Governing natives: Indirect rule and settler colonialism in Australia's north 9781526100054

Citation preview

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

General editors: Andrew S. Thompson and Alan Lester

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Founding editor: John M. MacKenzie When the ‘Studies in Imperialism’ series was founded by Professor John M. MacKenzie more than thirty years ago, emphasis was laid upon the conviction that ‘imperialism as a cultural phenomenon had as significant an effect on the dominant as on the subordinate societies’. With well over a hundred titles now published, this remains the prime concern of the series. Cross-disciplinary work has indeed appeared covering the full spectrum of cultural phenomena, as well as examining aspects of gender and sex, frontiers and law, science and the environment, language and literature, migration and patriotic societies, and much else. Moreover, the series has always wished to present comparative work on European and American imperialism, and particularly welcomes the submission of books in these areas. The fascination with imperialism, in all its aspects, shows no sign of abating, and this series will continue to lead the way in encouraging the widest possible range of studies in the field. ‘Studies in Imperialism’ is fully organic in its development, always seeking to be at the cutting edge, responding to the latest interests of scholars and the needs of this ever-expanding area of scholarship.

Governing natives

SELECTED TITLES AVAILABLE IN THE SERIES WRITING IMPERIAL HISTORIES ed. Andrew S. Thompson GENDERED TRANSACTIONS Indrani Sen

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

EXHIBITING THE EMPIRE ed. John M. MacKenzie and John McAleer BANISHED POTENTATES Robert Aldrich MISTRESS OF EVERYTHING ed. Sarah Carter and Maria Nugent BRITAIN AND THE FORMATION OF THE GULF STATES Shohei Sato CULTURES OF DECOLONISATION ed. Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle HONG KONG AND BRITISH CULTURE, 1945–97 Mark Hampton

Governing natives Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

INDIRECT RULE AND SETTLER COLONIALISM IN AUSTRALIA’S NORTH

Ben Silverstein

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Ben Silverstein 2019 The right of Ben Silverstein to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS ALTRINCHAM STREET, MANCHESTER M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 7849 9526 3  hardback First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

CONT ENTS

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Acknowledgements—vi Note on terms—viii List of abbreviations—ix 1 Strehlow’s problem: colonial transformations and a governmental event 2 The political organisation of the British in their Empire, 1875–1939: transforming indirect rule 3 Reporting on the northern contradiction: conflict and crisis, 1918–45 4 Thomson in Canberra: anthropologising Aborigines 5 Native administration in the Northern Territory: a white minority in the national community 6 From a White Australia to an Aboriginal New Deal 7 The long march: work and the ends of settler colonialism 8 Never yet: the tense of citizenship Bibliography—194 Index—213

[v]

1 24 54 81 106 135 161 184

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

ACK NOW L EDGEM EN TS

Researching and writing this book has been a slow process and I have many to thank, at a number of institutions, for their help and support over the years. At La Trobe University I was lucky to work with and alongside a number of welcoming and stimulating colleagues. For their solidarity, support, and advice, a special thanks to Richard Broome, Roland Burke, Michelle Carmody, Claudia Haake, Gabby Haynes, Katie Holmes, Rhys Isaac, Diane Kirkby, Marilyn Lake, Damir Mitric, Nadia Rhook, and Randal Sheppard. I began writing this manuscript while employed as a Lecturer at Nura Gili Indigenous Programs Unit at the University of New South Wales, where many of the ideas were developed, challenged, and refined in conversations with a group of colleagues and comrades including Duane Hamacher, Leah Lui-Chivizhe, Sarah Keech, Ben Kelly, Martin Nakata, Vicky Nakata, Damien O’Reilly, and Virginia Watson. In mid-2016 I moved to the History Department at the University of Sydney, and I am especially grateful to Warwick Anderson, who offered me the time, space, support, and intellectual provocations that made completing this book a possibility. There I was part of a team researching ‘Race and Ethnicity in the Global South’, joining a wonderful group of scholars including Jamie Dunk, Sebastián Gil-Riaño, Miranda Johnson, and Sarah Walsh. And since the beginning of 2018 I have worked at the Australian National University, where Ann McGrath’s project on ‘Rediscovering the Deep Human Past’ is continuing to challenge the way I think of Aboriginal histories and historiographies. The research for Governing natives was made possible by the generous assistance of a number of librarians and archivists. I am particularly thankful to staff at the National Archives of Australia offices in Canberra and Darwin, the University of Sydney Archives, and the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies in Oxford. Materially, this research was supported by the Lloyd Robson Memorial Award, travel funding provided by La Trobe University, and two Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship grants: FL110100243 at the University of Sydney, and FL170100121 at the ANU. I am grateful to those friends and colleagues whose care, encouragement, solidarity, and urges to write have been crucial. Thanks to Tamar Blickstein, Roland Burke, Jane Carey, Ann Curthoys, John Docker, Amanda Kearney, Dane Kennedy, Philippa Levine, Sophie Loy-Wilson, Fiona Paisley, Zora Simic, Audra Simpson, and Lorenzo Veracini. A [ vi ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

ACK NOW LEDGEMENTS

special thanks to Claire McLisky, Erica Millar, and Crystal McKinnon, who have been dear friends and co-conspirators throughout this project, and from whom I have learnt immeasurably. This book has also benefited from the questions and criticisms of those who read it in various stages of development, from Gurminder Bhambra, Akira Iriye, and Gyan Prakash, who each read and commented on much earlier versions of some chapters, to Tracey Banivanua Mar, Penny Edmonds, Julie Evans, David Philips, and Patrick Wolfe, who were all wonderfully supportive readers and provided valuable advice and guidance, to my PhD examiners Ann Curthoys, Wm Roger Louis, and Henry Reynolds, whose helpful and encouraging feedback made this a better book. Roland Burke, Sara Dehm, Coel Kirkby, Jordy Silverstein, and Sarah Walsh all read drafts of various parts of the book and I am grateful for their many thoughts and suggestions. Emma Brennan has been a generous and patient editor, bearing with me through long periods of slow thinking and frenzied rewriting. Thanks also to the anonymous readers who helped refine the scope and whose advice ensured that this is a book that makes some sense. I am especially thankful to Tracey Banivanua Mar and Patrick Wolfe, who formed an irrepressible team guiding me through research, thinking, and writing to develop new questions and more compelling answers. Tracey and Patrick were both brilliant; working with them was both daunting and exhilarating. I benefited from their demanding generosity, their insistent encouragement, and their suggested ideas, texts, and pathways to consider. The manuscript for this book was mostly written between their funerals, but many of the ideas in it emerged in conversations between us, whether in formal meetings or in countless impromptu chats; both Tracey and Patrick are threaded throughout this book and it is, in a substantial sense, theirs too. Jordy Silverstein has been a keen interlocutor and challenging reader throughout this long process. Her work is an object lesson in integrity and critical sophistication and she has both made and helped me to do better. My parents, Rae and Mervyn Silverstein, have been a great source of support, love, and faith. Leo came along just as I should have been knuckling down to work on the manuscript and I’ve been lucky to enjoy his incessantly questioning nature and his regular reminders to ‘stand up, fight back!’ Sara Dehm has been a constant support, an indispensably critical and acute reader, and an enthusiastic adventurer as we’ve taken on new projects in new cities. She has discussed many of the ideas in this book in their first articulations and then picked them apart in written form to make them both clear and workable. Her love and her encouragement have been a part of this project from beginning to end. [ vii ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

NOT E ON T ER MS

The subject of this book is largely colonial thought and practice from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Accordingly, it engages critically with words and concepts that both were and continue to be damaging to Indigenous people and Indigenous political aspirations. Some of these words are replaced by less violent substitutes; others are quoted on the understanding that their violence is essential to the meaning intended or practised by those who initially wrote or spoke. Readers should thus be aware that this book contains language that may be hurtful. Where I am not quoting, and when referring to Aboriginal or Indigenous people themselves, rather than to historical representations, I use capital ‘A’ or ‘I’ in accordance with modern and respectful usage.

[ viii ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

L IST OF A BBR EV I AT IONS

AAPA AFA APNR ASAPS CAR CLR GRG NAA NASA NTAS NTPA NTRS SRG SRSA VAG

Australian Aboriginal Progressive Alliance Aborigines’ Friends’ Association Australians for the Protection of Native Races Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society Commonwealth Arbitration Reports Commonwealth Law Reports Government Record Group National Archives of Australia National Archives of South Africa Northern Territory Archives Service Northern Territory Pastoral Lessees’ Association Northern Territory Record Service Society Record Group State Records of South Australia Victorian Aboriginal Group

[ ix ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

CH A P T ER ON E

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Strehlow’s problem: colonial transformations and a governmental event

It was November 1937 when anthropologist and patrol officer Ted Strehlow realised he had a problem. He had travelled 130 km through the central Australian desert from Alice Springs to Hermannsburg Mission to investigate an apparent murder that had taken place some weeks earlier at Thira, a sheep camp on the upper Ormiston River. There he found that a forceful and unwanted marriage proposal had sparked a disagreement between a number of people he described as Pintubi and Ngalia. When four Pintubi women began fighting, he was to write, their husbands felt themselves compelled to act. Witjitji and Wantu’s husband Kulaia ‘sprang up and hit Mungana over the head once with a boomerang’, and Mungana’s husband Ngulunta ‘took his spear in order to punish Kulaia’. Kulaia, in response, seized his own spear and shield. A marital dispute now became, in Strehlow’s breathlessly evocative prose, a mystical tribal feud: ‘The two men advanced upon each other. It was a moonless night, and the fires were burning low, and midnight was approaching. Everyone in the camp began to stir. Ngulunta threw his spear first, but Kulaia dodged it. The spear’, Strehlow wrote, ‘sped on’, almost becoming an agent of its trajectory, determining its own path. It ‘buried its point in Tjukutai’s left side, just over the hips. Tjukutai had walked across the spear’s line of flight a few feet behind Kulaia.’1 Tjukutai, the younger brother of Witjitji and Wantu, died almost immediately and, a few days later, the thrower of that spear, Ngulunta, was himself speared through the left thigh by Nananana, a relative of the deceased. What, Strehlow wondered, should he do? Encountering the aftermath of this situation, in which Aboriginal people had acted as though unconcerned by the spectre of his authority, he was deeply unsure. He elected to take charge through a demonstration of force, taking all those involved most of the way back to Alice Springs and holding them at the Jay Creek station. But confirming his immediate physical [1]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

control only amplified his uncertainty. He wrote to his superiors in Darwin to relate the unfolding events and ask if anyone should be charged and tried, whether Ngulunta for the initial murder of Tjukutai, or Nananana for the spearing that followed; a spearing that ought to be understood, he noted, as a lawful Aboriginal response. All these men, Strehlow pointed out, were ‘relatively untouched by civilisation’, and though there were ‘no real tribal considerations’ involved, the applicability of settler laws was at least questionable. On the other hand, ‘these people had been warned off the settler areas previously, and told to live their own lives in the unoccupied land at Haast’s Bluff’. The problem, he suggested, was one of coexistence; of people and of laws. If Kulaia, Ngulunta, and Nananana wanted to ‘live their own lives’, they would have to do so in their own spaces. And so long as they ‘continue[d] to leave their own tribal territories’ in order to ‘hang around the stations and camps of white men’, he preferred not to respect their jurisdiction.2 Strehlow’s problem derived from his recognition that this was not a simple common-law criminal matter. What he saw was less a lawless mob than it was a people who sustained the operation of Aboriginal laws through practising Aboriginal relationships and remedies. This recognition, framed by his anthropological expertise, was characteristic of the colonising practice of indirect rule. But he was uncertain about its consequences. How could Aboriginal laws be incorporated into the government of the Northern Territory? Were there limits to the reach of settler legal force? These are questions that appear anomalous to today’s observer. Though historians of Australia have turned in recent years to the study of legal pluralism, it has generally been supposed that questions of jurisdiction had largely been settled by what Lisa Ford termed the ‘juridical death of Aboriginal people’ in the 1830s. As Heather Douglas and Mark Finnane extensively illustrate, this ‘juridical death’ was a settler fantasy which has incited continued struggle over the scope of law and sovereignty. But for them, the ‘protracted struggle over what it might mean to assert jurisdiction over the Indigenous peoples of the Australian colonial territories was a nineteenth-century story’.3 Strehlow’s problem reminds us of the continuing renegotiation of such matters. At heart, his problem emerged from the puzzle of government in a territory ruled by Australian settlers who encountered peoples who ruled themselves; peoples who appeared, in all important aspects, to be practising sovereignty. How, Strehlow essentially asked, was he to govern a people who were self-governing, who had their own laws? How could they be fixed in place, and where, and under what circumstances could their laws be both recognised and respected? How could government be ordered?4 [2]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

COLON I A L TR A NSFOR M ATIONS

These were questions being asked across the Northern Territory as in other sites across the British Empire. The problems that produced them were not universal problems of colonial government, but nor were they unique: Strehlow’s uncertainty was far from his alone. It was to be found everywhere administrators sought to work with indirect rule, an art of government that became a standard in the interwar period and which we can trace from Fiji and Northern Nigeria to London and ultimately, in this study, to the Ormiston River in the Northern Territory. This part of Australia was far from the halls of colonial power in London or Lagos, distant and marginal to the British Empire as a whole and rarely considered by historians as a site for the elaboration of techniques of colonial government. But it represents a valuable entry point into considering the nature and implications of this moment in British colonialism. This book charts the turn to indirect rule as a practice of governing the Northern Territory in the 1930s. As a series of developing crises in Australia’s north accrued and condensed, the Australian Government was compelled to reform its administration of ‘native affairs’ in the Northern Territory. Forced to reckon with Aboriginal manoeuvring and confounding acts, the official mind of Australian settler colonialism was pushed to recognise that Aboriginal social reproduction was not a threat to the fabrication of a new society in the north; in fact, it was indispensable.5 This recognition, and the 1938 policy reform that was its product, signified the reception of indirect rule; a political rationality that identified ‘native society’ as its subject, and the art of incorporating it, in some form, into the colonial state. It imagined government as dispersed, as the work of conducting customary institutions and traditional laws to articulate native society with colonial interests, ordering by striving not to dissolve but to preserve apparently intact but vulnerable traditional societies. In telling this story, this book traces the emergence of several crises of north Australian settler colonialism: material, administrative, and of public power. The hegemony of the Northern Territory administration was failing, frustrated by the intensifying contradictory forces at work in a capitalist social formation whose main industry was reliant on super-exploited unfree Aboriginal labour, and not least by Aboriginal people’s continuing practice of sovereignty in ways that confounded settler colonialism. The future of the Northern Territory seemed bleak. In response, government administrators and policymakers turned to the newly archetypal response to colonial crises, displacing instability onto native precariousness or recalcitrance, a move being made elsewhere across the Empire. By the 1930s, we can observe indirect rule in northern Australia on the cusp of enunciation; a product of the settler idea that [3]

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory could best be governed by reference to an imperial repertoire of ‘governing natives’.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The art of indirect rule In taking indirect rule seriously as a governing art, this book departs from the historical orthodoxy that reduces it to specific constitutional arrangements. Historians usually take a formalistic understanding of Frederick Lugard’s Nigerian model of indirect rule as the archetype, describing it in terms of the colonial state’s mobilisation of chiefly or Indigenous authority, or its recognition of local sovereignty and use of traditional authorities to govern. Margery Perham, Lugard’s friend and biographer, described it as a ‘system by which the tutelary power recognizes existing African societies and assists them to adapt themselves to the functions of local government’.6 Such accounts set out an instrumental practice of delegation which robs indirect rule of any ideological specificity, culminating in Frederick Cooper’s argument that Lugard’s work was little more than ‘an attempt to make retreat sound like policy’.7 But to accept the argument that indirect rule represented a ‘retreat’ from the ambition of remaking Africa is to suggest that Lugard’s work comprised simply popularising and advocating what was merely a necessary response to limits on colonial power. It presumes rather than questions the constitution of the colonial field. The limits ‘found’ and the scope of ‘necessary’ responses did not emerge naturally. This book argues instead that they were effects of a midnineteenth-century ideological turn to understand empire differently, a turn that both influenced and was transformed by Lugard.8 This turn, which Coel Kirkby describes as the ‘birth of the native’, can be traced through the wake of the 1857 Indian Rebellion. Responding to this crisis of order, the colonial jurist Henry Maine produced his influential theory of traditional society as simultaneously internally coherent and resting in equilibrium, and yet so fragile that almost any contact with ‘modern’ society produced disintegration. For Karuna Mantena, this was the ontology that underpinned what Mahmood Mamdani has argued became the central problem of colonial government in Africa: that of maintaining order while governing intact yet vulnerable native societies. And this problem was managed by the institution of a racially bifurcated state, where citizens were governed by a civic law while the ‘native’ arm of the state mobilised ethnically or tribally constituted bodies of customary law.9 When colonial governors wrote of their practice, or when they surveyed the colonial field, they wrote of discovering limits, of the seemingly permanent intransigence of native society, and of the need for a practice – a new [4]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

COLON I A L TR A NSFOR M ATIONS

mode of governmentality they termed ‘native administration’ – that might manage, if not overcome, this difference. Disavowing the fundamentally productive nature of their work, they wrote of recognition, not invention; of mobilisation rather than transformation. But the colonial field they ‘found’ took form in the official mind through the ontology of native society, revealing a disjuncture between the writing and the practice of indirect rule.10 Africans understood themselves to be Hausa or Yoruba, or of any number of complementary or intersecting identities, in diverse ways with different implications. But there was no ‘native society’ prior to its identification in white writing and white imaginations. Recognition conjures its object.11 As Mamdani identifies, to govern tribes individual people needed to be made tribal. Indirect rule was, then, a practice of subjectivation, constituting and maintaining tribal subjects. Lugard, as writer, instead framed the colonial field as one populated by tribes prior to the imperial moment. He imagined native society not as an artefact of the encounter between African peoples and British colonisation but as both a limit and an incitement to colonial power, as a social body whose potential could be harnessed to the colonial social formation. This book thus begins its account of indirect rule in Chapter 2 not with constitutional arrangements but with what David Scott has described as ‘colonial governmentality’; a complex of power and knowledge that produces the ‘targets of colonial power … and the field of its operation’ as ‘effects of rule’.12 Reading administrators’ writing critically, we find that indirect rule appears in their works as a whole way of thinking and acting in relation to colonial rule, with specific objects and ends of government. This book identifies two key elements to indirect rule: the tribe, a representation of ‘traditional society’ as its subject and object; and the management of that tribe by conducting social forces to guide customary social institutions. In the language of the South African Native Economic Commission in 1932, indirect rule would take ‘Native organization’ embodied in the tribe as its foundation, ensuring that progress and the expansion of its capacities would ‘start … from a basis which the Natives understood and prized, and develop … from that to something higher’. Intervention, within this governing philosophy, worked with, rather than against, social institutions: it ‘must not run counter to economic force, but must utilize economic forces to achieve its purpose’.13 And as these techniques were used to manage the articulation of modes of production – ordering the social formation through, and on the basis of, a functioning tribe – they were framed by their practitioners as effective and intentional, as the playing out of coherent and controlled government. [5]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

Administrators did not discover native society in Australia until the interwar period, as anthropological knowledge came to dominate the official mind of northern Australian colonialism.14 In the wake of the 1933 Yolngu rejection of settler authority in an episode that came to be known as the Black War of Arnhem Land, the anthropologist Donald Thomson was sent to investigate their customary laws and social institutions. His reports established the existence of native society in the official mind of Australian settler colonialism. Strehlow’s problem arose because, in the context of this knowledge, he too recognised that Aboriginal sociality and laws could not simply be ignored. Instead, they needed to be governed. In 1935, in the wake of the Black War and a separate series of police killings of Aboriginal people in Central Australia, the Australian Minister for the Interior had declared that in incidents involving Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory, no criminal charge should be laid ‘where tribal laws are concerned and where no white man was involved’.15 This order, written in a time of violence and increased anthropological authority, crafted a space for a kind of Aboriginal self-government, one that purported to preclude direct settler interference in regulating relationships between Aboriginal people so long as Aboriginal jurisdiction was itself restricted in its application; ‘tribal laws’ could govern relationships between people, but they were not the law of the land. This direction and its effects represent a translation of the political rationality of indirect rule into the practice of government in Australia. But in tracing moves like this, we need to attend to plurality and heterogeneity. Context matters: indirect rule in Australia was importantly different to indirect rule in Nigeria. In Australia, the contradictory processes of difference produced an ambivalence that appears in the settler colonial context as the practice of race in discourses of jurisdiction and subjection.

Recognising settler colonialism Attending to this difference need not lead us to adopt the peculiar categorical insularity that has accompanied the emphasis in recent historiography on the distinct nature and structure of settler colonial formations, of self-governing rather than Crown colonies. This position is at its most apparent in Lorenzo Veracini’s argument that ‘settler colonialism is not colonialism’, but can be found in a wide range of otherwise transcolonial works which have tacitly accepted the divisions established by a colonising whiteness which delimited certain ‘white men’s countries’ as the privileged domains of modernity, and which starkly distanced them from other colonial formations where white men may have dominated, but could never achieve hegemony.16 [6]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

COLON I A L TR A NSFOR M ATIONS

Specifying settler colonial difference need not result in drawing this sharp distinction but can, rather, allow us to trace gradations across a dynamic and unified empire. Australia was located within an empire and was itself, in the South Pacific, an imperial power. And it was also a constitutive part of an emergent settler international, attuned to the governing practices of settler states in North America as elsewhere. Australian settler colonialism functioned between the local, the international, and the imperial. This book’s account of settler colonialism rests on Patrick Wolfe’s influential elaboration of its specificity through a (neo-)structural approach that attends to colonial heterogeneities by tracing the material conditions and favoured colonial discourses of each social formation. In his work on continuities in Australian history, Wolfe discerned a form of colonialism ‘premised on displacing indigenes from (or replacing them on) the land’; a form he contrasted to franchise colonialisms where value was generated through extracting surplus value from the labour of colonised peoples. Where in such franchise colonies, including Nigeria, the colonial form generated an imperative to maximise native production, settler colonies are by contrast ‘premised on the elimination of native societies’.17 Thinking with this method has productively opened up a field that articulates and respects the distinct nature of colonialism in those parts of the world where settlers remain numerically and politically dominant today.18 But it needs to be accompanied by an insistence on thinking of white men’s countries as entwined in an imperial and imperialist world, just as were other colonies, allowing us to consider colonialisms in context. It is not enough to denote Australia, for example, as a settler colony and thereby to distinguish it from Nigeria as a plantation or franchise colony. Instead we need first to consider both within the same field, one of differentiated colonialisms within a diffuse but cohesive empire, and also to disaggregate each nation or colony by remaining alert to the distinct spaces that comprised the larger polity or territory. Just as Lagos was distinct from Bornu, the Ormiston River was not Melbourne. The production and expropriation of value, after all, was historically contingent and thus necessarily differed markedly across space and time. This book traces this heterogeneity through a study of indirect rule, placing a differentiated empire within a unified field of analysis. It charts the emergence of indirect rule both in a local register and in the context of imperial formations that framed and constrained individual initiatives. The turn to indirect rule across much of the British Empire was more than simply the almost coincidental repetition of similar improvisations or accommodations. It signals, rather, the spread [7]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

and influence of a political mentality, one that was articulated distinctly in each contingent space. As noted above, writing – constructing models ambivalently abstracted from historical contingency – as well as reception and repetition, were important practices of empire, constituting a traffic in ideas, rationalities, and mentalities; clarifying colonial representation through uncertain and contingent networks of meaning.19 Maine’s theory of a viable and governable ‘native society’ licensed practices of governmental recognition and authorisation; practices that appear antithetical to a settler colonialism which is often thought to be constituted by a refusal to recognise, by the negation of Indigenous being.20 But negation is not absence; apparently anomalous governmental practices that countenance Indigenous presence neither disprove the existence of settler colonialism nor render a settler colonial analytic inapplicable. The critical point Wolfe introduced into the analysis of settler colonialism is a fundamental relationship of invasion; that although settlers’ ‘determinate articulation is not to a society but directly to the land’ and the ‘social relationship’ between settlers and natives ‘can be conceived of as a negative articulation’, this does not mean that those Indigenous people are irrelevant to the forms of colonial government. Rather, this ‘negative’ relationship is the central structuring element of the settler colonial formation. The forms of recognition that are practised or forced reflect, albeit imperfectly, the fundamental and overdetermined relationships between Indigenous people and the settler state. The history of settler colonialism, in other words, is structured by the initial and continuing expropriation of Indigenous land and a corresponding ‘logic of elimination’. This is a theory of the settler colonial condition that recognises ‘the Indigenous presence as an absent center that structures settler discourse’ in all contexts. We must therefore be attentive to two equally important elements of settler colonialism: the process of attempting to remove Indigeneity; and that of establishing a new, settler–dominated society on an expropriated land base.21 The history of these processes necessarily differs across a heterogeneous national space. The official mind of Australian settler colonialism recognised by the 1930s that Aboriginal labour was a key element of the northern economy, a colonial situation distinct from the south. But southern Australian settler colonialism was particular, not exemplary. A national aspiration to White Australia did not preclude northern zones of liminality which were uncontainable within a logic of the frontier. In Australia’s north, settlers depended on black labour to make White Australia viable, developing relations of exploitation that generated interlaced and overlapping territories of whiteness and Indigeneity, of dispossession and tribalism. Northern settler colonialism was abrasive; it sat, in the southern imagination, precariously within the Australian [8]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

COLON I A L TR A NSFOR M ATIONS

nation. And a national will to remake it as white overdetermined the northern dispensation, situating ambivalence at its heart.22 Northern settlers did not work towards native elimination by imagining native absence. Instead, they pursued a White Australia through the consumption of native peoples, laws, production, and sovereignties. A story of elimination as exclusion is, then, insufficient for understanding the trajectories of Australian colonialism. ‘To focus on exclusion, on what is not,’ Mamdani argues, ‘is not quite to show what is.’23 Ann Laura Stoler suggests that the historian’s task is less to identify particular types or forms of government than it is to ‘attend to scaling, to co-temporalities, to the specific sites where they are threaded through one another’; to ‘what a sedimented set of governing techniques with a different distribution do’. The point here, in other words, is not to define settler and franchise colonialisms as hermetic types, but to examine the recursion – the ‘partial reinscriptions, modified displacements, and amplified recuperations’ – of indirect rule in a settler colonial formation. It is to trace the shifting ways Australian colonialism conjugated and connected what Deleuze and Guattari term the ‘two solutions of extermination and integration’.24 This is not to suggest that the Northern Territory represents an exception or limit case for either indirect rule or settler colonialism; interwoven forms are the archetype, the practice of colonial government is always mediated and confounded, dispersed and contingent, muted and displaced. Settlers’ interactions and engagements with Indigenous people in Australia, narrated in the settler colonial archive under the sign of sovereignty, have included processes of differential recognition and incorporation, of overdetermined contingency. When Strehlow wondered how he might reckon with the practice of Aboriginal law in 1937, he both recognised a spearing as the outcome of a juridical practice and tried to incorporate that practice into settler government, producing the state as a site of dialogue and struggle. Different systems were constituted through and in relation to each other. An ontological sovereignty, which allows us to speak of distinct and singular entities acting autonomously, may not necessarily be helpful to the historian. Concentrating instead on articulations, on relations of interdependency, we find that what the colonial archive terms sovereignty is itself produced through situated practices that project the resolution of multiplicity.25 Indirect rule, in this sense, was a way of representing the congealed outcomes of these struggles under the sign of a singular sovereignty. What made men like Strehlow so uncertain was their inability to envelop Indigenous societies, to erase Indigenous presence outside relations of subjugation. The men and women he arrested would, he wrote, be free [9]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

to practise their laws in spaces set out for that purpose, located apart from white settlement. His frustration at their insistence on slipping through these borders, confounding the colonial order by practising Aboriginal laws in what Strehlow considered settler spaces, led him to confine them in custody, a performative overreaction. He imagined a polity smoothly constituted by ordered and adjacent jurisdictions, framing pluralism or multiplicity within a unitary polity. Strehlow recognised the Aboriginal sovereignty before him. And indirect rule represented an attempt to submerge it. This was a logic of recognition that worked to limit the possibilities of Indigenous sovereignties by reducing them to a supplement to a settler sovereignty that had (and has) been decentred by the acknowledgement of precolonial – and continuing – Indigenous communities. Suppression, reaffirming the force of settler law, was a condition of recognition.26 The historian’s citation of a ‘perfect settler sovereignty’ can be considered to operationalise a similar logic, a ‘domestication’ that renders objects familiar and settled in (their) place, a practice of recognition that settles colonial contradictions by locating the Indigenous within settler politics, constituting Indigeneity as subordination.27 This kind of recognition expropriates Indigenous difference ‘in and through the discourse of that difference’, subsuming Indigenous polities within the settler nation through a biopolitical and geopolitical incorporating economy of representation.28 To reprise this narrative of recognition is to reproduce these relations, reauthorising the production of knowledge that conduces to erasure and elimination. Recognition is not innocent. As a historical trope it cannot account for those excessive presences that escape its grasp and confound its terms, for the movements and actions of those Pintupi and Ngalia protagonists on the Ormiston River which are irreducible to an effect of colonialism. Their mobilities and their jurisdictional practices sutured together differentiated spaces, refusing an administrative logic of empty territory, of spaces upon which law could be enacted, to constitute themselves as peoples through and in relation to country.29 And they also, in increasingly novel and knowing ways, were expressing law in a register that evidences active responses to emerging settlerdeclared constraints and transitions. They were governing, in contexts not of their choosing, and amidst settler counter-claims that sought to determine the scope of their legibility and applicability. A language of articulation, rather than recognition, provides a valuable method of moving towards a story in which Indigenous people and peoples are neither domesticated nor externalised, are not obstacles so much as constituting actors. Pintupi and Ngalia actions were fully [ 10 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

COLON I A L TR A NSFOR M ATIONS

recognisable neither to Strehlow nor to today’s reader of his assessments, but they do evince the operation of distinct territorial imaginaries. Aboriginal refusals of settlers’ ordering fantasies may not have rendered colonisation impossible, but they shaped its trajectories. Amidst the differentiated yet interdependent spaces of the north, struggles over the authority of law were struggles to articulate those differences within colonising or Indigenising logics. Articulation, rather than an enveloping or assimilating recognition, can also provide us with a richer understanding of the north Australian social formation. In a conjuncture dominated by pastoral beef production, as will be discussed in Chapter 3, both Indigenous labour and Indigenous production were structurally indispensable to continued economic function. We find here an articulated, not a submerged, sociality. Settler prosperity in this part of ‘White Australia’ needed, for its pedestal, Indigenous land, and labour, and production. This establishes a national heterogeneity that may not be containable as exception. Difference is less aberrant than it is constitutive. The Australian settler state, that is, has been instantiated through dynamic processes of articulation, working not necessarily to eliminate immediately but rather to develop and secure its authority through Indigenous social and political formations. Colonialism in Australia has worked through both a necropolitics and a biopolitics, and is suffused with a history that includes both the seizure and the multifarious incorporations of Indigenous sovereignties that continue to inflect the contours of the social formation and the practice of the state.30 This book represents an attempt to write some of these incorporations – in the Northern Territory of the interwar period – into Australian history by considering them in relation to the colonising practice of indirect rule. This model reflects a critical practice of re-placing settler colonial formations within the Empire, identifying settlers’ administrative independence as the result of the devolution of responsibility to ‘ideal prefabricated collaborators’ rather than as signalling any more meaningful structural change.31 Settlers’ practice is that of colonialism; the problems they faced, and the solutions they developed, were colonial in nature. In arguing that settler Australia should be framed within an empire that cohered through both material networks and as an ideological and intertextual milieu, this book locates Aboriginal history within imperial history, situating the settler colonial politics of Indigeneity in that broader context. Australian settler governmentality, in other words, was not entirely exceptional; in this instance, we find administrators like Strehlow participating in, and constituting, an [ 11 ]

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

integrated, empire-wide repertoire of the arts of governing and colonising peoples.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Sovereignty, crisis, and a confounded settler colonialism Strehlow’s problem emerged in the context of a broader crisis of colonialism in the interwar Northern Territory. This book foregrounds the metabolising crises that generated the conditions for the practice of indirect rule. Every capitalist social formation harbours within it crisis tendencies or contradictions, relying for its reproduction on essential conditions that it simultaneously does away with. When these contradictory forces accrue to the point of crisis, they create an environment of potential change, encouraging new avenues for conceptualising social order, reconfiguring knowledge, and realigning power. They generate a heightened need for new accounts of the world and our place in it, new terms for understanding social reality, and new schemes for reckoning with and reconciling social forces in ways that may facilitate, rather than frustrate, social reproduction.32 We find throughout this book that it was as a response to colonial crises that indirect rule became a compelling political rationality, a way of making sense of the world amidst imperialist accumulation, reconciling the distribution of colonial power with its disintegrating effects. Chapter 2, which traces a textual genealogy of indirect rule as an art of government, begins in the mid-nineteenth-century moment of imperial crisis. The Indian Rebellion of 1857–8, the New Zealand Land Wars of the 1860s, the US Civil War of 1861–5, the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, the continuing violence and instability of the South African and Queensland frontiers, combined with the catastrophic Indigenous death rates being recorded throughout the colonial Pacific, prompted a reformulation of the way colonial rule was imagined. A response to disorder that focused on the failures of governing knowledge transposed vulnerability away from a contradictory colonial rule and onto a precarious ‘native society’, quickly developing into a structure of recognition and response. This structure was recapitulated by both Arthur Gordon in his approach to governing Fiji and Lugard in Northern Nigeria. Both worked to articulate landholding ‘native societies’ with either settlerowned plantations or British mercantile capital. Lugard’s success was in his writing, where he elided colonial struggles and instead popularised indirect rule as an art of government which could be abstracted from the specificities of the colonial formation and deemed applicable as a functional and benevolent approach to distinct articulations. The book then follows the movement of indirect rule, as well as its influence and rearticulation in Australia. It travelled not as a [ 12 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

