This new study offers a timely and compelling account of why past generations of Australians have seen the north of the country as an empty land, and how those perceptions of Australia's tropical regions impact current policy and shape the self-image of the nation. It considers the origins of these concerns - from fears of invasion and moral qualms about leaving resources lying idle, from apprehensions about white nationhood coming under international censure and misgivings about the natural attributes of the north - and elucidates Australians' changing appreciations of the natural environments of the north, their shifting attitudes toward race and their unsettled conceptions of Asia.

This new study offers a timely and compelling account of why past generations of Australians have seen the north of the country as an empty land, and how those perceptions of Australia's tropical regions impact current policy and shape the self-image of the nation. It considers the origins of these concerns - from fears of invasion and moral qualms about leaving resources lying idle, from apprehensions about white nationhood coming under international censure and misgivings about the natural attributes of the north - and elucidates Australians' changing appreciations of the natural environments of the north, their shifting attitudes toward race and their unsettled conceptions of Asia.

White Australians once confidently-if regretfully-believed that the Aboriginal people were doomed to extinction. Even in the 1950s, Australian children were still being taught that the Australian Aboriginals were a dying race who would eventually disappear from the face of the earth. In Imagined Destinies, Russell McGregor explores the origins and the gradual demise of the 'doomed race' theory, which was unquestioned in nineteenth-century European thinking and remained uncontested until the 1930s. White perceptions of Australia s indigenous people and their future had been shaped by Enlightenment ideas about progress, Darwin s new theories on the survival of the fittest, and other European philosophical concepts. Imagined Destinies provides a challenging analysis and history of an idea which has exerted a powerful influence over white Australian attitudes to, and policies for, Aboriginal people. Indeed, its long shadow may still be with us.

McGregor offers a holistic interpretation of the complex relationship between Indigenous and settler Australians during the middle four decades of the twentieth century. Combining the perspectives of political, social and cultural history in a coherent narrative, he provides a cogent analysis of how the relationship changed, and the impediments to change.

An exploration of the doomed race theory and its place in the Western imagination. This study applies observations to the relationship between white Australians and the Aboriginals.