Education as anthropology: A.P. Elkin on ‘native education’, the Pacific, and Australia in the 1930s

ABSTRACT

In 1936, Prof A. P. Elkin attended a seminar in Hawaii lasting several weeks, on the topic of ‘native education’. In his various papers presented to a range of experts from the region and beyond during the formal conference held in Honolulu as part of the residency, Elkin set out his views on the future of the Indigenous people of Australia. Education would be pivotal to this new approach on pragmatic and humanitarian grounds. Elkin concurred with the findings of the residency: local forms of adapted education were considered appropriate for most Aboriginal Australians, only a minority continuing into further education; communities as well as children should be better prepared for their integration into the nation as the Indigenous people. This paper sets out to interrogate the proximity of anthropology and education in these claims, and the elision of Aboriginal people’s agency including their contemporaneous campaigns for equal education.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• anthropology
• Australian history
• Aboriginal education
• history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ A. P. Elkin, ‘Native Education with Special Reference to Education’, Oceania 7, no. 4 (1937): 462. This article is one of two published in Oceania based on Elkin’s papers at the residency in Hawaii.

² The term ‘native’ is used here as a reflection of historical context, and is not endorsed by the author.

³ Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), chs 7 and 8; Geoffrey Gray, ‘From Nomadism to Citizenship: A. P. Elkin and Aboriginal Advancement’, Citizenship and Indigenous Australians: Changing Conceptions and Possibilities, ed. Nicolas Peterson and Will Sanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 55–75; Gray, A Cautious Silence: The Politics of Australian Anthropology (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007), esp. ch. 5; Alison Holland, Breaking the Silence: Aboriginal Defenders and the Settler State 1905–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2019); Jane Lane, ‘Anchorage in Aboriginal Affairs: A.P. Elkin on Religious Continuity and Civic Obligation’ (PhD diss., ANU, 2007); Russell McGregor, ‘Assimilation as Acculturation: AP Elkin on the Dynamics of Cultural Change’, in Contesting Assimilation, ed. Tim Rowse (Perth: API Network, 2005), 169–83; Russell McGregor, ‘Assimilationists Contest Assimilation: T.G.H. Strehlow and A.P. Elkin on Aboriginal Policy’, Journal of Australia Studies 26, no. 75 (2002): 43–50; Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997), esp. ch. 5; Russell McGregor, ‘Intelligent Parasitism: A.P. Elkin and the Rhetoric of Assimilation’, Journal of Australian Studies 20, nos 50–51 (1996): 118–30; Russell McGregor, ‘From Old Testament to New: A.P. Elkin on Christian Conversion and Cultural Assimilation’, Journal of Religious History 25, no. 1 (2001): 39–55; Russell McGregor, ‘Assimilation as Acculturation’, 169–83; Andrew Markus, Governing Savages (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990), pp. 147ff; Andrew Markus, ‘After the Outward Appearance’, in All that Dirt: Aborigines 1938, ed. Bill Gammage and Andrew Markus (Canberra: History Project Incorporated, 1982) ch. 7; Mark Finnane and Fiona Paisley, ‘Police Violence and the Limits of Law on a Late Colonial Frontier: The “Boroloola Case” in 1930s Australia’, Law and History Review 28, no. 1 (2010): 141–71; Ben Silverstein, Governing Natives: Indirect Rule and Settler Colonialism in Australia’s North (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), esp. ch. 6; Tim Rowse, Indigenous and Other Australians since 1901 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2017), esp. ch. 4.

⁴ McGregor, Imagined Destinies, 220–2; McGregor, ‘Assimilation as Acculturation’. Gray, however, concludes that Elkin’s integrationist vision required Aboriginal people to lose a great deal while white people merely had to give up their racism: Gray, ‘From Nomadism’, 67.

⁵ Anne O’Brien, Philanthropy and Settler Colonialism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), esp chs 4 and 5.

