the Straits: A Visit to Victoria (London: Chapman and Hall, 1861). 8. See, e.g., Louisa Meredith, Some of My Bush Friends in Tasmania: Native Flowers, Berries and Insects, Drawn from Life, Illustrated in Verse and Briefly Described (London: Day and Sim, 1860); Our Island Home: A Tasmanian Sketch Book (London: Marcus Ward and Co., 1879); Tasmanian Friends and Foes, Feathered, Furred and Finned: A Family Chronicle of Country Life, Natural History, and Veritable Adventure (London: Marcus Ward and Co., 1881); Bush Friends in Tasmania: Native Flowers, Fruits and Insects, Drawn from Nature with Prose Descriptions and Illustrations in Verse, Last Series (London: Macmillan, 1891). Most of these contained illustrations of f lora and fauna by Meredith and sometimes verse. Some of the same material appeared in several books. 9. These issues are explored further in Ann Standish, Australia through Women’s Eyes (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009). 10. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 5. 11. See Mary Louise Pratt and Steve Clark, ed., Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit (London: Zed Books, 1999). 12. Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991), 5. 13. Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, vol. 1, [v], vii and x. 14. Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, vol. 2, 239. 15. Ibid., 268. 16. Claudia Knapman, White Women in Fiji 1835–1930: The Ruin of Empire? (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1986); Helen Callaway, Gender, Culture and Empire: European Women in Colonial Nigeria (London: Macmillan, 1987); and Chilla Bulbeck, “The New Histories of the Memsahib and Missus: The Case of Papua New Guinea,” Journal of Women’s History 3, no. 2 (1991): 82–105. 17. Jane Haggis, “White Women and Colonialism: Towards a Non-Recuperative History,” in Gender and Imperialism, ed. Clare Midgley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 45–75. 18. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds, Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,




19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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1992); Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). Anna Cole, Victoria Haskins, and Fiona Paisley, eds, Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal History (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005); see also Julie Evans, Patricia Grimshaw, and Ann Standish, “Caring for Country: Yuwalaraay Women and Attachments to Land on an Australian Colonial Frontier,” Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 4 (September 2003): 1–30; Patricia Grimshaw and Elizabeth Nelson, “Empire, ‘The Civilising Mission’ and Indigenous Christian Women in Colonial Victoria,” Australian Feminist Studies 16, no. 36 (2001): 295–309. Tracey Banivanua Mar’s chapter in this collection (chapter eleven), which focuses on Queensland at a slightly later period, e.g., has many resonances with our argument here and provides an insight into how there were both distinct differences and many similarities in the operation of settler colonialism in the different Australian colonies. Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, vol. 1, 88. Ibid., 89–90. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 152–3. Ibid., 63. Ibid., 239. Ibid. Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, vol. 2, 90. Ibid., 269. Ibid., 273. Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, vol. 1, 55. Ibid. On the “Black Wars” in Tasmania, see Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1981); Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People (Melbourne: Penguin, 1995); and The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (Melbourne: Penguin, 1990). For discussion of recent debate over the extent of the violence between Aborigines and settlers in Tasmania, see Robert Manne, ed., Whitewash (Melbourne: Black, Inc., 2003); and Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, History Wars (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003). Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, vol. 1, 188. Ibid., 192–3. Ibid., 198–9. Ibid., 200. Ibid., 218. Ibid., 215. Quoted in N. J. B. Plomley, ed., Weep in Silence (Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1987), 353. Ibid. Ibid., 366. Rae-Ellis, Louisa Anne Meridith, 208. Meredith, My Home in Tasmania, vol. 1, vii–viii. Rae-Ellis, Louisa Anne Meredith, 214.



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Reading the Shadows of Whiteness: A Case of Racial Clarity on Queensland’s Colonial Borderlands, 1880–1900 Tracey Banivanua Mar

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hiteness is slippery. In the proliferation of studies dedicated to the emergence of race as an organizing tool for power relations, whiteness has been defined in ever more variegated ways. In his rather hostile critique of the analytical category of whiteness mentioned in this collection’s introduction, Eric Arnesen described it as something of a “moving target,” a catch-all metaphor in which historians have been known to conflate entire spectrums of racialized thought, power, and action.1 Although Arnesen himself is guilty of conflating work on whiteness with critical race theory, the critique that whiteness is sometimes all things to all people is not without merit. Although whiteness was culturally, scientifically, and bureaucratically defined and articulated in explicit ways throughout the colonial world, I argue in this chapter that articulations of whiteness could be as elusive in the past as they are today. A key reason, I argue, is that the idea of being white was essentially oppositional and defensive, and was deployed in relation to what it was not, more often than in relation to what it was. As DuBois put it, whiteness, like Europe, was a riddle defined by “colonial shadows,” and whiteness, without its shadows, difficult to see.2 If we are to go beyond simply charting and counting the ways in which an articulated white identity historically emerged, our studies of it must be accompanied by a deeper analysis of the way race defined power, particularly at the structural level where privilege and disadvantage were historically embedded. This chapter explores this through a focus on the Australian colony of Queensland in the final decades of the nineteenth century. There expressions



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Tracey Banivanua Mar

of whiteness appeared in public and popular discourses in two key ways. First, as the identification system for settler society in relation to the defense of the colony from both external and internal threats; and second, as the logic for an emerging structural formation of settler society. When whiteness was referred to in Queensland it was normally as a composite term for all settlers and settler interests, and nearly always it was expressed oppositionally—both aggressive and defensive. Underpinning the sometimes anxious, sometimes triumphant expressions of whiteness in Queensland was a feature that was common to its expression elsewhere. Defending and protecting whiteness, particularly in a settler-colonial context, manifested in and found clarity as a possessive title against the world’s others, of privilege, space, mobility, freedom, and rights. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have recently charted this “global color line,” tracing the ways whiteness gained clarity as a result of a transnational clamping down of access to freedoms and rights at the turn of the nineteenth century.3 As is explored in this chapter, in Queensland at this time whiteness emerged as a proprietorial claim mediated by ready access to both state and nonstate violence and enforcement. The incident I focus on is a particularly telling example of settlercolonial concerns toward the end of the nineteenth century, and which found expression in an often-confused swirl of racial discourses. As would be the case with the historical formation of race in the United States, it was the interaction of constructed categories of color and whiteness with concepts of property, space, and other social formations that produced an enduring coherence from that “incoherent fiction” of race.4 In tracing this clarity from confusion we have an opportunity of viewing whiteness as it became invisible.

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Queensland’s claim to fame in the twilight of the nineteenth century was that it was the first tropical colony settled exclusively by the hard work of the white race. As Queensland’s attorney general put it in 1895, “We are the only country on the face of the whole of God’s earth who has attempted this, the most difficult problem the World has ever had before it—the settlement of a tropical country with a purely white race.”5 Warwick Anderson has argued that a peculiarity of discourses of whiteness in tropical regions such as Queensland was the centrality of anxieties over racial degeneration, and the role of discomfort and fear in the articulation of being white. 6 The triumphalism in Queensland therefore marks an ideological shift that occurred as the Australian colonies drifted toward a White Australia in which racial privilege would be constitutionally and legally cemented from 1901.7 Whiteness was becoming less fragile. These triumphant declarations of Queensland’s exceptional status express a wider amnesia that characterized settler histories in Australia for most of the twentieth century. For the establishment of essential industries such as pearlshelling, sugar, and pastoral production had actually extensively relied on the domestic and agricultural labor of Indigenous peoples, both Aboriginal and



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Torres Strait Islander, Pacific Islanders, and others. 8 Labor, that is, that in the case of Pacific Islanders was indentured and paid a fraction of white wages, and in the case of the vast majority of Aboriginal peoples’ labor, was not paid at all.9 The sugar industry in particular was built in the second half of the nineteenth century by sixty-three thousand indentured laborers brought to Queensland from the Melanesian or “black” islands of the western Pacific. This deliberate introduction, however temporary and bonded, of a population of (mostly) black men to a colony intent on the displacement of an existing Indigenous black population gave rise to a shifting, sometimes incoherent language of race. From the 1870s onward categories of “blackness” emerged in public and government discourses in Queensland that drew sharp distinctions between Indigenous and Pacific Islander peoples. While Aboriginal people were talked about generally as “blacks” and “blackfellas,” Islanders became known as “Kanakas.” As discussed later, the terminology is incidental, for it merely named a deeper desire for distinction. This article focuses on the occasional confusion over racial categorization that reigned at the coalface of colonial relations when the actions of black Queenslanders— Indigenous and non-Indigenous—blurred these cherished distinctions. I argue that it was in the moments of cathartic physical and legislative violence, bubbling up from the resulting tension, that settler society’s racial self-consciousness, or whiteness, crystallized. Many examples exist, but events surrounding the so-called Bunya Black, or Bunya Terror, are particularly illustrative. Revolving around the Bunya pine, the Bunya Mountains, and the corridor of land encompassing the Bunya district near Brisbane, this example resounds with the wider frequencies of evolving notions of whiteness and settler-colonial belonging.

“Bunya” and Settler Colonialism On October 1, 1889, the Brisbane Courier reported that a deputation of residents had arrived in Brisbane from the Bunya district to request police protection against, and the posting of a substantial reward for, the capture of a black man who roamed the district and had ushered in what was described as “a reign of terror.”10 The Bunyaville district is in what is now the northwest suburbs of Brisbane, and although it had long been considered an “inside” or settled district in 1889, the presence of the man who became known as the Bunya Black, served to recall the invasive and intermittently vulnerable nature of settler society. Moreover the district itself, its place and its associations, arguably heightened his symbolic impact, for the word “Bunya” had a history that distils the wider processes of settler colonialism in Queensland. The Bunya district is part of the wider region made famous in the nineteenth century by the Bunya pine and its significance to Aboriginal people. The pine grows only in an area spanning the various territories of the Jinibara, Wakka Wakka, and Kabi Kabi peoples—in a corridor of land between the coast, the Bunya mountains in the west, and the Blackall ranges in the north.11 Throughout the nineteenth century the Bunya pine was closely identified by settlers with Indigenous peoples. Its botanical uniqueness and majesty came to epitomize indigenous flora, and as such, representations of it over time resonated with the themes of noble and fallen savagery



Reading the Shadows of Whiteness

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so familiar to colonial literature.12 The tree and its produce was also the centerpiece of one of the most well-known and iconic social activities of Indigenous groups throughout northern New South Wales and southeast Queensland—the Bunya festivals. Roughly every three years the Bunya pine produces nuts that were harvested during festivals held throughout the season. These were regularly attended by thousands of Indigenous peoples from territories and language groups spanning an estimated distance of at least five hundred kilometers. On foot, people would travel to the Blackall ranges and Bunya mountains for large festivals and ceremonies that were socially and economically central to communities.13 The Bunya festivals occupied a prominent place in many early settler accounts of occupation in Queensland as a symbol of Indigenous ownership. In the case of early settler Tom Petrie, who traveled as a child to the Blackall Mountains with his father Andrew, or missionary Karl W. E. Schmidt, a contemporary of Andrew Petrie who searched for fertile mission ground in the Bunya Mountains, the Bunya festivals explicitly demonstrated an unsettling prior claim.14 Far from discovering the Australian ideal of effective terra nullius, as Raymond Evans has recently explored, European visitors found social spaces in the Bunya region. Their journeys of discovery followed well-worn pathways and roads that were worn down by the traffic of Indigenous peoples, passed bora grounds and middens, and wound past the tall, straight trunks of Bunya pines, notched with ownership, or dangling with the vines that enabled harvest.15 Accordingly, as settlement haltingly encroached on the mountain sites of the Bunya festivals, and as the festivals continued to operate, the proprietorial claim of European settlers to the land was continually contested by Aboriginal landowners and visitors to the festivals. This area of southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales was the site of lengthy, organized, and strategic resistance to settler encroachment. As Evans has detailed, the Bunya gatherings were the means of communication, planning, and coordination for Indigenous groups throughout the region. Bunya country was therefore popularly viewed by settlers, and thus treated, as a “base for terrorism,” and as a result became central points of frontier conflict.16 During the 1860s and 1870s, festivals, ceremonies, and the movement of Aboriginal people throughout the region were the focus of settler aggression and harassment, and by the 1880s, the large Bunya gatherings had all but ceased.17 By the 1880s the lower slopes of the Bunya Mountains, and the most accessible land throughout the corridor to the coast, had been devastated by the colony’s insatiable hunger for timber. Though slower in the rougher mountainous terrain of the Bunya mountains, from late 1883 the Great Bunya Sawmills stripped the oldest, tallest, and straightest pines from the foothills in a short-lived industry that reshaped and erased this socially significant Indigenous terrain.18 The Bunya tree, the Bunya Mountains, and the regions within the reach of the Bunya festivals distil a wider context in which we can situate the events involving the Bunya Black. In particular it draws our attention to anxieties regarding the legal and moral validity of settler occupation in Queensland that peppered parliamentary records, the press, private letters, and published



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reminiscences throughout the nineteenth century.19 For the Bunya tree and its dedicated festivals epitomized the presence and prior claim of Aboriginal people. They regularly and often spectacularly demonstrated that land was empty neither of prior claim nor social meaning, and unsettled legal mythologies of emptiness upon which settler society built its claim to land. Nestled within this region, in the corridor that linked the sea to the mountains, around the Pine river settlements of upper Moreton Bay, the Bunyaville timber reserve was established in 1874. 20 It was here, in the late 1880s, amidst a wider context of concentrated violence and meaning, that the so-called Bunya Black sparked a brief but intense debate from which would surface themes that went to the heart of race formation in Queensland.

The Bunya Black When the deputation of Bunya residents arrived in Brisbane in October 1889, they described a situation “worthy of the presence of ‘Jack the Ripper’ himself.” A man, a black man, who no one could describe in detail, had for some time been “at large” in the district, and was suspected of “committing atrocities” such as stealing “not only fowls, but f lour, provisions, and tools for a tent.” 21 As the premier put it, he had done “all sorts of things, and frightens children.” 22 The final straw had been in late September when a young sawyer, a Mr. Poultney, had been in search of timber in the scrub, when he was suddenly confronted by a blackfellow, who bade him good morning . . . As soon as Mr. Poultney turned his back he was struck on the shoulder with some hard substance—he could not say what—for the young man made off as fast as he could. 23 During a subsequent police search the man’s camp had been found strewn with “bones and feathers of fowls . . . and articles which had been stolen during the past two years or more,” and in “one log chopped open by the police were found a white tablecloth, two sheets, a dress, and a unit of female underclothing.” 24 It was reported to Parliament that despite the deployment of twenty of Queensland’s regular police, the Bunya Black had evaded capture for months, although they were reassured that police had actually “seen the man, so there is no doubt the man is a reality and not a myth.” 25 In light of the situation, and despite being able to offer no physical description other than that he was black, the visiting deputation requested special police protection and the posting of a “substantial reward for the capture of the blackfellow.” 26 At face value, the reaction of settlers in requesting the posting of a bounty was overblown and did not match the crimes this petty thief was directly accused of having committed. A consideration of the stated threats posed by the Bunya Black, however, illuminates an underlying and specific concern. The




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emphasis of the deputation’s concerns, as repeated in both the Brisbane press and in parliament, was not so much the specific value of stolen items. Instead, much was made of his guerilla style, his perceived invisible presence, and his prolonged evasion of capture. The man’s mobility, and the ease with which he moved through a terrain that stumped the police, destabilized the emerging conviction in Queensland that this was a white colony whose frontiers were almost closed. In other words the Bunya Black, his very presence, seemed to activate a frontier response. In 1889 the Bunyaville district was considered to be “inside.” In the language of the day, inside districts were those regions where Aboriginal peoples’ resistance was seen to have been subdued, and where introduced industries were rewriting land with European vistas of progress. In Bunyaville, a school had opened, the first mail service had started in 1874, and the railway had arrived in 1888 symbolizing the permanency of settlement. 27 But while it was no longer frontier territory, neither was the district completely inside. The deputation of settlers indicated that the area was still vulnerable, being twelve miles from Brisbane, and bordered by the extensive timber reserve declared in 1874. Here the trees, the brush, and terrain still visually marked the land as not fully, not aesthetically, settled, and at this time and in the years that followed, Poultney and other loggers and settlers in the area were campaigning hard to have timber and land released for the purposes of further settlement. 28 Little land was released, and it remained rugged and rough, “clothed thickly with bushwood and patches of scrub [and] almost if not absolutely impenetrable in many places.” 29 It was, as Archibald Meston described it, country “in which a black man is much more at home than a white man.”30

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The Bunya district in 1889 was something of a borderland. By this term I refer to those contested spaces that were not on the frontier, but neither could they be considered completely, or peacefully, settled. To this extent, both race and place marked these borderlands. Here settlers were closer to the raw violence of colonial invasion. The frontiers continued to have a remnant presence, not just through the physical appearance of the area, but in the interactions between definitions of race, fear, and, of course, violence. In other rural borderland districts, such as the sugar regions further north where large populations of Pacific Island laborers occasionally outnumbered white settlers, similarities recurred. In these borderlands people of color were tolerated for utilitarian purposes, but otherwise publicly loathed and scrutinized.31 Of particular concern was when people of color roamed these districts autonomously beyond the confines of plantations or segregated areas of town. Fear, anxiety, and the occasional violent catharsis were the result. Throughout the nineteenth century in Queensland, the uncontrolled presence of Islanders or Aboriginal people was frequently framed in letters to the press and government bodies as inherently both threatening and illegal. In



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1869, for example, the year after Islanders were first imported to Queensland, the postmaster in Cleveland brought charges of attempted murder against a group of Islanders who passed his house. In a later inquiry he stated that they did nothing but sit on his verandah and smoke a pipe, but on that account “a man’s life was not safe with a lot of those fellows around him.”32 From the regular relocation of Aboriginal and Islander settlements on the fringes of sugar towns, 33 to ongoing objections to the presence of segregated “Kanaka towns” as labyrinths where “black and yellow make their lairs” in a “nightmare” of “evil sights, and smells and sounds,”34 or the more general swelling and lancing of district-wide racial tension, color in the borderlands was coded problematic.35 Amidst widespread racial tension, race itself was mediated by the availability of force in a context where acts of independence were frequently taken to represent more sinister crimes. The events in Bunyaville district were exemplary. There, the thieving of a man that few people had seen was readily conf lated with more serious unsolved crimes. In 1887, Bridget Baker, a young white girl, had been assaulted on her way home from school. Her brother had reported that “a blackfellow had come out of the scrub and taken his sister away.”36 Bridget was eventually found, but a year later, was murdered. Again “a blackfellow was suspected as the perpetrator,” although there was no evidence. Her mother was later arrested but released and the crime remained unsolved. 37 In 1889 this unsolved crime, along with a mysterious fire that engulfed the Bunya church two days before the Bunya Black’s last sighting, and myriad petty thefts over many months were readily conf lated as the same black “terror.” Being a colonial borderland, threat and rumor in Bunyaville cultivated the kind of “epistemic murk” that generated violence on the frontier.38 The Bunya Black arguably tapped deeper settler-colonial insecurities, for this “mysterious savage” showed up the fragility and absence of signs and icons of a settled certainty where white women and children were safe, the church was unchallenged, and the “impenetrable” wilds were tamed, cleared, and harnessed to economic and agricultural purposes. Moreover, at the heart of anxieties was a telling confusion. In parliament and the Brisbane press questions were raised over the Bunya Black’s “original colour.” 39 In this context, his original color referred to the degree of his blackness—was he Aboriginal or, in the language of the day, a “kanaka gone wild”?40 This point was explicitly made by the Brisbane Courier, which reported that although it was likely that the Bunya Black was an Islander, his “last camp does not differ materially from the habitation of the ordinary aboriginal”: “Excessive caution (stealth, in fact) is characteristic of all his movements. His camp has been approached by a pathway of logs in order that he might leave no footmarks on the ground. His journeyings to an adjacent stream of water have been similarly effected.”41 The confusion over the Bunya Black’s original color was not abstract. Rather it ref lected a colony-wide concern throughout the nineteenth century to properly categorize people of color in the context of tropical settler colonialism’s uncomfortable paradox. That is, until 1901, white settlement in Queensland was seen as crucially dependent on the absence of blackness, or Indigenous




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peoples (to vacate the land), and the presence of blackness, or Islanders (to work the land).42 Color therefore had a temporarily legitimized place in symbolizing and enabling the exercise of settler ownership, but it was to be protected and restricted, and above all, contained. As one member of the Legislative Assembly had put it in 1880, Islanders would never be subjected to the levels of restriction and servitude that might be contained in legislation “dealing with the aboriginals of the country,” but as black laborers, they should be restricted enough to prevent “a hybrid race spring[ing] up amongst us.”43 Accordingly from the 1870s to 1890s, legislation and local bylaws that governed the movement and employment of Pacific Islanders were tightened, severely limiting their autonomous movement. By the end of the century, Islanders could not remain in Queensland for more than a month without an indenture contract, they could not be legally employed more than thirty miles from the coast, and neither could they be legally employed outside of unskilled labor in the sugar industry.44 By this time too, legislation introduced in 1897 also empowered the state with wide-reaching and explicit controls over Indigenous peoples. Despite concerted efforts on the part of settler society and government to contain and separate Indigenous and Islander peoples, they, like the Bunya Black, continually exceeded and blurred their designated categories. Indigenous peoples did not vacate their land but stayed on in the inside districts, while many Islanders on completing their three-year period of indenture did not go home but stayed and engaged as free labor. In breaching the neat containments of colonialism’s social map they became problematized in settler society as the “Kanaka Menace” and the “Aboriginal Problem.” But while it was the case in these borderlands that the presence of Indigenous people or Islander peoples was objectionable to many white settlers, it was not necessarily fearful. Within limits, such as the limits of indenture, Islanders or Indigenous peoples’ labor served settlement. It was when they behaved autonomously that tension, fears, and anxiety mushroomed in the colony’s newspapers and public forums, to manifest in various judicial and extra-judicial controls. Throughout Queensland and especially the sugar districts, dawn to dusk curfews, surveillance, special patrols, and special police were commissioned to keep Islanders and Indigenous peoples out of towns at times when they could not be properly observed.45 In these cases it was the signs of social and economic independence that were the targeted by policing or legislative measures. For like the Bunya Black, who took only chickens and tools, the perceived threat he posed stemmed from his evasion of capture and independent encroachment on white settlements. It was this that proved his actual and potential guilt. Racial categorization in Queensland never reached the level of litigation and legal determination of privilege that Cheryl Harris and Ariela Gross have detailed in the United States.46 But the confusion that emerged in Queensland over the status of people that occupied a middle, or blurred, racial ground are nevertheless significant for similar reasons.47 In 1889, debates over the original color of the Bunya Black had consequences. Samuel Grimes raised the issue in parliament on October 17, in response to circulating rumors that two self-proclaimed Aboriginal “experts,”



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a Mr. Seymour and Archibald Meston, had been commissioned to deal with the outlaw. Both had a brutal reputation and the meaning of their commission was clear. As Grimes put it, Meston on “more than one occasion . . . has boasted of the number of blackfellows who have fallen victim to his rifle.”48 Grimes was concerned with the air of “Lynch law” that was being generated around the Bunya Black’s capture, and even more concerned that sanction had been given to shoot the man although they did not yet know whether he was Aboriginal or an Islander.49 The underlying issue in the debate was not whether violence was sanctioned, but rather what level of sanction was attached to varying shades of blackness. Violence and its commission was being mediated in this borderland setting by a complex matrix of existing discourses on race and colonial settlement. Violence in Queensland was no secret. Its legitimacy, necessity, and commission were topics of ongoing public discussions throughout the period we consider here. It was widely evoked, for example, as the inevitable symptom of the initial stages of invasion, and public discussion of frontier massacres, “dispersal raids,” and other deadly violence against Aboriginal people was not infrequent. Pioneers celebrated as the true grit of Queensland’s settlement were classically those who had “rafted over rivers alive with alligators, fought with hostile blacks, starved and thirsted and come narrowly out of Death’s jaw more than once.”50 Violence also lurked in the affectionate humor of nostalgic reminiscences that evoked wild frontier worlds of blunt violence, pub brawls, grog consumption that killed the tough and fortified the toughest, and the eccentric hardships of a colonial existence.51 Everyday brawls, in the borderland too, were frequently inflected with racial catharsis. As was related to Bundaberg’s Court of Petty Sessions in 1880, “Black and white are generally together on a Saturday night” and “those boys are continuously kicking up a row with the Coolies in the streets.” Boolomal, an Islander who was a regular recipient of these rows, stated that: “The white boys every Saturday evening pelt the Polynesians” with dirt, bones, eggs, and “rotten liver.”52 In this wider context, when it came to the Bunya Black, the debate about the commissioning of violence swung on whether the man was simply a nuisance, or whether he was Aboriginal, therefore sanctioning a more final, less legal, “termination.”53 Beyond proximity, it was the depth of challenge he posed to white settlement, property, and interests that mediated both the ways in which he was categorized, and the levels of sanction for invasive or corrective violence attached to these definitions.

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As a borderland, Bunyaville was a colonial settlement moving from an outside district where the distance of an imagined civilization legitimated and compelled brutal and indiscriminate conf lict beyond the reach of the law and the state monopolized the means of containing and controlling categories of race. To some extent we see this ref lected in the intensification of state scrutiny and surveillance in the last decades of the nineteenth century. From the 1880s statistical information and censuses were regularly collected tracking the numbers




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of Aboriginal and Pacific Islander prisoners and the crimes they were imprisoned for; the numbers of marriages within and between the Aboriginal and Islander populations, and particularly of white women to “alien races”; and the numbers of homicides committed by “whites,” “Aboriginals,” and “Coloured Persons other than Aboriginals.”54 Annual government reports too detailed the kinds of offences Aboriginal and Pacific Islander prisoners committed; who they were marrying; and in the case of Islanders how they were employed, where they lived, how many were in hospital, and the number of murders, assaults, and rapes they committed.55 The result of statistical scrutiny was not merely the discursive one of settler Queensland’s “problem” populations of Islanders, Indigenous peoples, and alien races. In addition this statistical gauging was a self-articulating process of defining whiteness against its shadows. Moreover, this period of defining and quantifying also amounted to containment, for it was done in concert with a proliferation of race-based legislation. Along with previously discussed legislation restricting Islanders, the Aborigines Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act of 1896 introduced a new and unprecedented level of legally sanctioned surveillance and restriction of Indigenous people. Under the Act, the state and its representatives were empowered with the guardianship of Aboriginal children, and statutory bodies were granted extensive discretionary powers over Indigenous peoples’ choice of residence, marriages, movement, education, and employment. The fact that Archibald Meston, whose lethal expertise saw him employed to deal with the Bunya Black, was also the principal architect of the 1896 Act is telling, for he personifies the state’s incorporation of the violence of the frontiers, and the transformative role played by the borderlands. Archibald Meston tracked the Bunya Black until all trace of him disappeared, and the last reference to him in the Brisbane Courier urged the need for him to be severely and terminally dealt with.56 What happened to him after that is not clear. But his construction in public discourse in 1889 referenced a broad range of circulating colonial discourses in Queensland that converged toward the end of the nineteenth century to construct an imagined community, a white Australia. Whether or not the significance of the word Bunya resonated at the time is a matter for speculation. The link I have made, however, places the Bunya Black amidst the circulating settler discourses of the time. The event itself, the fears of settlers, the interest of the Brisbane press, the involvement of one of the architects of Queensland’s regime of Aboriginal Protection legislation, and the resulting confusion over his precise “original” blackness, all provide a snapshot of wider processes underway in other Australian colonies and internationally, where becoming white was being manifested and race more generally was being structurally embedded.

Conclusion From 1900, a comprehensive web of federal, state, and local laws sealed whiteness as a privileged possession in Queensland ensuring that only people who were white



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could be legally employed in many industries, or could access freedoms of movement, association, employment, or residence. This occurred amidst the global push toward white nationalism. In Australia, blackness and color would be expelled from the white body of the Australian nation. Most Islanders were deported after 1906 and Indigenous people and the minority of Islanders that remained faced life under race-based laws, by-laws, and other explicit forms of exclusion and inclusion for another sixty years.57 With these developments, whiteness as an inherent quality of proprietorial rights to land, governance, and citizenship had prevailed. But in 1889, the brief eruption of confusion, fear, and anxiety that resulted from the crimes of a person, who in all probability was simply a homeless man taking provisions from settlers in the Bunyaville district, gives us momentary insight into the converging discourses and practices that governed this episode of race formation. Moreover, the expressions of violence that accompanied the resolve to remove the Bunya Black from the peripheral vision of settlers reminds us of the physicality that accompanied the articulation of whiteness on the ground and in colonialism’s official mind.58 Whiteness in Queensland emerged as a defensive and negotiated concept forged physically in the context of colonial conf lict, and clarified in the confusion, inconsistencies, and contradictions of black menaces. It is neither unique nor terribly insightful to say that whiteness found expression in opposition to what it was not—that is, it was not black, nor alien. More importantly, whiteness was constructed in concert with shifting imperatives—economic, domestic, social, and moral, as well as those deeper sensibilities, those “structures of feeling,” of ownership or belonging.59 What we witness on the borderlands in Queensland were the points at which this identity of whiteness was inscribed in the social and legal fabric as that status that had exclusive access to political and social freedoms of and from governmental scrutiny. The Bunya Black draws our attention to a wider context in which notions of whiteness were being defined by ref lexive and defensive modes of colonial violence, and cultivated in frontier relations to fend off threats to the propertied interests of settler society. More than all of this, however, the Bunya Black f lagged a period when whiteness was disappearing into normativity as an invisible legal category, precisely at the point of its clearest articulation in social structures.

Notes 1. Eric Arnesen, “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination,” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (2001): 9. 2. W. E. B. Du Bois, “World’s of Color,” Foreign Affairs (1925), cited in Nathaniel Berman, “Shadows: Du Bois and the Colonial Prospect, 1925,” Villanova Law Review 45 (2000): 960. The fuller quote reads: “One might indeed rede the riddle of Europe by making its present plight a matter of colonial shadows and speculate wisely on what might not happen if Europe became suddenly shadowless—if Asia and Africa and the islands were cut permanently away.” 3. Marilyn Lake, chapter nine in this collection. See also Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, Cambridge University Press, 2008).




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4. D. Marvin Jones, “Darkness Made Visible: Law, Metaphor, and the Racial Self,” The Georgetown Law Journal 82 (1993): 439. See also Richard T. Ford, “Urban Space and the Colour Line: The Consequences of Demarcation and Disorientation in the Postmodern Metropolis,” Harvard Blakletter Journal 9 (1992): 117–47. 5. Queensland Parliamentary Debates, 74 (1895): 7. 6. Warwick Anderson, chapter five in this collection. See also The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2005), 74–5. 7. Instrumental and ref lective of this shift would be J. S. C. Elkington’s report to the Commonwealth Parliament in 1905. See J. S. C. Elkington, “Tropical Australia: Is It Suitable for a Working White Race?” Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers 2 (1905): 1393–4. For a contemporary historiographical survey of the Whiteness in the Tropics debate, with specific reference to Queensland, see J. W. Gregory, The Menace of Colour: A Study of the Difficulties Due to the Association of White and Coloured Races, with an Account of Measures Proposed for their Solution, and Special Reference to White Colonization in the Tropics (London: Seeley Service, 1925). 8. For the sake of clarity I refer in this chapter to Indigenous and Islander peoples with “Islander” referring to the Pacific Islander ancestors of today’s Australian South Sea Islander communities. When referring to “Indigenous” peoples in this chapter, I am generally referring to Aboriginal peoples of the Australian mainland and Torres Strait Islanders. 9. Unpaid Aboriginal labor, particularly domestic and agricultural, was used extensively in Queensland’s agricultural and pastoral industries. While the historiography on this is vast, see Rosalind Kidd, Trustees on Trial: Recovering the Stolen Wages (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007) for the present impact of this past; and Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987); Noel Loos, “Queensland’s Kidnapping Act: The Native Labourers Protection Act of 1884,” Aboriginal History 4, no. 2 (1980): 150–73; Bill Rosser, Dreamtime Nightmares: Biographies of Aborigines under the Queensland Aborigines Act (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1985). 10. “Police Protection for Bunya,” Brisbane Courier, October 1, 1889, 6. 11. The exact boundaries between landowners and language groups overlapped. The information here is based on claims before the Native Title Tribunal as of 2007. See, for more, the map of boundaries offered by Gaiarbau, a Jinibara man, in the mid-1950s in L. P. Winterbotham and Gaiarbau, “Some Original Views around Kilcoy: Transcription and Notes by Gerry Langerad with the Editorial Assistance of Barbara Langevad,” Queensland Ethnohistory Transcripts 1, no. 1 (1982); and the bibliography on the Jinibara and Turrbal People, available at the National Native Title Tribunal, http://www.nntt.gov.au/bibliography/1022034514_3065.html. 12. Glenn Cook, “Representing the Bunya Pine,” Queensland Review 9, no. 2 (2002): 83–94; Belinda McKay and Patrick Buckridge “Literary Imaginings of the Bunya,” Queensland Review 9, no. 2 (2002): 65–79. 13. Paddy Jerome, “Boobarran Ngummin: The Bunya Mountains,” Queensland Review 9, no. 2 (2002): 1–5; Raymond Evans, “Against the Grain: Colonialism and the Demise of the Bunya Gatherings, 1839–1939,” Queensland Review 9, no. 2 (2002): 39–46; Kevin Tibbett, “Risk and Economic Reciprocity: An Analysis of Three Regional Aboriginal Food-Sharing Systems in Late Holocene Australia,” Australian Archaeology 58 (June 2004): 7–10.



