Nothing seemed to offer more striking proof to the late Victorian mind of the infernal truth of social Darwinism than the supposed demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Unlike some mainland black groups, Tasmanian Aborigines now have no traditional tribal culture left. It was taken from them with great violence and great rapidity.
In the late 19th century, the theory that the Aborigines were an inferior race that was doomed to die out became accepted as fact.
The number of those identifying as Aborigine in Tasmania rapidly rose in the late 20th century.
Unfortunately, anti-Darwinism keeps playing minor variations on the same negative themes and adds nothing to our understanding of life.
It's very easy for Australians living in big cities to either romanticise or demonise the situation in Aboriginal places - to kind of look at things through the 'noble innocents' prism or through the 'chronically dysfunctional' prism, and I suspect that is so often the case.
My grandparents would never admit to being Tasmanian, but I think it's really great and funny. But I guess, in the past, Tasmanians just weren't quite accepted. You had that lazy reference to them being felons.
I hope I may have succeeded in presenting to you, however imperfectly, the currents of thought due to the work of the immortal Darwin which have helped to make anthropology what it is at the present time.
Darwin himself recorded the fact that he accepted the Malthusian idea.
But, as we have before been led to remark, most of Mr. Darwin's statements elude, by their vagueness and incompleteness, the test of Natural History facts.
The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.
No opposing quotes found.