The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia by Warwick Anderson. Melbourne University Press, $A34.95, pp 364. www.basicbooks.com. ISBN 0 522 84989 X. www.mup.unimelb.edu.au. Due to be published in the USA next month by Basic Books, $45. ISBN 0 465 00305 2. Rating: ★★★
It is not often that a book elicits an apology for past injustices before it has been published, but in 2002 this happened with Warwick Anderson's The Cultivation of Whiteness.
Between the two world wars, researchers from the University of Adelaide travelled the Australian outback conducting crude research on Aborigines, including experiments on their feelings of pain, and forcibly took blood samples and body measurements. The research forms one part of Australia's highly racialised history. In apologising, Professor Cliff Blake, the university vice chancellor, said that “the tests and experiments carried out on Aboriginal people in south Australia in the name of science in the 1920s and 1930s were degrading and in some cases barbarous.” He expressed “deep sorrow for what happened” and apologised to the descendants of those who were experimented on.
The Cultivation of Whiteness is the first comprehensive examination of race as a scientific and medical category in Australia, tracing its development up to the second world war. Anderson was well placed to write this history, since he was a medical doctor and a historian of science at the University of Melbourne until a recent move to the University of California at San Francisco.
Much 19th and early 20th century Australian thought was dominated by race as a scientific concept, which informed medical, scientific, and social thinking. Anderson shows how ideas of “whiteness” in Australia were cultivated through a range of scientific and medical discourses. The first two-thirds of the book deals with the “racial” self consciousness of white Britons in a tropical climate and the development of ideas around race and disease in the new country. But it is the chapters on indigenous (both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) people that stand out, at least partly because the research that Anderson documents has left such a scar.
Australian Aborigines were a focus of biological, medical, and anthropological curiosity for researchers. The University of Adelaide experiments and theories contributed to the new policy of absorption, by concluding that Aborigines actually formed an “archaic” part of the white race that should be reabsorbed to “breed out the colour” and inferior genes of Aborigines. Indeed, much of the university's race research looked specifically at whether indigenous people could be reabsorbed. But absorption, as opposed to separation, led directly to today's stolen generations: for several decades children (particularly those of mixed ethnicity) were forcibly removed from indigenous families to be brought up in white society with white education, customs, beliefs, and culture.
After the second world war race as a scientific concept largely collapsed, but in Australia the research and policies derived from it left a lasting legacy. It took a 1967 referendum to start dismantling Australia's highly racialised society by allowing indigenous people to be counted as humans in the census and granting them the vote and citizenship.
Removing formal restrictions did not end disadvantage—indigenous people today have significantly lower levels of wealth, employment, and education, and they experience continuing prejudice. The impact of past policies and contemporary disadvantage on health is shocking. At its starkest, life expectancy among indigenous people is 20 years below that of other Australians. There are other examples of health disadvantages: the perinatal death rate is twice that of other Australians; youth suicide is four times higher than among non-indigenous people; the rate of hospitalisation from diabetes is 10-15 times that of other Australians; and endstage renal disease rates are four times higher. Despite the deplorable state of health among indigenous people and a rising gap between the health of indigenous and non-indigenous people in some areas, spending per head on health is barely higher than for the general population.
Many activists argue that understanding, acknowledging, and apologising for the past is a necessary precursor to reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous Australia, as well as to achieving desperately needed material, social, and health equality. Warwick Anderson's book is a long overdue and important part of this process, partly because it locates the history of indigenous people within the history of how white people have thought about themselves.
Figure.
THE KOBAL COLLECTION
Telling the tale of the stolen generations: the recent film Rabbit Proof Fence