During the initial phase, in which invading Europeans first confronted Aborigines defending their territory, Aboriginal resistance was subverted as a result of the combined effects of four related factors: homicide, introduced disease, starvation, and sexual abuse. The scenario is, of course, broadly familiar in the U.S. context. There is, however, a major difference. In the United States, depictions of black sexuality dominated miscegenation discourse to an extent that led Winthrop Jordan to claim, albeit with some exaggeration, that 'the entire interracial sexual complex did not pertain to the Indian.' In Australia, on the other hand, which lacked a comparably 'third race,' miscegenation discourse came to focus primarily on indigenous people, whose blackness became correspondingly salient.
Aborigines who survived the disaster of the first phase found themselves reduced to improvising whatever livelihoods they could in the pores of the alien new society, which generally found them repugnant. Measures were introduced to confine the surviving Aboriginal 'remnant' to fixed locations, either by the lure of rations or by coercive measures. This constitutes the second, carceral phase of settler-colonial policy toward Aborigines. In keeping with Social Darwinist premises, as corroborated by Aborigines' manifest decimation, their confinement on missions and reserves was seen as a temporary measure, since they were believed to be a dying race. Although framed in philanthropic rhetoric (as in missionaries 'smoothing the dying pillow'), this phase maintained the logic of elimination in that it vacated Aboriginal territory and rendered it available for pastoral settlement.
Mission boundaries were not enough, however, to prevent the sexual encounters, conducted under conditions of radical inequality, that characterized relations between white men and Aboriginal women. These encounters produced offspring who, growing up as they almost invariably did with their maternal kin, identified themselves as Aboriginal. Moreover, far from dying out, this section of the Aboriginal population threatened to expand exponentially. As the nineteenth century moved to its close, the romance of extinction progressively gave way to the specter of the 'half-caste menace.' Aboriginal people became racialized—in the full genetic sense involved in blood quantum legislation—during the years surrounding national independence, in 1901. These developments coincided with the end of the frontier, an uneven process that marked the final internalization of the 'Aboriginal problem.' They also coincided with the introduction of the so-called White Australia Policy. Seeking to build a white man's paradise in the South Pacific, and encouraged by trade unions keen to eliminate cut-price labor, the newly federated national government in 1903 introduced legislation that curtailed non-European immigration and targeted non-white residents for deportation. Since no external homeland could be plausibly assigned to Aborigines, the remedy for the challenge that they posed to white Australia was not projection without but absorption within. From around the turn of the twentieth century, a range of measures were introduced that were designed to detach individuals from Aboriginal communities, stripping them of their Aboriginal identities and incorporating them into white society. Thus the assimilation police was a symptom of Aborigines' containment within Australian society, constituting an internal correlate to the White Australia Policy.
—Patrick Wolfe, from "Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race," published in The American Historical Review