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14. Karl W. E. Schmidt, “Report on an Expedition to the Bunya Mountains in search of a suitable site for a mission station,” 18423522/1 and 3522/2, Heritage Collection, Queensland State Library; and Constance Campbell Petrie, Tom Petrie’s Early Reminiscences of Early Queensland (Brisbane: Watson, Ferguson and Co., 1904). 15. Evans, “Against the Grain,” 49. Here Evans was citing from the journeys of Rev. Christopher Eipper. 16. J. Mackenzie-Smith, “Evan Mackenzie: Pioneer Merchant Pastoralist of Moreton Bay,” MA thesis, University of Queensland, 1989, cited in Evans, “Against the Grain,” 52. 17. Jerome, “Boobarran Ngummin,” 3; Evans, “Against the Grain,” 51–54. Literature on the frontiers of Queensland, and south-east Queensland in particular, is extensive. For the classics, see Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (Ringwood: Penguin, 1982); and Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance: Aboriginal European Relations on the North Queensland Frontier, 1861–1897 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1982). 18. Erica Long, “A History of the Timber Industry in the Pine Rivers District,” Access History 2, no. 1 (1998): 55–73; Evans, “Against the Grain,” 57–9. The area of the Bunya Mountains was eventually declared a national park in what I have elsewhere argued was a peculiarly settler-colonial institutionalization of “emptying” land. 19. Examples are too vast to be listed here; however, the outpourings of anonymous settlers over the topic of the native mounted police and frontier violence that filled the pages of The Queenslander in 1880 provides a concentrated example. These letters were collated and published as The Way we Civilise in the same year. See The Way We Civilise; Black and White; the Native Police: A Series of Articles and Letters Reprinted from the “Queenslander” (Brisbane: 1880). 20. Cultural Heritage Study of the Bunyaville State Forest. Queensland Government Publications, Brisbane, 1995, 35. It is unclear what the connection with Bunya was, given that the Bunya pine was not proliferous in the area. A possible connection is the settlement of Tom Petrie in the North Pine region. In 1891, the nearby town of Kedron was renamed Bunyaville after taking advice from people living in the area near Bunyaville. Queensland State Archives, Reserve Files, Series 17925, Item 141133, Bunya Timber Reserve, Department of Public Lands to Surveyor General, January 22, 1891. 21. Brisbane Courier, October 3, 1889, 4. 22. Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 59 (1889), 2251–2. 23. “Police Protection for Bunya,” Brisbane Courier, October 1, 1889, 6. 24. Ibid.; Brisbane Courier, October 4, 1889, 4. 25. Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 59 (1889), 2251. 26. “Police Protection for Bunya.” 27. “Appendix D: Cultural Heritage Assessment,” in Petrie to kippa-Ring Transport Corridor Study: Final Impact Assessment Study Report, Brisbane (2003), 49. 28. Queensland State Archives, Reserve Files, Series 17925, Item 141133, Bunya Timber Reserve. 29. Brisbane Courier, October 4, 1889, 4. 30. Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 59 (1889), 2253. This discussion of borderland, inside, and outside districts builds on and draws from the insights of existing discussions. See Tom Griffiths, “The Outside Country,” in Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia, ed. Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths




31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

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(Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002), 223–44; and Ross Gibson, Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2002). Kay Saunders, “ ‘The Black Scourge’: Racial Responses Towards Melanesians in Colonial Queensland,” in Race Relations in Colonial Queensland: A History of Exclusion, Exploitation, and Extermination, ed. Ray Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin, second edn (Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1988), 147–234; Tracey Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The AustralianPacific Indentured Labor Trade (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007), 91–100. “Progress Report from the Select Committee on the Operation of the Polynesian Labourers’ Act of 1868,” Queensland Votes and Proceedings 1 (1869): 79. The court and police records of the sugar towns reveal an ongoing and often intimate relationship between the residents of so-called fringe camps and the police of centers such as Bundaberg and Mackay. See Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, 92–96; Henry Reynolds, “Fringe Camps in Nineteenth Century Queensland,” in Lectures in North Queensland History: Third Series (Townsville: History Department, James Cook University, 1978), 247–63. E. J. Brady, The King’s Caravan: Across Australia in a Wagon (London: Edward Arnold, 1911), 257. Large-scale race riots or racial violence beyond the frontiers were occasional. The more significant episodes, preceded and succeeded by intense periods of racial anxiety and demands that black populations be brought under control, include: the public executions of Islander prisoners in Maryborough in 1877; the Normanton riots of 1888; and the Mackay Racecourse riots of 1883. These were discussed in parliament: Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 23 (1877), 35–7; vol. 55 (1888); 257; and Clive Moore, “The Mackay Racecourse Riot of 1883,” in Lectures in North Queensland History: Third Series (Townsville: History Department, James Cook University Press, 1978), 181–96. Brisbane Courier, October 4, 1889, 4. Brisbane Courier, October 3, 1889, 4. Michael Taussig, “Culture of Terror—Space of Death: Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (1984): 467. See also Barry Morris, “Frontier Colonialism as a Culture of Terror,” in Power, Knowledge and Aborigines, ed. Bain Attwood and John Arnold (Melbourne: La Trobe University Press, 1992), 72–88; and Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, 20–41. Brisbane Courier, October 4, 1889, 4. “Police Protection for Bunya.” “Kanaka” was a derogatory term for Pacific Islanders and Australian South Sea Islanders, used throughout Queensland. Brisbane Courier, October 4, 1889, 4. This land/labor specificity of settler colonialism is developed most explicitly in Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (2001): 866–905; and his Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), particularly the chapter “Repressive Authenticity.” Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 31 (1880), 139 and 161. The Pacific Island Labourers Act 1880 and amendments in 1892 and 1896 were the principal legal mechanisms for these changes. Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, 80–90.



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45. Ibid., 89–90. 46. Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberle Crenshaw et al. (New York: The New Press, 1995), 276–91; Ariela J. Gross, “Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South,” The Yale Law Journal 108, no. 1 (1998): 109–88. See also for current examples, Judy Rohrer, “ ‘Got Race?’ The Production of Haole and the Distortion of Indigeneity in the Rice Decision,” The Contemporary Pacific 18, no. 1 (2006): 1–31. 47. Gross, “Litigating Whiteness,” 126. 48. Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. 59 (1889), 2251–2. 49. Brisbane Courier, October 18, 1889, 6. 50. Brady, The King’s Caravan, 244. 51. E. Foreman, The History and Adventures of a Queensland Pioneer (Brisbane: Exchange Printing, 1928), 133; A University Man [George Carrington], Colonial Adventures and Experiences by a University Man (London: Bell and Daldy, 1871), 34; and Brady, The King’s Caravan, 276. As Brady put it: “if so many Queenslanders did not drink whiskey and soda before breakfast, the average length of life in the North might be higher. I ventured to say this to a man in Mackay. He said it was better to drink whiskey and soda before breakfast than rum and milk. One had to drink something.” See also “Report of the Royal Commission . . . Intoxicating Liquors in Queensland,” Queensland Votes and Proceedings 3 (1901): 1–200. 52. Queensland State Archives: CPS 3A/P3. Boolamal vs George Milner, Assault, Bundaberg Court of Petty Sessions, October 12, 1880. Deposition of Witnesses. Francis Clarke, Police Constable, Bundaberg, and Boolamal and Laffon. 53. A. E. Meston, “The Bunya Blackfellow,” Brisbane Courier, October 24, 1889, 7. 54. Key examples include the return showing “Convictions of Polynesians, Cingalese, Maltese, Malays and Chinese,” Queensland Votes and Proceedings 2 (1883–84): 1449–52; “Employment of Time-Expired Polynesians,” Queensland Votes and Proceedings 2 (1883–84): 1425–28; “Kanaka Statistics,” Queensland Votes and Proceedings 3 (1889): 225–8; “Results of the Census Taken on 31 October, 1898, of the Coloured Alien Population,” Queensland Votes and Proceedings 3 (1898): 821. 55. These were collected annually and published in the Vital Statistics of the Queensland Votes and Proceedings. As a ref lection of the processes discussed in this chapter, some of the most informative statistics were the annual Police Commissioners’ reports. I have collated and discussed the Police Commissioners’ statistics from 1868 to 1906 in Banivanua Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue, 89–100. 56. “The Bunya Terror,” Brisbane Courier, November 2, 1889, 3: “the reign of the ‘Bunya Terror’ should terminate suddenly on an early date.” 57. On the impact of Australia’s White Australia Policy on South Sea Islanders, see Patricia Mercer, White Australia Defied: Pacific Island Settlement in North Queensland (Townsville, Queensland: Studies in North Queensland History, James Cook University Press, 1995); Michael Berry, Refined White: The Story of the How South Sea Islanders Came to Cut Cane in Queensland and Made History Refining the White Australia Policy (Queensland: Australian Sugar Industry Museum, 2000); and Tracey Banivanua Mar, “ ‘No Aboriginal Native of . . . the Islands of the Pacific’: South Sea Islanders and the Distant Vote of the Commonwealth,” in Race, Sex and Democracy: One Hundred Years of the Commonwealth Vote, ed. J. Chesterman and D. Philips (Melbourne: Melbourne Publishing Group, 2003), 71–88. On life in Australia under the White Australia Policy, see Noel Fatnowna, Fragments of a Lost




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Heritage (North Ryde: Allen & Unwin, 1989); and Faith Bandler, Wacvie (Adelaide: Rigby, 1977). 58. Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961). The use of Robinson and Gallagher’s “official mind” is meant here to denote a sense of the transnational corporate memory of colonial projects. 59. Taussig, “Culture of Terror—Space of Death,” 468.


The Deluded White Woman and the Expatriation of the White Child Margaret Allen

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t the end of the nineteenth century, white settlers in Australia saw themselves as threatened by millions of Asian peoples in lands to their north. Immigrants from China and from Japan, India and South East Asia were seen as endangering Australians’ standard of living and indeed their civilization and way of life. In 1901, the newly federated nation of Australia passed its foundational act, the Immigration Restriction Act. This established what became known as the White Australia Policy. The act prohibited the entry into Australia of people who failed a dictation test of fifty words, which could be administered in any European language. The tests were administered to exclude people described, in other legislation, as “Aboriginal native[s] of Asia, Africa and the Pacific.”1 This act consolidated a number of other restrictive immigration acts, chief ly aimed against the Chinese, which the various Australian colonies had passed in the years before federation. 2 As Gwenda Tavan has argued, “By the mid 1890s popular hostility towards the Chinese had evolved into a broad doctrine of national identity and sovereignty, and a belief that prohibiting all non-European immigration was the only way to prevent Australia being swamped by Asians.” 3 While the policy has now been dismantled it has had an almost indelible inf luence upon Australia’s demographic composition in maintaining a significant and inf luential Anglo-Celtic element.4 However, despite its great inf luence in shaping Australian culture and society, it was in some ways always a fantasy. The white settlers confidently expected that the Australian Indigenous peoples whom they saw as inferior would disappear. As Indigenous people point out, they have survived, struggling against great injustices. Furthermore, there were almost 50,000 settlers from China and other Asian countries in Australia at the



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time of the restrictive legislation. While many of the Pacific Islander workers and their families, who had come as indentured laborers, were deported from 1904, these other non-European peoples were able to remain in Australia, although their numbers declined during the first five decades of the twentieth century.5 These populations were highly masculine. Yarwood estimates that 93 percent of the 17,157 Chinese in Australia in 1921 were men along with 94 percent of the 3,150 Indians. 6 Among the white population, the strongly masculinist labor movement, concerned to protect its conditions against cheaper Asian workers, was an important element in the development and maintenance of this racist policy.7 While there was also support among white women, there was also some uneasiness that white women may not be fully committed to the white national project. In his analysis of Australian cultural and political writing around the turn of the nineteenth century, David Walker has discerned a fear that the white woman could be a weak link in the struggle to maintain a White Australia. There was an anxiety about “racial betrayal by frivolous white women.”8 He notes the concern felt by the writers in the nationalist Bulletin for the overly enthusiastic welcome given to the Japanese Naval Training Squadron on its visit to Australian ports in 1906: this “feminine and semi-feminine fuss over Japanese visitors.” 9 Kate Bagnall has explored the relationships that white women had with the Chinese hawkers who sold vegetables door-to-door in Australian cities a century ago. She argues that a number of these women who “had the time and opportunity to relate to Chinese hawkers” across the threshold of their homes came to see them as individuals, upon whom they relied for household supplies and whom they liked.10 These interactions were represented, by those anxious about maintaining White Australia, as threatening “the White home and family, the authority of the White man and, ultimately social order.”11 While powerful racist discourses represented the “Asiatic” as an evil and dangerous type, there were numbers of Asian men in Australia who were well respected in various ways and were part of their local community.12 Among these were those bound by more intimate ties, into the broader Australian community. Some of the Chinese and Indian and other men deemed “nonwhite” who were resident in Australia in the early twentieth century had wives and families in their homelands. Indeed they might be termed sojourners in Australia, for they also enjoyed long visits to their families at home. However, others married in Australia. Some married into Indigenous families, and Indigenous families in Australia bearing surnames such as Ah Kit, Khan, or Abdullah tell of such unions.13 Yet others married white women. White women who married across “racial” boundaries were often stigmatized and seen as coming from degraded sections of the white community. However, a few such families acquired a respectable social position. Thus, in 1906, Susannah Buick, from a prosperous Kangaroo Island family, married Otim Singh, an Indian hawker turned shopkeeper. Together they ran Otim Singh’s “Peoplestores” at Kingscote until Singh’s death in 1927.14 Kate Bagnall has studied marriages between white women and Chinese men in Australia. In some cases these unions spawned



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successful Australian families, some of which moved between Australia and China.15 However, some families were more unstable and fractured, and women lost their children when their fathers took them home to China.16 The movement to unite the separate Australian colonies and the birth of federated white Australia coincided with the height of the child rescue movement.17 The fate of the child was seen as crucial to the health of the nation. The “child life” was the focus of much attention and seen as representing the future of white nations. In Australia in the early twentieth century most white children were under the control of their fathers. However, in the case of the illegitimate child, the mother was the legal guardian, having full custody.18 Here there was the possibility of such a mother making decisions that might endanger the white nation. In this chapter I discuss a case, a family drama, that involved an Indian man, domiciled in Australia, a white woman—a single mother—and her daughter. This was a case of an interracial marriage and the removal of the white Australian girl to India, in which anxieties about the mobility of the black man and the commitment of the white woman to the white nation surfaced. The extensive investigations, which attended this isolated case, and the consequent passing of legislation regulating the expatriation of white children by non-Europeans demonstrate the fears aroused by this case. A number of those involved in debating the issues believed that the state should step in and override the legal rights of the single mother with regard to her child and thus the future of the white nation. This case also struck at the heart of the White Australia policy and the notion of the white nation, for the apparent transmogrification of this white girl child, “from an Australian into an Asiatic,”19 endangered essentialized notions of whiteness, race, and nation, revealing their precarious and mutable nature.

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In 1909 a sensational article appeared in the Perth Sunday Times alleging that a white Australian girl child had been abducted by an “Afghan” 20 and taken to India for immoral purposes. 21 An Australian man traveling to India on the R. M. S. Ortona in July 1909 had observed the man and a six-year-old white girl on the ship. He questioned them and reported that the man, Noab (probably Nawab) Khan, said he had a farm at Echuca in Victoria and that he was taking the girl, his stepdaughter, to his family near Rawalpindi in India. The Australian man, who had written to the newspaper about what he saw as a shocking situation, predicted the girl’s future to be that of a sex slave, “Now the object of the man in fetching the little girl appears to be this. When she grows to be a woman she will be brought in contact with natives of high caste and with plenty of money. The rest is understood as far as black men are concerned.” 22 The correspondent sheeted home the responsibility for this to the Australian authorities for “allowing a black man to take a white girl from Australia to be brought up in India, and undergo what fate God knows.” 23 Here it is seen as axiomatic that Indian men were highly sexualized, degenerate, and inclined to prey upon young girls. The possibility that the explanation



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proffered by Noab Khan was true and that he, the Indian, was a normal and kind person, with a respectable family life, was not entertained. The editor of the Perth newspaper took it upon himself to prosecute enquiries about the identity of Noab Khan in Echuca, a town some thousands of kilometers away. He found that indeed, Noab Khan was well respected in his local area, where, as one local policeman pointed out, “he is regarded as a favourite” and that “by his thrift [he] appears to have done well hawking and is now a farmer.” 24 Indeed his application for a Certificate Exempting the Dictation Test (CEDT), which would allow him to reenter white Australia, showed his standing in his community. He had references and recommendations from two local policemen, from a justice of the peace, and from the bank manager in his district. Furthermore, it was ascertained that he was a property owner, for he had a farm at Leitchville, near Echuca, where he lived with a white woman. 25 The matter was taken up, as a sort of personal crusade, by a politician James Mackinnon Fowler, who represented Perth in the Federal House of Representatives. He was an ideologue of White Australia, whose rhetoric was characterized by the “stridency of whiteness” referred to by Marilyn Lake in this collection (chapter nine). He was an experienced propagandist and having just changed political allegiances was in a vulnerable position given the approach of the next election. 26 The police were asked to report upon the circumstances that led to Noab taking a white girl to India. They reported that Mrs. Lillie Khan, Noab’s wife, had consented to her six-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, Leontine Adell, 27 going to live with Noab’s mother, so that she could learn the language and attend school in the Khan family’s village near Rawalpindi. Once her husband returned from India, Lillie and Noab planned to leave Australia and settle permanently in India. 28 Fowler was not happy to accept this information about this couple who were making decisions about their lives and that of their daughter. He took it upon himself to investigate the matter further and once he heard that Noab Khan had returned from India, he journeyed from Melbourne to interview the Khans at Leitchville. He wrote an article, provocatively entitled “A Piebald Australia,” about this expedition, where he represented himself as the intrepid investigator, intent upon uncovering the truth. In this article, which appeared in the Sunday Times, he represented the removal of Leontine as an “outrage”: With all our enthusiasm for a White Australia, it comes as a shock that a little Australian girl of white parentage has, through the marriage of her mother with a native of India, been taken to that country to be brought up in a Punjaubi village as a Mahometan. It will come as a greater shock to learn that there is no law in existence in Australia to prevent this. 29 In this volume Tracey Banivanua Mar (chapter eleven) has noted white concern about the autonomy of the black man. Similarly, Fowler did not believe that Noab Khan should be able to make decisions about his own family, He was particularly incensed that government officials had stood by and allowed “the



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little white girl [to be] carried off to the remote Punjaub, without let or hindrance.” Further when Noab Khan had applied for his CEDT in 1909, the officials, “whose duty [Fowler argued] it is to preserve Australia for Australians” failed, he claimed, to recognize that they should also “preserve Australians for Australia” and thus work to keep the little white girl, Leontine, in Australia.30 Although Fowler had come into the Khan home to discuss their private business, he reported that “[b]oth of them willingly entered into conversation with me on the subject.”31 Perhaps they did not realize that he would write about them in the newspaper. However, in the account that Fowler wrote of this meeting he had to admit that his previous assumptions about Noab Khan and the circumstances relating to Leontine Adell’s journey to India were incorrect. Khan had been represented as a sinister figure in the September Sunday Times article. Now Fowler described him with terms often used in relation to ideals of white Australian masculinity: “I was prepared to meet a good specimen of the Asiatic. The man did not belie the reports. He is quite a young man, a fine type physically, well set up and athletic, with a frank open manner and pleasant face. He speaks English fairly.”32 Feigning gentlemanly circumspection, he wrote about Lillie Khan, “Of Noab Khan’s wife I have a natural reluctance to write.” But he did write about her, pointing out that her life had been hard before she married Noab. “It was obvious that he had been a good husband to her,” Fowler was perhaps alluding here to the fact that Lillie’s child Leontine was born out of wedlock. Indeed, Lillie Hocking had been nineteen when she had her child at the Melbourne Women’s Hospital: no father’s name was given on the birth certificate.33 Fowler also admitted that Noab had been good to Lillie’s daughter: “Noab Khan had been an affectionate step-father to the little girl I can also well believe.” 34 The couple explained that they had decided to sell their farm in Victoria and were going to live in India where Noab had inherited land. One of the factors in this decision was, as Lillie explained, “that she was ostracized by the white people on account of her marriage, and thought she would have a better time of it among her husband’s relatives.” 35 Furthermore, they feared “the color trouble” would mean “persecution” for Leontine, who was ready to start school but who as the “step-child of Noab Khan . . . had been roughly treated already by other children on this account.” 36 Noab maintained that his own family “were well to do” and “the child would be well cared for, and would receive more affection from his own people than she had got among her own race in Australia.” 37 Fowler was concerned that not only was the child to be brought up among “natives,” but that she and her mother were converting to Islam. Lillie had sent Leontine’s birth certificate and a letter of consent for Noab to take when he took Leontine to India. Here she stated, “I have turned to my husband’s religion (Islam) and I also wish my little daughter to follow the same which she cannot do in this country and I will soon be going home to his country myself, and she is just the right age to be taught our religion.”38 Noab said that Leontine was happy with his people and she would be brought up as a “Mahometan” and even though there were




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Christian missionary schools in the district, “he was very definite in saying he would have nothing to do with them.”39 Fowler admitted that Noab and Lillie spoke unreservedly and with “every appearance of honesty and good faith.”40 Fowler concluded the article with a suggestion that he had been mistaken: “I confess I left the Hindoo and his wife with a feeling that this matter wore a different aspect from that which it had when I entered upon the inquiry.”41 Fowler had gone to investigate an outrage but found reasonable people making thoughtful decisions. A white woman had decided it was in her best interests to marry an Indian man and to take her white girl child and to go and live with him in India. Further, as Fowler noted, her life had “probably had a big improvement” when she married Noab. Here was the suggestion that a black man might be a better husband than a white man. Lillie, who was apparently seduced and abandoned by a white man, must have felt this. Indeed, in making possible what Fowler termed “A Piebald Australia,” such a relationship posed a challenge to White Australia and also to white masculinity. Not only was Lillie allowing a white man’s child to be raised among natives and be “aspostasized,” but she was also likely to bear a black man’s children. By marrying an Indian man in Australia, she could be seen as rejecting white masculinity and being attracted to a different type of masculinity. Another Australian woman who made a similar choice, by “marrying” an Indian in Australia, was Winifred Steger. She fell in love with an Indian hawker Ali Ackba Nuby at Mungallala, Queensland, in 1915. She had run away from a violent husband, leaving her children behind. He talked about his family in India and she made him a cup of tea when he called on his hawking rounds. She bought some dress material from him and loved the pretty things he sold from his cart. He gave her a hair ribbon to match the new dress she made. Winifred was still married to her drunken white husband, from whom she had f led some years before, and she worked in a hotel. But Ali spoke to her politely, calling her “mem-sahib” and treating her “with respect.”42 He did not go to the bar with the other men. One night he came and said “[c]ome with me and be my wife” and she found “[f ]or the first time in her life she felt herself truly loved.”43 Such challenges to white masculinity was hard for James Fowler to accept. Although he had heard Lillie and Noab’s story, he did not let the matter rest, rather making it his mission to protect Leontine’s whiteness. At his instigation, the British authorities investigated Leontine’s living situation in India. They found she was living in the home of Gulab Khan, Noab’s brother. It was alleged that a “native wife of Nawab Khan” also lived there. Leontine had been learning Hindustani from a white woman in the next village, who had also become a Muslim. She had run away from white society to marry a “tum tum driver.” It was reported that the child “now talks Hindustani and no distinction is made between her and the children of Gulab Khan.” The child was not being ill-treated, but it was claimed that her “education is being entirely neglected” and, contrary to Noab’s own claim, the family was described as poor and of a “low social order.”44 Lillie and Noab quickly got wind of these investigations into Leontine’s situation in India. Noab’s family wrote to them about the visit of “one officer and



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two constables” to their home in the village near Rawalpindi. Lillie was clearly alarmed to hear of this and that the officials were threatening “trouble if my little girl that I sent to them is not sent back to Australia within the course of three months.” Writing to Fowler, she pleaded, “I do not want to have my little girl sent back to Australia.”45 She and Noab were “trying very hard” to sell their farm in Victoria and once this was done they would travel together to India. She did not want Leontine sent back, but if necessary she would go alone to India to forestall this, but would prefer to wait till her husband could accompany her “because it is so awkward travelling in a strange country by myself.” She assured Fowler that she was satisfied with and well informed about the situation of her daughter, writing “[she] is well looked after there I heard a lot from an English woman who writes all English letters to me she tells me the child is very well cared for.”46 It is not clear whether Fowler, who as an opposition backbencher had no power to make decisions in this case, replied to Lillie. Rather, at Fowler’s instigation, the Department of External Affairs wrote to Lillie, sending on the Indian report about Leontine, but curiously omitting the reference to the allegation about the “native wife.” An offer to repatriate Leontine was made, but Lillie did not respond to the letter.47 Fowler was determined to investigate all the possible angles in this case for upon receipt of the Indian report he asked the Victorian government to investigate Noab and Lillie’s marriage, suggesting that it was bigamous, in order to dispute the legality of Noab having taken Leontine to India. They found that the marriage had been performed according to “the rites of the Mahommedan religion” by Meyer Abdullah in Carlton, Melbourne, in January 1906. It was witnessed by two witnesses, one of whom was Marm Deen, a respected Melbourne businessman, but it may not have been a valid marriage and it was not registered.48 Fowler was determined that no other white child would share Leontine’s experience and introduced an Expatriation Bill as a Private Member’s bill into the Federal Parliament in September 1910. He was careful to point out that the bill was “not intended to interfere with any rights of white parents as regards their children,”49 in fact it would allow the government to intervene and override the authority of a mother, when she was the legal guardian, if she agreed to her child being taken away to Asia, by an Asiatic, and brought up in the way that Leontine was. In a full f lush of white righteousness he said I want to preserve for all White Australians their rights as citizens of this country. I think that, even where parents fail in their duty to their children in this respect, we ought not to allow the ordinary accepted rights and powers of parents over their children to stand in our way.50 While carefully maintaining that both Lillie and Noab had believed their actions were in Leontine’s interests, he contended that she was “dominated by the powerful personality of her husband.”51 The single mother, who had full guardianship rights over her child and was represented as failing to exercise




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this authority in the interests of the nation, should be supplanted by the state, which would look to the interests of the child and the nation: “where parents fail in their duty to their children in this respect, we ought not to allow the ordinary accepted rights and powers of parents over their children to stand in our way.”52 While Fowler was not successful in getting this bill passed and withdrew it when the government undertook to introduce a broader measure, the debates showed that the members of parliament shared Fowler’s sense of outrage that Noab had been free to take Leontine to India. However, it is interesting to note that Fowler was not entirely successful in getting the draconian measures he wanted passed even when the government introduced its own legislation, which was passed at the Emigration Act in November 1910. Throughout these debates many members expressed their concerns in racialized terms, also redolent with the discourses of the child rescue movement. In the second reading speech, introducing his Expatriation Bill, Fowler linked the foundation of the nation, Australian citizenship, and whiteness. The White Australia principle is one to which we are all proud to give our adhesion. We are also proud of the fact that this Parliament was called into existence for the particular purpose of crystallizing the opinion of the people with regard to White Australia legislation . . . We have laid down the principle that only people of white race shall have the full rights and privileges of Australian citizenship . . . It is a very remarkable discovery to me that people, especially young persons, can and are being deprived of their rights as citizens in a way which the law at present affords no remedy.53 This “little Australian girl [had been] permanently deprived of her rights of Australian citizenship . . . [and] apostasized [sic] to Mahommedanism.” Given “the customs, habits and ideas of the people of India” he predicted a terrible fate for Leontine, “something which Australians cannot contemplate with equanimity . . . I want to preserve for all White Australians their rights as citizens of this country.”54 Fowler described, at some length, his efforts to investigate this case, reading into the record long extracts from correspondence around his inquiries. While he maintained that “[t]he alleged stepfather seems to be a fairly superior sort of man; and, from all I can gather, he treated the child very affectionately,” he objected to the autonomy and mobility of the Indian man, “I thought it was somewhat singular that this man, having a native wife in India, should come to this country and marry a white woman without let or hindrance.”55 He raised the allegation of bigamy, the possible illegality of Noab and Lillie’s marriage, and thus challenged Noab’s right to take Leontine to India, but admitted, “[a]t any rate, in the present uncertain state of the law, I cannot ascertain definitely whether Nawab Khan is the legal custodian of the little girl.”56 Egerton Lee Batchelor, the labor minister for external affairs, agreed it would be “much better for the child to be brought back and reared among



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We have every reason to believe that the mother is kind to the girl, and is fit to control her. Inquiry shows that she deliberately chose, without any pressure, so far as can be ascertained, to have her child brought up as a Mahommedan. She has accepted the faith of her husband, and desires that her child shall also adopt it. She declares that she is bringing up the child under her husband’s charge, and she objects to any outside interference.58 Indeed, Lillie’s behavior in agreeing with her husband was that required of a good wife. Batchelor did not wish the state to override Lillie’s rights over her child. In quoting from the letter sent from the Indian authorities after their visit to Noab’s family, he represented Lillie in a good light by choosing to read a section that included information demonstrating that the family had taken some care with Leontine’s transfer to India: “The child had been taught Hindustani by a European woman, now living in a neighboring village of Bahdir Khan.”59 Batchelor contested the view that the Khan family were poor, for the farm in Victoria had now been sold and he contended that Lillie would have about five hundred–six hundred pounds: “and a woman possessing that amount of money in India would not be considered to be in poor circumstances.”60 While he was careful to applaud Fowler for his efforts to uphold the tenets of White Australia, he simply wished “that honourable members shall understand the exact position.” His position was that “it would be difficult for a Minister to prevent a girl being taken from Australia by her mother.”61 He proceeded to wrest control of the debate away from Fowler, by introducing other “cases which are infinitely worse than that now under discussion.” Here he referred to the situation of more than twenty young white Australians, aged between seven and seventeen years, who had been contracted to Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company to perform in India and South East Asia. These children had been maltreated by their white employer. Indeed, in Madras members of the audience had observed this cruelty and someone had kidnapped them to get them away from this employer. 62 In the ensuing court case the “most undesirable conditions” of these children were revealed. The members were horrified by this case, Lyttleton Groom commenting that “[c]hild life is exploited left and right,” and Fenton, “[i]t makes one blush for the race.”63 Leontine’s case paled in comparison, the minister, Batchelor, addressed Fowler, “[t]he honourable member must agree that the cases to which I have referred are of greater importance than the case he has mentioned.”64 Fowler agreed to withdraw his bill upon the assurance that the government would introduce a measure that would contain measures to prevent any recurrence of both Leontine’s situation and that of the white children in Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company. 65



people of her own race” but pointed out that given Lillie’s legal right, it was difficult “to remove a child from the guardianship of its mother.”57 Despite Fowler’s arguments and allegations, Batchelor maintained the right of the mother to make decisions about her child.

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It is significant to note that in this and in subsequent debates, the legislators and the government were chief ly concerned with the expatriation of white children, rather than those of mixed-race children. As Bagnall notes the “Australian government didn’t make any real intervention to stop Anglo-Chinese children or families leaving Australia.”66 Shortly after the withdrawal of Fowler’s bill, the government introduced an Emigration Bill with the intention that “[n]o adult Asiatic shall be permitted to take a child of European race or extraction from Australia without obtaining a permit.”67 Fowler believed it was too weak and could not imagine any circumstance in which a European child could legitimately be taken from Australia by an Asiatic. Reflecting upon Leontine’s experience of traveling with Noab Khan was enough, he claimed, “to make any parent’s blood boil.”68 He wanted a permit system for all children going overseas without a parent, even though this would affect many families, even those of the honourable members. As Sir Robert Best protested, “[t]he honourable member might wish to take away a nephew on a tour.”69 Fowler pursued his agenda that no Asiatic be permitted to take a European child from Australia. Indeed, he also suggested that the government should grasp the nettle about “marriages between white women and Asiatics, which we have too much of in Australia.” 70 While the government proposal would require the granting of a permit before children could go overseas for an employment contract and also when a European child was not “in the care or charge of some adult person of European race or extraction,”71 Fowler was particularly concerned to prevent white children, where the mother was the legal guardian, falling under the sway of Asiatic men. He specifically sought government surveillance and the need to apply for a permit in relation to a child whose “mother . . . [had] formed a connexion, by marriage or otherwise, with a man who is not of any European race.”72 Clearly in Fowler’s view such women could not be trusted to safeguard the white nation. He was not able to get sufficient votes to get this passed and Batchelor reiterated the government’s position: “I cannot consent to allow children to be taken from the custody of their mothers simply because the latter have married Asiatics . . . I doubt whether we have the power to remove a child, simply because the child’s mother is married to an Asiatic.”73 While Fowler garnered little support for his measure there was a good deal of sympathy for the intention behind his proposal. His dogged pursuit of this case and his desire to preserve white child life for Australia was seen as noble. Even when Fowler’s amendment was lost the minister declared that he did “not regard the matter as closed” and asked if there were “any means by which we can meet his [Fowler’s] wishes to any extent.” 74 He accepted further suggestions from Fowler to guide the granting of permits and the final Emigration Act required an Asiatic taking a European child out of the country to gain a permit that might be refused if the minister felt it would be detrimental to the child’s welfare.75 Although the legislation was not as restrictive as Fowler wished, it did provide some protection for the white nation, against deluded white women, “unfortunate creatures” who might betray it and allow an Asiatic stepfather to get control of a “White Australian child” and take it to his own country.76 The



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case of Lillie Khan and her daughter Leontine was an isolated one, but the time spent debating this issue in parliament, and the passing of the Emigration Act of 1910, revealed the anxieties of the legislators about white women and their commitment to the preservation of White Australia.

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Around the time that Fowler introduced his private member’s bill, the Sunday Times ran another article on the case outlining “the terrible fate that has overtaken” Leontine. Noab, who after Fowler’s own inquiry could be seen as generous and affectionate, was once again seen in stereotypical terms and dubbed “Khan the kidnapper.” 77 The newspaper editor claimed he and Fowler had foiled Noab’s plan. This was a bold, but a false claim. In fact, Noab and Lillie sold their farm and left Australia in March 1911 together with their six-weekold son, Serendarz. While the emigration of Leontine, a white child, had caused a great furor, that of her little “half-caste” half-brother was of no importance. His father’s CEDT was annotated to the effect that Serendarz, born in February 1911, was also leaving the country. It seems that Lillie and Noab and their growing band of children lived in India for many years. Noab’s CEDT was extended on four occasions. Lillie wrote the application for him in 1917 and again in 1920: on the latter occasion she wrote that Noab was away “on field service in Aden.” Presumably at this time, Lillie and her children were living with the extended Khan family in the village of Luckorie. With the final renewal in 1923, Noab was informed that he must return to Australia within three years as his CEDT would not be further renewed. It seems that Lillie had died in 1922,78 and when Noab and two of his sons returned to Australia in 1925, they were questioned about Leontine. They reported that she was still in India, looking after another little brother.79 Presumably, by then, Leontine had fulfilled the Sunday Times’ dire prophesy of having changed “from an Australian into an Asiatic.” The ensuing history of her half-brothers, Serendarz (Mansub or Monsoob) and Amir, who returned to Australia with their father, also illustrates the fluidity of apparently essential identities. They settled down to life in Australia.80 They became Australians. In August 1925, Noab reported that they were “in school at Koondrook and are both getting on well.”81 Indeed Amir (Ameer) born in Luckorie in 1916, briefly took up an element of archetypical Australian masculinity when he enlisted in the Australian services in March 1941. His marriage late that year saw perhaps the beginning of a new Australian family.82 His older Australian-born brother, Monsoob (Serendarz), married Margaret Hayes in 1941 and was beginning a family.83 He was farming in the Echuca region. When he died in 1970, he had shed his Indian name, being known as Jack Carne.84 When his Australian sons married, it seems that Noab was back in India. He had tried in the mid-1920s and again in 1936 to get his other sons and also Nour Mahomed, the son of his white stepdaughter Leontine, out to Australia, but it seems they did not or could not come. 85 Perhaps he had to give up on



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getting all his family to Australia. When Noab returned to India in 1937, he was aged sixty-three, describing himself as a widower. 86 It is likely that he did not return to Australia, and it can be imagined that his sons in India and his stepdaughter Leontine and her family looked after him in his declining years.

1. See Diane E Kirkby, “ ‘Honorary Chinese’? Women Citizens, Whiteness and Labour Legislation in the early Australian Commonwealth,” Social Identities 13, no. 6 (2007): 804. 2. See Alexander Yarwood, Asian Migration to Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1964), 5–18; and Ann Curthoys, “Liberalism and Exclusionism: A Prehistory of the White Australia Policy,” in Legacies of White Australia: Race, Culture and Nation, ed. Laksiri Jayasuriya, David Walker, and Jan Gothard (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2003), 8–32. 3. Gwenda Tavan, The Long Slow Death of White Australia (Scribe: Melbourne, 2005), 9–10. 4. Gavin Jones, “White Australia, National Identity and Population Change,” in Legacies of White Australia, 126. 5. Ibid., 113. 6. Yarwood, Asian Migration to Australia, 163. 7. See Andrew Markus, Fear and Hated: Purifying Australia and California, 1850– 1901 (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger, 1979). 8. David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1919 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1999), 128. 9. Ibid., 130. 10. Kate Bagnall, “Across the Threshold: White Women and Chinese Hawkers in the White Colonial Imaginary,” Hecate 28, no. 2 (2002): 29. 11. Ibid., 16. 12. See Margaret Allen, “Otim Singh in White Australia,” in Something Rich and Strange, ed. Nena Bierbaum et al. (Adelaide, Wakefield Press, forthcoming 2009). 13. Penny Edwards and Yuanfang Shen, eds, Lost in the Whitewash: Aboriginal-Asian Encounters in Australia, 1901–2001 (Canberra: Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, 2003). 14. See Allen, “Otim Singh in White Australia.” Christine Stevens has written about the Afghans in Australia, a number of whom married “white women.” Christine Stevens, Tin Mosques & Ghantowns (Melbourne, Outback Books, 1989). 15. Kate Bagnall “ ‘I am Nearly Heartbroken About Him’: Stories of Australian Mothers’ Separation from their ‘Chinese’ Children,” History Australia 1, no. 1 (2003): 30–40. See also Jan Ryan, “ ‘She Lives with a Chinaman’: Orient-ing ‘White’ Women in the courts of Law,” Journal of Australian Studies 60 (1999): 149–59. 16. Bagnall, “I am Nearly Heartbroken About Him.” 17. Dorothy Scott and Shurlee Swain, Confronting Cruelty: Historical Perspectives in Child Protection in Australia (Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2002), 1–59. 18. In Victoria, single mothers gained this in 1883. Shurlee Swain with Renate Howe, Single Mothers and their Children: Disposal, Punishment and Survival in Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 132.



Notes An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Historicizing Whiteness, edited by Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, and Katherine Ellinghaus (Melbourne: RMIT Press, 2007).

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19. “Khan the Kidnapper,” Sunday Times, September 25, 1910, cutting in Department of External Affairs, A1 1911/8557, “Case of alleged abduction of a White Child, by Noab Khan,” National Archives of Australia (NA A). 20. The term Afghan was used rather indiscriminately in Australia at the time to refer to someone from India, or Afghanistan and sometimes from Syria. 21. “A Mysterious Affair White Girl Abducted by an Afghan,” Sunday Times, September 9, 1909, cutting in A1 1911/8557, NA A. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. B. K. de Garis and Geoffrey C. Bolton, “James Mackinnon Fowler,” in Australian Dictionary of Biography, ed. Bede Nairn and Geoffrey Serle, vol. 8 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1981), 564. 27. The girl’s name is spelled in a variety of manners, including Leonline, Leontine, Leon Tine, and Leontene. 28. A1 1911/8557, NA A. 29. James Mackinnon Fowler, “A Piebald Australia Fowler, M. P., Goes to Cohuna,” Sunday Times, November 14, 1909, cutting in A1 1911/8557, NA A. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. See Birth certificate Leonline (sic) Adell Hocking, no. 9011 of 1903, Victorian Births, Deaths and Marriages Registry, Melbourne. 34. Fowler, “A Piebald Australia.” 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. A1 1911/8557, NA A. 39. Fowler, “A Piebald Australia.” 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Hilarie Lindsay, The Washerwoman’s Dream: The Extraordinary Life of Winifred Steger 1882–1981 (Sydney: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 157–9. 43. Ibid., 159–61. 44. A1 1911/8557, NA A. 45. Lillie Khan, Leitchville to J. M. Fowler, March 11, 1910, held in J. M Fowler papers, MS2280/2. National Library of Australia (NLA). 46. Ibid. 47. A1 1911/8557, NA A. 48. Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Debates (CAPD), October 13, 1910, 4531. 49. CAPD, September 1, 1910, 2419. 50. CAPD, October 13, 1910, 4528. 51. Ibid., 4530. 52. Ibid., 4528. 53. Ibid. 54. Curiously this proposed bill also included a clause of “protection for the aboriginal natives of Australia.” Fowler declared “I desire to forbid the taking of an aboriginal




55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85.

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native out of Australia for any reason whatever.” This aspect of the bill and the final legislation is not discussed in this chapter. CAPD, October 13, 1910, 4532. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. A1 1911/8557, NA A. CAPD, October 13, 1910, 4533. Ibid. See Betty Pilgrim, “Tasmanian Talent to the Fore: the legendary ‘Pollard’s Lilliputian Opera Company 1880–1910,’ ” t.s., n.d., held in University of Tasmania Library. CAPD, October 13, 1910, 4535. Ibid., 4536. Ibid., 4538. Bagnall, “I am Nearly Heartbroken About Him,” 38. CAPD, November 10, 1910, 5992. Ibid., 5996. Ibid., 5995. Ibid., 6003. Evidently Fowler was interested in a campaign around this point and his papers contain newspaper cuttings about meetings in both Melbourne and Perth advocating that it be made “a penal offence for white women to consort with or marry Asiatics.” See Age, August 11, 1910, and J. M. Fowler Papers, NLA. CAPD, November 10, 1910, 6000. Ibid. Ibid., 6002. Ibid., 6004. Ibid. Ibid., 6003. “Khan the Kidnapper.” Noah [sic] Khan, request for permission to introduce his son Hukmut Khan to Australia, B13/1926/10107, NA A. A1 1911/8557, NA A. Amir Khan, Indian passenger ex “Mongolia,” B13 1925/7744, NA A. Serendarz (Mansub Khan), Indian passenger ex “Mongolia,” B13 1925/7745, NA A. B13/1926/10107, NA A. B884/V69577 and B883/VX70368 Ameer Khan, service record, NA A. Monsoob Khan and Margaret Hayes, May 21, 1941, Marriage Certificate no. 8907, Victorian Births, Deaths and Marriages Registry, Melbourne. It is interesting to note that Florence Hawkins was listed, incorrectly, as Monsoob’s mother in the certificate and that she was a witness to the marriage. Presumably she had been in a de facto relationship with Noab Khan. Monsoob Khan, Death Certificate no. 10642/70D, Victorian Births, Deaths and Marriages Registry, Melbourne. He sought permission to bring his and Lillie’s son, Hukmut, aged around six years, to Australia to join his older brothers in school. It seems that Leontine had been caring for the child and the plan was that she would accompany him on the voyage.



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While permission for Hukmut to enter was granted, it seems that he did not come to Australia, for Noab made another application for him to enter in 1936. Noab also sought permission for Leontine’s own son, and his grandson, Nour Mahomed, to come to Australia, but this seems to have been refused. Some of these records are confusing and incomplete and names are spelled in a number of ways. Noab sometimes referred to his nephews as his sons, as was customary in the Punjab. See Noab Khan application for a CEDT, B13/1926/10107 and B13/1937/10912, NA A. 86. B13 1937/10912, NA A.







Whiteness and the Imagining/Managing of Colonial Populations



PART IV




“Women’s Objective—A Perfect Race”: Whiteness, Eugenics, and the Articulation of Race Jane Carey

W

riting in 1930 for Herself, a magazine published by Sydney’s women’s organizations with a strongly eugenic focus,1 Irene Longman, Queensland’s first woman member of parliament and sometime president of that state’s National Council of Women, ref lected on the topic “Women’s Objective—A Perfect Race.” She argued that: Many of our most pressing difficulties . . . could be relieved by the scientific and courageous tackling of such problems as mental deficiency and other questions concerning the health of the race . . . We women must seriously consider this terrible problem of the unfit . . . The women of our day and generation are more fitted than those of any other period to continue the great traditions of the race from which we have sprung. 2

Five years later, the quarterly meeting of the Mothers’ Clubs of Victoria passed a resolution wholeheartedly in favor of voluntary sterilization for the physically and mentally “unfit.” Speaking in support of this motion, Mrs. Priestly of Sale observed, “In Australia there was power to make the race we wished. It should not only be a white race, but a race of the best whites.”3 These moments ref lect a wider racial battle that absorbed the middle-class women’s movement at this time—namely, protecting White Australia from the “danger” of racial degeneration through the unchecked breeding of the unfit. Simultaneously, they argued that women’s work was essential to this cause. While exhibiting remarkably little interest in the “Aboriginal problem,” or the



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“peril” of Asian immigration, their (vigorous) campaigning around white racial improvement reveals the racialized identifications that permeated the movement and animated many of its endeavors. As this chapter explores, these activities demonstrate far more than the impact of racial thinking on the women’s movement. They allow us to see how whiteness formed a major field of racial discourse in Australian society at large. Exploring such discussions thus provides significant new insights into the popular race consciousness that sustained Australia’s repressive racial structures. Australia’s “racial” past has been extensively explored in relation to the treatment of Indigenous peoples and the racially restrictive immigration regime of the White Australia Policy.4 But these histories have rarely been linked, in Australia or elsewhere, to the concurrent and pervasive anxieties about white racial degeneracy. Historical scholarship still largely assumes that “race” only encompasses “others.” Similar tendencies are ref lected in the substantial literature on the racial dimensions of the western women’s movement and broader formations of western womanhood. Claire Midgley, Antoinette Burton, and Patricia Grimshaw, among others, have examined how white women were constituted, or constituted themselves, in relation to racial others and how colonial discourses and the “civilizing mission” provided new possibilities for western women’s agency.5 But explicit historical scholarship on women and whiteness remains rare. Indeed, many scholars approach whiteness solely as a masculine property. 6 Angela Woollacott’s and Louise Newman’s work are significant exceptions, but these too focus on how whiteness is revealed via discourses about others. This chapter charts a different trajectory. Exploring the eugenically inspired campaigns of Australia’s largest women’s organization, the National Council of Women, and other women’s groups dedicated to the cause of white racial health, it argues that the racial concerns at work in these groups were not primarily directed toward others. Rather, they revolved almost entirely around anxieties internal to whiteness. These voluminous discussions of whiteness have not, to date, received much attention. While women’s strong involvement in the eugenics movements of Britain and the United States has been noted, the full significance of this in terms of white women’s racial positioning remains under-examined.7 Indeed, eugenics has received surprisingly little attention as a discourse of whiteness. 8 Moreover, it has generally been portrayed as an antifeminist movement that limited white women to their domestic and reproductive roles.9 As I will argue, however, since eugenics was primarily concerned with reproductive protocols and child rearing, this was an area where elite white women could and did assert authority as “mothers of the race.” In fact, it was sometimes claimed as an exclusively feminine project. Such racial discourses were appropriated by elite women in support of their reforming campaigns and to argue for a larger public role for themselves in the settler-colonial project of White Australia. Propagating a large and healthy white population was essential to this endeavor. Such trends were by no means limited to Australia. Australian women were often inspired by their transnational



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networks—observing developments not only back “home” in Britain but also in the United States. They certainly engaged in the “comparative practices” that Ann Stoler argues underwrote “global circuits of knowledge production.”10 Expanding our categorical lens to include these discussions of whiteness adds greatly to our understanding of the extent and nature of racial thinking at work in early-twentieth-century Australia. Recent scholarship on whiteness in Australian history has so far concentrated on the realms of politics, science, and medicine.11 Work on race in other contexts, however, has increasingly explored the more “everyday” operations of race.12 Ann Stoler has particularly alerted us to the importance of “intimate domains” as “critical sites for the consolidation of colonial power.” Taking intimate domains seriously reveals the significance of, for example, “Orphanage records, housekeeping manuals, treatises on domestic hygiene, school medical reports, debates over breast-feeding, nurseries, and kindergartens,” and thus, more broadly, how “racialized thinking . . . underwrote the most benevolent reforms.”13 While campaigns against the “menace of mental deficiency” might not be classified as benevolent, they certainly reveal how racial thinking inspired reforming agendas and supported white women’s agency.

Protecting White Australia: The Threat from Within These tendencies are brought into sharp relief in the activities of the Australian National Council of Women—an umbrella organization that encompassed hundreds of women’s groups across the continent. From early in the twentieth century, this group identified “mental deficiency” as one of the greatest threats to the future of the white race and one in urgent need of attention. They strongly advocated segregating such unfit bodies into “farm colonies” or other institutions, and promoted birth control and sterilization to further prevent their propagation. Discussions of mental deficiency featured prominently at all of the Council’s national conferences throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The 1926 conference resolved to “impress on both Federal and State governments the urgent need for them to unite in taking in taking uniform action on the matter of mental deficiency.”14 At the 1929 meeting, during a special evening forum on the issue, Edith Cowan, Australia’s first woman member of parliament, advocated the compulsory removal of “defective” children from their parents, while at the 1932 conference, Mrs. Cumbrae Stewart of Queensland observed that “mental deficients were increasing. They should be segregated altogether, and most of her committee agreed that sterilization should be brought in.”15 A resolution in support of segregation was passed in 1936, with Lillie Goodisson of the Racial Hygiene Association of New South Wales giving a long speech on the subject, and the protracted discussion of sterilization at the 1935 conference emphasized the desirability of “preventing them coming into the world.”16 Indeed, throughout the 1930s the Council went to considerable efforts to have the issues of segregation and sterilization placed on the agenda of the International Council of Women (ICW), so that a global inquiry into the efficacy of this “treatment” could be carried out.



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This national activity ref lected and reinforced local initiatives by women’s groups across the country. The New South Wales branch of the National Council of Women first took up this issue in 1899, hosting several lectures on “special schools” for “children of deficient intellect.”17 Following their recently successful campaign for the establishment of an “epileptic colony,” the Victorian Council’s 1906 conference included two papers in this issue.18 As one delegate reported on these presentations: The facts . . . were most serious and, to any thoughtful mind, threatened the future of our race. The remedy proposed by each speaker was perpetual segregation, if possible from early childhood—in happy surroundings in farm colonies . . . [where] they may be kept happy by employment and amusement and be self-supporting to a great extent. Thus, the delegate expressed the hope that in such institutions “the evil seeds inherited may die from inanition and surroundings uncongenial.”19 But it was in the interwar years that women’s activism in this sphere reached its peak. Numerous special committees and indeed whole separate organizations were formed to tackle the “menace” of mental deficiency. In 1919 Dr. Grace Boelke, formerly a school medical inspector, convened one such committee for the National Council of Women of New South Wales. She argued that this issue “should rightly” be taken up by the Council, so that it “might be credited with accomplishing a great national work.” 20 The Victorian Council similarly formed a special committee in 1923 to consider the “control and treatment” of the “mentally unfit.” Throughout the 1920s Dr. Jean Greig, head of the Victorian School Medical Inspection Service, used the Council as vehicle to campaign for “residential colonies” where mentally defective children could be “segregated and protected for the rest of their lives both from themselves and from the rest of the community.” 21 From the early 1920s, the Queensland Council, under the inf luence of Irene Longman, hosted frequent lectures where the “importance of preventing the propagation amongst the mentally deficient” was stressed. 22 This interest evolved into an intense lobbying campaign; they enlisted the support of doctors, teachers, and administrators in numerous public meetings and deputations. Frustrated at the lack of progress being made, the Council, again spurred by Longman, decided to create an independent organization to address the problem. The Association for the Welfare of Mental Deficients was formed in December 1932 at a meeting attended by about fifty people, mainly representatives of women’s groups, but also women doctors and “social workers,” and a handful of male doctors and academics. Irene Longman was elected president. 23 Their main objective was to establish home where “the feebleminded . . . would be under observation and control,” administered either by the government or themselves. 24



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in the interests of the individual and the race it must be seen to that there were not more mentally deficients born than they as a community could help. The Association holds no sentimental objection to sterilization on the grounds of interference with the liberty of the subject. They also advocated legislation to prevent the unfit from marrying. As Longman further explained at this meeting: “All children have the right to be well-born . . . No mental defective can make a good parent, and should not be allowed to have offspring. This is in the interest of both individual and the race.” 25 Such extreme measures were simply justified by racial imperatives. Longman also sought to further this cause during her term in the Queensland parliament from 1929 to 1932. Speaking on the Supply Bill in 1929, she agued the need for special institutions for mentally deficient children: Looking through the different reports that come before us of late I see that mention is continually made of difficulties in regard to the subnormal children in our midst . . . This is a most important question. As a matter of fact I think it is one of the most important questions facing our state. Recounting the National Council of Women’s campaigns for legislation on this issue, she strongly urged that controls on marriage be introduced. Drawing on her reading of American eugenic literature, she reminded the honorable members of “the well-known Jukes and Kallikat families,” who produced a long line “of mental deficients, of criminals, of prostitutes and . . . put the country to considerable expense in caring for them. It is unquestionable that we want to prevent that sort of thing.” 26

Eugenics, Racialization, and White Women’s Agency The activities of the National Councils of Women demonstrate the extent to which eugenic thinking and concerns about whiteness pervaded the Australian women’s movement. Such interests were not confined to the generally conservatives groups that comprised the Council. The threat of mentally deficiency was an issue that united white Australian women across the political spectrum. The Feminist Club of Sydney, for example, listed the “Segregation of the Unfit” on its primary platform of objectives and discussed this problem frequently through the 1920s and 1930s. 27 Indeed, its president Milicent Preston Stanley, the first woman elected to the New South Wales parliament, boasted that the Club had “pioneered” efforts for legislation on this issue. 28 The Australian Federation of Women Voters, an organization founded as a more progressive alternative to the



The Association openly supported sterilization policies. As Longman explained at the Annual General Meeting in 1934:

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National Council of Women, similarly devoted considerable attention to the issue. Particularly at their 1933 conference, when “a public meeting one evening concerned itself entirely with the question of the further multiplication of the unfit.” 29 The Tasmanian vice president of this group, Edith Waterworth, was a confirmed eugenicist, who had campaigned vigorously in support of that state’s Mental Deficiency Act of 1920. In 1933 she argued that the Federation should: “do all within their power bring before those in authority the burning question of the physically and mentally unfit and deficient, and the vital need for the prevention of their multiplication by segregation and sterilisation.”30 But it is the Racial Hygiene Association of New South Wales, forerunner of the present-day Family Planning Association, that provides perhaps the most striking Australian example of the links between women’s groups and eugenics in this period. As the country’s largest and most enduring eugenic organization, it represents the high point both for Australian eugenics and for women’s involvement in the movement. Formed in Sydney in 1926 at a meeting organized by the Women’s League, the overwhelming majority of its active members were women. As a report of an early meeting observed, “It was noticeable that it was nearly all women who were bent on improving the race. Men were conspicuously absent.”31 The Association was led at first by its enigmatic copresident Ruby Rich, and devoted secretary Lillie Goodisson, a trained nurse who was the mainstay of the organization until ill-health forced her to resign in 1941.32 The well-known eugenicist and sex education campaigner Marian Piddington was also initially a prominent figure, although she soon fell out with the Association. In 1927 both Jessie Street, later president of the United Associations of Women, and Millicent Preston Stanley became vice presidents of the Appeal committee, and its executive included many other leading figures of the women’s movement. The Association’s three objectives were to campaign for sex education, the “prevention and eradication of venereal diseases,” and the “improvement of the Race on Eugenic Principles,” although this last aim was soon changed to the less ambitious “Education of the Community on Eugenic Principles.”33 Early activities included film screenings accompanied by lectures providing sex education along with dire warnings about the racial dangers of VD. By 1927 it was claimed that numbers attending such meetings had grown from fifty to over five hundred.34 Numerous deputations were organized and sex education classes were held, initially run by Piddington. In 1933 they opened Australia’s first birth control clinic—the activity for which they are largely remembered. Ruby Rich continually reiterated the need for women’s involvement in this cause. As she ref lected in an interview in 1927: Is this campaign to combat venereal diseases and for sex education a woman’s work, or is it not a burden more fitting for the men to shoulder? I claim that it is a co-operative responsibility . . . women have a right to help, have a right to rise up and do something, however small it may be, to clear our country of this scourge.35



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The following year she observed that, despite criticisms she had received, “I am convinced that it is a woman’s job.”36 Attempts were made to attract men into the movement as well. One early meeting resolved that the presidents should, “call on some other men, in order to get them interested.”37 In an obvious effort to consolidate their status and authority, many prominent men, and some women were invited to join their advisory board, and a wide array of doctors, academics, public servants, and clergy accepted.38 However, it was largely women who filled the executive committee, which conducted most of the actual work of the Association, and who attended meetings, except for high-profile special events. Only one man turned up to the first annual meeting in 1927.39 By contrast, the Association enjoyed the strong support of a small group of women doctors, including Kate Ardill Brice and Frances Harding, who largely instigated the opening of the birth control clinic. Indeed, women were perceived as necessary for this: it was definitely decided that “this work should be done by a Woman Doctor.”40 Thus an overview of the Association’s activities up to 1938 observed, “Though this organisation is composed of men and women, which is the ideal co-operation, yet I am afraid our women have done most of the work.”41 Apparently saving the race fell squarely into the domain of women’s work. The eugenic orientation of the organization was clear from the outset. Its initial name was in fact the Race Improvement Society. While some scholars have emphasized the Association’s support for birth control as a feminist project,42 all of its endeavors were in fact eugenically inspired. A pamphlet outlining the Association’s activities, produced in the mid-1930s, made this clear. Their sex education lectures were described as emphasizing “the responsibility of the Community and the individual for preserving and improving the quality of future generations.” The birth control clinic was specifically listed under “eugenic” work and it was stated that this offered “advice [by] qualified medical women . . . for the improvement of the Race, by suitable mating, by clean living, and by preventing the propagation of the Mentally Unfit.”43 The Association did not advocate indiscriminate use of contraceptives. Instead, it was supported largely on the grounds that it would help stop the “promiscuous breeding of degenerate children.”44 Contraception was only supported where pregnancy was likely to produce dysgenic (that is racially damaging) results, which they defined as including too many children too close together. In response to concerns about the declining birth rate, the Association argued that “we want quality,” “Not people who are unfit!”45 The Marriage Advisory Centre they established in 1936 to provide premarital medical examinations had even clearer eugenic motives. As Ruby Rich’s husband, Dr. Maurice Schalit, explained, the Centre aimed “not only to find out that the candidates are bodily fit to marry, but also . . . that the candidates are also mentally and morally healthy.” They discouraged marriage “between those whose mental and hereditary history is tainted with the same strain . . . in the interest of future offspring (children, if you prefer the word).”46 From its earliest days the Association campaigned vigorously for legislation to make such examinations compulsory. Mental deficiency was also a key concern and soon began to take precedence, dominating its agenda. The Association campaigned strongly for the




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establishment of “Farm Colonies” as well as openly advocating sterilization policies. This focus was particularly evident at the three-day national congress hosted by the Association in 1929, where several sessions were devoted to the “feebleminded.” Dr. Lorna Hodgkinson, psychologist, Harvard graduate, and superintendent of the education of mental defectives in New South Wales from 1922 to 1926, warned that “mental defectives are breeding freely and bringing . . . all the evils which are associated with mental degeneracy, such as crime, pauperism, venereal disease.” The problem, she argued, demanded “permanent care and control in properly established working colonies.”47 The closing session was devoted to “Eugenics” and “Sterilization,” after which seven pro-sterilization resolutions were passed unanimously. Closing the conference, Lillie Goodisson thus observed, “I know we are going to do great things to help build up a healthy virile race in Australia.”48 That all of these efforts were specifically directed at White Australia was made explicitly clear at the launch of the Association’s appeal for funds in June 1927. At this high-profile event, Judge Walter Bevan addressed the audience in the following terms: “Are we going to have a White Australia; not merely white in skin, but white at heart—a really good, clean Australia?” Achieving this, he argued, would require radical interventions: “There should be, from cradle to the grave . . . repeated mental tests on everyone in the community,” the results of which should become “the foundation of future reforms along eugenic lines.”49 Amidst all this racial fervor, however, there was remarkably little discussion of the “Aboriginal problem” of the day. Only two meetings were held on this issue. This neglect might be considered surprising, given this is widely understood as the most pressing racial concern of the period. It is also surprising given the growing promotion of “biological absorption” as the solution to this problem.50 But this racial movement was concerned solely with white Australians. There was greater discussion of the “Aboriginal problem” in the broader women’s movement. Both the National Council of Women and the Australian Federation of Women Voters supported various initiatives relating to Aboriginal welfare, particularly for Aboriginal women, including the appointment of white women “protectors.” While some scholarship has thus characterized the women’s movement of this period as “pro-Aboriginal,”51 other work has pointed to how this activism too was infused with racialized thinking.52 Certainly this was evident in the National Council of Women’s discussions of such issues, which largely reflected the desire to prevent “miscegenation” by banning contact between white men and Aboriginal women. The 1926 national conference passed four motions urging restrictions on the marriages and movements of Aboriginal peoples toward this end.53 While at the 1934 Conference, newspaper reports that the Commonwealth government was arranging for “octoroon girls” from the north to be sent to Victoria for adoption “so that they might grow up in decent surroundings and be able to marry white men” sparked a fierce and prolonged debate. Some argued that it would be a “most dangerous thing” and



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that “it would be much better to sterilize them.”54 In this context, the women’s movement support of measures for the “welfare” and “protection” of Aboriginal women must be read with caution. Moreover, despite the considerable scholarly interest that these discussions have attracted, they did not in fact absorb a great deal of attention within the women’s movement viewed as a whole. Far more time and energy was devoted to the problem of mental deficiency and other issues relating to white racial health. These were evidently seen as far more pressing concerns. The women who took up this cause so passionately clearly felt there was important work for them to do in the salvation of their own race.

A Transnational Mission Such beliefs about the progressive racial potential of white womanhood did not emerge in isolation, entirely within the confines of Australia’s national boundaries. Indeed, such conceptions were largely generated within transnational spaces, such as international conferences and exhibitions, and through international networks and exchanges at an individual level. Those involved in the cause of mental deficiency drew heavily and explicitly on the transnational circulation of literature—books, newspapers, government inquiries, publications from international organizations, medical and scientific reports, journals, and conference proceedings had a critical inf luence. Australian activists took close note of developments in Britain, from the 1908 Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded, to the International Eugenics Congress of 1912, to the various governmental and scientific inquiries on this issue in the 1920s and 1930s. The 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, which enshrined the “farm colony” solution as the best means of combating this problem, was particularly inf luential.55 Marian Piddington’s eugenic interests began with her attendance at the 1912 Eugenics Congress in London.56 Others too consumed the Eugenics Review, the journal produced by London’s Eugenics Society from 1909, which contained a strong emphasis on the hereditary menace of mental deficiency. Local feminist eugenicists, again particularly Piddington, were also inf luenced by the eugenic writing of Marie Stopes, Britain’s most well-known birth control campaigner. Stopes viewed birth control as an essential tool for combating racial degeneracy, as was clearly indicated by the name she gave to her Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress, founded in 1921.57 But those involved in campaigns for white racial salvation looked almost as often to the United States as they did to Britain for inspiration and validation. They took note of American eugenics publications, particularly the “eugenic family studies,” of which the Jukes were the most infamous, and the sterilization policies, premarital medical certificates, and the farm colony systems being implemented across the country. The ICW and other international women’s organizations similarly functioned as a conduit for the exchange of such ideas.58 Australian women’s already prominent interest in mental deficiency was given further impetus by the resolution passed at the ICW’s 1925 conference in Washington urging all




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member councils to “take an active interest in the care and protection of abnormal children, and to report on the measures taken in this direction in the various countries.” The international survey the ICW conducted in 1926 specifically inquired about the existence of sterilization legislation, prompting the Australian calls for a global study of this policy.59 Australian women were certainly not alone in their strong interest in eugenics. Indeed, they mirrored trends in other Western countries in this respect. Women played a significant role in the American Eugenics Society and comprised the overwhelming majority of the field workers trained by the Eugenics Records Office between 1910 and 1924. 60 Women were even more prominent in London’s Eugenics Society. Formed in 1907, largely due to the efforts of the indefatigable Sybil Gotto, the majority of the Society’s members up to 1913 were women and the Eugenics Review was initially produced by the Women’s Printing Society. Gotto became its foundation honorary secretary, a position she held until 1920, and other prominent members included Emily Lutyens and Marie Stopes. Although female membership later declined, to around a third by 1938, the Society still depended heavily on women’s labor, both paid and voluntary, to support its activities. 61 However, it was the British Social Hygiene Council (the other major eugenic organization founded largely by Sybil Gotto 62) that had the most direct links to Australian women’s organizations. The Racial Hygiene Association was affiliated with the Council, often drawing their ideas directly from this organization’s work, and, along with other Australian women’s groups, was frequently represented at the Council’s annual meetings and international conferences. Established in 1914 as the National Council for Combating Venereal Diseases, with its change of name the Council developed a broader agenda. The Eugenics Society was closely involved with the organization, initially providing it with accommodation and most of its personnel. And like the Eugenics Society, the Social Hygiene Council enjoyed strong links with women’s groups, women were well represented in its membership and Executive Committee, the majority of its lecturers were women (mostly doctors and scientists, including Mary Scharlieb, Winnifred Cullis, and Maude Royden), and women social workers were a key target audience for their lectures. 63 Writing on “Women’s Part in the Campaign Against Venereal Disease” in the 1917 Annual Report, Mrs. Creighton, a member of the Executive Committee, argued that: “There is a special work for women to do, as there has been a special work done by women in the past in this connection . . . it is most pre-eminently our duty.”64 The Council, however, did not just promote this womanly duty at a local or even national level. They encouraged such activism across the Empire. In 1920, with government funding, they organized three Commissions to travel to the colonies, each consisting of “one medical man,” who would provide instruction on diagnosis and treatment, and a woman “lay Commissioner,” who would “take the educational and propaganda equipment.” Sybil Gotto was appointed to one of these Commissions. 65 From 1924 they held a series of Imperial Social Hygiene Conferences, and established a journal, Health



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and Empire, signifying its shift to an imperial agenda. The conferences particularly provided a forum for promoting a greater role for women in racial work. The fifth Imperial Conference, held in 1931, included a special session on “British Women and Social Services Overseas,” which urged the need for women to play a greater role in the life of the colonies. Countess Claire Buxton, in her opening comments, noted: “white women have an enormous responsibility, when they live in native territories or in any other part of the Empire . . . the future civilisation of native races largely rests with us,” while Lady Denham, speaking on the “The Position of Women in the Empire,” argued that “the inf luence of women” was one of the Empire’s greatest assets, and that “there is work, and important work—for every white woman in the Empire to do.”66 In her analysis of the “imperial activism” of British women’s groups, Clare Midgley has observed that such activism “presented . . . women’s work in ways which emphasised female imperial agency and encouraged middle-class women to broaden their vision of appropriate feminine roles beyond the domestic.”67 The British Social Hygiene Council certainly illustrates this point. In contrast to the Eugenics Society, whose major interests were fixed on issues of white/British racial health, the Social Hygiene Council defined its racial mission in relation to “others” as well. Australian women too could identify with this broader imperial project. As Edith Waterworth, representing the Australian Federation of Women Voters at the 1936 Imperial Hygiene Conference, argued: “The young women of the British Empire should be brought to realize that the health, the well-being, in fact the whole future of the race was in their hands.”68 At home, however, Australian women largely sought to harness such ideas for specifically nationalistic purposes. And the particular context of White Australia shaped how they resonated with Australian womanhood and how these concepts were deployed.

Conclusion Discussing Australian medical and scientific conceptions of whiteness, Warwick Anderson has observed: for most doctors, biologists and anthropologists, whiteness was not an empty category, defined only in opposition to other races: rather it was filled with f lexible physical, cultural and political significance. But we have became so accustomed to this assemblage . . . that we may fail to recognize the work it took to put it together, to make it look normal. 69 This chapter has examined how elite women too sought to contribute to the making and maintenance of whiteness, and through this to create themselves. In undertaking this responsibility, they spoke to some of the major anxieties about race in Australia and across the western world. These anxieties produced vast new fields of work—particularly in reforming the working classes who were viewed as the major source of racial decay. Women, both as activists and increasingly as professional workers, clearly believed they had a significant role




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to play here. Their intense interest in the issue of mental deficiency is only really explicable if we understand this as an extension of the wider racial project the women’s movement had set for itself. The activities I have discussed here represent just a few among many through which elite women sought to enhance their own status by taking up the cause of white racial advancement and claiming particular responsibilities in this sphere. Campaigns for kindergartens, school medical inspection, public health, and even general hygiene equally emphasized the importance of white racial improvement for national progress. Such interests f lowed naturally from the racialized foundations of western feminism, based as it was around notions of progress, civilization, and capacities that only white women were seen to possess. The very term “new woman” relied on evolutionary ideals. White anxieties regarding Indigenous people were certainly also circulating, particularly among those charged with administering “native” policies. And, as Katherine Ellinghaus argues in chapter sixteen, it is imperative that we the recover the devastating impact of the racial structures they produced. Ultimately, however, as Liz Conor and Angela Wanhalla also demonstrate in chapters fourteen and fifteen, such policies revolved around protecting white racial status and imaginings of the ideal settler population. My purpose here has been to track this broader field of racial discourse and the regimes of governance and identifications it promoted. Looking only at their slight attention to Aboriginal issues, it would be easy to conclude that race was not a major concern for the Australian women’s movement. Once their voluminous discussions of whiteness are included within the frame, however, the strength of their racialized identifications is sharply revealed. In taking up this cause they helped to create the “everyday” race consciousness that allowed Australia’s oppressive racial regimes to f lourish. These insights are thus more broadly revealing. When white Australians generally spoke of racial problems in this period they were most likely to be referring to issues of white racial health. While attention to the Aboriginal problem was relatively limited, anxieties about white degeneracy abounded in numerous settings. For many, the greatest threat to White Australia was from within. The desire to shore up the imperial project through propagating a vigorous white race was most explicitly articulated in settler colonies and, I suggest, played a highly significant role in the making of racial categories in these contexts.70 While clearly situated within commonplace understandings of racial hierarchy, by the early twentieth century at least, articulations of whiteness did not necessarily rely on the direct deployment of others. The concept of a racial “other” required a conception of a racial self. Founded as it was on the White Australia Policy in 1901, the “whiteness” of Australian national identity was continually and explicitly proclaimed. Australia is thus perhaps exemplary of these transnational trends. Since the 1970s historians have looked largely, if not exclusively, to white western constructions of others as the key site for the elaboration of racial ideas. What I wish to suggest is that such an approach is not always sufficient. The relational nature of race, which Said so acutely alerted us to, may not necessarily



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Notes See, e.g., “The Eugenics Number,” Herself, April 1929. Herself, July 1930; emphasis in original. Argus, September 10, 1935. Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia (Melbourne: Penguin, 1982); Bain Attwood, Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005); Andrew Markus, Australian Race Relations, 1788–1993 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994); David Walker, Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850–1939 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1999); Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia (Melbourne: Scribe Publications, 2005). 5. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Clare Midgley, ed., Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); and Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865 (London: Routledge, 2007); Patricia Grimshaw, “Settler Anxieties, Indigenous Peoples, and Women’s Suffrage in the Colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii, 1888 to 1902,” Pacific Historical Review 69, no. 4 (2000): 553–72. 6. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilisation: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Leigh Boucher, “Masculinity Gone Mad: Settler Colonialism, Masculinity and the White Body in Late Nineteenth Century Victoria,” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 13 (2004): 51–67; and “Unsettled Men: Settler Colonialism, Whiteness and Masculinity in Victoria, 1851–1886,” PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2005; Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002); and Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Marilyn Lake, “White Man’s Country: The Trans-National History of a National Project,” Australian Historical Studies 35, no. 122 (2003): 346–63; Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008). Ruth Frankenburg’s foundational observations about the importance of whiteness for contemporary American women have not significantly inf luenced historical work: White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 7. Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885–1914 (London: Penguin, 1993), 222–49; Amy Bix, “Experiences and Voices of Eugenics Field-workers: ‘Women’s Work’ in Biology,” Social Studies of Science 27, no. 4 (1997): 625–68; George Robb, “Eugenics, Spirituality, and Sex Differentiation in Edwardian England: The Case of Frances Swiney,” Journal of Women’s History 10,

1. 2. 3. 4.



mean that racialized beliefs are only articulated in explicit discussions of others. Anxieties internal to whiteness were also present and, in certain times and places, formed the major field of racial discourse. They represent a significant, but neglected, realm of racialization. Only by viewing these discourses together, within a single analytic frame, can we comprehend the pervasive reach of race.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

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no. 3 (1998): 97–117; Ann Allen “Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain, 1900–1940: A Comparative Perspective,” German Studies Review 23, no. 3 (2000): 477–505; Angela Wanhalla, “ ’To Better the Breed of Men’: Women and Eugenics in New Zealand, 1900–1935,” Women’s History Review 16, no. 2 (2007): 163–82. Some general histories of eugenics brief ly note women’s strong presence: Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1995[1985]), 64; Frank Dikotter, “Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics,” American Historical Review 103, no. 2 (1998): 467–78. Matt Wray and Warwick Anderson have covered some of this territory: Anderson, Cultivation of Whiteness, 153–63; Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” History Workshop Journal 5 (1978): 9–65; Carol Bacchi, “Evolution, Eugenics and Women: The Impact of Scientific Theories on Attitudes towards Women, 1870–1920,” in Women, Class and History: Feminist Perspectives on Australia, 1788–1978, ed. Elizabeth Windschuttle (Melbourne: Fontana, 1980): 132–56; Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Ann Laura Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 6. Lake and Reynolds’s work charts “the spread of ‘whiteness’ as a transnational form of racial identification,” 3. See the work of Anderson, Lake, and Boucher cited in note 6 earlier. Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, eds, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 8. Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire,” 4, 5, and 7. Minutes, July 23, 1926, National Council of Women of Australia Records (hereafter NCW of Australia Minutes), MS 7583, box 12, Australian Manuscripts Collection, National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA), Canberra. NCW of Australia Minutes, September 19, 1929 and November 22–25, 1932, boxes 11 and 12. NCW of Australia Minutes, September 17, 1936, and August 28, 1935, box 11. Minutes, November 30, 1899, National Council of Women of New South Wales Records, MLMSS 3739 (hereafter NCW of NSW Minutes), box MLK 3009, Mitchell Library, Sydney. See also May 25, 1899, and March 29, 1900. Flier for 1906 Congress, contained in the Minutes of the National Council of Women of Victoria (hereafter NCW of Victoria Minutes), NLA. Report on the Victorian Congress by Mrs. Hugh Dixson, NCW of NSW Minutes, November 8, 1906. NCW of NSW Minutes, September 25, 1919. NCW of Victoria Minutes, March 22 and August 28, 1923. Minutes, April 10, 1922, National Council of Women of Queensland Records, Fryer Library, University of Queensland, Brisbane. See also February 28, 1921, and March 11, 1921. Minutes, December 9, 1932, Association for the Welfare of Mental Deficients (hereafter AWMD Minutes) contained in the National Council of Women of Queensland Records. AWMD Minutes, May 8, 1933. Clipping denoted Courier Mail, next to AWMD Minutes, March 19, 1934.



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26. Queensland Parliamentary Debates (Brisbane: Government Printer, 1929), 1045. 27. Pamphlet contained in Executive Minute Book for 1929–32, Feminist Club of New South Wales Records, MLMSS 1703, Box K21797, Mitchell Library, Sydney. 28. Telegraph, July 25, 1933. 29. Australian Women’s Weekly, June 10, 1933. See also reports of various conferences contained in the Federation’s journal the Dawn. 30. Dawn, May 17, 1933. Grant Rodwell, “ ‘If the feeble-minded are to be preserved . . . ’Special Education and Eugenics in Tasmania 1900–1930,” Issues in Educational Research 8, no. 2 (1998): 131–56. 31. News clipping dated June 24, 1926, in the Racial Hygiene Association Minute Book (hereafter RHA Minutes), Family Planning Association Records, MLMSS 3838, Mitchell Library, Sydney, with entry for June 23, 1926. 32. Meredith Foley, “Lillie Goodisson,” in 200 Australian Women: A Redress Anthology, ed. Heather Radi (Sydney: Women’s Redress Press Inc., 1988), 72–3. 33. RHA Minutes, July 11, 1927. 34. Press release, “Wanted—A Real White Australia!,” Ruby Rich Papers, MS 7493, folder 427, NLA, Canberra (hereafter Rich Papers). Attendance at one film was so large that people were turned away: Sydney Morning Herald, February 21, 1927. 35. Sunday News, September 4, 1927. 36. Sydney Morning Herald, February 28, 1928. 37. RHA Minutes, May 25, 1926. 38. Including Professor Harvey Sutton of the University of Sydney. 39. RHA Minutes, July 11, 1927. 40. RHA Minutes, November 7, 1932. See also RHA Minutes, Advisory Board, November 9, 1932. 41. “Resume of Racial Hygiene Association Work,” circa 1938, Family Planning Association Records. 42. Diana Wyndham, “Striving for National Fitness: Eugenics in Australia, 1910s to 1930s,” PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1997, 13 and 83; Ann Curthoys, “Eugenics, Feminism and Birth Control: The Case of Marion Piddington,” Hecate 15, no. 1 (1989): 73–89. 43. Pamphlet, “What Racial Hygiene Means!!,” Rich Papers, folder 423. 44. RHA Minutes, March 18, 1930. See also pamphlet “Birth Control Clinic,” Rich Papers, folder 423. 45. RHA, “Annual Report, 1940–41,” Rich Papers, folder 423. 46. Typescript signed “M. A. Schalit, 1938,” Rich Papers, folder 425. 47. Lorna Hodgkinson, “Mental Deficiency as a Problem of Racial Hygiene,” in Australian Racial Hygiene Congress, 1929: Report (Sydney: Racial Hygiene Association, 1929), 35–6. See also Alison Turtle, “The Short-lived Appointment of the First New South Wales Government Psychologist, Lorna Hodgkinson,” Australian Historical Studies 25, no. 101 (1993): 569–88. 48. Australian Racial Hygiene Congress, 65 and 67–8. 49. Sydney Morning Herald, June 23, 1927. See also the report of this meeting and various news clippings in RHA Minutes, June 22, 1927. 50. On “biological absorption” see Russell McGregor, “ ’Breed out the colour’: Or the Importance of being White,” Australian Historical Studies 33, no. 120 (2002): 286–302; Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London/New York: Cassell, 1999); Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and




51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

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Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887–1937 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006); and Liz Conor, chapter fourteen in this collection. Fiona Paisley, Loving Protection? Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights, 1919–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000); Marilyn Lake, “Women and ‘Whiteness’,” Australian Historical Studies 32, no. 117 (2002): 338–42; and “Childbearers as Rights-Bearers: Feminist Discourse on the Rights of Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Mothers in Australia, 1920–1950,” Women’s History Review 8, no. 2 (1999): 347–63. Alison Holland, “The Campaign for Women Protectors: Gender, Race and Frontier between the Wars,” Australian Feminist Studies 16, no. 34 (2001): 27–42; and “Wives and Mothers Like Ourselves: Exploring White Women’s Intervention in the Politics of Race, 1920s–1940s,” Australian Historical Studies 32, no. 117 (2001): 292–310; Victoria Haskins, My One Bright Spot (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). NCW of Australia Minutes, July 26, 1926, box 12. NCW of Australia Minutes, November 21, 1934, box 11. Mathew Thomson, The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy, and Social Policy in Britain C.1870–1959 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). Australian Highway 3, no. 10 (1921): 11–12. See the extensive correspondence between Stopes and Piddington in the Marie Stopes Papers, PP/MCS, file A. 307, Wellcome Institute Library, and Marie Stopes Papers, series 9, add. 58572, British Library, London. Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women, The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Report on the Quinquennial Meeting. Washington 1925 (London: International Council of Women, 1926), 23; Biennial Report, 1925–27 (London: International Council of Women, 1927), 327, 388–91; Report on the Quinquennial Meeting. Vienna, 1930 (Tarland: International Council of Women, 1930), 643. Bix, 625–68. For women’s extensive role in this group, see The Eugenics Review (1909–40) and its annual reports. Statistics of women’s membership up to 1913 are from Bland, Banishing the Beast, 356, ff. 29, and for 1914 and 1938 from Ian Brown, “Who were the Eugenicists? A Study of the Formation of an Early Twentieth-century Pressure Group,” History of Education 17, no. 4 (1988): 305–7. Sybil Neville-Rolfe, Social Biology and Welfare (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1949), 11–48. British Social Hygiene Council Records, SA/BSH, Wellcome Institute Library, London; Health and Empire (1926–40). Second Annual Report of the National Council for Combating Venereal Disease (London: 1917), 19–29. Fifth Annual Report of the National Council for Combating Venereal Disease (London: 1920), 27; Neville-Rolfe, Social Biology and Welfare, 33–5. Proceedings of the Fifth Imperial Social Hygiene Congress (London: British Social Hygiene Council, 1932), 171–2. Midgley, “Bringing the Empire Home: Women Activists in Imperial Britain,” in Hall and Rose (eds), At Home with the Empire, 233. Health and Empire 11, no. 3 (1936): 191. Anderson, Cultivation of Whiteness, 3. I am drawing here on Stoler’s observation that race was “a central colonial sorting technique” and Wolfe on the “organizing grammar of race” underpinning settler colonialism (Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire,” 2; Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 387).



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“Born and Nurtured in Darkest Ignorance”: White Imaginings of Aboriginal Maternity Liz Conor

I wish to advise readers that in some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities, seeing photographic images of deceased persons may cause sadness or distress, particularly to the relatives of those people. Every effort has been made to contact the descendents of the people shown in these images, where they were able to be identified.

I

n 1893 the U.S. company Quaker Oats trademarked Aunt Jemima, a matronly Southern slave figure, for American packaged breakfast products.1 This domesticated “Mammy” figure had derived from a minstrel song of that name and persisted through the popular 1940s radio series The Beulah Show. Across the Pacific, in 1943, the widely read Australian journalist Ernestine Hill described a group of Aboriginal women at Horseshoe Bend on the Northern Territory Finke river as “a bevy of fat, smiling lubras, like American mammies in their bright frocks and kerchiefs.” 2 Whether any of these women actually were mothers was beside the point. In perhaps the first and last likening of Australian aboriginal women to the American Mammy figure, Hill had hoped to evoke their servility in this quaint spectacle of outback domesticity, but she had also reassigned the ostensibly innate maternity of the native woman to white service. The maternity of the starch-aproned and neatly turbaned figure of the slave Mammy was embodied, not in her relationship with her own children, but in her domestic service to white women and her jovial nurturing of their children. In



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Australia, the wide-scale appropriation of Aboriginal girls and women’s labor as domestic apprentices and indentures in mission and government stations and white homes does not manifest in the white imagination as a motherly Aboriginal Mammy type except in this one instance given by Hill. Given the other racialized types circulating between the United States and Australia in the 1940s—such as the piccaninny—it is something of an anomaly that the Mammy didn’t recur in Australia. As Jane Carey, Leigh Boucher, and Katherine Ellinghaus note in their introduction to this volume, “the unstable fiction of race was and is always generated by processes that refuse to be enclosed within [such] territorial boundaries.” The local conditions of racialized maternity are clear, however, when we consider that the slave Mammy had a particular utility within the American economy—that of maximizing slave labor by reproducing it.3 The Australian Aboriginal mother, on the other hand, had an opposing role to play in “dying race” theory. She either failed to reproduce black children, ate them when she did, or prolifically reproduced “half-caste” children with lower-class white men whom it was hoped, as Angela Wanhalla notes in chapter fifteen in this collection, could act as assimilators through their involvement with native women. In Australia, however, the state assumed the function of assimilator principally through the removal of “half-caste” children who were rarely acknowledged by their biological fathers. It is no wonder Aboriginal maternity never assumed a type that was popularly and widely circulated such as the Mammy. Instead, Aboriginal maternity was disavowed in the colonial imagination, or reassigned toward the fantasy of homogenized race destiny in white Australia. The depth of national investment in this fantasy can be gauged by the irrational premise that Aboriginal mothers could be recruited as bearers of the white race. As Patrick Wolfe has carefully detailed in his account of mother-right and nescience in anthropological discourse, Aboriginal mothers had a particular utility to the “logic of elimination” he has identified, but it was not biological. As Wolfe writes, “Aboriginality was an ideological, rather than a biological threat.” The “genetic arithmetic” that assimilation policy calibrated through the categories “half-caste”, “quadroon,” and “octoroon” did not extend to a one-sixteenth category because the race destiny for such children was to have been “bred white.” The custodial knowledge and rights of Aboriginal mothers—the race threat that they might keep their whitened children “behind in the camp constituted a cultural archive in which the illegitimacy of the Australian state was comprehensively inscribed.”4 The importance of Aboriginal maternity and its claim over Aboriginal children and those children culturally imagined as biologically white cannot be overstated. While writing about her travels Hill blithely makes her way through two of the more significant tropes of Aboriginal maternity. She visits her friend, the amateur ethnologist and “Queen of the Blacks” Daisy Bates, and together they “track up on a woman” due to give birth that Bates had suspected of intending to eat her baby. Instead they found a “proud mother, beyond reproach,” whose “grisly hunger for human meat—‘meeri-coonga’—had been staved off for the time.” Hill remarks, “Even so, I could not help thinking, purely as a journalist, that God and Daisy Bates had robbed me of a thundering front-page story.”5 Hill is similarly nonchalant when a white father of four Aboriginal children



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asks for her help with his “poignant little problem.” The Northern Territory chief protector of Aborigines from 1927 to 1938, Dr. Cecil E. Cook, was sending a policeman with a pack-horse to remove his children to “an institution for vocational training in Alice Springs.” The bereft father pleads that the children are happy and well, and that if they are taken, “the old woman will break her heart.” But the mothers’ feeling is immaterial to Hill in this “vitally interesting ethnological experiment” of submerging the progeny of the black race into the white, effecting their “complete disappearance,” by “breeding him—or rather her . . . —with the whites to every possible extent.” Indeed for Cook “the quickest way . . . to write the end of the story” is to “breed him white.” Thus Hill assures her readers of the “eradication” and “elimination” of the “half-castes” who she calls “pitiable,” “menacing,” “human misfits,” “cursed with a dark skin in a white man’s country.”6 In this account the mothers are reinscribed as “lubras” and their “attitude” to the “little yellafella” is “problematic.” In some instances the lubras show “the utmost maternal love, trekking hundreds of barren miles with the baby in their arms to avoid its being taken, and weeping bitterly at giving it up. In others, they callously leave it at birth along the track, or perhaps bury it in a snake-hole or rabbit burrow.” 7 Hill was circulating, without any evidence, long-standing and widespread understandings of Aboriginal maternity: it was blighted by cannibalism and either devoid of the natural feeling of the universal mother, or unreasonably clinging to her children when they were better off as charges of the state. Under the policy of assimilation Aboriginal mothers were the cargo-carriers of white Australia effecting through their wombs the extinction of their own race. It almost goes without saying, and many times it does go without saying, that the figure of the Aboriginal mother—either to “fullbloods” or “halfcastes,” whether as “Myall” or “detribalised” or “civilised”—has been critical to the development, enactment, and enforcement of all state policies directed at Aboriginal Australians including the administrative regimes of protection, segregation, biological absorption, and assimilation. It was centrally and critically the interruption of the mother-child relation, principally through wide-scale child removal, that enabled the twentieth-century attempt to divest Australia of Aboriginality. This indelibly sorrowful history of state intervention into Indigenous families has been extensively documented in recent years, through the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Enquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, (1997)8 and most notably in the work of Anna Haebich. In this chapter I will trace the white imaginings of Aboriginal maternity that informed the paradoxical state demands on women’s procreative capacities to expire their own race while reproducing another.

The Native Mother within the Family of Man Colonialism is a “systematic accumulation of human beings and territories,” 9 it requires dominating representational frameworks to contain and order the



White Imaginings of Aboriginal Maternity

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accumulation of human differences. The metaphor of humanity as the “family of man” is one such dominating framework. It both contains reproduction as a kinship of shared human experience, itself the “crux” of sexual difference that is universally recognized,10 while it disavows the “native” mother, who is closest to nature, through colonialism’s peculiar version of maternal repudiation. Ideas of the Family have never embraced the concept of equal membership: families are profoundly hierarchized structures. Yet the Family of Man metaphor was used to describe the inclusive embrace of humankind, while it disguised the ranking of family members by their differentiated status as reproducers, inheritors, and through the division of labor, the assertion of authority, and the enforcement of dependence. Scientific racism figured evolutionary progress as a story of familial progress, of humanity’s advancement from the degenerate native child to the adult white man. Anne McClintock identifies a converse narrative: that “of racial decline from white fatherhood to a primordial black degeneracy incarnated in the black mother.”11 It was a narrative that would prove integral to the concentrated removal of “half-caste” Aboriginal children from their mothers and communities. From the second half of the nineteenth century social Darwinism instituted the Family Tree of Man, yet this afforded women only a marginal relation to the metaphorics of nationhood. White imaginings about Aboriginal maternity were premised on exteriority, in that white representations imposed limitations on the intelligibility of Aboriginal mothers. For Edward Said this naming of the other describes the “life-giving” power of the “creator.”12 The discourse of the other is itself a “means of creation.”13 Similarly, Anne McClintock describes the imperial act of discovery as a “surrogate birthing ritual,” which expresses “anxiety about generative power” while it guarantees the uprooted colonial a “relation to origin.”14 Marianna Torgovnick also notes the metaphor of family relations at work in Freud’s analogy of the child’s separation from the mother as a “cultural achievement” that institutes the “reality principle.” Freud identifies the maternal body with the primitive and the oceanic. Torgovnick writes, “the oceanic with its absence of boundaries and divisions, is something we need to be to protected from if we are to take our place in the ‘mature’ culture of the West: we must fear it as we fear the primitive and separate from it as we separate from ‘primitive’ sexual urges and from the bodies of our mothers.”15 Thus for Torgovnick “ ‘going primitive,’ is inescapably a metaphor for the return to origins.”16 The familial trope had been a ready means of naturalizing imperial expansion without the legitimation of scientific racism. In 1840 the Colonial Magazine declared triumphantly that the empire of England was “the earthly representative of the church, whose offspring shall be nations, of which kings shall be fathers, and queens the nursing mothers.”17 However, it is the father that begets the nation in what Marilyn Lake has wryly dubbed a “seminal act” of cultural production.18 She writes, “Though women might breed a population, giving birth to babies, only men, it seemed, could give birth to the political entity, the imperishable community, or the nation.”19 Perhaps unsurprisingly, women did not have custody in the issue of their own bodies until the Infant Custody Act of 1839. Women may create children but they did not possess them. The



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nascent colony of New South Wales was thus conceived through the procreative power of the Imperial paternal state. But if “Mother of the Race” and “Mother Country” positioned women oddly in the Family of Man, as Jane Carey’s work on feminist organizations’ involvement in the eugenics movement shows, these nationalist maternal tropes simply excluded Aboriginal women. 20 Carey has found that eugenic feminists gave only “slight attention” to Aboriginal mothers. The reproduction of fit and virile white offspring was the main game. In the overall discursive tide of white Australia that swept the nation, Aboriginal mothers were but a tributary concern.

The Primordial Mother Aboriginal mothers evidently embodied a primeval maternity, and this image of Aboriginal maternity persisted in the settler-colonial imagination, who was often a “lubra” or “gin” with her “piccaninny.” Images such as studio portraits circulated as postcards as shown in figure 14.1. The woman and child in this postcard bear a striking resemblance to Toby and Jenny—who were taken from Queensland with a group of tribesmen and women by the impresario Robert A. Cunningham acting for P. T. Barnham, to be displayed in expositions and fairgrounds around the world as “Australian Savages.”21 It is a mannered scene of maternal-child attachment, which is here posited as part of the natural realm of the savage. The postcard feigns an anthropological interest, despite it being posed and produced for consumption as picturesque. Savagery and the exotic paradoxically encompassed the maternal, suggesting that universal and recognizable traits of humanness became exotic when realized under the rubric of racial difference. By the time this compelling photograph, Aboriginal girl and newborn baby, Canning Stock Route (figure 14.2), by Axel Poignant (historian Roslyn Poignant’s husband) appeared in 1942 Aboriginal maternity was deeply enmeshed in the operations of the various state welfare and protection boards. Poignant was unusual in his imagery of Aborigines in his esteem for traditional culture and this image of Aboriginal maternity is unusual for its time in conveying the selfpossession of the mother and her seeming indifference to the viewer’s regard. Like many images of Aboriginal maternity from settlement it evinces the natural state for womankind, and suggests that however the relation of maternity might be intervened upon by medicine, mothercraft, and domestic science, there is a sense that maternity is a primordial, impervious, natural category of human existence, not to mention aesthetically and spiritually uplifting. The long-standing conventions of the feminized noble savage as maternal were to reappear under the guise of “New Age” romanticism at William Ricketts’ Sanctuary established in the Dandenong Mountains north of Melbourne in 1977. Ricketts attached great significance to Aboriginal maternity as embodying the “Earthly Mother” whom he sculpted throughout the sanctuary in clay figures that seemed to generate out of root systems and rock formations (figure 14.3). Ricketts wrote of this clay model of an Altjira woman that crowned his “Holy Mountain” in his self-fashioned sanctuary, that it, is “she who leads the





Figure 14.1 “A Gin and Piccaninny” [between 1868 and 1872], in Scrapbook Australia, collected by Charles Harris Allen during a journey around the world, n.d., unpublished, Rex Nan Kivell Collection; NK 10389. Album 278. Reproduced from the Rex Van Kivell Collection, NK10389, Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.


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Figure 14.2 Axel Poignant, “Aboriginal Girl and Newborn Baby,” Canning Stock Route, 1942. Reproduced from the National Library of Australia, nla.pic-vn4463084, with the kind permission of Roslyn Poignant.

mind back to the beginning of the world, when the earth was pure and free from disease and death.” Ricketts’ Aboriginal mother was the life-source of all life forms, yet untainted by the ordinary travails of humanity.

A Love that is Past Understanding Alongside this primordial maternity was the specter of an Other mother, one that departed from European conventions in the organization of care for children




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Figure 14.3 “Earthly Mother,” in William Ricketts Sanctuary promotional booklet (Melbourne: the Sanctuary, 1971), 3. Reprinted with the permission of Parks Victoria.

and the duties of raising citizens that would add to the nation’s well-being. Perhaps this accounts for the comment by Reverend Dove, chaplain of the reserve settlement at Wybalenna, on Flinders Island, in 1840. Dove described Aboriginal parent’s feelings for their children as “more of the nature of an instinct than a principle” and thereby “directed to no high or worthy end.” 22 Similarly, in 1865 Gideon S. Lang described the ungoverned Aboriginal family thus: “It is a remarkable fact that I never saw, and only once heard of, a native child being corrected by its parents or other blacks, and, as a consequence they grow up savagely impatient of any approach to it.” 23 The motherly attachment of Aboriginal mothers spoiled their children: it was not care, it was indulgence. Contrary to the edicts of European child rearing, Aboriginal maternity was undisciplinary: it did not guide children toward citizenship. As such, “being Aboriginal was in itself reason to regard children as ‘neglected.’ ” 24 The property rights and authority of the mother in Aboriginal communities was either unintelligible to white Australians, or evidence that the Aboriginal family was improperly headed, necessitating the intervention of the paternal state. 25 For eighteenth-century Europeans women had become “the object of impregnation rather than participants in reproduction.” 26 The deciding role of the Aboriginal mother in how and where a child was conceived and the implications for paternity and property rights were challenges to the agnatic bloodlines of European inheritance. If Aboriginal adults were “untutored children of nature” 27 the logic of family succession would then construe Aboriginal children as waifs and strays.



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According to the president of the NSW State Children Relief board, “Paternity is casual and conjectural, and promiscuous association is the rule: sanitation is ignored. Dirt is the dominating element. In this mire of moral and physical abasement, tended by semi-imbecile mothers, children are allowed to wallow through the imitative stages of childhood.” 28 In this discourse of the ignoble native mother racial difference is marked by the abjection of Aboriginal maternity. These Other Mothers perpetrated infanticide, cannibalism, and suckled dogs, casting a sense of racial difference through the confusion of species. Remarking on the offensive odor of aborigines in 1907, A. Norton wrote, “Their dogs, too, have an offensiveness about them which prompts others than their owners to give them a wide berth; the gins, however, love them with a love that is past understanding. They share their food with them, their blankets and their vermin.” 29 This love was past understanding, or unintelligible, because it was misdirected and animalistic. Accusations of infanticide and cannibalism were persistent throughout settlement such that it was commonly accepted as intrinsic to traditional culture and repeated without evidence. In 1840, a pamphlet advising prospective immigrants to “Australia Felix” remarked that “the natives of Australia can only be placed in the great animal family as one degree above the brute creation” since “there is no doubt that the lives of infants are often taken, and the bodies converted into food.”30 Cannibalism of children reverses the natural order of birthing. As McClintock argues, “the fear of engulfment expresses itself most acutely in the cannibal trope.”31 Infanticide was also thought to play a significant role in population decline and thereby was a natural part of the race destiny of the “withering” native. In 1845 the Science of Man magazine reported “the diminution and final extinction of the black-fellow as he makes room for the civilised occupant of his territory is a feature of which Australia furnishes neither the first nor the only example”—“the common practice of infanticide” being a contributing factor in their “gradual extinction.” 32 Some white men saw infanticide as imposed by Aboriginal men, whose assertion of authority over their wives was not an act of governance, but rather the arbitrary compulsion of brute force.33 In 1879 J. D. Woods gave a lecture to the Philosophical Society on “Aborigines of South Australia.” Woods claimed “infanticide has prevailed all over the continent for the sole purpose, it seems, of leaving the wife free to attend upon the husband who for the time may happen to own her.”34 Another newspaper review of Brough Smyth’s book includes a lengthy description of marriage rites in which resistant young brides are violently subdued and resign themselves to becoming the “obedient drudge to her new master.” The reviewer concludes, “It is not at all surprising that infanticide formed the logical practical sequel of such matrimony. The wretched black mother almost invariably killed her first child, as being too heavy a burden to carry about in the discharge of her other domestic duties.” 35 And yet it was through Aboriginal maternity that Robert Dawson, chief agent of the Australian Agricultural Company experienced an accord with his “unenlightened brethren of the south,” he and they being “the children of one




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common parent” in spite of their being “born and nurtured in darkest ignorance.”36 Dawson was unusual in that he did not equate the seeming lack of a system of governance, “not even chieftainship,” with unruly families. He instead argued that “want of government” was “amply compensated by parental inf luence.” He also refuted the chattel and slave construct of Aboriginal mothers, reporting that “in the event of the fathers’ decease, the mother still retains her place and inf luence.” Dawson added, “native men will manifest regard and duty toward their mothers, by making the most painful sacrifices to please them, and by sharing with them the food and gifts they obtain.” 37 Dawson was deeply affected by the particular plight of Aboriginal mothers. If they survived atrocities they were ravaged by grief. He related an encounter with a grieving mother whose adult son had been shot “by accident or design” by a white constable. “She was inconsolable,” he reported. “Before the catastrophe, she was a remarkably fine woman, tall and athletic.” Dawson finds her soon afterward a truly wretched and forlorn spectacle, apparently wasted down by watchfulness and sorrow. As soon as she saw me, she held up her hands (the sign of grief ), with her body half lent forward, and wept till the tears overf lowed her whitened cheeks in streams of unaffected grief. She left me to join a group of women around a fire a short distance off; I watched her unperceived, and saw her sitting, leaning with her cheek upon her hand, apparently in silent sorrow. 38 Dawson is careful to show that he witnessed her grief undetected. Colonials often looked upon the strictly observed ceremonial rites of Aboriginal women’s grief as a performance of ritual, and saw its authenticity of feeling thus compromised. Another affected colonial was George French Angus who reported in 1847 that he had never witnessed “more attenuated or wretched looking beings” than the Port Fairy Tribe at Portland Bay, It appeared unaccountable, that a race of people living a primitive life, amidst the aromatic fragrance of these woods, with their dwellings upon the green and f lower-spangled turf—breathing the pure transparent air of this part of Australia, and enjoying one of the finest possible climates—should be so low in the scale of humanity as are these degraded creatures, when all around is fair and beautiful.39 The promise of a new land was compromised by the spectacle of Indigenous degradation and destruction. Angus described a scene that he also sketched (figure 14.4): But the most extraordinary and revolting spectacle . . . was an old woman, reduced to a mere skeleton, with an idiotic child—apparently four or five



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Figure 14.4 “An Old Woman,” in Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, George French Angus, courtesy of the State Library of Victoria.

years old, but unable to stand erect—to which she was attempting to supply nourishment from her shrivelled and f laccid breast. Both were utterly destitute of clothing; and the spectre-like form of the aged hag, as she sat in the ashes before the hut, was loathsome: one of my companions actually turned sick and vomited at the sight.40 This was not a spectacle descriptive of starvation, disease, dispossession, or colonialism. It was the spectacle of Aboriginal maternity as unable to reproduce its young, and thus as an anomaly in an arcadian paradise. In this regard Angus’ scene played into the emerging theory of the dying race that Aboriginality simply withered before the onslaught of modernity. But it did not merely die out, it failed to reproduce itself, through a series of associations between Aboriginal maternity and death.

