Mixed Race Studies

‘Breed out the Colour’ or the Importance of Being White

Australian Historical Studies
Volume 33, Issue 120 (2002)
pages 286-302
DOI: 10.1080/10314610208596220

Russell McGregor, Associate Professor of History
James Cook University, Townsville, Queensland, Australia

This article examines inter-war proposals to ‘breed out the colour’ of Aborigines of mixed descent. Positioning these proposals in the context of contemporary Australian nationalism, scientific discourses and administrative practice, the article concludes with a discussion of their alleged genocidal intent.

In Australia between the wars, ‘breeding out the colour’ was propounded as a solution to the ‘half-caste problem’. It was a perverse proposition. The supposed problems deriving from miscegenation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians would be remedied by instituting still more comprehensive regimes of miscegenation. But now miscegenation would be managed. And the perversity of absorption did not end there. It was a nationalist project, aspiring to keep Australia white; but it flew in the face of commonly understood notions of White Australia as a doctrine of racial purity. Absorption was intensely racist but at the same time defied prevalent racist assumptions of ‘hybrid inferiority’ and demands for the segregation of ‘half-castes’. It was in certain respects a eugenist strategy, but in others dashed with eugenic principles, Absorption held a component of humanitarian welfarism; it also evinced a profound disdain for the subjects of its welfare interventions, a disdain that could extend to the attempted eradication of all vestiges of Aboriginality. This aticle explores these multiple and conflicting imensions of schemes to ‘breed out the colour’ in the Inter-war years.

For all its myriad inspirations and aspirations, ‘breeding out the colour’ was above all just that: a stratagem to erase ‘colour’, to bleach Australia white through programs of regulated reproduction. So committed were its proponents to the process of whitening that one could imagine that they took whiteness as an end in itself, a taken-for-granted good. Perhaps they did. Whiteness was a potent signifier: of virtue, of racial superiority, above all in this context, of national membership. Breeding the colour out of persons of Aboriginal descent was equally a process of breeding them into the community of the nation. Inter-war programs of biological absorption should be understood, I argue, in the…

Read or purchase the article here.

Training for assimilation: Cecil cook and the ‘half‐caste’ apprentice regulations

Melbourne Studies in Education (Currently known as Critical Studies in Education)
Volume 29, Issue 1 (1987)
pages 128-141
DOI: 10.1080/17508488709556226

Tony Austin
Darwin Institute of Technology

One of the most significant consequences of the colonisation of Aboriginal Australia was a fast growing population of people of mixed Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal descent, known as ‘Half-castes’. As the increase in numbers became pronounced. Half-castes were vilified more vehemently even than other Aborigines. However, popular contempt was tinged with shame that children, fathered by Europeans and so with a mix of White blood, were left to be brought up as ‘savages’ in the bush or on the fringes of settlement. Hence legislation for the protection and control of Aborigines included special provision for Half-castes: they were to be given an improved chance to assimilate to White Australia.

This paper describes one attempt in the Northern Territory during the 1930s to prepare young people for assimilation—an apprenticeship scheme for Half-caste pastoral workers. The scheme is viewed in the context of Commonwealth Government policy for Half-castes and prevailing views about the intellectual capacity of Aborigines and Half-castes.

Social Darwinism and Aboriginal Intelligence

From the earliest days of Commonwealth control of the Northern Territory progressive officials with anthropological interests, like Chief Protectors Herbert Basedow and Baldwin Spencer had included in their policy proposals education and training for Aborigines and especially for Half-castes who were considered to be intellectually superior to other Aborigines. But these proposals were barely acted upon. In addition to general Commonwealth neglect of Aborigines and intermittent military and financial crises, the reason is to be found in Australian views about Aborigines’ intelligence.

