The Cultivation Of Whiteness: Science, Health, And Racial Destiny In Australia available in Hardcover
The Cultivation Of Whiteness: Science, Health, And Racial Destiny In Australia
- ISBN-10:
- 0465003052
- ISBN-13:
- 9780465003051
- Pub. Date:
- 05/09/2003
- Publisher:
- Basic Books
- ISBN-10:
- 0465003052
- ISBN-13:
- 9780465003051
- Pub. Date:
- 05/09/2003
- Publisher:
- Basic Books
The Cultivation Of Whiteness: Science, Health, And Racial Destiny In Australia
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780465003051 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Basic Books |
| Publication date: | 05/09/2003 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
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THE CULTIVATION OF WHITENESS
Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in AustraliaBy WARWICK ANDERSON
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2003 Warwick AndersonAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3840-6
Chapter One
Antipodean Britons
THE EARLY AUSTRALIAN COLONISTS found themselves drawn deep into the cross-currents of their new environment. They felt their bodies move along with the strange elasticity of the air; their spirits shifted with the direction of the winds; at certain times of day the clear light irritated their eyes; thought, muscle power, vital energy-all could become unreliable and fickle in circumstances so unlike those of home. Many immigrant Europeans seemed out of balance with the new climate, while some of those whites born locally, developing in ill-matched circumstances, appeared gradually to diverge from the ancestral type. New fevers and fluxes were challenging the basic economy of alien bodies, overstimulating and then depleting racial reserves of energy. The climate was foreign, social life appeared disordered, the diseases varied, and it sometimes seemed that a new biological type might emerge from the colonial turmoil.
Whether as convict, officer, or free settler, coming to Australia was no simple transposition. Those who first stepped ashore at Port Jackson (later Sydney) in 1788 had entered a new territory, unsure of the character ofthe seasons, the prevailing winds, the fertility of the soil, the quality of the water. As later colonists moved inland from Sydney or established other outposts along the coast, they too were assaying the land and climate as they went, using their own bodily sensations, their feelings of comfort or unease, to judge whether the land they coveted was a properly British territory. Until late in the nineteenth century, newcomers would attempt to match their personal sense of bodily terrain with their novel environment, adjusting their diet, clothing, housing, and physical activity in order to establish a harmony of individuality and circumstance. Some, such as Dr. George Wakefield, called this unavoidable process "acclimatisation" or "seasoning." From his tent at Emerald Hill, near Melbourne, in 1853, the young doctor wrote home to let his father know that "this certainly is the most extraordinary place ever beheld, everything being reversed to what it is in England." For many years his body was not in harmony with this environment, and he suffered terribly, like most of his patients, from rheumatism, dysentery, and intermittent fever. But his constitution eventually seemed to adjust, and in 1861 he wrote that "I am afraid that I should not be able to stand the cold after having become acclimatised to the heat of this country ... besides there is a certain charm to colonial life, a kind of independence." Wakefield, like so many other Britons in the southeast of the continent, had become inured to the hot summer winds, the damp winters, the sudden variations in weather, the droughts, the floods, the poor soils, multitudes of insects, and monotonous eucalyptus forests. He found that he was drinking and eating more, smoking more, and washing more often, his clothes were looser and more casual, he wore a wide-brimmed hat, and he went out riding as often as possible. He still felt British-very much a white man-and he increasingly yearned for "home" as he aged, but his body and habits had changed perceptibly in the foreign environment. Like most-but perhaps not all-of his fellow colonists, he had acclimatized.
In seeking to explain the excessively high death rate of white children in the new country, Dr. J. William McKenna observed in 1858 that "nature presents herself under aspects most remarkably distinct from what she does in our native land." Without physical and behavioral adjustment, without acclimatization, white families were in peril. It had to be recognized that immigrants, "being placed under new conditions of life ... have also a new class of knowledge to acquire." If they failed to do so, then the harsh Australian summer would remain a season of "grief, mourning and desolation" for the poorly adapted transplanted Britons.
McKenna, like many local physicians, put his faith in cold baths and ice water, but the medical experts who had stayed behind in Britain could afford to show more detachment, and thus be less optimistic, when pronouncing on the fate of the race in foreign climes. Frequently they warned of racial limits to acclimatization. In his influential survey of medical climatology, R. E. Scoresby-Jackson, an Edinburgh physician, treated Australia as a vast experiment in racial transplantation, just one part of "the inquiry which is at this moment being carried on in every quarter of the globe relative to the effects of migration from one portion of the earth's surface to another upon every variety of organised creatures." Evidently, the death of a few infant organized creatures in Melbourne would cause him little grief: They must simply have "abrogated the laws of climate." Scoresby-Jackson believed that it was highly probable that
all who leave their native soil to reside in foreign climates would ultimately die out were this not prevented by the return of their offspring to spend a portion of their lives in the mother country, or through the transfusion of new blood into the veins of their descendants by intermarriage with immigrants fresh from the parent stock.
