The Doomed Race: A scientific axiom of the late nineteenth century

Abstract

Anthropologists and other scientific investigators of the Australian Aborigines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries confidently predicted the imminent extinction of the race. Indeed, "confidently predicted" is understating the case. Scientists at the time knew that the Aborigines would soon be extinct. It was taken for granted as a self-evident truth. James Barnard, VicePresident of the Royal Society of Tasmania, opened his paper at the 1890 meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science with the assertion: It has become an axiom that, following the law of evolution and survival of the fittest, the inferior races of mankind must give place to the highest type of man, and that this law is adequate to account for the gradual decline in numbers of the aboriginal inhabitants of a country before the march of civilisation^2 This paper seeks to explain why the inevitable extinction of the Aborigines was raised to the status of an axiom. It will discuss both the supportive empirical evidence and the presuppositions which underlay contemporary scientific understandings of the Aborigines. The latter of these was by far the most important.