Australia's Colored Minority Summary

This essay will contain an analysis and evaluation of images taken from A.O Neville’s book ‘Australia’s Coloured Minority: It’s Place In The Community’. Published in 1947, Neville argues in his book that ‘half-blood’ Aboriginal people can successfully live integrate into European society, which he proves through a series of photographs. At this time in Australian history, there was significant disparity between the established settler colonies from Britain, and the indigenous people of Australia. One key issue faced by the British Empire was the existence of ‘half-caste’ children. It was very common in white settler colonies for the men to sleep with the native women, and then abandon any children that may be the product of these relations. These children created problems for the success of Australian society, because they faced rejected from European and Aboriginal communities for being too closely related to the ‘other’. Given that this treatise was published in Sydney, and with a foreword from anthropologist E.P. Elkin, we can assume that this audience was relatively educated and located in New South Wales. There were many anxieties in Australia in the
However, this was not his title until 1936: from 1915 onwards he was the Chief Protector of Aborigines. Neville’s responsibilities in this position were to look after the affairs of Aboriginal Australians, as they did not have political rights. At a meeting for Aboriginal affairs in Canberra, Neville posed this question: “Are we going to have one million blacks in the Commonwealth or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there were any Aborigines in Australia?”. Neville’s photographs challenge the attitude of ‘hybrid inferiority’ by demonstrating how half-caste Aboriginal men and women can be integrated through dress, and through controlled