a shortage of food. Along the frontier of settlement in the early twentieth century, relations between whites and Aborigines continued to reveal conflict and inhumanity. The Aborigines who were forced to live on the Government reserves or mission stations, mainly lived in squalor and poverty. There they received the minimum necessities - medicine, shelter, a minimum of food that in most places was inadequate to sustain a healthy life, and the customary blankets. In some places some schooling and elementary training in practical skills was also provided. There was a very high child mortality rate within the reserves. Whether the mission or reserve was church or government run, the aboriginal people who were situated there were regimented and severely punished if they did not obey the rules. Aborigines in 1900 had been stripped of their former way of life and were treated like ignorant animals and slaves.The lack of humanitarian care in the aborigines situation was encouraged by the common held view in society that the aborigines were a dying race. Drawing from the Darwin theory, white society believed that extinction of the Aborigines was a part of evolution, survival of the fittest. Such an attitude was confirmed by a decline in Aboriginal population, with only 40 000 full-blooded aborigines estimated to be still alive in 1901. Most of the survivors were shipped off to the reserves left to die out of the white public eye. Australian society believed that the Aboriginal people were doomed to a natural selection death at the hands of the fitter Europeans, thus causing a general disregard for Aboriginal wellbeing.The Darwinist way of thinking led to the exclusionist policy of the 1901 Australian Constitution, written up after federation in 1901. The aboriginal race, Australias original landowners, was not even counted as a part of the nations population. As well as not including them in the national census, the constitution excluded aborig...