COLON I A L TR A NSFOR M ATIONS

constitutional form but as a political rationality and art of government. And as in Fiji, where revision followed catastrophic depopulation, or Nigeria, where governmental reform followed the unstable eruptions of sovereign polities, it was the condensation of crisis in the Northern Territory that rendered indirect rule viable. This book traces a series of contradictions of settler colonialism that together produced a terrain of crisis. Chapter 3 examines the contradictions inherent in the pastoralism that was so critical to the Northern Territory. Pastoral production was, in its interwar iteration, heavily dependent on cheap Aboriginal labour. At the same time, it depended for its profitability on a rate of exploitation that eroded the capacity of Aboriginal workers to stay alive. This was a material contradiction in which the relations of production mitigated against the reproduction of labour and, therefore, the reproduction of pastoral production itself. Pastoralism was destroying its condition of possibility, a contradiction registered in the Payne–Fletcher Inquiry, which reported in 1937 on the failing production of the Northern Territory. This crisis demanded a reconsideration of the relationship between settler societies and Aboriginal peoples, a new mode of managing the articulation of communities and of modes of production, a reconfigured colonial social formation in the north. And this revision was effected through a turn to understand the Northern Territory differently, to contextualise it within the British Empire as much as it was situated within a White Australia, and therefore to bring Australia into that transcolonial discussion on native administration and frame its governing practice within that conversation. Chapter 4 then turns from that discovery of the Northern Territory’s colonial difference to examine the complementary discovery of native society, the recognition of Indigenous difference in the north. The expansion of settler law had been intended to order the Northern Territory, to perfect settler sovereignty. But it was instead producing disorder. This became apparent when, in 1933, Aboriginal people at Woodah Island in eastern Arnhem Land killed a policeman who was ostensibly in the area to investigate previous killings of Japanese men who had intruded into Yolngu country. Imagining a continent unified under the authority of common law was essential to the practice of white settler sovereignty in Australia. But the provocations of intruding into Aboriginal country, exploiting Aboriginal workers, disturbing Aboriginal kinship and marriage regulations, and seeking to bring settler law to bear on Aboriginal legal responses quickly disabused settlers of the notion that their governing capacity was possessed of an omnipotent sovereignty. This was an administrative crisis, in which public power lacked the capacity to govern effectively in its own terms. While a range of responses to Yolngu action were considered, including another [ 13 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

police party, an ultimately abandoned punitive mission, and a successful missionary peace party, this chapter examines Donald Thomson’s deployment to investigate and report on Yolngu law and custom. His narration of the discovery of ‘native society’ in Australia populated the terrain of northern government in the official mind of Australian settler colonialism. Identifying the anthropological ‘native society’ in the north was the governing correlate of the recognition of the Northern Territory’s colonial difference traced in Chapter 3. It established Aboriginal presence, inciting a turn to indirect rule as the art of governing native society without pushing it to disorder. These acts of recognition – of a colonial economy reliant on black labour and of the presence of anthropological native societies in the north – remained marginal in the policy of the Northern Territory administration itself. In Darwin, Chief Protector of Aboriginals Cecil Cook pursued a White Australia through Aboriginal assimilation. This was, for Cook, both a biological and a social process. Through managing Aboriginal sexualities, particularly the marriage and sexual behaviour of Aboriginal women, he sought the biological absorption of Indigeneity into the settler community. And by confining Aboriginal people in urban sites of discipline, he worked towards their individuation which, in the settler imaginary, denoted their departure from ‘native society’. But interwar campaigns for Aboriginal rights increasingly emerged as counter-hegemonic movements. Aboriginal activists called for fundamental reform and improvement of their conditions all over the nation, imagining futures of modernity, dynamism, and sovereignty. White humanitarian movements translated these claims as licensing the implementation of what A. P. Elkin, Chair of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, termed the ‘indirect method’, demanding better government in the north. These social movements were sufficiently forceful and prominent as to call into question the legitimacy of Cook’s government, turning public opinion against his regime and generating a crisis of authority. Progressively these antagonisms coalesced to produce a general crisis of the government of the Northern Territory as a whole; they were condensed into a single frame that focused attention on the entwined failures of pastoralism and of Aboriginal administration. The late 1930s, then, emerged as a conjunctural moment when these crises – material, administrative, and of ‘public power’ – ‘“fuse” into a ruptural unity’.33 Hegemony was failing in the Northern Territory, demanding change. But the nature of that change remained contingent. And when these crises arrived in John McEwen’s office as, in late 1937, he was appointed Minister for the Interior, he was presented with a series of questions. What provoked these crises and how were [ 14 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

COLON I A L TR A NSFOR M ATIONS

they to be resolved? How could he establish principles for governing Aboriginal people that would sustain settler colonialism in the Northern Territory? How could he reorganise public power, synthesising forces, ideas, and practices into coherent policy? McEwen’s predicament was a version of Strehlow’s problem at a different scale, positioning him at the fulcrum of the local, the national, and the imperial. He read the Payne–Fletcher Report into northern pastoralism alongside Thomson’s Reports into the Yolngu people of north-eastern Arnhem Land. He met with Aboriginal activists from Victoria and New South Wales, as well as anthropologists Elkin and E. W. P. Chinnery. And he was pushed by the letter-writing campaigns of Aboriginal rights activists and white humanitarians who directed his attention to the techniques of native administration elsewhere in the British Empire and the settler world. These varied influences coalesced in a response to the crises of the Northern Territory that articulated indirect rule in a settler colony; a response that modified the mode of hegemony.34 This response, termed the Aboriginal New Deal, reorganised the basis of production to stabilise social reproduction. Chapter 6 traces the way the new policy harnessed Aboriginal reserves to two projects: one synchronic, where reserves would be the sites of reproducing native societies, producing future labourers for pastoral stations and providing a social force for the reproduction of pastoral relations; and one diachronic, a starting point for a ‘long march’ to citizenship. This introduced a novel kind of settler colonial state, one that recognised and sought to govern native society through an asymptotic staging of progress which anticipated an elimination whose fulfilment it could not countenance. The Aboriginal New Deal set out a spatialised evolution that categorised and progressively located different kinds of Aboriginal subjects, a sequential conceit that suggested an order of appearance, from a first stage of ‘myalls’ on reserves on to ‘semi-detribalised’ people on stations and finally to citizens in towns. Its narration rendered functional the articulation of indirect rule in a settler colonial formation, its iteration as part of a process of elimination, one that would never yet be complete.35 Chapter 7 turns to labour as the mechanism of movement along the long march. It was work that provided the impetus for motion; this was a system of labour exploitation glossed as the production of modernity. This chapter examines the distinctive government of work through transforming customs on pastoral stations. Indirect rule, as becomes clear in its north Australian expression, was most crucially the government of ‘native society’, acting on and through its social institutions. Where those institutions were definitively not those of chieftaincy or authoritarian rule, the art would be in mobilising alternative organising institutions. In doing so in the [ 15 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

Northern Territory of Australia, administrators crafted an administrative structure that worked through spatialising distinct native societies, emphasising the educative and progressive function always inherent in Lugardian indirect rule. Indirect rule in a settler colonial nation worked between a national logic of elimination and a local structural reliance on Indigenous communities; an ambivalence that could be contained, but not resolved. This order continued to generate problems; it could not settle the Northern Territory. Crisis was replaced by new contradictions. And Indigenous people continued to exceed the containment promised by indirect rule. Administrators like Strehlow were confronted with movement that enacted Aboriginal histories and laws rather than an ordered colonial pluralism; this movement confounded his order. Confounding acts were represented less by direct confrontational resistance than by what Audra Simpson describes as a refusal to accept the sovereign authority of the settler colonial state.36 This was accompanied by the corresponding practice of making meaning of the world in the terms offered by Aboriginal epistemologies, labouring to move pursuant to Aboriginal practice rather than the exigencies of settler industry, practising lawful relationships through Aboriginal rather than Australian regulations, and working in pastoralism to subsidise Aboriginal life rather than to transcend and erase it. Such Aboriginal practice consistently confounded the orderly terms of British imperialism and Australian settler colonialism, rendering the neat functionality of the northern articulation an often ineffective ideological production, and troubling the political rationality of indirect rule. When Strehlow’s questions reached the local metropole of Darwin, his problem became Cook’s. Cook agreed that the use of spears to settle the matter indicated that ‘tribal practice’ had entered into the case, and that the episode ought to be treated as ‘a tribal one’. But while this approach suggested that there was no space for administrative intervention, Cook did find that his government was needed. He was, he wrote, ‘impressed by the necessity of teaching such offenders that they must not leave their tribal areas and that tribal practice cannot be pleaded for them when they migrate therefrom into white jurisdiction’.37 Movement into ‘white jurisdiction’ signified a troubling transgression of the proper conjunction of race and space. At stake here was not only the degree of autonomy Aboriginal communities could assert, and be recognised to assert, but also, and crucially, the location of that autonomy. Strehlow recommended that Ngulunta and his wives be exiled to Tennant Creek for two years, and that Kulaia and Nananana be compelled to return immediately to the reserve at Haast’s Bluff, the threat of prosecution and gaol being contingent on [ 16 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

COLON I A L TR A NSFOR M ATIONS

their absence from white jurisdictional space. Cook presented these recommendations to the Administrator of the Northern Territory, C. L. A. Abbott, who approved.38 This was an entirely spatial solution to the problem of intervening jurisdictions; in working out indirect rule, institutional segregation followed territorial segregation.39 The state’s response was not to try to adjudicate the matter but rather to deal with the problems of transgression and plurality – of spatial coexistence – by seeking to control Aboriginal movement over an imagined jurisdictional frontier. It sought to order the Territory spatially, linking reserves, pastoral stations, and towns in an assemblage of proper sites for Aboriginal law and for white jurisdiction, limiting the circumstances in which they might coexist.40 And this kind of order was, as we will see, characteristic of the practice of indirect rule in Australia’s Northern Territory. This book is a history of the question Strehlow asked, of the discursive and material conditions that created his problem at this time and in this place, bringing meditations on questions of sovereignty, space, and the relationships between Aboriginal people and the state into the archive in this specific way. In this uncertain application of a form of pluralistic government, the ‘Ormiston Murder’ archive hints at the tensions that emerged around intersections of race and space, ordered government and frontier ideology. As Elizabeth Povinelli points out in her analysis of a similar case, it should be clear that Strehlow was hardly the only person talking.41 Fred Raggatt, the white manager of the sheep camp on which the murder took place, may have sought black workers, but not Aboriginal people who insisted on their own legal authority in the camp. Questions of identifying ‘Aboriginal natives’ and classifying tribal law were discussed by anthropologists, some of whom, including Thomson and Chinnery, were beginning to work in ‘native administration’.42 In that work they advocated for forms of segregation or for the ‘Murray system’ of government: named for the Australian governor known as the architect of indirect rule in Papua. Their words were read by government bureaucrats dealing with Strehlow’s problem in Canberra as well as Darwin, each of whom imagined and planned for particular northern futures they sought to realise. In repeated negotiations, struggles, and contests, a range of people voiced divergent opinions on the proper relationship between Aboriginal and settler authority. The trouble on the Ormiston River was an event attended by all these voices. And the archive that records it was not produced in isolation: it should be situated in a context that spanned the Empire. But it should also be examined in its particularity. In Australia, the question Strehlow asked was explicitly northern in its orientation, in the [ 17 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

knowledge it assumed and the recognition it advanced. His question reflected the colonial social formation in its northern articulation, and his problem more substantially reflected the inadequacy of authoritative sovereignty as an explanatory model, both for historians today and for administrators then. For settler sovereignty was never fully resolved, never ‘perfect’; neither in the 1830s, the 1930s, nor today. Nothing, Simpson writes, ‘is simultaneously so certain and yet so fraught with precariousness as the practice of sovereignty—globally or locally’.43 Sovereignty is practised in each ‘event’, requiring instantiation at every moment that appears as failure; sovereignty, in a settler colony, is never complete. We see this, and the anxiety such ‘imperfection’ provoked, in interwar Australia in the remarkable explosion of discussion of Aboriginal laws and customs, in proposals to establish ‘native courts’, and in Strehlow’s insistent questioning in the case of the Ormiston Murder. But why did the issues of Indigenous jurisdiction reach such a stage at this time? And why was this episode focused on such particularly racialised and spatialised subjects? One hundred years after the issue of common law jurisdiction was supposedly settled, the debate and indecision regarding the Ormiston Murder in 1937 suggests to us that the patrol officers and administrators of the Northern Territory in the 1930s considered that the Aboriginal people they encountered were not (yet) subjects of settler sovereignty. How the settler state dealt with this moment of recognition and authorisation in a specific context of exploitation, producing distinctive articulations by developing novel techniques of erasure as Indigenous sovereignties appeared before it, is the subject of this book.

Notes 1 T. G. H. Strehlow to C. E. Cook, 25 November 1937, NAA: F3, 20/58. 2 Ibid.; Cook to Eric Asche, 4 December 1937; Asche to Cook, 8 December 1937, NAA: F3, 20/58. On Strehlow’s philosophy of Aboriginal ‘codes’ and social relationships, see Tim Rowse, ‘Strehlow’s Strap: Functionalism and Historicism in a Colonial Ethnography’, in Bain Attwood and John Arnold (eds), Power, Knowledge and Aborigines (Melbourne: La Trobe University Press, 1992). 3 Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 198; Heather Douglas and Mark Finanne, Indigenous Crime and Settler Law: White Sovereignty after Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 9. Douglas and Finnane do acknowledge the continued discretion of Northern Territory police, prosecutors, and government officials not to prosecute Indigenous people in similar matters in the first half of the twentieth century. 4 See Lauren A. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400 –1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 2. 5 The term ‘official mind’ is taken from Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961). This book is, in a way, a study of the mentality of the official mind in a different sense to that pursued by Robinson and Gallagher. It understands

[ 18 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

COLON I A L TR A NSFOR M ATIONS colonialism not only as a question of administration but as part of a whole field of thought and action, as the practice of white supremacy and imperial accumulation, knowledge, and accommodation. Administration is a manifestation of these practices. 6 Margery Perham, Native Administration in Nigeria (London: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1962), pp. 345–6. 7 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 11. See also H. F. Morris and James S. Read (eds), Indirect Rule and the Search for Justice: Essays on East Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); J. A. Atanda, The New Ọyọ Empire: Indirect Rule and Change in Western Nigeria, 1894–1934 (London: Longman, 1973), p. 126; Crawford Young, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 107–8. 8 For Perham, working through ‘native’ intermediaries was neither new nor notable. But ‘this expedient’, she argued, ‘was consciously developed by Lord Lugard into a constructive system of government for Northern Nigeria’. Perham, Native Administration in Nigeria, pp. 345–6. See also Margery Perham, ‘A Re-Statement of Indirect Rule’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 7:3 (1934), 322. 9 Coel Kirkby, The Birth of the Native and the Reconstitution of the British Empire (forthcoming 2018); Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2004), pp. 16, 23–4, 39, 50–1, 122–5. In his more recent work, Mamdani too has situated Maine’s legal and social theory of the customary ‘native’ subject as the ontological basis of indirect rule, reframing it as a form of colonial governmentality. Mahmood Mamdani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 6, 23–6, 42–4. Others trace the historical roots of indirect rule to Theophilus Shepstone’s administration of nineteenth-century Natal, prior to the diffusion of Maine’s work into British Africa. See Mamdani, Define and Rule, pp. 6–7, 64–71; Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, p. 92; J. C. Myers, Indirect Rule in South Africa: Tradition, Modernity, and the Costuming of Political Power (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008); Thomas V. McClendon, White Chief, Black Lords: Shepstone and the Colonial State in Natal, South Africa, 1845–1878 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010), pp. 15, 21–46. 10 See also T. O. Beidelman, The Culture of Colonialism: The Cultural Subjection of Ukaguru (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), p. 15. 11 This is not to say that the process of recognition was constituted by the application of Western epistemologies upon inert native people, or that, as Patrick Wolfe puts it, anthropology was a ‘soliloquy’, a form of ‘Western discourse talking to itself’. Rather, as Sujit Sivasundaram argues, British articulations of ‘natives’ arose ‘out of the competitive engagement between colonists and colonizers’, taking place in contexts ‘set’ by Pacific Islanders, Asians, Africans, and, we might add, Aboriginal people, whose ‘changing traditions … shifted the form and placement’ of colonial recognition. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), p. 4; Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Appropriation to Supremacy: Ideas of the “Native” in the Rise of British Imperial Heritage’, in Astrid Swenson and Peter Mandler (eds), From Plunder to Preservation: Britain and the Heritage of Empire, c. 1800–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 170. 12 David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 25 (original emphasis); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 77; Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), p. 24. See Jesse Bucher, ‘The Skull of Mkwawa and the Politics of Indirect Rule in Tanganyika’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 10:2

[ 19 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES (2016). Historicising governmentality in colonial contexts necessitates certain revisions to a Foucauldian analysis. See Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 126–7, 260ff; John L. Comaroff, ‘Governmentality, Materiality, Legality, Modernity: On the Colonial State in Africa’, in Jan-Georg Deutsch, Peter Probst, and Heike Schmidt (eds), African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), p. 114; Wilson Chacko Jacob, Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870 –1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 21–4. 13 Union of South Africa, Report of the Native Economic Commission 1930 –1932 (Pretoria: The Government Printer, 1932), pp. 9–10, 12, 81. 14 There were some Australian precursors which drew on Maine’s work, notably in the implementation of the ‘Mamoose’ system on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait from 1878 onwards and in Archibald Meston’s administration of Aboriginal people in Queensland from 1894 until 1903. Thanks to Coel Kirkby for alerting me to these precedents. In British New Guinea, which was redefined from a protectorate to a British colony in 1888, Lieutenant-Governor William MacGregor implemented a form of indirect rule inspired by Arthur Gordon’s Fijian schemes on which he had previously worked. When British New Guinea became the Australian Territory of Papua in 1905, a more formalised system of indirect rule became policy, particularly under Lieutenant-Governor Hubert Murray between 1908 and 1940. 15 Quoted in E. W. P. Chinnery to Government Secretary, Darwin, 16 August 1939, NAA: F3, 20/32. 16 Lorenzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 13–31. See, e.g., Douglas M. Peers, ‘Is Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again?: The Revival of Imperial History and the Oxford History of the British Empire’, Journal of World History, 13:2 (2002), 466–7; Alan Lester, ‘Colonial Networks, Australian Humanitarianism and the History Wars’, Geographical Research, 44:3 (2006), 230. On the constitution of white men’s countries, see Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008). 17 Patrick Wolfe, ‘History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism’, American Historical Review, 102:2 (1997), 399, 418–19; Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, pp. 1–2, 167. By placing the production of value, in this case primarily through the expropriation of land, in the definitional foreground, sites of settler colonialism can be distinguished from those colonial formations where settlers were or are politically dominant but did not seek uninterrupted possession of territory, as in the cases of South Africa or Kenya. 18 There is a rapidly expanding literature on settler colonialism, spanning not just Australia but also Aotearoa/New Zealand, Hawai’i, the United States, Canada, and Palestine; a body of work that has become too broad to summarise here. Some important recent milestones engaging with Australian history include Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Tracey Banivanua-Mar and Penelope Edmonds (eds), Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington (eds), Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); John Hinkson, Paul James, and Lorenzo Veracini (eds), Stolen Lands, Broken Cultures: the Settler-Colonial Present (Melbourne: Arena Publications, 2012); Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present; Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016); Penelope Edmonds, Settler Colonialism and (Re)conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); and the publication, since 2011, of a journal entitled Settler Colonial Studies. For a more thorough overview,

[ 20 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

COLON I A L TR A NSFOR M ATIONS albeit one that is already dated in this transforming field, see Lorenzo Veracini, ‘“Settler Colonialism”: Career of a Concept’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 41:2 (2013). 19 Vanita Seth, Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500 –1900 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 231. See also Timothy Mitchell, ‘Everyday Metaphors of Power’, Theory and Society, 19:5 (1990). 20 Mantena, Alibis of Empire, p. 177; Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 22. That indirect rule is antithetical to settler colonialism has generally been assumed by historians. See, from among a wide range of examples, D. A. Low, Lion Rampant: Essays in the Study of British Imperialism (London: Frank Cass, 1973), pp. 16–18; Lorenzo Veracini, ‘“Emphatically Not a White Man’s Colony”: Settler Colonialism and the Construction of Fiji’, Journal of Pacific History, 43:2 (2008). South Africa is a notable exception, often considered a colony of settlement and a site for the implementation of indirect rule. Alison Holland has discussed the influence of indirect rule on interwar humanitarians in Australia. See Alison Holland, Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett’s Crusade for Aboriginal Rights (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2015), pp. 81–2. 21 Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, p. 2; Patrick Wolfe, ‘Introduction’, in Patrick Wolfe (ed.), The Settler Complex: Recuperating Binarism in Colonial Studies (Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2016), p. 9; Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8:4 (2006), 388. On different modes of elimination, or what Veracini describes as population ‘transfers’, see Veracini, Settler Colonialism, pp. 33–50. 22 Ben Silverstein, ‘“Possibly they did not know themselves”: The Ambivalent Government of Sex and Work in the Northern Territory Aboriginals Ordinance 1918’, History Australia 14:3 (2017). Others have recently situated the Northern Territory not as settler colony but as a colony of exploitation, almost outside a White Australia. See, e.g., Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Towards a Further Redescription of the Pastoral Frontier’, Journal of Australian Studies, 26:72 (2002), 31–2; Regina Ganter, Mixed Relations: Asian–Aboriginal Contact in North Australia (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2006); Julia Martínez and Adrian Vickers, The Pearl Frontier: Indonesian Labor and Indigenous Encounters in Australia’s Northern Trading Network (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015); Claire Lowrie, Masters and Servants: Cultures of Empire in the Tropics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). 23 Mahmood Mamdani, ‘Historicizing Power and Responses to Power: Indirect Rule and Its Reform’, Social Research, 66:3 (1999), 864. 24 Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 27, 30; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1988), p. 472. 25 For Judith Butler, ‘[s]overeignty is what is tactically produced through the very mechanism of its self–justification’. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006), p. 82. See also Alyosha Goldstein, ‘Colonialism, Constituent Power, and Popular Sovereignty’, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 2:1 (2014). A number of Indigenous scholars have, in recent years, worked with the concept of sovereignty to inflect it with new meanings and suggest new practices that avoid some of these problems. See, for example, the contributions to Joanne Barker (ed.), Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005) and Aileen Moreton-Robinson (ed.), Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2007). 26 This book emphasises this recognition of Aboriginal sovereignty through a formal adoption and reckoning with indirect rule, some sixty years before it was echoed by the High Court of Australia in the Mabo judgement which recognised native title. Ben Silverstein, ‘Submerged Sovereignty: Native Title within a History of Incorporation’, in Julie Evans et al. (eds), Sovereignty: Frontiers of Possibility (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013).

[ 21 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES 27 Mark Rifkin, ‘Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the “Peculiar” Status of Native Peoples’, Cultural Critique, 73 (2009), 102, 106; Mark Rifkin, Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Carol Pateman, ‘The Settler Contract’, in Carol Pateman and Charles W. Mills, Contract and Domination (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), p. 59. On a ‘perfect settler sovereignty’, see Ford, Settler Sovereignty. 28 Glen S. Coulthard, ‘Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the “Politics of Recognition” in Canada’, Contemporary Political Theory, 6:4 (2007), 442–3; Stephen Turner, ‘“Inclusive Exclusion”: Managing Identity for the Nation’s Sake in Aotearoa/ New Zealand’, Arena Journal, 28 (2007), 92. 29 See Fred R. Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1986), pp. 71–102; Samia Khatun, ‘Beyond Blank Spaces: Five Tracks to Late Nineteenth-Century Beltana’, Transfers, 6:3 (2015). 30 Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15:1 (2007), 17. 31 Ronald Robinson, ‘Non-European Foundations of European Imperialism: Sketch for a Theory of Collaboration’, in Robert B. Sutcliffe and Roger Owen (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972), p. 124. This distinguishes such moments as Australian federation in 1901 or the independence of the USA in 1776, from moments of decolonisation in Nigeria in 1960 or Fiji in 1970. It is the difference between South African union in 1910 and democracy in 1994. As Ann Curthoys points out in her discussion of settler self-government in the Australian colonies in the 1850s, the ‘near-destruction of Aboriginal societies wrought by colonisation continued under new management’. In fact, she argues, the settler achievement of responsible government came explicitly at the expense of Indigenous autonomy, liberty, and sovereignty. Ann Curthoys, ‘“The Lying Name of ‘Government’”: Empire, Mobility and Political Rights’, in Jane Carey and Jane Lydon (eds), Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 90; Ann Curthoys, ‘Taking Liberty: Towards a New Political Historiography of Settler Self-Government and Indigenous Activism’, in Kate Fullagar (ed.), The Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Effects and Transformations since the Eighteenth Century (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), p. 238. 32 Adam Ashforth, The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 8–9. 33 Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 214; Stuart Hall and Doreen Massey, ‘Interpreting the crisis’, Soundings, 44:1 (2010), 57–62; Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Verso, 1969), p. 99; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1996), p. 210. On contradictions of public power, see Nancy Fraser, ‘Legitimation Crisis? On the Political Contradictions of Financialized Capitalism,’ Critical Historical Studies, 2:2 (2015), 163. 34 Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, p. 217. 35 The argument in this paragraph draws on Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 60–1. 36 Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 115–45. 37 Cook to Strehlow, 9 December 1937, NAA: F3, 20/58. 38 Strehlow to Cook, 23 December 1937; Cook to C. L. A. Abbott, 13 January 1938, NAA: F3, 20/58. Despite the decision not to prosecute, Strehlow reported that he had held Kulaia, Ngulunta, Witjitji, Wantu, Mungana, and six children at Jay Creek until 20 May 1938: ‘List of Natives who have resided at Jay Creek for the greater part of the time between 1/4/38 and 30/6/38’, NAA: F127, 3. This segregating legal remedy persists in central Australia. Alice Springs Magistrate Greg Borchers declared in a 2012 hearing that a young Aboriginal man would not be permitted to remain in or return to Alice Springs after his release from detention because he was ‘not fit to live in a civil society’ and would instead be returned to ‘the unregulated lands of the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjaraku’, where he could live ‘for as long as you like’. Russel

[ 22 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

COLON I A L TR A NSFOR M ATIONS Goldflam, ‘The (Non-)Role of Aboriginal Customary Law in Sentencing in the Northern Territory’, Australian Indigenous Law Review, 17:1 (2013), 77. 39 The terms and the formulation are borrowed from Jan Christiaan Smuts, Africa and Some World Problems, Including the Rhodes Memorial Lectures Delivered in Michaelmas Term, 1929 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), pp. 74, 76, 78, 92. 40 We might here be alert to what Shiri Pasternak describes as the ways ‘jurisdictional encounters produce colonial space’. Shiri Pasternak, ‘Jurisdiction and Settler Colonialism’, Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 29:2 (2014), 146. 41 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 147. 42 In Strehlow’s field of central Australia, anthropologists from Adelaide were more likely in the 1930s to measure the skin temperature of Aboriginal people, or take their blood or test their intelligence. See Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), pp. 194–209. 43 Audra Simpson, ‘Under the Sign of Sovereignty: Certainty, Ambivalence, and Law in Native North America and Indigenous Australia’, Wicazo Sa Review, 25:2 (2010), 107.

[ 23 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

CH A P T ER T WO

The political organisation of the British in their Empire, 1875–1939: transforming indirect rule Writing in the aftermath of rebellion: governing native society In June 1857, in a London shocked by news of the ‘wildest excesses’ of ‘slaying, burning, and destroying’ committed by ‘sepoy mutineers’ in India, Benjamin Disraeli rose in the House of Commons. Then leader of the Conservative Opposition, he spoke for three hours, interpreting the rebellion not as a ‘military mutiny’ but as a ‘national revolt’, one which demanded a reconsideration of British colonialism in India. He located the source of colonial disorder in three British transgressions of the previous decade: ‘first, our forcible destruction of native authority; next, our disturbance of the settlement of property; and thirdly, our tampering with the religion of the people’. In particular, the British refusal to recognise the Indian custom of adoption which could determine the inheritance of land – a non–recognition which Disraeli interpreted as a form of expropriation – had fundamentally disrupted Indian tradition. This, he suggested, reflected a colonialism that worked through transformation, that sought enrichment through direct expropriation, tampering with the economic structure of Indian society. There were other ways, Disraeli argued, of increasing revenue that did not necessarily rely upon increasing British control; ways which would not produce disorder.1 Sixty years later, Frederick Lugard sat in his genteel study at the home he shared in Surrey with his wife Flora, reflecting on his recently concluded tenure as Governor of Nigeria. Born in the nervous shadow of the Rebellion, in Madras in January 1858, he had lived and worked in an empire shaped by responses like Disraeli’s. Now anxious to demonstrate his successful translation of these concepts into the Nigerian state, he set himself two tasks: revising his Political Memoranda for publication; and setting down on paper his ideas about colonial [ 24 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

TR A NSFOR MING INDIR ECT RULE

government. As Governor, he had been a constant writer. Margery Perham suggested that Lugard was fundamentally a ‘man of the desk’, for whom ‘pen and paper had been at least as important a part of his equipment as compass, tent, and gun’.2 And he continued this mania for writing in Surrey. The Political Memoranda were quickly published in 1919, and he turned to his masterwork, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, completed in 1921 and published early the next year. He pronounced on the tropical role for imperialism, arguing that Britain, as trustee for a tropical empire, was mandated both to guide the primitive races within its care to advance towards greater civilisation, and to develop the material resources of the tropics for the benefit of mankind. To guide, not to transform, was his mantra of post-1857 colonialism. And in framing a colonial mission that ostensibly worked successfully in the interests of both Africa and Europe, Lugard ‘turn[ed] ambivalence about conquest into enlightened policy in an era when conquest had lost its public aura’.3 Disraeli’s speech had expressed the early stirrings of a moment of transition in British imperialism, discerning a new problem in colonial rule and calling for a ready solution. From responses to the Rebellion which inspired Arthur Gordon in Fiji, on to Frederick Lugard’s government of Nigeria and his translation of his methods into text, this chapter traces the history of the problem and solution identified by Disraeli as they developed from ideas voiced from opposition into a coherent political rationality accepted by British elites. In identifying British interventions into Indian authority, property, and religion as the source of disorder, Disraeli effected a reversal of agency, attributing anticolonial resistance not to nationalist responses to oppression but rather to a failure of command. Imperialism, he argued, was vulnerable. Without a better and more penetrating understanding of native manners and customs, colonial rule would continue to produce an instability that undermined the steady march of progress. But with that knowledge, if colonisers knew their natives better, administration and control could succeed. Lugard’s indirect rule, resting as it did on the notion that a truthful understanding of a subject society was the necessary basis for government, reflected the apogee of this era in British colonialism in which a preoccupation with problems of order and transformation – the ‘native question’ – was pre-eminent. Not only was there a shift in imperial ideologies; ideology produced the Empire differently. And this was effected in no small part by the books Lugard wrote. His writing was seductive because of its practice of fetishising the social formation, but also for its presentation of a governing mentality of colonialism: he situated colonial administration within a way of thinking, imagining [ 25 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

the subjects and objects of government and presenting techniques for acting upon these for imperial advantage. Lugard’s texts, in other words, were productive in themselves. In them he crafted indirect rule as an art of government that, while produced in a specific situation, could influence and structure the practice of colonial government elsewhere. An art of government emerges through the development and practice of techniques whose function is not to model and remake its subject through totalising control but instead to manipulate it. Crucial to this, as Michel Foucault identified, is knowledge of that subject; the discovery of a society distinct from the state. Society has its ‘own laws and mechanisms of reaction, its regulations as well as its possibilities of disturbance’. One ‘cannot consider it completely penetrable’. Instead, it can be manipulated. But to do so, one ‘must take into account what it is’, one must ‘reflect upon it, upon its specific characteristics, its constants and its variables’. These characteristics can be conducted through producing desires and repugnancies, incentives and disincentives: this is the art of government.4 Recasting indirect rule in these terms situates the identification of ‘native society’ as fundamental to the emergence of a new political rationality. This chapter historicises its invention as a response to colonial disorder, as an explanatory device for Disraeli, Henry Maine, and others seeking to comprehend the failure of British command in 1857. It traces its instrumentalisation by Gordon in Fiji, who sought to avoid wholesale Indigenous proletarianisation and instead guarantee the economic and political basis for native society to flourish as part of a colonial formation. And it maps its citation in Lugard’s writing as a means for making intelligible his claimed success in Nigeria. While these writers proposed native society as a limit to their power, a problem of colonial government, we as historians should not take them at their word: to do so is to reproduce, rather than critique, their political rationality. The apparent impossibility of complete transformation in the face of apparently unimpeachable tribalism was not a ‘problem’ that required ‘solution’ but is better thought as a strategy of domination. It incited a new, enlightened art of colonial government: indirect rule. Texts on indirect rule privileged ‘native society’ as a subject of government, as what Karuna Mantena describes as both ‘pretext and solution’, and described a mode of intervention into that subject, nurturing the chief as an endogenous force of social regulation.5 This, alongside chiefs’ arrogation of powers over native land and labour, produced native society as an economic unit, with specific relations of production and consumption at its base. In the post-1857 British Empire, the Indian Rebellion stood as an object lesson, a reminder of the disordering consequences of intervention into these relations.6 This substituted [ 26 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

TR A NSFOR MING INDIR ECT RULE

for the spread of capitalist relations a turn to embrace colonial articulations of modes of production, and gave rise to a state form that could govern the articulation. The ‘bifurcated state’, in Mahmood Mamdani’s term, became the archetype, mobilising neo-traditional Native Authorities to order a sphere of native production articulated with the British colonial government of capitalist trade and production. The bifurcated state was not constituted simply by working through a chief or Native Authority. These aspects represent the institutions by which some policies of indirect rule were brought into effect, but do not exhaust its meaning. Indirect rule is better understood as an art of government that could perform part of the work of managing and ordering a social formation characterised by this articulation and overdetermined by the discovery of ‘native society’ – a social and economic body – as the subject of government.7 As should be clear by now, this chapter argues that writing was crucial in expressing indirect rule in this form. Texts were produced in conversation with ongoing imperial debates over colonial practice, the viability of assimilation, the nature of race and the social differences it articulated, and the role of Britons in the tropics. They were often produced in libraries and studies far removed from the provisional sites of colonialism, placing the lives of ‘native’ peoples less in their own contexts than in a grand story of British imperialism. And texts like Lugard’s were written into a genre of guidebooks to colonial government published in the wake of 1857, speaking to an established body of British literature. Writing was, for Lugard, a practice of power, a way of exercising authority through reducing colonialism to a field of controllable discourse. Writing back in England, far from Nigeria, gave Lugard the capacity to occlude and supplant African meaning. It was a way of creating his own history, adopting a position of specular domination and presenting his aspiration to total control as fact. A book, as Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr have argued, ‘was the very emblem of imperial sovereignty’.8 Lugard could ignore the ‘undermining manipulations [of] dominated peoples’ that were the stuff of everyday life for the political officer charged with implementing his system. In books, writers like Lugard could abstract order from contingency, crafting indirect rule as an art of government rather than a tense and dynamic hegemony. And his books quickly became classics, ‘regarded’, as the Nigerian administrator George Tomlinson recalled, ‘with something approaching to veneration’.9 In this chapter I trace the ways the model to which Disraeli gestured was reiterated through Gordon’s work in Fiji and codified by Lugard in Nigeria and in Surrey. This is not a claim to the one true genealogy of indirect rule, though Gordon’s experiment was, as will become [ 27 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

clear, one influence on Lugard in Nigeria. But Gordon’s practice of colonial rule also loomed larger than others in the Western Pacific, across territories whose colonial states were staffed by his former subordinates. Indirect rule, in other words, was not invented in Africa and transported elsewhere, including Australia. It represented, rather, a trend in imperialism that spanned the British Empire, emerging in a number of sites including the Western Pacific, before being expressed as an art of government by Lugard. The chapter, then, contextualises Lugard’s work in systematising and formalising a standard of colonial administration, producing a political rationality that was simultaneously a privileged vantage point for producing ideas and actions, a series of instructions, and a way of framing and viewing the colonial world. In his writing, Lugard transformed indirect rule into a norm, developing a central role for the British alongside a persuasive moral justification for British accumulation. He rendered indirect rule a compelling and travelling idea.

