Turn this water into wine

Abstract

Since the continent of the Australian Aborigines was colonised, most commentary on the ‘natives’ was in terms of being child-like and that the state of being of the native personified the basic elements of nature. Over the twentieth century- while attempting simultaneously to preserve and extinguish the ‘tangible form’ and the ‘true nature’ of the Aborigine - much effort was directed towards biologically and socially transmuting the substance of the native into a mimicry of whiteness through the application of science and the employment of Christianity. The following is an explanatory treatise discussing a noteworthy grouping of interactions between a number of bureaucrats, politicians, missionaries and anthropologists who - although dedicated to constructing a new (white) existence for Aboriginal people - could never quite disengage from simplistic characterisations of the people for whom they were advocating.