Mixed Race Studies

The Outsiders Within: Telling Australia’s Indigenous-Asian Story

University of New South Wales Press
June 2007
256 pages
234 x 153mm
Paperback ISBN: 9780868408361

Peta Stephenson, Honorary Fellow
Asia Institute, University of Melbourne

An engaging account of the ways in which over hundreds of years Indigenous and Southeast Asian people across Australia have traded, intermarried and built hybrid communities. It is also a disturbing exposé of the persistent—sometimes paranoid—efforts of successive national governments to police, marginalise and outlaw these encounters.

Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Trading places
• 2. Makassan meetings
• 3. Dangerous liaisons
• 4. Colonial encounters
• 5. Paranoid nation
• 6. Invasion narratives
• 7. Where are you from?
• 8. Detoxifying Australia
• 9. Old roots, new routes
• Bibliography
• Interviews
• Index

Introduction

With a gun in hand Ah Hong, a Chinese cook and market gardener, shouted these words at the police: ‘you sleep with black women too. My woman’s got my kids.’ It was Alice Springs in the early 20th century and Ah Hong had committed the ‘crime’ of fathering three ‘mixed-race’ children. Ah Hong met Ranjika, a Western Arrernte woman, after the white man who stole her from her tribal husband abandoned her. Government officials targeted Ranjika and Ah Hong’s children for removal because they were of mixed Aboriginal-Asian descent. Reminding local officials that they also had sexual relationships with Aboriginal women. Ah Hong underlined the hypocrisy of fining or deporting Chinese and other Asian men because of their relationships with women or Aboriginal descent.

Around the same time, more than 2000 kilometres east in Queensland, another triangular relationship between Aboriginal, Chinese and white Australians was being played out. White authorities had seized Princy Carlo and her family (like many other ‘fringe-dwelling’ Aborigines) from their home country and packed them off to a government reserve more than 200 kilometres south-east. Princy Carlo was a mixed-race woman of Chinese and Wakka Wakka descent (from the Eidsvold district of southern Queensland, about 430 kilometres north-west of Brisbane). She did not yield to the assimilationist intent of government policy. Instead, she and her family established a camp they called ‘Chinatown’ at the Aboriginal settlement of Barambah (now Cherbourg).

The longstanding attempt to legislate Indigenous-Asian relations out of existence continues to cast its shadow today. Cathy Freeman is identified as Australia’s most famous Indigenous sportswoman, but she is also of Chinese descent. In the late 19th century, her great-great grandfather moved from China to northern Queensland, where he worked on sugarcane farms. In 2001 Freeman supported Beijing’s bid for the 2008 Olympic Games because of her Chinese heritage, but the English-language Australian media has entirely overlooked it. By contrast, in Chinese-language media inside and outside Australia, Freeman’s multicultural heritage is celebrated; many Chinese-Australians even hoped Freeman would win gold in the Sydney Olympics because of her Chinese descent. Is the suppression of Freeman’s heritage a sign that white Australia still wants to keep Asians and Aborigines apart?

The Outsiders Within is the story of the triangular relationship between Asians, Aborigines and white Australia. The three anecdotes just recounted are the tip of an historical iceberg. A unique and fascinating tradition of cross-cultural alliances between Indigenous and Asian Australian people exists in Australia, but it is largely unknown. In Broome, Western Australia, by the 1940s, cross-cultural unions between Indigenous and Asian people had become so commonplace that a majority of the Aboriginal population had some Asian ancestry. And, while Broome is an exceptionally multicultural society, an Indigenous-Asian heritage is a feature of most communities across northern Australia. Nor is it confined to the north: as this study shows, it stretches south to the metropolitan centres and, more recently, in the work of artists, film-makers and writers it has become part of a vigorously pursued project to understand Australia’s past and present differently. For the story we have to tell is both troubled and troubling. It obliges us to confront a legacy of discrimination, and to ask why the social, political and geographical legitimisation of Australia as a nation-state depended so profoundly on declaring Indigenous-Asian alliances illegitimate…