⁶ Alan Lester, ‘Humanitarians and White Settlers in the Nineteenth Century’, in Missions and Empire, ed. Norman Etherington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 64–85.

⁷ Lord Lugard, ‘Education and Race Relations’, Journal of Royal African Society 32, no. 126 (1933): 1–11. See also J. A. Mangan, ‘Imperial Education for Tropical Africa: Lugard the Ideologist’, Immigrants and Minorities 1, no. 2 (1982): 149–68; J. M. Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Baltimore: Ohio University Press, 2007), ch. 4; and Damien Matasci, ‘(De)Constructing the Global Community: Education, Children and the Transnational History of International Organisations’ in The Transnational History of Education: Concepts and Perspectives, ed. Eckhardt Fuchs and Eugenia Roldan Vera (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 231–60.

⁸ Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 119ff.

⁹ Felix Keesing, Education in Pacific Countries (London: Oxford University Press, 1938). Keesing withheld the names of those quoted to reflect the level of open exchange at the residency.

¹⁰ Not ‘cocky as Australians called them’: Keesing, Education in Pacific Countries, 138.

¹¹ Amanda Nettelbeck, Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood: Protection and Reform in the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

¹² Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness.

¹³ Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972 (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1996), esp. chs 11 and 17; Anna Haebich, For their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the South West of Western Australia 1900–1940 (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1992); Rowse, Indigenous and Other Australians, esp. ch. 3; Craig Campbell and Helen Proctor, A History of Australian Schooling (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2014), 67ff, 127ff, 24ff.

¹⁴ For a compelling discussion of these issues in relation to the Torres Strait, see Martin Nakata, Savaging the Disciplines, Disciplining the Savages (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007).

¹⁵ Peter Kallaway and Rebecca Swartz, ‘Introduction’, in Empire and Education in Africa: The Shaping of a Comparative Perspective (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), esp. 11ff. See also Peter Kallaway, ‘Science and Policy: Anthropology and Education in British Colonial Africa in the Inter-War Years’, Paedagogica Historica 48, no. 3 (2011): 411–30; Jana Tschurenev, ‘Knowledge, Media, Communication’, in A Cultural History of Education in the Age of Empire, ed. Heather Ellis (London: Bloomsbury, 2020): 39–58; and Felicity Jensz, ‘The 1910 Edinburgh World Missionary Conference and Comparative Colonial Education’, History of Education 47, no. 3 (2018): 399–414.

¹⁶ On the relationship of anthropology and education from the late nineteenth century, see Kathleen DeMarais et al., ‘Anthropology and Education’, in Handbook of Research in the Social Foundations of Education, ed. S. Tozer et al. (London: Routledge, 2010), 76–93.

¹⁷ Julie McLeod and Fiona Paisley, ‘The Modernization of Colonialism and the Educability of the “Native”: Transpacific Networks and Education in the Interwar Years’, History of Education Quarterly 56, no. 3 (2016): 473–502; Warwick Anderson, ‘Liberal Intellectuals as Pacific Supercargo: White Australian Masculinity and Racial Thought on the Border-Lands’, Australian Historical Studies 46, no. 3 (2015): 1–15.

¹⁸ Joyce Goodman, ‘Education, Internationalism and Empire at the 1928 and 1930s Pan-Pacific Women’s Conferences’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 46, no. 2 (2014): 145–59.

¹⁹ Duncan Bell, Ideologies of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), for example 107ff; Jeanne Morefield, Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), ch. 3; Tim Allender, Ruling through Education: The Politics of Education in the Colonial Punjab (New Dehli: New Dawn Press, 2006); Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

²⁰ Silverstein, Governing Natives, e.g. 44–6 and 141ff.

²¹ First Pan-Pacific Conference on Education, Rehabilitation, Reclamation, and Recreation (Washington: Department of the Interior, 1927), 93–4 and 111–12.

