'Is White Australia possible?' Race, colonialism and tropical medicine

Abstract

This article investigates the early twentieth century discourse of tropical medicine as a site in which "whiteness" became the object of biomedical scrutiny. Australian tropical medicine is notable in that it reversed the usual raced and gendered dynamics of Western medico-scientific research. Rather than studying the black body, it studied the white body, and rather than pathologizing women, it pathologized men. In the early to mid twentieth century tropical medicine was one of the primary sites for the formation of Australian governmental racism and nationalism, and for discussion and implementation of the infamous "white Australia policy". It was a response to European science which had long argued that "white man" and white populations would degenerate in the tropics. I examine tropical medicine and public health more generally as a mode of colonization of northern Australia, in which Aboriginal people were governed and managed through health measures. I also examine the specific ways in which whiteness was constituted by tropical medicine, and the class and gender issues which shaped the representational possibilities of this whiteness.