Melbourne: Hub of the Australian Eugenics Movement
Melbourne, and more precisely, the University of Melbourne, played a pivotal role in eugenics before WWI and especially during the interwar years. Melbourne University was in the forefront of the academic dissemination of eugenics ideology, its academics persuasive in their efforts to shape public policy on health❈. With professor of anatomy Richard Berry the principal advocate of the racial ‘purification’ cause on campus, the university spawned the Eugenics Education Society (EES). According to Ross Jones the EES “eugenicists operated primarily as a pressure group within the university, the education department and various government agencies and committees”[1]. Later the society morphed into the Eugenics Society of Victoria (1936). The obsessive skull-measurer Berry declared war on “rotten heredity”, calling for mandatory sterilisation and segregation of aborigines, the poor, homosexuals, prostitutes, criminals, alcoholics, the mentally ill, people with small heads and those with low IQs. Berry also advocated for a “lethal chamber” to euthanise “the grosser types of our mental defectives” as he described them (including Australian aborigines)[2].

Berry was the zealous “campaign director” for the dissemination of egregious ideas about race and the advocacy of eugenic interventions in Victoria, but he had plenty of other willing collaborators at Parkville (the university). Other Melbourne U professors up to their elbows in the eugenics movement included educationalist Frank Tate¤, biologist Baldwin Spencer and one-time vice-chancellor John Medley. Zoologist Wilfred Agar, like the others also honoured with an eponymous building at the university[3], was at one time “chief protector” of Aborigines(sic) in Darwin where he vilified aborigines and happily oversaw the removal of indigenous children from their families[4]. Another influential proponent of eugenics was Berry’s friend, the psychiatrist William Ernest Jones. Jones railed against “low-class Roman Catholic Irish” in whom he detected an “inherent lunacy”[5]

The campaign driven by the Victorian Eugenics Society resulted in mental deficiency legislation passing through Victorian parliament in 1939 but the eugenics policies were never implemented¤ ※ initially because of the onset of war (and later on after shocking revelations about the Holocaust came to light)[6]. Meanwhile, over the border in NSW, eugenicist doctor and minister for health Richard Arthur met similar difficulties with his 1930 mental defectives bill which failed to be passed. The so-called ‘reform’ eugenicists whilst still intent on denying sectors of the community some of the fundamental rights of citizenship (including the right to marry and to reproduce), also undertook interventions aimed at societal improvement (slum clearance, health reforms, educational reforms)[7]. Despite the wholesale discrediting of the eugenics movement from the 1940s the Eugenics Society of Victoria lingered on until 1961, having steered a course away from outright endorsement of eugenic measures.

Other pillars of Victorian society also firmly entrenched in the eugenics camp included newspaperman Sir Keith Murdoch (Rupert’s father), the CEO of the organisation that became CSIRO, Sir David Rivett, and the founder of ACER (Australian Council of Educational Research) Kenneth Cunningham. The involvement of many of the eminent has not received the scrutiny that Berry has … academic Ross Jones suggests a “conscious cover up” of prominent Melburnians took place post-war with the whole subject of eugenics becoming taboo[8] (there seems to be a pattern of excising the unsavoury activities of eugenicists from biographies to ensure reputation preservation for many implicated in the Australasian movements – see also PostScript).

Feminist-Eugenists and the Racial Hygienists
The progressive circles of Australasian society with an interest in eugenics included middle class women’s groups. Several prominent feminists, for the most part well-educated, were in the vanguard of the eugenics movement. Their agenda was focused very much on birth control for poorer, working class women. In Australia the NSW Racial Hygiene Association (RHA), founded by Lillie Goodisson, Marion Piddington (an early advocate of artificial insemination) and Ruby Rich in 1926, endorsed selective breeding to end hereditary disease and defects, and campaigned without success for the “mentally handicapped” to be segregated and sterilised. The Sydney-based RHA started the first birth control clinic in Australia in 1933✤. As the practice of eugenics became increasingly stigmatised the RHA shifted its focus to family planning with an organisational name-change in 1960 reflecting this change.

The RHA were instrumental in campaigning for pre-marital safeguards to ‘purify’ the White stock … hygiene clinics, mental and physical tests and the issuing of certificates of approval to engaged couples who tick all the right boxes for ‘purity’. In a similar vein south of the Murray the Eugenics Society of Victoria were demanding compulsory pre-nuptials health checks for couples as late as 1947[9]. The New Zealand bureaucracy had matrimonial ‘purity’ checks as well … those couples who obtained an official Eugenic Certificate received a piece of paper affirming that they had been adjudged to possess “a perfect physical and mental balance and unusually strong Eugenic Love possibilities (necessary for) “the future welfare of the race”.

New Zealand women for “race improvement”: organised volunteers and ‘femocrats’
Across the Tasman various NZ elite women’s groups were active in combating what they saw as the degeneracy of society. As noted by Angela Wanhalla, “New Zealand women’s organisations were among the most vocal supporters of eugenic attempts at race betterment”[9]. These middle-class dominated groups included the National Council of Women, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Farmers’ Union (Women’s Division)[10]. As well as the volunteer organisations! many ‘femocrats’ in the professions and government bureaucracies added their voices to the chorus advocating eugenics as the way forward to a better New Zealand[11].