Basedow and Spencer, in ascribing intellectual prowess (however limited) to Aborigines, were out of step with anthropological opinion. Late nineteenth century British, American and Australian anthropologists disseminated the belief that the Scale of Nature had become rigid, making progress for certain peoples impossible and so consigning them to a permanent place of inferiority in the struggle for survival. Such theories of evolutionary arrest, coupled with A.R. Wallace’s contention that moral and mental evolution had largely replaced physical evolution made the link between ‘savages’ and the apes, or at best with Neanderthal and Engis humans, conventional anthropological wisdom.

In Australia, ethnocentric Europeans reasoned that cessation of cultural evolution was demonstrated by Aborigines’ lack of recognisable institutions, rulers, morality, religion, parental pride, sense of humour or responsible treatment of the ‘fair sex’. Cultural discontinuity, it was argued, was a clear indication of intellectual inferiority. As [Charles] C. Staniland Wake put it, Aborigines ‘represent the childhood of humanity itself, revealing to us the condition of mankind, if not in primeval times, yet when the original potentialities of man’s being had been slightly developed by the struggle for existence’ Scientific substance for this view was provided by craniologists who alleged that Aboriginal brains were primitive and incapable of matching the power of those of the ‘higher races’. Features of Aboriginal brains were said to show an ‘infantile character… a type of anomaly which is referable to persistence of an immature (even a foetal) condition’.

Read or purchase the article here.

Caught up in a scientific racism designed to breed out the black

The Sydney Morning Herald
2008-02-14

Debra Jopson

She was removed as a toddler and raped as a ward of the state. Valerie Linow knows only too well the tragedy of assimilation policy, writes Debra Jopson.

The stolen child Valerie Linow is certain she knows why she and thousands of fellow Aborigines were taken from their families and placed in institutions or with white foster families.
 
“It was because of the colour of their skin, to make the country whiter and whiter. The way to do it was to get the half-castes out of the way,” she says.
 
Compassionate Australians recoil from that idea, but the historical record shows that this humble pensioner from Miller, near Liverpool, transported to Bomaderry Children’s Home when she was just two, is right….

…In 1933 a Sunday newspaper quoted Dr Cecil Evelyn Cook, dazzlingly qualified as an anthropologist, biologist, bacteriologist, chief medical officer and “chief protector” of Aborigines in North Australia, who pronounced there was no “throwback” to the black once enough white blood was bred in. “Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth generation, all native characteristics of the Australian Aborigine are eradicated. The problem of our half-castes will be quickly eliminated by the complete disappearance of the black race, and the swift submergence of their progeny in the white,” he said.

“The Australian native is the most easily assimilated race on earth, physically and mentally. A blending with the Asiatic, though tending to increase virility, is not desirable. The quickest way out is to breed him white,” Cook said.
 
Scientists and social scientists who calibrated how many drops of white blood made a person civilised gave politicians throughout Australia who were worrying about the “half-caste problem” the arguments needed to remove indigenous children from their families.
 
The Melbourne University ethnographer Professor Baldwin Spencer, who was made chief protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory in 1911-12, said: “No half-caste children should be allowed to remain in any native camp.”
 
In an official 1913 report he wrote: “In practically all cases, the mother is a full-blooded Aborigine, the father may be a white man, a Chinese, a Japanese, a Malay or a Filipino.
 
“The mother is of very low intellectual grade, while the father most often belongs to the coarser and more unrefined members of the higher races. The consequence of this is that the children of such parents are not likely to be, in most cases, of much greater intellectual calibre than the more intelligent natives, though, of course, there are exceptions to this.”
 
It seemed only right to give children with enough drops of white blood a chance to join the superior race and for 50 years, from 1919, the NSW Government used its power to take indigenous young from their families and make them wards of the state…

Read the entire article here.

Ambiguities of Race: Science on the Reproductive Frontier of Australia and the Pacific Between the Wars

Australian Historical Studies
Volume 40, Issue 2, 2009
pages 143-160
DOI: 10.1080/10314610902849302

Warwick Anderson, Professor of History
University of Sydney

The attitudes of Australian biologists, anthropologists, and historians toward race mixing in the early-twentieth century should be viewed in relation to the investigations of Indigenous depopulation and miscegenation taking place in the Pacific. Those Australian scientists committed to national or continental racial ideals–Cecil Cook and Norman B. Tindale among them–remained resistant to the lessons of the Pacific, favouring ‘half-caste’ absorption. Other scholars such as Stephen Roberts and A. P. Elkin took the oceanic approach, coming to value and harness racial hybridity. This essay shows how much of Australian racial thought drifted in from the Pacific.

