Difference Between Australia And Polygenism

In Kay Anderson and Colin Perrin’s paper, “How race became everything: Australia and polygenism” (Anderson 2008), they document a shift in our idea of the term ‘race’, that happened somewhere during the mid-eighteenth century, and that moved our thinking from a general Christian, monogenetic paradigm to a more scientifically backed polygenetic paradigm, due largely to the complexities surrounding the Aborigines of Australia, being ‘apparently unimproved’, and hence, ‘extremely savage’, they precipitated a crisis in existing ideas of what it meant to be human, and Polygenism attempted to account for those differing ideas.
The authors claim that before this shift happened, pre-18th century, mankind thought of race as being an environmental or
Humanism characterized ‘the human’ by its “separation from and capacity to rise above nature”, by virtue of cultivation of the ground, and domestication of animals, and is attributed to the Bible’s injunction to subdue nature. Differences in how we fared at ‘subduing nature’ could be explained by how each people had adapted to its own particular environment, but was all considered to be on the same human scale, there was always the ‘underlying unity of man’. They saw race as people who were further ahead or behind rather than as being something different because of some innate difference or deficiency, but thought us all as one species. Men launched ‘Human Development’ and ‘Human Improvability’ efforts trying to ‘civilize’ the ‘savage’ Indians, but there were very few success stories. The article states that “Clearly the limited level of development among the American Indians caused some concern, and at the very least required further explanation”.
By this time the dominating view was that the Aborigines’ barbarism could not necessarily be ascribed to ‘any inconquerable dullness of intellect, but merely to their love of erratic liberty’ (Colonial Office 1844, p. 150). They would soon be giving up and letting the indigenous peoples be put on reservations where they could transition from hunter to cultivator on their own time. They claimed that “Aborigines were uniquely incapable of improvement in general, and of cultivation in particular”, yet “An ‘intelligent’ Aboriginal witness called before the committee was asked by the chairman: ‘Would any black fellows living about you now like to have a farm and to grow cabbages and other things?’ When told ‘they would not stop by it’, the witness was asked for clarification: ‘They like to walk about?’ To which the answer was ‘Yes’” (Colonial Department 1845, p. 4). But these innate deficiencies were ‘confirmed’ by 19th century phrenology and craniology, declaring the attempts to civilize the savage as futile, that their reflective faculties were deficient in many areas, Number, Constructiveness, Reflection, and Ideality being at the top of the list. By 1866 it was a world-wide fact that the savage hunters were irreclaimable, and a lost cause, as printed in the British-based Popular Magazine of