Letter to the Editor
The echoes of assimilationism taught in our universities still haunt us
Many decades ago I was an honours student of anthropology at Sydney University. My thesis supervisor was W. R. ‘Bill’ Geddes. I was not fated to do outstandingly under him, but that’s another story. What haunts me now is his advocacy, not least in our one-on-one supervisory sessions in 1969, of assimilationism. It awakened no positive response in me – my family were of the left and always supported indigenous causes of another stripe.
Was Geddes in some political relation to this idea or was it a peculiarity of his anthropology?
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