In 1925, as he shuttled between Townsville and Rabaul, Raphael Cilento wrote to extol the new tropical white man evolving in North Queensland. A fierce advocate of white racial purity, the director of the Townsville Institute of Tropical Medicine was convinced the peculiar Australian combination of selected European stock, restriction of intercourse with other races, a tropical environment and modern preventive medicine was producing a more virile white man north of Capricorn, not another degenerate type. ‘He is tall and rangy, with somewhat sharp features, and long legs and arms’, Cilento wrote. ‘Inclined to be sparely built, he is not, however, lacking in muscular strength, while his endurance is equal in his own circumstances to that of the temperate dweller in his. This North Queenslander moves slowly, and conserves muscular heat-producing energy in every possible way’. It was as though the Townsville racial visionary was channelling Marcus Clarke, only the Melbourne novelist’s sardonic 1877 prophecy of the coming man now spawned rhapsodies in the tropical heat. The race is in a transition stage’, Cilento continued, ‘and it is very apparent that there is being evolved precisely what one would hope for, namely a distinctive tropical type, adapted to life in the tropical environment in which it
is set’. Cilento was certainly not crying in the wilderness. Ronald Hamlyn-Harris, director of the Queensland Museum and scourge of the mosquito, joined him in trying to cultivate ‘in the rising generation year after year a vision of…

Read or purchase the article here.

‘Queer magic’: Performing mixed-race on the Australian stage

Contemporary Theatre Review
Volume 16, Issue 2, 2006
pages 171-188
DOI: 10.1080/10486800600587138

Jacqueline Lo, Professor and Director of the ANU Centre for European Studies
Austrailian National University

Half-caste-woman, living a life apart.
What did your story begin?
Half-caste-woman, have you a secret heart
Waiting for someone to win?

Were you born of some queer magic
In your shimmering gown?
Is there something strange and tragic
Deep, deep down?…

(Noël Coward, Half-caste Woman, 1931)

Used variously to denote fusion, border crossing, miscegenation, transculturation, diaspora, cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, hybridity as a term runs the risk of being so stretched that it ceases to have any critical purchase for meaningful analysis. It is my contention that despite the extensive range of analysis of hybridity in contemporary postcolonial studies, the body and processes of embodiment have been largely under explored. The focus of attention tends to be on cultural negotiations and performances of identity, Even when race and racism is invoked, the analysis tends to centre on the power mechanisms that produce specific subjectivities and types of bodies. There is very little attention given to how subjected bodies themselves respond somatically to this will to power, nor of how hybridity itself is embodied and performed The invisibility of the body in hybridity-talk is all the more surprising given the genealogy of the term and its association with miscegenation. In order to explain this lack, it is necessary to briefly trace the history of hybridity.

Robert Young points out in his seminal text, Colonial Desire that the English word ‘hybrid’ stems from the latin term hybrida meaning…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Invisible Line

Late Night Live
ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Radio National
2011-06-13

Phillip Adams, Presenter

Kris Short, Story Researcher and Producer

Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law (and author of The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White)
Vanderbilt University

In America race has always been a potent issue—and it’s clear from some of the reactions to the Obama presidency that racial tension still simmers beneath the surface of the American body politic.

If you were to look at the legal history of race you would see an intricate process defining who is black and who is white in America, and you would assume that there is a strongly policed colour line, especially in the Southern States. But according to historian Daniel Sharfstein the boundaries of black and white are far more fluid than they seem at first glance. He says that racial ‘passing‘ is one of the great unspoken-of traditions in American history.

Listen to the interview here (00:28:01).

Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home

Wiley-Blackwell
August 2005
304 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4051-0054-0
Papeback ISBN: 978-1-4051-0055-7
E-book ISBN: 978-1-4051-4130-7

Alison Blunt, Professor of Geography
Queen Mary, University of London

Domicile and Diaspora investigates geographies of home and identity for Anglo-Indian women in the 50 years before and after Indian independence in 1947.

• The first book to study the Anglo-Indian community past and present, in India, Britain and Australia.
• The first book by a geographer to focus on a community of mixed descent.
• Investigates geographies of home and identity for Anglo-Indian women in the 50 years before and after Indian independence in 1947.
• Draws on interviews and focus groups with over 150 Anglo-Indians, as well as archival research.
• Makes a distinctive contribution to debates about home, identity, hybridity, migration and diaspora.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures.
• Series Editors’ Preface.
• Acknowledgements.
• 1. Domicile and Diaspora: An Introduction.
• 2. At Home in British India: Imperial Domesticity and National Identity.
• 3. Home, Community and Nation: Domesticating Identity and Embodying Modernity.
• 4. Colonization and Settlement: Anglo-Indian Homelands.
• 5. Independence and Decolonization: Anglo-Indian Resettlement in Britain.
• 6. Mixed Descent, Migration and Multiculturalism: Anglo-Indians in Australia since 1947.
• 7. At Home in Independent India: Post-Imperial Domesticity and National Identity.
• 8. Domicile and Diaspora: Conclusions.
• Bibliography.
• Appendix 1 Archival Sources.
• Appendix 2 Interviews and Focus Groups.
• Index

Read chapter one here.

Too White to be Regarded as Aborigines: An historical analysis of policies for the protection of Aborigines and the assimilation of Aborigines of mixed descent, and the role of Chief Protectors of Aborigines in the formulation and implementation of those policies, in Western Australia from 1898 to 1940.

University of Notre Dame, Australia
March 2008
328 pages

Derrick Tomlinson

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame Australia

For much of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, public policies for Western Australia’s Indigenous peoples were guided by beliefs that they were remnants of a race in terminal decline and that a public duty existed to protect and preserve them. If their extinction was unavoidable, the public duty was to ease their passing. The Aborigines Act 1905 vested the Chief Protector of Aborigines (after 1936 the Commissioner for Native Affairs), with lawful responsibility for the pursuit of that duty. All Aborigines caught by the terms of the Act, in particular Aboriginal children under the age of 16, and after 1936 girls and women under the age of 21, were wards of the Chief Protector and the Act entrusted him with extensive powers for managing their lives. The historical progression of public policies for the protection of Aborigines is analysed in this thesis. Particular attention is paid to developments guided by A.O. Neville, the third Chief Protector of Aborigines and first Commissioner for Native Affairs from 1915 to 1940. In that time, inadequacies in the law and its false assumptions about the destiny of the Aboriginal race were exposed. Those who framed the Aborigines Act 1905 failed to address the possibility that the race might not be extinguished, but might be transformed by interaction with the dominant white community. They did not anticipate a need to manage an emergent, fertile, and anomic half-caste populace, too black for the mainstream white community to accept as equals, but too white to be regarded as Aborigines. In the face of these and other challenges, public policy shifted under Neville’s guidance from protecting the racial integrity of Aborigines by segregating them from contaminating influences of the white community, towards the absorption of Aborigines, in the first instance those of mixed racial descent, by the white population. Critics of the latter policy have condemned it as being directed towards sinister objectives of ‘biological absorption’, ‘constructive miscegenation’, or, at the extreme, ‘genocide’. It is argued in this thesis that public policy in Western Australia was directed towards none of those objectives. Breeding out the colour was never the intention. Public policy progressively after 1915 was guided by an aspiration that Aborigines might be elevated in public estimation to a level where they might be accepted by the white community. A.O. Neville believed that in the longer term inter-racial marriage might even become acceptable and that ultimately ‘coloureds’ might breed out, but not that public programs should be directed towards that purpose.