Mixed Relations: Asian-Aboriginal Contact in North Australia

University of Western Australia Publishing
March 2006
384 pages
250 x 170 mm
Hardcover ISBN: 9781920694418

Regina Ganter, Professor, School of Humanities
Griffith University, Queensland, Australia

Awards

• Won – 2007 NSW Premier’s Awards (Community and Regional History Prize)
• Won – 2007 Ernest Scott History Prize

Australian histories too often imply that the nation’s history began in Botany Bay in 1788. But Australia was not an isolated continent, and long before white settlement, Macassan trepangers had made contact with Aboriginal people along the Northern Coastline, weaving trading networks that extended from China to the Kimberley and Torres Strait. It was this Asian–Aboriginal link that gave rise to the northern pearling industry, a subsequent driver of regional economic development.

Mixed Relations explores successive waves of contact in northern Australia and the impact of circumstances—political, legal and economic—on members of the polyethnic communities. Based on extensive fieldwork, including hundreds of interviews, it provides a fresh insight into the national narrative and poses challenging questions about the Australian identity in the twenty-first century.

White Without Soap [Review]

Australian Womens Book Review
Volume 23.1&2 (2011)
pages 16-18

Jean Taylor

Marguerita Stephens. White Without Soap: Philanthropy, Caste and Exclusion in Colonial Victoria 1835–1888, A Political Economy of Race. Melbourne: Melbourne University Custom Book Centre, 2010.

As it says on the frontispiece, White Without Soap was a PhD thesis in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne in November 2003. Usually, if a PhD thesis is to be published, the writer works on the thesis to make it more accessible for the general public to read. Jennifer Kelly’s Zest For Life, which gives a positive view of lesbians’ experiences of menopause, springs to mind as an example of a rewritten PhD thesis that was published by Spinifex Press in Melbourne in 2005.

However, I read Marg’s thesis not long after she had received her PhD and was mightily impressed. Not only with the academic language and the rigorous intellectual enquiry she brought to bear on this important subject and the research she did into this brutal aspect of Victoria’s past, but also as a reminder of the despicable treatment of Aboriginal people, and the ways in which we non-Aboriginal people still have a lot to learn in terms of our interaction with and our understanding of the Indigenous people of this country.

As Marg puts it in the Abstract:

The thesis explores the connections between nineteenth century imperial anthropology, racial ‘science’, and the imposition of colonising governance on the Aborigines of Port Phillip/Victoria between 1835 and 1888.

These supposedly scientific facts included the observation by a Polish traveller, Count Paul Strzelecki, that after an Aboriginal woman had a child by a European, she was then unable to bear children by an Aboriginal man. This is a plainly ludicrous suggestion, but one that Marg uses to point out just how assiduously and insidiously science was used to discredit Aborigines as a race-women in particular-and to justify the annihilation of the Aboriginal people and the confiscation of their land by the so-called superior European invaders…

…The Kulin Nation people-comprised of five language groups, Woiwurrung, Boonwurrung, Daungwurrung, Wathawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung-had survived in Central Victoria for tens of thousands of years before the European invasion in 1835. It went without saying that they were more than capable of conducting their own affairs. By 1859 Aboriginal people were in despair about their land being stolen, so that they had nowhere to hunt and gather food, and, therefore, no way to feed themselves as they had been doing since time immemorial. They petitioned the government of the time for some land they could call their own, where they could grow crops to support themselves, raise their children, and be relatively safe from murderous settlers.

Marg tells us that the government of the time had another agenda:

By the 1860s children of mixed decent, and girls in particular, had become the principal objects through which the colonial government justified the round up of the Victorian clans, and their concentration on “mission stations”.

Read the entire review here.

