Amongst the white population it was a widely held view that Australia's indigenous peoples were doomed. Australia's traditional owners were not considered to be a threat to white Australia because it was believed that they would not and could not survive in a 'civilised' society. It seemed not to occur to white Australians to blame themselves for the plight of the peoples they had killed and dispossessed. The following document contains statements that we know, today, to be completely wrong, but 'white' chauvinism made them accepted 'scientific facts' at the time. White 'Britishers' seemed blind to what we would now see as the arrogance, ignorance, injustice and cruelty of their own prejudiced assumptions – nevertheless, the following document is relatively moderate for its time.

Focus questions
RaQ1 What reasons are given for 'compensating' indigenous Australians?
RaQ2 What compensation is offered?
RaQ3 Imagine you are forced to leave your home and robbed of all your possessions. What compensation would you require?
RaQ4 Does the writer believe it is possible to successfully convert 'the Australian black' population to Christianity?
RaQ5 Why do you think the Christian religion and civilisation are important to the writer?

DESTINED TO DIE OUT?

What can be done for the Australian black? Is he capable of Christianisation? Is he capable even of civilisation? And is he so capable of either as to justify increased effort and expenditure ...

That the aborigines of Australia are destined to die out as those of Tasmania have already done, and those of New Zealand, not withstanding many elements of superiority, are fast doing, is admitted on all hands. The efforts therefore to which we are called on their behalf are not stimulated by the prospect of abiding or growing result, as in the case of a potential nationality; and it is the more requisite that good cause for action should be shown. Certain subordinate causes for action can be easily understood. It may be said, for instance, that the white man, in dispossessing the black of his hunting ground, has deprived him of his means of living, and that simple justice demands that compensation should be made at least to the extent of providing for the bodily necessities of the original holders of the soil. It may even be said that interest makes the same demand; for it is clear that the black, deprived of kangaroo, must, if not otherwise provided for, prey upon the sheep and cattle which have replaced it. These things must be admitted if the country is not prepared to take the rough-and-ready method, of which most people think we have had more than enough, which shoots down the blacks as human dingoes. Avoiding this intolerable extreme, the cheapest thing Australia can do is to feed and clothe her blacks so long as they are above ground.

It is when we are asked to do more than this ... that our difficulties begin. If we are asked to civilise the black, and still more if we are asked to Christianise him ... [W]hat is wanted is some fair rebutment of the evidence that he is incapable of them [i.e. Civilization and Christianity]... We want to have it proved to us that Christian missions to the blacks have succeeded and can succeed ... It is notorious that the "salvability" of the Australian black is doubted or denied.

Evening Observer, Brisbane, 24 July 1890, cited in Raymond Evans et al., 1901 Our Future's Past, Macmillan, Sydney, 1997, p. 48.