1 Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: Nation Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Sydney 1997)Google Scholar. The conservative response to this landmark report is outlined in a insightful and detailed account by Manne, Robert, ‘In Denial: The Stolen Generation and the Right’, Australian Quarterly Essays 1 (2001).Google Scholar

2 Dyer, R., White (London 1997)Google ScholarPubMed chapter 1. Dyer develops his opening discussion of a white racial consciousness on the basis of North American settlement history.

3 The argument in this paper alludes to the distinction that has been traditionally drawn between ‘settler societies’ and ‘colonial societies’ originally developed in the ‘Hartz thesis’. See L. Hartz ed., The Founding of New Societies (1964) who uses the notion of ‘fragments’ (of metropolitan European societies) as.the distinguishing feature of settler societies.

4 The notion of ‘outback’ and ‘bush’ are central to the Australian national mythology and nationalist discourse. The terms emerge from an Australian urban imaginary, which nevertheless has consistently drawn on ‘the bush’ as a defining nationalist characteristic. The ‘bush’ frontier and the more distant ‘outback’ frontier, like the American ‘wild west’, are iconic locations, which trouble urban settler society. They are locations which produce ‘real men’, in contrast to feeble urbanites, who demonstrate the virility of settler, new world societies. At the same time they represent social and cultural chaos, which threatens the fragile order of New World society. ‘Northern Australia’ is imbued with this contradictory imagery but carries with it the reality of distance, of racial contestation and the geopolitical reality of being a tropical boundary with Asia.

5 As Dyer argues, nineteenth-century discourses of whiteness also made it possible to ‘create a category of maybe, sometimes whites, people who may be let in to whiteness under particular historical circumstances’. The Irish, Mexicans, Jews and people of mixed race provide striking instances: often excluded, sometimes indeed being assimilated into the categories of whiteness, and at other treated as a ‘buffer’. Dyer, White, 18. In mainstream Australian Anglo-Scottish society, the Irish were gradually assimilated in this sense and in early twentieth century, Mediterranean workers, in the absence of indentured coloured labour ejected by racial legislation, were accepted as white. Half-caste-ness in this context was a concept that ambiguously both retrieved whiteness and rejected colour.

6 See Denoon, D., ‘Understanding Settler Societies’, Historical Studies 18/73 (1979) 511–527Google Scholar. He later developed his thesis in a monograph. The initial thesis however is based largely on an economistic argument related to the history of British (world) capitalism. From the more cultural perspective of current research, few of his original six characteristics would appear to be decisive. The question has been central in more recent debates in postcolonial theory. See specifically a recent Australian perspective: Johnson, A. & Lawson, A., ‘Settler Colonies’ in: Schwarz, H. and Ray, S. eds, A Companion to Postcolonial Studies (Oxford 2000) 360–376.Google Scholar

7 See Hage, G., White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural World (Annandale 1998).Google Scholar

8 Most recently, the ‘unguarded north’ has been seen as vulnerable to ‘boat people’, the unregulated hordes from Asia attempting to illegally enter paradise. During World War Two, Australian authorities were prepared to sacrifice the ‘top half’ to Japanese invaders.

9 Reid, G., A Picnic with the Natives: Aboriginal-European Relations in the Northern Territory to 1910 (Melbourne 1990) 198.Google Scholar

10 According to Reid, of these unintended consequences ‘disease, deprivation of natural resources, and reduction in reproduction appear to have been the main causes’. Reid, Aboriginal-European Relations, 198. Reid explicitly denies there was intentional ‘genocide. Reid’s account was first published after the initial claims of genocide had been published by Australian historians, and reissued subsequent to this debate having become a major national issue. Australia's most respected historian of Aboriginal-European relations, Henry Reynolds, has most recently surveyed the debate and the historical evidence. His tends towards a similar conclusion, but argues that cultural extermination was the aim of the most assiduous advocates of native welfare. Reynolds, H., An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (Ringwood 2001).Google Scholar

11 Reynolds, Henry, Aborigines and Settlers (Melbourne 1972)Google Scholar. Colin Tatz argues that all elements of Article Two of the UN Convention on Genocide apply to Australian Aborigines. He estimates that a population of 500 tribes numbering in total between 250,000 and 750,000 individuals at the time of British arrival had diminished to 31,000 over 123 years. European imported disease is recognised as having been a major killer. Rough estimates of ‘killings’ include 3,000–4,000 in Tasmania between 1824 and 1835, 10,000 in Queensland between 1824 and 1908, in central Australia forty per cent of Aborigines were shot and in Western Australia ‘hundreds of massacres’ took place. Tatz, C., Genocide in Australia (Canberra 1999).Google Scholar

12 Nowhere in contemporary or current Australian accounts does the term ‘concubinage’ appear to describe the more stable sexual relations between coloniser and colonized which characterise (the literature on) French and Dutch settlements.