White Without Soap: Philanthropy, Caste and Exclusion in Colonial Victoria 1835-1888, A Political Economy of Race

University of Melbourne Custom Book Centre
2010
318 pages
Paperback ISBN: 0980759420, 9780980759426

Marguerita Stephens

Explores the connections between nineteenth century imperial anthropology, racial ‘science’ and the imposition of colonising governance on the Aborigines of Port Phillip/Victoria between 1835 and 1888. Based on the dissertation of the same name.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• The View from Coranderrk
• Note on Language
• Map
• Introduction: Imperial Economies of Race
• Chapter One: From Philanthropy to Race 1835-1848
• Chapter Two: Colonising the Body: Infanticide and Governance
• Chapter Three: Colonising the Body: A Species Apart
• Chapter Four: Citizens, Rebels and Ambiguous Identities in the Ethno-Zoo
• Chapter Five: The Coranderrk Dormitory: Gender, Caste and Extinction
• Chapter Six: ‘You can make them white here without soap’
• Conclusion: ‘Yarra, my father’s country’
• Bibliography

INTRODUCTION: Imperial Economies of Race

In the expansionary movements of the European nation stales in the nineteenth century, race and empire were mutually constituted. ‘It was’, wrote Catherine Hall, ‘colonial encounters which produced a new category, race’.1 The idea of race raised colonialism to a biological imperative. The idea of race, and the ability of individuals to perceive the marks and differentials of race, have a history of their own. What follows is a history of how Europeans in one colonial encounter came to think that race mattered and how they produced specific categories of race that gave scientific and moral warrant to their rapacious colonising. It is a political economy of race.

This study is concerned with the multilateral connections between developments in the science of race across the European imperial domain and the operations of colonial policy in one location, that of Port Phillip, later Victoria, in south-eastern Australia in the middle and late nineteenth century. Specifically, it is concerned with the interactions between anthropology and the practical management of the Victorian government’s Aboriginal station Coranderrk, onto which the Kulin people, on whose land the colonial settlement of Melbourne was established in 1835, were gathered in 1863. It is concerned with the prominence of the Australians, particularly those from the south-eastern comer of the continent, in the formulation of European concepts of race, and with the daily lives of those on whom the ethnological gaze fell so heavily. It is concerned with the circularities of colonial theory and colonizing practice which produced the extinguishing Aboriginal body and the imperial fantasy of terra nullius. Colonialism and anthropology formed an hermetic ideological coupling of power and knowledge in which European desire, be it sexual or territorial, was projected onto the colonised with such force and effect that it delivered them up as objects who entreated their own colonization. It is with the twists and turns in this multidirectional relationship between theories of race and the practical expressions of colonial power through the categories of race that this study is concerned.

In the following chapters I explore how anthropology projected imminent Aboriginal extinction as an effect of biology and culture, rather than as an effect, and an animating ambition, of colonial practice. I also explore the complicity of humanitarian philanthropists in the production of the ‘ideological dissimulations’ encapsulated in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s provocative formula: ‘white men are saving brown women from brown men’ with its slippery and readily mutable verb. In south-eastern Australia, white men produced and reinforced colonizing power through the purported rescue of brown women, whose cthnologically-predicated ill-treatment by brown men provided the singular event that permitted the suspension of the letter of the law in order to impose ‘not only a civil but a good society’.

From the generalised rape, abuse and exploitation of the sexual labour of Aboriginal women and girls by colonists on the frontier in the late 1830s, to the emphasis laid by the Victorian Board for the Protection of Aborigines (BPA) on the seizure of Aboriginal girls from their kin in the 1860s and 1870s, to the Board’s determination in the 1880s to bring ‘finality’ to the Aboriginal ‘problem’ by steering young Aboriginal women into marriages with white men, the exercise of power over Aboriginal women was the most crucial vector of colonial power. In Victoria, as in so many other colonial sites, the control of female sexuality and reproduction was, as Anne McClintock argues, crucial to the ‘transmission of white, male power’.

