Science and the Savage: the Linnean Society of New South Wales, 1874-1900

Abstract

or in darker imaginings, unevolved beasts has a long ancestry of critique in the human sciences. A tradition of psychologically based research into white attitudes in the settler societies of British empire has chronicled the diverse forms of prejudice against indigenous people, including those who, in moving to cities, were seen as detribalized misfits, dislocated from their natural habitats in the open spaces of country.’ More recently, concepts of ’the primitive’ have been critically deconstructed to reveal the discursive practices out of which social relations were configured in colonial societies.’ In that critique, the contribution made by various legitimizing agents to the racialized representation of indigenous peoples has been carefully documented, including that by scientists who, in their various ’mismeasures of man’ in the nineteenth century, left an indelible stamp on public beliefs.’ The diverse research efforts of, for example, craniologists, phrenologists, eugenicists and various other physical anthropologists who sought to calibrate ’man’s’ putatively finite forms of biological organization have been shown to authorize ideas of race difference and hierarchy that flourished under European colonial regimes. In the analysis of the constitution of racialized knowledges, much less attention, however, has been paid to those sciences which took, not ’man’, but rather ’nature’ as their primary object and field of investigation. The overwhelming focus of critical historiographies of race knowledge by the academy have been the disciplines of anthropology and geography, which inscribed otherness in the course of their own institutional development and alignment with the interest of empire.’ Yet in particular colonial settings, earth scientists, botanists, zoologists and variously aspiring naturalists played an equally vital role in fuelling nineteenth-century conceptions of difference that were in currency throughout European empires. Such scientists formed societies devoted to studying the colony, of which a natural history organization in New South Wales is this paper’s