‘Preserving the Papuan’: JHP Murray and doomed race theory in Papua New Guinea

ABSTRACT

This article provides a detailed account of the impact of depopulation theories on the administrative policies developed under JHP Murray in the Australian Territory of Papua (1908–40). It charts the rise of a colonial discourse that linked racial and cultural pathology to physical depopulation in the Pacific and explores how the same set of ‘scientific’ ideas – the doomed race theory – was applied differently to Papuan versus Aboriginal subjects under the wider rubric of Australian ‘native’ administration.

KEYWORDS:

• Papua New Guinea
• JHP Murray
• pacific depopulation
• doomed race theory
• Australian colonial policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 These concerns reached their height during the period between Word War One and Two. See for example: Rivers 1922; Cilento 1923; Cumpston 1923; Roberts 1927; Williams 1932; Murray 1932b.

2 Regional studies include: Australia (McGregor 1997, 2002; Ellinghaus 2003; Anderson 2007); New Zealand (Nicolson 1988; Lange 1999); the United States (Dippie 1991; Qureshi 2013); Canada (Dascuk 2013); and Oceania (Douglas’ and Ballard 2008; Howes 2013).

3 Although early proponents of Stadial Theory tended to argue for the potential equality and perfectibility of all human populations, this equation was nonetheless consistently Eurocentric. The pathway towards an ideal social form was always one in which non-European societies strove to adapt and assimilate into European modes of social organization and industry.

4 This application was not entirely homogeneous either in PNG or Australia, but the cases that deviate seem to be ‘exceptions that prove the rule’; for example the cattle industry in the Northern Territory which was dependent on Aboriginal workers and was associated with a more positive racialized discourse (Howard Morphy pers. Comm. 2019).