BeDevil: Colonialism and the children of miscegenation

Journal of International Communication
Volume 19,  Issue 1, 2013
Special Issue: South-North conversations
pages 43-58
DOI: 10.1080/13216597.2012.754363

Wajiha Raza Rizvi
Hashmi Media Institute, Karachi, Pakistan

BeDevil (1993) addresses the marginalization of Aboriginal Australians in the events, symbolism, and media hype surrounding the bicentenary of European settlement in Australia in 1988. Tracey Moffatt challenges the racial stereotypes by gearing a political process of reform and self-recognition though her postmodernist ‘identity search’-driven work aiming at appropriation of hegemonic spectacle. BeDevil disrupts the hegemony of the pure original canon that excluded Aboriginal Australians from the mainstream. This sort of exclusion practice is a known phenomenon worldwide, more so happens in the postcolonial Third World countries like Pakistan and India as both exclude their ethnic minorities from the mainstream media. The paper echos back to Moffatt’s stories of bedeviling experiences with tales of similar issues around race, gender, and normality from Islamic Republic of Pakistan, wherein post-Independence immigrants are constantly struggling for appropriation and redefinition of their identities. The Pakistan born children of miscegenation are considered immigrants by descent despite the facts concerning Islamic origins, two nations’ theory, migration, and over 60 years residency. The paper compares the mutually bedeviling experiences of ‘othering’ and a struggle with the notions of shared social conscience and histories between children of miscegenation in Australia and Pakistan in the context of the Australian trilogy.

Read or purchase the article here.

‘Improving’ the Māori: Counting the Ideology of Intermarriage

New Zealand Journal of History
Volume 34, Number 1 (2000)
pages 80-97

Kate Riddell
Waitangi Tribunal, Wellington

IN 1996 THE CENSUS gave a total of 3,681,546 New Zealanders, of whom 524,031 were self-described as Māori or of Māori descent — thus, around 14%. The 1896 census gave 743,214 New Zealanders, and of that figure only 39,854 were described by the enumerators as Māori — around 5%. The closest thing to the category ‘of Māori descent’ in that census was the 5,762 ‘half-castes‘ described either as living as Pākehā or Māori. The New Zealand population in 1769 has been estimated as perhaps 100,000, and was 100% Māori.

These figures expose vast changes in the Māori population in size and compilation, from 100% of the population to a nadir of 5%, and back to an increasingly significant percentage of the overall New Zealand population at the close of the twentieth century. But the figures alone tell a small part of the revival of a supposedly ‘dying race’. This article explores the ideology of the censuses and the enumerators who contributed to them. At the core of this investigation is a belief that the prevalence of intermarriage between Māori and Pākehā directly affected popular views of whether or not the Māori population would survive the experiment of contact.

In 1896, with the Māori population at around 5% of the total population (and thought to be dropping), many did not believe that Māori would survive. That belief, however, flew directly in the face of much contemporary evidence to the contrary. Perhaps in one aspect, however, it was not so very wrong. Even some of the most ardent ‘fatal impact’ protagonists allowed that intermarriage with Pākehā would slow the extinction of the Māori. Others, perhaps best characterized as ‘assimilationists’, promoted intermarriage as the tool to save the Māori from themselves. To such people, the ‘half-caste’ product of intermarriage would improve the Māori ‘race’, both in terms of their statistical significance and as a people — rather like European husbandry would improve the land.

‘Half-caste’ is a problematic term. In New Zealand it has been used to describe both cultural and physical forms of the fruits of intermarriage. But it has almost never been used in a strictly biological sense. Once contact between Māori and Pākehā became widespread, ‘half-caste’ was never either a legal definition or a precise term for measuring blood-mixture. This is in direct contrast with strict legal and biological definitions in other New World colonies. In the censuses, the term came to be closely linked with the idea of ‘improving’ the Māori, like the land, by degrees. Intermarriage and the production of half-castes became synonymous with clearing away the native and planting the introduced…

…The Māori censuses to 1921 will be explored through three related myths. The myths are not easily separated, but each has some distinctive features. The first is an ambiguous one: the idea that Māori were better off either in close contact with or in isolation from Europeans. This myth expressed the belief that Māori were dying whether in close contact with Europeans or not, but that some factors could temporarily ameliorate or limit the effects of that contact. The second myth was that Māori were not worthy possessors of their own land. If they did not use it as Pākehā believed land was ordained to be used, then Māori would lose it. In this view, ‘improving’ the land and ‘improving’ the Māori went hand in hand. The third myth was that ‘half-castes’, the physical product of Māori and Pākehā intermarriage, were the only possible future for Māori (if Māori were to have a future at all). This explanation will be followed by a discussion of how the myths remained intact, despite the numerical evidence of the censuses to the contrary, and despite Māori opposition to the ideology of assimilation through intermarriage…

Read the entire article here.