13 Kuitenbrouwer, M., The Netherlands and the Rise of Dutch Imperialism (New York 1991).Google Scholar

14 The Northern Territory has been awaiting full statehood status since. The other ‘colony’ of an Australian colonial state was southeastern New Guinea, annexed by the colonial state of Queensland for reasons of economic potential and pre-emptive defence against foreign (German) imperial expansion.

15 The territory was formerly granted to the colony of South Australian in 1864 as a dependency to relieve Britain of the responsibility for this unclaimed wedge of the continent. Price, A.G., The History and Problems of the Northern Territory, Australia (Adelaide 1930)Google Scholar. The South Australian government instigated a series of colonising projects to entice white settlement from 1863.

16 Duncan, R., The Northern Territory Pastoral Industry, 1863–1900 (Melbourne 1967) 11.Google Scholar

17 Chinese were first recruited as indentured labourers from Singapore in 1874. Later Indies indentured workers were also employed. By 1876 there were 756 Chinese and Malays in the colony, 140 of whom were Chinese ‘coolies’. In 1878 this number had increased to 1,160, of whom 540 were Chinese. With the discovery of gold that year numbers increased rapidly to 1,568, 4,356 in 1880 peeking at 6,102 in 1888, and falling to 1,387 in 1910, after the majority were expelled from Australia. The European community had grown from 351 in 1872 to 731 in 1880 and 1,182 in 1910. Reid, Aboriginal-European Relations, 47–48.

18 Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, 155.

19 Ibid.

20 As early as 1874, the majority of Europeans had Chinese ‘houseboys’. Reid, Aboriginal-European Relations, 48. By 1892 the majority of pastoral industry employees were Aboriginal. Duncan, Pastoral Industry, 3.

21 Bosma, U., Karel Zaalsberg, journalist en strijder voor de Indo (Leiden 1997) 15.Google Scholar

22 Taylor, J., The Social World of Batavia: Europeans and Eurasians in Dutch Asia (Maddison 1982).Google Scholar

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24 Dudink, S., Deugdzaam liberalisme: Sociaal-liberalisme in Nederland, 1870–1901 (Amsterdam 1997).Google Scholar

25 Stoler, A., ‘Rethinking Colonial Boundaries: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 13 (1989) 134–161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Bosma, Karel Zaalsberg, 31–32 and A. Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (Michigan 1985).

27 Coté, J., ‘ “Our Indies Colony”: Reading First Wave Dutch Feminism from the Periphery’, The European Journal of Women's Studies 6 (1999) 463–484.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Bosma, Karel Zaalsberg, 29–37.

29 Kuitenbrouwer, The Rise of Dutch Imperialism.

30 Coté, J., “Het indisch meisje”: Constructions of Gender and Hybridity in Colonial Indonesia’,paper delivered at the Women in Southeast Asia Workshop,Monash University,September 2000.Google Scholar

31 Fasseur, C., ‘Cornerstone and Stumbling block: Racial Classification and the Late Colonial State in Indonesia’ in: Cribb, R. ed., The Late Colonial State in Indonesia: Political and Economic Foundations of the Netherlands Indies 1880–1942 (Leiden 1994) 31–56.Google Scholar

32 Bosma notes that concern had been expressed in the colony, particularly within a colonial press, regrading the economic and social position of a growing European pauper class since the 1880s in: Bosma, Karel Zaalsberg, 33–35.

33 By 1920, according to the census of that year, 6.63 per cent of the Javanese population lived in locations regarded as urban. Wertheim, ‘De stad in Indonesie’, Indonesie 5 (1951) 16, 24–40.

34 Van Goor argues that this turn around in colonial policy dates from 1894, in response to the events during the Lombok campaign. van Goor, J., ‘Imperialisme in de marge?’ in: van Goor, J. ed., Imperialisme in de marge: De afronding van Nederlands-Indië (Utrecht 1986) 9–18.Google Scholar

35 Rapport der Pauperisme Commissie Rapport der Pauperisme-Commissie, Ingesteld bij Artikel 2 van het Regeeringsbesluit van 29 Juni, 1902, No. 7 (Batavia 1903) 5.

