Teacher background information

This elaboration describes opportunities for students to investigate the role of science and the scientific community in the justification of policies affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples during the 19th and early 20th century. Students consider how deeply entrenched beliefs of the time, regarding the moral and intellectual ‘superiority’ of the ‘white race’, led to a skewed focus of Western scientific research on classifying human populations based on physical, mental and ‘moral’ traits. Discredited branches of science, such as phrenology and eugenics, as well as poorly understood evolutionary concepts from biology, provided ‘scientific’ arguments that seemingly justified policies of racial segregation in Australia. These policies went as far as denying citizenship rights for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and allowing state officials to take away ‘mixed-race’ children from their parents and families, now known as the Stolen Generations.

While notions of racial superiority have deep roots in many human societies, the technological and economic dominance of European nations in the 19th century and the establishment of colonial empires made such ideas particularly popular in Western societies of the time. With the emergence of scientific interest in questions of heredity and evolution, many researchers attempted to classify human populations into discrete races and sought empirical evidence for the existence of racial differences in intellectual capabilities and moral characteristics. Such traits were often thought to be linked to certain physical traits, such as facial features or the shape of the skull, as articulated in the now disparaged field of phrenology. Results of such research were commonly published in the form of racial hierarchies, with the European or ‘white’ race at the top.   

This belief in racial superiority was often accompanied by a fear that intermarriage between races would cause an intellectual and moral decline of Western civilisation through the inheritance of inferior mental traits that were believed to be prevalent in the ‘coloured races’. This fear also rested on the now discounted belief that a human’s mental capabilities and moral character are entirely, or at least primarily, determined by genetics and (virtually) unaffected by social and environmental circumstances. Influenced by Charles Darwin’s hypotheses on evolution, his cousin Francis Galton proposed the idea that human society can be improved through ‘eugenics’, that is the encouragement of ‘good breeding’ based on a rigorous statistical understanding of heredity. Fuelled in part by the fear of racial degeneration through miscegenation, eugenics developed into a well-established academic field by the early 20th century. 

Scientists at the time often believed that the ‘primitive’ races represented an earlier, less evolved stage of human development. Seemingly in accordance with Darwin’s ideas about evolution through natural selection and the notion of “survival of the fittest”, as popularised by the sociologist Herbert Spencer, it was commonly assumed that the ‘native peoples’ would eventually become extinct through contact and competition with the ‘superior European race’. This idea, which in the Australian context is referred to as the “doomed race” theory, was often understood to be an inevitable consequence of ‘natural law’. The outcome of extinction was believed to be inevitable unless the state took measures to segregate and ‘protect’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It was intended to minimise contact between races by establishing reservations and by imposing employment and marriage restrictions on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Policies also included the forcible removal and subsequent institutionalisation of ‘half-caste’ children with the intention of preventing any ‘wild’ influences from their Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures while educating them for life in ‘civilised’ Western society. The scientific argument was that through controlled marriage policies for mixed-race Australians, any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander traits could be ‘bred out’ over the course of a few generations.   

In light of contemporary developments in genetics and biotechnology, the central idea of eugenics – the ‘betterment’ of the human species through control of its genepool, be it through old-fashioned breeding programs or modern gene-editing methods – may become a contentious topic again. By investigating the role of science in the development of policies affecting Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples in the early 20th century, students contemplate how the values and beliefs of a society may influence the direction of scientific research and how, in turn, scientific concepts may have an impact on the governance of that society.