The individual Briton might visit the antipodes with impunity, but it was quite likely that an isolated white race permanently resident there would eventually degenerate and die out. A medical responsibility thus supervened on British colonialism: How might doctors transform Britons from sojourners into settlers, how might they make them feel at home in such a strange place-how, indeed, would they ever acclimatize such alien whites?
Looking into the past from an age of mundane global traffic, it may be difficult to comprehend the nineteenth-century medical vision of British settlement in Australia: It is perhaps hard today to imagine that bodies once appeared so vulnerable, so sensitive to circumstance, that tragedy might await those who had merely wandered from their ancestral environment. But if location seems to us medically trivial, it was not so for most of the nineteenth century. To explain the basis of health, and the causes and expressions of disease, medical doctors and lay people alike drew on a language of place and circumstance. An individual's constitution, the sum of heredity and education, was always responding dynamically to fluctuations in local conditions-to the prevailing temperature, the direction of the winds, the shift in seasons, the character of the soil, the presence of filth or rotting vegetation. The body functioned as an amazingly sensitive system of intake and excretion, of give and take with its changing environment. When that system was in balance, a state of health was achieved; but when the exchange went awry, disease was the result.
In this conceptual framework there was little room for reductionist notions of extraneous disease entities; rather, ill health was seen as an imbalance, or disease, of the whole bodily system, a disorder whose character might shade subtly from one diagnosis to another during the course of an illness. On one day the symptoms and signs would suggest typhoid, but on another the manifestations might assume more an aspect of typhus. It was the doctor's duty to attempt to restore the balance of assimilation and excretion, to stimulate a lowered (asthenic) systemic tone with a strengthening diet and tonics, or to deplete an overstimulated (sthenic) constitution with purging and bleeding. Diagnosis and treatment were titrated against the patient's experience of illness and the doctor's local knowledge. The patient could affirm the systemic imbalance implied in any diagnosis and feel the effects of restorative treatment; and the doctor generally was well aware of the family history and circumstances and would modify his intervention accordingly. Both doctor and patient shared a cognitive framework that related bodily experience to predisposition and environment.
"The body was always in a state of becoming," writes Charles E. Rosenberg, "and thus always in jeopardy." In a person's homeland, the crises generally were seasonal or developmental or behavioral; but these challenges to constitutional stability would dwindle into insignificance when compared to the effects of migration from one climatic zone to another. It was commonly believed that each race had a distinctive constitutional character or temperament that was best suited, whether through providential or evolutionary mechanisms, to its ancestral environment. Any disruption to this nexus through emigration would threaten bodily integrity. The constitutional balance of British bodies, finely attuned to circumstances of Britain, might thus destabilize in the antipodes. Colonial physicians watched vigilantly for any signs of imbalance in the bodily systems of themselves and their alien charges. They described modifications of white bodies, alterations in their ailments, and the necessary innovations in treatment. Prospects for permanent European settlement remained unclear, a cause of considerable anxiety among medical experts. Would the old race become increasingly diseased and disordered in Australia and eventually die out? Would British bodies and minds prove basically resilient, demonstrating an unanticipated stability of type? Or would an altogether new biological form emerge, finely attuned to its weird circumstances?
Strangers in a Strange Land
During the first thirty years of British occupation, doctors began with some trepidation to take stock of the healthfulness, or salubrity, of New South Wales. On the whole it did not seem, at first glance, especially hostile to the British bodily economy, but medical men qualified their praise with the reservation that there had been insufficient time to observe its long-term effects. The country was still too unsettled; people came and went and rarely stayed long enough to put down any roots. In the first few years at Sydney, malnutrition-even starvation-and not the foreign climate seemed the chief cause of illness and death among the thousand or so convicts and their warders. During the next thirty years of settlement, the preponderance of convicts would draw medical attention more to immorality and intemperance, and less to displacement, as the likely causes of any constitutional derangement. Not surprisingly, doctors expected that the convict version of the British bodily system would more often be buffeted by excess and indulgence, whether in drink or sex or other vice, than reflect the changes in atmosphere and soil. Hippocratic medicine-the concern with airs, waters, and places as causes of disease-was essentially a discourse of settlement, requiring some familiarity with the lie of the land and knowledge of weather patterns, and presupposing a people of previously sound constitution, most of them conducting themselves responsibly, behaving in a settled and temperate manner. Not until after the 1820s did colonial doctors believe these conditions had been achieved in Australia.
