This volume presents an attempt to reveal and explain the sources of racial interaction in an Australian colonial setting. Dealing, as it does, with European and mostly British reactions to the main racial minority groups in the one colony and over the same time period, it affords a unique opportunity to examine an entire corpus of racial thought, expression and behaviour by whites towards non-whites within a single, coherent and intelligible framework: a framework, moreover, which demonstrates definite patterns of racial conflict and colo nial conquest, as well as the realities of racial subjugation. oppression and discrimination. Our title is therefore uncompromisingly blunt and purposely so. The picture we mean to present is one of a white-dominated, though racially hetero geneous society moving painfully-and, ultimately, vainly towards a desired goal of white homogeneity and 'racial purity".