D’Arcy, Jacqueline. ‘The Same but Different’: Aborigines, Eugenics, and the Harvard-Adelaide Universities’ Tasmanian Historical Studies, Vol. 12, 2007: 59-90.

Abstract:

Norman B Tindale and Joseph B Birdsell visited Cape Barren Island (CBI) Reserve in January 1939, as part of the Harvard-Adelaide Universities’ Anthropological Expedition. The Expedition, it is argued, was the last major eugenic research project to be undertaken in Australia. This is demonstrated most poignantly through Tindale’s and Birdsell’s use of the CBI Reserve as an anthropological and eugenic laboratory. Although much has been written on eugenics and on mixed-blood populations in general, a significant gap exists in the historiography of the CBI Reserve in the 1920s and 1930s, and the Expedition there in 1939. Whatever the reason for its omission, it is important now to include it in the historical record, as the CBI Reserve Expedition of 1939 has significant bearing on current discussions about Aboriginality, and implications for Native Title.

This paper is divided into two sections. The first presents new research into the nature of various reports written about the Islanders during the 1920s and 1930s. The reports clearly reflect changes in contemporary Australian opinion regarding race and miscegenation – an opinion that was moving steadily away from a Social Darwinist explanation of the ‘half-caste problem’, towards a eugenic solution The second section of the paper focuses upon Tindale’s and Birdsell’s field journals and notes. For both men, the CBI segment of the Expedition would prove crucial in their decision to advocate ‘absorption’ as the solution to the “‘half-caste problem” of the 1920s and 1930s’.