Bernard O'Dowd and the 'Problem' of Race

So wrote Humphrey McQueen in 1970: and historians have largely accepted his contention that Australian nationalism and racism were inseparable bedfellows in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The aim of this paper is to explore the racial ideas of one radical nationalist intellectual of this period, Bernard O'Dowd (1866- 1953), who seems to be an exception to the McQueen thesis. Its object, however, is not merely to provide a sketch of the ideas of an eccentric man. Instead, I am pursuing a method advocated by the cultural historian Robert Darnton of attempting to understand the past by exploring it at the points 'where it seems to be most opaque':