²² Quoted in Roy MacLeod and Philip Rehbock, ‘Developing a Sense of the Pacific: the 1923 Pan-Pacific Science Congress in Australia’, Pacific Science 54, no. 3 (2000): 219.

²³ Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness.

²⁴ For example, Felix M. Keesing, Modern Samoa: Its Governance and Changing Life (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1934).

²⁵ Fiona Paisley, ‘Applied Anthropology and Interwar Internationalism: Felix and Marie Keesing and the (White) Future of the “Native” Pan-Pacific’, Journal of Pacific History 50, no. 3 (2015): 304–21.

²⁶ Felix Keesing wrote retrospectively of the importance he attributed to testing pure research against the ‘practical needs’ of colonial administration, and of those among his peers who, from the 1920s, had been ‘dissatisfied’ with merely ‘descriptive’ ethnographies that gave little thought to the impacts of contact. See Felix Keesing, Social Anthropology in Polynesia: A Review of Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 2–4.

²⁷ Felix M. Keesing, ‘Education and Native Peoples: A Study in Objectives’, Pacific Affairs 8 (1932): 675–88.

²⁸ Richard D. Heyman, ‘C.T. Loram: A South African Liberal in Race Relations’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 5, no. 1 (1972): 41–50; Richard Glotzer, ‘Charles Templeman Loram: Education and Race Relations in South Africa and North America’, in Empire and Education in Africa: The Shaping of a Comparative Perspective, ed. Peter Kallaway and Rebecca Swartz (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), 155–75.

²⁹ Peter Kallaway, ‘Conference Litmus: The Development of a Conference and Policy Culture in the Interwar Period’, in Transformations in Schooling: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. K. Tolley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 123–49.

³⁰ B. Malinowski, ‘Native Education and Culture Contact’, International Review of Missions 25, no. 100 (1936): 480–515.

³¹ L. J. Lewis, Phelps-Stokes Reports on Education in Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1962).

³² R. S. Schenk, The Educability of the Native (Melbourne: United Aborigines Mission, c.1940). Five years earlier, the missionary teacher and humanitarian Mary Montgomery Bennett had published on her work with the Aboriginal children at the mission. See M. M. Bennett, Teaching the Aborigines: Data from Mount Margaret Mission, WA (Perth: City and Suburban Print, 1935); Alison Holland, Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett’s Crusade for Aboriginal Rights (Crawley, WA: UWA Publishing, 2015).

³³ Thomas D. Fallace, Race and the Origins of Progressive Education, 1880–1929 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2015), esp. ch. 2.

³⁴ Thomas S. Popekwitz, ‘Introduction’, in Inventing the Modern Self and John Dewey: Modernities and the Travelling of Pragmatism in Education, ed. Popekwitz (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 3–36.

³⁵ Julie McLeod, ‘Educating for “World-Mindedness”: Cosmopolitanism, Localism and Schooling the Adolescent Citizen in Interwar Australia’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 44, no. 4 (2012): 339–59.

³⁶ Keesing, Education in Pacific Countries, 190.

³⁷ Elkin, The Australian Aborigines, xi.

³⁸ Silverstein, Governing Natives, 44.

³⁹ For example, Bell, Ideologies of Empire, 107ff. See also Clive Whitehead, ‘British Colonial Education’, History of Education Journal 24, no. 1 (1995): 1–15; and T. Walter Wallbank, ‘The Educational Renaissance in British Tropical Africa’, Journal of Negro Education 3, no. 1 (1934): 105–22.

⁴⁰ Keesing, Modern Samoa, 420–1.

