1: RACE AND THE ORIGINS DEBATE


“No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man.”40


The consequences of such thinking were soon obvious. We have already seen Gould’s comment about the turbo-boost that Darwin’s book provided to racist thinking. For Gould to say that racism (the sort that argued for biological inferiority of the other group) increased by ‘orders of magnitude’ means that it was amplified a hundredfold, a thousandfold, or more.41


This was a


worldwide phenomenon, but was particularly starkly illustrated in Australia’s colonial history. The country’s Aboriginal people had already suffered considerably due to the sorts of pre-Darwin/ anti-Genesis notions discussed earlier. But their treatment took a massive nosedive post-Darwin.


ABORIGINALS—BEARING THE BRUNT


An unusual book was published in 1974, called Aborigines in White Australia: A Documentary History of the Attitudes Affecting Official Policy and the Australian Aborigine 1697–1973.42


Apart


from a few introductory/editorial comments, it consists almost entirely of substantial excerpts from documents. These are parliamentary transcripts, court records, letters to editors, anthropological reports, and so forth.


Far from showing a progressive enlightenment in the attitudes of the colonists as time goes on, one can see a distinct change for the worse after 1859, with a marked increase in callousness, ill- treatment and brutality towards Aboriginal people being evident in official attitudes. This is not lost on the editor of the above book, who writes:


“In 1859 Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species popularized the notion of biological (and therefore social) evolution. Scholars began to discuss


40. Thomas H. Huxley, Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews, Appleton, New York, USA, p. 20, 1871. 41. One order of magnitude means 10 x; two is 100 x; three is 1,000 x; and so on. 42. Edited by Sharman Stone, Heinemann Educational Books, Melbourne, 1974.


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