The lack of long experience of settled conditions did not, of course, stop the first British colonists in New South Wales from making occasional efforts to understand the territory and the climate, whenever more pressing duties permitted them the leisure to speculate on their displaced destiny. John White, the surgeon-general of the First Fleet and then of the settlement at Port Jackson until 1794, had kept a diary of the winds and temperatures as the ships sailed from Britain to New South Wales, but on arrival in 1788 he was compelled to set this aside and concentrate on improving the nutrition of the convicts, in an effort to abate an epidemic of scurvy. It was not until a few years later-after nutritional worries had diminished and death rates had declined-that Governor Arthur Phillip felt confident enough to write to Lord Sydney and assure him that "a finer and more healthy climate is not to be found in any part of the world." Many others in the infant colony, including David Collins, the judge-advocate, shared Phillip's good opinion of the "salubrity" of New South Wales. Watkin Tench, a young captain of the Marines, found the climate "undoubtedly very desirable to live in. In summer the heats are usually moderated by a sea breeze, which sets in early." Everyone was relieved that it was not an Indian climate. "Those dreadful putrid fevers by which new countries are so often ravaged, are unknown to us," wrote Tench within a few years of arrival. "And excepting a slight diarrhoea, which prevailed soon after we had landed, and was fatal in very few instances, we are strangers to epidemic disease." The cautious John Hunter, governor of the colony from 1795 until 1800, admitted that the "sudden vicissitudes" of heat and cold might make the English "too apt to pronounce this colony very unhealthy," but his experience had convinced him that this was not the case. Indeed, he had never seen "the constitutions either of the human race or any other animal more prolific in any part of the world": Multiple births were common, and women at an advanced age had produced children.
Even so, most of the early colonists still feared the hot winds that frequently blew from the inland. In March 1789, for example, Collins reported that "those persons whose business compelled them to go into the heated air declared that it was impossible to turn the face for five minutes to the quarter from whence the wind blew." Watkin Tench, otherwise so breezily optimistic, also deplored the "intolerable heat" that was, he thought, "occasioned by the wind blowing over immense desarts [sic]." During the great heat of 27 December 1790, Tench found that "our dogs, pigs, and fowls, lay panting in the shade, or were rushing into the water." But "no lasting ill-effects, however, arose to the human constitution; a temporary sickness at the stomach, accompanied with lassitude and headache, attacked many, but they were removed generally in twenty-four hours by an emetic, followed by an anodyne." Still, it seemed that the new country, often surprisingly pleasant, could suddenly turn into a most un-British cauldron. In November 1791, Collins observed:
The extreme heat of the weather during the month had not only increased the sick list, but had added to the number of deaths. On the 4th, a convict attending on Mr White, in passing from his house to the kitchen, without any covering upon his head, received a stroke from a ray of the sun, which at the time deprived him of speech and motion, and in less than four-and-twenty hours, of his life.
And yet such environmental catastrophes continued to appear insignificant in comparison to the ill effects of convict vice. Collins and others especially deplored the common overindulgence in rum. When "dysentery" broke out in 1793, the severe judge determined that many "were affected after drinking, through want of a sufficient stamina to overcome the effect of the spirit." With such poor stock it would remain difficult to assay with confidence the quality of a foreign soil and atmosphere.
Free settlers, arriving in greater numbers during the 1820s, attracted by the developing pastoral industry, seemed generally more robust in constitution and more restrained and resolute than the convicts. Almost 10,000 free settlers arrived in the penal colony in the 1820s, but immigrant numbers began to dwindle at the end of the decade as the result of a decline in wool prices. Many of the newcomers, concerned that they might yet become the innocent victims of migration, wondered if their displacement from home gave any legitimate cause for apprehension. What sort of effect might the airs, waters, and places of New South Wales exert on their alien British bodies? How should they adjust to changed circumstances? Might not a hot wind cancel out even the most fastidious conduct?
Peter Cunningham, a navy surgeon who had spent two years in New South Wales in the 1820s, tried to encourage prospective emigrants, proclaiming the "extraordinary healthfulness of the climate." It was a happy place where many European fevers and diseases, including "intermittents, remittents, typhus, scarlet fever, small-pox, measles, hooping cough, and croup," were unknown. 20 Cunningham admitted that the hot northern winds often left influenza and eye blight in their wake, and dyspepsia frequently was "aggravated in the low, warm, portions of our country." He also conceded that "on reaching the age of puberty, phthisis [tuberculosis] is liable to supervene from the rapid sprouting out in stature of our youths at this period; but the European phthisis is uniformly cured or at least relieved by a removal hither, if early resorted to." And as for dysentery, the major expression of British discomfort in the antipodes, Cunningham assured his readers that "deaths even from this cause are exceedingly rare among the sober-living portion of the community, and far from common even among the debauched"-dysentery was "seldom productive of danger to any but the imprudent and intemperate." So long as one behaved prudently it would be safe to tend one's flocks on the pastures of Australia Felix.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................viiIntroduction....................1
1 Antipodean Britons....................11
2 A Cultivated Society....................41
3 No Place for a White Man....................73
4 The Making of the Tropical White Man....................95
5 White Triumph in the Tropics?....................139
6 Whitening the Nation....................165
7 From Deserts the Prophets Come....................191
8 The Reproductive Frontier....................225
Conclusion: Biology and Nation....................253
Abbreviations....................259
Notes....................261
Bibliography of Works Cited....................329
Index....................381