Gordon in Fiji: taxing the collective As he sailed to Fiji in 1875 to take up his post as Governor, Arthur Gordon closely read Java; or, How to Manage a Colony, a work by J. W. B. Money, a lawyer who had worked in Calcutta in the 1850s and looked elsewhere for a more stable form of colonial rule in the aftermath of the 1857 Rebellion.10 Money found in the Dutch rule of Java a model of harmonious relations between ‘Europeans’ and ‘natives’, where colonial rule produced order, stability, and prosperity by recognising and instrumentalising native societies. This, he argued, produced ‘a very general contentment on the part of the governed with the existing state of things, and on the part of the Government, a large revenue per head, no debt, and a yearly increasing surplus to be sent … to Holland’.11 Java appeared as the site of a happy, industrious, and prosperous colonialism; a model for Gordon to emulate indeed. Far from this imagined paradise in Java, Gordon arrived in Fiji to find islands beset by turmoil. Indigenous Fijians had experienced a series of catastrophes, of both violence and disease, as almost 4000 white settlers from Australia and North America had, since the early 1860s, acquired control over much of the islands’ accessible and fertile land. There they had established profitable cotton plantations based on the exploitation of local workers and, later, workers from other islands in the Pacific. Seeking to wrest back dominion and establish order, Ratu Seru Cakobau, the paramount chief of the Bauan confederacy, had in 1871 garnered settler backing to declare himself Tui Viti, the king of a Fijian confederation. But Cakobau was no puppet and, as [ 28 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

TR A NSFOR MING INDIR ECT RULE

disgruntled settlers withdrew their support, his regime faced impoverishment and collapse. Requiring new allies, in 1874 Cakobau negotiated the cession of Fiji to the British, seeking to safeguard Fijian land rights and political representation amidst the pressure of an overwhelming colonising force.12 Cakobau tried to instrumentalise British sovereignty to limit white settlers’ expansionist mania. And, from the Colonial Office’s perspective in London, cession was more an attempt to institute law over those barely governable settlers than a colonial land-grab.13 But British rule began inauspiciously. When Cakobau returned from a state visit to Sydney that marked the cession and arrived in the then Fijian capital of Levuka, he brought with him a measles infection contracted in Australia. He survived, but the epidemic he sparked killed 40,000 Fijians, one-quarter of the Indigenous population. As settlers sought to take advantage of this devastation and claim territory, Gordon arrived and reiterated the importance of the ban, already set out in 1873, on further alienation of land from Indigenous Fijians; he later claimed to have been personally instructed by the Queen ‘to tell the Fijian people that their lands were theirs and should never be taken from them’.14 In so doing, Gordon’s intervention into Fijian struggles began by seeking compromise between Indigenous and settler interests. He was persuaded by Cakobau’s argument that the colonial state was dependent on chiefly support, that its legitimacy stretched only so far as it was grafted onto their structure of rule. And he was aware that the colony had to pay, that the continued prosperity of settler plantations was essential and required preservation. A hegemonic solution required the incorporation of both into the state. Gordon was not only persuaded by Cakobau’s compelling rhetoric; he was conscious that a successful government would depend on the cooperation of the chiefs. ‘The white settlers in Fiji’, he argued, ‘had not colonized an empty waste, or cultivated for the first time land until then only roamed over by nomadic savages.’ Instead, they had planted estates ‘among a large and industrious population, owners and cultivators of the soil, and possessing a complex social and political organization in vigorous activity’.15 Chiefs were at the centre of these organisations, and they pushed and schemed to carve out a space for their authority, articulating lively and resurgent polities that demanded protection and inclusion. Cakobau’s 1871 Constitution, modelled on the 1864 Hawaiian Constitution, had grafted a formal constitutional structure onto existing strains of Indigenous government. Chiefdoms were renamed ‘districts’, leading chiefs appointed as provincial Governors, and subordinate chiefs as magistrates. Negotiating strategic compromises while applying pressure on and through Cakobau, these [ 29 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

chiefs were able to ensure little change to their role and power even as sovereignty shifted and was remade.16 Instead of eroding their authority in favour of white administrators, Gordon incorporated it. 1874 marked cession, not annexation, and the governing role of a Fijian aristocracy continued. Grasping to understand and communicate the Fijian colonial field, Gordon read Maine’s Ancient Law, published in the same year as Money’s Java. Ritualised ‘traditional’ society, Maine argued, was both stable and vulnerable; it could not easily be ruled. The task of government was, then, to develop knowledge of its fundamental characteristics, understanding the ways they worked together to achieve an almost perfect, but precarious, social equilibrium. A government that took ‘native society’ seriously could then conduct it, directing it with care and efficacy, producing progress and wealth rather than dissolution and disorder.17 Maine’s political rationality framed the field of government and provided Gordon with a way of comprehending what he faced in Fiji, of understanding Indigenous claims as ‘native society’ speaking, articulating the necessary conditions of its existence. This presented Gordon with a pathway of action. He directed the Bose Levu vaka Turanga (Council of Chiefs) to develop a land law that would identify and codify the Indigenous landowning unit, a task completed in 1879 when, after years of contentious debate, the Council declared its consensus that: ‘The beginning and the end of the matter is this: we repeat, and with one voice declare that the true and real ownership of land with us is vested in the mataqali alone, nor is it possible or lawful for any mataqali to alienate its land.’18 A Lands Ordinance, finally enacted after Gordon left in 1880, secured the mataqali as the landowning group and had inalienability as ‘its most important feature’. The effect, he hoped, would be that ‘secure in the possession of their lands, the native proprietors will increase in wealth, and make corresponding advances in social progress’.19 The idea that governing secure native societies could facilitate progress was underpinned by Maine’s belief that all societies would, in time, proceed along a slow transition from relations based on status to relations based on contract, substituting private property for kinship-regulated communal property. This argument suggested that modernity was immanent in native society; wholesale colonial reconstruction would disrupt its emergence. Gordon described this communal subject of colonial government as a political body native to the Fijian islands. He fondly quoted Tui Lakeba’s statement to the first Bose Levu vaka Turanga in 1875: ‘Who, of himself, can build a good house? … Who ever heard of a man planting his garden by himself, and then having plenty for his family to eat? [ 30 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

TR A NSFOR MING INDIR ECT RULE

Do not we Fijians do all things in companies? How can a single man alone build his house, plant his garden, and construct his canoe and sail it? To do this we must cease to be Fijians.’20 Gordon described taking this corporate subject of government in developing taxation as the central technology for instituting an economic, political, and social order, a vector through which relations of land, labour, and race were channelled. It was the means by which a state could be constructed. Taxation, first, was a communal, rather than individual liability. ‘Among natives,’ he wrote, ‘the individual invariably acts as part of a family or village.’21 And, secondly, inspired by Money’s description of the Javanese ‘culture system’, taxation was to be paid in produce, not cash. This regime worked to transform Fijian villagers into communal producers of cash crops under the guidance and authority of chiefs. It was designed to ‘stimulat[e] native industry, and largely increas[e] the native trade in the group’ by promoting the ‘cultivation of articles of export’ – the commodities acceptable for the payment of tax obligations were, in 1879, copra, cotton, candlenuts, tobacco, and maize – and by educating Fijians both in the operation of the cash market and in receiving an appropriate value for their produce.22 This reflected the colonial articulation of modes of production. Gordon identified that the purpose of the system of individualised taxation was ‘that of furnishing through its instrumentality a large supply of labour to the plantations of the white settlers’.23 This new taxation regime – alongside severe restrictions on settler employment of Indigenous Fijian labour and the introduction of indentured Islander and Indian labourers in their place – instead secured chiefly power over native land and labour, giving form to an uneasy alliance between administrators obsessed with orderly production, white landowning settlers concerned to regularise their labour force in the nascent sugar industry, and Indigenous chiefs anxious to secure a space for their communities.24 The Fijian state emerged, then, through a system of tax assessment and collection that was designed to articulate Indigenous owned and worked customary production with settler-owned and indenture-worked plantation production; a hegemonic solution to the problems posed by the emerging contradictions of the dynamic colonial social formation. Gordon naturalised this government, writing that the ‘wisest course to pursue would be to preserve as far as possible the existing native organisation of village communities, to uphold the authority of the Chiefs and local councils, and generally to maintain existing native laws and customs, modifying them where necessary, but working them mainly through native agency’. He thus described his attempt to ‘seize … the spirit in which native institutions have been framed and endeavour to work them as to develop to the utmost possible extent the latent [ 31 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

capacities of the people for the management of their own affairs’.25 These were the terms of indirect rule which, J. D. Legge identified in his 1958 discussion of Fijian administration, denoted ‘a way of approaching the problem of governing a native people’, one that ‘recognizes the integrated character of native society and the fact that native institutions have important functions to perform’. The point here is not the incorporation of ‘Chiefs and local councils’, features which were a variable effect of the local dispensation. The critical element of Gordon’s government was rather the inseparably political and economic ‘preservation’ of ‘native’ organisation, laws and customs, and agency.26 Fiji was an important early laboratory for indirect rule, transforming the written lessons of 1857 into a praxis of working on ‘native society’ to order and produce a colony. While for imperial historians Gordon’s rule often appears as little more than a footnote in a genealogy of indirect rule, historians of Fiji have placed it at the heart of the story, culminating in Ian Heath’s argument that Lugard and Gordon met in the 1890s ‘and began a correspondence which lasted until the latter’s death, and Lugard’s views and practice more closely approximated to Gordon’s after these meetings’.27 It is true that Gordon and Lugard communicated and met in mid-1894 and discussed east African politics and government, and that Gordon, by then Lord Stanmore, was sufficiently impressed to try to arrange for Lugard to be appointed to govern either Nyasaland or Uganda. But their correspondence, and their unrecorded meetings, as Colin Newbury has identified, present no evidence of any instruction in techniques or policies of Native Administration. This does not mean, as Newbury goes on to argue, that their relationship was immaterial, that each man’s work should be understood as independently crafting local solutions to local administrative challenges.28 Rehearsing the fiction that imperialism was improvised and haphazard, accidental and absent-minded, does not help us understand the milieu in which Gordon and Lugard worked. The challenges they faced were not given; they were effects of the means and ends, the problems and solutions, of colonial government as understood by administrators. Apparently individual programmes of colonial government were each symptomatic of an emergent understanding of empire, one perhaps shared at the meetings between Stanmore and Lugard. Lugard may have been influenced by Gordon but he was, more importantly, a man of the same imperial era, practising government in the wake of an interpretation of the Rebellion that rendered a different colonial formation legible. This genealogy of indirect rule is one of ideologies and discursive formations, an interpretive and intertextual connection that does not depend on a surfeit of direct communication [ 32 ]

TR A NSFOR MING INDIR ECT RULE

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

or on slavish imitation. In West Africa of the late nineteenth century, as in Fiji of 1875, colonial government was designed to expand the productive capacities of native societies and appropriate the surplus, giving rise to what Gordon termed ‘the communal system of native administration’: the basis of indirect rule in the form Lugard was to develop in the ensuing decades.29 In the next section, I trace Lugard’s work in transforming Gordon’s experiment into a norm across the British Empire.

Lugard in Nigeria: an African political system Lugard was first appointed High Commissioner of the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria in 1899, five years after his meetings with Gordon. Charged with expanding British control over the area with a white staff comprising only five political officers, he negotiated ever–shifting alliances with local authorities to expand and sustain the emergent colonial state.30 He secured these partnerships by committing, as had Gordon, to prevent the advent of foreign–owned plantations and the land-grabs these required, instead encouraging the production of cash crops by peasant farmers on their own land, or on relatively small African–owned plantations. In so doing he established the basis for the archetypal instance of the bifurcated state, resting on two key institutions: segregation, which ‘separated whites from natives’, and customary law, which ‘separated civil from uncivil society’.31 Cities and trading entrepôts on the coast, where Africans were progressively and systematically excluded from positions in the administrative branches of government or on Legislative Councils, were administered through a form of British common law under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of Nigeria. The economically productive regions were zones of indirect rule, where tribes were governed through regimes of customary law implemented by chiefs. ‘Parliamentary institutions’, Lugard was to argue, ‘were not … suited to Africans.’32 Lugard served as High Commissioner until 1906, before returning in 1912 as Governor of both Northern and Southern Nigeria to amalgamate the two protectorates into one colony. As Governor-General of a unified Nigeria from 1914, he initiated work on a railway that would link the North with the coastal ports, enabling increasing trade and production that was to transform colonial relations. In the south-east, the substantial pre-existing trade in palm oil products continued throughout the colonial period while, from 1914 onwards, cocoa (in the south-west) and groundnuts (in the north) became important trade commodities.33 Increasing trade presented opportunities for chiefs or other local leaders to expand their authority over ethnicised subjects, [ 33 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

arrogating novel powers over land and labour. This flux produced the colonial state as dynamic and emergent, the site of processes of struggle and articulation, formed but never resolved in its hegemony.34 This state was established through fierce contestation. Facing different problems to those of Cakobau in Fiji, the Sultan of Sokoto, for example, did not see cession as a means of saving his people. After a century of expansion, by the time of Lugard’s arrival in West Africa the Sultan ruled a Caliphate that spanned much of what was to become Northern Nigeria, appointing emirs who owed him allegiance in each city. Lugard led an army into the north in 1902 and had conquered the territory by the following year, appointing a new Sultan and, some months later, killing the previous incumbent. But rather than disabling or replacing his structure of rule Lugard assimilated it into the colonial state, embracing the established law courts and schools, as well as the elite Fulani ruling class who had conquered the Hausa states in the early nineteenth century and now staffed the bureaucracies. 35 But he did claim to subjugate that state. And once the sovereign power of the Caliphate had collapsed, he delivered a speech to an assembly of chiefs that set out the terms on which conciliation could proceed, declaring the constitutional principles of indirect rule. ‘Every Sultan and Emir … who is appointed’, he proclaimed after taking Sokoto, ‘will rule over the people as of old time … but will obey the laws of the Governor and will act in accordance with the advice of the Resident.’ This regime removed the legal basis of the Caliphate as a political unit and established each emir as the head of a distinct Native Administration, serving at the pleasure of the British, with powers of legislation, jurisdiction, and, most importantly, tax collection, remitting part to the British authorities.36 Emirs, or other forms of chiefs, emerged as the fulcrum of colonial rule. And, after amalgamation, Lugard expanded this system to the rest of Nigeria. In the north, he had harnessed Fulani emirs to his administration. In Yorubaland in the south-west, he ‘recognised’ a baale in each tribe, under paramount obas who were granted the powers of northern emirs. And in south-eastern Nigeria where there was no pre–colonial tradition of chiefly rule, he expanded chiefly power and jurisdictional autonomy by removing Supreme Court authority over the warrant chiefs, who had first been appointed in the 1890s, and withdrawing white political officers from formal membership on Native Courts.37 Each Nigerian tribe was constituted and ruled by a Native Authority headed by a chief who governed through a body of traditional law and custom which ensured his right to administer communal land and rendered the peasants of his community subject to his direction. This consistent form of the Native Authority owed much to British [ 34 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

TR A NSFOR MING INDIR ECT RULE

assumptions of African despotism and chiefs were quick to take advantage, crafting a customary sphere that entrenched patriarchal gerontocracy, acquiring substantial power over young men and women’s mobility, labour, and sexuality.38 Expansions and transformations of chiefly power, remaking ethnicity as well as class and gender relations, were to provoke widespread resistance, most famously in the Aba Women’s War of 1929 where tens of thousands of Igbo, Opobo, and Ibibio women in the Calabar and Owerri provinces attacked not only the British, but also the institutions of (warrant) chiefly rule. This was an area with no tradition of chieftaincy, and when warrant chiefs were charged with levying taxation in 1928, it produced dissent that soon exploded into outright rebellion. Individual taxation was sharply resisted not only for its imposition of an increased economic burden in a time of heightened need, but also for its transformative intervention in the gendered order of families and communities. When rumours spread that women would be taxed, rebels attacked the institutions of colonial rule: first Warrant Chiefs, then Native Courts, and ultimately British trading houses. They sought – Matera, Bastian, and Kent argue – to destroy manifestations of British colonialism in order to reshape relations between men and women, trying to ‘set their world aright’. Though put down by military force, they both instilled a tradition of women’s resistance in south-eastern Nigeria and forced limits to the powers of both warrant chiefs and Native Courts.39 Targeting chiefs first represented a peasant critique that identified both the immediate vector of power and its basis. The British may have ruled Nigeria, but the face of that rule, to most Africans, was their chief. British administrators in Nigeria thus allied with the land-controlling chiefly class at the expense of British industrial capitalists on one side and African peasants on the other. Despite those industrialists’ demands, the white population was mostly confined to trade and business, while communal land rights, held in trust by chiefs, were largely protected.40 Lugard and his allies in the Colonial Office preferred to work with British trading companies than with aspiring industrial plantation owners. Nigerian communities’ resistance to the foreign alienation of land, and refusal to offer their labour regularly and efficiently on British-owned plantations, represented resistance to proletarianisation that figured as a limit, in the interests of order, on the expansion of white control of land and labour. Native production provided a more reliable and secure option.41 Throughout the colonial era the overwhelming bulk of production continued to be carried out on African-owned and controlled lands by peasants who grew both subsistence and cash crops, the latter usually sold on to trading firms on the coast. In this [ 35 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

way, British merchant capitalists allied with chiefs, profiting from favourable export conditions produced by underdevelopment and cartel behaviour, while chiefs were able to accumulate capital through exploiting the labour of peasants.42 Privileging small–scale, household production provided a level of relative autonomy for African peasants even as it expanded the scope of chiefly control over labour power and its products, reducing chiefly authority to this remnant. Anne Philips has argued that this ‘West African Policy’ of reliance on peasant development on communally held lands was little more than a ‘retreat’ in the face of the ‘recalcitrance of local conditions’. The British had arrived, she wrote, expecting to remake what would become Nigeria through instituting ‘entirely novel relations of production’, but found themselves up against limitations they construed as the exigencies of preserving order. Having retreated to an embrace of peasant production, they ‘romanticize[d] their failure into a success’ and declared it enlightened policy.43 But the reliance on peasant development was itself, as Philips herself details, a colonial innovation, reflecting a move away from both slavery and proletarianisation and towards a distinct colonial articulation which was an effect of the balance of power between the specific sectors of British capital invested in West Africa, and Africans of different classes’ continued fight for each element of self–determination. This is best thought not as a retreat but as a new mode of colonial attack, one that was novel in Fiji but normalised in Nigeria. And the system was solidified and codified under Lugard, if not in practice then in his writing, which instrumentalised a theory of ‘native society’ that rendered this colonial dispensation legible. In his texts, he naturalised a form of colonialism that rested on accommodating African society and ‘native’ production. There we find an idealist expression of arrangements of jurisdiction and authority which matched neatly to the articulation of modes of production. Sites of capitalist trade, of shopkeepers and some limited manufacturing, and the centres of commodity export were governed directly by a civil law determined largely by British administrators. Areas of primary production, on the other hand, were sites of indirect rule where chiefs administered a body of customary law that expanded to govern property and obligation. The articulation of jurisdictions reflected the articulation of modes of production. Lugard’s triumph was in obscuring, through writing, the relations of struggle that characterised this dynamic state form. Instead, he represented the social formation as the outcome of a considered application of a colonial template. In elaborating his conception of the state through writing, it became a fetishised ideological product, a [ 36 ]

TR A NSFOR MING INDIR ECT RULE

model rendered transferable by its dislocation from the specific conjunction of colonial Nigeria.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

A letter from Surrey: Lugard’s principles of colonial rule Through writing, Lugard expressed indirect rule as an art of colonial government which could travel to be received and transformed around the empire. His Political Memoranda were the ‘District Officer’s Bible’, and represented an attempt to continue to control administration, in Northern Nigeria especially, after his retirement to Europe. Across 13 memoranda, he set out procedures for dealing with an extraordinary range of matters, from the duties of political officers to the administration of taxation to the appropriate way to plan a township. The Dual Mandate, by contrast, was written with a more open ambition of influencing all European practices of tropical colonialism. Written as he was under consideration for appointment as Britain’s representative on the League of Nations’ Permanent Mandates Commission, it set out to justify both the project of colonialism and Lugard’s own work to that end, presenting, over more than 600 pages, general principles for a valuable colonial rule. Neither the Dual Mandate nor the Political Memoranda were to be read as rulebooks; they were rather guiding texts, introducing principles of government that were to be adhered to without necessarily imitating the Nigerian administrative structure entirely. Lugard’s idealist expression transformed contingent processes of exploitation, flows of commodities and labour power, into effects of his governing will. ‘[L]iberty and self–development’, he declared, ‘can best be secured to the native population by leaving them free to manage their own affairs, through their own rulers, proportionately to their degree of advancement, under the guidance of the British staff, and subject to the laws and policy of the administration.’44 His literary abstraction, his gloss on hegemony, was so persuasive in its time that by 1938 Lord Hailey could argue that the ‘early stage of administration in Nigeria … reflects the application of a deliberate policy, put into operation from the first and steadily developed to meet the expanding needs of civilized government’.45 In this section, we turn away from the difficult processes of state formation and towards Lugard’s analysis and description of his system of government. Indirect rule, for Lugard, was the practice of building an ordered state around the proper subject of government, the tribe, articulating its social forces with those of British colonialism. While a thoroughgoing remodelling of these societies would lead to their dissolution, knowledge of native institutions presented the shrewd [ 37 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

governor with opportunities for rearticulation. His books presented the techniques for doing so, three of which will be examined here: bolstering chieftaincy, a process of training that would generate a stronger state; taxation, which would strengthen but also integrate the state, producing as its effect an increased productivity of labour; and customary landholding. To govern well, as Lugard frequently argued, was to avoid the calamitous example of British India where ‘we have destroyed the natural institutions of the country, … we have sapped the foundations of native rule, and have taught only the duty of obedience’.46 In British Africa, Lugard instead instructed administrators ‘in every case’ to ‘endeavour to rule through the Native Chiefs’; to strengthen those ‘foundations of native rule’. The chief here represented both an individual man – the leader of a community – and a metaphor for the adoption of African modes of government. Lugard was thus able to distinguish between British rule ‘in which the chiefs are mere agents of the Government’ and, more approvingly, ‘native rule under the guidance and control of the British staff’ which governed ‘natives’ as integrated communities with social and political institutions. The objective of this latter mode of government was, he suggested, to ‘evolve reform by organisation and adjustment, without dislocation of customs and traditions to which the people are accustomed’; ‘in a word, the development of indigenous institutions rather than the sudden introduction of alien methods, however excellent’. Such ‘development’ was to be found in a strengthening state, as chiefs learnt ‘how to exert and maintain authority, and establish a chain of responsibility reaching down to the village head’. Colonial administrators’ role, Lugard directed, was not to exact obedience but rather to adopt the role of ‘advisers and guides in a period of involuntary change and transition’, reconciling old traditions with new conditions.47 The administrator would thus guide the chief and, through him, the tribe. The chief emerges here as a technique of government, a mode of intervening in and colonising communities, conducting them through acting on a socially integral institution. Lugard’s instruction to the political officer to advise and guide the chief relied upon a form of regular oversight that would produce a particular type of chiefly leader. The theme of the good chief, and the responsibilities of the white administrator in relation to shaping this good chief, recur throughout the Dual Mandate, denoting improving government and consequently signifying progress. Supporting chieftaincy as a social institution of native society was a privileged method of nurturing the development of that society itself. Good government, in other words, did not discipline each subject, or intervene and regulate each action, but rather took [ 38 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

TR A NSFOR MING INDIR ECT RULE

subjects in their own communal context and worked to direct and conduct them along an evolutionary path. The end of government was explicitly not imitation – the creation of societies that mimicked Europe – but rather the expansion of the material and civilisational capacity inherent in each African society. An idea of development was, in fact, the uniting principle of Lugard’s governing philosophy. African alterity and the problem of order provided him with a justification for colonisation: prior to cession, he wrote, African life was characterised by ‘ever-present … inter-tribal war, … extermination and slavery’. But in Lugard’s post–cession writing, as he concerned himself with government more than conquest, African socialities came no longer to represent a radical or unfathomable alterity, nor decadence and degradation, but rather indicated primitivity. Such societies represented, in this colonising fantasy, earlier phases of human progress: in Africa, ‘[e]very phase of human evolution may be studied as a living force’. He differentiated between ‘races of Asiatic origin’ or Hamites, their ‘negroid descendants’, who comprised a range of different races depending on the nature and extent of ‘admixture’, and ‘the negro tribes’. Those Britons at the apex of humanity with their racial ‘genius … to colonise, to trade, and to govern’, found that discovering this open field of human evolution imposed upon them a burden to transform and develop both the field of primitivity and the people who inhabited it, and to do so in accordance with now universalised principles of progress.48 The talents of whiteness corresponded uncannily to this new white man’s burden, naturalising the colonial situation. Fabricating history as teleology, Lugard traced a path of progress in terms of collectivity and authority. He began with the patriarchal stage, where no authority was recognised beyond the male head of the family, moving on to the tribal stage headed by a common chief. From here, tribes would group together ‘to form a single administrative unit’ which could constitute a Native Authority and, ultimately, would unite with other administrative units to form a nation. Citing a series of anthropological abstractions, each stage was signified by a point in the development of the state from absence to forceful presence, from the family to the nation, via the tribe and clan. Encountering communities which corresponded to each phase scattered across Africa, Lugard directed the colonial state to govern that which it found, governing tribes as tribes, clans as clans, and nations as nations: ‘there is no desire to impose on the people any theoretically suitable form of government, but rather to evolve from their own institutions, based on their own habits of thought, prejudices, and customs, the form of rule best suited to them, and adapted to meet the new conditions’. Colonial government was, for Lugard, directed towards conducting communities [ 39 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

along the pathway of progress by strengthening their political institutions. Its central aim was ‘the high ideal of leading the backward races, by their own efforts, in their own way, to raise themselves to a higher plane of social organisation’.49 District officers’ role was that of state– building, working ‘to strengthen the authority of the chiefs, and encourage them to show initiative; to learn their difficulties at first hand, and to assist them in adapting the new conditions to the old – maintaining and developing what is best, avoiding everything that has a tendency to denationalisation and servile imitation’. The aim, Lugard declared, was to ‘endeavour gradually to bring them to the standard of an advanced community’.50 Amidst great transformation, Lugard narrated a colonialism of conducting, maintaining, and developing. These techniques of colonial government, and not a fundamental reconstruction, would produce the expansion of the state, of civilisation, and of production. As for Gordon in Fiji, for Lugard taxation formed a crucial technology in producing these evolving subjects of the colonial state; it was a ‘concomitant of progress’. The institution of tax signified the imposition of, and submission to, law, and thus marked a developmental tipping point: ‘It marks the recognition by the community of the Suzerainty of the protecting Power, and the corresponding obligation to refrain from lawless acts. Failure to impose it is regarded as a sign of weakness or fear. The payment of “tribute” to a chief marks the transition from the patriarchal to the tribal stage.’51 Lugard instructed administrators to link their taxation to that tribute: ‘The object in view is to retain as far as possible the ancient tribute as sanctioned by Native law and custom, and to preserve the individuality of the institutions of the country; to utilise the Native machinery for the purpose.’ Tax would enable the inauguration of a treasury, an institution essential to the stable existence of a state, and the regular payment of wages to governing leaders and functionaries, linking rulers to the people as their paid representatives and embedding the state as an institution of ‘native’ society.52 In Nigeria, Lugard levied different forms of taxation depending on where he plotted each society in his evolutionary schema, but directed administrators always to ensure that it was ‘collected through the machinery of the native administration, in accordance with native law and custom, and under the close supervision of the British staff’. In this way, the tribute or tax would ‘assist in accomplishing the main object of administration’ by strengthening chiefly power and developing the native state through which the British could rule, ‘always endeavouring to push each community a step further up the ladder of progress, and of individual and municipal responsibility’.53 [ 40 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

TR A NSFOR MING INDIR ECT RULE

Just as Gordon organised a chain of authority in Fiji around the assessment and collection of tax, so in the Dual Mandate and Political Memoranda Lugard theorised taxation as the governmental technology that involved all levels of Native Administration. Tax, he wrote, was collected from the individual by the village headman, supervised by a district headman who had assessed the tax on the village as a whole, and who in turn reported to a chief. Taxes were received by this chief, presiding over a Native Authority, and deriving his power from the colonial suzerain.54 The institution of taxation, whether an income or head tax, must be, Lugard wrote, direct. Direct taxation, he suggested, would link the individual to the village, the district, the tribe and, ultimately, the colonial Governor, and would also transform the taxed subject. It brought, Toyin Falola argues, ‘colonial government to the grass roots’, marking the ‘extension of power to all the nooks and crannies of the country’ and to each individual subject through the institutions of traditional society. This new colonial subject was, Lugard imagined, characterised by obligation and allegiance to the state and an incipient recognition of individual responsibility, marking a measure of progress. These conditions were, in turn, linked to the institution of free labour.55 Lugard cautioned against levying tax for the sole purpose of leading Africans into debt, and thus compelling them to work for white masters or employers, but believed that through encouraging both active trade and individuality, tax would ‘stimulate productive industry’. Tax was to be assessed not on the basis of actual yield but ‘on what the land should produce if cultivated to a normal standard’, thereby inducing farmers to work at demanded rates of consistency and efficiency. Increasing labour productivity was integrally linked to the dual mandate. As the African Survey of the late 1930s was to suggest, the dual mandate could be expressed as ‘that of protection’, on the one hand, ‘and that of calling forth the power of self-exertion’ on the other. New forms of labour would civilise and liberate the individual worker, while expanding tropical production and trade in the interests of all humanity.56 Just as the genius of the British race was apparently that of colonising, trading and governing, so were the African races represented as essentially suited to and available for work, albeit requiring guidance to increase their efficiency. The Dual Mandate is replete with incessant references to African racial potency, industriousness, and willingness to work hard: they form ‘a virile and expanding race’ which ‘rarely needs compulsion to work’.57 In a tropical climate which, for Lugard, rendered ‘European settlement out of the question’, the ‘native must [ 41 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

be the producer of all agricultural exports’.58 Lugard’s colonial state was designed to order the colonial formation by regulating and directing the articulation of racialised modes of production: the ideal African was a peasant proprietor, a member of a governable community producing tropical products for sale to capitalist exporters who were usually, though not exclusively, white. African labour was to be governed by Native Authorities through what were conceived as traditional institutions: chiefly administration of the institution of tax, as discussed above, but also of landholding. Controlling the alienation of land, as for Gordon in Fiji, was for Lugard the ‘first and most important step to preserve the peasant proprietor’. Land could not be transferred out of ‘native jurisdiction’, a restriction that was designed to prevent proletarianisation and the unfettered expansion of capitalist relations of production. If peasant, glossed as African, modes of production were not only to be preserved but themselves expanded, Lugard advised that land must be administered by chiefs according to traditional law and custom. This too marked an evolution; modes of land tenure denoted stages of social progress from communal landownership to familial or individual ownership based on use, on to the tribal stage where a chief controlled and allotted the land of his tribe. Upon this chiefly power rested not only African production but the entire artifice of indirect rule in its Nigerian incarnation. The system of ruling through chiefs depended, wrote Lugard, on the recognition of their powers of alienation and control of land: ‘A chief acts as trustee for the tribe in regard to land.’59 This was, for Lugard, the heart of indirect rule. It was represented as directing traditional communities towards increasing commodity production by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of their social institutions, embracing the totality of their social formation. Lugard’s linkage through indirect rule of land and labour, tax and law, the state and native custom, was represented as part of a coherent governmentality. The specific West African mode of managing custom and land tenure was not crucial to indirect rule in general: what we see in Nigeria is what he described as ‘only a particular method of the application of these principles’.60 Lugard’s account of indirect rule as an art of government rests on the role of Native Authorities as integral (governing) elements of social formations that could be articulated as productive forces with a colonial capitalist system of trade, on the expansion of production and delegation of local administration as indicia of civilisation and progress, and on the community, or society, as the unit of government.61 In directing the transformation of native communities through an evolving custom, a transformation naturalised as evolution, taxation, and land tenure appear as the privileged technologies of government. [ 42 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

TR A NSFOR MING INDIR ECT RULE

Lugard’s principles of indirect rule were generally received in the terms he intended, establishing Indigenous or native communities as the subjects of government and providing for their articulation with an intruding and transforming colonialism. But for all that he placed his guidance in general terms, Lugard’s techniques of government reflected a particular colonial situation. In the West African colonies, Britain sought the acquisition of tropical commodities produced by African labourers, exploiting African communities by the acquisition of surplus through trade which, ‘though it has developed at an extraordinary rate, … is capable of indefinite expansion’.62 Native development and progress, in other words, was oriented towards a limitless future. But this was a future that the British could only face with ambivalence, celebrating change they would ultimately work to frustrate.