White Without Soap: Philanthropy, Caste and Exclusion in Colonial Victoria 1835-1888, A Political Economy of Race

University of Melbourne
November 2003
328 pages

Marguerita Stephens

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of History

The thesis explores the connections between nineteenth century imperial anthropology, racial ‘science’, and the imposition of colonising governance on the Aborigines of Port Phillip/Victoria between 1835 and 1888. It explores the way that particular, albeit contested, images of Aborigines ‘became legislative’. It surveys the declining influence of liberal and Evangelical ‘philanthropy’ at the end of the 1830s, the pragmatic moral slippages that transformed humanitarian gestures into colonial terror, and the part played by the Australians in the emergence of the concept of race as the chief vector of colonial power. The thesis contrasts the rhetoric of the British Evangelicals with governmental rationalisations in connection with Major Lettsom’s murderous raid on the Kulin on the outskirts of Melbourne. It then probes two mid century ‘scientific’ discourses – one concerning the purported infertility of Aboriginal women in connection with white men (a thesis that captivated Social Darwinists but was belied by the ubiquitous presence of children of mixed descent); the other concerning the purported propensity of the Australians to wantonly destroy their own offspring – to illustrate how self-serving misinterpretations of the effects of colonisation, and of Aboriginal cultural practices, presented the Kulin as less than human and underwrote the removal of their children into ‘protective’ incarceration. It explores how a policy originally intended to ‘domesticate’ and transform the children of the Kulin into model citizens turned into a project designed to eradicate the Aborigines of Victoria by ‘breeding them out’. It considers the contestations between humanitarians and racialists at the Board for the Protection of the Aborigines and how, in the 1870s, an arcane theory that the Aborigines were of Caucasian origins came to underwrite an intentionally genocidal ‘absorption’ policy that deployed the arithmetics of caste. Throughout the thesis, the determination of the Kulin survivors to adapt to the new circumstances, their efforts to farm the Coranderrk station lands as independent, free farmer-citizens, their resistance to the Board’s efforts to ‘board out’ their children and dispossess them of every acre of land in the colony, is juxtaposed against representations of the Aborigines as primitives, savages, as less than human and inherently bound for extinction on the one hand, and as a people passively awaiting the remedy of being made ‘white without soap’ on the other.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Half-castes between the Wars: Colonial Categories in New Zealand and Samoa

New Zealand Journal of History
Volume 34, Number 1 (2000)
pages 98-116

Tocolcsulusulu D. Salesa
Oriel College, University of Oxford

BY THE 1930s ‘half-castes‘ seemed a near-universal product of colonialism. They were a natural outcome of the human activity of procreation, and not a colony in the world was without them. In New Zealand and Samoa, half-castes had risen to prominence, not always with admiration, and occupied a territory somehow between natives and Europeans. They were a kind of human borderland, markers of the differences between the two populations. Half-castes were born of a ‘queer magic’, as Noel Coward called it, children of natural human desires, yet often treated as unnatural; left in a position which could attract both envy and disdain. In the years between the World Wars, the well- known figure of the half-caste gained a new kind of relevance as, among others, eugenicists, racial biologists, colonial experts and governments found newer ways of considering them. The prevailing contemporary view did not seem a kind one. The anti-racist scientist Cedric Dover lamented in 1937 that the half-caste was depicted as ‘an undersized, scheming and entirely degenerate bastard. His father is a blackguard, his mother a whore. His sister and daughter . . . follow the maternal vocation.’

