Prevención

Adelaide entomologist Norman Tindale had increasingly become interested in race crossing during the 1930s. Having worked for the South Australian Museum in the 1920s, he visited Harvard University in 1936 to liaise with the anthropologist Earnest Hooton. As a result of his connections to Hooton, who put him in touch with one of his protégé's a young Joseph B. Birdsell they collaborated in 1938, as Birdsell proposed an anthropometric study of ‘race mixture’ throughout Australia.79 _{The Harvard-Adelaide race crossing study had been}

initiated, and as a result of the influence of Hooton, Tindale, Birdsell and the team were provided with some financial backing from the Carnegie institution. As Anderson notes, the veteran anthropometrist Charles Davenport, who had conducted a similar study during the First World War, expressed his interest in the field study.

By conducting both sociological and anthropometric investigation, Birdsell hoped to make an assessment on indigenous absorbability by measuring ‘the capacity of the hybrids for adapting themselves to European civilization’ and the extent to which ‘half-castes’ could scientifically still be described as a problem population.80 _{What Tindale and Birdsell found}

when they departed Adelaide in 1938 fascinated them, and they diverged from their initial

79 _{Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia (New}

York: Basic, 2003), p.235, see also, Warwick Anderson, Ambiguities of Race: Science on the Reproductive Frontier of Australia and the Pacific Between the Wars. Australian Historical Studies, 40(2), 2009, 143-160, see also, Heidi Zogbaum, Changing Skin Colour in Australia: Herbert Basedow and the Black Caucasian

(Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010).

80 _{Quoted in, Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in} Australia (New York: Basic, 2003), p.235

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focus on the 'black-white' cross, going beyond the study of groups in South Australia to conduct further investigations in Queensland and the South East.81 _{By 1939, the two}

investigators and their team had conducted anthropometric measurements and collected data on over 1200 aboriginals, in addition to recording blood types, but also genealogies and family trees of race mixture. Both Tindale and Birdsell were particularly enthusiastic about what they saw as the marked and surprsising physical and mental harmony of the ‘Australian hybrids’, evidence in the view of Tindale that ‘hybrid absorption’ was working in Australia, and that state policies should be instituted to accelerate this. They observed 175 ‘exotic crosses’ including among a number of ‘hybrid subgroups’, 26 Aboriginal-Chinese hybrids, and a number of cases of intermarriage with Malay migrants in the Northern Territory.82

Although these hybrid peoples tanned easily and displayed some ‘aboriginal morphology’, they looked more like a ‘dark, aberrant white type’ akin almost to ‘mediterranean’ peoples, rather than, as Birdsell stated, the ‘American mulatto’ crosses whom he felt displayed physical and mental disharmony.83 _{Against the backdrop of increased Italian and Southern}

European migration the Australia during the interwar years, being described as Mediterranean fitted these ‘half-caste’ people within the lexicon of racial acceptability. There were many of the ‘F1 hybrids’ at Brewarrina, where Charles Davenport had conducted his own rather more limited race crossing studies more than two decades before. Once again they were struck by what they saw as the impressive capability and behaviour of the people they encountered, and as Anderson argues, this led Birdsell and Tindale to state that the ‘racial experiment

supported hybrid absorption’.84 _{Asian infusion and dispersal among the aboriginal}

81 _{Ibid, p.235}

82 _{Ibid, p.237} 83 _{Ibid, p.237} 84 _{Ibid, p.237}

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populations of Queensland, Northern Territory and other parts of the country, had not shown marked signs of degeneration, Tindale and Birdsell claimed based on their fieldwork.85

Birdsell and Tindale responded differently to the data. Tindale wanted the ‘half- caste’s to be biologically merged into White Australia, and felt the study supported this. As Anderson agrees, Tindale’s ideas were based on local, inward focused ethnic exceptionalist assumptions, a‘uniquely white Australian interpretation of race mixing’ that lent itself to a ‘facile affirmation of national goals.’86 _{Birdsell didn’t contribute to the Tindale report, and}

later refused to turn his anthropometric data into an article. He felt that hybrids were being unfairly chastised by the Australian state. The ‘half-caste’ peoples he felt were biologically ‘stable’, and could be left to their own devices, or be allowed to live among and in tandem with white society, rather than be forcibly whitened through reproductive coercion.87

