Australia and New Zealand were colonies of mass-European settlement. In both, the status and future of their indigenous minorities complicated the ideal and attainment of nationhood. As McGregor (1993:57) observed in relation to Australia, the belief that national cohesion depended upon 'a large degree of racial homogeneity' — displayed and symbolized in 'whiteness' — was standard. During the interwar period, among white New Zealanders particularly, similar values and metaphors resonated and scholars have explored the significance of 'whiteness' for both nations.^[25] Though Belich has argued that a more appropriate descriptor of New Zealand's racial template was 'Aryan' rather than 'white', the quest for racial consistency provides a common ground for considering approaches to miscegenation on both sides of the Tasman in the era examined here.

In Australia between the wars, the half-caste problem was most vividly perceived on the frontier where the children of Aboriginal mothers and European fathers were often described as destitute. Paul Hasluck (1905-1993), later Minister for Territories, said that most had 'no chance to be anything but hangers-on' (1938:3-4). The historian Gordon Briscoe (2001), who was born at a native institution in Alice Springs in the late 1930s, has described how Aboriginal mothers living near the transport and communication links of central Australia survived under great stress, without support from the white fathers of their children but also reluctant to live a tribal life and fearing tribal men. Unusually severe droughts in Central Australia during the 1920s also compelled many people of Aboriginal descent to depend more heavily on support than before. The Great Depression then denied incomes to many who had been earning money.^[26] Demographic trends were also apparently dramatic. Population data were unreliable but seemed to show that half-caste numbers had steeply increased.^[27] To some observers, half-castes promised either to form an ever-growing, impoverished, illiterate, coloured population or, alternatively, to merge back with 'full-blood' Aborigines and swell their numbers (Briscoe 2001; Hasluck 1938:6).

At a conference held in Canberra from 21-23 April 1937, Commonwealth and State Aboriginal authorities addressed the half-caste problem. It resolved that 'the destiny of the natives of aboriginal origins, but not the full-blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth, and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end'.^[28] Tindale (1941), following a survey of Australia's half-caste populations conducted in 1938 and 1939, ultimately agreed. He rhetorically posed four options. The sterilization of half-castes he immediately dismissed. He also rejected the desirability of cultivating a new but distinct half-caste race — though in a few circumscribed communities he saw the process under way and some missionary opinion supported the idea (e.g., Webb n.d.). Tindale considered current policies, characterized by inconsistency and drift, as undesirable too.^[29] Assimilation through miscegenation, which required the removal of mixed-race children, was the remaining option. Within government circles, Cook in the Northern Territory and A.O. Neville (1874-1954), the Commissioner of Native Affairs for Western Australia, were the most energetic proponents of this policy which gained increasing favour in the late 1930s (Wilson 1997:32‑5).

More than one motive or justification can be discerned in the policy of child removal. Certainly, the image of half-castes as destitute and outcast often misrepresented their situation. Even among those in difficult circumstances, there is piercing testimony to the strength of caring ties that connected persons of mixed ancestry with parents and kin — whether white, 'full-blood', or within evolving half-caste communities.^[30] The vital contribution of Aboriginal and mixed-race men and women to the rural economy was also widely admitted. J.W. Bleakley (1879-1957), the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Queensland, remarked in an official report that the pastoral industry in the Northern Territory was 'absolutely dependent' upon them (1929:7; McGrath 1987). Others referred to half-caste families 'owning their own property, paying rates, educating their children, managing their affairs', and functioning within white society, if at a modest grade (Hasluck 1938:23). Some alluded too to half-castes of high social status within white society, such as the landowning '5/8 Aboriginal of wealth, married to a white woman' whose class was inferior to her husband's (Tindale 1941:113, 119). Nevertheless, the removal of mixed-race children harmonized with the established practice of institutionalizing children deemed neglected or deprived.

Measures to remove mixed-race children were not confined to Australia. Indigenous writers of New Zealand and Canada have discovered similar histories of child removal.^[31] In managerial colonies, too, Europeans were often averse to the sight of light-skinned children growing up 'native'. In the Australian mandate of New Guinea, indigenous parents hid their 'white' children from missionaries and others in authority and some coercion was used to remove Clem Leahy and his half-brothers from their families for missionary schooling.^[32] Occasional files in the colonial archives of Fiji also concern the removal of 'white' children from indigenous communities. The Methodist missionary Joseph Waterhouse (1828-1881), for instance, appealed for the removal of two white boys from Fijian households, insisting that these children should have 'the education and advantages common to those of their colour'. Even before colonial rule in these islands, he remarked, half-caste families never allowed their children to live with Fijians.^[33]

Clearly, then, some white onlookers within and beyond Australia objected to the exclusion of such children from their paternal heritage and believed that church or state should assume a responsibility for them, as an uncle might acknowledge the offspring of an errant brother by adopting the role of father. These are complicated feelings in which arguably emotions and ideas about kinship, paternal responsibility, and rights of inheritance were translated into a discourse on race. But at a certain level of interpretation, the teleological force of the vision of a 'white Australia' seems difficult to deny. 'Full-blooded' Aborigines were not such an issue. Whether they totally died out, as many commentators still believed they would, or whether small populations could survive inviolate under secluded conditions, made little difference to this vision.^[34] Half-castes, however, had to be a transitional category for the goal of white Australia to be reached.

Yet two basic difficulties bedevilled this long-range process. First, it relied on the intermarriage of half-caste women with European men but left unanswered the question of what to do with half-caste men (McGregor 1997:167-8). The second difficulty related to the supposed racial distance between Aborigines and Europeans. A policy favouring marriage between half-caste women and white men had, in effect, to shorten that distance. Advocates of such a policy tried to do precisely this. They insisted that no harmful effects of Aboriginal ancestry could be discerned in the children resulting from intermarriage with whites: unlike 'Negro blood' which allegedly produced occasional 'throwbacks' to the Negro-type among white descendants, 'Aboriginal blood' disappeared after a few generations. Indeed, Neville (1947:63) averred that among whites and Aborigines, the opposite kind of 'throwback' occurred, with a child of an Aboriginal mother sometimes reverting to the colour of a white grandfather. Moreover, increasing stress appears to have been laid on racially classifying Aborigines as 'Caucasian'.^[35] The geographer Griffith Taylor (1880-1963) joined a chorus repeating that 'blood-tests of Australian aborigines agree more closely with those of west Europeans than with similar tests of most intervening races'.^[36] Thus, with assurances rather than celebration, the racial distance between Europeans and Aborigines was narrowed.