Contesting Assimilation

By Tim Rowse Ed, Perth: API Network, 2005, 352 pages, paperback, $34.95. Reviewed by Emma Kowal in the October 2005 issue.

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In Tim Rowse's introduction to his edited collection Contesting Assimilation, he shows why 'assimilation' has been a most useful device for contemporary commentators of all political shades: its vagueness. While the most common periodisation is 1940-1970, stated starting dates vary from the establishment of the first Native Institution for Aboriginal Children at Parramatta in 1814 (p 27) to the establishment of the Australian Council of Native Welfare in 1951. As to its ending date, Indigenous advocates are quick to point out that the colonists have never left and they still suffer from assimilationist pressures, while assimilation advocates argue that contemporary Indigenous achievements in politics and literature attest to the continued success of assimilation. (p 247) Reading this book as a non-historian (anthropologist) brought up with a distaste for assimilation, I was struck by the continuities of issues facing both the main characters of the assimilation era and those of us who are today still wondering what the ideal configuration of Indigenous people in Australian society might be.

The complexity of the myriad policies and practices that we might label 'assimilationist' comes through clearly in the seventeen chapters authored by many prominent historians. While tales of inadequately-resourced programs, inflexible administrative cultures, and astounding institutional racism and ethnocentrism will be familiar to most, there are less familiar historical moments and arguments presented. Julia Martinez's account of the Northern Australian Workers Union support for equal pay for 'half-castes' in the 1930s, backed by 'popular support for the inclusion of 'half-castes' within both the union and the wider community' (p 111) is a case in point. General readers may also be surprised by the prominence given by assimilationists to combating racism in the white community. The complexity of the ideas of prominent assimilationist thinkers such as Hasluck, Elkin, Neville and Bennett are well treated by Russell McGregor, Tim Rowse, Fiona Paisley and others.

John Maynard argues in the opening chapter that Aboriginal people see that 'assimilation/absorption was a weapon of destruction from the earliest periods of settlement'. (27) He presents a common view that equates assimilation with 'breeding out the colour', an ideology influenced by racial science that separated the policy intentions for 'part-Aboriginal people' from 'fullbloods' were at their most prominent in the 1920s and 30s.

Arguments elsewhere in the book complicate this picture. In Chapter 3, one of three chapters he contributes, Rowse argues that many Indigenous people from the 1870s onwards fought to have their capabilities in economic production and general 'respectability' recognised by the white community, desires that were partly fulfilled by the exemption legislations enacted from 1936. Gaynor Macdonald similarly shows how the vision of prominent Indigenous civil rights campaigner Bill Ferguson converged with the assimilationist Aborigines Protection Board regarding the Bulgandramine Mission in 1941. We are left with the old problem of how to treat these Indigenous people who sought to be recognised for their ability to perform as equals in the world of the colonisers -- do we dismiss them as blindly taking on the coloniser's value system, what today we would call internalised racism; or do we see this evidence as condoning assimilation, because Indigenous people themselves fought for it? This is generally not a question for historians, but an interesting subtext throughout the book (only Julie Wells directly addresses this).

The relationship between assimilation and self-determination is another subtext of the book. Bob Boughton suggests that assimilation policies were a strategy to deflect the broader demands of self-determination being made by parts of the labour movement from the 1930s. The similarities and continuities between the two eras are brought out in discussions of key figures such as Elkin and Hasluck, and also in discussions of assimilation programs. Anna Haebich's description of Western Australia's 1948 assimilation program -- 'to dismantle all discriminatory policy and practice, extend citizenship rights to Aboriginal people, and improve their living conditions' through housing and education programs (p 202) -- sounds similar in content to many programs of the self-determination era, although the stated aim of such programs would clearly be different.

Rowse's considered thesis, presented in the introduction, is that self-determination is the end-point of assimilation, not its opposite. The conventional chronology of 1940-70, Rowse argues, actually represents the time-lag between the conception of the idea that Indigenous people should be accepted as equal Australian citizens and their ways of life respected, and the integration of these ideas with policy: not the assimilation era, then, but the assimilation of assimilation. He argues that the ability of Indigenous peoples to demand special rights (such as land rights) derived directly from the recognition of their civil rights which underpinned assimilation. Child removal and control of marriage are thus examples of 'immature' assimilation that lingered on from the protection era. (pp 19-24) In Chapter 9 Rowse shows that the move toward 'self-determination' was paralleled by the social science of immigration that came to the view in the 1950s that cultural pluralism -- fostering ethnic solidarity in the first generations of migrants -- was the best way to develop an assimilated (or as they preferred 'integrated') society of different groups. This argument will be jarring for those see assimilation as, by definition, aiming to end the existence of Indigenous peoples as distinct groups, a view many Indigenous advocates came to in the 1950s, as both Marilyn Lake and Bain Attwood narrate.

This book is a useful and often lively overview of many aspects of twentieth century Indigenous policy, and would be an ideal resource for undergraduate teaching. While there are no simple answers as to what assimilation was and is, the points of debate are made clear, and there is ample material with which to reflect on our current national aspirations for Indigenous Australians.

Citation

• Emma Kowal. 'Review: Contesting Assimilation by Tim Rowse ed' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), October 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 06 September 2010].

Back Cover Blurb

• 'Assimilation' was one of the most hopeful social ideals of post-secondworld war Australia, a rallying cry for those who wanted a 'fair go' forIndigenous peoples.
  
  By the 1970s, 'Assimilation' had slipped into disrepute and was a dirtyword among people of progressive opinion.
  
  By the early twenty first century, such odium was countered by a moreconservative nostalgia for a golden Australian past.
  
  Throughout the course of its many usages, 'Assimilation' has been acontested term whose importance today, like reconciliation, isevidenced by the lack of agreement about what it actually means.
  
  In Contesting Assimilation, fifteen historians illuminate moments intwentieth century Australia when the policy of 'assimilation' was beingplanned, implemented, abandoned and debated.
  
  The essays collected here are about non-Indigenous Australians, theirsocial ideals, their racial theories, their policies and programs. Readerswill encounter influential officials such as A O Neville, S G Middleton,J H Davey and Cecil Cook, the influential federal minister, Paul Hasluck,and humanitarian critics and supporters such as Mary Bennett, GeraldPeel and A P Elkin. Several contributions focus on Indigenousanticipations of and responses to assimilation including what FredMaynard learned from African-American wharfies, what some urbanAboriginal people understood by 'respectability', and why residentsof Bulgandramine lost the place they called home.
  
  SYMPOSIA General Editor Richard Nile (www.api-network.com/symposia)

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