Melting Away Before the Touch of Civilization The destruction of Aboriginal life contravened the imperial logic of progress. It challenged white imaginings of the purely beneficial effects of their presence on the native. Europeans would bequeath the Enlightenment on Australia’s “benighted savages.” A new language of rights, the appeal to reason, Christianity, the Scientific and Agrarian Revolutions, new systems of knowledge, taxation,




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bureaucracy, held out the promise of Enlightenment progress for all. And yet the Enlightenment ethic of improvement, which underpinned the civilizing mission, seemed rudely resisted by Aborigines. The number succumbing to disease alarmed colonials. The new world should not be strewn with bones. In 1880, a review of A. W. Howitt and Lorimer Fison’s Kamilaroi and Kurnai appraised the decimation and ran a familiar line “The Australian tribes are melting away before the touch of civilisation . . . They now represent the condition of mankind in savagery better than it is elsewhere represented on earth.”41 The improvement and development of the Aboriginal was arrested. Another response to Brough Smyth’s 1879 Aborigines of Victoria described adult Aborigines as arrested in their development, which ran contrary to the ethic of advancement: “They consequently remain, and will remain always, not animals, but little children, never advancing, and never capable of cumulative advance, but living on unchanged till the conditions around them become too much for their limited powers, and then dying sadly out.”42 Yet the incompatibility of the primitive with modernity turned on Aboriginal maternity. The famous assertion of Count Strzelecki persisted for many years, that there existed a “remarkable physical law in connection with the rapid decrease of the aboriginal races of these colonies.” An aboriginal women, after connection with a European “loses the power of conception on a renewal of intercourse with the male of her own race, retaining that only of procreating with the white man.”43 But it was not merely the remarkable contraceptive effect of white men that rendered the Aboriginal woman infertile, contact with modernity both “withered” the population and eradicated Indigenous maternity. But Aboriginal women themselves were ill-equipped for the travails of maternity, it seemed. In his privately printed and rather salacious book on the sex life of South Sea natives, R. Burton drew on Malinowski. As late as 1935 he argued that “premature promiscuity,” namely “Coitus before the appearance of menstruation leads to severe shattering of the health or at any rate to rapid decline.44 That is also the reason why the majority of Australian women are repulsively ugly even in their early twenties and have the appearance of hags.”45 For Europeans idealized maternity was spiritually and aesthetically uplifting: it negotiated the contradictions of unsexual but feminized beauty. Aboriginal maternity on the other hand was uncloistered, and any sign of active, unsheltered maternity was repulsive to the colonials. This association between Aboriginal maternity and race decline was furthered through European responses to rituals of grieving. The amateur anthropologist Hon. A. Norton ref lected on grief rites among Aborigines at Miriam Vale Station in 1907. He wrote, “When a boy, who for a time was with me, died, his mother for weeks carried some of his bones in her dillybag.”46 Angus had earlier attributed this custom to a universal mother’s love that was exaggerated to the point of abhorrence. He wrote of another gloomy picture of the lowest grade of our species,—a woman, and a mother, wandering in search of roots, with her digging-stick in her hand.



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She was almost naked, and her dark limbs were thin and poor; yet she carried a heavy load at her back. Night and day she bore her burden onwards, without complaint, though it was a loathsome and decaying corpse that she cherished. It was the dead body of her son, a child of ten years old; and a tribute of her affections. Oh! How strong is a mother’s love, when even the offensive and putrid clay can be thus worshipped for the spirit that was once its tenant.47 Colonials were more interested in the circumstances and evidence of this rite than they were in the circumstances in which these mothers lost their children. Informed by the ocularcentric logic of the West, these men needed to see what was in the bag, as part of their occupation of the country inhered in unrestricted visual access. In 1872 a letter by Albert McDonald was read to the Anthropological Institute, in which he describes overtaking a “mob of blacks” who had stolen his sweet potato. He ordered an elderly woman with a “bulky swag” to unpack, and insisted in spite of her people’s remonstrations she very reluctantly untied it and showed me as much of the skin as satisfied me. I saw the head and the hair on, and the hands sticking up, one at each side of it, the fingers distended. The woman handled it as tenderly as if it had been a baby. Since then, I have often seen the large bundles, and once I had an old woman working for me several weeks who had her boy’s skin and was very careful to keep it warm, thinking that her boy could still feel. One wet afternoon I sat down with her in her gunyah, and gently and gradually got the history of her boy. He had been killed. She cried bitterly, and seemed very sorrowful, but not at all vexed when at length I asked her to let me look at the skin. She first looked all around, to make sure that no others were near, and then began to untie the rags it was wrapped in. As she did so, she commenced a wail impossible to describe—so intense and heart-piercing. When the skin was uncovered, she seemed to get worse, took it to her knee, rocked it, held it to her breast, then at arms’ length, until I began to fear she would lose her senses, and was glad when she suddenly recollected it was cold and wet, and wrapped up the skin again, covering it with all the clothes and blankets she had, and sitting naked herself.48 Louis D. Johns, R. E. John’s brother, who had been observing the “customs” of the Narrinyeri on Lakes Albert and Alexandria in 1855–6, added his own note to this account that he had sent to his brother, “I have often tried to get a skin, but never could, yet I have offered a pound for one.”49 The searing insensitivity of these men blundering into dilly bags containing the carefully protected remains of bereaved children could only be effected through the sense of right of access, visual and otherwise not only to land, but to sacred rite, ceremony, and law, which for colonials was distinct from the realm of feeling. And feeling




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in the native mother came under the rubric of anthropological observation and documentation. To add to the generally macabre sense conveyed by this attenuated and unreasoning attachment to dead children Aboriginal maternity was at other times, notably the wrong times, disconcertingly robust. The Colonial Intelligencer printed a letter from South Australia in 1850 “from a person of authority” (possibly Edward Eyre) reporting that: “Accidents at parturition are unknown. Women have been seen chopping up wood three hours after giving birth to a child.”50 Earlier in 1838 Assistant Protector Thomas reported, “I have known females have an infant during the night and forced to tramp in the morning.”51 This activity not only made something of a mockery of the bourgeois ideals of lying in and confinement, but they suggested that maternity did not preclude women from the economic workings of the camp, which for Europeans was increasingly the grounds for women’s continued confinement to the domesticated private realm and the gendered doctrine of separate spheres. Attenuated breastfeeding also confronted Europeans as a practice that disregarded the aesthetic function of the breast. Colonial accounts abhorred the post-maternal breast as pendulous, and as prematurely aging otherwise young women.

Mother of the F1 Generation Anthropometrics and scientific racism had construed the Aboriginal as a “dark Caucasian” enabling the counterintuitive claim that Aboriginal women could reproduce the white race through bearing the pale children of white men. Unlike the “African Negroid,” Aborigines were thought to share a genetic identity with Europeans, indeed they were thought to be the “living fossils” of Caucasians. Monogenesists had propagated the doctrine of common origins in the 1860s. The “common descent of the Caucasian and Oceanic varieties from the first parents of our race” was the basis for “the human family.”52 Curiously, given all this talk of reproduction, Aboriginal mothers were again disavowed. Black women don’t have babies, they “encroach” and “retreat,” their wombs enacting a farcical choreography of race fatalism. Expressions such as “outgrow their heredity,”53 “effage,”54 “Aboriginal morphology,”55 and the “F1” generation, referring to first-generation hybrids, erased the presence and activity of Aboriginal mothers. For Northern Territory chief protector Cecil E. Cook, the “half-caste” was not born, rather he must “evolve into a white man.”56 Similarly for the chief protector in Western Australia from 1915 to 1940, A. O. Neville, human life “spawns and increases like an unhealthy fungal growth” in the “dreadful conditions” of the fringe camps.57 Warwick Anderson has described the eugenic breeding policies of the first half of the twentieth century as constituting a “reproductive frontier” that sought to eliminate the racially inauthentic “half-caste” and enable, through biological absorption, a national biological homogeneity.58 State intervention in Aboriginal reproduction “substituted for frontier white men, rendering them reproductively invisible.”59 But it also palpably excluded Aboriginal mothers. If



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white blood would dilute and bleach the blackness of the “half-caste”, a remaining obstruction to assimilation was the Aboriginal mother. Since there was no question of white women contributing to the white gene pool by bearing the children of Aboriginal men, the indifference of white fathers to the children they begat with Aboriginal women left them perilously in their mother’s care. In 1913 Natalie Robarts noted of “half-castes” at Coranderrk, that while “intelligent and capable of working” their white blood could not realize its potential because, “the mother being the black parent, the moral tendencies lean toward the native on account of pre-natal inf luences. Also, the child, being brought up among an indolent, lazy people, contracts these habits.”60 The architect of biological absorption policies, the highly regarded anthropologist A. P. Elkin, saw his work of social anthropologist as belonging to a “trustee race.”61 It was thus the policy design of state administrators and not the reproductive capacity of Aboriginal women that would bring forth the F1 generation of “half-castes”, the females of which act as conduits for whiter children. For Neville, former commissioner of native affairs for Western Australia, on the “Half-Caste”62 the “mingling” of Aboriginal mothers with white men “enabled our coloureds to partly replace the disappearing full-blood Aboriginal.”63 Indeed, as Chief Protector of Western Australia Neville’s enthusiasm for this mingling had led him to famously aver of young women domestics impregnated in white homes, “it really doesn’t matter” if Aboriginal girls sent from the training homes to service into white homes return pregnant and have “half a dozen children,” since the kids never see their mothers again and “grow up as whites.”64 But it was left to the chief protector of Aborigines in Queensland (1914–41) John W. Bleakly to make the most grandiose paternity claim over the children of Aboriginal women. Appearing before the South Australian Royal Commission on the Aborigines he declared that children with “more white blood in them than black should be the care of the white man.”65 Given these contradictory directives made on Aboriginal mothers—that they effected the demise of their own race by the seemingly immaculate conception of paler-skinned children, through mere mingling—it is little wonder that Aboriginal women were denied the 1912 Federal Maternity Allowance. 66 In spite of the call by post-suffrage maternalist feminist Vida Goldstien that “Maternity is Maternity whatever the race,”67 Aboriginal children would not remain under the “primitive” inf luence of their mothers. By 1939 Aboriginal organizations were calling for better conditions for Aboriginal mothers including free maternity hospital treatment and “clinical instruction on baby welfare similar to that given to white women.”68 The Aborigines Progressive Association sought legal advice over deductions made by the Aborigines Protection Board from family endowment entitlements to Aboriginal mothers. Before a Select Committee of Parliament in 1937, the board gave evidence that it was using Child Endowment moneys to finance the building of huts on Government Reserves—to house children removed from their mothers due to inadequate housing—in spite of a Parliamentary grant exceeding fifty thousand pounds annually. 69




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The impact of this colonial maternal repudiation was devastating on Aboriginal mothers, to the extent that the Bringing Them Home Report was unable to find mothers able to testify at the Inquiries hearings. Their stories are yet to be told. Yet they were persistently present in white imaginings. The famous cartoon (shown if figure 14.5) drawn by English caricaturist Phil May while in Sydney for three years appeared in the Bulletin in 1888.70

Figure 14.5 “A Curiosity in Her Own Country,” cartoon by Phil May reprinted from the Bulletin, 1888.


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This landless, homeless Indigenous mother is anomalous to the fenced and paved metropolitan scene, and May seems to comment on how her displacement and itinerancy exposes her as a public spectacle. Like the bizarre euphemisms that swirled around the figure of the Aboriginal mother, silence greets the mother, who sits quietly under the gaze of the population that displaces her (which includes the Chinese). White Australia went to extraordinary lengths to repudiate Aboriginal mothers’ custodianship over their children. Their reproductive capacity was put to the paradoxical use of breeding the demise of their own race and to carry children paler than themselves. Moreover, through perhaps the most grandiloquent family policy statements in Australian history, their children should belong not to their mothers, but to white administrators. But the disavowal of Aboriginal maternity was frequently ruptured in the white imagination. When visiting the Mapoon mission in 1948 the widely read author Alan Marshall was confronted by Aboriginal children with blonde hair and blue eyes. This “effage” of Aboriginal mothers disclosed the sexual behavior of white male colonials and Marshall candidly betrayed the unspoken discomfort white Australians experienced around the figure of the Aboriginal mother. He mused, “They say necessity is the mother of invention. A Cape York miner once said ‘In the Cape country it is the mother of half-castes.’ ” 71

Notes The chapter title has been taken from Robert Dawson, The Present State of Australia; a Description of the Country, its Advantages, and Prospects, with Reference to Emigration; and a Particular Account of the Manners, Customs, and Condition of its Aboriginal Inhabitants, extracted in Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India, China and Australasia 4 (January–April 1831): 122. 1. To this day the smiling face of Aunt Jemima appears as a trademark for the US Pinnacle Food Corporation. To diffuse her association with the Mammy figure, and with a long history of racially derogatory images of African Americans for white consumption, Aunt Jemima’s present incarnation is as a “working grandmother.” See M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998). 2. Ernestine Hill, The Great Australian Loneliness (Melbourne: Robertson and Mullens Limited, 1943), 303. 3. See Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 866–905. 4. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), 184 and 185. 5. Hill, The Great Australian Loneliness, 254. 6. Ibid., 226–7. 7. Ibid., 229. 8. Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: the Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997).




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9. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, fourth edn (London: Penguin, 1995), 123. 10. Henrietta Moore, quoted in Felicity A. Nussbaum, “ ‘Savage’ Mothers: Narratives of Maternity in the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” Cultural Critique no. 20 (Winter 1991–92): 124. 11. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), 49. 12. Said, Orientalism, 57. 13. Ibid., 87. 14. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 29. 15. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects and Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 207. 16. Ibid., 185. 17. “England’s Destiny-Colonization,” The Colonial Magazine and CommercialMaritime Journal 8, no. 26 (1840): 132. 18. Marilyn Lake, “Mission Impossible: How Men Gave Birth to the Australian Nation: Nationalism, Gender, and Other Seminal Acts,” Gender and History 4, no. 3 (Autumn 1992): 305–22. 19. Ibid., 307. 20. Jane Carey, chapter thirteen in this collection. See also Lake “Mission Impossible,” 307 and 313. 21. See Roslyn Poignant’s excellent and detailed history of their travels in her Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2004). 22. Quoted in Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000 (Fremantle, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2001): 118. 23. “The Aborigines of Australia: A Lecture,” delivered by Gideon S. Lang, St George’s Hall, Melbourne, July 12, 1865. Unattributed newspaper cutting, R. E. Johns Scrapbooks, Box 1: Circa 1856–66, 222. Museum of Victoria, Melbourne. 24. Robert Van Krieken, Children and the State: Social Control and the Formation of the Australian Welfare State (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991), 8. 25. See Sylvia J. Hallam, “Aboriginal Women as Providers: The 1830s on the Swan,” Aboriginal History 15 (1991): 39. See also Judith Wright’s wry comment “the idea of women owning land is rather unfamiliar to white male Australians.” Wright, “Being White Woman,” in Being Whitefella, ed. Duncan Graham (Fremantle: Freemantle Arts Press, 1994), 178. 26. Nussbaum, “ ‘Savage’ Mothers,” 128. 27. “Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council on the Aborigines; together with the Proceedings of Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendices, 1859,” extracted in The North British Review 32 (February–May 1860): 380. 28. Charles MacKellar, quoted in Van Krieken, Children and the State, 97. 29. A. Norton, “Stray Notes About Our Aboriginals,” Science of Man 9, no. 6 (June 1, 1907): 86. 30. Editors of the Port Phillip Gazette, Latest Information with Regard to Australia Felix, The Finest Province of the Great Territory of New South Wales; including The History, Geography, Natural Resources, Government, Commerce, and Finances of Port Phillip; Sketches of the Aboriginal Population and Advice to Immigrants (Melbourne: Arden and Strode, 1840), 97. 31. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 27.



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32. Author signed himself “Aboriginal,” “Ethnology: The Case of the Aborigines,” in Science of Man 10, no. 4 (1908): 55. 33. W. W. Thorpe, “The Aborigines of Australia,” in The Australian Museum Magazine, ed. C. Anderson, 2, no. 9 (January–March 1926): 305. 34. J. D. Woods, “Aborigines of South Australia,” lecture to the Philosophical Society, February 4, 1879. Unattributed newspaper cutting, R. E. Johns scrapbooks, Box 3, ca. 1869–82, 463, Museum of Victoria. 35. Unsourced newspaper clipping, review of Bough Smyth’s, The Aborigines of Victoria, R. E. Johns scrapbooks Box 3, ca. 1869–82, 431, Museum of Victoria. 36. Dawson, The Present State of Australia, 122. 37. Ibid., 123. 38. Ibid., 124. 39. George French Angus, Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, vol. 1, second edn (London: Smith, Elder and co., 1847), 183. 40. Ibid., 184. 41. A. W. Howitt and Lorimer Fison, Kamilaroi and Kurnai (Melbourne: George Robertson, 1880). Unattributed and unsourced newspaper review clipping, R. E. Johns scrapbooks, Box 3, ca. 1869–82, 528, Museum of Victoria. 42. “The Intellectual Status of the Aborigines of Victoria,” reprinted from The Spectator, March 29, 1879. Unattributed newspaper cutting, ref lecting on Bough Smyth’s, The Aborigines of Victoria, R. E. Johns scrapbooks, Box 3, ca. 1869–82, 462, Museum of Victoria. 43. Author signed himself “Aboriginal,” 56. 44. B. Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1929). 45. R. Burton, ed., Venus Oceanica: Anthropological Studies in the Sex Life of the South Sea Natives, privately printed for subscribers, limited to 925 copies (New York: Oceanica Research Press, 1935), 44. 46. Norton, “Stray Notes About Our Aboriginals,” 101. 47. Angus, Savage Life and Scenes, 75. 48. Letter of Albert McDonald, July 31, 1871, read to the Anthropological Institute May 6, 1872. Hand transcribed by R. E. Johns, “General Notes on Australian Aborigines. ‘Narrinyeri’ Tribes on Lakes Albert and Alexandria at the mouth of the Murray river, customs observed by R. E. Johns’ brother Louis D. Johns”, ca. 1855–56. Box 2 13.7.1887-Circe 1889, 364, Museum of Victoria. 49. This obviously carefully important rite was demoted to a custom, to do with charms and ornament. In a letter to the Argus in 1866, W. Locke reported that “If a young baby died, the mother had to carry the body on her back till her husband procured the kidney fat of a strange blackfellow. This is a very horrible custom. I have seen a lubra so carry about her dead child. The kidney fat is wrapped up in several bits of rag, and worn around the neck as a charm.” W. Locke, “The Native Language,” letter to the Argus, August 1, 1866. Unattributed newspaper cutting, R. E. Johns Scrapbooks, Box 1: Ca. 1856–66, p. 266. Museum of Victoria. This idea of the remains of children used as charms recurred again in 1948 from Rev. H. M. Arrowsmith, ed. These Australians (Sydney: Church Missionary Society Publication, Edgar Brugg and Son, 1948), 82. 50. “South Australia. The Aborigines,” The Colonial Intelligencer; or, Aborigines’ Friend 3, no. 21 (November 1850): 106. 51. W. Thomas, Brief Remarks on the Aborigines of Victoria, 1838. Handwritten notes, State Library of Victoria, MS7838 Box 862/9(a), 11.




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52. “Report of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council on the Aborigines; together with the Proceedings of Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendices, 1859,” extracted in The North British Review 22 (February–May 1860), 371. 53. Hill, quoted in Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 221. 54. Norman B. Tindale, quoted in Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 226. 55. Joseph B. Birdsell, quoted in Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 229. 56. Cecil E. Cook, quoted in Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 237. 57. A. O. Neville, quoted in Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 238. 58. Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 219. 59. Ibid., 236. 60. Natalie Robarts, quoted in Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 220. 61. A. P. Elkin, quoted in Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 240. 62. A. O. Neville, “The Half-Caste in Australia,” Mankind 4, no. 7 (September 1951): 274–90. 63. Ibid., 277. 64. Ibid., 277 and 281. 65. Haebich, 177. 66. Ibid., 160. 67. Two royal commissions were appointed due to scandals surrounding Aboriginal maternity. The first in Victoria in 1876, after a resident of the Coranderrk Aboriginal Station died in childbirth, attended “only by the drunken wife of the hop master.” Then again in 1933 Mary Bennett paper, “The Aboriginal Mother in Western Australia,” presented to the annual conference of the British Commonwealth League, a London-based feminist organization, prompted the appointment of the Moseley Royal Commission on the condition and treatment of Aborigines. Maternalist Feminists of the Women’s Service Guild, in Perth, joined Bennett in advocating for Aboriginal mothers’ custody rights. See Marilyn Lake, “Childbearers as RightsBearers: Feminist Discourse on the Rights of Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal Mothers in Australia, 1920–50,” Women’s History Review 8, no. 2 (1991): 352. 68. Proceedings from the Conference of Aborigines, January 26, 1938, Sydney, published in The Australian Abo Call: The Voice of the Aborigines, no. 1, April 1938, 9. 69. “Family Endowment Deductions: Why Are These Made?” The Australian Abo Call: The Voices of the Aborigines, no. 6, September 1938, 2. 70. Nicholas Thomas claims it is a New Zealand cartoon in his, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 93. 71. Alan Marshall, Ourselves Write Strange (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1948), 50.



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Rethinking “Squaw Men” and “Pakeha-Maori”: Legislating White Masculinity in New Zealand and Canada, 1840–1900 Angela Wanhalla

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he question of how the state regulated, monitored, and policed interracial relationships in former frontier spaces has been extensively investigated in recent decades.1 Historians of intimacy have reexamined conjugal relations, sexuality, and family life in the light of colonial practices, and have sought out these arenas as sites of resistance to colonial authority. Inspired by international scholarship that considers the relationship between the rule of law, intimacy, sexuality, and the family, this chapter examines the extent to which private life was structured by colonial policy or what Ann Laura Stoler refers to as the “tense and tender ties” of colonialism. 2 The chapter focuses on the legislative mechanisms invoked in colonial Canada and New Zealand to protect the racial status of white men involved in illicit interracial relationships. As Jane Carey, Liz Conor, and Katherine Ellinghaus have highlighted in this collection, racial anxieties circulated throughout colonial societies. 3 The politics of “blood” was marshaled in support of land dispossession, assimilation policy, and eugenic prescriptions for racial survival. Masculinity was also a contested racial terrain in settler societies. Canada’s Indian Act 1876 and New Zealand’s Half-Caste Disability Removal Act 1860 constitute the legal mechanisms invoked to preserve men’s racial status, something that was degraded by contact with Aboriginal women. Following Adele Perry, I argue that these pieces of legislation “did not reject, but rather reinforced, the power accorded



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white men in a colonial and patriarchal society.”4 Once rescued New Zealand’s “Pakeha-Maori” and the Canadian “squaw man” could be recast as potential agents of assimilation, as long as they were kept off the native reserve.5 But if they were to act in this manner white men had to remain tightly controlled, though this was an untenable position, because their affective ties of kinship often meant they worked against the interests of the government and instead could act as a powerful force for Aboriginal autonomy.

Troublesome Men In the second half of the nineteenth century, at a time when native reserves were being marked out on the ground, the colonial governments of Canada and New Zealand took a keen interest in a group of troublesome and unruly white men who had “gone native.” White men were a distinct source of anxiety in the American West during the late nineteenth century, but their presence in frontier spaces was not restricted to that region. In fact, troublesome men circulated throughout the British world. In the Canadian West and on New Zealand’s resource frontiers—sealing, whaling, forestry, and goldmining—they came to prominence at a time when systematic colonization was underway. Many of these men were deemed unruly because they inhabited “native spaces” and were married to Aboriginal or mixed descent women. The troublesome men at the center of this chapter have been, depending on the context, described as White Indians, white “savages” or renegades, and Pakeha-Maori. The variety of terms for newcomers who married Aboriginal women and lived within Aboriginal communities attests to the fact that they were not merely a product of the nineteenth century U.S. West, but circulated throughout the British Empire in frontier spaces. 6 The term with most purchase and resonance on the North American frontier was “squaw man.” Settlers and officials employed this term to describe dissolute, debased, and corrupt white men residing on reservations in the second half of the nineteenth century. Regarded as a disruptive force in Aboriginal and colonial society, squaw men were traitors to their race, and blurred the distinction between separate white and native spaces. Moreover, squaw men were traitors to white masculinity because they were implicated, as political agitators, in working against the colonial and civilizing project.7 Worse, these men were viewed as benefiting economically from reservation life. 8 They were charged with engaging in interracial relationships not for love or affection, but to gain access to land. Corrupt, manipulative, and untrustworthy, the civilizing project could certainly not be left to them alone. In New Zealand the term Pakeha-Maori was commonly employed in the nineteenth century to describe men who had given up their racial status in favor of “going native.” 9 Like squaw men, newcomers who had gone native in early New Zealand had abandoned white society and its values. Key to redeeming white men was to define where they could live. Native reserves in Canada and New Zealand emerged out of a distinct set of local and



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historical relationships in the second half of the nineteenth century, but, very broadly, in both colonial spaces they were geographically bounded places that were regarded as native spaces, which were designed to be distinct and separate from European settlements.10 But no matter how much colonial surveyors and government agents attempted to draw geographical boundaries, the line, as Sheila McManus has remarked of the Canadian-U.S. border, did not separate, but was in fact quite porous in nature.11 A boundary line did not negate or halt interracial contact in either country. The problem was that interracial couples and mixed-descent peoples were an already long established part of these frontier spaces, and the question of how to deal with them—economically, socially, and politically—was a fraught and complex issue that was never really resolved. In Canada, the passage of legislation in 1876, known as the Indian Act, tightly defined who was “Indian” and who was not, and where one could reside. This act had significant implications for the Aboriginal population, particularly women who married “out,” as well as their non-Aboriginal partners. The Indian Act was one of many federal policies predicated upon a particular stereotype of Aboriginal woman as inherently immoral and highly sexualized.12 Women were “squaws”—they were drudges and promiscuous—and white men were degraded through contact with them. Therefore, interracial relationships were dangerous because they were “an active threat to white men’s fragile moral and racial selves.”13 Under the Indian Act, women were excluded from owning property on reserve, and they could not inherit property. They were excluded from band politics, and could not vote or hold office.14 Male descent was entrenched as the primary mode of membership in a band. A woman married to a non-status man (a group that included white men), was also excluded from band membership.15 Instead of focusing on what the Act meant for Aboriginal woman—a topic that has been broadly discussed within Canadian scholarship—I want to read it differently, looking at what the Indian Act meant for “white” men. When it came to interracial marriage, especially in the newly settled Canadian West, the status of white manhood was at stake, and had to be redeemed through legal mechanisms like the Indian Act.16 Whiteness was at the heart of the Indian Act and its subsequent amendments. Under the act upon interracial marriage a woman took on the identity of her husband, becoming “non-status” or white. Indeed, the “whiteness” of a partner was an important issue to Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) officials, to whom Indian Agents reported on a monthly basis. Correspondence between Agents and officials focused on the ethnicity of male partners, and any agent who failed to note this detail was reprimanded.17 According to Sheila McManus the squaw man had far greater economic implications in the United States than in Canada, because no legislative provision was enacted to remove these men from reservations, enabling them to live in Aboriginal communities, and to act as a disruptive economic and political force in these spaces.18 The DIA archive of letters and reports suggests, however, that the Canadian squaw man was viewed with similar dislike, particularly



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as potential “intruders” and “agitators.” In Canada, the native reserve was to be a native space. White men had to be kept off reserves because they could be a source of vice and corruption, particularly of Aboriginal women. In the United States men on reserve gave up their whiteness, but in Canada their status as white was retained: they could not “go native” because a “removal” policy prevented such a possibility. The term white was a very important one indeed, as it had material and spatial implications. Under the Act, Aboriginal women who married out could no longer reside on the reserves, and nor could their husbands, so a process of removal was instituted. In the context of colonial Canada, removal denoted spatial relocation and this was a process that focused explicitly on white men and their Aboriginal wives. Numerous examples of removal exist in DIA archives. Thomas Wright was removed from the Caughnawa Reserve, Quebec, even though he was, as the Agent remarked, “a well behaved man [and] the department has never instructed me to force him off.”19 George Chessier, the Indian Agent at Caughnawa, was curtly reminded that the “mere fact of Mr Wright having married an Indian woman of the Tribe gives him no right to reside on the Reserve, and that his wife, by reason of her marriage with him, has ceased to be an Indian.” 20 Andrew Carpenter was removed from Tuscarora, Ontario, in 1896. 21 Thomas Good “got notice to leave the [Six Nations] reserve; the same as was served to all the whites years ago. I never received notice that the Council decided I should leave the Reserve.” 22 Good’s case highlights the impotence of colonial agents. Good regarded the Band as the authority on the reserve—he lived on their terms and within their rules—and only the Council could order him off the reserve, not DIA officials. White men could often refuse to leave the reserve, but they were not always desirable inhabitants to the Band, who used mechanisms already in place to enact removal on their terms. During the 1870s, Stephen Redgrave, who lived at the Nass River Reserve in British Columbia (BC), was engaged in “bad conduct.” The band council informed Israel Wood Powell, the superintendent of Indian Affairs for BC, that Redgrave was “causing trouble on [the] reserve.” Redgrave, the council stated, was inciting political division in the community as well as resistance to colonial authority, by claiming that the “Govt does the work of the Queen and not the chiefs.” To the band council he was a “bad man” who [is] living here with a poor Indian woman, and we are told that he has a wife and children in Victoria, [and] he wants to get the land from the poor friends up the river. He has got the old man “Seat-Leem” with him and he wishes to be Chief, so he goes with Redgrave to all that is bad. We wish that you would tell us what to do and we pray that you will have the man Redgrave taken away. 23 Redgrave, or the “Big Judge,” as he was known among the Nass River people, was undermining not only colonial authority, but also systems of chief ly



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leadership, so important to social structures and Aboriginal masculinity. 24 As a political agitator Redgrave fits the characterization of a typical squaw man. Removing white men from native spaces did not ensure that they remained untroublesome. Many husbands wrote to the DIA on behalf of their wives for clarification about treaty entitlements. An Aboriginal woman who engaged in interracial marriage underwent a process of commutation. A legal process provided for under the 1876 Act, commutation involved the relinquishing of a woman’s rights to annuities by accepting a lump sum payment, usually fifty dollars, thereby severing her connection to the Band not only financially, but also socially and culturally. Walter Scott’s wife, Victoria Burns, formerly of the Birtle Agency, withdrew from Treaty in 1893. Walter applied to the DIA in 1901 claiming eight years annuity payments, as well as commutation money for Victoria. 25 Frank Thomson also wrote to the DIA, stating “my wife is an Indian woman, and has never drawn annuity since I married her eighteen years ago, in fact, she never drew annuity in her own name, as she was not of age when I married her. I want to know what steps she should take to commute her annuity.”26 Men like Scott and Thomson, while not “White Indians” who lived with and adopted the culture, or strictly squaw men who lived on reserves and were politically threatening, were still viewed with suspicion because they conformed to a view that white men married Aboriginal women for reasons that were economic, rather than romantic. Often the white men most troublesome to the DIA were those who lived among Aboriginal communities on an official basis and were employed to police the Act, among them Indian Agents, their employees, and the Northwest Mounted Police. These men were the subject of complaint on the basis of the very behavior they were meant to prohibit, and, in fact, were implicated in criminal acts. In 1891 a clerk was accused by an Indian Agent of fathering a child by an Aboriginal woman of Beardy’s Reserve in the province of Saskatchewan. The woman in question regarded it as sexual assault. Agent Mackenzie visited her and “the following is what she said”: I am very much ashamed of what has happened. She said the Clerk Cameron need not deny that it is his child as most assuredly it is his, as no man has had anything to do with me since I have been a widow but Cameron. She said he bothered her for a long time, and she told him to leave her alone as he would get her in child and that she did not want to have anything to do with any man, as she would prefer to die than to be in the way she is now, she says he still persisted and finally got the upper hand of her. She said it was always when I was away that he took advantage of her. She said I am telling the truth and to prove that you can see Cameron never comes to see me now, and I declare no Cree or any other man but Cameron has had to do with me as I told you when you came in, and now he won’t even give twenty five cents to support it, and he has not paid me yet for the last washing I did for him. She said she wanted something done for her, as she was hard up and no one would come to see her, and if left this way she would die. 27




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Mackenzie sought advice on the matter, because “the Band feel very bad about this and I fear if something is not done they will inf lict severe punishment on him, and would advise his removal from this place as soon as possible.” 28 The sexual stereotyping of women as “squaws” played an important role in official reluctance to punish white men who offended against Aboriginal women in Canada, and it was central to this case, where the woman in question was labeled as promiscuous by the man who assaulted her. 29 In correspondence the clerk questioned “his being the father of the child” because “he has reason to believe that others had also illicit intercourse with the woman in question.” Cameron’s defense against the charges centered on the immorality of Aboriginal women. “I am accused as being the sole author of such complainants misfortunes,” he stated, but, “if one why may there not be others?” 30 An official investigation resulted in the removal of the clerk from the reserve, but he retained a position in the DIA and was never prosecuted. The DIA was heavily invested in controlling the conjugal relations of Aboriginal men and women. Specifically, they encouraged Christian marriages.31 Officials would go to great lengths to intervene in and control Aboriginal women’s sexuality. A mixed descent woman of the Pacheena Band in British Columbia came to the notice of the DIA in 1899. Bob Macdonald, described as her “white lover,” had taken their two-year-old daughter and refused to return her. Out of desperation she turned to the authorities for assistance.32 The Indian Agent saw Macdonald as a typical squaw man—one who was untrustworthy and engaged in immoral behavior, a “thoughtless” and “vicious” man, who “should hardly be allowed to relieve himself of his responsibilities towards to her with impunity.”33 Louisa’s was “not a singular case and only differs from many others which have occurred on this coast in the publicity which attaches to it.” 34 Indian commissioner A. W. Vowell, however, saw the case in a very different light. He refused her any assistance on the basis that the child was white and should not be raised among “Indians” because “she deserted [her Aboriginal husband] to live with a white man knowing full well that she was doing wrong.”35 In this case the Indian Act worked in Macdonald’s favor, condoning his behavior because it confirmed the immorality of Aboriginal women, and thus offered a space for the retention of men’s racial status in colonial Canada. Aboriginal women’s status was far more precarious.