⁴¹ Keesing, Education in Pacific Countries, 97. See also, John M. Barrington, ‘The Transfer of Educational Ideas: Notions of Adaptation, Compare 31, no. 1 (1983): 66. For concerns over ‘maladaptation’ and ‘surface Europeanisation’ in New Zealand, see I. L. G. Sutherland, ed., The Maori People Today: A General Survey (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 264; and for the Torres Strait, see Alan Williamson, Schooling the Torres Strait Islanders, 1873 to 1941: Context, Custom and Colonialism (Adelaide: University of South Australia, 1994). On the interwar genealogies of 1970s Indigenous language campaigns, see Jane Simpson, ‘Self-Determination with Respect to Language Rights’, in Indigenous Self-Determination in Australia: Histories and Historiography, ed. Laura Rademaker and Tim Rowse (Canberra: ANU Epress, 2020), 293–313; and for a critical analysis of their ongoing political implications, see Nakata, Disciplining the Savages, e.g. 162–3.

⁴² On Te Rangi Hīroa at the residency, see Barrington, ‘The Transfer of Educational Ideas’, 61–8; and Judith Simon, ‘Anthropology, “Native Schooling” and Maori: The Politics of “Cultural Adaptation” Policies’, Oceania 69 (1998): 61–78.

⁴³ Tamara Elder, Little Song: The Life of Ataloa Stone McLendon (Edmond, OK: Medicine Wheel Press, 2015).

⁴⁴ ‘Native Races. Conference in Honolulu. By Prof. A.P. Elkin’, Sydney Morning Herald, September 25 1936, 10. Warwick Anderson concludes that the location in Honolulu, coupled with his admiration for Te Rangi Hīroa, became a catalyst in Elkin’s awareness of being a white man in a settler colony. See Anderson, ‘Liberal Intellectuals’, 10–12.

⁴⁵ Conal McCarthy, ‘“Two Branches of the Brown Polynesians”: Ethnographic Fieldwork, Colonial Governmentality, and the “Dance of Agency”’, in New Zealand’s Empire, ed. Katie Pickles and Catharine Coleborne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 51–67.

⁴⁶ A. P. Elkin, ‘The Emergence of Psychology, Anthropology and Education’, in One Hundred Years of the Faculty of Arts (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1952), 21–41.

⁴⁷ Wise, The Self-Made Anthropologist, 26–7; Lane, ‘Anchorage in Aboriginal Affairs’, 107.

⁴⁸ Ian Tregenza, ‘The Political Theology of The Morpeth Review, 1927–1934’, Journal of Religious History 38, no. 3 (2014): 413–28; Tregenza, ‘The Idealist Tradition in Australian Religious Thought’, Journal of Religious Studies 34, no. 3 (2010): 349ff; Marnie Hughes-Warrington and Ian Tregenza, ‘State and Civilization in Australian New Idealism, 1890–1950’, History of Political Thought 29, no. 1 (2008): 89–108; Tim Rowse, Australian Liberalism and National Character (Malmsbury: Kibble Books, 1978), 158–9; Gregory Melleuish, Cultural Liberalism in Australia: A Study in Intellectual and Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

⁴⁹ For example, A. P. Elkin ‘A Policy for the Aborigines’, Morpeth Review October (1933): 29–35.

⁵⁰ Melleuish, Cultural Liberalism, 141.

⁵¹ Robert N. Bellah, ‘Durkheim and History’, American Sociological Review 24, no. 4 (1959): 447–61.

⁵² Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), ch. 5. See also W. Pickering, ed., Durkheim: Essays on Morals and Education (London: Routledge, 2009); and Jeffrey S. Dill, ‘Durkheim and Dewey and the Challenge of Contemporary Moral Education’, Journal of Moral Education 36, no. 2 (2007): 221–37.

⁵³ Lane, ‘Anchorage in Aboriginal Affairs’, 120.

⁵⁴ Laura Rademaker, ‘Eaglehawk and Crow: Aboriginal Knowledges, Imperial Networks and the Evolution of Religion’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 21, no. 3 (2020), doi: 10.1353/cch.2020.0027.

⁵⁵ For example, A. P. Elkin, ‘Gross Crimes Against the Aborigines’, To-Day, September 1, 1934, 17.

