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Nettheim, Garth --- "Book Review - Nowhere People" [2005] IndigLawB 65; (2005) 6(15) Indigenous Law Bulletin 19


Book Review

Nowhere People

By Henry Reynolds

Viking, 2005

review by Garth Nettheim

Henry Reynolds’ 14th book is sub-titled ‘How international race thinking shaped Australia’s identity’. The theme of the book, generally, is indicated in the Introduction: ‘Half-castes were a global phenomenon; the inevitable accompaniment of travel, trade, war and colonisation’.[1] He goes on: ‘few people have suffered more opprobrium than half-castes in the European empires and their independent off-shoots’.[2]

Cosmopolitan racial gossip was one thing; the invincible certainties of experts was another. Each nourished the other. From the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, biologists, ethnographers and social commentators wrote with seeming certainty and frequent unanimity about half-castes. But for all their assumed expertise, technical skill and authoritative language, they came up with much the same sort of account that was common in popular literature. Savant and citizen were in agreement about the hapless half-castes, whose discordant bodies and minds created innumerable social problems.

But there was more to it than that. The half-caste was a threat to racial unity; they compromised the purity of blood. The further proliferation of half-castes caused anxiety in many countries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[3]

The book is in three parts, with Part 1 focusing on ideas from overseas. In chapter 1 Reynolds discusses books written in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and North America about people of mixed descent being ‘commonly treated with contempt’.[4] In the first half of the 19th century, ‘the question of racial mixture became entangled with a much larger debate about the diversity and origin of humanity, ... between monogenesists and polygenesists’ as to ‘whether humankind was one species or several’.[5] Such debates related to ‘the future of slavery and the course of European colonisation’[6] but related also to the question of intermarriage. Deeply influential also were the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin. But Reynolds writes that the ‘new thinking was just as corrupted by old and deep prejudices as what had been replaced’.[7]

In chapter 2 Reynolds notes that ‘[a]ttitudes to people of mixed race did not improve much during the first third of the twentieth century... New theories and techniques – eugenics, genetics, statistics and intelligence tests – were used to buttress entrenched prejudices’.[8] The chapter cites an array of respected scholars in support of propositions about the negative qualities of peoples of mixed race.

Chapter 3 is titled ‘Eugenics – a New Religion’. Francis Galton’s ideas explored the notion that latent characteristics can be inherited from as many as 196 ancestors and could ‘emerge unexpectedly in later generations’.[9] It was proposed that future genetic inheritance should be managed to the overall improvement of the race. By the turn of the century there were increasing concerns about ‘competition between races and nations’.[10] ‘Eugenics was about more than ideas. It embodied an in-built blueprint for action’.[11]

In chapter 4, ‘The Most Primitive of Man’, Reynolds refers to the large literature on, among others, Australian Aborigines.

It was a coincidence that the emergence of scientific racism in the late eighteenth century coincided with the British occupation of Australia. Reports about the Aborigines could be immediately employed in constructing theories about race, human equality and the origins of human society. They continued to be so used through the nineteenth century’.[12]

Scholars of the time widely agreed that ‘Africans and Oceanic Negroes, as Aborigines and Melanesians were often known’[13] were the least evolved of humans. Scientists began to measure skulls and ‘facial angles’ of people of different races; ‘the result was almost always the same. The Europeans came in on top of the table, with Africans and Aborigines at the bottom.’[14] The science of ‘Phrenology was one of the offshoots from the ongoing study of skulls and brains’.[15] ‘Anatomists working outside the framework of phrenology arrived at similar conclusions about the Australians’.[16] The eventual extinction of the ‘savage races’ and the ascendancy of the ‘civilized races’ was considered to be predestined.

Mixed-descent people were seen as, at the very least, unfortunate victims of implacable biological laws and probably dangerous misfits and malcontents. They were threatening not only as individuals but even more so as members of an ill-starred group who were unwelcome wherever they turned’.[17]

Reynolds then turns in Part 2 to consider how the ideas discussed in Part 1 played out in Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. He begins chapter 5, ‘Racial Ideas at the Time of Federation’, by noting the ‘near-unanimity’ in the first Federal Parliament ‘about the centrality of race’.[18] During 1901 two key bills were debated – the Immigration Restriction Bill and the Pacific Island Labourers’ Bill. The ultimate objective was a White Australia. ‘Hostility to interracial marriage appears to have been almost universal at the turn of the century’.[19]

