ABSTRACT
In the introductory essay to his 1893 Romanes Lecture, Thomas Henry Huxley noted: ‘the colony is a composite unit introduced into the old state of nature; and thenceforth, a competitor in the struggle for existence, to conquer or to be vanquished’.1 This utilisation of evolution as an analogy for the imperial process should not come as a surprise, for Huxley was amongst the chief popularisers of Darwinian ideas. He is credited with establishing the modern idea of the professional scientist as a secular prophet. This ‘devil’s disciple’ and ‘high priest of evolution’, as one historian has described Huxley, saw colonialism as providing further proof of the efficacy of evolution.2 If the colonists were ‘slothful, stupid and careless’, then their colonies would be overtaken by the ‘old state of nature’. Using the example of a shipload of ‘English colonists’ landing in Tasmania he noted: ‘[t]he native savage will destroy the immigrant civilized man; of the English animals and plants some will be extirpated by their indigenous rivals, others will pass into the feral state and themselves become components of nature’. To ensure that this did not occur, Huxley spelt out the importance of protection against extreme heat and cold in the form of housing and clothing; he advocated drainage and irrigation works which would deter the effects of excessive rain and drought; roads, bridges, canals and ships that would overcome natural barriers to transport; ‘mechanical engines [which] would supplement the natural strength of men and their draught animals’, and hygiene which would deter the onset of disease. ‘With every step of this progress of civilization, the colonists would become more and more independent of the state of nature; more and more their lives would be conditioned by a state of art.’ Colonialism would thus be subject to natural processes. But colonial power would be forged as it overcame and transformed nature, and, even at its highpoint, empire would be susceptible to defeat by evolution. But
by this point of the nineteenth century, the last of the Tasmanian aboriginals was deemed dead.3
