Preserving the National Complexion

After the First World War, Australians began to notice a new trend among the Aboriginal population. Within their own enclaves, people of mixed descent were reproducing faster than white Australians. Remarking on this trend, demographer Jens Lyng observed in 1927 that 'the idea of the White Australia ideal eventually being shattered from within cannot be dismissed as altogether absurd'. Lyng's wording was guarded, and there is no evidence to suggest that the Australian public was alarmed by half-caste reproduction rates or fearful that it posed a threat to the national ideal. Some administrators of Aboriginal affairs were alarmed and fearful, however — or at least their statements on the issue were alarmist and fear-provoking. Two administrators in particular — Western Australia's Chief Protector of Aborigines (later Commissioner of Native Affairs), AO Neville, and the Northern Territory's Chief Protector of Aborigines, Cecil Cook — elevated the 'half-caste menace' to their highest priority.

Neville's and Cook's solution to the half-caste problem was biological absorption, colloquially called 'breeding out the colour'. This entailed directing persons of mixed descent into marital unions with white people, so that after several generations of interbreeding all outward signs of Aboriginal ancestry would disappear. It held an incongruent array of aims and means. Absorption promised to resolve the supposed problems resulting from racial intermixture by encouraging still more intermixing. It aimed to uphold the ideal of white Australia but flew in the face of popular notions of white Australia as a doctrine of racial purity. While racist in many ways, absorption simultaneously defied prevalent racist assumptions of hybrid inferiority. It parallelled eugenicism in certain respects, but also clashed with eugenic principles. It was inspired partly by humanitarian welfarism, but evinced profound disdain for the subjects of its welfare interventions.

Despite these myriad inspirations and aspirations, absorption's primary objective was accurately stated in its colloquial designation. It aimed to 'breed out the colour' — to physically transform persons of Aboriginal ancestry into white Australians and thereby bleach out the as yet small coloured stain in the national fabric. Half-castes must become white since whiteness was the essential qualification for national membership. Breeding the colour out of persons of Aboriginal descent was equally a program of breeding them into the community of the nation. This chapter argues that biological absorption in the interwar years should be understood in the context of a strongly ethnic conception of Australian nationhood, whereby myths of blood kinship provided the core of national cohesion. It also argues that while absorption was a variant of assimilation, it was in crucial respects different to the social assimilation which some critics were beginning to advocate in the 1930s, and which came to the fore after the Second World War.

Managing miscegenation

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

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

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

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

Since no government ever enshrined biological absorption in legislation, its status as policy has been disputed. The word 'policy' may be open to several interpretations, but if it is taken to refer to a set of objectives and a course of action endorsed and pursued by those charged with...