Following chapters go on to ‘consider the ways in which Australian society dealt with people of mixed descent’.[20] For a number of years it seems to have been understood that full-blood Aborigines were dying out, and that relationships between Aborigines and non-Aborigines resulted in very few half-caste children. The ‘half-caste child did not appear to be a source of concern or anxiety in the 1870s and 1880s, although perceptive witnesses could already see a likely population explosion impending’.[21] When this eventuality was finally recognised, ‘Governments and their officials became increasingly keen to pass legislation that restricted the freedom of Aborigines and half-castes more and more... But whatever was done, the population went on increasing, and so the half-caste problem continued to dog the dream of White Australia right up until the 1940s.[22]

Chapters 8 to 10 discuss the efforts of governments and officials over this period to respond to the ‘half-caste problem’, in the several jurisdictions, by legislating for greater controls over Aborigines and part-Aborigines by such means as the removal of lighter-skinned children from reserves to institutions, strict controls over inter-racial marriages, and the like. The study provides rich accounts of particular individuals that played key roles, including A O Neville in Western Australia, Dr Cecil Cook in the Northern Territory, and Paul Hasluck in various capacities. A critical development was the growing acceptance of the notion that Aborigines were not, after all, as different a species of humanity as had been formerly believed, but were in fact early Caucasians. Another significant development was the first conference of state and Commonwealth Aboriginal authorities held in Canberra in 1937 endorsing Neville’s motion which became the foundation of the policy of assimilation.

Part 3 is headed ‘Absorption and Assimilation in the Post-war Period’. In Chapter 12, Reynolds notes that it was only in ‘the late 1930s that anthropologists and journalists began to seriously examine the communities of mainly mixed-descent people living on the fringes of settled Australia in town camps, on government reserves and pastoral stations’.[23] He quotes a number who attest, among other things, to the socio-economic disadvantage experienced by many such communities, but also the difficulties they encountered in gaining acceptance in the wider community. While assimilation and absorption were seen by some as answers, ‘the caste barrier’ – white racial prejudice – intensified in the late 1930s to the mid-1950s.

Chapter 13, ‘Removing Children’, begins by noting that there had been ‘a growing resistance to racist ideas in many Western countries in the 1930s in response to developments in Nazi Germany’.[24] The United Nations, and UNESCO, began with authoritative repudiations of racism. These developments had some influence in Australia, but little immediate impact on policy relating to half-castes.

During the 1950s the practice of removing light-skinned children to institutions continued, and any return to their families was discouraged. The author discusses the motivation of those directly involved with such removals. Many of the children removed ‘lived in conditions of deep poverty and deprivation’. But:

The demonstrable and indisputable fact is that most children were taken away because they were of mixed descent, regardless of the ambient conditions where they lived. Appearance was everything. Full-blood children were normally left where they were, even while lighter-coloured siblings were taken away’. [25]

Half-castes, as we have seen, were not merely individuals who exacerbated a perceived social problem; they were also a threat to the idea of a homogenous White Australia. To miss this part of the story is to totally misunderstand it. And standing behind White Australia itself was the imposing range of racial ideas that dominated scientific and sociological thought in all parts of the Western world before World War II.[26]

What we now know about are the disastrous consequences for large numbers of people that followed from the policy of child removal.[27]

Nowhere People is an invaluable resource for those interested in exploring the intellectual and policy background that led to such ‘disastrous consequences’. It is, as one has come to expect from the author, well-researched, clearly written, and full of fascinating stories and vignettes. But it is not only an ‘academic’ study. Henry Reynolds introduces a strongly personal dimension in the Prologue, ‘Family Secrets – Secrets and Silences’, and he returns to it in the Postscript ‘Family Secrets – Research and Revelation’. It concerns the question whether his father’s mother may have been part-Aboriginal, and the family’s search for answers.

Highly recommended.

Garth Nettheim was Dean and Head of School of the Law Faculty and founding Director of the Indigenous Law Centre, UNSW. He is currently an Honorary Visiting Fellow teaching Indigenous legal issues and human rights law at the Law Faculty, UNSW.


[1] Henry Reynolds, Nowhere People (2005) 1.

[2] Ibid 3.

[3] Ibid 5.

[4] Ibid 15.

[5] Ibid 16.

[6] Ibid 18.

[7] Ibid 24.

[8] Ibid 29.

[9] Ibid 52.

[10] Ibid 56-7.

[11] Ibid 58.

[12] Ibid 67.

[13] Ibid 68.

[14] Ibid 71.

[15] Ibid 72.

[16] Ibid 73.

[17] Ibid 81.

[18] Ibid 85.

[19] Ibid 93.

[20] Ibid 96.

[21] Ibid 110.

[22] Ibid 113.

[23] Ibid 191.

[24] Ibid 207.

[25] Ibid 217.

[26] Ibid 218.

[27] Ibid 220.


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