Never yet: race and progress in the travelling idea of indirect rule Lugardian indirect rule became a colonial standard throughout the British Empire during the interwar period. This was in large part an effect of his representation of colonial government in naturalised terms of race. Lugard’s philosophy of indirect rule was a productive abstraction: it took a synchronic view of the colonial social formation and elided the struggle which wrenched it into that position. He set aside the primitive accumulation, the daily violence, and the implications of a thorough transformation of traditional power in describing the complete control of the bifurcated state governing a stable articulation of two modes of production; in the Nigerian case those of merchant capitalism and peasant commodity production. And these different modes of production signified, and were themselves produced by, the irreducible and naturalised alterity of race. Lugard slipped so easily between discourses of race, of work, and of progress because they ultimately signified, in his writing, the same thing. Political philosophers and functionaries of empire were able to express their complete control amidst real struggle and precariousness through this naturalising ideological function: it explained the total control, which included elements of deferred coercion, of the colonial state. Out of this form of the state emerged forms of political and economic participation that were overdetermined by racialised political subjectivities. Africans were excluded from institutions of capital and democratic government on the basis of race, but were included in an ethnically defined political process as so many tribes: they were recognised not as Africans but as a series of ethnic minorities.63 Tribalism thus masked an underlying political exclusion while blackness (or nativeness) mapped [ 43 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

onto class. This was complicated by so–called detribalisation – which could be legislatively defined as the effect of education or proletarianisation (the growth of a permanent rather than migrant labouring class) – and miscegenation, which were central concerns of government in delineating distinct populations to govern, and produced figures of discourse which not only did great violence in Africa but were portable around the world, including to Australia. The idea of an authentic ‘Native rule’ relied upon a sharp differentiation between white and black, settler and native. Segregation was more than just restrictive legislation or the division of government power: it was the articulation and legitimation of difference.64 The typical African, Lugard believed, was ‘a happy, thriftless, excitable person, lacking in self-control, discipline, and foresight, naturally courageous, and naturally courteous and polite, full of personal vanity, with little sense of veracity, fond of music, and “loving weapons as an oriental loves jewellery”’. He was, most importantly, ‘steadfast’ in his ‘loyalty and affection’. Lugard resisted any transgression of the ‘native’ category, whether through religious conversion or secular education.65 Culture change, he imagined, would loosen tribal bonds and therefore weaken the authority a chief held over his people. The ‘Europeanised African’ is ‘separated from the rest of the people by a gulf which no racial affinity can bridge’. This fragmentation was troublesome and prevented ease of control. Moreover, the Europeanised African changed for the worse not only in outlook, but also in physical capacity. He or she ‘has become less fertile, more susceptible to lung disease and to other diseases, and to defective dentition’.66 Pathologising the effects of cultural change hardened the racialisation of both Africans and Europeans: representing hybridity as repugnancy restated difference as irreducible, naturalising and solidifying alterity. Chiefs were not to transgress the bounds of the ‘proper’ native. This was to be achieved through an education policy which aimed to ‘train a generation which will be able to achieve ideals of its own without a slavish imitation of Europeans, and be proud of a nationality with its own definite sphere of public work and its own future’. Nigerian education policy shifted to a programme of extending Muslim education from 1908, avoiding the earlier Indian policy of an anglicised education system.67 Lugard’s discussion of the role of education as an element of indirect rule is revealing in this context. Education is a fundamental technology of government. But it was also a crucial element of colonial subjectivation and represented, in Lugard’s indirect rule, a key site of intervention and uncertainty. We can read his work on education as indicative of the objects and contradictions of colonial policy as a [ 44 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

TR A NSFOR MING INDIR ECT RULE

whole. Just as, for example, ‘native authority … is inevitably weakened by the first impact of civilised rule’, Lugard wrote that education would inevitably ‘produce a ferment of new and progressive ideas, subversive of the old order’; the education system must then ‘guide these tendencies so that they may conduce to the betterment of the body politic and not to its disintegration’. This could only be effected by ‘placing the formation of character and habits of discipline above the training of the intellect as the primary object of education for Africans’.68 Lugard’s focus on ‘the formation of character’ as the principal object of education suggests the production of colonial subjectivities was consciously at the foreground of his government. Proper colonial subjects were tribal, were submissive to legitimate authority, and would work without requiring risky or costly coercion. The problem of order here loomed large: Lugard cautioned against teaching Cromwell, whose revolt against the monarchy could provoke awkward questions and induce dissension.69 Education, he wrote, ‘should enlarge their outlook, increase their efficiency and standard of comfort, and bring them into closer sympathy with the Government’. It should also ‘produce a new generation of native chiefs of higher integrity, a truer sense of justice, and appreciation of responsibility for the welfare of the community’; it should improve native government.70 The ‘problem’ of the improperly ‘educated African’ symbolised, for Lugard, the failure of education, producing, as it apparently did, people practically ‘of a different race’. This was a figure adopted from transcolonial discussions of the ‘politically–minded Indian’.71 The increasingly valorised post-Rebellion alliance with Indian princely rule had, as its discarded other, the Bengali ‘babu’ of Calcutta. If a lesson of 1857 was that a civilising mission produced disorder, it was embodied in the figure of the Indian who had adopted a veneer of education and civility over an otherwise ‘uncivilised’ nature. Semi–educated ‘babus’ were further considered feminised, decadent, and unmoored, troubled by their transgressive status ‘between’ two cultures but without firm roots in either.72 These figures of anxiety stood in for the uncertainty of a colonial rule resting on the shifting foundations of colonised societies; they embodied an object lesson in the dangers of dissociating colonised subjects from an ordered state comprising traditional regimes of custom and control. These mobile stereotypes – of the prince ruling his traditional community, and the semi–acculturated babu – carried with them the trace of a specific mode of colonialism. Here, we might only note that this figure invokes the spectre of race in a malleable form. R. S. Rattray, Government Anthropologist on the Gold Coast between 1921 and 1930, described the appearance [ 45 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

of a gulf between ‘the educated African’, who had ‘been cut off in great measure from his own country, customs, and beliefs’ and ‘seems to lack that indefinable something which often ennobles his wholly illiterate countryman, and raises him considerably above the common herd. I do not know exactly how to describe what it is that the one often possesses and the other seems to miss. It appears to me like some hand reaching out of the past and linking him with it.’ Lugard too was ‘baffled’ by the ‘educated native’ who he found ‘distasteful’ and ‘antagoniz[ing]’. Education and literacy were the mark of detribalisation and deculturalisation read as degradation. The discomfort with racial transgression, that ‘indefinable something’, was here imbued with a strong sense of the authenticity of proper native alterity.73 An anglophile or missionary education, with its potential for transforming what Lugard described as ‘character’, here risked undermining the very physical basis of segregated difference; hence his insistence that after a proper colonial education its subject ‘will remain an African – not a déraciné and pseudo-European’.74 The same but not quite was altogether too similar for indirect rule; excluding Africans from democratic government and delegating their administration to tribal institutions relied on Africans as tribal subjects. Detribalisation and deracination signified similar processes of disorder. This problem of difference thus appears as a problem of order at the level of subjectivity but read as embodied in race, an at times useful contradiction to which we will return in discussions of the ‘half–caste’ in Australia’s Northern Territory in Chapter 5. Race both impelled and restrained progress, signifying both potential for ‘improvement’ and its ultimate limit. Historians have tended to understate the theory of progress in Lugard’s work, rather seeing his government as wedded to a stultifying vision of order and traditional authenticity. But progress has a conspicuous presence in his written work, denoted by the growth of the state and by expanded production. In practice, this conduced to reconstituting native society as a functional part of a system of domination, rearticulating its institutions of difference and stratification to increase colonial exploitation. Customary institutions were remade and became the conduits of larger forces of domination, as local powers that were once constituent parts of regional networks were articulated with the tentacles of empire. Gordon’s version of indirect rule avant la lettre was a form of government which established specifically Indigenous social organisation as the necessary condition for progress: ‘if only sufficient time is allowed them’, he pleaded to Lord Selborne in London, ‘I am sure that they will become a thriving and even powerful community.’75 In his writing in Surrey, Lugard too argued that African forms of government were a proper [ 46 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

TR A NSFOR MING INDIR ECT RULE

basis for development. ‘Mohammedan rule in Africa’, he wrote, can ‘be made an instrument of enlightened progress’.76 A theory of progress enabled indirect rule to be scripted both as compelling, as the practice of a civilisational responsibility, and as benevolent, as the fulfilment of a trust. The concept of the dual mandate, which formed the basis of Lugard’s elaboration of the purpose of colonial government, synthesised two early twentieth-century conceptions of the ‘trust’, a position captured in the epigraphs to The Dual Mandate. Joseph Chamberlain, Lugard quoted, had declared that ‘[w]e develop new territory as Trustees for Civilisation, for the Commerce of the World’, while the then recent Covenant of the League of Nations in establishing the Mandate System entrusted colonising nations with the ‘wellbeing and development of peoples not yet able to stand by themselves, form[ing] a sacred Trust of Civilisation’. The trust, in these two senses, essentially directed colonial government to convey civilisation to backward colonial subjects while expanding production and trade in colonial territories: put more bluntly and evocatively, it represented ‘bringing to the dark places of the earth, the abode of barbarism and cruelty, the torch of culture and progress, while ministering to the material needs of our own civilisation’.77 This synthesis of the civilisational and the material was narrated by Lugard as succeeding the unabashed transformative exploitation of prior colonialism, and opened up a space for mobilising knowledge through a more substantial and refined mode of colonial rule. As British power slowly declined in the liberal internationalist context that succeeded the First World War, American-inflected norms of self–determination replaced an unabashed imperialism.78 This did not, of course, indicate an end to colonisation, but rather mandated justifications for colonial rule within a liberal language of trusteeship and improvement. This was the function of The Dual Mandate. Through his books, as well as through Lugard’s work as a key member of the League of Nations’ Permanent Mandates Commission, indirect rule became colonial doctrine.79 And due in part to the lobbying of his wife, Flora Shaw, Lugard’s language of government seeped through the Colonial Office. A 1938 handbook for the unified colonial service advised that the ‘function of the British administrator is rather to guide by influence and advice than to rule by direct command’. He should make a ‘constant effort … to seek out and to develop the best in the natural institutions of the people themselves’.80 Guiding those institutions represented indirect rule as the performance of malleable techniques, adjustable to novel adaptations both elsewhere in Africa and later in Australia, available to perform order in contexts of crisis and instability. [ 47 ]

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 ‘The Mutiny in the Indian Army’, The Times (29 June 1857), p. 8; Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 27 July 1857, vol. 147, cols 448–9. See also Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 58–98. 2 Margery Perham, Lugard: The Years of Authority 1898–1945 (London: Collins, 1960), p. 174. On the relationship between Perham and Lugard, see C. Brad Faught, Into Africa: The Imperial Life of Margery Perham (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 109–25. 3 Daniel Bivona, British Imperial Literature, 1870–1940: Writing and the Administration of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 158. 4 Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 220; Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, ‘Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government’, British Journal of Sociology, 43:2 (1992), 175; Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 4, 33; Michel Foucault, ‘Space, Knowledge and Power’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), p. 242; Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 20–1. See also Colin Gordon, ‘Governmental Rationality: An Introduction’, pp. 14–27 and Graham Burchell, ‘Peculiar Interests: Civil Society and Governing “the System of Natural Liberty”’, p. 120, both in Peter Miller, Graham Burchell, and Colin Gordon (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 14–27. 5 Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 11. 6 On India as referent in Fiji and Nigeria, see Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 35, 43, 47. The aftermath of the Rebellion also prompted substantial administrative reform, including the devolution of power to provincial and local governments and the expansion of princely rule. Judith M. Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 33, 126–7; Michael Herbert Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System, 1764–1858 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991). 7 Practising a Foucauldian method in conjunction with an analysis of relations of production situates this work within recent scholarship which describes Foucault as offering a ‘complementary analysis to Marxism’, working ‘within the same historical current as Marxism’. Here, I seek to understand practices of governing the articulation, a particularly colonial, and fundamentally racialised, form of government. Stuart Elden, ‘A More Marxist Foucault: Reading La société punitive’, Historical Materialism, 23:4 (2015), 151; Mark G. E. Kelly, ‘Foucault against Marxism: Althusser beyond Althusser’, in Jernej Habjan and Jessica Whyte (eds), (Mis)readings of Marx in Continental Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 94. 8 Kathryne S. McDorman, ‘Two Views of Empire: Margery Perham and Joyce Cary Analyze the Dual Mandate Policy’, Research Studies, 50:3–4 (1982), 156; Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘Introduction: The Spine of Empire? Books and the Making of an Imperial Commons’, in Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr (eds), Ten Books that Shape the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 1. See also Christopher J. Gray, Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa: Southern Gabon, ca. 1850 –1940 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), pp. 104–5. 9 Cited in A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ‘Introduction to the Third Edition’, in Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, Political Memoranda: Revision of Instructions to Political Officers on Subjects Chiefly Political and Administrative: 1913–1918 (London: Frank Cass, 3rd edn, 1970), p. xviii. See also Sean Stilwell, ‘Constructing Colonial

[ 48 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

TR A NSFOR MING INDIR ECT RULE Power: Tradition, Legitimacy and Government in Kano, 1903–63’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 29:2 (2011), 198. 10 See, e.g., John D. Kelly, ‘Gordon Was No Amateur: Imperial Legal Strategies in the Colonization of Fiji’, in Donald Lawrence Brenneis and Sally Engle Merry (eds), Law & Empire in the Pacific: Fiji and Hawai’i (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2004), pp. 77–87. 11 J. W. B. Money, Java; or, How to Manage a Colony. Showing a Practical Solution of the Questions Now Affecting British India (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1861), Vol. I, pp. 47–8. 12 This period of conflict, which preceded and was not halted by cession, is summarised in Tracey Banivanua–Mar, ‘Cannibalism and Colonialism: Charting Colonies and Frontiers in Nineteenth–Century Fiji’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52:2 (2010), 268–78; Michael C. Howard, Fiji: Race and Politics in an Island State (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1991), pp. 21–4; K. R. Howe, Where the Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from First Settlement to Colonial Rule (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1984), pp. 273–7. 13 Ahmed Ali, ‘Fiji: Political Change, 1874–1960’, in Brij V. Lal (ed.), Politics in Fiji: Studies in Contemporary History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986), p. 1; Tracey Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 22–3. 14 Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords, 16 July 1907, vol. 178, col. 478. 15 Arthur Hamilton-Gordon Stanmore, ‘Native Councils in Fiji (“Na Veimbose Vaka Turanga”)’, Contemporary Review, 43 (1883), 713. 16 David Routledge, Matanitu: The Struggle for Power in Early Fiji (Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1985), p. 130; J. D. Legge, Britain in Fiji, 1858–1880 (London: University of Western Australia Press, 1958), pp. 80, 96; Colin Newbury, ‘Bose Vakaturaga: Fiji’s Great Council of Chiefs, 1875–2000’, Pacific Studies, 29:1/2 (2006), 83. 17 Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (London: Murray, 1930 [1861]); Mantena, Alibis of Empire. See also Adam Kuper, The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth (London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2005), pp. 39–50. 18 ‘Notes and Proceedings of Native Council’, 1879, cited in Peter France, The Charter of the Land: Custom and Colonization in Fiji (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 113. See also pp. 100–19. 19 Fiji—Ordinance No. XXI of 1880, Memorandum by the Honourable Sir Arthur Gordon, April 1881, in Arthur Hamilton-Gordon Stanmore, Fiji: Records of Private and Public Life, 1875–1880 (Edinburgh: R. & R. Clark, 1897), Vol. IV, pp. 509, 11. 20 Stanmore, Fiji, Vol. I, p. 321. 21 Arthur Hamilton-Gordon Stanmore, Paper on the System of Taxation in Force in Fiji: Read before the Royal Colonial Institute, by the Hon. Sir Arthur Gordon, 18th March, 1879 (London: Harrison & Sons, 1879), p. 22. 22 Ibid., pp. 25, 29–32, 37; Money, Java, Vol. I, pp. 109–12, 212. The increase in Indigenous Fijian production of cash crops in connection with the tax scheme was substantial, from £8,685 worth in 1876, the first year such taxes were collected, to £25,552 in 1879, an increase of 194 per cent to represent the bulk of the colony’s production. See Stanmore, Fiji, Vol. IV, p. 484. Bruce Knapman, Fiji’s Economic History, 1874–1939: Studies of Capitalist Colonial Development (Canberra: National Centre for Development Studies, 1987), p. 4. Cf. Murdo J. MacLeod, ‘The Sociological Theory of the Taxation of the Peasant’, Peasant Studies Newsletter, 4 (1975). 23 Stanmore, Paper on the System of Taxation in Force in Fiji, p. 18. 24 Ibid., pp. 27–8; ‘Atu Bain, A Protective Labour Policy? An Alternative Interpretation of Early Colonial Labour Policy in Fiji’, Journal of Pacific History, 23:2 (1988). Laurence Brown, ‘Inter-Colonial Migration and the Refashioning of Indentured Labour: Arthur Gordon in Trinidad, Mauritius and Fiji (1866–1880)’, in David Lambert and Alan Lester (eds), Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

[ 49 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES 25 The description of Fijians as living in ‘village communities’ drew on Maine to allude to their similarity to Indians. Gordon located Fijians in a racial typology that classified the native peoples of the British Empire: ‘No one would dream of placing on one level the acute and cultivated Hindoo or Cingalese and the wandering and naked savage of the Australian bush. The Fijian resembles neither; but he has more affinity with the former than the latter.’ Stanmore, Fiji, Vol. I, pp. 198–9. This was a deliberate counter-racialisation explicitly crafted both to dispute the darkened primitivity stressed by settlers eager to demonstrate the necessity of enlightened intervention and the concomitant accessibility of land and exploitable labour, and to assert the amenability of Fijian communities to some kind of self–government following, though modifying, an Indian ‘princely state’ model. 26 Legge, Britain in Fiji, pp. 165–6, 282. See also Kirstie Close-Barry, A Mission Divided: Race, Culture & Colonialism in Fiji’s Methodist Mission (Canberra: ANU Press, 2015), pp. 1–4. 27 Ian Heath, ‘Toward a Reassessment of Gordon in Fiji’, Journal of Pacific History, 9 (1974), 92. See also George Kingsley Roth, Native Administration in Fiji During the Past 75 Years; a Successful Experiment in Indirect Rule (London: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1951); J. K. Chapman, The Career of Arthur Hamilton Gordon, First Lord Stanmore, 1829–1912 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964), preface. 28 Lord Stanmore to Frederick Lugard, 5 June 1894; 13 June 1894; 11 November 1894, Lugard Papers, MSS Brit Emp, s 45, f 82; Lugard to Stanmore, 6 June 1894; 12 June 1894; 22 July 1894, Stanmore Papers, MS 49242, ff 121–33; Colin Newbury, Patronage and Politics in the Victorian Empire: The Personal Governance of Sir Arthur Hamilton Gordon (Lord Stanmore) (Amherst, MA: Cambria Press, 2010), pp. 80, 177, 180–1. 29 Lord Stanmore, notes for speech, c.1905, Stanmore Papers, MS 49242. 30 A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London: Longman, 1973), p. 190; Perham, Lugard: The Years of Authority, p. 35. 31 Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2004), p. 70. 32 Lord Lugard, Colonial Office record of a meeting at the Carlton Hotel, 6 October 1939, CO 847/17/11 in S. R. Ashton and S. E. Stockwell (eds), Imperial Policy and Colonial Practice 1925–1945 (London: HMSO, 1996), vol. 1, p. 297; Andrew Roberts, ‘The Imperial Mind’, in Andrew Roberts (ed.), The Colonial Moment in Africa: Essays on the Movement of Minds and Materials, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 33. 33 Toyin Falola and A. D. Roberts, ‘West Africa’, in Judith M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume IV (London: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 516–17; R. Olufemi Ekundare, An Economic History of Nigeria, 1860–1960 (London: Methuen, 1973), p. 158; Sally Herbert Frankel, Capital Investment in Africa: Its Course and Effects (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 308. See also Frederick Cooper, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 21. 34 See Clifton C. Crais (ed.), The Culture of Power in Southern Africa: Essays on State Formation and the Political Imagination (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003). 35 Obaro Ikime, The Fall of Nigeria: The British Conquest (London: Heinemann, 1977), pp. 198–201; Perham, Lugard: The Years of Authority, p. 90; Prosser Gifford, ‘Indirect Rule: Touchstone or Tombstone for Colonial Policy?’, in Prosser Gifford and Wm. Roger Louis (eds), Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 60; R. A. Adelaye, Power and Diplomacy in Northern Nigeria, 1804–1906: The Sokoto Caliphate and Its Enemies (London: Longman, 1971), p. 257. 36 Toyin Falola, Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), pp. 14–16; Perham, Lugard: The Years of Authority, pp. 121–37; Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, ‘The Fight against Slave–Traders on Nyassa’, Contemporary Review, 56 (1889), 343; Frederick Lugard, ‘The Speech at Sokoto’, in A. H. M. KirkGreene (ed.), The Principles of Native Administration in Nigeria: Selected Documents,

[ 50 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

TR A NSFOR MING INDIR ECT RULE 1900–1947 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 43–4; John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 200–1; D. A. Low, Lion Rampant: Essays in the Study of British Imperialism (London: Frank Cass, 1973), p. 92. 37 Olufemi Vaughan, Nigerian Chiefs: Traditional Power in Modern Politics, 1890s–1990s (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000), pp. 1–43; Adiele Eberechukwu Afigbo, The Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria, 1891–1929 (New York: Humanities Press, 1972). Historians have stressed the diverse ways in which indirect rule was implemented across Nigeria. See Toyin Falola and Saheed Aderinto, Nigeria, Nationalism, and Writing History (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010), pp. 45–6. 38 Perham, Lugard: The Years of Authority, p. 155; Michael Crowder and Obaro Ikime, ‘Introduction’, in Michael Crowder and Obaro Ikime (eds), West African Chiefs: Their Changing Status under Colonial Rule and Independence (Ile-Ife: University of Ife Press, 1970), p. x; Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed Books, 1987); Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, p. 8. 39 Afigbo, The Warrant Chiefs, pp. 241–2; Ifi Amadiume, ‘Gender, Political Systems and Social Movements: A West African Experience’, in Mahmood Mamdani and Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba (eds), African Studies in Social Movements and Democracy (Dakar: Codesria, 1995), p. 38; Falola, Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria, pp. 108–30; Marc Matera, Misty L. Bastian and Susan Kingsley Kent, The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 236. See also Judith van Allen, ‘“Aba Riots” or Igbo “Women’s War”? Ideology, Stratification, and the Invisibility of Women’, in Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay (eds), Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976), p. 60; Gloria Chuku, Igbo Women and Economic Transformation in Southeastern Nigeria, 1900 –1960 (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 203–36. 40 Roberts, ‘The Imperial Mind’, p. 30; C. C. Wrigley, ‘Aspects of Economic History’, in Roberts (ed.), The Colonial Moment in Africa, p. 106. For some small exceptions, see Ekundare, An Economic History of Nigeria, pp. 158–9, 76–9, 82–3; Tekena N. Tamuno, The Evolution of the Nigerian State: The Southern Phase, 1898–1914 (Harlow: Longman, 1972), p. 260. 41 Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa, pp. 213–14. 42 J. O. Ahazuem and Toyin Falola, ‘Production for the Metropolis: Agriculture and Forest Products’, and O. N. Njoku, ‘Trading with the Metropolis: An Unequal Exchange’, in Toyin Falola (ed.), Britain and Nigeria: Exploitation or Development? (London: Zed Books, 1986). 43 Anne Phillips, The Enigma of Colonialism: British Policy in West Africa (London: James Currey, 1989), pp. 11–12. See also George Padmore, How Britain Rules Africa (London: Wishart, 1936), pp. 315–16. 44 Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1922), p. 94. 45 William Malcolm Hailey, An African Survey: A Study of Problems Arising in Africa South of the Sahara (London: Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 419. 46 Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, p. 219. 47 Lugard, Political Memoranda, pp. 10, 228, 52; Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, p. 194; Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, ‘Education and Race Relations’, Journal of the African Society, 32:126 (1933), 7. 48 Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, pp. 5, 67–8, 75, 618–19. 49 Ibid., pp. 215, 17–19. See Olufemi Taiwo, ‘Reading the Colonizer’s Mind: Lord Lugard and the Philosophical Foundations of British Colonialism’, in Sue Campbell and Susan E. Babbitt (eds), Racism and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 50 Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, pp. 66, 217–18. 51 Ibid., pp. 218, 32.

[ 51 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES 52 Lugard, Political Memoranda, p. 169; Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, pp. 219, 31. 53 Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, p. 230; Lugard, Political Memoranda, pp. 167, 200. 54 Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, pp. 200, 42. The chief was no doubt reminded of his subordinate status by the presence of a British resident whose ‘advice on matters of general policy must be followed’, though the resident must be ‘careful not to interfere so as to lower his prestige, or cause him to lose interest in his work’: p. 201. 55 ‘The result it aims at is to emancipate the people from indolence on the one hand and forced service on the other, and to raise them to a plane of greater communal and individual responsibility.’ Lugard, Political Memoranda, p. 169; Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, pp. 232–3. See also Falola, Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria, p. 79; Barbara Bush and Josephine Maltby, ‘Taxation in West Africa: Transforming the Colonial Subject into the “Governable Person”’, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 15:1 (2004). Walter Crocker’s scandalous account of tax collection in Lame in 1933, a tale of chiefly evasion, people hiding their livestock and running away, and the seizure of such property as he could find to be auctioned to recoup the tax assessments, suggests that deference to colonial tax collection and the form of responsibility it encouraged was a project met with great resistance. See Walter R. Crocker, Nigeria: A Critique of British Colonial Administration (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936), pp. 79–81. 56 Frankel, Capital Investment in Africa, p. 9. 57 Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, pp. 68, 72, 235. See also pp. 42, 400–9. 58 Ibid., pp. 397, 424. In practice, labour was often forced for infrastructure projects. On the place of white settlers in the tropics, see also pp. 41–3. This continued to represent orthodoxy through the interwar period. In 1926, Under–Secretary of State for the Colonies William Ormsby-Gore determined that British policy in the tropics must hold to ‘its two essential features of indirect rule and native agriculture’. W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, Report by the Hon. W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore M.P. (Parliamentary under-Secretary of State for the Colonies), on His Visit to West Africa During the Year 1926 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1926), p. 12. 59 Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, pp. 280, 84, 96, 305; Hailey, An African Survey, p. 714. 60 Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, p. 200. 61 On the administrative unit of indirect rule, see ibid., pp. 202, 44–5. 62 Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, ‘Report by Sir Frederick Lugard on the Amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria and Administration, 1912–1919’, in A. H. M. Kirk-Greene (ed.), Lugard and the Amalgamation of Nigeria: A Documentary Record (London: Frank Cass, 1968), p. 96. 63 Mahmood Mamdani, ‘Historicizing Power and Responses to Power: Indirect Rule and Its Reform’, Social Research, 66:3 (1999). 64 William Beinart and Saul Dubow, ‘Introduction: The Historiography of Segregation and Apartheid’, in William Beinart and Saul Dubow (eds), Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 4. 65 Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, pp. 69–70; Lugard, ‘Report by Sir Frederick Lugard on the Amalgamation of Northern and Southern Nigeria and Administration’, pp. 147–8. 66 Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, pp. 79–81. This was the other side of theories of white degeneration (to the local standard) in the tropics, which were largely discredited by the twentieth century, and replaced by fear of black degeneration in urban spaces. In each case the problem is primarily spatial. 67 Lugard, Political Memoranda, p. 130; Ronald Hyam, Elgin and Churchill at the Colonial Office 1905–1908: The Watershed of the Empire-Commonwealth (London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 527. 68 Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, pp. 203, 432.

[ 52 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

TR A NSFOR MING INDIR ECT RULE 69 Ibid., p. 52. In 1913, he had been allowed to ‘discourage’ schools from teaching the history of the Stuarts on the grounds that this may encourage ‘disrespect for authority’: Roberts, ‘The Imperial Mind’, p. 34. 70 Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, pp. 425–6. 71 Ibid., p. 81. 72 See Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 47–78; Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 73 Robert Sutherland Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), pp. vii–viii; Frederick Lugard to Flora Lugard, 10 October 1912, cited in Perham, Lugard: The Years of Authority, pp. 389–90. 74 Lugard, ‘Education and Race Relations’, 8. 75 Gordon to Selborne, January 1877 quoted in Heath, ‘Toward a Reassessment of Gordon in Fiji’, 85–6. 76 I. F. Nicolson, The Administration of Nigeria, 1900–1960: Men, Methods and Myths (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 147; Lugard, Political Memoranda, p. 166. 77 Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, p. 618. In a slightly earlier version, Lugard placed greater emphasis on the necessity of the exploitation of the tropics to the development of ‘the civilised world’ whose needs were also entrusted to the colonial trustee. Developing the tropics was synonymous with rendering ‘their essential produce … available to civilised nations’. Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, ‘Tropical Africa’, Edinburgh Review, 229:468 (1919), 364–5. 78 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 79 Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 107–11. This normalisation was, of course, contested. See Padmore, How Britain Rules Africa, pp. 315–16. 80 Charles Jeffries, The Colonial Empire and Its Civil Service (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), pp. 133–4. On Flora Shaw, see Helen Callaway and Dorothy O. Helly, ‘Crusader for Empire: Flora Shaw/Lady Lugard’, in Nupur Dasgupta Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 81; Anthony I. Nwabughuogu, ‘The Role of Propaganda in the Development of Indirect Rule in Nigera, 1890–1929’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 14:1 (1981).