⁵⁶ Silverstein, Governing Natives, 86; Freddie Foks, ‘Bronislaw Malinowski, “Indirect Rule”, and the Colonial Politics of Functionalist Anthropology, c.1925–1940’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 60, no. 1 (2018): 35–57.

⁵⁷ ‘Editorial’, Oceania 1 (1930): 1–4. See also Warwick Anderson, ‘Knowing Natives: Instituting Social Anthropology in Australia after World War I’, in The First World War, Universities and the Professions in Australia 1914–1939, ed. Kate Darian-Smith and James Waghorne (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009), 249–60; and Geoffrey Gray, ‘Dividing Oceania: Transnational Anthropology, 1928–30’, Histories of Anthropology Annual, 6 (2010): 48–65.

⁵⁸ McGregor, Imagined Destinies: 191–2. See also Henrika Kuklick, ‘“Humanity in the Chrysalis Stage”: Indigenous Australians in the Anthropological Imagination, 1899–1926’, British Journal for the History of Science 39, no. 4 (2006): 535–68.

⁵⁹ ‘Science Congress: Anthropology Section’, Oceania 5, no. 3 (1935): 364.

⁶⁰ Holland, Breaking the Silence, 249ff.

⁶¹ McLeod and Paisley, ‘The Modernisation of Colonialism’; Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 226–35.

⁶² Warwick Anderson, ‘Racial Hybridity, Physical Anthropology, and Human Biology in the Colonial Laboratories of the United States’, Current Anthropology 53, series 5 (2012): S95–S107; Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, chs. 7 and 8.

⁶³ Christine Leah Manganaro, ‘Assimilating Hawaii: Racial Science in the “Colonial” Laboratory, 1919–1939’ (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2012).

⁶⁴ A. P. Elkin, ‘The Social Life and Intelligence of the Australian Aborigine: A Review of S.D. Porteus’, “Psychology of a Primitive People”’, Oceania 3, no. 1 (1932): 101–13.

⁶⁵ Erik Linstrum, Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), ch. 3. See also Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 239ff.

⁶⁶ A. P. Elkin, ‘The Educability of the Australian Aborigine’, in Papers and Addresses Presented at the Seminar-Conference on Education in Pacific Countries, Honolulu Hawaii July 3–August 7, 1936, vol. 2, 64–5. L SEM, Colonial Department, Institute of Education, University of London. See also Elkin, ‘Native Education’, 486–7.

⁶⁷ See for example, A. P. Elkin, ‘The Aborigines, Our National Responsibility’, Australian Quarterly, 23 (1934): 52–60.

⁶⁸ Elkin, The Australian Aborigines, xii.

⁶⁹ Lane, 'Anchorage in Aboriginal Affairs', 299. For a discussion of this kind of racial mapping as typical of ‘defenders’ like Elkin, see Holland, Breaking the Silence, ch. 2.

⁷⁰ Due to limited space, it is not possible to discuss other themes at the residency such as mass education in Asia or Continental European colonial traditions.

⁷¹ The programme was reproduced in Keesing, Education in Pacific Countries, 200–11.

⁷² A. P. Elkin, A Policy for the Aborigines (Morpeth: St John’s College, 1933); A. P. Elkin, ‘Anthropology and the Future of the Australian Aborigines’, Oceania 5, no. 1 (1934): 1–18.

⁷³ A. P. Elkin, ‘The Changing Australian Aborigine with Special Reference to Education’, Papers and Addresses, 258.

⁷⁴ Ibid., 261.

⁷⁵ Ibid., 263.

⁷⁶ Elkin, ‘Native Education’, following page 500.

⁷⁷ Elkin, ‘The Changing’, 263.

⁷⁸ A. P. Elkin ‘Australian Native Policies’, Papers and Addresses, 196.

