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Diana Wyndham, Eugenics in Australia: striving for national fitness, London, The Gallon Institute, 2003, pp. xv, 406, £5.00 (paperback 0-9504066-7-8).
The importance of eugenics in immigration, Aboriginal and public health policies is a subject of recurring interest in Australian history. Joy Damousi devoted her first issue as editor of Australian Historical Studies in October 2002 to the themes of race, migration, eugenics, purity and progressivism. Its contributors, and chroniclers of the history of public health in Australia, notably Michael Roe and Milton Lewis, have suggested factors which gave eugenics in Australia its particular shape. Federation of the separate colonial states facilitated a national approach to public health, especially for infectious diseases, and this included an emphasis on the health of visitors and immigrants. The constant perceived threat of invasion meant there was a need to settle tropical Australia. In addition there was the belief that Australians, particularly children, were and should be stronger and healthier than populations in the Northern Hemisphere. Whether early-twentieth-century Aboriginal policy was eugenic or not is currently being debated. It has been argued that policies of the absorption of Aborigines are counter to...