Read the entire thesis here.

Living as Others in Japan

Japanese Studies Association of Australia 2011 Biennial Conference
Internationalising Japan: Sport, Culture and Education
University of Melbourne, Melbourne Law School
185 Pelham Street
Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia
2011-07-04 through 2011-07-07

Wednesday, 2011-07-06, 11:00-12:30 AEDT (Local Time)
Room 102

This panel will present two historical papers about individuals whose lives were affected by the Pacific War, and a third paper which examines issues involving intercultural communication between Japanese and non-Japanese people. The two historical stories focus on how their respective individuals navigated their life course as “Others” in Japan. Hamilton will shed light on children born to Japanese mothers and Australian fathers during the Allied Occupation in Kure. Tamura’s paper is on a businessman of mixed heritage, English and Japanese, born in Kobe, who was interned in Japan. Parry’s paper provides a look into intercultural communication between Australian students in a homestay among ten Japanese host parents.

Kure Kids
Walter Hamilton

Walter Hamilton has recently completed a book on the mixed-race children of the Occupation, under the working title of Lest We Beget: The Mixed-Race Legacy of Occupied Japan. (www.lestwebeget.com).

Nearly sixty years have passed since the post-war occupation of Japan. It might be assumed historians will have exhausted all there is to say about its political, economic and social effects. But one unexplored aspect remains vividly alive: the hidden ancestral links that bind Australians, Americans, Britons and others to Japanese blood-relations never known, never met: the unclaimed, mixed-race offspring left in Japan when the troops departed. Their fathers would not or could not acknowledge them: an estimated 10,000 children, including several hundred fathered by Australians.

So familiar is the idea of military conquest leading to the birth of “unwanted” children outside marriage – across racial, class and cultural divides – they tend to be dismissed as a natural corollary of war. Their appearance in occupied Japan came as no surprise. The “Madame Butterfly” tradition provided a high-toned model of Western men exploiting Japanese women. As if their biological inevitability made them what they were, the children attracted scant attention from Western writers, who acquiesced in facile assumptions about their fate. Surely they were disowned by their fathers, lamented by their mothers and thrust to the lower depths of society. The eminent American historian John Dower has called them “one of the sad, unspoken stories” of the occupation. Japanese historical and fictional treatments of the issue also suffer from a determination to link the children exclusively to prostitution, moral collapse and national humiliation.

Australia joined the occupation not expecting to convert the former enemy but to punish and ostracise him. With immigration restrictions, in some respects, even tighter than they were in 1941, permission was denied for troops in Japan to marry across the race divide. Anyone defying the ban risked being forcibly removed from his de facto wife and children. Although these measures were relaxed in 1952 to admit the first Japanese war brides, no such right was extended to the unacknowledged or orphaned children of Australian servicemen. In addition, the federal government maintained an elaborate deception to stop the children being adopted by Australian families. Bogus welfare arguments were used to cover a purely political determination. The moment the strategy showed signs of faltering, it was reinforced through public monies being deployed to keep the children in Japan. There were almost no exceptions, even for the sons and daughters of brave men who had fought and died in the Korean War. In the words of a leading churchman of the day, the Reverend Alan Walker: “There have been few more disgraceful incidents in the whole miserable history of Australia’s racial immigration policy.”

This paper will introduce several individuals born in or near the city of Kure, in Hiroshima prefecture, where the British Commonwealth Occupation Force (BCOF) was based from 1946 until the withdrawn of the last Korean War contingent in 1956. The Kure Kids encountered discrimination because of their physical appearance, dysfunctional family life, low socioeconomic status and social isolation. But the lives of these Japanese “others” represented much more—in quality, variety and achievement—than is suggested by the conventional portrayal of “sad, unspoken stories.”