⁷⁹ See Tom O’Donoghue, ‘Colonialism, Education and Social Change in the British Empire: The Cases of Australia, Papua New Guinea and Ireland’, Paedagogica Historica 45, no. 6 (2009): 787–800.

⁸⁰ Elkin, ‘The Changing’, 198.

⁸¹ Finnane and Paisley, ‘Police Violence and the Limits of Law’.

⁸² Elkin, ‘The Changing’, 198

⁸³ Ibid., 199.

⁸⁴ Ibid., 199–200.

⁸⁵ Silverstein, Governing Natives, 89–92.

⁸⁶ The phrase ‘teach a lesson’ had been scrawled next to a list of names for a punitive expedition. See A. P. Elkin, ‘Wanted. A Positive Aboriginal Policy’, Sydney Morning Herald, October 13, 1933, 10.

⁸⁷ Elkin, ‘The Changing’, 200.

⁸⁸ Ibid., 199.

⁸⁹ Ibid., 199.

⁹⁰ Ibid., 200.

⁹¹ Elkin, ‘Philosophy of Education’, Papers and Addresses, 288. See also Elkin, ‘The Aborigines, Our National Responsibility’, 52–53.

⁹² Thom Blake, Dumping Ground: A History of the Cherbourg Settlement (St Lucia: Queensland University Press, 2001).

⁹³ A. O’Brien, ‘Hunger and the Humanitarian Frontier’, Aboriginal History 39 (2015): 109–34.

⁹⁴ Elkin, ‘The Changing’, 200.

⁹⁵ Ibid., 201.

⁹⁶ Ibid., 201.

⁹⁷ Elkin, ‘The Educability of the Australian Aborigine’, Papers and Addresses, vol. 2, 63.

⁹⁸ Ibid., 63.

⁹⁹ Ibid., 64.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 64.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., 70.

¹⁰² Ibid., 65.

¹⁰³ Keesing, Education in Pacific Countries, 22.

¹⁰⁴ Elkin, ‘Educability’, 65.

¹⁰⁵ Ibid., 70.

¹⁰⁶ Keesing, Education in Pacific Countries, 51–2.

¹⁰⁷ Native Races: Conference in Honolulu’, Sydney Morning Herald, September 25, 1936, 10

¹⁰⁸ Elkin, ‘Education of Native Races in Pacific Countries’, Oceania 7, no. 2 (1936): 145–68; Elkin, ‘Native Education’, 459–500. See Also McGregor, Imagined Destinies, 220–1.

¹⁰⁹ For example, ‘Aboriginal Education, “Oceania” Raises Issue’, Mercury (Hobart), July 1, 1937, 6.

¹¹⁰ Elkin to Carrodus, May 21, 1937. ‘Conference on Education of Native Races in the Pacific’, National Archives of Australia (NAA), File 1937/8828.

¹¹¹ Carrodus to Elkin, May 19, 1937 and July 23, 1937. NAA 1937/8828.

¹¹² McGregor, Imagined Destinies, 220; Markus, Governing Savages, 151.

¹¹³ ‘NSW Course of Instruction for Aborigines’ Schools (1940), Education, Series 12, Box 74, File 222. Elkin Papers, University of Sydney Archives. The revision of history textbooks was discussed at the residency: Keesing, Education in Pacific Countries, 64–5.

¹¹⁴ Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness, 235ff.

¹¹⁵ J. J. Fletcher, Documents in the History of Aboriginal Education (Carlton: Southwood Press, 1989), 163–4.

¹¹⁶ ‘Re-Admitted to School: Aboriginal Children’, Daily Mercury (Mackay), August 10, 1936, 9.

¹¹⁷ Fletcher, Documents in the History of Aboriginal Education, 149–50.

¹¹⁸ Daniel Morrow and Barbara Brookes, ‘The Politics of Knowledge: Anthropology and Maori Modernity in Mid-Twentieth Century New Zealand’, History and Anthropology 24, no. 4 (2013): 457–8. See also Simon, ‘Anthropology, “Native Schooling”, and Maori’, 61–78.