[ 53 ]

CH A P T ER T H R EE

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Reporting on the northern contradiction: conflict and crisis, 1918–45

Occupying administration Success eluded the Northern Territory in the first half of the twentieth century. In May 1936, a delegation of Northern Territory pastoralists met with the Minister for the Interior Thomas Paterson to express their dismay at the absence of development. Without substantial infrastructure improvements, they complained, it was impossible to turn a profit. They called for a government inquiry, one that would survey the resources of the Territory and draw up a development scheme that might ensure their future success. The Minister was persuaded, appointing the inquiry they sought with the favourable members they suggested.1 Some five years earlier, facing a more serious inability to make a living, the pastoralists’ working-class counterparts in Darwin had taken more direct action. In January 1931, over fifty unemployed white men had established themselves on the veranda of the government offices in Darwin, demanding an immediate increase in relief work and financial support. This was not the first such occupation: the previous May they had locked Robert Weddell, the Administrator, in his office for several hours before he was freed by police. On this occasion, the men seemed determined to stay, establishing placards, tents, and cooking equipment, and raising the Red Flag from one of the veranda posts. Cecil Cook, the Chief Protector of Aboriginals and Chief Medical Officer of the Northern Territory, was both brazen and quick to act. The day after the occupation was established, he marched across the road to seize the flag, returning to the police station with it in hand. Protesters rushed the station and demanded its return before raising it once more at the government offices. There they remained, before being ‘cleared’ a few days later by baton–swinging police, an episode that ended with three policemen and several more demonstrators lying unconscious in the street.2 [ 54 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

CONFLICT A ND CR ISIS, 1918 – 45

In different ways, these two episodes illustrate the frustrations of white men – both capitalists and labourers – in the interwar Northern Territory. Its economy lurched through the interwar period in a state of depressed insecurity. Justice Drake-Brockman of the Court of Arbitration and Conciliation noted in 1934 that ‘the Northern Territory is in the peculiar position that she produces practically nothing of any particular account which brings in revenue for the Territory or any income for its people’. The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner argued in 1939 that ‘economically speaking, the north has been dying on its feet for twenty years’, and Prime Minister John Curtin, speaking at a Conference of Commonwealth and State Ministers on postwar reconstruction in October 1944, preferred to speak of parts of the north as undead, as ‘vampires which at present are sucking away much of the nation’s strength’.3 There was only one major commercial industry in the Territory – pastoral beef production – and it functioned far from any market; however successful its production may have been, no one could buy the beef.4 In the absence of a major export industry, even at the best of times most white residents of Darwin subsisted on the basis of no more than two or three days of government relief work each week. Whether in the more comfortable settings of a meeting between lobbyists and the Minister, or in one of the many white workers’ rebellions of the era, northern white settlers demanded a different mode of government. Their calls registered the instability and conflict that characterised the north. To the Australian Government, occupation itself was troublingly precarious. The Northern Territory census represented a regular reminder of the numerical weakness of the white population. Before the Territory came under Commonwealth control in 1911, its non–Aboriginal inhabitants numbered 3301, of whom only 1182 were white.5 In 1929, the non–Aboriginal population stood at approximately 3532, including 2684 ‘persons of European origin’, while it was estimated that there were 15,971 Aboriginal people. In 1938, the Administrator of the Northern Territory C. L. A. Abbott celebrated the highest nonAboriginal population since the Commonwealth took control, but it was still only 6704 compared with approximately 15,261 Aboriginal people.6 This was a space, in other words, where settlers were not only a minority, but were expected to remain so for the foreseeable future. Making a white majority was to become a critical element of settler colonial population management, but administrators continued to question whether this would be possible in a tropical Territory. A settler colonial future seemed impossible, or perhaps deferred. How could government be rearticulated in this context of apparent failure? [ 55 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

This chapter considers a series of contradictions as they tended to crisis in the interwar Northern Territory through a study of the ways they were characterised in official discourse. This was a crisis of settler colonialism, as both white labour and white capital felt themselves unable to gain a permanent foothold in the Territory. But it was also a crisis of a colonial formation that relied on the continued exploitation of ‘native labour’. Jeff Collman has argued that prior to the Second World War ‘Aborigines and white settlers managed to sustain linked but functionally autonomous domestic economies … . The conflict between their modes of production and their wider social interests was not yet manifest.’7 This chapter argues instead that by the 1930s a sense of conflict and crisis was taking hold. It explores responses to this crisis, focusing particularly on the Payne–Fletcher Inquiry, established in response to pastoralists’ complaints in 1936, to map the way these contradictions were interpreted by the official mind of Australian colonialism. The Report that emerged from this Inquiry registered the ideological contradiction at the heart of northern colonialism, one that prevailed throughout the interwar period and shaped government action in contingent and complicated ways. It reiterated a fundamental commitment to the White Australia policy, to the almost exclusive employment of white labour. But it simultaneously called for the Commonwealth government to produce and support an economy that depended upon large-scale pastoralism, an industry dependent on black labour. At the same time, a material contradiction that characterised the relations of production in the pastoral industry was itself tending to crisis. White pastoralists were dependent both on black labour and on a rate of exploitation that eroded the capacity of workers and their communities to survive. And, as workers struggled just to stay alive, pastoralists were increasingly unable to find Aboriginal workers to replace them. This was a failing articulation: the colonial fantasy of a ‘practically … unlimited number’ of black workers was rapidly becoming untenable.8 It became the task of government to find a way through this crisis, to work out the conditions on which pastoral production could continue to function to make White Australian settlement of the north feasible. This was the distinct problem facing the Commonwealth Government throughout the period of study. Colonisation was producing disruption rather than stability; its contradictions required management. This presented a similar challenge to that facing administrators in many of the British colonies of Africa, but one overlaid by an official commitment to settler colonialism. In British Africa, as discussed in Chapter 2, indirect rule had provided a way of conceptualising both the problem [ 56 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

CONFLICT A ND CR ISIS, 1918 – 45

and its solution. Its relevance in Australia, a so-called ‘white men’s country’, was a different matter. In the midst of this crisis, one that lasted for decades, we can observe a turn to understand the Northern Territory as distinct from the rest of Australia. This turn was, in Gramscian terms, an organic phenomenon. It was not only defensive but also formative and productive, generating new configurations of political alliances and philosophies. The discovery of difference, the turn to conceive of the Northern Territory in new ways, was less a reflection of the crisis than it was a response to it.9 And it was the content of this difference that was most crucial. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century the Northern Territory was popularly understood in the south as strange and remote, as unknown and potentially unknowable. Government reports ordinarily included a complaint that ‘the Northern Territory still remains to most Australians, a nebulous kind of place, a veritable unknown land’, or that to ‘most Australians the Northern Territory still remains an enigma – an unknown, semi–tropical territory, partly settled, partly arid, maligned, misunderstood and whimsically paradoxical’. In 1930, Jessie Litchfield wrote on her return from Darwin to Sydney that people in the south were not even sure where it was: ‘I heard once that it was situated in the North Island of New Zealand, and again that it was somewhere in New Guinea.’ They believed it to be ‘overrun with Chinese’, and Darwin to be ‘ravaged’ by ‘[h]ordes of kangaroos’ and ‘mobs of cannibal blacks camped near the town’.10 These reflected the special position of the north in the imagined Australian nation. After his first year as Administrator, Abbott ‘stressed … that the Northern Territory should now be regarded as a normal portion of Australia. I sincerely suggest that the practice of regarding the Territory as freak country ceases and that a proper perspective is taken.’11 This vision of the Northern Territory as a ‘normal’ part of Australia, rather than as somehow obscure or deviant, was a way of discussing the manner of its government, of making a claim for the absence of any meaningful difference. But most commissions of inquiry instead turned to interrogate and understand that difference, to replace a conception of deficiency or ‘freak country’ with a positive model of a colonial terrain, a governable subject. In the official mind of Australian settler colonialism the Northern Territory came to be understood in comparative terms, contextualised within the British Empire as akin to colonies like Nigeria or India. This was not a difference that emphasised deficiency – signalling a shift away from the focus on a lack of settler presence – but rather difference that moved towards identifying specific governmental problems and signified the need for corresponding solutions. As ideological and material [ 57 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

contradictions intensified, these comparative approaches to thinking about government became increasingly compelling. Through analogy with colonies in the Pacific, Africa, and Asia, the Northern Territory emerged as a colonial terrain. This brought Australia firmly into a transcolonial discussion on how to govern ‘native labour’, a discussion structured by Lugardian norms. In this chapter I explore these contradictions and the emergent government response. Beginning with the elaboration of ideological contradiction in the Payne–Fletcher Report, before describing the prevailing material contradiction in a detailed account of the pastoral dispensation, the chapter argues that the ensuing crisis sparked the recognition of Northern Territory difference. What was the place of the Northern Territory in Australia? How was it to be understood? These were the questions that determined the role and practice of government.

The ideological contradiction: White Australia and Black labour in official discourse Grenfell Price, a geographer whose history of the Northern Territory received official sanction when it was condensed and included as an appendix to the Report of the Inquiry sparked by the cattlemen’s 1936 complaints, described the pastoral industry as the North’s ‘one great industry which can compete in the markets of the world’.12 But pastoralism was also a perennial economic disaster, consistently failing in that world competition. In response, the Commonwealth Government regularly turned to commissions of inquiry into the Territory’s primary producer, placing it at the centre of formulations of the Northern Territory as a subject of government. Adam Ashforth has argued that the importance of such commissions lies in their practice of transforming the social world into a series of interlinked problems, authorising official ways of speaking about social realities. Commissions produce reports that transform the words of interested parties into evidence, assimilating them into a narrative of past problem and future solution, reflecting and shaping social reality to constitute a terrain of government. Inquiries, then, are important sources of governmental reason.13 In the Northern Territory these commissions were also most often ‘technologies of delay’ and inaction; ways of substantiating the crisis and posing as evidence that the state was acting on the un(der)development of the north. As Zoë Laidlaw found in her study of the nineteenth-century British Commission of Eastern Inquiry, appointing a commission both ‘signalled the aspiration to reform and its realisation’.14 Similarly, Northern Territory commissions usually attributed economic malaise, at least in part, to poor infrastructure, even as the Commonwealth [ 58 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

CONFLICT A ND CR ISIS, 1918 – 45

consistently refused to bear the prohibitively high political and economic costs of remedying this problem. In 1925, the British engineer Sir George Buchanan, who had recently reported on the transport problems facing South Africa, was appointed to report on harbour works and development in the Northern Territory. He identified the pastoral industry as the ‘only one that has shown any prospect of success in the Northern Territory’, and called for its ‘development … by every possible means’ to be the ‘first policy of the Administration’.15 But pastoralism, he identified, could not succeed in so remote a location. With limited markets, a Vestey’s-owned abattoir that had opened in Darwin to great fanfare in 1917 closed in 1919.16 The one successful beef export market, the Philippines, was opened to the Northern Territory in 1921 but cut off in 1930, leaving Great Britain as the only foreign market for Australian beef. There Australian pastoralists faced competition from both local and Vestey’s–owned Argentinian beef; the oversupply through the 1920s leading to a continuing fall in prices.17 The absence of markets was, Buchanan concluded, a failure of connection: in the absence of trains, cattle needed to be driven to port or to interstate markets, long trips on which stock quality diminished substantially. Buchanan called for immediate investment in extensive railway construction, one route linking Darwin to western Queensland and on to New South Wales, as well as another heading west from Borroloola through Katherine across to Wyndham, the site of an abattoir in the north-east corner of Western Australia.18 These were never built. In response to the Depression-era national economic downturn, in 1932 the Commonwealth Government commissioned another enquiry (the ‘Shepherd Committee’) – comprising Frank Shepherd, SurveyorGeneral of the Northern Territory, James Brackenreg, a stock inspector, and D. D. Smith, the Territory’s Resident Engineer – to investigate conditions on pastoral leases. Their report, completed in 1934, was neither tabled in Parliament nor published; it was sharply critical of management on cattle stations, particularly on the massive stations controlled by the British–owned corporate and political powerhouses Vestey’s and Bovril. The problem with pastoralism, the Committee argued, was less its remoteness than its inefficiency. In general, the Shepherd Committee found, the few remaining smallholders were much more successful than the major landholders. The Committee described managers who rarely knew how many cattle they held, neither making necessary improvements to ensure an adequate water supply nor introducing new blood to their stock. Without adequate fencing or boreholes, breeding was uncontrolled and stock losses were common. Consequently, the stock was of poor quality [ 59 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

and, when combined with the difficulty of finding markets, the result could only be inefficiency and failure. The only substantial investment made on many holdings was in the initial stocking with cattle: without further capital commitments from pastoralists, the Committee argued, there was no hope of success.19 The Payne–Fletcher Report, on the other hand, was to embrace these large holdings. After meeting with pastoralists in 1936, Paterson reported to Cabinet that earlier land policy for the Northern Territory had been based on the supposition that, as demand for pastoral leases steadily increased, large estates would be broken up to make room for newcomers. In the continuing absence of that demand, it was time to abandon fantasies of closer settlement and instead develop a new land policy, one that would work with the large stations. At the delegation’s suggestion, Queensland public servant and supporter of big graziers William Payne was appointed as committee chair, and suggested John Fletcher, a Queensland pastoralist, to assist him. The two toured the pastoral regions of the Northern Territory before writing an extensive report that laid blame for continuing failure at the feet of both poor government policy and pastoralists’ inefficiencies.20 The Report began with an historical overview of the development, or underdevelopment, of the Northern Territory. This was a history of ‘tragedy’ and ‘disappointment’, of ‘hopes … dashed and shattered on economic rocks’, in which the Northern Territory emerged as an ‘enigmatic entity which has baffled Australian statesmanship for so long’.21 The primary problem of government, Payne and Fletcher identified, was that of population: while they acknowledged that the Northern Territory was unable to support a population of a comparable density to that in the south-east, it must still be peopled further. The Report began by noting that the ‘population to-day, exclusive of full-blood aboriginals, is 5,454 persons, of whom 3,800 are whites’, an increase of only 4144 people in the 26 years since the Commonwealth had taken control. And the Report ended by setting an objective of at least 15,000 people, other than Aboriginal people, within a decade.22 The importance of population was in its capacity to constitute a replacement society, to bring to fruition a project of settler colonialism. Lorenzo Veracini has argued that managing population economy is at the heart of settler colonialism; describing it as a project of emptying, in different ways, Indigenous and migrant segments of the population.23 But, in the discourse of government, the term ‘population’ referred exclusively to non-Indigenous people, categorically registering a distinction between settler and native. As a specifically settler subject of government, the racialised population included ‘Europeans’ and ‘Asiatics’, but not ‘natives’. As will become clear, Indigenous people were conceived [ 60 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

CONFLICT A ND CR ISIS, 1918 – 45

not as an ‘Other’ population but as a racialised supplement to the settler population; as black labour, a subsidy to the population whose provision made settler life viable in the north. Settler sovereignty is practised and produced through this cacophonous government of population.24 The Payne–Fletcher Report sought to promote the population of the Territory through encouraging industry, primarily the pastoral industry, not through direct subsidies but instead by eliminating charges, taxes, and tariffs. The Report was sharply critical of the inefficiencies of large stations, particularly on the best pastoral land in the Victoria River, where they described ‘insufficient’ improvements and ‘little care’ taken in breeding or handling cattle. It suggested increasing rents to demand greater productivity, as well as confirming the security of pastoral tenure, granting longer leases of up to fifty years and removing the Commonwealth’s right of resumption in exchange for an (unenforceable) undertaking to improve the land.25 The pastoral industry was of value to north Australian colonialism largely as an effective way of occupying vast swathes of land, of rendering the Northern Territory imaginable as owned and possessed, if not fully settled, by white Australians. And its increased efficiency would, the Report believed, expand the industry of the Territory as a whole, leading to increased demand for white labour and, therefore, the growth of a settled population. The Payne– Fletcher Report expressed its full support for the White Australia policy, describing the ‘national policy of a White Australia’ – denoting both the ‘heroic task’ of maintaining ‘the northern portions of this Continent as a heritage for the white race’ as well as a commitment to white labour – as ‘sacrosanct’ and ‘inviolable’. But in striving for an increased white settler population that would possess the north, the Report also countenanced a reliance, albeit one imagined as temporary, on Aboriginal labour.26 This reliance had been reported by earlier commissions of inquiry into both pastoralism and Aboriginal policy. Buchanan, for example, wrote that the ‘Australian aborigine … is at his best on a cattle station, and there has made himself nearly indispensable. He is also greatly in demand wherever agriculture is being attempted, and in the townships for domestic service.’ As a consequence, to ‘conform to the idea of a White Australia … is now probably impracticable, and would seriously dislocate the lives of nearly the whole of the white population in the Territory’.27 The Payne–Fletcher Report consolidated this integration of Aboriginal labour into the biopolitics of white population. It described finding on stations Aboriginal people who were ‘really skilful workers, apparently delighting in their work and the conditions under which they lived’, and endorsed a policy that would ‘ensure that aboriginals, [ 61 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

like ordinary citizens, will be of some use and service to the country in which they dwell and not be permitted to be an incubus on the community’. And they justified this as a subsidy to the white population. If an expanded white population could only be achieved through economic success in the pastoral industry, and if that industry could only succeed – on such large landholdings – through mobilising black labour, then Aboriginal labour was an essential element of the settler economy.28 But this was an ambivalent acknowledgement. The Payne–Fletcher Report instantiated Aboriginal workers as liminal, as simultaneously both a part of, and excluded from, the settler colonial dispensation. These workers were imagined less as chattels available by right to pastoralists than as a necessary subsidy to the cattle industry.29 Similarly, in its discussion of the travails of tropical life, particularly for white women, the Report suggested that the ‘introduction of a strictly limited number of eastern natives under indenture for domestic duties would, paradoxical as it may seem, help to strengthen the White Australia policy by guarding the health of females on whom the success of that policy depends’.30 Again, white settlers could thrive by relying on ‘native’ labour. The White Australia policy – fabricating a White population – would be strengthened not by the exclusion of ‘coloured’ workers but by their inclusion; a paradox indeed. The Payne–Fletcher Report thus mapped out an ambivalent settler colonialism: endorsing both the White Australia policy and indentured ‘Asiatic’ labour; supporting increased investment in infrastructure and confirming pastoralists’ rights to hold land without improving it; calling for increased white settlement by expanding the reliance on Aboriginal labour. It framed black labour as a pedestal on which a white population could be strengthened, thus rendering the northern white population as fundamentally dependent on Aboriginal health and survival. A colonial project within which a settler colonial end – the indefinite expansion of a white population with the effect of securing white possession – would be achieved through a franchise colonial dispensation – relying on industries that were increasingly dependent on Aboriginal labour – established an ideological contradiction at the heart of government.

The material contradiction: violence and unfree labour in the pastoral industry Entrenching a dependence on black labour as a necessary element of constituting a White Australia generated a problem that was more than simply ideological. It also consolidated the material contradiction at [ 62 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

CONFLICT A ND CR ISIS, 1918 – 45

the heart of the pastoral dispensation. As much as pastoralists were dependent on Aboriginal workers to make their industry viable, they established conditions that were antithetical to Aboriginal survival. Their refusal to provide workers with wages or with sufficient food and shelter to maintain and reproduce their communities, and their insistence on the regular application of extreme violence to extract labour, meant that Aboriginal communities on pastoral stations were suffering. As a result, pastoralists found it increasingly difficult to find sufficient workers in these communities. The articulation of pastoralism and Aboriginal production was failing, pushing the contradiction into a phase of crisis and rendering its management a governmental priority. How did this contradictory relation develop? Vestey’s and Bovril, who held massive swathes of the Territory under pastoral lease, ran their stations as cheaply as possible. The Bovril-owned Victoria River Downs (VRD) station, the largest in the Northern Territory, was stocked with 170,036 cattle (on paper) in 1934, and managed a profit of only £18,910. Even as the industry recovered from the Depression, and as cattle prices began to rebound, in 1938 they reported a net profit of only £51.31 The value of these stations, to these larger companies, was less in their individual profitability than in maintaining control of the global market in beef. But smaller landowners, and the Australian government, did strive for economic success. Without investment in infrastructure, the prospect of even small profit margins was dependent upon the rate of labour exploitation. The viability of pastoral enterprise was based on the exemption from paying award wages to black workers.32 Beef production was, as was later acknowledged in J. H. Kelly’s 1952 report into the northern cattle industry, heavily state–subsidised. During the 1930s half the cost of well boring and freight on materials for water supplies and fencing was borne by the Commonwealth. Employers’ returns from the sale of cattle, though not income earned by stockmen, was exempted from income tax once the Payne–Fletcher Report’s recommendations were implemented in 1937. Rent, while often unpaid, was absurdly low: in the 1940s the annual rent for one station of 6206 square miles, carrying about 35,000 cattle, was approximately £500, less than the annual wages and keep for a single head stockman.33 But the state assistance given in keeping a black workforce in order was, as Dawn May has noted in her study of Queensland pastoralism, the most crucial subsidy.34 This combination of low investment and cheap labour conduced to a labour–intensive mode of production, known as the ‘open-range’ system of extensive rather than intensive grazing. On most large stations, in the wet season, cattle roamed freely on unfenced land. Breeding, feed, [ 63 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

and water were largely uncontrolled. Each year, in the dry season, workers would muster the entire herd, branding and cutting each cow and calf, and selecting those to be taken by drovers to market. The tasks of formal open-range station musters could be described as ‘wild cattle hunting’, and Aboriginal workers found their skills transferred relatively smoothly. Bill Harney wrote that the ‘cow and calf muster’ was a time when the ‘station blacks … enjoyed a life similar to that which they once knew in tribal days’, and a ‘protector’ in 1944 similarly described stock work as resembling an Aboriginal ‘natural state’.35 The two modes of work were certainly not identical, however. Station land was contested space, mapped by pastoralists as homogeneous, undifferentiated and objectified, while Aboriginal people continued to articulate relational country that was rich with cultural, as well as economic, meaning. Wandering cattle, who were chased anywhere and everywhere during the muster, left tracks that overlaid but did not erase Aboriginal country. Moreover, aside from the muster, work tasks were difficult to reconcile with the naturalised terms Harney employed. While skills may have been transferable, the station milieu was a distinctly new dispensation. In 1927, white pastoral workers on Vestey’s stations were awarded a basic wage of £3, and the basic wage for other white workers in the Territory was set at £5 10s. Under the Aboriginals Ordinance, on the other hand, Aboriginal workers were to be paid 5s per week (2s of which was to be paid into a Trust Fund), as well as food, clothing and tobacco. It was widely acknowledged that, in fact, they received no money at all.36 From 1933 onwards, if employers could prove to the Chief Protector of Aboriginals that they were maintaining the relatives and dependents of Aboriginal workers, at a cost equal to or exceeding that 5s per week, they were exempted from the obligation to pay wages.37 Cook naturalised these differentiated forms of payment in terms of racialised culture, mapping a work arrangement onto apparently predetermined living standards: ‘The Aboriginal, to live the life that has been his ancestors’ from time immemorial, requires neither wage nor dole. The virgin bush is at once his dwelling, his wardrobe, and his well stocked larder. The white man, on the other hand … is unable to live at the standard set by usage unless permanently employed at a comparatively high wage.’38 A pastoralists’ representative put it similarly in 1930: ‘What I would like to point out is that the aboriginal is not a white man. He belongs to a different scale of civilization altogether, and his wants are not the same.’39 Aboriginal people continued to represent the overwhelming majority of the pastoral workforce until the partial advent of equal wages in 1968 and were recognised, as Abbott wrote, ‘as an integral and very [ 64 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

CONFLICT A ND CR ISIS, 1918 – 45

vital part in the economy of development’.40 By 1938, for example, 3520 Aboriginal people were reported as employed (many more were unofficially employed), most in the pastoral industry. Though not legally allowed to be employed outside the homestead, Aboriginal women in the Territory did an extraordinary amount of work on cattle stations as stockworkers, drovers, houseworkers, cooks and more.41 Matt Thomas, a road ganger on Wave Hill Station, described the far–reaching gendered inequality of remuneration in 1937. The Aboriginal workers he managed were ‘constantly asking’ for clothing and medicine: ‘I managed to get sent out eight pairs of trousers, three shirts, and three pairs of boots for the [three] boys. Nothing was sent for the [seven Aboriginal women], and they worked harder and longer hours than the bucks. The [Aboriginal women] had to make dresses from flour bags to cover their naked bodies.’ The conditions at Wave Hill were, Thomas wrote, ‘no better, nor worse, than those upon other stations through the Territory and the East and West Kimberleys’.42 For Aboriginal station workers, housing was poor, the nutrition derived from rations was inadequate, and the work was demanding over workdays that regularly lasted 16 hours. Managers spent very little to provide facilities for any employees, and without wages, and with limited ‘bush tucker’, there was as yet little scope for Aboriginal workers to improve their situation. Pastoral relations of production, moreover, were characterised by ever–present actual or threatened violence. Stratification was produced and maintained by widespread force that facilitated both the acquisition and maintenance of an efficient black workforce and the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women. This force took the form of beatings, denying rations, or death. Rosalie Kunoth-Monks remembered a milieu of violence: ‘It was things that just happened: people being chained up; people being whipped for hand-pumping the well too slow, for getting in the way of the cattle when the cattle came to drink; things like that. That was punishable by physical force, and most of the station owners practised that.’43 The ever-looming threat of violence, which needed regularly to be renewed by practice, was a specific technology of labour mobilisation. Rendered legitimate by a racial discourse which inscribed violence as a privileged mode of communication between (white) masters and (black) workers, this culture of force and fear was designed to perform that mastery and maintain in workers a submission that could not openly be broken.44 Violent excess was considered essential to control. One white resident disclosed in 1932 that I have been up till recently for several years a resident of the Northern Territory and can certify that a lot of unnecessary ill-treatment and

[ 65 ]

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

cruelty is meted out to the natives and immoral use is made of the native women by white men. But I also maintain that natives need rather harsh and drastic treatment to keep them under control, otherwise the Northern Territory would not be safe for the white race, white women especially.45

The ‘need’ for ‘unnecessary’ violence reminds us of the communicative and subjectifying effect of demonstrations of overwhelming force. These combined with threats and rumour to form and sustain the ‘political economy of terror’ that Deborah Bird Rose has argued had been established in the late nineteenth century.46 The Reverend Sexton, a member of the Board of Inquiry investigating some of the violent excesses in Central Australia committed by Constable McKinnon in 1935, noted that once the ‘court sessions were over and men began to speak freely … it was openly stated that it would be impossible to live in the outback unless a fear complex could be created in the native mind’.47 This atmosphere of constantly threatened violence usually prevented workers from withholding their labour by leaving the station. Desertion, when occasionally practised, was a powerful mode of resistance. Station work needed to be completed in the right season, and thus had some urgency: workers’ withdrawal of their bodies was a powerful way to destabilise the station. It was not a step taken lightly. H. V. Miller, who had managed Bradshaw station on the Victoria River in the 1920s, complained of his workforce that they ‘would work well for a while, but never steadily. … Set them at a steady job and for a week or two they would work. Then the novelty would wear off. One morning you would wake up and they would be gone.’ Snowy Kulmilya, one of the workers, put this in the context of excessive force: ‘Oh, we didn’t want to run away. But that head stockman … we didn’t like him hurting us. … We were frightened we might get shot. Some people used to just sneak away, run away, away from that man.’48 The defiance of desertion was a risky move. Bill Stanner recalled witnessing in the 1930s ‘one desperate man, deserted by his labourers, going after them with a stockwhip, in the knowledge that their work stood between him and ruin’.49 This was not uncommon. When workers walked off, though usually remaining on their own country, they were often brought back to work by force. At Willeroo, a Vestey’s station in the Victoria River district, the workers deserted in 1936. Bartlam, the overseer, went to their camp and began firing, before requesting that one of the workers, Brumby, meet him in the saddle room. There he struck Brumby twice on the head with an axe handle, then kicked him and beat his face with a revolver. The workers returned.50 Desertion, in fact, was criminalised. In 1924, an Aboriginal man at Borroloola was sentenced to three months ‘with hard labour’ for ‘unlawfully [ 66 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

CONFLICT A ND CR ISIS, 1918 – 45

enticing aboriginals away from their lawful employment’.51 And in 1938, the Sydney-based Aboriginal newspaper Abo Call published an account of an Aboriginal stockman who had deserted a cattle station in 1932, and whose manager ‘was anxious to get him back’. Two policemen arrived, found the man with two women, and arrested all three. Charged with ‘illegally using a horse’, he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment (the women were neither charged nor freed). The station manager was left without a stockman, but a lesson was no doubt communicated to the rest of the workforce.52 More often, police would avoid laying charges and rather bring back the workers who had deserted, working to maintain a workforce through the continual threat and practice of force. Pastoralists relied on the support of the local police, whose ‘job [was] to provide any aboriginal labour and assistance needed’.53 Aboriginal workers often considered themselves unable to leave. Hobbles Danayarri, a Mudburra man who had worked on Wave Hill and VRD Stations from the 1930s onwards, remembered an experience of enslavement: ‘Old Gilruth told every man, whitefellow: “You’re going to kill these people right up. And you can have, top of that, couple of men, or big mob men, make them bit of prisoner. If you put them on a job, make them prisoner. Make them work for you.”’54 The Minister of Home and Territories, Arthur Blakely, agreed in 1929 that ‘there was a form of slavery in operation’. At times, according to Cook, pastoralists implemented a form of chattel slavery. He wrote in 1932 that ‘there is amongst employers an inclination towards the application of principles of slavery to Aboriginal employees’, in the form of ‘an unwritten law … they shall not employ an Aboriginal “belonging to” … [another employer] without the consent of the former employer’.55 But this was a form of slavery distinct from that often imagined under the term: Aboriginal workers were certainly forced into working, but it was perhaps the threat of banishment from the station – exile from one’s country – that was the chief tool of compulsion. This was a coercion, in other words, that depended upon workers’ Indigeneity. Aboriginal working communities usually lived on their own country, a relationship recognised by pastoralists for its utility in ensuring a labour force comprising people who may not want to work for them, but who would not leave without the gravest provocation. Thus taking advantage of communities’ relation to country, pastoralists had a stake in their continuing strength and relative autonomy. Their interest came to align with conserving, rather than eliminating, Aboriginal society. But this was a categorically and structurally ambivalent interest. While the pastoral industry needed the labour of Aboriginal workers, it was also vulnerable to Aboriginal attack. The explorer Michael Terry wrote of another pastoralist, Mathews, who went to take up land in [ 67 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

the Victoria River district in 1926, only to be told by local Aboriginal people that the land was theirs. Mathews chased them away and, in revenge, the grass was burnt leaving no pasture for cattle, his hens were stolen, and beef was regularly taken. Similarly, Florida Station at Murwangi in Eastern Arnhem Land was taken up in the 1930s and quickly abandoned after a series of strategic attacks on cattle.56 The 1928 Coniston massacre – where a punitive mission led by police murdered at least 31, and perhaps as many as 110, Warlpiri people – came after Aboriginal threats to white settlers in the area which were, it seems clear, designed to assert Aboriginal sovereignty in the area. Its immediate provocation was the murder of Fred Brooks, a dingo hunter, but there had been a history of Aboriginal declarations of authority to which the massacre was a more general response. Henry Tilmouth, a settler whose land adjoined Coniston Station, had left the region after an Aboriginal man ‘came up to camp, taunting him: “This one black feller country; nothing want ’em white man, white feller shift, can’t sit down longa black feller.”’57 As the then Government Resident in Central Australia, John Cawood, put it, what was at stake was occupation of and sovereignty over territory. It was, he suggested, ‘the opinion of old residents of this part’ that ‘trouble has been brewing for some time, and the safety of the white man could only be assured by drastic action on the part of the authorities. In their opinion the only other alternative was to hand the country back to the blacks.’58 The question of sovereignty was certainly not settled, nor was violence in any way monopolised by the state. But in this Warlpiri country, white sovereignty was instantiated by the practice of extreme violence, communicating clearly that Aboriginal resistance in the form of assertions of dominion would be met with disproportionate force. Until the 1940s, pastoralists’ control over, and ownership of the stock on, the land was always tenuous. Aboriginal cattle-spearing was common and, to a limited extent, tolerated. But both large–scale cattle killing and personal attacks on settlers were met with disproportionately violent responses; these were both read and probably intended as Aboriginal resistance to pastoralists’ living and working on the land. As J. W. Bleakley, the Queensland Protector of Aboriginals, wrote in his report into Aboriginal administration in the Northern Territory, ‘[a]s long as the blacks have reason to labour under a sense of deprivation or injustice, the trouble with cattle killing will continue’.59 Retribution was considered a part of the Territory economy of justice: ‘there are many nomadic natives wandering about the ranges and periodically the bucks sally forth on a cattle slaying expedition. The squatter puts up with a certain amount of this as a necessary evil, but when the [ 68 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