Colonial authority was built on the assumptions that European society in the colonies was an obvious and discrete social and biological whole—a ‘natural’ community—and that the boundaries which separated colonizer from the colonized were easily drawn and unmistakable. Half-castes were living proof that these assumptions were false, and daily they had to deal with the trauma their existence exposed. Unintentionally they had the capacity to traverse categories, or be cast from one to another, and this often attracted distrust and suspicion. Their variability meant that although the term ‘half-caste’ was in use from the mid-nineteenth century in both New Zealand and Samoa, the substance it enclosed continually changed. Moreover, each reconfiguration of what half-caste meant potentially reconfigured the limits of ‘Native’ or ‘European’, and how distant or different these categories were. This changing nature of the half-caste reveals the creative and plastic nature of colonialism and its terms of government. But it does much more than this, as such terms were part of a vocabulary commonly used by colonizers, and government was implicated in a broader discussion where varied definitions and understandings of half-castes might inform each other, and where definitions remained mercurial and contested. In Samoa and New Zealand half-castes attracted not only political and social interest, but also scientific and scholarly concern. The years on which this article focuses, the 1920s and 1930s, were a highpoint for this.

At this time both New Zealand and Samoa were under the same colonial power—New Zealand—yet in the two countries the half-caste category was not the same. The many differences make comparison intriguing. Samoa was a tropical, plantation colony, with a small population of Europeans; New Zealand was a temperate, settler colony, with an increasing white population. Their histories, however, are entangled, and in several ways the fortunes of half-castes in Samoa and New Zealand shaped each other. Margery Perham, a colonial ‘expert’ and Oxford don, passed through both New Zealand and Samoa in 1929 on a worldwide tour of British colonies. She realized the degree of entanglement between New Zealand and Samoa when she observed that ‘every event in the [Samoan] islands found immediate echo in New Zealand, and New Zealand’s response re-echoed back in the islands’ .Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler have written that ‘metropole and colony, colonizer and colonized, need to be brought into one analytic field’. Half-castes in Samoa and New Zealand offer an opportunity to do just that…

Read the entire article here.

Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750–1940

Australian National University Press
October 2008
372 pages
Paperback ISBN-10: 1921313994; ISBN-13: 978-1921313998
Online ISBN: 9781921536007

Edited by:

Bronwen Douglas, Senior Fellow in Pacific and Asian History
The Australian National University

Chris Ballard, Fellow in Pacific and Asian History
The Australian National University

From the 18th century, Oceania became the principal laboratory of raciology for scholars, voyagers, and colonisers alike. By juxtaposing encounters and theory, this magisterial book explores the semantics of human difference in all its emotional, intellectual, religious, and practical dimensions. The argument developed is subtle, engrossing, and gives the paradigm of ‘race’ its full use value. Foreign Bodies is a model of analysis and erudition from which historians of science and everyone interested in intercultural relations will greatly profit.

This book is also available as a free download in PDF, HTML and mobile device formats. Please read Conditions of Use before downloading the formats.

Contents

• 1. Introduction: Foreign Bodies in Oceania Bronwen Douglas
• Part One — Emergence: Thinking the Science of Race, 1750–1880
  • 2. Climate to Crania: science and the racialization of human difference Bronwen Douglas
• Part Two — Experience: the Science of Race and Oceania, 1750–1869
  • 3. ‘Novus Orbis Australis’: Oceania in the science of race, 1750–1850 Bronwen Douglas
  • 4. ‘Oceanic Negroes’: British anthropology of Papuans, 1820–1869 Chris Ballard
• Part Three — Consolidation: the Science of Race and Aboriginal Australians, 1860–1885
  • 5. British Anthropological Thought in Colonial Practice: the appropriation of Indigenous Australian bodies, 1860–1880 Paul Turnbull
  • 6. ‘Three Living Australians’ and the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, 1885 Stephanie Anderson
• Part Four — Complicity and Challenge: the Science of Race and Evangelical Humanism, 1800–1930
  • 7. The ‘Faculty of Faith’: Evangelical missionaries, social anthropologists, and the claim for human unity in the 19th century Helen Gardner
  • 8. ‘White Man’s Burden’, ‘White Man’s Privilege’: Christian humanism and racial determinism in Oceania, 1890–1930 Christine Weir
• Part Five — Zenith: Colonial Contradictions and the Chimera of Racial Purity, 1920–1940
  • 9. The Half-Caste in Australia, New Zealand, and Western Samoa between the Wars: different problem, different places? Vicki Luker
• Epilogue
  • The Cultivation of Difference in Oceania Chris Ballard
  • Index

