The administration's handling of the Mau caused outcry and controversy in New Zealand. Many commentators found it difficult to explain why half-castes in this island territory had proven so problematic. The psychologist and ethnologist Ernest Beaglehole (1906-1965) later reflected that perhaps the legacy of earlier German attitudes towards Samoan half-castes was somehow to blame (1949:56-7).^[58]

But the attractiveness and assimilability of the Maori half-caste, in the lines of thought described in this chapter, and the contrasting indigestibility of the Samoan half-caste perhaps derived in part from differences in broad colonial requirements. During this era in the settler societies of Australia and New Zealand, to achieve the goal of a racially coherent nation that was some shade of white, indigenous elements had logically to be absorbed into the majority population. Despite New Zealand's founding Treaty of Waitangi — which authorized the coexistence of two distinct peoples and two ways of life, one indigenous and one European — Te Rangi Hiroa and like-minded thinkers in New Zealand shared with the advocates of intermarriage between half-castes and whites in Australia a similar national vision and ideal of racial homogenization — even if in New Zealand they saw it as a more distant goal. By contrast, managerial colonialism in Samoa and Fiji required service to the ideal of native preservation. Fiji was in principle for Fijians, Samoa in principle for Samoans. The performance of social roles as conceived in these colonies relied on the language of race for the definition of their agents. This was a political vision — and ideal — of racial differentiation.

These statements of contrasting racial ideals and imperatives, though big, loose, and abstracted, nevertheless remind us that place is more than an historical site: it can be an historical actor too. At least one Maori observer of New Zealand's troubles in its territory of Western Samoa sensed this. The barrister and parliamentarian Sir Apirana Ngata stressed the radically different nature of the race relations necessitated by mass white settlement in his ancestral lands, gently challenging the conceit that white New Zealanders' colonial record with Maori fitted them to administer Samoans and also underscoring the more profound upheaval that his own people had had to survive. If Western Samoa, he wryly remarked, had been a temperate country suitable for European settlement, then the motto 'Samoa for Samoans' — first coined by the New Zealand administration though the Mau appropriated it — would have justified the taking of land from Samoans as in the Samoans' best interest.^[59] In terms of my initial three axes of variation, Ngata seemed to see the latitudinal as ultimately the most important determinant of colonial racial ideology. And while I argue that the particular attitudes towards miscegenation in Australia and New Zealand that have been addressed here share fundamental similarities, their contrast — measured in differing degrees of enthusiasm for the biological absorption of indigenous elements within the white majority — can also be explored, as Howe has argued (1977), in terms of comparative colonial histories ultimately and crucially shaped by place.

Yet while this chapter has tried to give an answer to the opening questions, even within these terms of reference I am uneasy with my conclusions. In Australia's case, for instance, just how important was a teleology of a white Australia? I feel its undertow and some of the writers cited here stress its power. Patrick Wolfe (2001; 1999:32) talked in language stronger than mine of a 'logic of elimination' that corresponded with settler colonialism and he dubbed Australia's policy of biological assimilation a 'eugenic realpolitik'. But even if we concede this teleology, the removal of mixed-race children could occur without it; some individuals who aspired to a white Australia did not support a policy of 'breeding out the colour'; while a few in favour of racial mixing rejected this national ideal as unattainable. I have previously alluded to examples of the removal — or attempted removal — of mixed-race children in the mandated territory of New Guinea and colonial Fiji where no logic of absorption towards the telos of white nationhood pertained. Leading promoters in Australia of 'breeding out the colour' also admitted that one of the greatest obstacles to this policy was 'colour prejudice' and that during the interwar years prejudice against half-castes was increasing.^[60] Such views, though they typically accompanied support for a white Australia, could obstruct this particular process as a means for achieving it. On the other hand, some proponents of racial mixing, like Griffith Taylor, remained unconvinced that a white Australia was possible (Anderson 2002:165-68).

Other key questions remain outside my terms of reference: about the diversity of views and practices relating to miscegenation; the existence of and potential for multiple explanations; and the ways in which actors themselves saw the world and understood their own motivations. Given that the removal of half-caste children is, along with the killing of Aborigines on the frontier, central to a broad and polarized debate over whether white Australians carry the guilt or not of attempted genocide, these are volatile questions (Manne 2001). It is difficult, for example, to reconcile the interpretation of assimilation in Australia advanced by Wolfe (1999:32; 2001), who conflated biological and cultural assimilation, with that offered by Paul Hasluck who as Minister for Territories helped formulate and direct the post-World War II policy of cultural assimilation. Hasluck (1988:67‑68; 1995:50) argued that even those attending the 1937 Canberra conference were not proposing a 'solution' to a 'single problem' or following one particular abstract doctrine; and he insisted that, far from implementing a racial policy, most of the supporters of assimilation, including himself, were implementing their opposition to race. Arguments such as that developed by Suzanne Parry (1995) can mediate these opposed positions by proposing that well-meaning people could support or engage in actions that were facilitated by ideologies of nationalism, patriarchy, and racism without explicitly invoking them — and, I suppose, perhaps even though they might explicitly reject them. Nevertheless, such mediations do not help us to understand the different worlds in which people subjectively lived and acted.