In this lucid and original book, Warwick Anderson offers the first comprehensive history of Australian medical and scientific ideas about race and place. ""The Cultivation of Whiteness"" examines the notion of 'whiteness' as a flexible category in scientific and public debates. This is the first time such an analytic framework has been used anywhere in the history of medicine or of science. Anderson also provides the first full account of experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s on Aboriginal people in the central deserts. As the first extensive (and entertaining) historical survey of ideas about the peopling of Australia, it will help to reshape debate on race, ethnicity, citizenship and environment.