New Zealand In colonial New Zealand, interracial marriage was welcomed by Maori, especially in the South Island, to control access to trade and to wealth, and to repair the damage done to populations due to inter-tribal wars prior to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi on February 6, 1840. Interracial marriage was never prohibited. In fact it was encouraged as a biological component of racial amalgamation policy, the object being the cultural and physical assimilation of Maori into the European system and population. Maori women were at the center of this process, not Maori men.



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Around two thousand newcomers, comprising of whalers, traders, early settlers, and missionaries, were resident in New Zealand on the eve of the signing of the Treaty. With the establishment of British authority and law in the decades after 1840 the question of interracial marriage and the rights of white men came up for debate. The status of interracial relationships and the rights of the children was discussed among officials soon after the Treaty was signed. Willoughby Shortland, administrator and colonial secretary of New Zealand, suggested in 1842 that it be “recommended to the Home Authorities that some provision be made suitable to the circumstance of those who may have formed connexion with Maoris legally.”36 In the first instance, white men’s land rights needed to be resolved. The archive of letters, petitions, and political debate on these matters throughout the 1840s and 1850s ref lects fears about white (colonial) masculinity, the need to reform it, or at least regulate it, and to reward those who engaged in legal marriage. Maori were treated distinctively within the law. Colonial legislation did not recognize marriage undertaken within the framework of Maori custom. Instead, successive laws from 1847 encouraged, rather than required, Maori to conform to western and legal marriage with its formal ceremony, conducted by a minister, and recorded on a marriage certificate.37 Legally, the acceptance of interracial marriage opened up the complicated question of the property rights of Maori women, as well as rights of the white men they married.38 Evidence for this can be found in the passage of colonial ordinances and statutes relating to interracial marriage throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, which, in part, preserved men’s racial status, their economic power, and furthered racial amalgamation policy. The relationship between economics and marriage is clear in the ordinances and statutes enacted from the 1840s, because all dealt with the property rights of white men engaged in a legally recognized interracial marriage. From the mid-1840s, New Zealand’s colonial authorities received numerous communications from men who feared for the status and economic security of their families and looked to the Crown and colonial government for assistance, or at least recognition under British law to ensure the property rights of their wives and children.39 The subsequent Ordinances and legislation, and the petitions and letters relating to appeals for assistance, constitute an important, but largely untapped, archive about whiteness and masculinity in the colonial era. Ann McGrath has examined marriage, the law, and colonialism in Queensland, Australia, and discovered an archive arose around requests for consent to marry. Consisting of letters from white men, these requests brought interracial couples into the ambit of the court system and the Protectorate, and also made claims to “respectability” and “responsibility.”40 While concerned with exploring Aboriginal women’s agency, McGrath illustrates that the rights of white husbands were at stake under legislation in Queensland. If found to be engaged in an illicit and thus illegal relationship men could lose their Aboriginal partner to removal, and the state could break up the family. Claims to respectability were paramount to gaining consent to marry as well as retaining family life and




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included evidence of economic independence. Similar claims to respectability were made by white men in a set of discrete archives, which open up understandings of white masculinity in New Zealand’s colonial era to investigation. Petitions to authorities for economic assistance offered evidence of respectability, and notably, their commitment to a stable family life.41 Many requests for assistance came from ex-whalers living in the lower South Island, and derived out of promises made by Walter Mantell while completing the purchase of Ngai Tahu tribal territory for the Crown under Kemp’s Purchase, 1848, and the Murihiku Purchase, 1853. Mantell promised grants of land under Crown title to the wives and children of white men within the boundaries of these purchase blocks. According to Mantell, in 1848, there were resident a number of families of halfcastes, whose fathers it was naturally supposed might, unless reassured to their prospects after the cession of the land to government, throw obstacles in the way of its acquisition: so when I was sent in August to persuade or compel those natives who had not joined in Kemp’s deed to acknowledge that their land was sold to the Crown, and with the rest to permit the survey of Reserves within the Block, I was instructed to promise these people, that when the land belonged to the Crown provision in land under Crown Title would be made for their wives and children. To have included this provision within the Native Reserves would have, it was held, subjected the Natives therein to undue domination on the part of the White’s (sic) and half-castes of their families.42 Very soon after the completion of the 1848 and 1853 purchases Mantell received letters from white men requesting the fulfillment of his promises. Having broken up a “group of squatters” at the settlement of Moeraki in 1852, Mantell subsequently recommended to the Colonial Secretary in May of the same year that “grants [be made] in favor of those who had wives and families,” of which “many applications have been sent to me.”43 The evictions at Moeraki and Mantell’s comments about the “whites” proves these men were considered troublesome and disruptive, first to the successful completion of the purchase, and second, to the distinction between white and native spaces. Mantell feared the “White’s,” like the “squaw man,” would incite discontent amongst Ngai Tahu by dominating politically and economically. His job was to keep them off the reserve, and to prevent further discontent by promising them land grants. The rights of white men came first. In 1848, while visiting Moeraki to set the boundaries of a reserve, Mantell described the mixed descent families as living in “vice and misery” and in want of “a less bad example from their Parents.”44 In 1854 he recast himself as the champion of white husbands, ascribing to them characteristics worthy of rewarding, and sought official support for this, describing these men as “a class of poor yet deserving individuals, the pioneers of civilisation.”45 Legislation was enacted to preserve the economic rights of former whalers in the lower South Island. The Stewart Island Grants Act (1873)



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represented these men as “settlers,” the pioneers of colonization in the South, and the land grants set aside for them under this Act was central to securing this “respectable” status for them. Respectability was reinforced by the applications of descendants of early interracial unions in the 1870s and 1880s, who applied for land grants based on the long residence of their fathers.46 The association between interracial marriage and economics was explicit in the mid-nineteenth century. While officials wished to secure the rights of those legally married to Maori women, they remained suspicious of the motives of white men who engaged in such relationships. A series of laws were passed to provide land to mixed descent children, notably the four Half-Caste Crown Grants Acts passed between 1877 and 1885, but anxiety focused on how this land was to be secured for them, in fear that the white father coveted it and would dispense of the land as if it were his. Alexander Mackay, commissioner of Native Reserves in the South Island, expressed his concern to Harry Atkinson, minister of Crown Lands, in March 1875 that the plan of granting land to the European fathers of half-caste families instead of to the person who it is intended to benefit is a disadvantageous one to the persons concerned, especially if the Grant is silent respecting the object for which the land is apportioned. There is one instance of the injustice that may be done in this way in the case of the Haberfield family. In this case according to the terms of the Grant, the Father holds the land for his life. The result of this is, that he can do what he pleases with it as far as occupancy is concerned. Since the death of his first wife, a half-caste, named Meriana Tete, he has married a European woman and has farmed away all the children of the former marriage, thereby preventing them from deriving any benefit from the land that was given in the first place as a maintenance for them.47 Those men who had gone native remained a figure of suspicion in official circles, whose motive for engaging in interracial marriage was understood to be for the purpose of economic gain, and thus, land grants would naturally be followed by abandonment. How to retain the rights of Maori women and their children after interracial marriage, particularly if that relationship subsequently failed, was a question that played out in the “case of widow Meurant.”

Mrs. Meurant and the “Rights of Aboriginal Women” New Zealand officials did not interfere in interracial relationships in a direct manner, but anxiety about them did exist. As Patricia Grimshaw has remarked, Maori women had “the right to marry whom they chose,” but their property rights within interracial marriage required recognition under law to prevent the loss of those rights.48 Maori women’s property rights after marriage were investigated as part of the Old Land Claims Commissions held throughout the




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1840s and 1850s. Commissioners dealt with pre-Treaty land sales between Maori and private individuals as well as waivers of the Crown right to preemption in the late 1840s, which allowed for private purchases of Maori land. As part of these investigations a number of “half-caste” claims, the majority relating to the Bay of Islands, Auckland, and Tauranga, came to light. In all cases investigated white men claimed gifts of land made over to them on marriage by Maori relatives. Land was gifted, often as a marriage portion, for any future children of the relationship. White men applied to have these marriage gifts formally acknowledged via a Crown Grant in their name as a trustee for the children. One particular case generated a large archive of correspondence, including petitions and a legal opinion. Francis Dillon Bell, land claims commissioner, began investigating the case of “widow Meurant” in the 1850s, and it was not resolved until the 1880s after an enquiry and legal opinion was sought, which found that “the real question at issue [is] one of an aboriginal woman’s rights.”49 Kenehuru of the Ngati Mahuta tribe entered into marriage with a white man, Edward Meurant, in 1835. Kenehuru lost a portion of her land to the Crown in 1847. How she came to lose this land was the subject of Bell’s investigation. Sympathizers sought assistance from the Colonial Office and the New Zealand government, but without success. In 1854, her case gave rise to the claim that if a Native woman marry a European subject of the Queen, her land is confiscated to the Crown; but, if she merely live in concubinage with a European, all the power in New Zealand cannot touch one acre of that land. I ask, is this an official premium upon immorality, or is it not?50 This question was posed by Hugh Carleton, an Auckland politician, and the son-in-law of Henry Williams of the Church Missionary Society. Williams was dismissed from his position in 1847 in a decision inf luenced by the governor George Grey. Carleton attacked Grey in the House over the matter of Kenehuru, and within the pages of Auckland newspaper the Southern Cross, of which he became editor in 1856. George Grey, the architect of New Zealand’s amalgamation policy, represented the case as one pertaining to Aboriginal women’s property rights. A Crown grant had been issued to Meurant for ten acres of land in 1848 that had originally consisted of thirty acres gifted as a marriage portion to Kenehuru. If the gift of land was made after marriage, Grey argued she could have acquired no rights, and there could have been no forfeiture to the Crown.51 In an 1851 despatch on the matter Earl Grey, the colonial secretary for the colonies, argued that any sale required Kenehuru’s consent in accordance with “native usage.”52 In the same despatch Earl Grey pointed out that “an European marrying a Native woman acquires no further rights in such lands, whether allotted before or after her marriage, than she possessed herself ” and Meurant had no claim to a Crown Grant.53 By acquiring twenty acres, and granting ten acres to Meurant, the Governor had acted as if native title had been extinguished. But as the land



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by a sedulous encouragement of marriage between the European colonist and the native female, the Government of Sir George Grey has offered a positive premium to concubinage, by its sordid and dishonest appropriation of the land settled by native relations as the marriage portion of the native wife of an European husband.55 This “seizure” of land amounted to the “moral and social debasement of the aboriginal natives of the north” through the mechanism of the Native Land Purchase Ordinance. Political concern was given support by the local settler population. In 1854 eighteen leading Auckland settlers formed the Association for the Prevention of Immorality, and petitioned the government to enact measures “to remedy certain evils supposed to exist by the loss of land, incurred on the marriage of an European with a Native woman.”56 Political debate and legislative activity in the 1840s and 1850s reinforces Damon Salesa’s argument that racial amalgamation policy in New Zealand in part tried to regulate and control, but not outlaw, interracial marriage.57 It could not be prohibited because interracial relationships were a reality in New Zealand, and an official response was required to make them “regular,” “moral,” and “legitimate.” In The Story of New Zealand, authored by A. S. Thomson, and published in 1859 when the Meurant case was a part of social and political debate in Auckland, interracial marriage was described as a “union of the races.” This union, argued Thomson, should be promoted in New Zealand law with regard to inheritance because as the “law now stands, concubinage is indirectly encouraged, and legal unions between European males and native females are discouraged.”58 Thomson’s wish for the promotion of amalgamation of the races through legal marriages under New Zealand law was shortly to be realized in the form of the Half-Caste Disability Removal Act (1860). The 1860 Act was designed to encourage legal, moral unions, which would assist in furthering racial amalgamation. It legitimized the children of interracial marriages prior to 1860, as well as their inheritance rights. Immorality was also removed by encouraging legitimate interracial unions in the future, because Maori women’s property rights were retained after marriage to a white man, thereby removing the “official premium” on concubinage. But the 1860 Act targeted a certain class of person: children of mixed descent who had “wealthy fathers, or those whose father had secured property to his name” and therefore suffered a legal disability in regards to inheritance.59 There is extensive evidence that as long as marriages were legal, the government supported interracial relationships because the practice accorded with amalgamation policy. 60 Prior to the passage of the Half-Caste Disability Removal Bill colonial politicians debated on how to deal with interracial marriage, especially as it



was a gift, native title remained intact, the land remained under Kenehuru’s authority, and the governor was bound by law to protect her rights.54 Widow Meurant’s case was heralded as an example of Grey’s “indifference to colonial morality” in the Southern Cross, in which,

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pertained to the inheritance of property. During the 1850s, some politicians believed that any Maori woman married to a European man was subject to common marriage law, and thus her property came under her husband’s control. Interracial marriage, therefore, was “on occasions used by the colonial administration as a subtle way of enlarging the holdings of Crown land.”61 Certainly, the question of economics and property rights underpinned debates leading up to the passage of the 1860 Bill. Maori women’s wish to maintain separate property rights, it was believed, encouraged interracial relationships rather than formal marriages in colonial New Zealand. The fear of an increase in illicit relationships ensured the passage of the 1860 Bill, as did the fear that without formal marriage, the Crown could not gain access to Maori land, because if a Maori woman “merely live in concubinage with a European, all the powers in New Zealand cannot touch one acre of that land.”62

Conclusion Neither Canada nor New Zealand outlawed interracial marriage, but officials were anxious about it, especially the implications for white masculinity. In the United States men on reserves forfeited their whiteness, but in Canada their status as white was retained: they had not gone native, but instead were prevented from doing so through the removal policy established under the Indian Act. Similarly, in New Zealand the Half-Caste Disability Removal Act 1860, which seemed on the surface to be concerned with women’s property rights, was a useful way to retain economic status for men who had co-habited and entered into marriage with Maori women. Interracial marriage was not prohibited in colonial Canada or New Zealand, in part because sanctions against the practice would undermine the claims to respectability of white settlers, and by extension, settler society. Preventing men from going native and, thereby, “saving” their racial status as white, and thus as civilized and respectable, proves that race and gender was at the heart of colonial legislation in colonial Canada and New Zealand.

Notes 1. Much of the archival research for this chapter was undertaken while I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History, University of Saskatchewan. I am grateful for the generous support of the Canada Research Council, which funded that postdoctoral position, and for the advice and support of Jim Miller, Keith Carlson, Bill Waiser, Heather Watson, Joanie Crandall, Lissa Wadewitz, and Simone Horwitz. Completion of this chapter could not have been achieved without the support of a Royal Society of New Zealand Fast-Start Marsden Grant. 2. Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” in Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 23–70. The most recent work on intimacy and empire, which includes Australasia and invites connections with North America, can be



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3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

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found in Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds, Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Empire (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). Jane Carey, chapter thirteen in this collection; Liz Conor, chapter fourteen in this collection; Katherine Ellinghaus, chapter sixteen in this collection. Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race and the Making of British Columbia, 1849–1871 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 47. Colin G. Calloway, “Neither White Nor Red: Renegades on the American Indian Frontier,” Western Historical Quarterly 17, no. 1 (1986): 52. William T. Hagan, “Squaw Men on the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Reservation: Advance Agents of Civilization or Disturbers of the Peace?,” in The Frontier Challenge: responses to the Trans-Mississippi West, ed. John G. Clarke (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 1971), 171–202. David D. Smits, “ ‘Squaw Men,’ ‘Half Breeds,’ and Amalgamators: Late Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Attitudes toward Indian-White RaceMixing,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 15 (1991): 29–61. See Daniel Thorp, “Going Native in New Zealand and America: Comparing Pakeha Maori and White Indians,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31, no. 3 (2003): 1–23; James Axtell, “The White Indians of Colonial America,” in American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, ed. Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell (London: Routledge, 2000), 324–50; Linda Colley, “Going Native, Telling Tales: Captivity, Collaborations and Empire,” Past and Present 168 (2000): 170–93. John Mack Faragher, “The Custom of the Country: Cross-Cultural Marriage in the Far Western Fur Trade,” in Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives, ed. Lillian Schlissel, Vicki L. Ruiz, and Janice Monk (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 208. Ibid., 208. See Trevor Bentley, Pakeha-Maori: The Extraordinary Story of the Europeans who Lived as Maori in Early New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin, 1999). The term “native spaces” is borrowed from Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002). Sheila McManus, The Line Which Separates: Race, Gender, and the Making of the Alberta-Montana Borderlands (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). See Sarah Carter, “ ‘We Must Farm to Enable Us To Live’: The Plains Cree and Agriculture until 1900,” in Native Peoples: The Canadian Experience, ed. R. Bruce Morrison and C. Roderick Wilson (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1995): 444–70. Perry, On the Edge of Empire, 58. Kathleen Jamieson, Indian Women and the Law: Citizens Minus (Ottawa: Advisory Council on the Status of Women, 1987), 1; Joan Sangster, “Native Women, Sexuality and the Law,” in In the Days of Our Grandmothers: A Reader in Aboriginal Women’s History in Canada, ed. Mary-Ellen Kelm and Lorna Townsend (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2006), 301–35; Robin Jarvis Brownlie, “Intimate Surveillance: Indian Affairs, Colonization, and the Regulation of Aboriginal Women’s Sexuality,” in Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, ed. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale (Vancouver: UBC, 2006), 160–78.; Lynn Gehl, “ ‘The Queen and I’: Discrimination Against Women in the Indian Act Continues,” Canadian Women’s Studies 20, no. 2 (2000): 64–9; Bonita




15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

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Lawrence, “Real” Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004). Indian and Northern Affairs, The Historical Development of the Indian Act (Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1978), 61. Perry, On the Edge of Empire, 74. Deputy Superintendent-General to MacColl, September 25, 1891, RG10, File 82643, Volume 3862, C-10193, Library and Archives Canada, (hereafter LAC), Ottawa. Also see Superintendent-General to Indian Commissioner, Northwest Territories, who asks if Elizabeth St. Germain’s husband is “a whiteman, half-breed or non-treaty Indian?” on June 5, 1891, RG10, File 78429, Volume 3853, C-10193, LAC. Also see RG10, File 27719, Volume 3737, C-10192, RG10 and File 9223, Volume 3657, C-10190, LAC. McManus, The Line Which Separates, 75–6. George E. Chessier to Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs, June 22, 1883, RG10, File 43,497, Volume 2222, C-11182, LAC. Department of Indian Affairs to G. E. Chessier, June 30, 1885, RG10, File 43 497, Volume 2222, C-1182, LAC. Hayter Reed to E. L. Newcombe, September 25, 1896, RG13, File 1896–832, Volume 102, A2, LAC. See RG10, File 87,704–2, Volume 2425, C-11218, LAC. Nass River Band Council to Powell, October 7, 1879, RG10, File 17,071, Volume 3700, C-10123, LAC. Chief to Powell, undated, RG10, File 17,071, Volume 3700, C-10123, LAC. Walter Scott to David Laird, June 7, 1901, RG10, File 135,540–6, Volume 3953, C-10198, LAC. Frank Thomson to Superintendent-General, January 29, 1909, RG10, File 135,540–1, Volume 3953, C-10198, LAC. Mackenzie to Hayter Reed, March 3, 1891, RG10, File 81,984, Volume 3858, C-10151, LAC. Ibid. Sarah Carter, Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997); “Categories and Terrains of Exclusion: Constructing the ‘Indian Woman’ in the Early Settlement Era in Western Canada,” in In the Days of Our Grandmothers, 146–69; Jean Barman, “Taming Aboriginal Sexuality: Gender, Power, and Race in British Columbia, 1850–1900,” in In the Days of Our Grandmothers, 270–300. Cameron to Hayter Reed, March 26, 1891, RG10, File 81,984, Volume 3858, C-10151, LAC. See Sarah Carter, “ ‘Complicated and Clouded’: The Federal Administration of Marriage and Divorce among the First Nations of Western Canada, 1887–1906,” in Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West through Women’s History, ed. Sarah Carter, Lesley Erickson, Patricia Roome, and Char Smith (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005), 151–78; “Creating ‘Semi-Widows’ and ‘Supernumerary Wives’: Prohibiting Polygamy in Prairie Canada’s Aboriginal Communities to 1900,” in Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colonial Past, ed. Katie Pickles and Myra Rutherdale (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005), 131–59. J. W. Mackay to DIA, May 4, 1899, RG10, File 184310, Volume 3992, C-10202, LAC. Ibid.



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34. Ibid. 35. Vowell to Agent Maclean, May 22, 1899, RG10, File 184310, Volume 3992, C-10202, LAC. 36. W. Shortland to W. Whittaker, May 6, 1842, OLC 1/60 OLC 1323, Archives New Zealand, (hereafter ANZ-W), Wellington. 37. Sandra Coney, ed., Standing in the Sunshine (Auckland: Viking, 1993), 186. Joan Metge and Donna Durie-Hall, “Kua Tutū Te Puehu, Kia Mau: Maori Aspirations and Family Law,” in Family Law Policy in New Zealand, ed. Mark Hanaghan and Bill Atkin (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1992), 63. 38. Judith Binney, “ ‘In-Between’ Lives: Studies from within a Colonial Society,” in Disputed Histories: Imagining New Zealand’s Pasts, ed. Tony Ballantyne and Brian Moloughney (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2006), 93–118; Angela Wanhalla, “Marrying ‘In’: The Geography of Intermarriage at Taieri, 1830s–1920s,” in Landscape/Community: Perspectives from New Zealand History, ed. Tony Ballantyne and Judith A. Bennett (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2005), 73–94; Damon Salesa, “Race Mixing: A Victorian Problem in Britain and New Zealand,” PhD thesis, Oxford University, 2000. The most recent work is Kate Stevens, “ ‘Gathering Places’: The Mixed Descent Families of Foveaux Strait and Rakiura/Stewart Island, 1844–1864,” BA (Hons) research essay, University of Otago, 2008. 39. See the letters of Joseph Crocome, James Daniells, and William Shearer in the Register of Inwards Correspondence to the Civil Secretary, CS 2/1, ANZ-W. Letters of a similar nature and subject matter are listed in the Register of Inwards Correspondence to the Civil Secretary, CS 2/1; the Register of the Maori Affairs Department, 1840–1847, MA 2/1; and the Register of Correspondence to the Governor, 1840–1870, G 22/1, ANZ-W. 40. Ann McGrath, “Consent, Marriage and Colonialism: Indigenous Australian Women and Colonizer Marriages,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6, no. 3 (2005). http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/journal_of_colonialism_ and_colonial_history/v006/6.3mcgrath.html. 41. The following files all contain letters and petitions from white men and their mixed descent children requesting land grants, as well as documents and schedules of names pertaining to investigations into these claims: MA13 19/12[a], Part 1; MA13 19/12[b], Part 2; MA13 19/12[c], Part 3; MA13 20/12[d], Part 4, ANZ-W. 42. Evidence of Walter Mantell before the Public Petitions Committee, July 20, 1869, MA 13/20 12[e] Part 5, ANZ-W. 43. Mantell to Colonial Secretary, April 6, 1854, LE 1/38 1863/116, ANZ-W. 44. Mantell to Colonial Secretary, May 17, 1852, cited in Waitangi Tribunal, Ngai Tahu Ancillary Claims Report, 1995 (Wellington: Waitangi Tribunal, 1995), 182. 45. Mantell to Colonial Secretary, April 6, 1854, ANZ-W. 46. For instance, Petition from the Stevens family, August 4, 1881; and Alexander Mackay to Land Claims Commissioner, November 22, 1879, MA13 19/12[a], Part 1, ANZ-W. Also see investigations into “half-caste” claims by the Old Land Claims Commission in OLC 4/20, ANZ-W. 47. See MA 13/20 12[d] Part 4, ANZ-W. 48. Patricia Grimshaw, “Interracial Marriages and Colonial Regimes in Victoria and Aotearoa/New Zealand,” Frontiers 23, no. 3 (2002): 25. 49. Herbert Leadham, Report on Kenehuru, July 13, 1872, OLC 1/60 OLC 1323, ANZ-W.




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50. Hugh Carleton, July 13, 1854, New Zealand Parliamentary Debates (First Session), (1854), 221. 51. Leadham, Report on Kenehuru. 52. Ibid. 53. Earl Grey to George Grey, April 5, 1851, Extracts from Official Papers, OLC 1/60 OLC 1323, ANZ-W. 54. Leadham, Report on Kenehuru. 55. Southern Cross, February 17, 1852, 2. 56. Petitions Received by the House of Representatives during the First Session at Auckland, New Zealand, Votes and Proceedings of the House of Representatives, Session 1, 1854. 57. Salesa, “Race Mixing,” 122. 58. Arthur S. Thomson, The Story of New Zealand Past and Present—Savage and Civilised, Volume II (London: John Murray, 1859), 305–6. 59. Salesa, “Race Mixing,” 266. 60. Ibid., 139. 61. Bettina Bradbury, “From Civil Death to Separate Property: Changes in the Legal Rights of Married Women in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand,” New Zealand Journal of History 29, no. 1 (1995): 45. 62. Carleton, quoted in ibid., 45.



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Into the White Man’s Kingdom: Whiteness and Indigenous Assimilation Policies in the United States and Australia, 1880s–1960s Katherine Ellinghaus

I

n his assessment of the field of whiteness studies in the United States, Peter Kolchin has complained that scholars “often display a notable lack of precision in asserting the non-white status of despised groups.” The “despised” groups Kolchin refers to are the Irish, Jewish people, and poor whites that have most often been the subjects of the foundational texts of American whiteness studies.1 “What is at issue,” Kolchin says, “is not the widespread hostility to and discrimination against” these groups, “but the salience of whiteness in either explaining or describing such hostility and discrimination.” The transition of these groups from being perceived as despised, unassimilated, and “non-white,” to applauded, assimilated, and “white” is too simplistic. Whiteness did not always equal acceptance. As Kolchin points out, the status of southern poor whites “is especially telling.” 2 These people were, as Matt Wray has shown, the recipients of negative racial stereotyping that read them as “not quite white.”3 At the same time, they were never completely denied their whiteness. As Wray points out, poor whites offer a challenge to the boundaries of whiteness as it has been understood by whiteness studies. Phrases such as “white trash” describe people “whose very existence seems to threaten the symbolic and social order.”4 In this chapter, I address these theoretical concerns about how we might understand whiteness by taking this question—when did whiteness equal acceptance and when did it not?—into two completely different contexts.



CHAPTER 16

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Katherine Ellinghaus

Aileen Moreton-Robinson has argued that historians need to decide whether “whiteness,” as formulated by American historians, is a useful theoretical concept to apply elsewhere. “[T]he problem with the American literature,” she writes, “is that it tends to locate race and whiteness with the development of slavery and immigration rather than the dispossession of Native Americans colonisation.”5 I examine the whiteness offered to Indigenous people at the height of assimilation policies in two separate settler societies. Dictionary definitions of assimilation often imply a form of equality, a benign process whereby individuals or groups of different ethnic heritage acquire the basic attitudes, habits, and mode of life of another national culture, or, as the South Australian Aborigines Friends Association put it in 1944, enter “into the white man’s kingdom.”6 But so often, Indigenous assimilation was also an idea predicated on maintaining the racial status quo, as the work of Australian historians such as Anna Haebich, Tim Rowse, and in the United States, Fred Hoxie and Ward Churchill has demonstrated.7 When viewing whiteness from outside the familiar nation-building stories of the United States, as this collection seeks to do, whiteness seems very different. Indigenous people were inherently “raced”— not just by the color of their skin, or their non-Western cultures, but also by hundreds of years of transnational colonial racial discourses about their “savagery” and “otherness.” Merely undergoing the processes of assimilation and acculturation was never going to have them read as white. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of assimilation did promise some kind of transformation—it promised acceptance, blending in, and economic, political, and social equality with whites. But this was not the whiteness available to immigrants in the United States described in the work of Roediger, Ignatiev, and Brodkin. As Kolchin goes on to argue, “In viewing whiteness as an independent category, many whiteness studies authors come close to reifying it and thereby losing sight of its constructed nature.” 8 This chapter shows how, when applied to Native Americans and Aborigines in the United States and Australia in an assimilationist context, whiteness was constructed in a very different way to the way it appears in the context of American immigrants. Both the United States and Australia were not only settler societies, they were also immigrant nations, whose national identity and history have been built on the myths of new arrivals, their hard work, and their apocryphal rises from obscurity to riches. But for Aborigines and Native Americans whiteness did not operate in the way it did for immigrants, who through acculturation and financial success might attain it; instead it operated as an ideal set of social and economic behaviors that Indigenous people were meant to strive for and imitate. What studies such as Matt Wray’s tell us is that in many ways the whiteness described by the early U.S. studies of immigrant whiteness was, for some groups, an ideal that might never be reached or a promise that might never be kept. For groups who did not have the ability to be read as racially white, as Jewish, Irish, and southern whites with their European backgrounds were able to be, whiteness was unattainable through mere culture and lifestyle changes. As Maureen Perkins has written of the whiteness that was offered to the stolen generations in Australia, in many



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ways the promised assimilation was “actually a false whiteness, one that they could never in truth achieve . . . this was probably well understood by those who implemented the policies.” 9 Even though the rhetoric of assimilation talked about equal citizenship and self-sufficiency, in fact Aborigines and Native Americans were never imagined as full participants in the societies that they were supposed to be assimilating into. This is surprising considering the bureaucratic emphasis on reducing government spending on Indigenous people that underlay so many of the policies of assimilation and protection in these two settler societies. It is not, however, unexpected when the intense racism directed at Indigenous peoples, and the oft-expressed expectation that they were going to “vanish” as a result of colonialism, is taken into account. Assimilationists often expressed the belief that the faster that Aborigines and Native Americans assimilated the better. In fact, various assumptions about Indigenous people and their abilities, not to mention their position as dependent wards, prevented governments from ever really giving them the chance to assimilate. Despite the rhetoric of joining the “white man’s kingdom,” in many ways Indigenous people were simply not imagined as ever really doing so. There was, in fact, a discomfort felt by white Australia and white America when acculturated Native Americans and Aborigines engaged in certain kinds of white conduct, and approval when they engaged in other kinds. As discussed elsewhere in this collection, settler societies were inherently anxious. As Angela Wanhalla and Jane Carey show in this collection, settlers became particularly anxious when the neat boundaries between white and nonwhite were threatened by, for example, interracial relationships between white men and indigenous women, or eugenic theories that posited a weakening of the white “race.”10 Settlers were also made nervous when, instead of displaying the kinds of behavior that ref lected the life of the ideal, religious, thrifty, moral white person, Indigenous people indulged in modern behaviors such as spending on consumer goods. In essence, assimilated Indigenous people were supposed to replicate an ideal kind of white lifestyle, one that often had little to do with the white society they came in contact with. This uneasiness is most evident at what might be called the “high end” of assimilation: policies aimed at providing assimilative pathways to Indigenous people seen as best candidates for assimilation. In Australia and the United States, legislation provided new legal statuses to Aborigines and Native Americans whom white officials perceived to be good candidates for assimilation. Aboriginal people could apply for certificates of exemption that released them from state “protection” legislation. This legislation, passed by every state and colony in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, “protected” Aboriginal people in theory only. In actual fact it imposed wide-ranging controls on their movement, place of abode, terms of employment, racial status, and their ability to purchase alcohol and have custody of their own children. Similarly, in the United States certain Native Americans were declared “competent” and awarded a fee patent that allowed them to sell, deed, and pay taxes



Indigenous Assimilation Policies

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on their lands and disqualified them from the benefits that came with government recognition of their Indian status.11 A basic promise made by assimilation was that assimilated persons would be able to earn their living and participate equally in the industrialist societies in which they lived. As I will show, being declared competent or “exempt” relied, in a large part, on demonstrating acculturated financial and social behavior. Competent Indians and exempt Aborigines were expected to be able to grapple with the consumer, capitalist aspects of settler society. The extent of their engagement with free enterprise was, however, slightly different in each place. Because U.S. assimilation policies involved the allotment of land, competency in the United States had the added consequence of sometimes placing large sums of money in Indian hands. Thus, anxieties over how Native Americans dealt with sudden wealth often characterized discussions of competency. In Australia, individual parcels of land were never handed out to Aborigines on a wide scale, and in fact state governments withheld Aboriginal earnings and social security entitlements to a degree that is only recently starting to be recognized and investigated.12 In Australia, therefore, while similar anxieties about Aboriginal thrift existed, they were on a much smaller scale, involved lesser sums of money and concentrated on encouraging and controlling social behavior more generally. But in both Australia and the United States, the anxieties about and restrictions and controls imposed on Indigenous spending show that even Aborigines and Native Americans who were, to whites, acculturated examples of the pinnacle of assimilation policy were not imagined as white, nor even as equal to whites in this crucial area of their lives.

