Race Matters in Australian Sport

The first officials and transported convicts ‘Down Under’ disliked, disdained and then disregarded the humanity of the native peoples. Starting with white settlement in 1788, Aborigines were seen essentially as ‘other’ — not just different in quality but as other than human, and treated accordingly for long periods. This was despite edicts from the British Colonial Office to maintain friendly relations, not to disturb Aboriginal lands, to provide them with food, shelter, ‘gratuitous medical assistance and relief’ (Dunstan 1966: 315–6). The newcomers, including Christian missionaries, described them variously as ‘odious’, ‘scarcely human’, ‘hideous to look at’, ‘steeped in infamy’, ‘rotten in things sexual’, ‘sins against creation’, ‘wild animals’, ‘loathsome’, ‘vermin’ and a ‘nuisance’ (Tatz 1999: 15). Disparateness was [and is] pervasive and inescapable. It became genocidal in two forms: first, by physical killing, and second, by the forcible transfer of their children into the mainstream society, part of a eugenicist fantasy to facilitate the disappearance of Aboriginality.