‘Grass roots’ racial fitness in NZ
New Zealand’s quest for ongoing, nationwide improvements in the eugenic fabric of the country included the periodical measurement of Pākehā schoolchildren. In 1927 bureaucrats delighted to announce that New Zealand children were taller and heavier than their English counterparts (and than Australian as well!)◘. These findings reinforced the belief that New Zealand was the ideal nursery for British stock. Agricultural-based New Zealand missed no opportunity to promote itself as “Britain’s farm”, the exporter of primary products to the ‘Mother’ country[12].

PostScript: No retrospective … the iniquitous past practice that dare not speak its name
Devotees of conspiracy theories would revel in the apparent hush-up subsequently of the involvement of many prominent Australasians in eugenics. A cursory thumb-through of ADB and DNZB✡ biographies of Australasian public figures (especially medical practitioners, scientists and educationalists), largely written before the 1990s, is very revealing. In the mini-bios of figures who were significant and even integral in some cases to the eugenics movements in Australia and New Zealand, eg, Richard Berry, Frank Tate, Kenneth Cunningham, Raphael Cilento, Harvey Sutton, Elizabeth Gunn, Truby King and Duncan MacGregor, eugenics doesn’t rate a mention – any reference to their key historic roles in eugenic causes have been discreetly omitted (or if mentioned at all their eugenics careers have been swiftly glossed over). By the 1950s most eugenicists still practicing in Australia and New Zealand had, as elsewhere, sought to distance themselves from the negative connotations of the eugenics title by adopting new designations such as “human geneticist”, ‘sociologist’ or ‘demographer'[13].

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❈ the University of Melbourne’s counterpart in the US was the University of Virginia, a stronghold of the belief and practice where a “eugenics mania” existed (see also ‘The Eugenics Movement in Australasia IV’)
¤ one of Tate’s pet projects as director of education was aimed at excluding working class kids from secondary and tertiary education, in sharp contrast to his NSW counterpart Peter Board’s equality of opportunity approach
※ compare with the success of eugenics legislation in the US – in the 1920s and ’30s sterilisation laws were passed in 24 of the (then) 48 states
✤ the RHA and other elite other women’s groups were undoubtedly inspired and enlightened by the international trail-blazers in the birth control field … British palaeobotanist Marie Stopes and American nurse and sex educator Margaret Sanger, both strongly committed eugenics ideologists
◘ measurement to determine physical fitness became a pastime of state officials on both sides of the Tasman. In Australia, welfare worker Dr Mary Booth was a consistent advocate for even more anthropometry, as was eugenicist Dr Harvey Sutton. Many of the anthropometrically-inclined like fitness expert H C Bjelke-Petersen were perturbed to discover that the chest-girth of the typical white schoolboy in Australia was “distressingly small”, W Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny. All of the eugenic emphasis on measurement did have a utilitarian purpose in encouraging statistics-gathering by the state
✡ Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University; Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, NZ Ministry for Culture & Heritage)

[1] R L Jones, ‘Eugenics in Australia: The Secret of Melbourne’s Elite’, The Conversation, 21-Sep-2011, www.theconversation.com
[2] Australasian politicians were pretty much in synch with the eugenicist-scientists, certainly in regard to craniometry – in 1911 Australian PM Andrew Fisher urged the state premiers to regularly measure the heads of state schoolchildren, Walker, op.cit. Craniology – examining the human skull to ascertain supposed racial differentiation, harks back to the earlier (19th century) pseudo-science of phrenology which purported to divine(sic) character and mental capacity by also examining the skull; E Cervini, ‘A theory out of darkness’, Sydney Morning Herald, 13-Sep-2011, www.smh.com.au
[3] community disquiet about the retention of eugenicist nomenclature at Melbourne University is a topic that is gaining heat, E Cervini, ‘Its time Melbourne Uni stopping honouring eugenicist Richard Berry’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 6-March-2016. The focus remains on the unapologetic Berry who never recanted his eugenicist beliefs and maintained a collection of aboriginal ancestral remains in the Anatomy building on campus
[4] M Dobbin, ‘Heart of darkness: Melbourne University’s racist professors’, The Age (Melbourne), 30-Nov-2015, www.theage.com.au
[5] S G Foster, ‘Jones, William Ernest (1867–1957)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/jones-william-ernest-6882/text11929, published first in hardcopy 1983, accessed online 19 November 2016
[6] Jones, ‘Secret of Melbourne’s elite’, op.cit.
[7] R L Jones, ‘The master potter and the rejected pots: Eugenic legislation in Victoria, 1918-1939’, Australian Historical Studies, 1999; 30(113)
[8] A C Wanhalla, ‘Gender, Race and Colonial Identity: Women and Eugenics in New Zealand, 1918-1939’, Unpub. Thesis for MA in History, (University of Canterbury, NZ, 2001)
[9] Cervini, ‘Theory out of darkness’, op.cit.
[9] Wanhalla, op.cit.
[10] A Bashford, Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, National and Public Health
[11] A Rees, ‘The Quality and not only the Quantity of Australia’s People. Ruby Rich and the Racial Hygiene Association of NSW’, Australian Feminist Studies, Vol 27 2012 – Issue 71, http://dex.doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2012.648262, pub. online: 07-Mar-2012; ‘The Racial Hygiene Association of New South Wales’, (Wikipedia), http://en.m.wikipedia.org; A C Wanhalla, ‘Gender, race and colonial identity : women and eugenics in New Zealand, 1918-1939’, (CORE, University of Canterbury 2001), www.core.ac.uk
[12] P Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand
[13] D H Wyndham, ‘Striving for National Fitness: Eugenics in Australia 1910s to 1930s’, (Unpub. PhD thesis, Department of History, University of Sydney, July 1996)