97
These men of the emerging capitalist class were not
concerned with humanitarian ideals: their purpose
in life was to make money, and investment in South
Australia was a most attractive method of doing so.
If, in the process, a great many migrants should
benefit, and the majority of the previous owners
of the land should suffer then this was of little
concern, since neither impinged greatly on the central
issue, which was making a profit.
1
A legal denial of existence by the 1834 Act made the practices
of early colonists easy to defend.
8.41 (ii) Legitimation of nihilation by ’scientific* arguments
The initial denial of existence of the people found in the
Land Acts was legitimated in a different form at the turn of the
century by ’scientific’ theorizing that Aborigines were not human.
The beliefs held about primitive peoples in general being sub-
human were transferred to Australian Aborigines and strengthened,
even in the face of contrary evidence, by writings in the spirit
of Darwinism which led to nihilation of the Aboriginal world at
the cognitive level.
Jenkin (1979:248) points out that pseudo-scientists looked
to Aborigines as the ’missing link between apes and men’. However,
The Register, an Adelaide newspaper of 17th June, 1914, made
the following startling announcement:
The native tribes of Australia are generally considered
to be at the bottom of the scale of humanity ...
and probably to be inferior in mental development
to many of the stone-age inhabitants of Europe in
prehistoric ages. Yet they have every right to
be considered man.
HUMAN AFTER ALL
Though infantile in intellectual development, the
Australian natives are thoroughly human, as can readily
be seen by the cubic measurement of their brains,
99.35 inches compared with that of a gorilla, 30.51
inches.
The damage of this absurdity lies not only in the arrogance
of an in-group recognising another group ’as human after all*,
1
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