Mis/Understanding Jens Lyng: Revisiting the Racialised Studies of an Early Twentieth-Century Historian

Mis/Understanding Jens Lyng: Revisiting the Racialised Studies of an Early Twentieth-Century Historian

The works of Danish-Australian historian Jens Sørensen Lyng (1868–1941) provide a problematic foundation for Australian migration studies. His 1927 magnum opus, Non-Britishers in Australia: Influence on Population and Progress, championed racist methodologies based on Nordic supremacy while simultaneously espousing progressive aspects of multiracial inclusion and pluralist nation-building. While revisionist histories have since condemned him as a racist pseudoscientist, Lyng’s more progressive arguments concerning Australian development and the acknowledgment that all peoples – to some extent regardless of race – had a role to play in a modernising Australia have been mostly overlooked. This article re-examines Non-Britishers in Australia and Jens Lyng himself to bring this apparent contradiction to the fore. It argues that Lyng’s work illustrates the interpolations of progressivism and racism in the era of White Australia, and that the two must be understood not as opposing sets of ideas but as ones that could be and were simultaneously promoted.