overs, dressed as men. This has been immortalised in Ted Egan's popular song. As in the American South, this question of some black ancestry is the haunting refrain that exists in the recesses of many family histories. The explosion in numbers of people asserting Aboriginal identity in successive censuses is the surfacing of this widespread repressed family memory.
Many other mixed-blood people became part of a surviving, and later reviving, Aboriginal society in many parts of Australia. In Victoria, southern South Australia, Tasmania and NSW there are very few full-blood Aboriginals left, but there is now a large and vigorous Aboriginal society of mainly mixed ancestry.
In the 19th century, a sometimes well-intentioned, but often vicious, white paternalism emerged in relation to Aboriginal affairs and the anthropological study of Aborigines. The work of Protectors cum anthropologists, such as Daisy Bates and TG Strehlow, has been used to justify some paternalistic practices and to defend essentially conservative policies in relation to Aboriginal affairs. Recently an anthropologist working in Aboriginal affairs, Ken Maddock, has attempted to use his anthropological prestige to buttress the reactionary Quadrant project in relation to Aboriginal affairs.
Even a well-known, prize-winning, although rather opaque novelist, David Foster, has made spectacularly reactionary public statements on Aboriginal issues, once again, quickly seized on by Paul Sheehan in his book. A theme that was begun in the 19th century by the fantasist Daisy Bates, was that of "the passing of the Aborigines", which she associated with a wild exaggeration of perceived barbaric rituals and practices in traditional Aboriginal society.
The eccentric and tortured Daisy Bates became a byword for these two themes, and her largely invented stories of ritual infanticide came to be a core element in the conventional European view of traditional Aboriginal society, which she kept repeating forcibly was dying anyway. Dick Hall, in his wonderful and effective book Black Armband Days (Random House, 1998), thoroughly and comprehensively "deconstructs" the previously all-pervasive Daisy Bates legend.
Some of the bones of allegedly ritually eaten Aboriginal babies that Daisy Bates sent to the South Australian Museum, were later found to be the bones of feral cats, and a lot of the other bones can't be traced.
The impact of the Strehlow-Bates school of Aboriginal "anthropology" has been enormous. The ease with which someone like Pauline Hanson or the authors of the book Pauline Hanson, The Truth (Pauline Hanson Support Movement, 1997), just reel off wild assertions implying that tribal Aboriginal eating of babies was an almost normal dietary practice, underlines the unpleasant ideological impact of this thoroughly white paternalist, shoddily researched, or even falsified Daisy Bates style "Anthropology". Whenever some racist wishes to abolish ATSIC, like Pauline Hanson, or cut off funds for Aboriginal health and welfare, its become almost routine for them to throw in dubious anthropology about Aboriginal "baby eating" and other barbarities alleged to be part of traditional Aboriginal culture.
The main figure in this paternalistic extinctionist attitude to Aboriginal culture and affairs was the extraordinarily talented, prodigiously energetic, but possibly slightly mad, anthropologist T.G. Strehlow. There is no question that Carl Strehlow and his son, T.G. Strehlow, put together a thorough record of the Arrernte culture through their anthropological efforts over many years. Nevertheless, both Strehlows 'thoroughly racist preconceptions led them to exaggerate perceived brutal aspects of Arrernte culture. T.G. Strehlow's racist Eurocentrism made him the originator of a general theme that has become almost a mantra of racists who wish to appear learned. His view was that Arrernte society, although brutal and in parts even Satanic was, nevertheless, in its own way, authentic. (TG's father, Carl was head of the Finke River Mission, at Hermannsburg, in the Northern Territory from 1894-1922, and TG was raised and individually taught by his father to the age of 14.) He had absolute contempt, however, for mixed-blood people, who he regarded as degenerate, not authentic Aboriginals, and demeaning to the white "race" also.
This Strehlow view of Aboriginal traditional society as cruel, brutal, authentic but doomed, and half-caste society as loathsome and degenerate, has become the accepted ideology on Aboriginal affairs of many racists and bigots in Australian society. The many variations on this theme permeated most attempts to address the problem of Aboriginal society until very recent times. The state project of stealing mixed-blood children from their parents (the stolen generations) stems from the Strehlow view that half-caste society was vile. The He...
