{"id":30575,"date":"2013-04-22T01:57:01","date_gmt":"2013-04-22T01:57:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=30575"},"modified":"2013-04-22T01:57:01","modified_gmt":"2013-04-22T01:57:01","slug":"white-without-soap-philanthropy-caste-and-exclusion-in-colonial-victoria-1835-1888-a-political-economy-of-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=30575","title":{"rendered":"White Without Soap: Philanthropy, Caste and Exclusion in Colonial Victoria 1835-1888, A Political Economy of Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

White Without Soap: Philanthropy, Caste and Exclusion in Colonial Victoria 1835-1888, A Political Economy of Race<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

University of Melbourne
\nNovember 2003
\n328 pages<\/p>\n

Marguerita Stephens<\/strong><\/p>\n

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History<\/em><\/p>\n

The thesis explores the connections between nineteenth century imperial anthropology, racial \u2018science\u2019, and the imposition of colonising governance on the Aborigines of Port Phillip<\/a>\/Victoria between 1835 and 1888. It explores the way that particular, albeit contested, images of Aborigines \u2018became legislative\u2019. It surveys the declining influence of liberal and Evangelical \u2018philanthropy\u2019 at the end of the 1830s, the pragmatic moral slippages that transformed humanitarian gestures into colonial terror, and the part played by the Australians in the emergence of the concept of race as the chief vector of colonial power. The thesis contrasts the rhetoric of the British Evangelicals with governmental rationalisations in connection with Major Lettsom\u2019s murderous raid on the Kulin<\/a> on the outskirts of Melbourne. It then probes two mid century \u2018scientific\u2019 discourses – one concerning the purported infertility of Aboriginal women in connection with white men (a thesis that captivated Social Darwinists but was belied by the ubiquitous presence of children of mixed descent); the other concerning the purported propensity of the Australians to wantonly destroy their own offspring – to illustrate how self-serving misinterpretations of the effects of colonisation, and of Aboriginal cultural practices, presented the Kulin as less than human and underwrote the removal of their children into \u2018protective\u2019 incarceration. It explores how a policy originally intended to \u2018domesticate\u2019 and transform the children of the Kulin into model citizens turned into a project designed to eradicate the Aborigines of Victoria by \u2018breeding them out\u2019.<\/strong> It considers the contestations between humanitarians and racialists at the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines and how, in the 1870s, an arcane theory that the Aborigines were of Caucasian origins came to underwrite an intentionally genocidal \u2018absorption\u2019 policy that deployed the arithmetics of caste. Throughout the thesis, the determination of the Kulin survivors to adapt to the new circumstances, their efforts to farm the Coranderrk<\/a> station lands as independent, free farmer-citizens, their resistance to the Board\u2019s efforts to \u2018board out\u2019 their children and dispossess them of every acre of land in the colony, is juxtaposed against representations of the Aborigines as primitives, savages, as less than human and inherently bound for extinction on the one hand, and as a people passively awaiting the remedy of being made \u2018white without soap\u2019 on the other.<\/p>\n

Read the entire dissertation here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

White Without Soap: Philanthropy, Caste and Exclusion in Colonial Victoria 1835-1888, A Political Economy of Race University of Melbourne November 2003 328 pages Marguerita Stephens Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History The thesis explores the connections between nineteenth century imperial anthropology, racial \u2018science\u2019, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[838,459,8,4405],"tags":[986,14494,6161,5336],"class_list":["post-30575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dissertations","category-history","category-media-archive","category-oceania","tag-australia","tag-marguerita-stephens","tag-university-of-melbourne","tag-victoria"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30575\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}