te view of a superior status, than that of their fellow mankind, those of the Australian Aborigines.
             'Let us make their passage to the grave as comfortable as possible', allows the reader to be left with no other choice, than that of a program of systematic genocide was well under way in the year of 1868, against the Australian Aborigine. This view was held open by the 'Illustrated Melbourne Post', a paper with a large reader contingent. Running through many of the speeches at this time was the powerful current of popular Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism was the application to society of the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and was first published in his 'Origin of the Species' in 1859. These ideas came to dominate Australian thinking from the late 19th century until the 1940s and can be found in both popular & scholarly work. Aborigines were seen by many as being a lower link of a static chain of being. Social Darwinists regarded them as an earlier, less evolved people. They were, as a result, doomed to die out. They could not compete in the struggle for existence with the higher European race. Humanitarian concern might ease the passing but nothing could bend the laws of evolution.
             Henry Reynolds (1998) in his work, 'This Whispering In Our Hearts', goes on to describe th
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