Racial Crossings: Race, intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire by Damon Ieremia Salesa (review)

Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2013
DOI: 10.1353/cch.2013.0015

Sarah Carter, Professor of History
University of Alberta

Damon Ieremia Salesa, Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)

With a focus on New Zealand to 1872 but with attention to other British colonies, Damon Ieremia Salesa finds that “€œthe “€žcrossing”€ of races: different races associating, liaising, reproducing, marrying or consorting,”€ (1) was everywhere. Racial crossings both fascinated and concerned the British of the Victorian era in the colonies and the metropole, yet rarely were they punished, or legislated against. One of the major insights of this study is that racial crossing (properly managed and administered) was seen as a strategy of colonialism, not a challenge to it, and was a “€œcornerstone of the colonial management of races”€ (13), although there were dissenting voices and intense debates. But while the book deals with intermarriage and more informal crossings, there is greater focus on the concept and pervasiveness of “€œracial amalgamation,”€ as opposed to separation or segregation, as a strategy for dealing with and solution to the “€œproblem”€ of different races. Racial amalgamation was a method of erasure, of obliterating difference peacefully. A central argument of this book is that race was constitutive and elemental, that New Zealand was “€œa “€žracialized state,”€ one associated and with a nineteenth-century British Empire increasingly organized and ruled through discourses and practices of race”€ (17).

Advocates of the “€œsystematic”€ colonization of New Zealand including Edward Gibbon Wakefield proposed policies that included variants of racial amalgamation, which was a foundation of the land policy of the New Zealand Company, the focus of the first chapter. There were to be no vast tracts of land set aside as reserves in New Zealand, no separation of the races. Instead the Tangata Whenua would be interspersed and sprinkled among the colonizers. This would permit an expansive, intensive colonization and at the same time speed the “€œcivilization”€ of the Tangata Whenua who, it was assumed, would naturally desire to acquire the habits and comforts of their new neighbours. The second chapter traces the development of “€œtender ties”€ between Tangata Whenua and foreigners, the emergence of the term “€œhalf caste“€ by the 1820s and the growing perception of New Zealand as a place of disorder and pandemonium in need of intervention. Yet no steps were taken to obstruct or abolish intermarriage by colonial government; it was actively supported by authorities as long as it was “€œlegitimate”€ according to British law. At the Colonial Office at mid-century, Herman Merivale was the “€œphilosopher”€ of the amalgamation of colonists with Indigenous people, which he saw a “€œsensible, humane and practical course”€ (95), compared to the other two alternatives: extermination, or segregation on reservations. Merivale imagined a peaceful “€œeuthanasia of savage races”€ (157). The goal of peaceful disappearance of Indigenous people through amalgamation, however, had the effect of sharpening racial categories and hierarchies. A racialized colonial regime based on strategies of amalgamation was etched onto the land in New Zealand and entrenched in related legislation and policy.

An important chapter is devoted to debates about racial crossing in science and scholarship. Those who saw race crossing in a positive light drew on views of the Britons as a mixed race people who had grown in strength and superiority as a result. Organizations such as the Aborigines Protection Society, and the Ethnological Society of London, promoted the benefits of race crossing, while others, most notably the Anthropological Society of London, sharply disagreed. Influential authors in the colonies, such as A.S. Thomson, writing about New Zealand, saw amalgamation as the hope for the future, arguing that by the third generation “€œthe features of the Maori race will disappear from among the half-castes”€ (157). While Salesa notes that Indigenous voices and actors were absent from science and scholarly circles, throughout the book there is an important thread of Tangata Whenua discourses of racial crossings. A major point of the book is that Indigenous understandings contrasted fundamentally with colonial taxonomic practices. “€œHalf castes”€ found an accepted place; they were born members of a hapū or clan through their mothers and were not fractionalized into “€œhalves.”€…