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Nowhere People
  • Published: 5 May 2008
  • ISBN: 9781742284231
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 300
Categories:

Nowhere People



'That's how at six at night on 11 May 1928 I stopped being a Yanyuwa child and became a nowhere person... Motherless, cultureless and stuck in a government institution because my mother was Aboriginal and my father was not. I ceased to be an Aboriginal but I would never be white. I was not something bad, shameful, called a half-caste.' - Hilda Jarman Muir
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people of mixed Aboriginal and European ancestry - half-castes - were commonly assumed to be morally and physically defective, unstable and degenerate. They bore the brunt of society's contempt, and the remobal of their children created Australia's stolen generations.
Nowhere People is a history of beliefs about people of mixed race, both in Australia and overseas. It explores the concept of racial purity, eugenics, and the threat posed by miscegenation. Award-winning author Henry Reynolds also tells for the first time of his own family's search for the truth about his father's ancestry, and gives a poignant account of the contemporary predicament facing people of mixed heritage.

  • Published: 5 May 2008
  • ISBN: 9781742284231
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 300
Categories:

About the author

Henry Reynolds

Henry Reynolds is the author of fourteen books, including An Indelible Stain?, The Other Side of the Frontier, Black Pioneers, Fate of a Free People, This Whispering in Our Hearts and the award-winning Why Weren't We Told? Born in Hobart, Tasmania, in 1938, Henry taught in secondary schools in Australia and England after receiving a Master of Arts from the University of Tasmania, and for many years was on the teaching staff in the history department of James Cook University in Townsville. He is currently Research Professor at the University of Tasmania and is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Senior Research Fellowship.

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