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also brought 40,000 Chinese to the diggings. Racial intolerance flared into anti-Chinese
riots. As whites' resentment hardened, Australia began a whites-only immigration policy
that lasted until the end of the Second World War.
AUSTRALIA'S ORIGINAL PEOPLE
Australia's indigenous people, the Aborigines, have what is probably the oldest culture in
the world: more than 50,000 years. Their likely ancestral home was somewhere in South-
east Asia. Coastal tribes fished, while those in the interior were hunter-gatherers, moving
in small bands through a hot, dry, and barren land. They killed with spears and throwing
sticks (the boomerang) but did not use bow and arrow. Anthropologists today view them as
superb survivors, finding hidden water holes, tracking elusive game, walking the land with
only memory and songs to guide them.
The first settlers regarded them as less than human. With dark to black skin, they were
seen as fit for slavery. They appeared to have no religion, no hereditary kings, and no
settled abode. They also suffered from comparison with the people of Polynesia. Polyne-
sians prayed to gods. They were ruled by kings and queens. They danced and sang. They
toasted and feted their European visitors, and they were handsome and sexually forthcom-
ing. When Europe first encountered Polynesia, tales of the South Pacific took on mythic
qualities. Surely this was the Eden of the Old Testament. Surely these were nature's noble-
men and women, as yet uncorrupted by crass civilization. (Readers of Rousseau saw his
“noble savages” in Polynesia.) Tahiti, said a French visitor, is Cythera, the legendary birth-
place of Aphrodite.
Australia's Aborigines lived far from Paradise. By European standards, they were not
handsome. Too busy just staying alive, they had no time for elaborate displays. They had
no gifts for visitors. According to Hughes, the only thing they had to sell was their women.
And the offspring of those encounters, trying to live in two worlds, were despised. An old
and familiar human trait was at work. Those far down the social scale take comfort in find-
ing and treating with contempt those even further down the scale. The Aborigines made
perfect targets for the scorn and hate of convicts and their guards. Scorn was intensified by
Aboriginal body adornment. In ritual song and dance, bodies were and still are painted with
white clay, mud, and red ochre. Aboriginal body decorations are slathered. Polynesians, on
the other hand, display tattoos (a Polynesian word) of intricate design.
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