In Tindale’s conclusions, and in the sociological report he published to precede a report on the anthropometric data, a contradiction arose. Breeding between white Europeans and the aboriginal hybrids would not, Tindale felt, upset the delicate ‘biological balance’ of White Australia, since many of these ‘half-castes’ already had significant Caucasian qualities. However, ‘The absorption of ethnic strains of any widely different type is…dis-couraged", and Anderson argues that Tindale interpreted this to mean interbreeding with Asian peoples, despite the supposed virility of the F1 crosses that they had documented and described positively.88

There is therefore room to surmise that it was felt Asians still should not mix with aboriginals, not necessarily because it was seen to be particularly degenerative biologically, but because there was still a sense that the rules of White Australia laid down in 1901

85 _{Ibid, p.238}

86 _{Warwick Anderson, Ambiguities of Race: Science on the Reproductive Frontier of Australia and the Pacific}

Between the Wars. Australian Historical Studies, 40(2), 2009, p.154

87 _{Ibid, p.155}

88 _{Quoted in, Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in} Australia (New York: Basic, 2003), p.240

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mattered. While Asian miscegenation may not have caused biological instability, it could stimulate social instability. Continued public adherence to this racial constitution, meant that giving any concessions to an Asian presence in the country would be seen as officially

unacceptable and bound to aggravate race feeling and wider geopolitical anxieties that had deeper, nineteenth century roots. The sociological barriers to Asians were still in force. Birdsell was supposed to publish the results of these race crossing studies, but the outbreak of the pacific war, and Birdsell's enlistment delayed the codification of the team's

anthropometric results to add to the existing anthropological analyses. When he came back to his research in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he worried that his racial typologies now lacked useful meaning.89 _{The growing movement toward genetics as the new framework to}

analyse population difference or 'characteristics' meant that the construction of primary racial types and hybrid subgroups was crumbling, and Birdsell could not rework his old data to fit the new approach.

So arguably, as medically sanctioned and directed biological absorption of the aboriginal population into the white national body had been given the scientific and legislative green light in the 1930s, the proliferation of ‘hybridities’ among whites,

aboriginals and Asians created an expanding and untidy plethora of ‘racial subgroups’ and race mixing combinations that anthropologists increasingly struggled to define. This had by the end of the Second World War ‘destabilised the whole edifice of racial classification’, and led to fragmentation and confusion in Australian miscegenation thinking.90 _{It was this}

overextension of ideas of racial ‘plasticity’ which were just as important in explaining the decline of race science in the global south as the circulation and reception of transatlantic attempts to dismantle race in the 1930s. Furthermore more broadly, with the growing

89 _{Ibid, p.241}

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popularity of genetics as an explanation for the inheritance of characteristics, intellectuals were moving away from anthropometric measurement of difference, although rather later than they had done in transatlantic circles. Frank E. Macfarlane Burnet in ‘Migration and race mixture from the genetic angle’, published in the Eugenics Review in 1959, was symptomatic of a broader Australian re-orientation towards a tentative acceptance that hybridity could prove a positive, and that miscegenation was less of a concrete and dangerous issue than race scientists had previously claimed.91

Within this backdrop of growing uncertainty by the post-war years, the veteran aboriginal protectors, Neville and Cook, had largely stuck to national or localised ideas inspired by the interwar Adelaide school, that absorbing the aboriginal into the white was a policy that should be continued, and were convinced that any Asian or coloured ‘infusion’ with indigenous blood would be highly detrimental to their cherished whitening project. Anxieties about an internal Asian threat, therefore persisted in the practices of some official actors through into the 1940s, and Asian immigration restriction was not completely

abandoned until the passing of the Commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act in 1975. Despite a growing consensus that previous scientific constructions of race mixture, and the place of Asian infusion within the blending of races were relatively meaningless, the perception of Asians as an external and internal demographic threat seemed to remain. Miscegenation regulation and micro-management had for a fleeting decade or so offered to solve the problem of the Asian-Aboriginal ‘half-caste’. As Birdsell’s eventual pessimism showed, imagined categorisations of Asian, Caucasian and Indigenous had been fractured and defeated by the sheer variety of miscegenation that investigators observed in the urban South East as well as the 'reproductive' frontier of coastal towns and outback enclaves.92

91 _{Ibid, p.249}

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