Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880-1939

White Australians once confidently—if regretfully—believed that the Aboriginal people were doomed to extinction. Even in the 1950s, Australian children were still being taught that the Australian Aboriginals were a dying race who would eventually disappear from the face of the earth.

In Imagined Destinies, Russell McGregor explores the origins and the gradual demise of the 'doomed race' theory, which was unquestioned in nineteenth-century European thinking and remained uncontested until the...