¹¹⁹ McGregor, Imagined Destinies, 220.

¹²⁰ Campbell and Proctor, A History of Australian Schooling; see also Quentin Beresford, ‘Separate and Unequal: An Outline of Aboriginal Education 1900–1996’ in Reform and Resistance in Aboriginal Education: The Australian Experience, ed. Q. Beresford et al. (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2012), ch. 3; McGregor, ‘Governance, Not Genocide: Australian Assimilation in the Post-War Era’, in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), ch. 12.

¹²¹ Quoted in Markus, ‘After the Outward Appearance’, in All that Dirt: 84–5.

¹²² John Maynard, Fight for Liberty and Freedom: The Origins of Australian Aboriginal Activism (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007), 97–8. For more on this and other campaigns by Aboriginal parents, see J. J. Fletcher, Clean, Clad and Courteous: A History of Aboriginal Education in New South Wales (Sydney: Southwood Press, 1989), 111ff; Heather Goodall, From Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972 (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin in association with Black Books): 109ff, 147ff; and for Duren’s campaign, 160ff; and Rowse, Indigenous and other Australians since 1901 (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2017), ch. 3.

¹²³ Attwood and Markus, The Struggle, 149. See also McGregor, ‘Looking Across the Tasman: New Zealand Exemplars in Australian Indigenous Affairs, 1920s–1970s’, History Compass 5, no. 2 (2007): 406–26; and Attwood, William Cooper, 172–3.

¹²⁴ Cooper to the Minister for the Interior, February 22, 1936; Attwood and Markus, Thinking Black, 50.

¹²⁵ ‘Native Races. Conference in Honolulu. By Prof. A.P. Elkin’, Sydney Morning Herald, September 25, 1936, 10.

¹²⁶ ‘Educating the Native’, Western Australian, November 20, 1936, 21.

¹²⁷ Silverstein, Governing Natives, 122.

¹²⁸ Quoted in Rowse, ‘Britons, Settlers, and Aborigines’, 299–300.

¹²⁹ ‘Future of the Australian Aborigines: Science Congress Urges Government Action, Special Tribunal Proposed’, Chronicle (Adelaide), January 24, 1935, 46.

¹³⁰ ‘Care of Natives’, Brisbane Courier, May 27, 1933, 15.

¹³¹ Elkin, ‘The Changing Aborigine’, 3; A. P. Elkin, ‘Civilised Aborigines and Native Culture’, Oceania 6, no. 2 (1935): 117–46. See also McGregor, ‘Intelligent Parasitism’.

¹³² Keesing, Education in Pacific Countries, 51.

¹³³ ‘Care of Natives’, Brisbane Courier, May 27, 1933, 15.

¹³⁴ Ibid., 60–7.

¹³⁵ ‘Aborigines in Parliament. Queensland Would Have No Difficulty in Selecting Representatives’, Telegraph (Brisbane), February 2, 1935, 8.

¹³⁶ Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, 91ff.

¹³⁷ Silverstein, Governing Natives, 126.

¹³⁸ Tim Rowse, ‘Genealogies of Self-Determination’, in Contesting Australian History: Essays in Honour of Marilyn Lake, ed. Joy Damousi and Judith Smart (Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2019), 136–51; Rowse, ‘The Identity of Indigenous Political Thought’, in Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, ed. Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse (New York: Routledge, 2013), 95–107; Rachel Standfield, ‘Moving Across, Looking Beyond’, in Indigenous Mobilities: Within and Across the Antipodes, ed. Standfield (Canberra: ANU EPress, 2018), 1–33; see also Ballantyne this issue.

