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The natives of Australia are known as aborigines. These people who had lived on the continent for thousands of years suffered one of the biggest exterminations in history with the spreading of European settlers over the country. The ideological basis of this extermination was Darwinism. Darwinist ideologues' views of the aborigines formed the theory of the savagery these people suffered.
In 1870 Max Muller, an evolutionist anthropologist from the Anthropological Review of London, had divided human races into seven categories. Aborigines appeared at the bottom, and the Aryan race, that of the white Europeans, at the top. H. K. Rusden, a famous Social Darwinist, had this to say about the aborigines in 1876:
The survival of the fittest means that might is right. And we thus invoke and remorselessly fulfil the inexorable law of natural selection when exterminating the inferior Australian and Maori races… and we appropriate their patrimony coolly.32
And in 1890 the Vice-President of the Royal Society of Tasmania, James Barnard, wrote: "the process of extermination is an axiom of the law of evolution and survival of the fittest." There was therefore, he concluded, no reason to suppose that "there had been any culpable neglect" in the murder and dispossession of the Aboriginal Australian.33
As a result of these racist, ruthless, and savage views nourished by Darwin, a terrible massacre was begun with the aim of exterminating the aborigines. Aboriginal heads were nailed over station doors. Poisoned bread was given to Aboriginal families. In many parts of Australia, aborigine settlement areas disappeared in a savage manner within 50 years.34
The policies aimed at aborigines did not end with massacres. Many members of the race were treated like experimental animals. The Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. held the remains of 15,000 people of various races. 10,000 Australian aborigines were sent by ship to the British Museum with the aim of seeing whether or not they were the "missing link" in the transition from animals to human beings.
Museums were not just interested in bones, at the same time they kept brains belonging to aborigines and sold them at high prices. There is also proof that Australian aborigines were killed to be used as specimens. The facts below bear witness to this ruthlessness:
A death-bed memoir from Korah Wills, who became mayor of Bowen, Queensland in 1866, graphically describes how he killed and dismembered a local tribesman in 1865 to provide a scientific specimen.
Edward Ramsay, curator of the Australian Museum in Sydney for 20 years from 1874, was particularly heavily involved. He published a museum booklet which appeared to include Aborigines under the designation of "Australian animals". It also gave instructions not only on how to rob graves, but also on how to plug up bullet wounds in freshly killed "specimens".
A German evolutionist, Amalie Dietrich (nicknamed the 'Angel of Black Death') came to Australia asking station owners for Aborigines to be shot for specimens, particularly skin for stuffing and mounting for her museum employers. Although evicted from at least one property, she shortly returned home with her specimens.
A New South Wales missionary was a horrified witness to the slaughter by mounted police of a group of dozens of Aboriginal men, women and children. Forty-five heads were then boiled down and the 10 best skulls were packed off for overseas.35
The extermination of the aborigines continued in the 20th century. Among the methods employed in this extermination was the forcible removal of aborigine children from their families. A news story by Alan Thornhill, which appeared in the 28 April 1997 edition of the Philadelphia Daily News, recounted this method used against the aborigines in this way: