From miscegenation to assimilation: rationalities of child removal in Australian colonial administration

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an ARC Small Grant titled “The Bringing them Home ‘Stolen Generations’ Report: a sociological analysis of the evidence”. It examines the governmental rationalities which informed policies and practices concerning the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families. The project’s close reading and analysis of the submissions and the associated secondary literature indicates, first, that the conservative eugenicist thought which characterised practices of child removal during the period 1910-1930s cannot be so neatly distanced from the more recent liberal environmentalist arguments which informed child removal policies during the 1940s-1970s. That is, a simplistic separation and polarisation of eugenicist ideas and practices (‘breed out the colour’) from liberal environmentalist ideas (characterised by the arguments found in current responses to the Bringing them Home Report that ‘assimilation and child removal was informed by good intentions’) is impossible. Miscegenation and assimilation are rationales of governance informed by wider discourses of welfare, citizenship and civilisation, discourses which remain salient in key strands of contemporary public and official debate surrounding “The Bringing them Home ‘Stolen Generations’ Report”, including the Federal Government’s submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee, Inquiry into the Stolen Generations.