Role Of Social Darwinism In Australia

Social Darwinism is the theory that groups of people or races can be compared to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin did with plants and animals in nature. During the period of 1930 and 1970, social Darwinist theories played a major role in negatively impacting the lives of Aborigines in Australia to a great extent. They used the social Darwinist theories as an excuse for the white Australians to apply Darwinist theories like 'survival of the fittest' and 'white superiority' and the overall ill-treatment of the Aborigines. They believed that because of their primitive lifestyle and culture they should be segregated so it was easier to hunt them down and change the mindset sets of the half caste children. Despite, the social Darwinist theories that the white …show more content…
The British people wanted the Aboriginal people to live the way did and they made an assumption that the Aborigines wanted too. They thought by breeding out and changing the lifestyles of the Aboriginal people, that they were helping them out and making them a better race. The missionaries assumed that by making them abandon their spirituality and religion, they were saving them from the devil and submitting them to God. The officials, mainly Mr. A.O Neville, thought that they were giving the half-caste children better lives by sending them to European families. Even though some of the Aboriginal people would have learned the English lifestyle and culture and completely changed into an English person, in that forgetting everything Aboriginal about themselves the white Australians still saw them as inferior and so they were still paid lower wages, they were not allowed to vote, they had to request for marriages and other restrictions were still placed upon the despite their