Degrees of fatalism: discourses on racial extinction in Australia and New Zealand

Abstract

On both sides of the Tasman Sea in the nineteenth century, many settlers believed the indigenous peoples doomed to extinction. In both Australia and New Zealand, colonists drew on the experiences of other parts of the world — North and South America and the wider Pacific region — to buttress their belief. Equally, they drew on theories and argumentation advanced in the imperial centre — primarily Darwinism by Buller's day; other scientific, medical or religious ideas before that — to validate their conviction that the local natives had not long to live. This awesome prospect was given the positive gloss of progress, representing the extinction of Maori or Aborigine as merely one small chapter in the grand drama of civilisation’s triumph over savagery.