COLONIALISM AND THE SCIENCE OF RACE DIFFERENCE Dr Deirdre Howard-Wagner Lecturer, Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney deirdre.howard-wagner@arts.usyd.edu.au ABSTRACT Australian sociologists have given limited attention to scientific race theory and its historical relevance to the conditions of Indigenous peoples, leaving the work to historians and anthropologists, such as Elkin (1931), Berndt (1971), Ryan (1981), Beckett (1988), Cowlishaw (1988 and 1990), Reynolds (1989, 2000 and 2001), and Morris (1992 and 1997) Rowse (1994), Markus (1994), Kapferer (1995) and Glover (1998). Scientific race theory normalised social and biological theories of natural selection in scholarly and popular discourse, creating a classificatory system. This classificatory system formed the basis of the construction of an inferior other in colonising discourses, normalising the superiority of the dominant or colonising culture. The science of race difference is relevant to sociology in terms of how it gave rise to a particular way of viewing the Indigenous ‘other’ that resulted in certain practices and organising strategies that controlled, excluded and marginalised the Indigenous ‘other’ from Australian society. The purpose of the paper is, therefore, to reflect on what I refer to as the science of race difference and its relevance to the categorisation of the Indigenous peoples as ‘other’. 1 INTRODUCTION It gives me concern to have been forced to destroy any of these people, particularly as I have no doubt of their having been cruelly treated by some of the first settlers who went out there; however, had I not taken this step, every prospect of advantage which the colony might expect to derive from settlement formed on the banks of so fine a river as the Hawkesbury would be at an end (Paterson, 1795). The first one hundred and forty years of Australian history was marked by conflict and dispossession, the taking of Indigenous land, the destroying of food and antagonism to their habits and traditions characterised the specific form of settler colonialism that took root in Australia (Reynolds, 1989; Markus, 1994; & Tatz, 1999). Despite the presence of Indigenous peoples, the British colonial authorities declared Australia terra nullius, which removed any legal recognition of pre- existing Indigenous institutions. From the outset, the Indigenous peoples were denied any space officially to negotiate the terms of their existence. The colonial form of sovereignty and the mode of rapid land appropriation did much to shape conflictual colonial relations between the pre-existing Indigenous peoples and the colonising settlers. Dispossession, dispersal and marginalisation of the Indigenous population were the major