Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887-1937

5. The Broken Promise of Aboriginal Education in Australia

5. The Broken Promise of Aboriginal Education in Australia During a period similar to the one discussed in the previous chapters in the United States, from the 1880s to the 1930s white Australian settlers also attempted to find a solution to the problem of the presence of the original owners of the land. Despite the fact that their settlement was younger and until 1901 was still a British colony, a similar environment of scientific and religious ideas influenced white Australian ideas about indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, white Australians came up with a very different solution, a version of assimilation that focused on biological absorption, the loss of indigenous physical characteristics through interracial sexual relationships, rather than cultural assimilation or the “whitening” of indigenous people’s lifestyle and culture. This chapter begins the Australian section of the book by describing white Australians ’ comparatively halfhearted efforts to culturally assimilate Aboriginal peoples implemented while America enjoyed what Siobhan Senier has called its “monolithic” assimilation period.1 Unlike the solution epitomized by eastern boarding schools like Hampton and Carlisle described in chapters 1 and 2, it was a solution that entailed a lackluster education policy and few opportunities for social mobility. In 1877 John Green testified to the Victorian Royal Commission on Aborigines about several cases in which Aboriginal children of both mixed and full descent had been raised in white households and educated “the same as one of the family.” This happy arrangement, he said, remained trouble-free until the Aboriginal child “came to an age that they would like to make love.” At this point, worried about the possibility 106 | broken promise of aboriginal education of their sons or daughters becoming involved in an interracial sexual relationship, the white parents would tell their children “that they must not make so free with the darky; they must remember that, although he or she has been educated in the family, it would be degrading to make love with them.” No longer treated as a member of the family, and with the “cold shoulder” turned toward them, Green reported, they returned to Aboriginal communities as soon as “they [could] find a chance.” This series of events, Green argued, led to cynicism among Victorian colonists about the worth of offering Aboriginal children an education: Now, say the wise ones, “Did I not tell you what would be the end of all your kindness to these darkies? There is that J—— R——, who was sent to college, he is gone back to the camp and has married an aboriginal.” These wise ones forgetting that it was mainly themselves that was the cause of the poor fellow’s downfall by raising him too high and not providing those supports that are so beneficial to keep young men from falling, viz., the prospect of getting married with some one they love.2 John Green’s testimony makes it clear that an education was not seen as a path to social equality for Aborigines in the minds of nineteenth-century white Australians. The few Aboriginal people who had been educated to a level where they might expect to be rewarded with equal treatment were held back by a lack of suitable marriage partners. It was not that white Australians were hesitant to engage in sexual relationships with Aborigines: on the contrary, casual exploitative relationships between white men and Aboriginal women were common. But white Australians hesitated to bestow the equal status implicit in the institution of marriage upon people they had decided were racially inferior (even if they had been raised as “one of the family”), and there was little opportunity for Aboriginal people to prove themselves so through education. This is because the attempt to promote cultural assimilation in Australia through the educational system set up for Aboriginal people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was rudimentary at best. It was not that white Australians were uninterested in cultural assimila- broken promise of aboriginal education | 107 tion of Aboriginal people; on the contrary, the need to “civilize” Aboriginal people was a common refrain in the speeches and articles of those interested in the “Aboriginal problem.” However, these sentiments were rarely translated into efforts to help them in this respect. In a sense, what Australian historian Henry Reynolds has called a “promise” of assimilation was made to Aboriginal people: that by acculturating they would improve their status, live more comfortably, and be treated...