The Cultivation of Whiteness

by Anderson, Warwick

• ISBN13: 9780822338406
• ISBN10: 0822338408
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-08-30
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

The Cultivation of Whitenessis an award-winning history of scientific ideas about race and place in Australia from the time of the first European settlement through World War II. Chronicling the extensive use of biological theories and practices in the construction and "protection" of whiteness, Warwick Anderson describes how a displaced "Britishness" (or whiteness) was defined by scientists and doctors in relation to a harsh, strange environment and in opposition to other races. He also provides the first account of extensive scientific experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s on poor whites in tropical Australia and on Aboriginal people in the central deserts."[Anderson] writes with passion, wit, and panache, and the principal virtues ofThe Cultivation of Whitenessare the old-fashioned ones of thoroughness, accuracy, and impeccable documentation. . . . [His] sensitive study is a model of how contentious historical issues can be confronted."-W. F. Bynum,Times Literary Supplement"One of the virtues ofThe Cultivation of Whitenessis that it brings together aspects of Australian life and history that are now more often separated-race and environment, blood and soil, medicine and geography, tropical science and urban health, biological thought and national policy, Aboriginality and immigration, the body and the mind. The result is a rich and subtle history of ideas that is both intellectual and organic, and that vividly evokes past states of mind and their lingering, haunting power."-Tom Griffiths,Sydney Morning Herald

Author Biography

Warwick Anderson teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction	1	(10)
THE TEMPERATE SOUTH
Antipodean Britons	11	(30)
A Cultivated Society	41	(32)
THE NORTHERN TROPICS
No Place for a White Man	73	(22)
The Making of the Tropical White Man	95	(44)
White Triumph in the Tropics?	139	(26)
Whitening the Nation	165	(26)
ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIA
From Deserts the Prophets Come	191	(34)
The Reproductive Frontier	225	(28)
Conclusion: Biology and Nation	253	(6)
Abbreviations	259	(2)
Notes	261	(68)
Bibliography of Works Cited	329	(52)
Index	381