CONFLICT A ND CR ISIS, 1918 – 45

attacks become too frequent, it is Trooper Hall’s job to administer justice.’60 This violence was tempered by pastoralists’ tacit acknowledgment that Aboriginal people were the ‘backbone’ of the industry. Miller alluded to the contradictions of interwar colonialism in the Territory when he wrote that the ‘Northern Territory aborigines are the Territory’s biggest problem. They are a menace in many ways. They are gradually dying out. They might be better away, but at present they cannot be done without.’61 Similarly, Hector Fuller, the manager on the Durack family’s Newry Station in the Victoria River District, wrote in 1937 that ‘[i]t is an old and very true saying that one cannot run both cattle and blacks on the one property, and I presume the cattle come first, as the cattle industry is the only one of consequence here’. He referred here to non–employed black people (‘bush blacks’), not the workers who were indispensable (‘my blacks’).62 Fuller sought not the extermination of Aboriginal people, but rather the end of any Aboriginal autonomy and self-sufficiency, and the creation of an entirely dependent slave class. Though relatively extreme, this expressed the contradictory logics of exploitation and elimination that ultimately underlay pastoralists’ plans for the development of the industry. Pastoralists, as Darryl Lewis has identified in his study of the Victoria River District, did not want to rid the land of Aboriginal people, though they were certainly hostile to those they cast as ‘wild blacks’. What they sought, instead, was a kind of subservient coexistence, in which Aboriginal people adjusted themselves to the new dispensation and came in peacefully to work (without pay) to make the cattle stations run.63 Facing the diminution of the Aboriginal working population, in 1944 Vestey’s pursued the unconventional step of inviting anthropologists to survey their stations and recommend ways to increase the supply of labour. Ronald and Catherine Berndt were employed to travel north, producing a valuable record of the ways Vestey’s employees considered the ‘Aboriginal problem’ in this era.64 Vestey’s policy, as interpreted by the Berndts in 1944–5, and reflecting little change from the general state of pastoral stations reported by Bleakley in 1929, was to accept that a consequence of appalling working conditions and insufficient rations was the diminution of their Aboriginal labour camps.65 Vestey’s acknowledged both their industry’s complete reliance on Aboriginal labour, and that black workers on their stations were dying, were not having children who survived, and were generally unhealthy. Gordon Sweeney, then a patrol officer based in Alice Springs, reported after a patrol of the western district in 1943 that on Wave Hill station, a Vestey’s property, children comprised only 19 per cent of the local [ 69 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

Gurinji people. Among the Wailbris and Mudburas, both ‘tribes’ of ‘desert natives’ who had only recently come in to the stations, 39 per cent were children.66 Aboriginal people could work on the stations, but no people could survive such conditions. On Victoria River Downs, which spanned over three million hectares, the Aboriginal population in 1880 has been estimated at over 4200. By the time of the first census in 1939, 187 Aboriginal people remained.67 Vestey’s, in general, was not at all interested in improving the conditions of life on stations amongst their already existing workforce: ‘I am not’, one station manager wrote to the Berndts in 1944, ‘in the least bit concerned in hearing anything about the actual station natives themselves.’ Rather, he wanted to bring in anthropologists who would ‘contact the bush natives, endeavour to settle the Myall tribe somewhere on our stations where we will be able to more or less keep them in hand, and utilise the labour that is available’.68 Unlike Fuller, who saw ‘bush blacks’ as a ‘menace’, Vestey’s managers were more likely to see them as a resource to be made available for exploitation. Station managers, on most Territory stations, believed there to be a near inexhaustible supply of Aboriginal people in the bush, who could be brought in to the stations as the labour of their predecessors required replacement. The pastoral economy was reliant on the reproduction of labour outside the pastoral mode of production.69

Recognising difference But these approaches functioned as contradiction. There was no inexhaustible supply of Aboriginal workers. Systematic exploitation and deprivation was causing both a human disaster and a developing labour problem that came to crisis in the 1930s. While many historians have suggested that the policy shift that ensued, discussed in later chapters, was a result of the need to reckon with the failure of the assumption of a dying race – Aboriginal, or ‘half-caste’, populations were increasing in numbers, not disappearing – the experience on the Territory’s pastoral stations was very different. There, Aboriginal people were dying. As Charles Rowley described, the working population was ‘rapidly declining’ due to ‘neglect’, a history of ‘exploitation’, and decades of violence, impoverishment, malnutrition, and deprivation of medical care. Aside from any human concern for such destruction, the struggling cattle stations were beginning to face a dire shortage of cheap labour. The labour situation, over the 1930s and 1940s, became ‘critical’.70 Stations relied on black workers but produced Aboriginal death. To succeed, they needed rather to incorporate Aboriginal communities and their social reproduction into the colonial order. What wealthy [ 70 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

CONFLICT A ND CR ISIS, 1918 – 45

pastoralists came to require, and what the Government tried to deliver, was the articulation of Aboriginal economies with pastoralist enterprise.71 The colonial formation of the Northern Territory was materially similar, in important ways, to that elsewhere in the Empire, amenable to similar techniques of government. And government reports began, in the interwar period, to acknowledge this. This was often a position explained by reference to the tropical climate. The study of ‘homoclimes’ – comparing similar climates in different places – popularised by geologist and geographer Thomas Griffith Taylor, produced scientific analogies between Australia’s north and British colonies elsewhere. Taylor himself had argued that the most appropriate comparison to the Northern Territory was southern and central India, ‘and any student of Australia’s future will do well to ponder on all that this implies’.72 For the Northern Territory’s Superintendent of Agriculture, who noted in 1939 that the appropriate ‘homoclimes’ were to be found in Africa and India, it implied that settlers should consider a change in the mode of agricultural production. He suggested implementing a form of shifting cultivation as practised in Nigeria. But ‘tropical administration’ more often implied a labour question; how best to structure the colony around the exploitation of ‘native labour’.73 When, in 1924, the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Commission held an enquiry into the basic wage, it stressed the Northern Territory’s exceptionality within the Australian nation. The Territory, Justice Powers declared, was ‘not part of White Australia’; it may have been situated geographically within the national space, but neither looked nor behaved in the way the Australian nation was supposed to. In a nation that branded itself a ‘working man’s paradise’, white workers were almost universally unable to find regular work at award wages, a situation Powers attributed to the ‘practically … unlimited number of aboriginals at Darwin, and in the Territory generally, who can be employed under a Government Ordinance at 5s. a week and aboriginal rations’.74 The Northern Territory was held distinct from the rest of Australia; an ambiguity that troubled administration throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Whereas white settlers were both politically and demographically predominant across most of southern Australia, in the north that domination was precarious. In the Northern Territory, Justice Powers wrote, ‘the majority of people, and of the employees, consist of coloured people and aboriginals’. He characterised this as an incorrigible distinction, marking out the north as not a part of White Australia, as what we might instead term ‘colonial’.75 Though its location on the Australian mainland ensured some ambiguity, the Northern Territory was administered by the same Commonwealth Department as the offshore [ 71 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

Territories of Papua and New Guinea. Was the Northern Territory a colonial territory incongruously located on the Australian continent, or was it an integral, albeit distinct, part of the settler nation? Behind these two possibilities lay the alternative models of the colonial situation and the settler colonial frontier; the former representing a potentially permanent foreignness, while the latter signified a space ultimately to be brought within the nation.76 Some considered the north as more akin to Papua than to Victoria, and as facing some of the same administrative concerns as South Africa. This view was well represented in the official mind. Buchanan had inferred Territory otherness in 1925 in mooting the possibility of adopting ‘the Crown Colony System of Government. The Federal Government would, in that case, represent the British Government, and the Minister for Home and Territories would represent the Secretary of State for the Colonies.’77 But others considered the implications of this colonial view to be threatening. The dominant colonial ideology of the dual mandate, with its argument that the world had an interest in African – and, by implication, all colonial – wealth, was described by the Australian diplomat Walter Crocker as a ‘dangerous argument, as it cuts both ways: what of the White Australia policy?’.78 Those who made colonial comparisons were set against the nationalist position that Australia was a white men’s country of which the Territory was to be made a part. Colonial or national: what was at stake in these debates was the north’s ‘ambiguous claim to inclusion in the future White Australian nation’, a claim long made precarious by the tropical climate and economic vulnerability, and fears that if the Territory was not developed by whites, others from further north may do so.79 The Payne–Fletcher Report sought to resolve this categorical problem by introducing the problem of time. It cast the Territory as ‘not yet’ a part of White Australia, a space that could and should ‘be developed by white labour and can be permanently populated by white people’ but which had ‘not yet’ reached such a position. There must, then, be a place for ‘coloured labour’, whether Aboriginal workers on pastoral stations or Aboriginal or indentured ‘Asiatic’ workers in white homes in the Territory’s townships. But ‘coloured labour cannot be allowed to become permanently established in Australia’. Encapsulating this colonial dispensation within a state of temporariness established the problems of colonial government, of native administration, as transitory.80 And in doing so, the Inquiry enabled a clear-sighted view of the way pastoral stations could operate on a less destructive basis. In practice, station managers encouraged the presence of a community from which [ 72 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

CONFLICT A ND CR ISIS, 1918 – 45

they could draw labour on their land. Aboriginal communities were treated collectively – workers and ‘dependents’ – as tribes which provided workers, and which were both entitled to rations and provided for their own livelihood. From the 1930s onward, Canberra began to take this formation as the northern norm akin to franchise colonies elsewhere, rather than as evidence of a deviance to be brought under control. The shift in governmental framing of the specific colonial situation represented a turn to embrace the social formation and a deferral of its transformation. This perpetuated, rather than destroyed, a colonial relation whereby settlers exploited the labour power of Aboriginal ‘tribes’. The task, then, was to govern this articulation.

Surviving sovereignty Under this new way of framing the Northern Territory as a governable subject, Aboriginal survival on stations came to be recognised as essential, for now, to the success of the settler pastoral industry. But this survival in fact was less a function of Aboriginal value to pastoralists than a result of the extraordinary labour of Aboriginal people to maintain community and country, and to demand of pastoralists an at least tacit recognition of their customary and lawful order, mapping of territory, and social relationships. For many Aboriginal people, station responsibilities overlay their managerial and ceremonial responsibilities to country. Riley Young Winpilin, an Aboriginal man of the Victoria River District, described survival on one’s own land in order to care for that land as the underlying reason for working on the station. People told themselves, he said, ‘Long as you can look after the land. Keep the place, right thing … . We might do something more sometime. We might turn the law someday. Any year’s time.’81 Musso Harvey, a Yanyuwa man and former station worker, described the maintenance of ceremony on the station, learning and practising every evening. The old men of the community would ‘call the name of people, call the country, what ceremonial, of good. What dreaming went through, how he went … tell us all the ceremonial.’ These old men were able to extract breaks for such practice from station managers – ’one day off or two day off, they have the dance, go back to work’ – and managers would both ‘leave us alone’ and prevent other settlers from going ‘into that business, stay out of it’.82 This acceptance required remarkable coercive effort or manoeuvring by Indigenous people. Their communal lives came to be normalised by the state in the late 1930s, when a new policy recognised this survival not just of Indigenous people but of rearticulated Indigenous communities, albeit by assimilating them into a colonial ontology. [ 73 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

As a consequence of that Aboriginal action, sovereignty was explicitly unsettled in the Northern Territory. The conflict and massacre at Coniston Station in 1928 was, in its extremity and publicity, exceptional. But it was at the same time representative of the contestation that attended each assertion of sovereignty in the interwar north. Settlers needed, inevitably, to reckon with overlapping sovereignties, territorialisations, and modes of production. This forced them to rethink the nature of settler colonialism in the north, to come to terms with the strength of Aboriginal communities in a modern nation, and to develop a sovereign assemblage that articulated territoriality and possession amidst ongoing contingency. This situation could have been understood as that of the pastoral frontier; a space on the ‘other side’ but inevitably to be brought within the nation. But it also came, in the interwar period, to be interpreted and normalised as a colonial situation, albeit within a settler colonial nation. Government inquiries were pushed towards an understanding of the need, in the Northern Territory, to acknowledge the existence of functioning Aboriginal communities and to work to manage their articulation with expanding settler pastoralism. They turned, that is, away from framing the Northern Territory as ‘freak country’, away from an interpretation of the north as somehow constituted by defective whiteness. In so doing, they began to normalise the north as a territory in which, as we saw in examining the Nigerian example, a native people appeared not only as an obstacle to colonial development, but also as a potential, if produced as contained, incorporated, and its forces channelled in specific directions. In the landmark Payne–Fletcher Report, this recognition registered the management of contradiction as the key governmental problem of the Northern Territory: seeking a White Australia through an intensified reliance on Aboriginal labour; and embracing a mode of production that had, up to that point, been responsible for the rapid diminution of its own labour force. In trying the manage these contradictions it turned to time, casting the Northern Territory as not yet white, as not yet able to function without Aboriginal labour. But the contradictions remained.

Notes 1  Ted Ling, Blame and Martyrs: The Commonwealth Government and the Northern Territory Cattle Industry, 1911–1978 (Darwin: Historical Society of the Northern Territory, 2015), p. 42. 2  Douglas Lockwood, The Front Door: Darwin, 1869–1969 (Adelaide: Rigby, 1968), pp. 244–50; Alan Powell, Far Country: A Short History of the Northern Territory (Darwin: Charles Darwin University Press, 5th edn, 2009), p. 125. 3  Commonwealth Railways Commissioner, Burns Philp & Co and A E Jolly & Co v North Australian Workers Union (1935) 34 CAR 22, 23 (Justice Drake-Brockman),

[ 74 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

CONFLICT A ND CR ISIS, 1918 – 45 citing his interim order of 9 July 1934; W. E. H. Stanner, ‘The Aborigines’, in J. C. G. Kevin (ed.), Some Australians Take Stock (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1939), p. 26; Northern Australia Development Committee, Development of Northern Australia (Northern Australia Development Committee, 1947), p. 2. 4  Pastoralists also substantially increased their sheep holdings in the interwar period, especially in Central Australia. 5  A. Grenfell Price, The History and Problems of the Northern Territory, Australia (Adelaide: n.p., 1930), p. 32. 6  Report on the Administration of North Australia for the Year Ended the 30th June 1929, Cmd. Paper No. 216, 1930; Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory for Year 1937–38, Cmd. Paper No. 150, 1939, pp. 10, 26. The numbers for Indigenous people were usually vague (under)estimations. 7  Jeff Collman, Fringe-Dwellers and Welfare: The Aboriginal Response to Bureaucracy (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1988), p. 247. 8  North Australian Industrial Union v Commonwealth Railways Commissioner (1924) 20 CAR 726, 734. 9  Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1996), p. 178; Stuart Hall, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, Marxism Today (January 1979), 15. 10  Report of the Board of Inquiry Appointed to Inquire into the Land and Land Industries of the Northern Territory of Australia (Payne–Fletcher Report), Cmd. Paper No. 4, 1937, p. 6; L. H. A. Giles, Typescript Copy of ‘The History and Development of the Northern Territory’, 1944, NAA: CP780/2; J. S. Litchfield, Far-North Memories: Being the Account of Ten Years Spent on the Diamond-Drills, and of Things That Happened in Those Days (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1930), pp. 163–4. Jack Patten of the Aborigines Progressive Association described Darwin as a ‘colour-mad hole’. ‘Packsaddle Imprisoned’, Abo Call (May 1938), p. 2. 11  Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory for Year 1937–38, Cmd. Paper No. 150, 1939, p. 19. 12  Price, The History and Problems of the Northern Territory, Australia, p. 48. 13  Adam Ashforth, The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 1–21. 14  Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Commonsense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 30; Zoë Laidlaw, ‘Investigating Empire: Humanitarians, Reform and the Commission of Eastern Inquiry’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40:5 (2012), 757. 15  George Buchanan, Northern Territory Development and Administration: Report (Melbourne: Victorian Government Printer, 1925), pp. 21, 24. 16  The abattoir reopened for a few months in 1925. Blaming the unions for high wages, Sir Edmund Vestey claimed in 1925 that it had been ‘more profitable to let the cattle die on the stations than to put them through the Port Darwin works’. ‘Europe Seeking Beef: Disabilities at Darwin’, Register (23 January 1925), p. 10. Staniforth Smith, Administrator of the Northern Territory, had estimated that two-thirds of Darwin’s (white, male) workers were left unemployed when Vestey’s closed the meatworks in 1919. Northern Territory of Australia, Annual Report of the Acting Administrator for the Year Ended 30th June, 1920, Cmd. Paper No. 119, 1921, p. 4. 17  Payne–Fletcher Report, p. 46; Margaret Kowald and W. Ross Johnston, You Can’t Make It Rain: The Story of the North Australian Pastoral Company 1877–1991 (Brisbane: Boolarong Publications with North Australian Pastoral Co., 1992), p. 47. The Philippines trade was never a boon for the Territory. In 1927–8, 5433 head of cattle were exported to Manila via the north (this increased to 6808 in 1929, but had peaked in 1924–5 at 9074), while 51,416 went overland to the states. Price, The History and Problems of the Northern Territory, Australia, p. 35; Third Annual Report of the North Australia Commission, 1st January 1929 to 31st December 1929, Cmd. Paper No. 82, 1930, p. 16; Michael Pearson and Jane Lennon, Pastoral Australia: Fortunes, Failures and Hard Yakka: A Historical Overview 1788–1967 (Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing, 2010), p. 160.

[ 75 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES 18  Buchanan, Northern Territory Development and Administration, p. 11. 19  ‘Report of the N.T. Pastoral Leases Investigation Committee’, 1934, NAA: F987, REPORT; J. H. Kelly, Report on the Beef Cattle Industry in Northern Australia (Canberra: Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Dept. of Commerce and Agriculture, 1952), p. 50. Pastoralists regularly requested rent reductions, and a 25 per cent reduction was implemented from 1 July 1932, though this made little difference to the rates of payment. See, e.g., Northern Territory Pastoral Lessees’ Association Deputation to Minister at Sydney, 22 February 1932; J. W. Allen to Archdale Parkhill, 11 June 1932, NAA: A1, 1934/3449. 20  Ling, Blame and Martyrs, pp. 42–3. 21  Payne–Fletcher Report, pp. 2, 5. 22  Ibid., pp. xi, 82. 23  Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 28. On the constitution of Indigenous peoples as racialised populations, thereby rendering them in different ways subject to settler colonial government, see Tim Rowse, Rethinking Social Justice: From ‘Peoples’ to ‘Populations’ (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2012); Mark Rifkin, ‘Making Peoples into Populations’, in Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (eds), Theorizing Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Michael R. Griffiths, ‘Interventions: Race, Culture, and Population via the Thought of A. P. Elkin’, Settler Colonial Studies, 6:4 (2016). 24  On cacophony and settler colonialism, see Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 66. 25  Payne–Fletcher Report, pp. 11–15, 20–4, 51. 26  Ibid., pp. 65, 71. 27  Buchanan, Northern Territory Development and Administration, pp. 14–15. See also ‘Report of the N.T. Pastoral Leases Investigation Committee’, p. 9; J. W. Bleakley, The Aboriginals and Half-Castes of Central Australia and North Australia, Cmd. Paper No. 21, 1929, p. 7; C. E. Cook to Robert Weddell, 7 October 1935, NAA: F1, 1938/46. 28  Payne–Fletcher Report, p. 71. 29  See Robert Castle, Craig Clothier, and James Hagan, ‘Wage Fixing for Aborigines in the Northern Territory Cattle Industry, 1911–1965’, in Patrick Bertola and Janis Bailey (eds), Frontiers of Labour: Proceedings of the Fifth National Conference of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History (Perth: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 1997), p. 54. 30  Payne–Fletcher Report, p. 72. 31  Jock Makin, The Big Run: The Story of Victoria River Downs Station (Adelaide: Rigby, 2nd edn, 1983), pp. 121, 32. The size of the herd was such that the Dry (February to November) never allowed enough time to complete the muster; no one could be sure how many head of cattle were actually on the station. See Keith Willey and Matt Savage, Boss Drover (Adelaide: Rigby, 1977), p. 72. 32  Wages were set by the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, but its awards consistently excluded Aboriginal workers in the Northern Territory, whose employment conditions were instead governed by the Aboriginals Ordinance. 33  Kelly, Report on the Beef Cattle Industry in Northern Australia, p. 58. 34  Dawn May, Aboriginal Labour and the Cattle Industry: Queensland from White Settlement to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 185; Peter Read, ‘The Survival of Slavery in Australia in the 20th Century: Not If but Why? A Black Armband History’, in Maria Suzette Fernandes Dias (ed.), Legacies of Slavery: Comparative Perspectives (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). 35  J. H. Kelly, Northern Australia Cattle Survey: Report (Canberra: Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Department of Commerce and Agriculture, 1949), p. 70; W. E. Harney, Content to Lie in the Sun (London: R. Hale, 1958), p. 40; Protector quoted in Gillian K. Cowlishaw, Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: A Study of Racial Power and

[ 76 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

CONFLICT A ND CR ISIS, 1918 – 45 Intimacy in Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999), p. 87. Ann McGrath has noted that Aboriginal people in the Territory in the 1980s used ‘the same terminology when referring to the hunting of native game and cattle management: “chasem round”, “huntem down”, “roundem up”’. Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. 45. White writers of the interwar period had little sense that Aboriginal people would also have had land management skills. 36  Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory for Year 1937–38, Cmd. Paper No. 150, 1939, p. 26; North Australian Industrial Union v J A Ambrose and Others (1924) 20 CAR 507, 512, 514 (Justice Powers); North Australian Workers Union v Commonwealth Railways Commissioner (1927) 25 CAR 897 (Justice Beeby). Vestey’s representative expressed surprise and dismay at what he took to be a new policy when ordered by Canberra to pay his Aboriginal workers in 1936. Allen to Thomas Paterson, 20 July 1936, 29 September 1936, NAA: A1, 1938/329. 37  ‘Report of the Chief Protector of Aboriginals’, in Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory for the Year Ended 30th June, 1932, Cmd. Paper No. 124, 1933, p. 7. Landowners and pastoral lessees applied a constant pressure to deregulate Aboriginal wages, and some regularly complained that the cost of supporting dependants made Aboriginal labour expensive, an argument consistently rejected by the North Australian Workers’ Union. Allen to Parkhill, 30 May 1932, NAA: A1, 1933/269; Robert Toupein to H. G. Nelson, 22 August 1932, NAA: A1, 1933/479. 38  Cook to Weddell, 7 October 1935, NAA: F1, 1938/46. Cook was here quoting his own memorandum of 10 March 1928. 39  W. H. Grant in Notes on Conference regarding the payment of Halfcastes and Aboriginals in Country Districts, 1930, p 71, NAA: A1, 1938/329. 40  Charles Lydiard Aubrey Abbott, Australia’s Frontier Province (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1950), p. 138. 41  Alfred Searcy, In Australian Tropics (London: George Robertson, 2nd edn, 1909), p. 173. See also Willey and Savage, Boss Drover, p. 12. The work in the homestead was taxing too. Ruby Tracker, an Alyawarre woman, described the workday of cleaning and providing ‘food for the whitefellas’ as well as her family, beginning before sunrise and ending some time after sunset: quoted in Pamela Lyon and Michael Parsons, We Are Staying: The Alyawarre Struggle for Land at Lake Nash (Alice Springs: IAD Press, 1989), p. 20. 42  Matt Thomas, ‘Exploitation of Native Labour’, Northern Standard (20 August 1937), p. 6. See also defences to Thomas’s allegations from Alfred Martin, of VRD. Station, and C. Linderoth, another road ganger, in the Northern Standard, 12 April 1938, and Thomas’s reply on 31 May. In response to Thomas’s allegations, Abbott described him as ‘almost a confirmed dipsomaniac [who] has a number of convictions against him’. C. L. A. Abbott to J. A. Carrodus, 20 April 1938, NAA: A1, 1938/329. 43  Transcript of Interview with Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, April 1988, pp 4–5, NTAS: NTRS 226, TS 501. See also Ronald Murray Berndt and Catherine Helen Berndt, End of an Era: Aboriginal Labour in the Northern Territory (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1987), p. 124; Tony Austin, Never Trust a Government Man: Northern Territory Aboriginal Policy 1911–1939 (Darwin: NTU Press, 1997), p. 257. 44  There is an extensive literature on violence in tropical or colonial contexts of labour extraction, stressing differently its function, psychological milieu, excess, or its various embodied modalities. See, e.g., Tracey Banivanua-Mar, Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007); Ben Silverstein, ‘The “Proper Settler” and the “Native Mind”: Flogging Scandals in the Northern Territory, 1919 and 1932’, in Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck (eds), The Intimacies of Violence in Settler Colonial Economies: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 45  C. Graham to Sydney Gardner, 4 March 1932, NAA: A1, 1937/3013.

[ 77 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES 46  Deborah Bird Rose, Hidden Histories: Black Stories from Victoria River Downs, Humbert River and Wave Hill Stations (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991), p. 24. On cultures of terror, see Michael Taussig, ‘Culture of Terror—Space of Death. Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26:3 (1984); Barry Morris, ‘Frontier Colonialism as a Culture of Terror’, in Bain Attwood and John Arnold (eds), Power, Knowledge and Aborigines (Melbourne: La Trobe University Press, 1992). 47  Reverend J. Sexton to J. B. Cleland, 8 July 1935, quoted in Andrew Markus, Governing Savages (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990), p. 110. 48  H. V. Miller, ‘Native Race: Territory Menace’, Daily Mail (19 November 1927) and Snowy Kulmilya, 1986, quoted in Rose, Hidden Histories, pp. 166–7. 49  W. E. H. Stanner, ‘Industrial Justice in the Never-Never (1966)’, in White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays, 1938–1973 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979), p. 253. 50  The Aboriginal ‘Willeroo boys’ involved in the violence received 12-month sentences for assault. J. A. McDonald to Paterson, 17 June 1936, NAA: A1, 1938/389; McGrath, Born in the Cattle, p. 110. 51  Quoted in Richard Munro Baker, Land Is Life: From Bush to Town: The Story of the Yanyuwa People (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999), p. 87. 52  ‘Northern Territory Natives’, Abo Call (July 1938), p. 3. 53  Margaret Ford, Beyond the Furthest Fences (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1966), p. 54. See also pp. 71, 79, 83. 54  Rose, Hidden Histories, p. 138. 55  Arthur Blakeley, 13 June 1930, NBAC/ANU, N21/48 ACTU, WA and Darwin, 1929–1940, quoted in Julia Martínez, ‘Racism in the Northern Territory: The Attitudes of Administrators, Pastoralists and Unionists to Aborigines Employed in the Cattle Industry, During the Depression, 1929–1934’ (Honours Thesis, University of Wollongong, 1995), p. 26; Cook to Weddell, 23 July 1932, NAA: A1, 1933/479. There were also reported instances of ‘breeding one’s own labour’: Bleakley, The Aboriginals and Half-Castes of Central Australia and North Australia, p. 27. 56  Michael Terry, Hidden Wealth and Hiding People (London: Putnam, 1931), p. 241; Anon., Milingimbi in Peter Read and Jay Read (eds), Long Time, Olden Time: Aboriginal Accounts of Northern Territory History (Alice Springs: Institute for Aboriginal Development, 1991), p. 19. Florida Station had been abandoned for similar reasons in the 1880s. Searcy, In Australian Tropics, p. 185. 57  Terry, Hidden Wealth and Hiding People, pp. 217ff, 23, 34. 58  Quoted in Markus, Governing Savages, pp. 54–5. The Government Resident of Central Australia was effectively the Administrator between 1926 and 1931, when the Northern Territory was split into two administrative areas: North Australia and Central Australia. 59  Bleakley, The Aboriginals and Half-Castes of Central Australia and North Australia, p. 35. See also McGrath, Born in the Cattle, pp. 6–15, 48. Minoru Hokari suggested instead that Gurindji people understood cattle killing as providing tasty meat, not as a practice of resistance. Minoru Hokari, Gurindji Journey: A Japanese Historian in the Outback (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2011), pp. 181–4. 60  ‘N.T. Police’, Northern Territory Times (26 February 1929), p. 3. 61  Miller, ‘Native Race: Territory Menace’. 62  Hector K. Fuller to Constable Fitzer, 23 November 1937, NAA: F1, 1939/593. The equation had been expressed with greater clarity by Mounted Constable Dempsey of Borroloola in 1913, who wrote that ‘Cattle and bush natives cannot together do well on the same country.’ Quoted in Baker, Land Is Life, p. 80. 63  Darrell Lewis, A Wild History: Life and Death on the Victoria River Frontier (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2012), p. 93. 64  See Berndt and Berndt, End of an Era; Geoffrey Gray, Abrogating Responsibility: Vesteys, Anthropology and the Future of Aboriginal People (Canberra: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2015).

[ 78 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

CONFLICT A ND CR ISIS, 1918 – 45 65  Bleakley, The Aboriginals and Half-Castes of Central Australia and North Australia, pp. 6, 9. 66  Gordon Sweeney to Chinnery, 1943 Patrol Report, 1943, NAA: F1, 1943/65. Many of these more recent arrivals were refugees fleeing the Coniston massacre. 67  Rose, Hidden Histories, p. 212. 68  AIA to Berndt, 6 November 1944, quoted in Berndt and Berndt, End of an Era, 37. By this time pastoralists were also facing the competition for labour of the Army, which, during the war, employed thousands of Aboriginal workers on far better conditions than those offered by station work. 69  See Claude Meillassoux, Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 70  C. D. Rowley, The Remote Aborigines (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1971), pp. 3–4. Cf. Powell, Far Country, p. 131; Julie Therese Wells, ‘The Long March: Assimilation Policy and Practice in Darwin, the Northern Territory 1939–1967’ (PhD Thesis, University of Queensland, 1995), p. 24; Mickey Dewar, In Search of the ‘Never Never’: Looking for Australia in Northern Territory Writing (Darwin: Northern Territory University Press, 1997), p. 72; Kelly, Report on the Beef Cattle Industry in Northern Australia, p. 249. At the same time, the Territory administration was revising its estimates of Aboriginal population downwards, indicating its recognition of a limit to the black population and the need to recalibrate the forms of intervention into Aboriginal communities and lives. Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory for the Year Ended 30th June, 1937, Cmd. Paper No. 58, 1938, pp. 1, 25. 71  Cf. Nicolas Peterson, who has argued that ‘Aborigines on cattle stations led self– contained lives.’ Nicolas Peterson, ‘Capitalism, Culture and Land Rights: Aborigines and the State in the Northern Territory’, Social Analysis, 18 (1985), 88. 72  Thomas Griffith Taylor, Geographical Factors Controlling the Settlement of Tropical Australia (Brisbane: Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, Queensland, 1917), p. 42. See generally Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Race, and National Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002). 73  ‘Report of the Superintendent of Agriculture and Curator of the Botanic Gardens’, in Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory for Year 1937–38, Cmd. Paper No. 150, 1939, pp. 27–8; Miles Staniforth Smith, Report on the Federated Malay States and Java: Their Systems of Government, Methods of Administration, and Economic Development, Cmd. Paper No. 32, 1906, pp. 5, 17. 74  North Australian Industrial Union v Commonwealth Railways Commissioner (1924) 20 CAR 726, 734. 75  Ibid. 76  Describing space as a frontier has important ideological effects. The frontier is, as Deborah Bird Rose has pointed out, ‘quite explicitly not the nation, but rather a site for the making of the nation’. The frontier as border appears as a line in time rather than space; a ‘Rolling Year Zero’ which pre–dates and constitutes the nation. The frontier, then, is the space and time where settler sovereignty is produced. And in naming this a frontier the resolution of conflict is overdetermined; it ends in the erasure of Aboriginal communities, in the constitution of the practice of Aboriginal sovereignties as anomalous and marginal. The frontier was thus purposeful, a space whose naming actively authorised an asymmetrical violence which produced settler sovereignty through prohibiting any oppositional force. Deborah Bird Rose, ‘Hard Times: An Australian Study’, in Klaus Neumann, Nicholas Thomas, and Hilary Ericksen (eds), Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999), p. 6; Julie Evans, ‘Where Lawlessness is Law: The Settler-Colonial Frontier as a Legal Space of Violence’, Australian Feminist Law Review, 30 (2009); Tracey Banivanua-Mar, ‘Frontier Space and the Reification of the Rule of Law: Colonial Negotiations in the Western Pacific, 1870–74’, Australian Feminist Law Review, 30 (2009).

[ 79 ]

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

77  Buchanan, Northern Territory Development and Administration, p. 4. 78  Walter R. Crocker, Nigeria: A Critique of British Colonial Administration (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936), p. 215. 79  Julia Martínez, ‘Plural Australia: Aboriginal and Union Labour in Tropical White Australia, Darwin 1911–1940’ (PhD Thesis, University of Wollongong, 2000), p. 34. 80  Payne–Fletcher Report, pp. 65, 71. 81  Quoted in Rose, Hidden Histories, p. xxi. See also Charlie Ward, A Handful of Sand: The Gurindji Struggle After the Walkoff (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2016), p. 2. 82  Quoted in Baker, Land Is Life, p. 109.