New South Wales Exemption certificates were created by clauses in state protection legislation that released the holder from control by that legislation. Being exempt from protection legislation meant slightly different things to Aborigines from different states, depending on what controls were imposed on them. But, in essence, exemption certificates were assimilationist—indeed perhaps the most assimilationist clause included in protection legislation. Michael Sawtell, a longtime member of the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board, explained in 1958 that “Certificates of Exemption [make Aborigines] full citizens, just as much a citizen as the Prime Minister, for . . . They are no longer deemed to be persons of Aboriginal blood.”13 Sawtell linked exemption certificates directly to acculturated behavior. “We cannot be accepted as an equal in good society, unless we are properly dressed, speak properly and behave decently. Proper social behaviour is a subtle form of exemption certificate.”14 Often, the most immediate consequence to holders’ lives was the ability to buy and consume alcohol publicly (although it was illegal to sell Aborigines alcohol in most states, a “back door” system meant that it was nevertheless obtainable). In some places there was the possibility of being enfranchised, or of children being allowed in public schools. In the post–World War II period, exemption certificates became



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the only way an Aboriginal person could gain access to federal government welfare programs, entitling them to receive government benefits such as the old age, invalid, widows’ pensions, and maternity allowances.15 Across Australia the numbers of exemption certificates applied for and granted were very low. In New South Wales, for example, between 1945 and 1964 only fifteen hundred applications were made from a population of fourteen thousand.16 Such statistics ref lect the considerable resistance to the exemption system among the Aboriginal community. Cyril Coaby, a Nunga man, remembered that he never applied for exemption because he objected to the wording on South Australian certificates that said “ ‘Cease to be an Aboriginal’ . . . No way in the world would I give up my Aboriginality for anything.”17 As Heather Goodall has argued, exemption certificates were used by the government as a kind of “carrot-and-stick behaviour modification program.”18 The application process was intrusive and patronizing. The New South Wales Board sent personal report forms to local police, supervisors of reserves and stations, and Aboriginal Welfare officers. These confidential reports contained information about racial “caste,” skin color, family, employment, work habits, “general conduct,” “drinking habits,” “gambling habits,” “thrift,” “morality,” whether or not the applicant’s house was clean, how well the children were taken care of, and the amount in any savings accounts. Exemption certificates could be revoked at the whim of a government official, placing many holders under considerable pressure in their daily life.19 The records of the New South Wales Board contain remarkably coercive correspondence from Board officials scolding, threatening, and encouraging exemption certificate holders to behave in approved ways. Dawn, the magazine published by the New South Wales Aborigines Welfare Board from 1952 to 1975, also played an important part in encouraging people to apply (and comply) using positive reinforcement. “Congratulations to [X] . . . on being granted an Exemption Certificate,” read an article in a 1960 issue. “When we heard of X’s Certificate we decided to have a look at him and were very pleased at what we saw.” X was praised for his clean and well-furnished house, his bank account and insurance policy, his well-mannered children, and his community activities. 20 Lillian Holt remembered how this rhetoric influenced her mother, who “applied three times for an Exemption Certificate . . . I’m sure that for those of my parent’s generation, that was part of the ‘glittering prize.’ That is, to be deemed respectable and responsible enough to no longer be considered an Aborigine under the Native Affairs Act.” 21 The Board saw financial success as a sign of acculturation, and placed special emphasis on the spending habits of exempted Aborigines. Irresponsibility with money could be the reason for the denial of a Certificate of Exemption. 22 One man’s arrears on the rent for his cottage on a reserve was given as a reason for the deferment of his application—the Board later relented and issued the certificate, but the man was told “that the issue of a certificate is an indication that the holder is an assimilated aboriginal and a citizen of good repute. Urge that he always remember this and that he pay his debt for rent as soon as




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possible.” 23 The Board also actively encouraged good spending habits, congratulating one young woman in writing “on your thriftiness which has enabled you to have a credit balance of £200 and it is hoped that you will further save and continue your studies so that your ambition to own a small farm may eventually be realised.” 24 The Board promoted a particular kind of modest spending behavior. The superintendent of the Aborigines Welfare Board M. H. Saxby wrote more than one article entitled “Thrift” for Dawn. Dawn offered detailed praise and advice for how people should use their money, and chided what the board saw as inappropriate spending behavior. In one article it was revealed not only that five residents of Boggabilla station had begun to receive pensions, but also the exact items on which they had spent their back pay. “[I]t is gratifying to note that without exception they have used their money wisely,” said Dawn, “on such comforts as blankets and rugs for the winter. Also sheets and pillow slips were bought. Items of furniture including kitchen cabinets, tables, and chairs, and a couple of inner spring mattresses were purchased. One pensioner secured a small battery radio.” 25 The purchase of “luxuries” was frowned upon. Another article, versions of which appeared several times in Dawn, complained of the growing number of people in arrears for the rent due on their government-supplied cottages. “The Board is also aware that many who are not paying their rent are nevertheless spending their earnings on items which, even among white people, would be regarded as luxuries.” 26 New South Wales Aborigines were clearly imagined to live impoverished lives with very different expectations about which items were extravagances to mainstream Australia. The pressure to purchase only sensible and necessary consumer goods coexisted in the white community with a hesitation to envision Aborigines as assimilated consumers. This anxiety prompted a white reader to write to Dawn complaining that “fully half of [Dawn] was white folk buttering themselves with all the good that was being done by them for the coloured people.” The writer particularly took issue with the “Home Hints” section: Those poor creatures in their quagmire, how could they benefit from:— “Wrap gold and silver shoes,” etc. “To clean soiled and pastel coloured shoes,” etc. “[What to do when] your trousseau linen starts wearing,” etc. . . . All this might be very handy for those living in such places as Armidale . . . but there is still a tragic number of our NO. 1 Australians who do not live in those progressive places. 27 Another white reader agreed that “too often [Dawn] seems to be patronising in its tone and some of the household hints, however well-intentioned, are just unreal if they are meant to help people many of whom are economically poor, due to lack of opportunity.” 28 As Anna Haebich has argued, assimilation was a powerful act of national imagining that did not always coincide with community attitudes or acceptance. 29 In this case, the spending behavior of acculturated Aborigines was



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imagined as something quite separate from the financial behavior of white Australia. For most of the twentieth century, capitalism, mass production, advertising, and a cultural shift that promoted consumption and the buying of goods for want rather than need shaped white Australian spending habits. As R. W. Connell and T. H. Irving noted in their classic study of Australian class structure, the late nineteenth century saw the “triumph of urban capital” and the ideal Australian family was encouraged to practice consumption, not thrift, in the name of progress.30 The postwar period was in particular a period of ever-increasing consumerist behavior for White Australia—but not for the New South Wales Aboriginal population.31 There was a sharp contrast between the Board’s encouragement of savings accounts with their shameless withholding of Aboriginal wages. Jimmie Barker remembered that his wages were sent directly to the New South Wales Protection Board: “I was allowed sixpence a week for myself, but it had never been paid to me . . , It was no use writing to the Board and asking for an explanation; their reply would always be to the manager, who would not show it to me unless it suited him.”32 Ella Simon articulated this injustice clearly in her 1978 biography: “Soon after the government started giving child endowment to everyone ours was taken from us,” she wrote. The story I heard was that a woman in Sydney had her endowment stopped for ages, and, when she finally got it, she was supposed to have gone all over Sydney in a taxi. Just because she was an Aboriginal they punished every Aboriginal woman . . . the Board said we were “squandering” our endowment money and they were going to look after all the money paid to us.33 At least one New South Wales Aborigine, who had had his exemption certificate confiscated by the local police, also thought that his exemption meant he was “recognised as a white citizen.” 34 But the promises of “white equality” in New South Wales had some extraordinary codicils. Underlying the rhetoric of equality was a hesitancy to see Aborigines as white enough to join Australian consumer society. In Western Australia, reported a member of parliament, the Indigenous community were well aware that the certificates offered only a false promise of whiteness and did not “regard that certificate as of much value. They say that after the granting of the certificate they would still be natives and not white men—neither one thing nor the other—and that in such circumstances they prefer to remain natives.”35 We might posit that many New South Wales Aborigines felt the same.

United States Competency came with similar expectations and controls of Indigenous earning and spending behavior. The 1887 General Allotment (Dawes Act) was the foundation of assimilation policy in the United States. Passed by the federal




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government, it attempted to force Native Americans to assimilate by dividing up reservation lands into 160 acre blocks that were allotted to individuals, who were supposed to become self-supporting farmers. The concept of a competent Indian person was necessitated by the stipulation in the Dawes Act that the government would hold the title to each allotment in trust for twenty-five years. The government soon found it expedient to create a system by which individual Indians could become exempt from this trust period. Congress began awarding competency on an individual basis by enacting special legislation, or tagging an extra clause onto some Indian-related legislation. In 1906, Congress moved to make competency more widely available. The Burke Act of that year allowed the secretary of the interior to issue fee patents, after an application process that began when an individual approached a local superintendent, who completed an application, posted it on the reservation for thirty days, and forwarded it to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. In 1917, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Cato Sells put in place a system by which all Indians with less than one-half Indian “blood” and Indian students twenty-one or older who had completed course work at a government school and received a diploma, were immediately declared competent whether or not they had applied. During Sells’ period as commissioner, agents and superintendents were encouraged to make lists of potential candidates and competency “commissions” were sent out to reservations to find as many Indians to declare competent as possible. The Office of Indian Affairs was under intense pressure to hasten the turnover of Indian lands to white Americans. The Dawes Act allowed for a significant amount of “surplus” land after every Indian was allotted, but the twenty-five-year trust period was soon perceived as a burden. Declaring Native Americans competent was one solution—a fee patent allowed an Indian to sell or lease his land, an opportunity that was taken advantage of my many unscrupulous whites. Throughout the early twentieth century, Indians were cheated, tricked, and forced into becoming competent and leasing or selling their lands for much less than their worth. By 1934, the commissioner of Indian Affairs admitted that due to allotment policy and competency Indian landholdings had been reduced from 138,000,000 acres in 1887 to 48,000,000 acres in 1934.36 However convenient competency might seem with hindsight to the colonial project of taking over Indian lands, competency was not just a method of land grabbing—it was intrinsically supported by the assimilationist rhetoric of the day. The U.S. government and the Office of Indian Affairs insisted that competency was a reward for acculturation and industry. Government officials talked about “releasing Indians from federal control” and enabling “the Indian Office to manage the affairs of the helpless class with undisputed authority, but, on the other hand, [removing] from the roll of dependents the ever-increasing number of Indians who no longer need Government supervision.”37 Underlying competency was a feeling that Indians ought to be self-sufficient and not receive any special benefits just because they were Indian. In fact, there was a perceptible belief held by many government officials that some potentially



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competent Indians deliberately did not want fee patents because they were taking advantage of their special status. In 1917 the competency commission who had worked on the Pottawatomi Reservation in Kansas reported finding “several very competent Indian allottees . . . who have refused to sign applications for patents in fee on the sole ground that they will have to become tax payers” and hoped that “some way can be found whereby patents can be issued to them.”38 The seemingly wise financial decision on the part of Indians who did not wish to become competent and therefore pay taxes and lose the special protections of their land seemed in harmony with the message coming from many assimilationists that they embrace American get-go and capitalist achievement. In 1896, Merrill Gates, the chairman of the Board of Indian Commissioners, declared that Indians need to be gotten “out of the blanket and into trousers,—trousers . . . with a pocket that aches to be filled with dollars!”39 In 1916, the Indian office began the practice of distributing fee patents in a ceremony that concluded with the newly competent Indian receiving an American f lag and a purse (at which point the master of ceremonies would announce “this purse will always say to you that the money you gain from your labor must be wisely kept”).40 The Carlisle Indian school, one of the central institutions of assimilation and the first boarding school to concentrate on Native American children, reported in its school newspaper that among the things being taught Indian children “besides Regular study and Work” are “How to earn money . . . To economize in all our affairs . . . Careful and correct business habits [and] How to get most for our money.”41 In another Indian school newspaper students were urged: Early to bed and early to rise, Love all the teachers and tell them no lies. Study your lessons that you may be wise And buy from the men who advertise.42 In actual fact, the spending habits of Indians, particularly those whose pockets had been filled with dollars from the quick sale of their fee-patented lands, were a huge source of settler anxiety. In 1906 a staff correspondent of the Minneapolis Journal was scathing about Anishinaabeg attempts to participate in the culture of consumerism that had matured in the United States since the middle of the previous century. “They gather in little groups on the corners watching the better-dressed pedestrians, and try their best to emulate them in manners,” he described. “The things that appeal to them most are the ways the white man has of spending money and enjoying life . . . Thousands of dollars have been spent by the Indians for articles they can never use.”43 Indians who followed the seemingly clear message given by being handed an American f lag and a purse to be filled with dollars were not treated well by government officials when they applied for competency. In 1908 Black Coyote, a Cheyenne and Arapaho man, seemed a model of assimilation. He was fifty-seven years old and had a successful farm that included eighty-five acres of corn, twenty-five




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acres of oats, and sixty-two head of cattle. Black Coyote felt that he “should be permitted to handle and manage his own business” and, accordingly, applied for competency. The superintendent of the Cheyenne and Arapaho reported negatively to the Indian office about Black Coyote’s application, claiming that after he had sold two pieces of inherited land (inherited land was not under the same restrictions as allotted land), Black Coyote had squandered the money: I am reliably informed that he bought pleasure vehicles and teams and other things which he had no good use for, and I am quite certain that he has no property left which was purchased with this money . . . From the foregoing it would appear that Black Coyote is improvident, or perhaps the word spendthrift would be better applied.44 Because white Americans often felt that Indians should sink or swim on their own, evidence that an Indian was a “spendthrift” did not always lead to a denial of an application for competency. Leroy and Mary Jane Redeagle, a Quapaw couple, were another success story, and owned land valued at approximately $160,000. Despite a critical report on their lifestyle from the superintendent of the Quapaw agency (who described Leroy as “educated, strong, healthy . . . without any occupation, except riding over the country in a big Pathfinder Auto and pestering his lessees for money to spend in luxurious living”), the Redeagles were awarded competency, in part because they were graduates of Carlisle and Haskell, and thus came under the Bureau’s policy of awarding competency to educated Indians. But there was another reason—their success made them seem in little need of protection. The superintendent predicted that they would not “have a dollar of it within less than five years.” But, he said, it is very doubtful whether it will make better citizens of them by endeavouring to hold them in leash any longer. If they are given full control of their land they no doubt will live a riotous and luxurious life for a short time, then be compelled by want to earn their living by the “sweat of their brows.”45 The tacit parallel behind the constant complaints about Indian spending was the role played by the white people who were ever-ready to take financial advantage of Indians with money to spend. Francis Leupp, commissioner of Indian Affairs from 1905 to 1909, bemoaned Indian spending habits in his 1910 book The Indian and His Problem. His descriptions of Indian spending, however, contain as much reports of abuse by whites as they do of any lack of Indian thriftiness. He described how, for example, a trader on a reservation, hearing that a certain Indian was dangerously ill, would go to his heirs-at-law and offer to let them have anything they



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Or, he complained, Indians might pay too much for bad quality goods. “One old woman, whose inherited allotment brought her $2,500, gave $1000 on the spot for a second-hand buggy and a miserable team of horses.”46 Across the country, “grafters” took advantage of competency laws to trick or force the Indian population to lease or sell their lands. The conf licting justifications for competency—the unspoken context of land transferral and the rhetoric about cultural assimilation—came together when white Americans placed the blame for their own poverty on Indian shoulders. As Philip Deloria has argued, “it proved easier to think of sold allotments as squandered than as swindled, for that placed responsibility on Indian people rather than those who cheated them.”47 Just as in New South Wales, the expectation that Indians should be thrifty and sensible to a level not expected of white people justified holding back their wages, taking their lands, controlling their lives, and setting up a culture in which they were encouraged to leave reservations and stop taking government support. The discomfort about Indigenous spending also existed because of the reluctance with which white people imagined Aborigines and Indians in the “modern” world. According, again, to Philip Deloria, “most American narratives [see] Indian people, corralled on isolated and impoverished reservations, miss[ing] out on modernity.” The idea of Indian people participating in modern behaviors such as driving a car were often seen as “anomalous.”48 A 1918 the Reno Gazette noted that the appearance of John Jones, a Washoe Indian, and his fiancé at the county clerk’s office to pick up a marriage license in a “big touring car” was newsworthy. “BRIDE A PRINCESS AND INDIAN GROOM OWNS HIS OWN AUTO” began the article that noted that “Civilization and the march of time have worked havoc with the tribal customs and ceremonies of the native Americans” and described how Jones stepped “outside the courthouses, cranked up his big touring car and rambled off in just as much style as any of his more aristocratic white brothers would have done.”49 “Non-Indian observers may have claimed that they wished Native people to join them in modernity as soon as possible,” Deloria argues, but the reality behind the rhetoric was somewhat different . . . [W]hite observers . . . remained hamstrung by notions of proper evolutionary development as something tied to sequence—hunter, then herder, farmer, mercantilist, industrialist, and so on. The expectation was that Indians would make all the regular stops on the trail up from savagery, skipping none . . . Leapfrogging over several stages directly into a world of cars and gas seemed like cheating nature and was not be tolerated.50



wished at his store on credit. Childlike, the heirs would covet everything in sight, and after a week or so would be down in his books for hundreds of dollars, representing little more substantial than sweetmeats, soda water and a few silly trinkets.

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Similar juxtapositions, as Sianan Healy has argued, were made in the Australian context, where Aboriginal people were seen, and even lauded, by the primitivist movement as an anathema to modernity.51 The reluctance to see Indigenous people as modern-day consumers or financial successes has survived into recent times. The $2.6 billion revenue earned by Indian-run casinos in the 1990s has been a focus of controversy, many critics fearing that the industry detracts from traditional culture. And stereotypes of Indigenous people as “living on government hand-outs” are a persistent theme in racist Australian rhetoric. As Ania Loomba describes, scholars of class and colonial discourse argue that “capitalism . . . does not override and liquidate racial hierarchies but continues to depend upon, and intensify, them.” Loomba goes on to argue that paying attention to the intersection of racial ideologies and class formation “helps us to understand not just colonial history but the postcolonial world as well [because the] race relations that are put into place during colonialism survive long after many of the economic structures underlying them have changed.”52 In reality, therefore, despite the very different kinds of assimilation policy attempted in Australia and the United States, neither country can conceivably be seen to have introduced the ideas of exemption and competency in order to really assist Indigenous people to become truly self-sufficient, equal with white people or truly white. Exemption certificates were not part of a general program of assimilation. There was little support for Aborigines who wished to become financially self-sufficient and to live away from stations and reserves, and almost no government effort to ensure that Aboriginal people were treated with equality in the labor force. This was simply a method of releasing Aboriginal people from government supervision, after which they were supposed to sink or swim, or, if they failed, to have their new statuses revoked and to return to their communities. Nor of course, despite the rhetoric, was the system of competency really part of a push to assimilate American Indians. In the United States competency was a neat solution to the pressure to turn over Indian lands to white settlers. The Dawes Act had managed to overturn the promises made in treaties to keep land in Indian hands, and had already released significant surplus lands into white possession; competency came very near to completing this process by opening up allotted lands to whites by removing any special protections. In Australia, where land was not an issue, exemption was much more about reducing the numbers of Aboriginal people dependent on the government—crucially, a key component of exemption was its attempt to sever intimate family and community relationships. Exempted Aborigines were expected to disappear into the white community—to literally “cease to be an Aborigine,” as some certificates actually stated. But they were not expected to become white—the only way this was imagined as occurring was at the endpoint of the process of biological absorption, when removed children of mixed descent who no longer looked Aboriginal could “pass” in mainstream society with the indigeneity unrecognized.



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The progression of American immigrants from nonwhite to white upon the ladder of assimilation is a seductive image. When assimilation policies directed at Indigenous people are interrogated, however, the reason immigrants were able to be called white is complicated. Clearly, this was more than just a cultural shift, it relied also on ideas about where whiteness could be applied, and how much of a transition acculturated behavior could make. For Indigenous peoples, acculturated behavior and financial success was not enough to make them safely equal to white people, let alone perceived as racially white. Assimilation was a process that was inseparable from issues of class, race, and culture, and all these issues need to be taken into account when examining whiteness in relation to it.

Notes 1. Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1999); and Working Toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York: Basic Books, 2005). My sincere thanks to the New South Wales Department of Aboriginal Affairs and the State Records Office of New South Wales for permission to access restricted archives while researching this chapter. 2. Peter Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America,” Journal of American History 89, no. 1 (June 2002): 164–5. 3. Matt Wray, Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 4. Ibid., 2. 5. Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “Preface,” in Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005), viii. 6. Aborigines’ Friends’ Association Inc Annual Report 1945 (Adelaide: The Association, 1945), 10. 7. Anna Haebich, Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia, 1950–1970 (Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2008); Tim Rowse, ed., Contesting Assimilation (Perth: API Network, 2005); Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Ward Churchill, “The Crucible of American Indian Identity: Native Tradition Versus Colonial Imposition in Postconquest North America,” in Contemporary Native American Cultural Issues, ed. Duane Champagne (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 1999), 39–68. 8. Kolchin, “Whiteness Studies,” 170. 9. Maureen Perkins, “False Whiteness: ‘Passing’ and the Stolen Generations,” in Whitening Race: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005), 175; emphasis in the original. 10. Angela Wanhalla, chapter fifteen in this collection; Jane Carey, chapter thirteen in this collection.




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11. The examples I draw upon in the United States will mostly be from the early twentieth century (when competency was at its height) and in the 1940s and 1950s in Australia. This is not because policies of exemption did not exist in Australia earlier, but rather because the postwar period in Australia is, arguably, more comparable to the United States in the early twentieth century in terms of the emphasis on cultural assimilationist policies. Until the 1940s and 1950s, Australian governments utilized policies of segregation, biological absorption, and control rather than enacting legislation that directly promoted self-sufficiency, education, and Christianization, as had been the U.S. government’s focus from 1887 onward. 12. Sean Brennan and Zoe Craven, “Eventually They Get it All . . .”: Government Management of Aboriginal Trust Money in New South Wales (Sydney: Indigenous Law Centre, University of New South Wales, 2006). 13. Michael Sawtell, “The Purpose of Exemption Certificates: A Form of Initiation,” Dawn 7, no. 6 (June 1958): 7. 14. Ibid. 15. John Chesterman and Brian Galligan, Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 162. 16. Ibid., 179. 17. Christobel Mattingly and Ken Hampton, Survival in Our Own Land: “Aboriginal” Experiences in “South Australia” Since 1836 (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 1988), 52. 18. Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with Black Books, 1996), 267. 19. Personal Report on Applicant for Exemption from Provisions of Aborigines Protection Act and Regulations Thereunder, Aborigines Welfare Board NRS 11 Applications for Certificates of Exemption 8/3093/B, State Records Office, New South Wales. 20. “A Worthy Citizen,” Dawn 9, no. 10 (October 1960): 9. 21. Lillian Holt, “History, Honesty, Whiteness and Blackness,” in Historicising Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the Construction of an Identity, ed. Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey, and Katherine Ellinghaus (Melbourne: RMIT Press, 2007), 1–5. 22. Memo 19/4/56, NRS 11 Applications for Certificates of Exemption, Aborigines Welfare Board Records, State Records Office, New South Wales. 23. Memo 17/1055, NRS 11 Applications for Certificates of Exemption, Aborigines Welfare Board Records, State Records Office, New South Wales; emphasis in the original. 24. Memo 30/9/52 and A.W.G. Lipscombe to [Applicant]. NRS 11 Applications for Certificates of Exemption, Aborigines Welfare Board Records, State Records Office, New South Wales. 25. “Pensions for Aborigines: Beware the Hangers on!,” Dawn 9 no. 8 (August 1960): 19. 26. “Shirking a Responsibility,” Dawn 9, no. 5 (May 1960): 10. 27. “Dawn is Criticised,” Dawn 8, no. 6 (June 1959): 1. 28. Mrs. Rosemary Lewis to the Editor, Dawn 8, no. 9 (September 1959): 13. 29. Anna Haebich, “Imagining Assimilation,” Australian Historical Studies 118 (2002): 61–70. 30. R. W. Connell, and T. H. Irving, Class Structure in Australian History: Documents, Narratives and Argument (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1980). 31. John Murphy, Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies’ Australia (Sydney: Pluto Press, 2000).



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32. Jimmie Barker, The Two Worlds of Jimmie Barker: The Life of an Aboriginal, 1900–1972, as told to Janet Mathews (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1977), 112–13 and 121. 33. Ella Simon, Through My Eyes (Adelaide: Rigby, 1978), 98. 34. [Applicant] to Mr. Saxby, AWB, 9/2/57, Aborigines Welfare Board NRS 11 Applications for Certificates of Exemption 8/3093/B, State Records Office, New South Wales. 35. Western Australian Parliamentary Debates, 114 (1944), 1021. 36. Felix S. Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law (Washington DC: United States Department of the Interior, 1945), 216. 37. Twenty-Seventh Annual Report of the Indian Rights Association, 1919 (Philadelphia: Indian Rights Association, 1919), 30; Francis E. Leupp, “Indian Lands: Their Administration with Reference to Present and Future Use,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 33, no. 3 (May 1909): 141. 38. C. F. Hauke, Chief Clerk to Julian H. Fleming, October 12, 1917, File 85832–1917127, Pottawatomi 127, CCF 1907–1939, RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration—Washington D.C. 39. Proceedings of the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian, 1896 (Lake Mohonk: Lake Mononk Conference, 1896), 11–12, quoted in David Wallace Adams, “Beyond Bleakness: The Brighter Side of Indian Boarding Schools, 1870–1894,” in Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Education Experiences, ed. Clifford E. Trafzer, Jean A. Kller, and Lorene Sisquoc (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 41. 40. Hoxie, A Final Promise, 180. 41. Indian Helper 3, no. 5 (September 9, 1887): 4. 42. Native American, April 10, 1915, n.p., quoted in Adams, “Beyond Bleakness,” 41. 43. U.S. Congress, House, Report in the Matter of the Investigation of the White Earth Reservation Vol. 1, 62nd Cong., 3rd sess. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1913), xiii–xiv. 44. Charles E. Shell, Superintendent to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, May 11, 1908 [quote] and A. W. Johnson, Agent, Geary, OK, The Continental Insurance Co. to Sec. of Interior, 28 May, 1908, RG 75, CCF 1907–1939, 127 Cheyenne and Arapaho, National Archives and Records Administration—Washington D.C. 45. Mary Lou Redeagle and Leroy Redeagle to Cato Sells, February 14, 1918, C.F. Hauk to Ira C. Deaver, January 11, 1918, Supt. Seneca School and agency to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, December 10, 1917, File 113704–17-127, Seneca 127, Central Classified Files 1907–1939, National Archives and Records Administration—Washington D.C. 46. Francis E. Leupp, The Indian and His Problem (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 185–6. 47. Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004), 151. 48. Ibid., 6. 49. Newspaper clipping, Reno (Nev.) Gazette, May 13, 1918, File of John P. Jones, 1327 Carlisle Indian Industrial School Student Records 1879–1918, RG 75, National Archives and Records Administration—Washington DC. 50. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 146–7. 51. Sianan Healy, “Settler Visions: Representations of Aboriginality in Australia and the United States, 1890s–1930s,” PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2006. 52. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), 127 and 129.







Conclusion



PART V




Epilogue Jane Carey, Leigh Boucher, and Katherine Ellinghaus

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his collection opens out a number of productive analytic avenues for whiteness studies. Fundamentally, these chapters have all foregrounded the ways in which whiteness was inevitably defined and articulated in accordance with specific relationships of power. While the operation of colonial power may have produced endless discursive chatter about the constitution of racial Others, these chapters suggest that our analytic endeavors need to upend the discursive weighting of this dynamic. At a fundamental level, this strategy affirms that “white people” have always been “raced” through these colonial dynamics—both individually and collectively—and that the analytic project of considering this racialization is vital if we are to avoid reinscribing the epistemic violences of colonial Othering into our historical work. Perhaps most visibly, this collection presents a forceful critique of whiteness studies’ current tendency to situate nineteenth-century United States as both origin and paradigm for the history of whiteness and, consequently, an argument for the provincializing of this genealogy. Since these essays “read” this historiography against and within the histories of European settler colonialism, many of the assumptions of the field (both theoretical and historical) have been seriously challenged. Without wanting to fall into the trap of asserting radical historio-theoretical intervention, we do claim that collectively these chapters suggest the possibility of a transnational history of “whiteness” as both a figuration of identity and a signifier of power. Moreover, by placing the particularities and exigencies of the settler- colonial encounter at the heart of this analytic project, together these chapters suggest the need for a history of whiteness that accounts for the complex relationships between space, identity, and dynamics of power and entitlement. While U.S. whiteness scholarship tends to disavow the settler-colonial origins of American



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racial formations, by forcing this scholarship to account for postcolonial thought and the histories of European imperialism, this collection has highlighted how contestations over political and territorial entitlement have been crucial to the history of whiteness.1 As Patrick Wolfe points out, precisely because settlers seek to replace Indigenous people, culture, and society in the settler-colonial encounter, assertions of spatial entitlement and belonging are at the heart of settler colonialism and its constitutive racial politics. 2 Precisely because the “rule of colonial difference” establishes race as a fundamental “sorting category” for colonial expropriations, declarations of racial membership are thus always an assertion of territorial entitlement.3 Indeed, assertions of whiteness—whether as bureaucratic category, personal subjectivity, or signifier of power—are necessarily implicated in claims to (and displacements from) territory. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the histories of settler-colonial violence and dis/replacement that turned these domains into white homes. In one sense, the chapters by Ann Standish and Patricia Grimshaw, Angela Woollacott, Tracey Banivanua Mar, Jane Carey, Penelope Edmonds, and Margaret Allen could all be read as discussions of the ways in which white people were made to belong in certain geographies—at the expense of Others. Indeed, perhaps we need a history of whiteness that acknowledges Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s reminder that ideas about home and belonging are always intensely political statements.4 Homes require borders, and nowhere is this dynamic made more visible than in the recalibrations of territory and entitlement that took place with the explosion of British settler colonialism in the nineteenth century. In the Anglophone world, the simple fact that significant numbers of white people moved outside their European homes to remake Indigenous spaces into white territories produced dramatic reorientations in white racial identity, and its apparent “homelands.” Indeed, in many ways, the project of settler-colonial expansion and rule was a bluntly transnationalizing precisely because it moved populations around the globe and required new modalities of thought to justify and cohere these border crossings. Unsurprisingly, then, several contributors pay critical attention to the transnational as a field of power. In this way, the chapters by Henry Reynolds, and Shurlee Swain, Margot Hillel, and Belinda Sweeney illustrate how revolutions in transportation impacted on the transnational circulation of racial knowledge and anxieties, as increased mobility allowed greater contact between different “races” than ever before. Others explore how, paradoxically, transnationally generated ideas about whiteness are frequently deployed for specifically national projects, as Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds have also recently acknowledged in their analysis of the transnational discourse around “white men’s countries.”5 This raises some serious questions about the utility of transnational history. As Katherine Ellinghaus has suggested, “the value of comparative, transnational, or global history lies in the insights it can provide into the uniqueness of nations while still recognizing the elements of their histories that they have in common.”6 And this, perhaps, is where the historians’ attention to locatedness is of



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particular value. Many essays explore the varied and complex ways that national, colonial, racial, local, and other identities intertwine, and question the extent to which the framework of whiteness alone can explain such complex, shifting modes of identification and structures of racial privilege. So too, Leigh Boucher highlights how important it is to think about whiteness and transnationalism in historically specific ways. Indeed, he proposes the term “transterritorial” as more useful for escaping the historiographic tyranny of western constructions of the modern nation-state. Both Boucher and Penny Edmonds argue that while national borders might not always matter, the recognition of the transnational should not blind us to the material realities of empire and the transterritorially discrete communities it fostered. There were always limits to the globalizing reach of white identity and power, and settler colonialism, it would seem, both generated and limited particular types of transnational exchange. Moreover, read together, these chapters indicate that the process of settler colonialism has provided a constitutive anxiety for white racial politics in the Anglophone world since the nineteenth century. If, as various postcolonial theorists suggest, colonialism was an endlessly anxious process for the colonizers,7 then it is no surprise that the replacement of Indigenous bodies with white “culture” was a dynamic that required tremendous political, emotional, and material work to uphold—not least in the ever-present potential for the racial and spatial projects of settler colonial rule to incohere as they unfolded. We might even suggest that the discursive and material (re)placement of populations in the spaces of empire required constant vigilance against possible threats to the racial logics of settler colonialism. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, these essays highlight how crucial the mutually encoding politics of population and gender were to these processes. As Warwick Anderson suggests, it is no coincidence that the white man emerged at a “biopolitical formation” in the early twentieth century. Anxieties about racializing gender difference and the management of racial membership via “bureaucratized”—to follow Ellinghaus—sexual prohibitions and enervations reverberate throughout the historical material in this collection. Marilyn Lake outlines the close alignment between the properties of whiteness and western masculinity, while Angela Wanhalla discusses how “squaw men” provoked anxiety not least because they “undermined white masculinity.” Margaret Allen explores the concurrent anxieties “that white women may not be fully committed to the white [Australian] national project.” Patricia Grimshaw and Ann Standish show how a white woman in colonial Tasmania defined her own racial status against the Aboriginal population, while Liz Conor explores how western gender ideologies impacted on Australian Indigenous women. So too, Jane Carey examines how elite Australian women through “promoting the [eugenic] cause of white racial improvement,” also “sought to contribute to the making and maintenance of whiteness, and through this to create themselves.” Finally, this collection substantively undermines one of the key assumptions of whiteness studies: namely, that whiteness maintains its power through an absence of discursive color. At particular moments—and often when the projects of settler colonialism were most at risk—whiteness functioned as a positive category in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century settler world (and this



Epilogue

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includes the United States). Taking up analytic tools developed through contemporary studies of whiteness thus presents some obvious problems for historians. The studies of “White Australia” particularly demonstrate that, in certain times and places, white identity was highly visible. There also remains a clear tension between approaches to whiteness as an overtly named and claimed, or desired, identity as opposed to structural frameworks, where the degree to which individual white people identify as white is less significant, or even irrelevant. This latter approach stresses how power and economic benefits are conferred on white people, the “terrorizing” impact of whiteness on those it excludes, and the positional power-effects of occupying and speaking from the “norm.” In contrast, Louise Newman’s work suggests that whiteness—in certain times and places—was a positive category that individuals could abdicate from or assimilate into. Indeed, Tracey Banivanua Mar’s subtle study of the micropolitics of race provides a compelling example of the need to historicize whiteness and attend to the shifting dynamics of power that always shaped its articulation. Re-orienting whiteness studies, then, requires some substantive analytic and empirical work. However, we hope to have demonstrated that this historical and theoretical project opens out some productive questions. Perhaps, then, we need to work toward an account of settler colonialism that considers transnationalized whiteness, and, in doing so, consider how settler-colonial expansion necessarily reconstituted this racial identity in the process. In the case of British settler colonialism—and this clearly includes the United States—we need to come to grips with how the competing categories of white, British, English, and Anglo-Saxon relate, and how they might ref lect differing modes of racialization. Indeed, it would seem that in various settler-colonial domains, whiteness was made firmly visible—often in response to the exigencies of settler-colonial expropriation and its concomitant anxieties. Perhaps, then, we also need to begin mapping the moments when settler-colonial whiteness (in its variegated articulations) came into contact with other forms of British colonialism and, indeed, other imperial formations altogether. By historicizing whiteness, these chapters have placed people—and the material relations of power they inhabited, contested, and maintained—at the center of this project. Whiteness studies quite rightly unsettles the notion that whiteness has no racial color. In doing so, however, we have to remember that whiteness is always implicated in a racial dynamic. These contrapuntal dynamics—to paraphrase Edward Said—are never simple references to racial Otherness; rather, they are relationships of power that function to terrorize, expropriate, and disenfranchise. And these dynamics continue to have a powerful inf luence over the world we all inhabit.

