© 2006 The author. Journal compilation © 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Nursing Inquiry 2006; 13(4): 300–310 Book Reviews Blackwell Publishing, Ltd. Oxford, UK NIN Nursing Inquiry 1440-1808 © 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd December 2005 12 4 Book Reviews Reviews Reviews Reviews December 2005 12 4 Book Reviews Reviews Reviews Reviews The cultivation of whiteness: Science, health and racial destiny in Australia by Warwick Anderson (2002), 363 pages, $34.95, Palgrave Macmillan, Melbourne. IBSN: 0-5228-4989-X. Contemporary understandings of whiteness usually associate it with the privilege of the ‘unseen’ race, seeing ‘white’ as usual and ‘normal’. This thinking means that white people will quickly identify themselves by class or profession but rarely automatically think of themselves as raced. Work by Ruth Frankenberg (1993) in the United States on white women continues to resonate with its concern about how whiteness works across ideas of public and private to com- plicate antiracist strategies formulated in the public sphere. In Australia, Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s Talkin’ up to the white woman sets out ways in which Indigenous women become enmeshed in a set of non-indigenous women’s ways of seeing (or rather not seeing) their own white-race privilege. Warwick Anderson, in The cultivation of whiteness: Science, health and racial destiny in Australia, does something very important to the contemporary idea of a settled or stable whiteness. He displays the fraught ways in which whiteness was worried about, sought and maintained from the earliest days of colonisation. His focus is on biological thinking, and particularly on the medical practitioners, scientists and anthropologists who transported and re-established regimes of thinking that centred on the survival of a ‘pure’ white man in the alien world of Australia. Within that focus he emphasises those medical men whose thinking and research secured funding that led them to form institutions such as the Australian Institute for Tropical Medicine. Anderson carefully points out that national interest in race was also a way of ensuring funding for a centre concerned more broadly with the tropics. Anderson tracks how the idea of being and maintain- ing white shifted over the years and between locations. He begins with the ‘Temperate South’, initially understood as a place where one could die of the shock of the difference in climate, particularly hot winds — to one gradually under- stood as a place that cultivation could render liveable and indeed health inducing for the white man. There is a fascin- ating insight into the particular anxiety associated with the in-between state where the land was opened up but not yet cultivated. This was seen as a site of new bad humours that might have no cure. It perhaps reminds us of postcolonial thinking, which claims the ‘in-between’ as a site of particular possibility for transforming the legacies of colonial thinking. But cultivation also led to badly formed, unhygienic cities and an increasing population of the poor and ill-bred, which in turn would need a continual program of educa- tion and reform to turn dissolute whites into better citizens. There was never an easy or uniform path to ‘proper’ whiteness. If education was finally seen as capable of transforming the problematic white, the same hopefulness for complete citizenry was not extended to other races. There were deep anxieties about whether even educated whites could survive, let alone work, in the tropics. The slipperiness of these inter- connected concerns is seen in JC Watson (first Labour Prime Minister) who visited the north in 1907. He began his tour concerned whether whites could live and work in such a hot environment, but found white men, women and children in ‘splendid health’. This health confirmed for Watson the importance of maintaining Australia’s quarantine from that ‘storm centre’ of disease, ‘the Continent of Asia’, and so the ‘White Australia’ policy. From all over Australia — as long as the separation of races via an idea of racial hygiene was maintained — a new vigorous, tough Australian would emerge, different from those who had emerged from the damp islands of Britain. The intrusive and continuing gaze of science was also turned to Indigenous Australians. Anderson neatly outlines the conflicting ways in which Indigenous Australians were admired for their adaptability while becoming ‘specimised’ through a process of recording and comparison. The role of science in seeming to both support and refuse the practise of child removal and cultural annihilation is a tricky one. No part of the scientific community is immune from being first and foremost a colonial invention. This book traces a very important genealogy of racial thinking in Australia. It was not the task of this book to ask questions about how some of these ideas were put into place through nursing practice and education, but those ques- tions should be asked. The text allows us to follow through from how doctors and other professional government men thought to how bodies were treated. In taking that as the organising principle of the book much is left out. It tends to be a medical version of the grand men and their ideas, thinking which ‘naturally’ excludes nurses, wives, cultural environments and Indigenous perspectives. One is left wondering about the unnamed woman and child seated next to Dr Smith Surgeon (c. 1860s) on the front cover. There is plenty of evidence here that these practitioners