[ 80 ]

CH A P T ER FOU R

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Thomson in Canberra: anthropologising Aborigines

Disturbing questions On 1 August 1933, Dhaakiyarr Wirrpanda, a Yolngu man, returned to a camp he had recently abandoned on Woodah Island in eastern Arnhem Land and found his wife, Djaparri, alone with Mounted Constable Albert McColl. Just weeks had elapsed since Dhaakiyarr and another man had killed two white beachcombers on their boat where they had engaged Djaparri and her mother for sex. This time, he waited in hiding before attempting to make contact with his wife. McColl saw him and fired three shots, either misfiring or missing each time, before Dhaakiyarr threw his spear, killing him.1 This brought to eight the number of intruders Yolngu in the Caledon or Blue Mud Bay region had killed in recent months. But killing an investigating policeman posed an ominous threat to settler law. The white population of the Northern Territory was shaken. Was settler sovereignty so precarious? Under what law were Yolngu people living? Could the remote reaches of the Territory be brought under white control? As most white Australians responded with a number of panicked initiatives, from heavily armed punitive missions to missionary peace parties, the anthropologist Donald Thomson saw an opening. Here, he wrote, was ‘an opportunity which would not occur again in a lifetime, to demonstrate the practical value of an anthropological approach, to avert disaster for the Aboriginal people of Arnhem Land and to pave the way for a completely new policy in administration’.2 By mid-1935 Thomson was in Arnhem Land, investigating Yolngu law and custom and beginning to write a report that, when it was finally read in Canberra, would help frame a new political engagement between settlers and Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. Settlers’ varied responses signify continuing disagreement over the colonial forms found and practised in the Northern Territory. The [ 81 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

exterminatory force of a punitive mission, the conciliatory coercion of a missionary expedition, and the penetrating scientific gaze of the anthropological fieldworker would each contain Aboriginal sovereignties, but in crucially different ways. Each corresponded to a different mode of colonial government, and it is both significant and suggestive that it was anthropology that ultimately prevailed. But what had made an anthropological expedition imaginable as a response to a crisis of law, order, and sovereignty? How could anthropological knowledge interpret and engage with violence and war? This chapter seeks to answer these questions by continuing to attend to the transformation of colonial knowledge in the interwar period. Aboriginal action had generated a crisis in the north, one that spread panic across Australia. Anthropological knowledge rendered that crisis legible by treating it as a failure of authority, a failure that was attributable to the prevailing inadequacy of governmental knowledge. Only a government based on true knowledge could preserve order, and only scientists, here anthropologists, could produce that knowledge. A crisis of sovereignty, then, was considered to incite the transformation of government practice towards a form of indirect rule. The recognition of the Northern Territory’s colonial difference traced in the previous chapter had as its correlate the recognition of Indigenous difference. No longer were Aboriginal people seen as irretrievably degraded. Rather, Aboriginal communities came to be seen as having their own logic, their own capacity, their own potential. This was a white discovery expressed across a number of genres. In her exemplary memoir of settlement, for instance, Henriette Pearce recounted her early years at Maranboy, 70 km east of Katherine in the Northern Territory. Her story, told to Elisabeth George in 1943 and published as Two at Daly Waters in 1945, described her arrival in what she imagined to be an empty landscape, finding herself and her husband ‘almost as solitary as Adam and Eve must have been when they went out as pioneers from the garden of Paradise’. But her imagination filled the landscape with menace: ‘a fear … gripped my heart. I thought of the wild black people hidden in the bush, and it seemed to me that the night was full of watching eyes.’3 Pearce’s first encounter with Aboriginal men was a shock: I flung the hair back from my eyes and saw just in front of me a score of naked black men carrying long spears. Their faces were streaked with ochre, their bodies painted with white skeleton lines, and they wore strange head–dresses that looked like something out of a nightmare to my English eyes. They stood there watching me, as still as if they had been carved in stone, but with eyes so dark and piercing, so intensely

[ 82 ]

A NTHROPOLOGISING A BOR IGINES

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

alive, that I had felt their glances rather than heard their stealthy approach.4

From emptiness to savage occupation, the Northern Territory came to be populated by a mystically powerful threat. Aboriginal people could see her, in all her affective vulnerability, but she could not return their gaze. But her terror at invisible dangers was replaced by the control she learnt to exercise once she could see Aboriginal people with her own eyes. ‘I was afraid of myalls (wild natives), but I had to become accustomed to dark faces about me. One of my first duties was to train the native helpers for their work inside the house and out.’ It was now her controlling gaze that could penetrate and assemble, arrange and rearrange its objects. The power of, and the threat of subjection to, the black gaze was subjugated: ‘dark faces’ sutured now to working rather than violent bodies. Her training successful, Pearce became completely reliant on the native labour, both in the house and on the mine, that made her life possible. The savages of her imagination became material to be disciplined as workers or, in her words, as ‘helpers’.5 The Northern Territory emerged in this narration as a terrain characterised not by emptiness but by otherness. And this otherness came to be constituted not by threatening ‘savages’ who must be exterminated, but by a race of menials to be exploited for labour. Pearce’s exemplary replacement of absence with violence, followed by her recognition of redeemable otherness, represented the seepage of the northern social formation into a popular understanding. But these discoveries were most significantly expressed in an ethnographic genre, which came to exercise a powerful influence over both popular conceptions of Aboriginal people and governmental thinking on the ‘Aboriginal problem’. As the explorer and author Fred Blakely wrote in 1938, a new era was dawning, ‘for the days of anthropology have arrived, and the Native will become an important subject, lifted from the abject state we doomed him to as “just a nigger”’.6 The writings of anthropologists, travellers, and settlers form an interconnected intertextual milieu. And this was true of Donald Thomson’s reports to government. His Interim Report, for example, is largely an instance of classic travel writing, conveying his sense of the environment and terrain, his hopes and fears, his senses of intimacy with various ‘natives’, and a tendency to complain incessantly about the undoubtedly painful injuries and illnesses that ailed him on his travel through Arnhem Land.7 And in his final reports, he narrated a transition from absence to presence, from a space of inferred menace to one filled with tribes [ 83 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

amenable to his offer of friendship and explanation of white law. He populated his reports with what his friend Reverend Theodore Webb, the Methodist missionary at Milingimbi in Arnhem Land, described as ‘a people extremely primitive and undeveloped, but at the same time rich in possibilities’.8 Thomson’s discovery was that of ‘native society’. He identified that Arnhem Land was not a lawless space, one of unmitigated and unredeemable savagery, but was rather filled with a profusion of laws, of customs, of regulated practices. These were social institutions that were legible to the scientist, the trained anthropologist with expertise in the then new school of British social anthropology. Observing, describing, and analysing these social institutions at close proximity, from within the community under consideration and on the basis of a sustained familiarity, Thomson recognised Aboriginal communities in Arnhem Land not as an ungovernable multitude but as so many tightly regulated, yet precariously balanced, native societies. In both the anthropological and popular imagination, Arnhem Land emerged as a synecdoche for northern Aboriginal people as a whole: Thomson’s discovery, and his popularisation of that discovery, had far-reaching ramifications. The shift in the subject of government in Arnhem Land suggested the need for a consequent shift in the techniques of colonial government in the Northern Territory. Rather than a future of menace and violence, struggle and failure, it pointed to a future of potential, ‘rich in possibilities’, in Webb’s words. The task of government became imaginable as that of harnessing those possibilities, turning them to productive futures. Thomson’s reports represented a signal moment in the colonisation of the Northern Territory, marking the conjunction of government and anthropological discourse, bringing colonial and colonising knowledge into an at times uneasy relationship with a continuing, albeit transformed, invasion. The crisis of order and sovereignty in the north led, in both imaginative and material ways, to the recognition of native society. And the popularisation of anthropological knowledge through Thomson’s writing alongside that of A. P. Elkin in Sydney provided a discourse within which Aboriginal claims could be framed. This chapter focuses first on the development of that anthropological knowledge across the British Empire and then in Australia before turning to examine Thomson’s reports, studying the ways these represented Aboriginal peoples in the north as governable subjects. His plans carried the traces of imperial, transnational, or transcolonial influence, both generative and symptomatic of an ideological shift in interwar Australia, and the encroaching dominance throughout the 1930s of what I have termed the political rationality that underpinned indirect rule. Popularising [ 84 ]

A NTHROPOLOGISING A BOR IGINES

his discovery of recognisable ‘native society’ in the north comprised Thomson’s great contribution to interwar political change.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Anthropology and social order In 1922, the same year Lugard published The Dual Mandate, Bronislaw Malinowski published his masterwork – Argonauts of the Western Pacific – while A.  R. Radcliffe-Brown also published his monograph based on an ‘intensive study of a restricted area’ amongst ‘exotic’ people, The Andaman Islanders.9 The two anthropologists would go on to become figureheads of the functionalist school of British social anthropology. They established a new methodology, one that identified the tribe as the unit of study, that privileged the practice of fieldwork in producing data, and that saw its task as uncovering the functions of the various social institutions that comprised the culture of the tribe. This functionalist turn moved away from evolutionist narrations of global and racialised histories of progress from primitivism to modernity, producing accounts which did not necessarily reject this history but which focused instead on describing and analysing ‘the process of social life of a certain limited region during a certain period of time’. This practice was to transform the relationship between government and science, affecting an expertise that was of use to colonial administration around the British Empire.10 Anthropology’s ontology cannot be separated from its ‘colonial situation’, and nor can colonisation be separated from the production of knowledge about colonial Others.11 And the rise to disciplinary authority of this school of British social anthropology was more than just coincidentally contemporaneous with the textual propagation of indirect rule as an art of colonial government. In a 1922 article, Malinowski differentiated between two forms of use that ‘ethnology’ may have had for colonial administration. First was the very practical value of managing ‘relations between white and coloured people’, a practice that was rarely successful. Second, and more importantly, was its value as a ‘powerful means of widening our outlook on human nature, of allowing us to build up a correct theory of society for the future scientific guidance of human affairs’.12 Functionalists explicitly celebrated the practical utility of their work to administration, placing it at the centre of their descriptions of the research they supervised and carried out. Radcliffe-Brown, for example, described the anthropologist’s ‘desire to make anthropology of service in supplying the systematic knowledge that is necessary for the proper solution of … problems … of administration’, while Malinowski called for anthropology to become an ‘applied science’, translating the ‘theoretical results’ of study ‘into practical [ 85 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

rules of conduct for the administrator, the missionary, the entrepreneur, or teacher’.13 This concern placed functionalist anthropology at the intersection of research and practice, a location that prompted anthropologists to theorise the subject of government in a way that responded to what James Scott describes as the problem, central to statecraft, of legibility. The theory of ‘native society’ on which indirect rule relied may have been an invention of the nineteenth century, but it did not crystallise as a subject of science until represented by interwar functionalists. In describing its form, functionalist anthropologists established a regime of truth, providing what Nikolas Rose has named an ‘intellectual machinery for government, in the form of procedures for rendering the world thinkable, taming its intractable reality by subjecting it to the disciplined analyses of thought’. As a field, it expressed a governing logic in a scientific register: anthropological literature was another site for imagining and normalising indirect rule.14 A thoroughgoing theory of ‘native society’ took form through an analysis of the tribe. As Malinowski wrote, ‘the social organisation of the tribe lies at the foundation of everything else’.15 And both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown established the self-contained tribe as the object of anthropological knowledge, describing autonomous and unambiguously distinct social groups. This represented, in part, the conditions studied by Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown out of which they produced their early extended ethnographic works: Argonauts and The Andaman Islanders. In New Guinea and the Andamans, they imagined their fields as isolated islands. The ocean, for them, constituted a skin, an ambivalent and, at times, permeable barrier to the communication and movement of Island peoples. To see Islander societies in such a way suggests an immersion less in Islanders’ worlds than in European social theory.16 From Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown on, social anthropology was structured around what George Stocking described as the ‘one ethnographer/one tribe’ model.17 Archie Mafeje defined the anthropologists’ tribe as comprising a unit which featured ‘territoriality, primitive government through elders and chiefs, and a primitive subsistence economy’, a list to which we might add consanguinity.18 As much as this was a product of anthropological theorising, in much of British-ruled Africa and the Pacific the tribe was being made material by colonialism. British colonial governments took ‘the tribal unit’ as their object, and communities were rearticulated through interventions that defined territorial boundaries, alienated land, and established reserves.19 But these processes rarely appeared in interwar anthropological accounts. Colonialism, with its very visible material impact, figured less as a [ 86 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

A NTHROPOLOGISING A BOR IGINES

transformative force than it did as an epistemic barrier standing between the anthropologist and an authentic image of native society. It was the anthropologist’s role, then, to occlude the colonial situation, to cast their penetrating gaze on the pristine social institutions that continued below.20 It was Radcliffe-Brown who explicated the theoretical basis which gave British social anthropology its coherence, drawing on Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim to describe an organic social structure.21 Society, he wrote, can be thought as a whole, resting in equilibrium, all its social forces balanced by carefully calibrated social institutions. The task of the anthropologist was to explain the function of each of these institutions, identifying in each the ‘part it plays in the total social system of social integration of which it is a part’. This integration was key: the ‘function of culture as a whole is to unite individual human beings into more or less stable social structures’ and to provide ‘such external adaptation to the physical environment and such internal adaptation between the component individuals or groups, as to make possible an ordered social life’.22 Radcliffe-Brown’s social structure was held together by social relationships of a juristic and ritual kind. He believed kinship to be the defining feature of ‘primitive’ society, emphasising inventive and labyrinthine, albeit sometimes incoherent, kinship structures which formalised relationships between members of a society and maintained an internal equilibrium or coaptation, where all elements fit together and complement each other.23 The language of social anthropology emerged as an intellectual apparatus for rendering reality thinkable by constituting a field of problems and actions, interventions and effects. Representation (classifying a people) and intervention (inciting their management) are inseparable.24 And in representing ‘native society’ as a tribe, constituted by kinship, social anthropologists configured the scope of the colonial problematic. The artifice of the tribe in Western knowledge was both a productive effect of, and set limits on, power, providing a terrain of government and a matrix of calculation for forms of intervention. Naming a social object a ‘tribe’ represented a mode of recognition that was not innocent: it fixed that object within an imperialist knowledge, reducing alterity to legibility and rendering colonial government both necessary and justifiable.25 We need to interrogate that anthropological vision; to avoid the fetishisation of the tribe upon which rests an artifice of colonial knowledge. And colonialism returned to the ethnographic text in a number of forms. We see its trace in anthropologists’ translation of change into a language of ‘decay’, or in their discussions of the degradation and danger that symbolised the spectre of unregulated culture change.26 [ 87 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

And it also appeared as a new context, a new milieu in which ‘native society’ found itself. The changing circumstances wrought by colonialism had, social anthropologists noted, both disrupted the internal equilibrium of the tribe and rendered it unfit for the external milieu in which it found itself. For Radcliffe-Brown, a change in external environment ought to be accommodated by the organism itself. But a ‘primitive’ social organism was unable to adapt to a change so radical as that effected by colonisation, its primitivity amplifying the ‘disintegrating effect’ of the external change wrought by the introduction of European settlements or colonising government.27 In the face of such potential for disorder, a mode of government which encouraged adaptation became necessary, ensuring continued, if not expanded, life. A specific form of colonisation became necessary to make ‘natives’ live.28 When Lugard declared that his aim in devising the appropriate form of colonial state was ‘to evolve from their own institutions, based on their own habits of thought, prejudices, and customs, the form of rule best suited to them, and adapted to meet the new conditions’, he anticipated this concern for an endogenous state that would assist in adapting the tribe to a new situation.29 As anthropology grew in influence through the interwar period, its ‘tribe’ became that of colonial government. When colonial administrators spoke of ‘tribes’ they implicitly referred to the meaning given that term in the discourse of functionalist anthropology.30 This conjunction of British social anthropology and colonial government was expressed institutionally in the founding of its Australian branch, in 1925, in the form of a Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. As Tamson Pietsch has argued, and as RadcliffeBrown’s perambulations between Cambridge, Cape Town, Sydney, Chicago, Oxford, and London demonstrate, scholars and universities formed an imperial academic community that knitted Britain together with the settler colonies.31 The Sydney Department had been established, with Radcliffe-Brown as Chair, with colonising ambition: to teach anthropology to cadets and officers of the Papua and New Guinea administrations. Radcliffe-Brown developed the Department on an academic footing, began publishing and editing Oceania, and directed the disbursement of Australian National Research Council (ANRC) funds for anthropological fieldwork. He sent researchers north and west, directing, in his successor Raymond Firth’s words, a ‘systematic attack’ on ‘the vast field of native life open for exploration’.32 When external funding sources for the Department – particularly the Rockefeller Foundation – withdrew, Radcliffe-Brown left for Chicago in 1931. He was temporarily replaced by Firth before Elkin took over the role as de facto head of Australian social anthropology at the beginning of 1933.33 [ 88 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

A NTHROPOLOGISING A BOR IGINES

Anthropologists in twentieth-century Australia tended to see their task as having a special urgency: to study the rapidly disappearing remnants of tribal Aboriginal society. Citing Tasmania as his example, Malinowski bemoaned the simultaneity of the rise of social anthropology and the fall of Indigenous societies: ‘Just as we have reached a certain academic status and developed our methods and theories, our subjectmatter threatens to disappear.’ Radcliffe-Brown similarly noted that ‘We have only just begun in time for I find that everywhere throughout Australia and Melanesia, the natives are either dying out rapidly or they are losing their customs and traditions. Work can be done now which will be impossible in a few years’ time.’ This meant, he wrote, that ‘the work we are engaged on is the most urgent in any field of science, since, if it is not done now, it can never be done at all’. Aboriginal culture, he suggested, was ‘bound to disappear in another half-century; even if the blackfellow himself does not become extinct his customs and languages will’. But the inevitability of Aboriginal demise was to be contested by a new generation of social anthropologists working in Australia.34 Donald Thomson was in the earliest cohort of Radcliffe-Brown’s students in Australia and was the first to graduate with the Diploma in Anthropology in 1927. Supported by his mentor Radcliffe-Brown, in 1928 and 1929 he travelled to undertake fieldwork in Cape York. After spending two years working in Melbourne as a biologist, he joined the University of Melbourne as a research fellow at the Department of Anatomy in 1932 and set himself to writing anthropology. Heavily influenced by Radcliffe-Brown, whose 1930 masterwork on Aboriginal social organisation structured social anthropological work for decades, Thomson published on culture and totemism, joking relationships, and fatherhood.35 He returned to Cape York in 1932, funded by the University of Melbourne, for a trip that would change him. There he witnessed arbitrary imprisonment and flogging at Aurukun Mission and was driven to protest, quietly and with little effect, to the Presbyterian Church in Melbourne. It was after this experience that Thomson was pushed to consider different modes of political engagement. And when he heard of the war in Arnhem Land, he saw a chance.

Disturbance at Caledon Bay In September 1932, at Caledon Bay, a group of Yolngu men killed five Japanese men who were there to collect trepang, or sea cucumber – Tanaka, Kimishima, Shibasaki, Inamori, and Higasaki – who were part of a group that had mistreated Aboriginal workers, and had possibly [ 89 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

sexually abused Yolngu women. The following year, two white travellers – Fagan and Traynor – were making their way across the north coast from Darwin towards Thursday Island when they stopped at Woodah Island, south of Caledon Bay. It was as retribution for the sexual relations between the men and some Yolngu women, whether forcible or by mutual consent, that three Yolngu men – Dhaakiyarr, Merara, and Jimbarion – paddled out to the boat and killed the two men. When news of the first killings reached Darwin in early 1933, two white policemen were sent on an unsuccessful expedition into Arnhem Land to arrest the perpetrators. A second, larger, police party set off, with four white policemen, including McColl, and a number of Aboriginal trackers. Unaware that the two white travellers had been killed weeks earlier, they too stopped at Woodah Island and it was there, in August 1933, that Dhaakiyarr speared McColl to death.36 McColl’s death sparked alarm in Darwin and beyond, and a punitive expedition was publicly mooted. Robert Weddell, the Administrator of the Territory, proposed sending 24 men armed with 20 rifles and 2000 rounds of ammunition, 12 revolvers and 1000 rounds of ammunition, and four shotguns with 300 cartridges. ‘Strong, demonstrative force’ was ‘imperative’, he declared, as the ‘natives [were] numerous, hostile and cunning, many murders by them during the last sixteen years remaining unpunished’. An extraordinary public outcry forced Canberra to prevent the punitive mission and though calls for increased white militancy were compounded when news of Fagan and Traynor’s demise arrived in Darwin in December 1933, a peace party of missionaries, organised by and at the expense of the Church Missionary Society, was sent to deal with the matter. This expedition succeeded in bringing a group of men – those considered responsible for the killings – to Darwin, where they were tried and convicted before the notorious Judge Wells.37 Thomson heard of the conflict while the peace party was still in the field, and wrote via the Chancellor of the University of Melbourne to offer his services, an offer that was rejected by the Interior Ministry in December 1933.38 Government scepticism was met with a public campaign backing his appointment. In February 1934, one of his key public supporters and a colleague at the University, Frederic Wood Jones, wrote in the Melbourne Herald calling for the professionalisation of Aboriginal administration in the form of a Department of Native Affairs that would be headed by an ‘anthropologist … in … possession of some first-hand knowledge, and a sympathetic understanding, of the customs and psychology of the Australian aborigines’. If Aboriginal administration were so organised, an ‘investigator, independent of missionary and police alike and one who knows the native and his [ 90 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

A NTHROPOLOGISING A BOR IGINES

psychology and language, would be despatched [to Caledon Bay] to make inquiry and report’.39 Once the missionary party returned in July, Thomson renewed his call to be sent to Arnhem Land, where he could carry out a ‘first-hand investigation … of the Aboriginal population’ and place the ‘formulation of any policy … dealing with native affairs’ on a ‘scientific’ basis.40 The Herald bemoaned the state’s inability to assert order and control, a problem it found unsurprising given the ‘lack of exact knowledge’ regarding Arnhem Land. ‘Surely,’ the Herald argued, ‘the first necessity for dealing with such a problem is that we should have a scientific knowledge and an accurate understanding of the native.’ The collection of this knowledge could ‘be done only by an anthropologist of Mr Donald Thomson’s special qualifications’.41 Essential to successful indirect rule, Margery Perham wrote, was ‘a determination to know the facts of native life in all their variety and to act upon that knowledge at whatever cost to administrative convenience’.42 Problems of colonial government were thus transformed into questions which had, at their heart, the issue of knowledge. The field was open, then, to the claims of new and more penetrating colonial knowledges. In Australia, perhaps more than in any other colonial field of the British Empire, anthropologists stepped in to the breach armed with their developing science. As early as 1927, Radcliffe-Brown had called for the appointment of a Government Anthropologist in the Northern Territory, and over the next few years groups of concerned white citizens began to call for the training of all Aboriginal protectors in anthropology.43 And when the crisis of order developed in eastern Arnhem Land, social anthropologists, with claims to scientific legitimacy, made a role for themselves. Elkin’s views on the Northern Territory were regularly reported in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1934, and his anthropological authority was crucial in transforming the Commonwealth’s government of Aboriginal people in the north into a key public concern.44 Cabinet finally approved Thomson’s proposal in December 1934, after Justice Wells had sentenced Dhaakiyarr to death.45 Wood Jones hailed the Minister’s decision as one that ‘lifted the question of the aboriginal from medieval darkness to the enlightenment of modern scientific study’, while the Sun celebrated his work as heralding a possible ‘new deal’ for Aboriginal people. John Perkins, the outgoing Minister, had more modest ambitions, hoping that Thomson would ‘contact’ and ‘establish peaceful relations … with as many native tribes as possible’.46 Punitive expeditions were part of a cycle of outrage and reprisal that ensured the persistence of conflict.47 An anthropological expedition, on the other hand, offered the possibility of a future of ordered relations. After months of wrangling over the conditions of [ 91 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

his employment, Thomson finally departed for Arnhem Land in March 1935 where, over the course of two expeditions, he lived for 26 months. Upon making contact, he informed the Yolngu that he ‘had come to not only speak to them of the white man’s laws, but that the Government had, besides entrusting me with the message to them, sent me to learn their language and their customs, in order that we, in our turn should better understand them; that the Government wished to introduce a “new fashion” in dealing with them’.48 This was applied anthropology, practicing the nexus between power and knowledge in the interests of future security.

Taking the tribe The story of Thomson’s two expeditions into Arnhem Land has been well told elsewhere, not least by Thomson himself. Here I focus on the findings expressed in three of the texts he wrote afterwards: his reports to Government – an Interim General Report in 1936, his Recommendations of Policy published in 1937, and his final Report published in 1939 – in which he asserted his authority as an anthropologist to identify and describe Aboriginal social organisation in Arnhem Land, to narrate his discovery of native society and articulate its political implications.49 Thomson’s work was not easy. He described his initial expedition into Arnhem Land as slow and ponderous, as he struggled through the bush looking for ‘Blue Mud Bay natives’. Other Yolngu refused to help, rendering it ‘impossible … to obtain any information whatever about the people of whom I was in search’. He sailed along the western side of Woodah Island ‘without finding any natives’, anchoring nearby only to find that ‘[n]o fires were to be seen, nor any other signs of natives’. He set off for the headland and landed his guides, who returned unable to find anyone. ‘It was clear’, he wrote, ‘that there were no natives in this vicinity.’ When he eventually saw the fires that marked Aboriginal camps, he was understandably cautious, aware that ‘their experience of white men visiting in boats had not been particularly happy’. Thomson made a show of leaving his boat and proceeding both on foot and unarmed, anxious to demonstrate that he posed no threat; he described his anthropological savvy as the key to developing a seemingly innocuous strategy of contact. As he finally drew near to a camp, the men he sought ‘stood up close to their spears and waited’ as his Aboriginal guides explained the purpose of the visit. Immediately, in response to both this explanation and his harmless demeanour, he was ‘received … with the greatest friendliness’. He had found Dhaakiyarr’s camp, where he lived for several days and was ‘able to commence a study of the language and the social organisation’.50 [ 92 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

A NTHROPOLOGISING A BOR IGINES

The story Thomson told in his reports mapped a narrative trajectory through empty country to a country populated by threat and, ultimately, on to a space populated by people who could be recognised and known, people subject to research and government. Here he could discover native society. For Thomson, the only true basis for effective policy was scientific knowledge of the society to be governed. To this effect, in his Interim General Report he emphasised the ‘necessity of the carrying out of thorough anthropological (and biological) surveys of this country as a prelude to its Administration’. And he began his Recommendations of Policy by citing the 1930 British ‘Memorandum on Native Policy in East Africa’, which recognised the necessity for ‘an understanding of the peoples and their cultures and social organization – of the study of their institutions – as a preliminary step to administration’. Only one who understands through ‘first- hand study … the people as they live’ could provide the information necessary. As an anthropologist, Thomson asserted his capacity to provide ‘a plain, unbiased scientific statement of the facts’, gathering data measuring the effect of different governmental interventions on the governed population. Martin Thomas has described expeditions as ‘machines for producing discourse’. And in his reports, Thomson set himself to describe typical ‘populations,’ each ‘group[ed] … into ethnographic “areas”,’ more commonly understood as tribes, for study and action. This authoritative writing was retrospectively to warrant his expedition.51 In taking the tribal unit, Thomson contributed to that relatively new tradition in Australian anthropology which emphasised the positive potential of northern Aboriginal communities. As discussed above, finding and recognising tribes was primarily a practice of government, one that owes much more to the terms of anthropological knowledge than it does to the characteristics of Indigenous social organisation. We should not confuse the two.52 This form of anthropological recognition was a process of ontological assimilation, rendering the other legible by framing it in terms of the already known, occluding alterity by locating it within imperialist knowledge. To be recognised as other – as tribal – is not to be external to the colonial order, but to be brought within, and thus signifies a discursive formation that succeeds the frontier, marking its closure. Identifying tribes, in other words, brought Aboriginal communities into a field of colonial government. In Arnhem Land, as elsewhere in northern and western Australia, anthropologists constituted governable tribes which could be incorporated into government administration. Many acknowledged in their accounts that while they ‘took the tribal unit’ as the object of study, this was an ideological or disciplinary, rather than empirical, commitment. The [ 93 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

American anthropologist Lloyd Warner, who was supported by both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown in his Arnhem Land fieldwork in the mid–1920s, classified eight tribes among the Murngin people (the Yolngu) in his suggestively titled 1937 book, A Black Civilization. But these were largely of his own creation. ‘The tribe’, he wrote, ‘is almost a non-existent unit among these people. … The tribes of north-eastern Arnhem Land, of which Murngin is one, are very weak social units, and when measured by the ordinary definitions of what constitutes a tribe fail almost completely.’53 The task of the anthropologist, though, was to explore tribal institutions and their functions. And after this early disclaimer, Warner’s description of the Murngin proceeded as though they existed as such outside his text. Malinowski had described in his diary his ‘[f]eeling of ownership’ on surveying the Trobriands: ‘It is I who will describe them or create them.’54 The people Warner designated the Murngin ‘tribe’ were rendered legible as a ‘tribe’ by virtue of his writing; through this process he claimed them as a creation of his description. In 1949, Thomson was to declare this ‘unfortunate’, noting that the ‘word murngin has nothing to do with social organisation and is in no sense the name of a tribe’.55 But in his government reports he too took the tribe as the social unit of analysis. He commenced the ethnographic section of his Interim General Report with his search for tribes, noting that he could find them in the west and south of the expedition area, but not in the east, where trouble had occurred. There people lived instead in groups of clans, termed ‘mulla’, but did not share a common language.56 For Thomson, echoing Radcliffe-Brown, the territorial or landowning group was the clan, which comprised a man and all his relatives in the male line. The social group, the camp or horde, consisted of the male members of the clan along with their wives, who remained members of the clan into which they were born. The tribe was the language group, a unit which seldom, if ever, had a social existence.57 In his popular 1938 survey account of Aboriginal society, Elkin agreed that the tribe was not a grouping lived in by Aboriginal people. Though he could identify that ‘there is a tribal sentiment centring round the tribal territory, language and social customs’, he noted that ‘the tribe seldom, if ever, functions as a whole in warfare or foodgathering. These are matters which concern local groups or clans.’ The tribe ‘is not really important politically or economically’; the hordes are ‘the real political and economic units’. Not only did Aboriginal people rarely act as a tribe, but he found it difficult to identify where each tribe ended and the next began: ‘language apart, border hordes of two tribes are more interested in one another than are distant hordes [ 94 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

A NTHROPOLOGISING A BOR IGINES

within one tribe’. These relationships ‘tend to make one tribe dovetail, as it were, into its neighbours’.58 Sharing Thomson’s insistence on a linguistic basis for the tribe, Elkin too refused to displace it as the crucial social unit of ‘native society’. This practice of taking the tribal unit was not arbitrary; it had, as Stanner identified, important governmental implications. Discussing the development of ‘native policy and administrative methods in Australia’ in 1938, he argued that the immediate political task for social anthropologists was to undertake a ‘tribal survey to locate and register tribes according to their district, cultural condition, and immediate needs’. This would allow ‘the plotting of natural administrative areas with reference to the need for decentralization, the logic of geography, and underlying cultural resemblances’.59 The creation of tribes had the function, Stanner implied, of framing objects of government. And this was an effect of Thomson’s work. He described the maintenance of social solidarity among Aboriginal communities through totemism, which he noted was ‘very strongly developed in this region’. Each tribe comprised a number of clans, each clan was divided into two moieties, and each moiety could be further split into subsections, each of which had its own totems and connected ceremonies. Each clan, too, had its totem, which supplied ‘the solidarity – the cohesion – that binds together’ its ‘members’.60 These characteristics had important implications for their government. It was, for Thomson, attention to ‘social organization, kinship, and behaviour, to the legal and moral codes, and to magical beliefs and practices which play a large part in the regulation of native conduct, and often supply the initiative for action which is otherwise incomprehensible and a systematic account of which would be of most practical value to the Administration’.61 If totemism was the basis of the solidarity of Aboriginal life in Arnhem Land, any interference with it would result in the ‘breaking down and disintegration of their entire social structure’.62 This was a finely balanced and precarious social life, one that beseeched protection and carefully planned government. In discovering this order Thomson departed from, and was to transform, the white public’s view of eastern Arnhem Land, which imbued it with an immutable savagery. Arnhem Land in general was Aboriginal territory. White pastoralists had found it difficult to establish a foothold, due to a combination of successful Aboriginal resistance to their presence and a lack of appropriate grazing grasslands. A Reserve had been proclaimed in 1931, and well into the 1930s the main trade remained trepang, though the Macassan traders who had collected it in Arnhem Land for export to Makassar (Sulawesi) had been replaced by a few whites and hundreds of Japanese men. Arnhem Land came [ 95 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

to be emblematic of Northern Territory difference within the settler nation; barely colonised and mostly populated by black people. Jeremy Long has argued that the space ‘become a metaphor for the lands beyond the frontier of settlement where “the blacks” were “untamed” and given to treachery and violence’. The explorer and writer Charles Conigrave, to take but one example, wrote in 1936 that the ‘native of the eastern portion of Arnhem Land’ was ‘a natural murderer’ who was ‘liable to kill at sight anyone visiting his coast who is believed to have in the hold of his lugger enough flour and other stores and gear to make an attack worthwhile’.63 Vic Hall, a key protagonist in policing the Reserve during the ‘Black War’, ascribed this murderous nature to a strange admixture of blood, a racial fusion that had produced a violent asociality: ‘It was because the Balamumu [Yolngu] had a great deal of Malay blood. The Macassarmen who had been coming to the Arnhem Land coast for centuries had been good mixers. Total result – a tribe that was the fightingest, most rumbustious one in all Australia.’ Harold Nelson, the Commonwealth Member of Parliament for the Territory, agreed that the local tribes were a ‘mixture of Japanese and Macassars, and combine the cunning of the Japanese with the strength and barbaric savagery of the Macassan’. They pursued, he declared, a ‘fetish of murder’.64 Such views, hardened into immutable racialised characteristics, supposed no potential for redemption. Violent reprisals were the only possible response to these tribes’ overstepping the bounds of their containment. In the absence of that force, many settlers believed, disorder was inevitable. For Hall, the Arnhem Land Reserve was ‘nothing but a half-explored space on the map. No machinery existed for dealing with its savage inhabitants, who had never been “shot up,” intimidated, or given any cause to respect the law. In fact, by international standards, it wasn’t a reserve at all; it was a completely uncontrolled wilderness where savages held sway.’65 But Thomson suggested that this was not a ‘lawless’ or uncontrolled frontier in any way. It was, rather, a space in which ‘natives believe that they are still living under their own laws’.66 Thomson’s claim to a scientific ethnography represented an attempt to understand the Arnhem Land tribe beyond pathology and in the context of its value. In this episode, as a punitive expedition was prevented and Thomson ultimately deployed in its stead, we see the emerging signs of a transition in the settler state’s mode of governing Aboriginal people. Representing Aboriginal people as tribes or native societies rather than as deviant communities of violent aggression produced them as potential subjects of indirect rule. It suggested that development could proceed through conducting Aboriginal society, not through clearing it away. [ 96 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