Between Father Land and Mother Land: a British-Japanese Dual National and his Pacific War
Keiko Tamua

In war, individuals are categorized either as friend or foe, and enemy nationals are seen and treated with suspicion and fear. In December 1941, when the Pacific War started, about 700 out of 2134 civilians of the Allied nations who were residing in Japan were arrested or interned as enemy aliens. Most of them had lived in Japan for a number of years and had become part of the community. Some civilians were repatriated to their home countries on exchange boats in 1942 and 43, but others decided to remain in Japan even though they knew they were going to be interned or kept under police surveillance. Most of them had mixed heritage through their parents and/or having Japanese spouse; they thought their home was Japan rather than Britain or the USA, and they felt they could not leave without their family members.

F. M. Jonas was one of these expatriates who were caught in the war. He was born in Osaka in 1878, having a British father and a Japanese mother. He had established himself as a respectable British businessman in pre-war Kobe, running a stevedore business at the port. He was highly regarded both in the expatriate and Japanese communities, having been vicechairman of the Kobe Foreign Chamber of Commerce, and president of the Kobe Regatta and Athletic Club – the premier expatriate social club in Kobe. When the war started Jonas was arrested by the Japanese authorities, and later interned as an enemy alien. However, he managed to secure release from internment through British-Japanese dual citizenship, and he changed his name to Morii Kamejirō. When the war ended, he tried to re-establish his formal status as a British national. He died in 1950 before final resolution was officially made. Did he claim citizenship of convenience to suit the circumstances, to avoid internment, and consequently did he betray his father land? Or did he have legitimate reasons to do so? What were the consequences of his action for himself and his family? Japanese nationality laws upheld the principle of paternal succession until 1985, and dual citizenship has never been recognized. How did Jonas convince the authorities of his dual nationality? In this paper, I will discuss the life course of F. M. Jonas, who lived between father land and mother land in the middle of the Pacific War. Through Jonas’ story, I will explore, from a historical point of view, how the nationality of mixed decent people has been interpreted and handled in Japan and Britain.

For more information, click here.

Shady’s Back

New Matilda
Surry Hills NSW, Australia
2011-05-02

Jennifer Mills

As Obama is called to prove his place of birth, Indigenous Australians are being asked to account for their origins too. Not black enough, not white enough: Jennifer Mills on public anxiety about biracial identity

The release of Obama’s birth certificate by the White House on Thursday has drawn a variety of responses—from conspiracists’ disbelief in its veracity to analysts’ disbelief in its necessity. Some say it arrives too late to dispel doubts about his origins, and others that Obama has cleverly sprung a right-wing trap by drawing conspiracists out.

At the same time, the case of nine Aboriginal people seeking an apology from Andrew Bolt for two columns in which he questioned their right to claim Aboriginal heritage has been fuelling public discussion, the best thing about which has been its domination by the voices of Indigenous women. The argument that Aboriginal people should be the ones who choose who gets to be Aboriginal has been made well elsewhere. But the fact that these discussions are happening with such vitriol and in the public sphere is worth noting, as it says more about the culture at large than about any of the individuals involved.

Where does this yawning discomfort and anxiety around biracial or multicultural identities come from? Are we seeing a return to blood quantums or to centralised, institutional definitions of race? Why does it matter if you’re black and white?

…The release of the birth certificate may achieve little, because it doesn’t address the real question of the birthers, to whom Obama will continue to exhibit a certain uncomfortable quality which the easily frightened are apt to label “foreignness.” There is indeed “something shady” about Obama—his colour. There is a vagueness about him which threatens those who seek to categorise and divide. That vague quality is a multicultural identity…

…Race is a fiction, an invention. It doesn’t show on a family tree, it can’t be proven with birth certificates or in a court of law. A legal definition of Indigenousness would be dangerously divisive, just as it is in the United States where Certificates of Degree of Indigenous Blood are still controversially issued by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Blood quantum laws in the US date back to the early 18th century and were used as a colonial tool to keep track of Indigenous populations. Now most sovereign tribes make their own definitions of Indigenous heritage and tribal membership. In Australia, the legal definition is similarly loose, autonomous and consensus based…

Read the entire article here.