Meeting of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council of Victoria

Meeting of the Select Committee of the Legislative Council of Victoria

In 1858, shortly before The Octoroon was written, Australian legislator William Hull asserted to a Select Committee of the Legislative Council of Victoria, that it was "the design of Providence that the inferior races should pass away before the superior races . . . since we have occupied the country, the aborigines must cease to occupy it."

(Willian Hull, J. P. Report of Select Committee of the Legislative Council of the Aborigines, Victoria, Australia; Together with the Proceedings of Committee, Minutes of Evidence, and Appendices. (Ordered by The Council To Be Printed, John Ferres, Government Printer, Melbourne, 1859), 9, available at http://aiatsis.gov.au/sites/default/files/docs/digitised_collections/remove/92768.pdf. Cited in Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880-1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997), 15).

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