In 1934 the Professor of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, AE Elkin, published a small pamphlet which called for "a positive policy which aims at the welfare and development of the aborigines". To us, Elkin's words seem anodyne. For his contemporaries, they had a galvanising effect. Before Elkin's pamphlet, Aboriginal policy had passed through just two phases. In the first, the Aborigines, an impediment to the steady expansion of the pastoral economy, were subdued. By the end of this phase, as a result of disease, removal from hunting grounds and water sources and the impact of armed force, perhaps half of the 500 or so tribes that existed at the time of the arrival of the British settlers had vanished altogether from the face of the Earth. In the second phase, those Aborigines who had survived the initial onslaught were segregated, either voluntarily on government stations, Christian missions and reserves or involuntarily in detention camps, and protected by an ever-tightening net of special laws that controlled movement, marriage, sexual behaviour, the fate of children, employment, savings and the consumption of alcohol. At the time of Elkin's pamphlet most Australians believed it was only a matter of time before the surviving remnant would die out. Following his call for a positive policy, a 70-year journey of government-led policy experiments to build a future for the Aborigines began. The mood of these experiments has since lurched erratically between rather pessimistic realism and over-optimistic hope. The most recent experiment was the decision in June to dispatch police, troops and medical workers to protect Aboriginal children on the remote settlements of the Northern Territory. The Howard government has now altogether abandoned the hopes embedded in the language of reconciliation. Realism once more rules. How did we arrive at this point?

It took a decade and a half for the first positive policy to be formulated clearly. It was labelled assimilation. The postwar Minister for Territories in the Menzies government, Paul Hasluck, was its philosophical driving force. For Hasluck, assimilation was not a set of administrative devices but a destination. The destination was this: "All Aborigines and part-Aborigines will attain the same manner of living as other Australians, as members of a single community enjoying the same rights and privileges, accepting the same responsibilities, observing the same customs and influenced by the same beliefs, hopes and loyalties as other Australians." The policy was frankly paternalistic, although the word was not used. Hasluck described welfare work among Aborigines as "sheltering, protecting, guiding, teaching and helping, and eventually, as the perhaps most difficult act ... quietly withdrawing without any proud fuss when the Aboriginal entered the Australian community". The policy was also gradualist. Hasluck assumed that the destination might not be reached for all Aborigines for three generations or more. He did not believe that assimilation implied racial inter-marriage and biological absorption, as many inter-war Australian native administrators did. He did not believe that it was necessary that all Aborigines would ultimately leave their ancestral homelands, although he thought that as a matter of fact very many would.

But where he was insistent was that Aborigines had no future as a distinct or separate people. The government might not actively work to destroy Aboriginal language and culture, but Hasluck believed that eventually both would have to go. In a letter to a churchman he put the point like this. Australians could not "have it both ways". If the aim was to facilitate eventual Aboriginal entry into the wider Australian society "on equal terms", such an ambition was quite simply "incompatible with full and active preservation of their languages and culture without any changes".

Towards the end of his life, after his policy had been discredited, Hasluck stated his case about the inevitable end of the Aborigines as a distinct people, about assimilation as their inevitable fate, with uncharacteristic polemical sarcasm. Were Aborigines, he asked in Shades of Darkness,

 

to be living museum pieces? Or a sort of fringe community whose quaint customs are stared at by tourists? Will the drone of the didgeridoo, the clicking of the boomerangs and the stomping in the red dust in the red centre of Australia still be the sufficient employment for the grandchildren of the people of Ularu? Will the separate development that is being pursued with a beneficent purpose today have the result that after two or three generations persons of Aboriginal descent find that they are shut out from participation in most of what is happening in the continent and are behind glass in a vast museum, or are in a sort of open-range zoo?

 

Aborigines were, in his vision, destined to be nothing more than an ethnicity. At most, Aborigines would have vague memories of what their people once had been. For Hasluck, the idea of a separate people was separatism; apartness was apartheid. He stared at the total destruction of the way of life of the people the British had encountered in Australia, and did not blink.

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