36 Pauperisme Commissie, 58.

37 Pauperisme Commissie, 46.

38 It needs to be recognised of course that the southern Australian colonies (later states) also stood in relationship to metropolitan Britain. In both colonial Java and southern Australia, metropolitan interests and attitudes were represented locally alongside, and often in conflict with views, which may be defined as reflecting the periphery (i.e. settler interests). Nineteenth-century (and indeed contemporary) northern Australian discourse was consistently framed in opposition to southern metropolitan criticism and appears uniformly ‘peripheral’, local, in that sense.

39 Batterby, P. & Sullivan, R., ‘Rights of Passage: Reflections on the Permeability of Australia's Northern Borders’ in: Shnukal, A., Ramsay, G. & Nagata, Yuriho eds, Navigating Boundaries: The Asian Diaspora in the Torres Strait (London forthcoming 2002).Google Scholar

40 Sowden, W., The Northern Territory As It Is: A Narrative of the South Australian Parliamentary Party's Trip and Full Description of the Northern Territory, Its Settlements and Industries (Adelaide 1882)Google Scholar. At the turn of the century when the concept was dusted off again, the prospect of Russian intrusion in Britain's eastern playground following the completion of its trans-Siberian railway became both the rationale and the model for a project befitting a new nation. Newland, S. ed., Land-Grant Railway Across Central Australia: The Northern Territory of the State of South Australia as a Field for Enterprise and Capital (Adelaide 1902).Google Scholar

41 See-Kee, C., Chinese Contribution to Early Darwin (Darwin 1987) 2Google Scholar; Lockwood, D., The Front Door: Darwin 1869–1969 (Adelaide 1969) 86Google Scholar; Price, A.G., The History and Problems of the Northern Territory Australia (Adelaide 1930) 23–24Google Scholar. Official census figure quoted by See-Kee for 1881 has the Chinese population as 2,490 which that writer disputes suggesting the Chinese population outnumbered European settler 4:1. He suggests over 6,000 Chinese in the territory in 1889. See Kee, Chinese Contribution, 1–2. Price gives the figure of 3,000 Chinese in 1879 compared to 400 Europeans and 7,000 by the time of the legislation. Initially Chinese indentured labour was imported in 1874 from Singapore to work in mines. More labour was recruited the following year for government projects and specifically again in 1888 to work on the railway extension. A wave of Chinese migration is reported by Price in 1884. Singapore was also the source for Dutch plantation labour in the new plantation economy being opened in East Sumatra. Indian labour was also sought (the Indian Immigration Act 1882), but did not appear to have received the support of British colonial officials. See Lockwood, The Front Door, 80.

42 Chinese were located in similar occupations in the southern Australian colonies and despite popular and legislative harassment, controlled forty-five percent of production and retail of domestic agricultural products. McConville, C., ‘Chinatown’ in: G. Davison, D. Dunston & C. McConville, The Outcasts of Melbourne: Essays in Social History (Sydney 1985) 58–68.Google Scholar

43 Taylor, The Social World of Batavia. Although increasingly modified by modern lifestyle and ideas, characteristic colonial dress of ‘sarong and kabaya’ for women and ‘pyjamas’ for men continued to mark the ‘Indo’ domestic culture into the twentieth century. P. Pattynama, ‘Beweging op het achtererf: dagelijks leven in de jaren twintig’ in: Willems, W., Bosma, U. and Raven, R. eds, Uit Indië geboren: Vier eeuwen familiegeschiedenis (Zwolle 1997).Google Scholar

44 Stoler, Anne, ‘Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race and Morality in Colonial Asia’ in: M. di Leonardo, Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Post Modern Era (Berkeley 1991) 51–101.Google Scholar

45 See for instance Bas Veth, Het leven in Nederlandsch Indie (1900). Veth castigates the moral corruption of Dutch youth in the Java in this rather notorious publication.

46 Sowden, Parliamentary Trip, 157. The colonial analogy is constantly made by the author with regard to Chinese. In this defence he notes: ‘what Sir William Jervois said of Singapore holds good in Palmerston. When a visitor gets there he will see the boat in which he lands manned by Chinamen; his luggage will be taken to the hotel by a Chinaman; when he gets to the hotel he will find the cook a Chinaman, the butler a Chinaman; and if there is a family he will find the nurse a Chinaman, and every department of life filled with this race.’ Despite the discriminatory language still echoing in Price's 1930 account, he concluded that the anti Chinese legislation in 1888 destroyed the late nineteenth-century colonisation of the north.

47 The description was intended to exclude Indian coolies and Aboriginals although elsewhere the argument is made for the value of Aboriginal labour in menial and domestic tasks.

48 Lockwood emphasises the reference in Sowden's 1882 account to the description of Aboriginals as ‘such degraded specimens of humanity! Less manlike, some, than chattering monkeys. I question whether any beings bearing the semblance of humanity could be found more low sunk than these.’ (Lockwood; The Front Door, 107.) This is indeed a key moment in the 1882 account, which contrasts the formality of the parliamentary delegation during this formal visit to the antics of Aboriginals when receiving handouts from this group. The account contrasts Aboriginals with parliamentarians but is actually intent on describing a situation created by the latter. References to Aboriginals elsewhere in this account are far less derogatory or bigoted.

49 The lack of facilities is noted, but implicitly explained by the temporary or recent existence of a settlement or the lack of individuals to support social development. In larger pioneer settlements, the range of normal community needs is noted in general terms but invariably the contribution of Chinese to the community’s resources is recorded.

50 Sowden, Parliamentary Trip, 159.

51 Reynolds, Aborigines and Settlers, chapter 1–2; Price, History and Problems, 26.

52 Jones, T., The Chinese on the Northern Territory (Darwin 1997) 46–48.Google Scholar

53 Reports to Select Committee on Aborigines Bill, S.A. 1897 & 1899; Reports of Aboriginal Protectors, S.A. 1902 & 1903, as quoted in Reynolds, Aborigines and Settlers, passim.

54 Price's evidence of European and Aboriginal murder from the end of the century are mainly retrospective generalisation although he notes a 1905 report claiming thirty murders ‘for which little punishment had been exacted from the natives’. See Price, History and Problems, 26.

55 Police Report, 1898, quoted in Reynolds, Aborigines and Settlers, 28. The context of this quotation is an official letter in which the police officer reports on how European treatment of Aboriginals impacts on his official work. Throughout he blames European men for the problems with which he, as a police officer, has to deal. In this context, the consequences of sexual relations instigated by Europeans are seen as the main cause. He concludes: ‘These unfeeling brutes, called men, think nothing of cohabiting with young gins, while they themselves were actually suffering from venereal disease, yea, and syphilis too, not caring how much they spread it amongst their fellow creatures.’

56 Letter of Travelling Inspector of Aborigines, May 1901 cited in Western Australian Parliamentary Papers, 1901–1902, quoted in Reynolds, Aborigines and Settlers, 74.

57 See Jean Taylor, The Social World of Batavia and W. Willems et al., Uit Indië geboren.

58 Ming, H., ‘Barracks-concubinage in the Indies, 1887–1920’, Indonesia 35 (1983) 65–93Google Scholar; Hesselink, L., ‘Prostitution: A Necessary Evil, Particularly in the Colonies: Views on Prostitution in the Netherlands Indies’ in: Locher-Scholten, E. & Niehof, A. eds, Indonesian Women in Focus: Past and Present Notions (Leiden 1992).Google Scholar

59 Stoler, Anne, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (New Haven 1985)Google Scholar. Stoler here analyses the economic bases of the changing discourse relating to colonial gender relations.

60 Vereeniging tot bevordering der Zedelijkheid in de Nederlandsche Overzeesche Bezittingen en De Nederlandsche Vereeniging Tegen de Prostitutie, Een Onderzoek naar den Toestand van het Nederlandsch-Indisch Leger uit een Zedelijk Oogpunt Beschouwd (1898). This report to government was marked ‘highly confidential’.

61 Breman, J., Koelies, planters en koloniale politiek (Leiden 1992)Google Scholar. The initial expose of plantation conditions was provided by a private (non planter, professional) European. A resulting official report, The Rhemrev Report, confirmed the allegations although as Breman shows, that report was buried. The non-official humanitarian concern here replicated that expressed by individuals in the northern Australian colony and points to the widespread humanitarian abhorrence expressed towards ‘traditional’ colonial practices within the colonial domain. Nevertheless, in both cases the solution was segregation which ultimately worked against the interests of indigenous communities which such humanitarianism claimed to represent.

62 For a standard account of the colonial ethical policy see Ricklefs, M., A History of Modem Indonesia Since 1300 (London 1993).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

63 See Coté, J., ‘Celebrating Women's Labour: Raden Ajeng Kartini and the Women's Exhibition’ in: Grever, M. & Dieteren, F. eds, Een vaderland voor vrouwen (Amsterdam 2000) 119–135.Google Scholar

64 See J. Cote, ‘Administering the Medicine: Education, Nationalism and Colonialism in Java and Victoria’ in: History of Education (forthcoming, 2001).

65 Chinese Dutch schools were aimed at discouraging Chinese to establish their own Chinese-English schools and to discourage the development of a Chinese nationalist movement.

66 There is a virulent sub-plot to this report, which reflected the change of government in the Netherlands. The Commission did not wish to remove churches and philanthropic welfare bodies from poor relief, but it recognised the need to make this a state responsibility and to end a ‘charity’ mentality: poverty relief had to be educative, economical and efficient. In line with the ideology of the new, anti-liberal Christian government in the Netherlands, the Commission argued that the absence of Christian principles in the home and the one-sided intellectual training provided in secular government schools, was particularly disadvantageous for mixed race children who were being raised by parents totally ignorant of modern child raising practices.

67 Pauperisme Commissie, 45.

68 See Dudink, Deugdzaam liberalisme.

69 Pauperisme Commissie, 51.

70 Ibid., 70.

71 Ibid.

72 De Staats Armenzorg voor Europeanen in Nederlandsch Indie, Nota (Batavia 1902).

73 Haebich, A., For Their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the Southwest of Western Australia, 1900–1940 (Nedlands 1988) 51–52.Google Scholar

74 Ibid., 59.

75 Quoted in ibid., 60.

76 Ibid., 72.

77 Ibid., 85. Haebich argues thatWestAustralian legislation gradually both increased controls aiming at segregation while progressively reducing opportunities for Aboriginals within the limits allowed.

78 Ibid., 77.

79 Austin, T., ‘Never Trust a Government Man’: Northern Territory Aboriginal Policy 1911–1939 (Darwin 1997).Google Scholar

80 Mulvanney, D.J. and Calaby, J.H., ‘So Much that is New’: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–1929 (Melbourne 1985).Google Scholar

81 For a broader discussion of the links between ‘social progressivism and Social Darwinism in eastern Australian discourse see M. Roe, Nine Australian Progressives: Vitalism in Bourgeois Social Thought 1890–1960 (Brisbane 1984). I locate Baldwin Spencer within the circle of Melbourne progressives in my ‘Administering the Medicine: Education, Nation and Colonialism in Java and Victoria, 1900–1905’, History of Education (forthcoming 2001).

82 Baldwin Spencer, ‘Report of Preliminary Scientific Expedition to the Northern Territory’, Bulletin of the Northern Territory 1 (March 1902). Mulvanney and Calaby note that it was Spencer himself, not the Commonwealth government, who conceived and implemented the ‘ambitious scheme for scientific fact-finding and systematic development of the tropics’. Mulvanney and Calaby, Baldwin Spencer, 265.

83 That is, the ‘professional orientalist’ whose systematic investigations provided the ‘data for colonial administrators. Edward Said, Orientalism (Harmondsworth 1995).

84 Those living in towns; those living on land liable to be effected by close settlement projects; those living on large pastoral leases; those in ‘wild unoccupied land’. Spencer however had also expressed his opinion that ‘the few remnants of the tribe (could be gathered together) into some mission station where the path to final extinction may be made as pleasant as possible’. Spencer, W. Baldwin and Gillen, F.J., The Native Tribes of Central Australia (London 1899) xiii, quoted in Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, 148.Google Scholar

85 Baldwin Spencer, ‘Report’, 14.

86 Ibid., 16.

87 Ibid.

88 Ibid., 11.

89 Ibid., 16.

90 Thousands of Chinese were in fact deported. The Chinese population fell from c. 7,000 in 1888 to 1,867 adult males and 22 adult females in 1905. Mass suicide and high mortality on board deportation ships are reported in Lockwood, The Front Door, 86–87.

91 Baldwin Spencer, ‘Report’, 17.

92 Quoted in R. Manne, 1999.

93 See Manne, ‘In Denial’; Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?

94 Quoted in Austin, Never Trust a Government Man, 45.

95 Austin, Never Trust a Government Man, 45.

96 A prime example here is the pessimistic Australian assessment of the new millennium, Pearson, Charles, National Life and Character: A Forecast (London 1894).Google Scholar