Notes 1. There is an obvious link here to Cheryl Harris’ work on whiteness and property in the United States. However, we are yet to unpick the relationship (if any) between the



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4.

5. 6.

7.

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individual property rights she describes and the disavowals of Indigenous sovereignty. Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1709. Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” The American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (2001): 866–905. “Rule of Colonial Difference” from Partha Chaterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), passim; “Sorting Category” from Ann Laura Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham and London: Duke University Press 2006), 2. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Critical Feminist Genealogies: On the Geography and Politics of Home, Nation and Community,” in Talking Visions, ed. Ella Shohat (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 385. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2008), 4. Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887–1937 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), xiv. See also Antoinette Burton, “On the Inadequacy and the Indispensability of the Nation,” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 1–23. The notion of colonial anxiety has become a recurrent trope in postcolonial analytics. See Bill Ashcroft, On Post-colonial Futures (London: Continuum, 2001), 152.



Epilogue




Margaret Allen is Professor of Gender Studies, University of Adelaide. She has published widely on gendered transnational and postcolonial histories. Her current project explores links between India and Australia (ca. 1880–1920), focusing upon Indian men living in Australia under the White Australia Policy and upon Australian women missionaries to India. Warwick Anderson is a professorial research fellow in the Department of History and the Centre for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine at the University of Sydney. His most recent book is The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Tracey Banivanua Mar has published on race and the dynamics of violence in Queensland’s sugar districts during the era of the Queensland’s indentured labor trade. She is currently working on legal and ritual methods of land possession and dispossession in the western Pacific region, and a transnational history of decolonization. Leigh Boucher is a lecturer in the School of Modern History and Political Science at Macquarie University, Sydney, and in 2008 he was the Leverhulme Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Research in History and Theory, Roehampton University, London. He has previously published work that investigates the relationship between settler-colonial rule, gender, and whiteness, and coauthored work that examines the sexual and racial politics of historical film. He is currently working on a monograph that examines the relationship between graduated sovereignty and suffrage in the nineteenth-century British settler world. Jane Carey holds a Monash Fellowship at Monash University, researching the racial population politics of settler colonialism. She has previously worked on whiteness in the Australian women’s movement and the history of women and science, and has published articles in Gender and History and the Women’s History Review. Liz Conor is an honorary research fellow in the Department of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of The Spectacular Modern Woman: Feminine Visibility in the 1920s (Indiana University Press, 2004).



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Contributors

Katherine Ellinghaus is a Monash Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at Monash University. Her publications include Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia (University of Nebraska Press, 2006) and Blood Will Tell: Native Americans of Mixed Descent and Assimilation Policy, 1887–1946 (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming). Patricia Grimshaw is a professorial fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her teaching and research interests have focused on colonialism, women, and gender in Australia and the Pacific. Her most recent book is the coedited Evangelists of Empire? Missionaries in Colonial History (eScholarship Research Centre, University of Melbourne, 2008). Margot Hillel, head, School of Arts and Sciences (Victoria), Australian Catholic University, has had varied involvement in children’s literature over many years as an academic and commentator. She has judged numerous literary awards, publishes regularly on children’s literature, reviews in journals and on radio, and has a Medal of the Order of Australia for services to children’s literature. Marilyn Lake holds a chair in history at LaTrobe University, Melbourne. Her most recent book is the prize-winning Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality, coauthored with Henry Reynolds, published by Cambridge University Press and Melbourne University Press in 2008. Louise Newman is associate professor of U.S. history at the University of Florida, Gainesville, where she specializes in women’s/gender history. She is the author of White Women’s Rights: Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1999). Henry Reynolds holds a personal chair in history and Aboriginal studies at the University of Tasmania. His recent publications include The Other Side of the Frontier, Why Weren’t We Told, An Indelible Stain?, Nowhere People, and, with Marilyn Lake, Drawing the Global Colour Line. Ann Standish is a historian and editor. She has taught at Melbourne and Deakin universities, worked in book publishing, and is currently managing editor of Cultural Studies Review. She is the author of Australia Through Women’s Eyes (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008). Shurlee Swain is a professor in the School of Arts and Science at Australian Catholic University and a senior research fellow at the Department of History



Penelope Edmonds is an Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellow in the School of Historical Studies, University of Melbourne. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial history, Australian and Pacific-region contact and transnational histories. [She is the author of Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities] (UBC press, 2009)

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Belinda Sweeney completed her PhD on prostitution at the University of Melbourne in 2006. She has undertaken research on and taught a range of subjects at the University of Melbourne and Australian Catholic University in politics and history. Belinda currently works in policy within Skills Victoria in the Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development. Angela Wanhalla lectures in the Department of History and Art History at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Her research focuses on interracial intimacy and hybridity in the British Empire. Her first book, In/visible sight: The Mixed Descent Families of Southern New Zealand, will be published by Bridget Williams Books in 2009. Angela Woollacott is the Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University. Her books include On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (University of California Press, 1994); To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001); and Gender and Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).



at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests include the comparative study of indigenous rights in settler colonies and child welfare history.




Aborigines (Australia’s Indigenous Peoples) Aboriginal history, 22, 184 “Aboriginal problem”, 51–53, 156, 158, 183, 190, 194 activism, 57–58 assimilation, 9, 190–91, 200, 201, 236–41, 246–47 biological absorption, 200–1, 212–13, 246 child removal, 201, 246 claims to land, 152–54, 156 dispossession, 135–36, 138, 140, 142, 143, 152–53, 161 n. 18, 215 families, 205–208, 246 financial responsibility of, 239–41, 246 grief, 208, 210–11, 217 n. 49 “half caste”, 200, 201, 212–13 in literature, 86, 90 labor, 150–51, 156, 199–200 laws and legislation relating to, 52–54, 76, 126, 156–59, 201, 237–40 removal, 106, 135, 146 mothers, motherhood and maternity, 9, 199–215, 218 n. 67 rights, 238–39 women, 190–91, 199–201, 203–205, 207–15, 241 African-Americans assimilation, 34 laws and legislation relating to, 76 “miscegenation”, 33, 34, 36–39

Allen, Theodore, 67 amalgamation, 34, 76, 77, 225, 228–29 See also assimilation; biological absorption; hybridity; interracial marriage; “miscegenation”; People of mixed descent; “race mixing” Anderson, Warwick, 5–6, 10, 132, 150, 193, 212 Anglo Saxonism, 7, 55–56, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 99–100, 102–108, 110, 112–13, 124, 127, 128, 131–32 See also Britishness Angus, George French, 208–209, 210–11 anxiety, 7, 9, 47, 109, 120, 129, 154–56, 159, 167, 184, 193, 194–95, 202, 219, 227, 237, 238, 243, 255, 256, 257 n. 1 See also whiteness—anxieties around Arneson, Eric, 3, 6, 149 assimilation, 6, 9, 32–34, 77, 236–38, 247 See also Aborigines—assimilation; biological absorption; First Nations Peoples—assimilation; Maori peoples—assimilation; Native Americans—assimilation; People of mixed descent; whiteness—gained via assimilation Association for the Welfare of Mental Deficients (Australia), 186–87



Index

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Index

Australia, 7, 8, 9, 10, 17–19, 21–22, 23–26, 45–58, 66–67, 68, 69, 76–77, 79, 91, 92–93, 101–102, 106, 109, 111, 122–24, 125–31, 135–37, 138–45, 149–59, 165–76, 183–95, 199–215 Black Wars, 143–45 Federation, 54, 55, 56, 126, 167 Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association, 18 Australian Federation of Women Voters, 187–88, 190, 193 Bagnall, Kate, 166–67 Baldwin, James, 65, 70 Ballantyne, R. M., 85, 86 Ballantyne, Tony, 21 Barker, Jimmy, 241 Barnado, Thomas, 83–84, 86–87, 89, 92, 94 Barnhart, William C., 90 Barton, Edmund, 126 Batchelor, Egerton Lee, 172–74 Bates, Daisy, 200 Bell, Col. George, 123 Bell, Duncan, 50, 105, 107, 109 Bell, Francis Dillon, 228 Bevan, Judge Walter, 190 Bhabha, Homi K., 65, 70, 100, 101 biological absorption, 9, 69, 190, 197n. 50, 200–1, 212–13, 224, 246 See also amalgamation; assimilation; hybridity; interracial marriage; “miscegenation”; People of mixed descent; “race mixing” birth control, 185, 188, 189, 191 Black Coyote, 243–44 blackness, 151, 155–59 Bleakly, John W., 213 blood, 38, 67, 69, 74, 76, 78, 99, 106, 109, 112, 124, 125, 127, 128, 131, 201, 206, 213, 219, 238, 242 Boggs, T. H., 75 Booth, William, 93 borderlands, 154–59

Boucher, Leigh, 23, 25, 70, 255 Bowman Stephenson, Thomas, 83–84, 89, 90, 91 Britain, 20, 21, 26, 191 British, 66–67, 69, 70, 103 Britishness, 100, 104–105, 106, 107, 112 See also Anglo Saxonism British Association for the Advancement of Science, 52, 104 British Empire, 1, 7–8, 9, 20–22, 23, 24, 26–28, 45–46, 49–58, 80, 83–87, 91, 93–94, 99–100, 102–103, 109, 112, 130, 192–93, 220, 254, 256 “Greater Britain”, 105–106, 109–110, 113 “Oceanic Britain”, 110–111 British Social Hygiene Council, 192–93 Brown, Kathleen, 36–37 Brown v. Board of Education (1954), 31 Bryce, James, 55, 73–74 Bunya Black, 151–57, 158, 159 Burns, Kathryn, 35 Burrage, E. Harcourt, 90 Burton, Antoinette, 21, 47 Butler, Judith, 48, 101 Byrd, William, 36 Canada, 9, 76, 77, 91, 99, 101–102, 106–109, 121, 126, 219–24, 230 Cannadine, David, 20–21 Carey, Jane, 19, 203 Castle, Kathryn, 85 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 49 Chamberlain, Joseph, 131 Charlton, W. R., 127, 128–29 Chatterjee, Partha, 47 children, 85, 87, 91, 92–94, 167–75, 186, 187, 189, 191–92 See also Aborigines-child removal; People of mixed descent—child removal; stolen generations



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child rescue, 83–89, 91, 93–94, 167, 172 Chinese, 25, 77, 92, 108, 125, 130, 131, 165–66, 174, 214–15 Christianity, 27, 34, 36, 84–89, 93, 97n. 64, 105, 125, 170, 209, 224 See also missionaries and missionary organizations citizenship, 32, 33–34, 36, 45–46, 53, 54, 56, 75, 111, 126, 131, 159, 171–72, 206, 237, 238, 239, 241, 244 imperial citizenship, 54 civilization, 107, 138, 146 civilizing missions or projects, 35, 52, 184, 220 class, 2, 4, 18, 20, 53, 85–86, 139, 241, 246 Coaby, Cyril, 239 colonialism, 1–4, 5–7, 11, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 28, 34–35, 46, 50, 47, 67–68, 101–102, 108, 136, 137–40, 143, 146, 201–202, 220, 237, 246, 253 See also settler colonialism comparative history, 254 See also transnational-transnational historiography Connell, R. W., 241 Cook, Cecil E., 201, 212 Coolidge, A. C., 79 Cooper, Frederick, 4, 49 Cowan, Edith, 185 Cuba, 124–25 Cumming, Cliff, 51 Cunningham, Robert A., 203, 204

dispossession, 5, 10, 11, 27, 28, 101, 104, 106, 108, 110, 111, 136, 140, 142, 143, 146, 152, 154, 159, 209, 215, 219, 220, 236, 242, 254, 256 domesticity, 8, 136, 138–39, 145–46, 166, 199 “dying race” theories, See race—“dying race” theories DuBois, W. E. B., 8, 65, 67, 70, 119–120, 122, 123, 127, 129–30, 131, 132, 149 Durie, Jane, 48 Dyer, Richard, 19, 48

Dalziell, Tanya, 19 Dawn, 239–40 Dawson, Robert, 207–208 Deakin, Alfred, 55, 121, 126–28, 131, 132 Deloria, Philip, 245 Dilke, Charles Wentworth, 7, 55, 68, 89, 99–100, 106–107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112

Falnes, Oscar, 111 feminism, 19, 58, 189, 194 First Nations Peoples (Canada’s Indigenous Peoples) laws and legislation relating to, 219, 221–23, 224 removal, 222–23 women, 221, 222, 223, 224 Fleming, Marie, 111

education, 32, 86, 103, 130, 136, 158, 170, 190 Edmonds, Penelope, 25, 55, 90 Edwards, G. B., 76–77 Edwards, Penny, 23, 25 Elbourne, Elizabeth, 27 Elgin, Lord, 80 Elkin, A. P., 213 Ellinghaus, Katherine, 23, 194, 254 english language, 56, 70, 86, 105, 165 enlightenment, 209–10 eugenics, 9, 19, 183–84, 187–92, 212 See also biological absorption; racial health and hygiene; mental deficiency Eugenics Society, 191–92, 193 European colonialism, 2–3, 5, 9, 10, 32, 67–68, 73, 253, 254 Evans, Julie, 25 Evans, Raymond, 152



Index

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Index

Fowler, James Mackinnon, 168–74, 175, 177n. 54 Frankenberg, Ruth, 18, 83, 87 Frantzen, Allen, 103 Freud, Sigmund, 70, 202 frontiers, 67, 108, 143–44, 152–55, 157, 158, 220 Froude, J. A., 109 Gates, Merrill, 243 gender, 2, 18, 19, 24, 26, 27, 33, 35, 36–38, 41, 86, 132, 137–140, 212, 230, 255 General Allotment (Dawes Act) 1887 (United States), 241–42, 246 genocide, 34 Gikandi, Simon, 88 Gilroy, Paul, 100 Godbeer, Richard, 36 Goodisson, Lillie, 185, 188, 190 Goodall, Heather, 239 Gotto, Sybil, 192 gold, 102, 106, 131 Goldstein, Vida, 213 Griesemer, James R., 66 Griffith, Arthur, 128 Griffith, Gail B., 28 Grimes, Samuel, 156–57 Grimshaw, Patricia, 119, 184, 227 Gross, Ariela, 156 Grey, George, 228–29 Guha, Ranajit, 47 Gulick, Sidney, 77–78 Haddon, A. C., 75 Haebich, Anna, 201, 236, 240 Haggis, Jane, 139–40 Haldane, J. B. S., 75 “half caste”, See Aborigines—“half caste”; Maori Peoples —“half caste”; People of mixed descent Half Caste Disability Removal Act 1860 (New Zealand), 219, 229–30 Hall, Catherine, 20, 49, 84, 87 Harris, Cheryl, 40, 100, 156, 256n. 1

Haskins, Victoria, 25 Healy, Sianan, 246 Heredity, See racial inheritance Herzog, J. B., 76 Hevia, James, 132 Hill, Ernestine, 199, 200, 201 Hodes, Martha, 37 Hodgkinson, Lorna, 190 Hoernle, R. F. A., 75 Holt, Lillian, 239 home, 8, 24, 135–36, 138, 140–43, 145–46, 254 hooks, bell, 100 Howitt, Alfred W., 210 Hughes, W. M., 79 Huttenback, Robert, 56, 103, 106 Huxley, J. S., 75 hybridity, 40, 100, 156, 212 See also interracial marriage; “miscegenation”; People of mixed descent; “race mixing” hygiene, See racial health and hygiene Identity, See whiteness—identity Immigration Restriction Act 1901 (Australia), See White Australia Policy immigration and immigrants, 8, 46, 51, 54, 55, 56, 76–77, 165, 184, 236, 247 imperial emigration, 91–93, 105, 136, 167–75 imperial federation, 54, 105, 110 imperial history new imperial history, 17, 20–22, 28 imperialism, See colonialism; settler colonialism imperial networks and exchanges, 49–57, 84, 100, 102, 105, 110–111, 254–55 indentured labor, 33, 38 India, 93 Indian Act 1876 (Canada), 219, 221–24, 230 Indians (and Australia), 93, 94, 166–76



266

Indigenous peoples, See Aborigines; First Nations Peoples; Maori peoples; Native Americans infanticide, 207 International Council of Women, 185, 191–92 interracial marriages, 9, 33, 34, 35–36, 37–38, 74–75, 77–78, 79, 80–81, 166–75, 190, 221, 223, 224–30 interracial relationships, 219–30 interracial sex, 33, 35, 36, 38–39, 69, 76, 223–24 intimacy, history of, 219, 230n. 2 Irish Nell, 33, 38 Irving, T. H., 241 Islam, 169, 170, 173 Jamaica, 25 Johnston, Sir Harry, 74–75 “kanakas”, See Pacific Islanders Khan, Lillie, 168–73, 175 Khan, Noab, 167–72, 174, 175–76 Kipling, Rudyard, 78 Kolchin, Peter, 3–4, 235, 236 Koven, Seth, 83 Kramer, Paul, 68, 131 Lake, Marilyn, 24, 46, 67, 68, 103, 107, 112, 150, 168, 202, 254 land, 77–78, 90, 135–36, 138, 140, 141–42, 145–46, 220, 226–30, 238, 242, 244, 246, 254 See also Aborigines—claims to land, dispossession; dispossession; Maori peoples—dispossession; Native Americans—expropriation of land; whiteness—and attachment or claims to land Lang, Gideon S., 206 Lawton, Lancelot, 78 Lazarre, Jane, 42 Lester, Alan, 27 Leupp, Francis, 244–45

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liberalism and liberal discourses, 41, 45–46, 48, 51, 53, 54, 55, 58, 75, 76, 120 Levine, James, 45 Longman, Irene, 183, 186, 187 Loomba, Ania, 22, 246 Loving v. Virginia (1967), 34 MacFie, Matthew, 108 Mackenzie King, William Lyon, 121 manhood, 45, 53, 55, 131, 202 See also gender: white men; white masculinity Mantell, Walter, 226 Maori peoples assimilation, 224–25, 229 dispossession, 220, 225 “half caste”, 226, 228 laws and legislation relating to, 225, 227 rights, 227–30 Marchant, Bessie, 86, 90 May, Phil, 214–15 Mayne, R. C., 102 McClintock, Anne, 202, 207 McCombie, Thomas, 45, 46, 50–55, 57–58 McDonald, Albert, 211 McElheran, John, 104 McGrath, Ann, 225 McKenzie, Kirsten, 26 McManus, Sheila, 221 McQuarrie, W. G., 77 Mehta, Uday, 45 melancholy, 70 mental deficiency, 183, 185–90, 191–92, 194 Meredith, Charles, 136, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143–45 Meredith, Louisa, 8, 135–46 Meston, Archibald, 154, 157, 158 Meurant, Edward, 228 Midgley, Clare, 193 Millis, H. A., 77



Index

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Index

Mills, Sara, 138 “miscegenation”, 6, 7, 33–40, 69, 73–81, 105, 108–109, 121, 158, 190 See also African Americans—“miscegenation”; biological absorption; hybridity; Native Americans—“miscegenation”; People of mixed descent missionaries and missionary organizations, 84–88, 90, 94 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 254 Moreton—Robinson, Aileen, 5, 18, 236 Morris, Alexander, 102, 107 mothers and motherhood, 138, 140, 167, 171–74, 184 See also Aborigines—mothers, motherhood and maternity Munro, John, 4 Myrdal, Gunnar, 76 Nash, Gary, 33 National Council of Women (Australia), 183–84, 185–86, 187, 188, 190 Native Americans assimilation, 9, 33–34, 236–38, 241–47, 256 expropriation of land, 237–38, 242–46 financial responsibility of, 241–46 laws and legislation relating to, 237–38, 241–43 “miscegenation”, 35–36 rights, 244 whiteness, 5 Nazi Germany, 75, 80 Neville, A. O., 212, 213 Newman, Louise, 19, 26, 184 New Zealand, 9, 21, 77, 219–20, 224–30 Ngai, Mai, 131 Niles, John, 103 Nuby, Ali Ackba, 170

others and othering, 5–6, 9, 11, 47–48, 53, 55, 85, 88, 94, 138, 150, 184, 193, 194–95, 202, 205, 207, 253, 254, 256 Pacific Islanders, 151, 154–59, 166 “kanaka menace”, 156, 158 Paisley, Fiona, 23–24 Pakeha (non-Maori/white New Zealanders), 18–19 Pakeha—Maori, 220 Pearson, Charles, 111–112, 120–21, 122 People of mixed descent Australia, 9, 76–77, 174, 175 Canada, 224 child removal, 37–38, 200, 201, 202, 213 laws and legislation relating to, 174, 175, 221 legal definitions, 37–39 Métis, 108 New Zealand, 77, 225–27, 229 “one drop rule”, 39–40 Peru, 35 United States, 37–40, 77–79 See also amalgamation; biological absorption; hybridity; interracial marriage; “miscegenation”; “race mixing” Perkins, Maureen, 236–27 Perry, Adele, 109, 219 Philippines, 6, 68, 124, 125 Phillips, Richard, 86 Piddington, Marian, 188, 191 Piesse, Major E. J., 79–80 Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 31 Poignant, Axel, 203, 205 postcolonialism, 1, 5–6, 10, 17, 21, 22, 28, 46–49, 52, 88, 101, 254, 255 poverty and the poor, 84–85, 87, 88 Pratt, Mary Louise, 88, 137 Prochaska, Frank, 84 Puerto Rico, 68



268

race, 1–3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 22, 45, 53, 55, 56, 84, 119, 122, 140, 150, 155, 158, 184, 185, 194, 254 and colonialism, 3 and skin color, 36, 65, 88, 190 “dying race” theories, 89–90, 107, 129, 165, 200, 207, 209–10, 215, 237 fluidity of, 32, 39–40, 156–57, 167, 175, 220 in laws and legislation, 31, 34, 37–39, 57–58, 76–77, 80, 126, 158–59, 168, 171–75, 187, 189, 192, 219–23, 225, 227, 229–30, 237–39, 241–42 “race mixing”, 41–42, 78, 79 See also amalgamation; assimilation; biological absorption; hybridity; interracial marriage; “miscegenation”; People of mixed descent racial degeneracy, 184, 191, 193, 194, 202 racial difference, 8–9, 46–47, 50–51, 57, 89 racial equality, 74–75, 236–38, 241, 246, 247 racial health and hygiene, 68, 69, 184, 185, 188, 191, 192–93, 194 racial hierarchies and classifications, 26, 27–28, 32, 40, 46, 52, 54, 57, 70, 73–74, 76–77, 78, 79–80, 86–87, 89–90, 103, 107, 124, 130,137, 145, 157–58, 194, 201–202, 209–10, 245–46, 256 Racial Hygiene Association of New South Wales, 188–90, 192 racial improvement, 184, 188–89, 194 racial inheritance, 34, 187, 189, 191 racial kinship, 127–28 racial tolerance, 75 racialization, 2, 5, 7, 9, 11, 37, 46–47, 56–58, 256 racism, 4, 18, 19, 40, 93, 94, 145

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269

scientific racism, 27, 202, 212 Reclus, Élisée, 110–111 Redgrave, Stephen, 222–23 removal of Indigenous children, See Aborigines—child removal; People of mixed descent—child removal; stolen generations reproduction, 69, 202, 203, 206, 212 republicanism (United States), 131 resistance, 120–22, 126, 129–30, 132, 152–54, 165, 219, 239 Reuter, E. B., 76 Reynolds, Henry, 24, 46, 67, 103, 107, 112, 150, 254 Rich, Ruby, 188, 189 Ricketts, William, 203, 205, 206 Robinson, George Augustus, 144, 145 Roediger, David, 6, 18, 40, 236 Roosevelt, Theodore, 68, 78–79, 121, 125, 126–28 Rose, Sonya O., 49 Rudolf, Edward de Montjoie, 83–84 Rutherford, Jennifer, 19 Said, Edward, 5, 70, 101, 194, 202, 256 Salesa, Damon, 229 Sawtell, Michael, 238 Saxton, Alexander, 67 Scully, Pamela, 26 Searle, Geoffrey, 104, 105 Seddon, Richard, 131 Seeley, John, 55, 109 self government, 45, 53, 54, 68, 124–26, 130, 131 Sells, Cato, 242 segregation, 31, 32, 69, 75, 101, 126, 185–86, 188 settler colonialism, 6, 7, 8, 9–10, 17–18, 22–25, 27, 28, 47, 49–50, 54, 55, 56–57, 58, 66, 100–101, 104, 142, 146, 151, 155, 253–54, 255–56 white settler colonialism, 23–24, 26–28, 32 sex education, 188–89



Index

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Index

sexuality, 26, 35, 48, 219, 224 Simon, Ella, 241 slavery, 5, 10, 17, 21, 32, 37, 38, 39, 200 “white slavery”, 86–87, 167, 173 Smith, Goldwin, 109 Smuts, Jan, 76 Smyth, Brough, 210 social Darwinism, 34, 106, 202 social hygiene, See racial health and hygiene South Africa, 23, 26–27, 67, 75, 76, 80, 90 sovereignty, 10, 33, 50, 53, 54, 57, 65, 68, 165 Spanish—American War, 122–24, 126 Spear, Jennifer, 35 Spiller, Gustav, 74 “squaw men”, 220, 221, 223, 224, 226 Stanley, Milicent Preston, 187, 188 Star, Susan Leigh, 66 Steger, Winifred, 170 Stephenson, Robert Louis, 89–90 sterilization, 183, 185, 187, 188, 190, 192 stolen generations, 236–37 Stoler, Ann Laura, 6, 11, 53, 185, 219 Stopes, Marie, 191, 192 Stratchely, St Loe, 105 Street, Jessie, 188 sugar industry, 151, 156 Tavan, Gwenda, 165 transnational historiography, 4, 46, 49–50, 57, 254–55 networks and exchanges, 4, 7, 49, 184–85, 191, 254, 255 See also imperial networks and exchanges; whiteness—transnational travel and travel writing, 87–94, 99, 106–107, 109, 110–111, 136–38, 140, 146 Thomson, A. S., 229

Thorne, Susan, 84, 87, 88 Torgovnick, Marianna, 202 Treaty of Waitangi, 224 tropics, 67–69, 150 Turner, George, 46, 50–51, 54–56 United States, 1–4, 5–6, 9, 10, 18–19, 26, 31–42, 65, 67, 68, 76, 77–78, 100, 121, 122–24, 126–27, 131, 191, 199, 221–22, 230, 236–38, 241–47, 253–54, 256 Civil War, 31 Jim Crow, 31–32 “mammy” figure, 199–200, 215 n. 1 US empire, 65 venereal diseases, 36, 188, 192 violence, 11, 27–28, 135, 143–45, 150, 152, 154–55, 157, 158, 159, 223, 254 Vowell, A. W., 224 Walker, David, 166 Wallenstein, Peter, 39 Waterworth, Edith, 188, 193 Waugh, Benjamin, 83–84, 89 Wellington, Raymond, 124 Wheeler, Roxann, 26 White Australia, 8, 9, 18, 23, 48, 56, 67, 76, 123, 126, 150, 158, 166, 167–68, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 183, 184, 190, 193, 194, 200, 201, 203, 215, 237, 241, 255 White Australia policy, 48, 76, 79, 130, 165, 167 white children, 167–75, 200 white femininity, 184 See also gender white masculinity, 168, 170, 220, 225–26, 230, 255 See also gender; manhood white men, 8, 9, 25, 33, 38, 65–70, 120–22, 125–26, 128–29, 130, 131–32, 166, 169, 188–89, 207,



270

210, 211, 213, 215, 219–26, 228, 230, 255 “white men’s countries”, 24, 46, 56, 107, 129, 131, 201, 254 white women, 24, 25, 26, 33, 37, 39, 138–40, 155, 166–67, 169–74, 183–94, 199–200, 255 whitefella, 18–19 whiteness abdication of, 6, 33, 39, 40, 42, 256 analytic category of, 2–7, 9, 10, 17–20, 23, 25, 26, 28, 38–42, 46–49, 57–58, 66–70, 87, 102–103, 107–108, 113, 130, 132, 149–50, 159, 184, 185, 193–95, 235–36, 247, 253–54, 255–56 and attachment or claims to land, 107, 145, 153, 154, 159, 211, 225 and Christianity, 93–94 and colonialism, 1, 4–5, 9, 11, 22, 25, 26, 28, 46, 107, 159, 246, 255, 256 and labor history, 4, 5–6, 18 anxieties around, 66, 68, 220, 227, 240, 255; See also anxiety as property or possession, 120, 132, 150, 159, 224, 254 boundary subjects, 66, 70 definitions of, 2, 3, 6, 9–10, 39, 41, 66, 68–69, 87, 100, 158, 159, 222 emotion of, 119–20, 122–24, 127–28, 129, 132 gained via assimilation, 32; See also assimilation; biological absorption

●

271

identity, 5–6, 8, 9, 65, 67, 70, 119–120, 122, 129–30, 132, 159, 185, 194, 253, 254, 255–56 loss of, 120–21, 129 “not-white” or “non-white” category, 129–31, 166, 235 of bodies, 47, 67, 68–69, 101, 255 passing, 39, 40, 246 power and privilege of, 3, 5, 8–9, 10, 11, 28, 39, 41–42, 47–49, 57–58, 65, 68, 85, 87, 101, 120, 149, 159, 253, 254, 255–56 space, 7, 10, 100–102, 106, 110–111, 220–23, 226, 253, 255 transnational, 4–5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 25, 51, 68, 103, 107, 120, 130, 150, 194, 236, 253, 254, 255–56 whiteness studies, 1–5, 10–11, 17–20, 28, 40, 46–49, 57, 61 n. 56, 100, 102–103, 107, 140, 149, 235–26, 253–54, 255, 256 white trash, 41, 43 n. 32, 67, 235 “widow Meurant”, 228–29 Wilkins, Rev. W. J., 85, 86 Wilson, Kathleen, 37 Wolfe, Patrick, 200, 254 Woodward, C. Vann, 31–32 Woollacott, Angela, 4, 10, 184 women’s movement, 183–95 See also feminism Wray, Matt, 2, 41, 66, 67, 235, 236 Young, Robert, 11, 20



Index

Re-Orienting Whiteness

Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness

Faulkner and Whiteness

Transnational Whiteness Matters

Whiteness: A Critical Reader

Possessive Investment In Whiteness

Democracy and Expertise: Reorienting Policy Inquiry

The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology

Reorienting Economics (Economics As Social Theory Series)

Democracy and Expertise: Reorienting Policy Inquiry

Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Reconstructions in the Cinema

Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture

Cities of Whiteness (Antipode Book Series)

Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination

The Fugitive Race: Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness

Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture

Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt

Whiteness, Otherness, and the Individualism Paradox from Huck to Punk

Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging

Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women (Gender, Racism, Ethnicity)

Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (Opening Out)

Whiteness and Morality: Pursuing Racial Justice through Reparations and Sovereignty

Habits of Whiteness: A Pragmatist Reconstruction (American Philosophy)

Whiteness and Morality: Pursuing Racial Justice through Reparations and Sovereignty

After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority (Cultural Front)

Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (American Philosophy)

Whiteness, Otherness, and the Individualism Paradox from Huck to Punk

Cities of Whiteness (Antipode Book Series, Book 10 )

The Machinery of Whiteness: Studies in the Structure of Racialization

The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

Buddhism in the Public Sphere: Reorienting Global Interdependence (Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism)

Re-Orienting Whiteness

Classic Hollywood, Classic Whiteness

Faulkner and Whiteness

Transnational Whiteness Matters

Whiteness: A Critical Reader

Possessive Investment In Whiteness

Democracy and Expertise: Reorienting Policy Inquiry

The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology

Reorienting Economics (Economics As Social Theory Series)

Democracy and Expertise: Reorienting Policy Inquiry

Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Reconstructions in the Cinema

Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture

Cities of Whiteness (Antipode Book Series)

Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination

The Fugitive Race: Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness

Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture

Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt

Whiteness, Otherness, and the Individualism Paradox from Huck to Punk

Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging

Outsiders Inside: Whiteness, Place and Irish Women (Gender, Racism, Ethnicity)

Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (Opening Out)

Whiteness and Morality: Pursuing Racial Justice through Reparations and Sovereignty

Habits of Whiteness: A Pragmatist Reconstruction (American Philosophy)

Whiteness and Morality: Pursuing Racial Justice through Reparations and Sovereignty

After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority (Cultural Front)

Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (American Philosophy)

Whiteness, Otherness, and the Individualism Paradox from Huck to Punk

Cities of Whiteness (Antipode Book Series, Book 10 )

The Machinery of Whiteness: Studies in the Structure of Racialization

The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

Buddhism in the Public Sphere: Reorienting Global Interdependence (Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism)

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