Case Study: Australia and Indigenous Australians

Key Terms used in Australian Case Study

• Indigenous population• Colonisation• Assimilation• Immigration• ‘Racial suicide’• ‘Racial decay’• ‘Breeding out Blackness’• ‘Stolen generation’

Background: Colonisation of Australia• British colonised Australia in 1788. Viewed

land as ‘empty’.• Used as a penal colony for British convicts • Strategic importance + natural resources• Approx 750,000 indigenous Australians,

thousands died from smallpox brought by British (by 1880s pop reduced to 80,000).

• 18th C on-going conflict between settlers and colonists.

Race theories in Australia in the early 20th Century

• Colonists saw Indigenous population as ‘inferior’ and ‘uncivilised’ – some scientists believed they would just die out.

• ‘Racial Suicide’: Eugenicists worried about slow birth rate of white pop compared to Asian population in region – White Australian Policy limited immigration of non-Europeans.

• ‘Racial Decay’: Eugenicists worried that nation would decline because middle classes had fewer children than working class and blacks.

White immigration policy: From Britain to Australia

• Immigration of white European people to Australia was encouraged and immigration of black and Asian people was restricted.

• 1910-1967 over 150,000 white children (usually from poor families or orphans) were sent to Australia and Canada to increase the white population.

The Stolen Generation• Some Eugenicists believed it would be

possible to ‘breed out’ the black population over several generations.

• ‘I see no objection to the ultimate absorption into our own race of the whole of the existing Australian native race.’ A.O Neville (Chief Protector of Aborigines)

• ‘Mixed-race’ children removed from their families between 1910-1970 to be absorbed into white society. These children are the ‘stolen generation’.

A.O.Neville – assimilation programmes for breeding blackness out.

A scene taken from the movie ‘The Rabbit Proof fence in which actor Kenneth Branagh plays A.O Neville (Chief protector of Aborigines 1915-1936) explaining how the Eugenics idea of selective breeding could remove the blackness from the mixed race’ population.

The Stolen Generation• From 1950s the language of government

policy changed and spoke about assimilation of native Australians.

• ‘mixed race’ children were still removed from their indigenous Australian families but now the government claimed it was for their welfare and because they were being neglected.

• Many children of this stolen generation were removed from their families as babies and grew up believing they were orphans.