Mixed Race Studies

White Without Soap [Review]

Australian Womens Book Review
Volume 23.1&2 (2011)
pages 16-18

Jean Taylor

Marguerita Stephens. White Without Soap: Philanthropy, Caste and Exclusion in Colonial Victoria 1835–1888, A Political Economy of Race. Melbourne: Melbourne University Custom Book Centre, 2010.

As it says on the frontispiece, White Without Soap was a PhD thesis in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne in November 2003. Usually, if a PhD thesis is to be published, the writer works on the thesis to make it more accessible for the general public to read. Jennifer Kelly’s Zest For Life, which gives a positive view of lesbians’ experiences of menopause, springs to mind as an example of a rewritten PhD thesis that was published by Spinifex Press in Melbourne in 2005.

However, I read Marg’s thesis not long after she had received her PhD and was mightily impressed. Not only with the academic language and the rigorous intellectual enquiry she brought to bear on this important subject and the research she did into this brutal aspect of Victoria’s past, but also as a reminder of the despicable treatment of Aboriginal people, and the ways in which we non-Aboriginal people still have a lot to learn in terms of our interaction with and our understanding of the Indigenous people of this country.

As Marg puts it in the Abstract:

The thesis explores the connections between nineteenth century imperial anthropology, racial ‘science’, and the imposition of colonising governance on the Aborigines of Port Phillip/Victoria between 1835 and 1888.

These supposedly scientific facts included the observation by a Polish traveller, Count Paul Strzelecki, that after an Aboriginal woman had a child by a European, she was then unable to bear children by an Aboriginal man. This is a plainly ludicrous suggestion, but one that Marg uses to point out just how assiduously and insidiously science was used to discredit Aborigines as a race-women in particular-and to justify the annihilation of the Aboriginal people and the confiscation of their land by the so-called superior European invaders…

…The Kulin Nation people-comprised of five language groups, Woiwurrung, Boonwurrung, Daungwurrung, Wathawurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung-had survived in Central Victoria for tens of thousands of years before the European invasion in 1835. It went without saying that they were more than capable of conducting their own affairs. By 1859 Aboriginal people were in despair about their land being stolen, so that they had nowhere to hunt and gather food, and, therefore, no way to feed themselves as they had been doing since time immemorial. They petitioned the government of the time for some land they could call their own, where they could grow crops to support themselves, raise their children, and be relatively safe from murderous settlers.

Marg tells us that the government of the time had another agenda:

By the 1860s children of mixed decent, and girls in particular, had become the principal objects through which the colonial government justified the round up of the Victorian clans, and their concentration on “mission stations”.

Read the entire review here.