The uselessness of 'race thinking' to settler Australians

Henry Reynolds is, among other things, an intellectual historian. In his 2005 book Nowhere people, he argues that nineteenth-century racial thought infomed Australia's identity as "White Australia' and that that identity was expressed, among other ways, in public policy towards Aborigines. Reynolds is emphatic that 'the idea of a homogenous White Australia'" and more particularly settler Australians' apprehension of the growing 'half-caste' population 'in terms of threat and menace' was influenced by 'racial ideas that dominated scientific and sociological thought in all parts of the Western world before World War II'. Without wanting to contradict this argument flatly, I want to dwell on some of its difficulties. In my opinion Nowhere people overstates the congruence between 'racial thought', Australian identity and public policy. By contrast, I want to reveal the tensions that often existed between these three things.