¹³⁹ Laura Rademaker, ‘Going Off Script: Aboriginal Rejection and Repurposing of English Literacies’, in Indigenous Textual Cultures: Reading and Writing in the Age of Global Empire, ed. Tony Ballantyne, Lachy Paterson and Angela Walhalla (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2020), 195–215; Alison Holland, ‘Colour not Civilisation: Contesting Boundaries of Citizenship and Rights in Inter-War Australia’, in Historicising Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the Construction of an Identity, ed. Leigh Boucher et al. (Melbourne: RMIT Publishing, 2007), 89–97.

¹⁴⁰ Bain Attwood, William Cooper: an Aboriginal Life Story (Carlton: Miegunyah press, 2021): 169–75, quotes on 169.

¹⁴¹ Attwood, William Cooper: See also Rachel Standfield and Lynette Russell, ‘Indigenous Activism for Human Rights: A Case Study from Australia’, in The Routledge History of Human Rights, ed. Jean H. Quataert and Lora Wildenthal (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 432–47; and Alison Holland, ‘Does the British Flag Mean Nothing to Us? British Democratic Traditions and Aboriginal Rights Claims in Interwar Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 50, no. 3 (2019): 321–38.

¹⁴² J. T. Patten and W. Ferguson, ‘Aborigines Claim Citizen Rights’, quoted in Bain Attwood, Rights for Aborigines (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2003), 84.

¹⁴³ A. P. Elkin, ‘Our Colour Problem’, Sydney Morning Herald, January 1, 1938, 9.

¹⁴⁴ William Cooper, ‘Treatment of the Aborigines’, The Age, March 16, 1933; Attwood and Markus, Thinking Black.

¹⁴⁵ Elkin, The Australian Aborigines, 22.

¹⁴⁶ Katherine Ellinghaus, ‘Absorbing the “Aboriginal Problem”: Controlling Interracial Marriage in Australia in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries’, Aboriginal History 27 (2003): 183–207.

¹⁴⁷ Silverstein, Governing Natives, 9.

¹⁴⁸ Catriona Elder, Dreams and Nightmares of a White Australia: Representing Aboriginal Assimilation in the Mid Twentieth Century (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 59.

¹⁴⁹ A. P. Elkin, Wanted – A Charter for the Native Peoples of the South-West Pacific (Sydney: Australasian Publishing, 1943), 10.

¹⁵⁰ A. P. Elkin, Citizenship for the Aborigines (Sydney: Australasian Publishing, 1944): 29.

¹⁵¹ A.P. Elkin, ‘The Rights of Primitive Peoples’, in Letters to the Contrary: A Curated History of the UNESCO Human Rights Survey, ed. Mark Goodale (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 225–36; Joel Spring, The University Right to Education: Justification, Definition, and Guidelines (London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000), ch. 2. See also Marie Keesing, ‘Education in Polynesia’, in K.Luomala et al (eds) Specialised Studies in Anthropology (Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1947), 47–57.

¹⁵² A. P. Elkin, introduction to Australia’s Coloured Minority: Its Place in the Community, by A. O. Neville (Sydney: Currawong Publishing, 1947), 10–19.

¹⁵³ A. P. Elkin, Citizenship for the Aborigines (Sydney: Australasian Publishing, 1944): 29.

¹⁵⁴ Goodall, From Invasion to Embassy, 236.

¹⁵⁵ Sophie Rudolph, ‘To “Uplift the Aborigine” or to “Uphold” Aboriginal Dignity and Pride: Indigenous Educational Debates in 1960s Australia’, Paedagogica Historica 55, no. 1 (2019): 152–65.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP200100728].

Notes on contributors

Fiona Paisley

Fiona Paisley is Professor Emeritus in History at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. She works on progressive debates and the reform of settler colonialism in the first half of the twentieth century. Her books include Writing Transnational History co-written with Pamela Scully (2019), Critical Perspective on Colonialism: Writing the Empire from Below edited with Kirsty Reid (2014), and The Lone Protestor: A. M. Fernando in Australia and Europe (2012).