A NTHROPOLOGISING A BOR IGINES

Policy, Thomson wrote, had hitherto assumed ‘that their culture is to be destroyed’, that there was no space in the Australian future for Aboriginal peoples. Instead he advocated a policy of ‘saving the remaining natives’. This could only be achieved, he argued, through segregating ‘undetribalized’ populations, put into practice through the imposition of inviolable reserves in Arnhem Land and wherever else appropriate populations could be found. Contact with non-native settlers and traders, whether ‘whites or Asiatics,’ was inimical to such a goal: interaction had, thus far, proved to be fatal. Thomson wrote of being impressed by the high proportion of children and the ‘well-nourished appearance and general good health of the natives’ in outlying areas of Arnhem Land. But the number and wellbeing of children ‘diminished noticeably with the approach towards the areas where there was regular contact with Europeans’. This was not for lack of food, but an inevitable result of contact with an ‘advanced culture’ under the old policy. Prolonged contact caused ‘decay’, ‘degradation’, and ultimately ‘extinction’. Until a method of assimilation could be developed which avoided this dire end, adjusting ‘native society’ to a new milieu, segregation should continue. Within these reserves, every effort should be made to ‘preserve intact their social organization, their social and political institutions, and their culture in its entirety’.67 He was not the first anthropologist to call for segregation. In 1926, Wood Jones, then based at the University of Adelaide, had argued that ‘[c]ontact with the white man had spoiled the Australian aborigine’, and called for Aboriginal people in the north to be ‘left exclusively to themselves to work out their own salvation and destiny’. And when Warner returned to Sydney from his fieldwork in Arnhem Land the following year, he advised that segregating ‘tribes as yet unharmed by intercourse with whites’ would prevent them sharing the fate of American Indians. He argued, as Thomson would later go on to do, that ‘a primitive culture is so delicately adjusted to the needs of the people that at the slightest interference it collapses’, confirming the ‘generally accepted theory that natives in their natural condition are healthy and virile, but that contact with civilisation is fatal to them’.68 Segregation with the aim of preserving Aboriginal social organisation was, in this anthropological view, essential to Aboriginal survival, and would be enacted by what Thomson termed a positive policy within which segregation would provide protection until a tested strategy for governing change was developed. Thomson’s idiosyncratic use of the word ‘undetribalized’ is notable here: as a spatial signifier it suggests an unexpected escape from contact; as a temporal signifier it denotes a time before change and dissolution. In situating the Aboriginal people of Arnhem Land in this phase, he placed them in a state of arrested [ 97 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

becoming, imagining detribalisation as inevitable and establishing the work of conjuring a new people as the anthropologist’s task. To this end, Thomson contrasted two types of culture change. The first was what he termed the ‘old system’, that which sought to remake Aboriginal people without regard for their social structure or its basis. This would lead to breakdown and disintegration, ultimately to extinction. But he also described an organic process of change, one he inferred was already under way in eastern Arnhem Land. The presence of ‘mulla’, groups which did not possess a common language, indicated to Thomson that ‘the present social grouping is unstable, and that it was probably in a transition stage, i.e., that it was undergoing change or reorganisation at the time when the contact with more advanced cultures put an end to its further development’. These were societies in motion, developing and reorganising. Change was possible, so long as government began by ‘preserving the nicely-balanced organisation upon which his culture stands’. A new Department of Native Affairs, staffed by anthropologically trained men under a qualified Director, would bring the government of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory into line with professionalised ‘native administration’ in Papua, New Guinea, and elsewhere in the Empire. This Department could govern change scientifically.69 Thomson’s plan was certainly not a complete rejection of assimilation; his proposed new Department would be tasked with systematically civilising those Aboriginal people already detribalised, while missionary organisations could be enlisted to establish and maintain stations as buffers around reserves. Here welfare work and a civilising mission could proceed, acting upon those Aboriginal people who were moving away from reserves. The ‘buffer’ Thomson envisioned would be designed less to protect reserve inhabitants from the encroachment of outside influence than to prepare Aboriginal people to encounter the white(r) areas of the north.70 His segregation, likewise, was not exclusively protective, but also positive and constructive: by embracing Aboriginal social organisation, Thomson envisioned spaces of Aboriginality within settler Australia, a north that would not quite, or at least not yet, be white. Thomson likened the ‘Aboriginal problem’ of the north to that facing other colonial administrations around the world. But it was also importantly distinct. Aboriginal production and social organisation was considered to differ importantly from that of ‘natives’ in the Pacific: the ‘Papuans, the Melanesians, the Polynesians and others’ were each a ‘gardening or an agricultural people—a people with a settled village life’. Northern Aboriginal people, on the other hand, were ‘a race of nomadic hunters … with no settled habitation or village life’.71 Indeed, this nomadism precluded Aboriginal agriculture; it was, for Aboriginal [ 98 ]

A NTHROPOLOGISING A BOR IGINES

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

people, a psychological impossibility. Thomson believed one should not try, nor could one succeed, in making ‘black white men’.72 This did not mean, however, that government–minded anthropological study was futile. Joining in the growing trend for anthropological study of so–called acephalous societies, Thomson described Aboriginal government in his final report: In the absence of kingship, chieftainship or other outward and visible signs of authority, the tendency is too often to assume that there is no organized code of behaviour among these people, i.e., a failure to recognize the fact that they have a definite code grounded in tradition and approved and sanctioned by the society. It comes as a surprise to many people, even among those whose business it is to deal with these natives, to know that they have a legal code that is not merely capricious, but functions in a definite manner.73

His model of Aboriginal social organisation coalesced around the shared obligations that wove the horde – the land-using group identified by Radcliffe-Brown – together. Kinship and its attendant obligations ensured compliance with law and custom, or sanctions in their breach, and formed the basis for an economic life Thomson went on to describe after his wartime experience in Arnhem Land, and which I will discuss in Chapter 7. It was through subtle tinkering with these relational obligations that change could be effected, conducting or redirecting, but never abolishing them. Thomson’s Reports had little immediate effect. He returned to Melbourne from Arnhem Land at the end of 1937 completely disillusioned. “Everywhere I have turned,’ he said, ‘I have found myself against a brick wall; circumlocution will defeat enthusiasm and sacrifice. … I have come South from Arnhem Land completely discouraged because of the unresponsiveness of the [Northern Territory] administration, its failure to frame a policy of native administration and its apparent ignorance of its responsibilities to the aborigines.’74 He moved to England in 1938, returning to Australia – and to Arnhem Land – to serve in the Royal Australian Air Force when war broke out.75 His work was important, though, alongside that of Elkin in establishing in both the official and public minds a new, and scientifically authorised, sense of Aboriginal society. Elkin’s attempts in the mid-1930s to monopolise authority to dispense knowledge regarding Aboriginal people were partly self-aggrandisement, but were also an effect of the growing public prominence of Australian social anthropology in the interwar period. Where the relationship between anthropologists and administrators elsewhere in the British Empire was primarily ideological and intertextual, in Australia [ 99 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

anthropologists became key players in public debates on the nature of administration. Thomson’s continual public statements and articles played a substantial role in formalising the nature of Indigenous institutions, thus normalising the possibility of governing, rather than exterminating, Aboriginal communities. And after 1934, due in no small part to the distinct work of Thomson and Elkin in crafting a public role for anthropological knowledge, Australian social anthropology took on an important advisory and, at times, practical role in public debate regarding the administration of Aboriginal people.76 This was to structure policy in the late 1930s.

Notes 1 Mickey Dewar, The ‘Black War’ in Arnhem Land: Missionaries and the Yolngu 1908–1940 (Darwin: Australian National University North Australia Research Unit, 1992), pp. 54–5. 2 Donald F. Thomson and Nicolas Peterson, Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land (Carlton: Miegunyah Press, 2005), p. 25. 3 Elisabeth George, Two at Daly Waters (Melbourne: Georgian House, 1945), pp. 9–10, 20. 4 Ibid., p. 26. 5 Ibid., pp. 27, 57, 76–7. 6 Fred Blakeley, Hard Liberty: A Record of Experience (London: George G. Harrap, 1938), pp. 156–7. 7 The first 30 pages of Thomson’s Interim Report are devoted to a ‘Narrative’ of his experiences, before he moved on to sketch an ethnographic account and provide some recommendations to government in the remaining 20 pages. Donald F. Thomson, Interim General Report of Preliminary Expedition to Arnhem Land, Northern Territory of Australia, 1935– 6 (Canberra: Government Printer, 1936). 8 T. T. Webb, The Aborigines of East Arnhem Land, Australia (Melbourne: Methodist Laymen’s Missionary Movement, 1934), p. 29. 9 George W. Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 122–3; Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978 [1922]); A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders: A Study in Social Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922). 10 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘Social Anthropology’, in M. N. Srinivas (ed.), Method in Social Anthropology: Selected Essays (Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Corp., 1983), p. 167. On the functionalist turn, see George W. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), pp. 245–8; Stocking, After Tylor, pp. 124–5; Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), p. 44. 11 V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 19; Henrika Kuklick, ‘Tribal Exemplars: Image of Political Authority’, in George W. Stocking (ed.), Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 70; Talal Asad (ed.), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973); Jack Goody, The Expansive Moment: The Rise of Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1918–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 9. 12 Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Ethnology and the Study of Society’, Economica, 6 (1922), 208.

[ 100 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

A NTHROPOLOGISING A BOR IGINES 13 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘Editorial’, Oceania, 1:1 (1930), 2; Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Introductory Essay on the Anthropology of Changing African Cultures’, in Bronislaw Malinowski et al., Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa (London: International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, 1938), pp. x, xii–xiii; original emphasis. See also, e.g., Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Native Education and Culture Contact’, International Review of Missions, 25 (1936). 14 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, ‘Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government’, British Journal of Sociology, 43:2 (1992), 182. 15 Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, p. 69. 16 Cf. Epeli Hau’ofa, ‘Our Sea of Islands’, in We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008). 17 George W. Stocking, ‘The Ethnographic Sensibility of the 1920s and the Dualism of the Anthropological Tradition’, in The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), p. 282. See also Bernard Magubane, ‘A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Colonial Africa’, Current Anthropology, 12:4/5 (1971). 18 Archie Mafeje, ‘The Ideology of “Tribalism”’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 9:2 (1971), 257–8. 19 Minute by Donald Cameron, October 1925, on Thompson to Colonial Secretary, 15 September 1925, quoted in John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 323. See Terence Ranger, ‘The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 249. 20 Bernard S. Cohn, ‘History and Anthropology: The State of Play’, in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 19–20. 21 See Auguste Comte, System of Positive Polity, Volume Two (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1875), 221–75; Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, Vol. I (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1883), 465–618; Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method: And Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method (London: Macmillan, 1982 [1895]). 22 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘The Present Position of Anthropological Studies (1931)’, in Srinivas (ed.), Method in Social Anthropology, p. 62. 23 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘The Mother’s Brother in South Africa (1924)’, in Structure and Function in Primitive Society: Essays and Addresses (New York: The Free Press, 1952), p. 29. See also A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘On Social Structure (1940)’, in Structure and Function in Primitive Society, pp. 197–8. 24 Rose and Miller, ‘Political Power Beyond the State’, p. 179; Tony Bennett, ‘Liberal Government and the Practical History of Anthropology’, History and Anthropology, 25:2 (2014), 152. 25 This argument is indebted to Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000). 26 Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, pp. 154–6. 27 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘Preface’, in Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (eds), African Political Systems (London: International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, 1940), p. xxii; W. H. R. Rivers, ‘The Government of Subject Peoples’, in A. C. Seward (ed.), Science and the Nation (Cambridge: Cambidge University Press, 1917), pp. 312–13. 28 Arguments such as this recall the alibi of empire Karuna Mantena identified that was constituted through the idea of the coherent and intact, but vulnerable, native society. Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 70. 29 Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1922), p. 219.

[ 101 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES 30 A. I. Richards, ‘Practical Anthropology in the Lifetime of the International African Institute’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 14:6 (1944), 292. 31 Tamson Pietsch, Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). There was also an important school of anthropology at the University of Adelaide, which continued to emphasise evolutionary questions and which barely featured in Elkin’s repetitive historical accounts. See, e.g., A. P. Elkin, ‘Anthropological Research in Australia and the Western Pacific, 1927–1937’, Oceania, 8:3 (1938); A. P. Elkin, ‘Anthropology in Australia, 1939’, Oceania, 10:1 (1939); A. P. Elkin, ‘The Development of Scientific Knowledge of the Aborigines’, in Helen Sheils (ed.), Australian Aboriginal Studies: A Symposium of Papers Presented at the 1961 Research Conference (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1963); Tigger Wise, The Self-Made Anthropologist: A Life of A.P. Elkin (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1985); Geoffrey G. Gray, A Cautious Silence: The Politics of Australian Anthropology (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007). 32 Raymond Firth, ‘Anthropology in Australia: 1926–1932 – and After’, Oceania, 3:1 (1932), 3. 33 Lugard had supported Radcliffe-Brown’s endeavours to preserve funding for teaching members of the New Guinea administration, lobbying the High Commissioner for Australia in London by stressing the importance of involving anthropological perspectives in colonial government. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown to Lord Lugard, 10 September 1930, Lugard Papers, MSS Lugard 8/1; Lugard to Radcliffe-Brown, 7 November 1930, Elkin Papers, P130/41/17. See also Lugard to Sir Granville Ryrie, 20 October 1930; Ryrie to Lugard, 3 October 1930; Lugard to Ryrie, 31 October 1930, all in Lugard Papers, MSS Lugard 8/1. 34 Malinowski, ‘Introductory Essay on the Anthropology of Changing African Cultures’, p. xii; Radcliffe-Brown to Rockefeller Foundation, November 1927 quoted in Wise, The Self–Made Anthropologist, p. 49; A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘Black Australia’, Australian Museum Magazine, 4:4 (1930), 138. 35 A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘The Social Organization of Australian Tribes’, Oceania, 1:1, 2, 3 (1930). See Donald F. Thomson, ‘The Hero Cult, Initiation and Totemism on Cape York’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 63 (1933); ‘Notes on a Hero Cult from the Gulf of Carpentaria, North Queeensland’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 64 (1934); ‘The Joking Relationship and Organized Obscenity in North Queensland’, American Anthropologist, 37:3, part 1 (1935); ‘Fatherhood in the Wik Monkan Tribe’, American Anthropologist, 38:3, part 1 (1936). 36 Dewar, The ‘Black War’ in Arnhem Land, pp. 38–60. 37 See Copy of Telegram Received from Administrator, Darwin, 27 August 1933, NAA: A431, 1947/1434. Correspondence relating to the protest is collected in NAA: A1, 1933/7632. 38 See Nicolas Peterson, ‘“I Can’t Follow You on This Horde-Clan Business at All”: Donald Thomson, Radcliffe-Brown and a Final Note on the Horde’, Oceania, 76:1 (2006); Bain Attwood, ‘Anthropology, Aboriginality and Aboriginal Rights’, in Bruce Rigsby and Nicolas Peterson (eds), Donald Thomson: The Man and Scholar (Canberra: Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, 2005), p. 105. 39 F. Wood Jones, ‘Why Bother About the Aborigine?’, Herald (10 February 1934), NAA: A1, 1937/15948. 40 Donald F. Thomson to J. A. Perkins, 18 July 1934, NAA: A659, 1939/1/5250. 41 H. C. Brown, then Secretary of the Department of the Interior, noted that Thomson’s proposal was ‘all very interesting but it does not solve our problem in the least’. It was ‘the administration of the law that is our immediate trouble’ and ‘we want something more than anthropology’. Thomson to Perkins, 18 July 1934, NAA: A659, 1939/1/5250; ‘Ruling the Native: First Essential Is To Learn About Him’, Herald (9 April 1934); ‘An Offer That Should Be Gladly Accepted’, Herald (14 February 1934), NAA: A659, 1939/1/5250.

[ 102 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

A NTHROPOLOGISING A BOR IGINES 42 Margery Perham, Native Administration in Nigeria (London: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1962), p. 59. 43 Radcliffe-Brown to McLaren, 5 August 1927, Elkin Papers, P130/41/44; Study of Aboriginal Group of the Citizen’s Educational Fellowship, Report and Conclusions, 1930, Minutes, Book I, Amy Brown Papers, MS9212, Box 3652A; ‘Proposals to form Basis of Suggested Petition to the Commonwealth Government’, c1933, Amy Brown Papers, MS9212, Box 3654/1(J); Resolution to be Submitted to the Australian and N.Z. Association for the Advancement of Science. Melbourne Meeting January 1935, Amy Brown Papers, MS9212, Box 3654/1(k). 44 Elkin’s comments in the Sydney Morning Herald included: ‘Recent Trials: Aborigines and the Law’ (9 June 1934), p. 14; ‘Aborigines and the Death Sentence’ (21 June 1934), p. 8; ‘Many Tribes: The Land and the Aborigines’ (24 July 1934), p. 13; ‘Papuan System Suggested’ (8 August 1934), p. 13. On the legal controversies of 1934, see Andrew Markus, Governing Savages (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990), pp. 112–21. 45 Minister for the Interior, Cabinet Document, Agenda No. 1280, Mr Donald F. Thomson, B. Sc, 10 December 1934, NAA: A6006, 1935/01/04; Thomas Paterson to Thomson, 4 March 1935, NAA: A659, 1939/1/5250. The High Court overturned this judgment on the basis of judicial misconduct at trial. Dhaakiyarr was released but disappeared, most likely lynched by vengeful police. See Tuckiar v The King (1934) 52 CLR 335–55; Ted Egan, Justice All Their Own: The Caledon Bay and Woodah Island Killings 1932–1933 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996), pp. 190–4. 46 F. Wood Jones, ‘New Era for Aborigines: Scientific Study Of Their Problems’, Herald (6 August 1934); ‘A New Deal For the Native’, Sun (19 May 1936), NAA: A659, 1939/1/5250; Perkins to Elkin, 15 August 1934, Elkin Papers, P130/41/84. Perkins was removed from Cabinet in response to the outcry in Britain over the Caledon Bay controversy. 47 Chris Ballard and Bronwen Douglas, ‘“Rough Justice”: Punitive expeditions in Oceania’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 18:1 (2017). 48 Thomson, Interim General Report, p. 16. 49 Thomson was in Arnhem Land from March 1935 to January 1936 and June 1936 to October 1937. See Thomson and Peterson, Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land; Thomson, Interim General Report; Donald F. Thomson, Recommendations of Policy in Native Affairs in the Northern Territory of Australia (Canberra: Commonwealth Government Printer, 1937); Donald F. Thomson, Report on Expedition to Arnhem Land, 1936–37 (Canberra: Government Printer, 1939); Lindy Allen, ‘Message Sticks and Indigenous Diplomacy: “Thomson’s Treaty”—Brokering Peace on Australia’s Northern Frontier in the 1930s’, in Kate Darian-Smith and Penelope Edmonds (eds), Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim (New York: Routledge, 2015). 50 Thomson, Interim General Report, pp. 9–16. 51 Ibid., p. 40; Thomson, Recommendations of Policy, p. 3; Martin Thomas, ‘What Is an Expedition?’, in Martin Thomas (ed.), Expedition into Empire: Exploratory Journeys and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 6. ‘It should be realized’, Thomson argued, citing as authority a decision of the British Colonial Office, ‘that the understanding of a native people is a specialist’s business, and comes only from specialized training and experience.’ Thomson, Recommendations of Policy, p. 4. 52 In this section I am examining the ‘tribe’ as a figure of interwar colonial discourse, a signifier that denoted a mode of production, a ritual community, a racialised conservative insularity, or a unit of primitive government. It bears only a very tenuous relation to the terms and signs Aboriginal people used to describe their communities, which are categorically not the subject of this chapter. See Marcia Langton, ‘Urbanizing Aborigines: The Social Scientists’ Great Deception’, Social Alternatives, 2:2 (1981). 53 W. Lloyd Warner, A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe (New York: Harper & Bros, 1937), pp. 9, 35.

[ 103 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES 54 Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), p. 140. See also Radcliffe-Brown, ‘The Present Position of Anthropological Studies’, p. 68; James Clifford, ‘On Ethnographic Authority’, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 29–30; Lyn Schumaker, ‘Constructing Racial Landscapes: Africans, Admnistrators, and Anthropologists in Northern Rhodesia’, in Oscar Salemink and Peter Pels (eds), Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 327. 55 Donald F. Thomson, Economic Structure and the Ceremonial Exchange Cycle in Arnhem Land (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1949), p. 11ff. 56 Thomson, Interim General Report, pp. 31–2. 57 Ibid., p. 41. Radcliffe-Brown was to distinguish the camp from the horde in private correspondence with Thomson in 1948. Quoted in Peterson, ‘“I Can’t Follow You on This Horde-Clan Business at All”’, p. 19. 58 A. P. Elkin, The Australian Aborigines: How to Understand Them (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1938), pp. 32, 25, 27. 59 W. E. H. Stanner, ‘Anthropology and the Dying Australian Aborigines’, Man, 38 (1938), 24–5. 60 Thomson, Interim General Report, p. 34. Radcliffe-Brown had explained ‘totemism’ as constituting a ritual relationship whose function was to ‘express and so to maintain in existence the solidarity of the group’. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘The Sociological Theory of Totemism (1929)’, in Structure and Function in Primitive Society, p. 128. 61 Thomson, Report on Expedition, p. 6. 62 Thomson, Interim General Report, p. 35. 63 J. P. M. Long, The Go-Betweens: Patrol Officers in Aboriginal Affairs Administration in the Northern Territory 1936–74 (Darwin: North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University, 1992), p. 2; C. Price Conigrave, North Australia (London: Cape, 1936), pp. 218–19. 64 Victor Charles Hall, Dreamtime Justice (Adelaide: Rigby, 1962), p. 26; H. G. Nelson, n.d., NAA: A1, 1934/1141. 65 Hall, Dreamtime Justice, p. 130. 66 Thomson, Interim General Report, p. 28. 67 Ibid., pp. 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46; Thomson, Recommendations of Policy, pp. 4–5, 8; Thomson, Report on Expedition, p. 14. Thomson also noted a long history of contact between Yolngu people and Macassars on the Arnhem Land coast, which had given these Aboriginal groups a facility in dealing with others. Contact, it seems, was not necessarily fatal. Positive culture change was possible. Thomson, Interim General Report, pp. 15, 38; Thomson, Recommendations of Policy, p. 7. 68 ‘Isolating the Blacks’, Register (20 November 1926), p. 20; ‘Australian Aborigines. Visit of American Anthropologist. Segregation Suggested’, Advertiser (20 October 1927), p. 11; ‘A Vanishing Race’, Sydney Morning Herald (27 October 1927), p. 10. 69 Thomson, Interim General Report, pp. 32, 35, 44; Thomson, Recommendations of Policy, pp. 5–6. 70 Though it did also have a protective function, particularly regarding Aboriginal people’s susceptibility to disease. See Thomson, Report on Expedition, p. 16. 71 But while distinct, the scientific argument for Aboriginal potential was reliant on a particular racialisation which, especially, denied the existence of ‘Negroid’ ancestry or traits in Aboriginal people. These contested the racial hierarchies narrated by Arthur Gordon, for example, not by disputing the value of categorisation by race, but by relocating Aboriginal society to a higher and more capable state. Elkin argued that Aboriginal people constituted a distinct ‘Australoid’ race, not descended from the ‘Negroid’. Such determinations suggested that there would be no chance of a ‘throwback’; progress, under the right conditions, would be linear and inexorable. Elkin, The Australian Aborigines, pp. 2–3. 72 Thomson, Interim General Report, p. 40; Thomson, Recommendations of Policy, p. 5; Thomson to Perkins, 18 July 1934, NAA: A659, 1939/1/5250.

[ 104 ]

A NTHROPOLOGISING A BOR IGINES

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

73 Thomson, Report on Expedition, p. 11. 74 ‘Dr Thomson Outspoken’, North Queensland Register (11 December 1937), quoted in Geoffrey Gray, ‘A Deep-Seated Aversion or a Prudish Disapproval: Relations with Elkin’, in Rigsby and Peterson (eds), Donald Thomson, p. 90. 75 Thomson organised the Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit, a unit of Yolngu scouts based in Caledon Bay, to prepare for a Japanese invasion. See Donald F. Thomson, N.T.S.R.U., 1941–1943: Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit (Nhulunbuy: Yirrkala Literature Production Centre, 1992). 76 See, e.g., W. E. H. Stanner and Diane Barwick, ‘Not by Eastern Windows Only: Anthropological Advice to Australian Governments in 1938’, Aboriginal History, 3:1 (1979).

[ 105 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

CH A P T ER F I V E

Native administration in the Northern Territory: a white minority in the national community In 1937, in advance of the first Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities, Yorta Yorta man William Cooper wrote to the Prime Minister to suggest an agenda for discussion. The organisation he had founded in 1934, the Australian Aborigines’ League, was hopeful that this opportunity would produce ‘the means of our emancipation’, an ‘Aborigines’ Magna Carta’ recognising both civil rights and specific Indigenous rights.1 As Cooper suspected, they were to be disappointed. He was not invited to the Conference and his concerns were not aired; this was a meeting of protectors, not the protected. It brought together authorities from all the mainland states and the Northern Territory under the guidance of the Commonwealth Department for the Interior for what the Minister Thomas Paterson described as an ‘epoch-making event’, the first time all the authorities ‘controlling natives’ gathered to discuss Aboriginal ‘welfare’.2 Robert Manne has located this Conference at the heart of his discussion of Australian genocide, quoting the Western Australian Commissioner of Native Affairs A. O. Neville’s objection to the increasing Aboriginal population. ‘Are we’, Neville asked the assembled Protectors, ‘going to have a population of 1,000,000 blacks in the Commonwealth, or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there ever were any aborigines in Australia?’ Commenting on the Northern Territory, Chief Protector Cecil Cook also described an administrative conundrum. A laissez-faire policy would inevitably lead to Aboriginal extinction, ‘and we shall have no problem, apart from dealing with those pangs of conscience which must attend the passing of a neglected race’. But if Aboriginal people were to be protected, on the other hand, ‘we shall raise another problem which may become a serious one from a national viewpoint, for we shall have in the Northern Territory … a large black population which may drive out the white’. For Cook, white occupation of the north was at stake. And, [ 106 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

NATIV E A DMIN ISTR ATION IN THE NORTHER N TER R ITORY

as had Neville, he expressed his preference for a policy of absorption, for the elimination of Aboriginality through its incorporation into a white future. By the end of the Conference, this had become the subject of a successful resolution that ‘the destiny of the natives of aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth, and it [the Conference] therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end’.3 This was the resolution that confirmed support for assimilation, for biological subsumption, and for the practices of child abduction whose legacy is the Stolen Generations. ‘If there exists a more terrible moment than this in the history of the twentieth-century Australian state than the Canberra conference of April 1937,’ Manne wrote, ‘I for one do not know where it is to be discovered.’4 This was a repudiation of the Australian Aborigines’ League’s calls for full citizenship and the removal of discrimination as well as land and communal integrity. But these Protectors’ desire for an Australia free of Indigeneity was increasingly subjected to critique. The League was one of a number of emerging movements that challenged the legitimacy of prevailing forms of governing Aboriginal people across the nation, particularly in the Northern Territory. And pushed by these movements, and by Donald Thomson’s reports and public advocacy, the Conference also resolved to disaggregate Aboriginality and pursue different policies for ‘full-blood natives’ and for others. It differentiated between ‘detribalized’, ‘semi-civilized’, and ‘tribal’ peoples and advocated the education of the first class, the supervision of the second with the intention of their joining the ranks of the first, and the preservation of the ‘uncivilized native … by the establishment of inviolable reserves’. This last decision troubled Cook. He believed that contact was both historically inevitable and fatal to Aboriginal communities, that the inexorable flow of colonial history would submerge those communities under the tide of a white future. He sought their disappearance, not their protection. A commitment to ‘inviolable reserves’, Cook argued, would have the effect of ‘developing a coloured race which would be a menace to the white population in the north’. This he described as a dangerous outcome, one which could create conflict of the kind that could be seen in South Africa or the United States, where an ‘acute … colour problem’ was causing ‘grave danger’. If Australia was to pursue this course, Cook argued, it may as well admit that it was abandoning the goal of a White Australia.5 Creating a white north may have formed Cook’s ambition, but it was an ambition that was generating significant political problems. His policies of Aboriginal elimination were contributing to both the crisis of production described in Chapter 3 and the crisis of order and [ 107 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

sovereignty described in Chapter 4. And they were also generating a crisis of legitimacy, as a broad and diverse range of social movements increasingly opposed his regime and proposed alternative forms of government for the Northern Territory. A new basis for legitimate Australian government of Aboriginal people needed to be found. Cook’s reference to South Africa and the United States would not do: Cooper was ‘alarmed’ at the comparison with these sites of segregation and saw little more than a future of increasing ‘humiliation’ and ‘degradation’ if such influences were brought to bear in Australia.6 But Cooper himself sought alternatives from elsewhere: he and others looked to both South Africa and the United States, as well as to colonial situations in Kenya and Nigeria and to plans and ideas being fabricated in London. Just as Money had sought inspiration from Java in the wake of the Indian Rebellion, in a time of crisis in Australia scholars and activists sought out instances of stability in colonial formations elsewhere. This chapter traces these challenges to Cook’s conception of Aboriginal protection that was directed towards the social and biological absorption of Aboriginality. Russell McGregor has argued that the policy of absorption, or ‘breeding out the colour’, was a way of fabricating a shared national ethnicity, of making plausible the claim to a homogeneous and familial Australia. He thus suggests that Cook’s ‘absorptionist strategies were directed against colour … rather than against Aboriginality per se’. They were nationalist, not colonial.7 Here I instead locate absorption as a settler colonial strategy of elimination, as a performative doing away with Indigeneity. Colour, and the meaning attached to phenotypical difference and diversity, was not ontologically prior to racialisation. As Patrick Wolfe has demonstrated, ‘social processes’ do not ‘operate on a naturally present set of bodily attributes’. Rather, race is ‘constructed in and through the very process of their enactment’. Race ought not to be reduced to colour. While Cook and others did also pursue the exclusion of Chinese or Japanese migrants, Aboriginality posed a different challenge to the white nation, one that, as Nadine Attewell has argued, threatened (and threatens) ‘not only its racial integrity but its territorial sovereignty’.8 It was primarily threatening, that is, because it enacted a prior claim to land, to sovereignty, and to belonging. Absorption was a response that represented a means of eliminating Indigeneity, not simply blackness, from a white settler future. While this project of absorption received formal governmental endorsement in 1937, social movements were at the same time becoming a counter-hegemonic force. The chapter examines the increasing prominence of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal political movements throughout the interwar period, focusing largely on transnational and [ 108 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

NATIV E A DMIN ISTR ATION IN THE NORTHER N TER R ITORY

imperial cultures of interwar Australian humanitarianism. A network of white humanitarians which had begun to coalesce in the early 1930s was consolidated by shared opposition to the ‘punitive expedition’ to Arnhem Land in 1934.9 These groups – constituted in part by the increasing presence of white women’s active participation in social movements – questioned the assumption that Aboriginal people in the north necessarily formed a dying race, and expressed concern with brutality and mismanagement. Through improved conditions and policies, they argued that Aboriginal people could survive not only as individuals but necessarily also, for now, as social bodies. This was a future available, they believed, to Aboriginal people of the north, not to those communities amongst which southern white humanitarians lived. There, and not in the south, they could envision a shift in the mode of government, embracing Aboriginal survival. And in seeking a means to Aboriginal survival and development, they turned to what Elkin described as the ‘indirect method’: ‘the development of primitive society so that it may participate in the life of the modern world in its own right’.10 This chapter examines a number of organisations or proposals that shaped the development of policy by pushing this method into public discussion. These were movements committed to opposing Cook’s belief that Australia was that particular kind of white man’s country in which Aboriginal people had no future.

Cultivating white subjects: Cook’s government of time, money, contract, and hygiene The son of a doctor, Cook had studied medicine in Queensland before taking an interest in the public health implications of Aboriginal communities, carrying out disease surveys in Queensland, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory.11 He worked under Raphael Cilento at the Australian Institute for Tropical Medicine before taking the joint positions of Chief Medical Officer and Protector of Aboriginals in the Northern Territory in 1927.12 The ‘“White Australia” Policy’, Cook argued, was ‘the keynote of Australian nationalism’, and he understood his project in the north as that of producing a white nation. Australia, for Cook, differed from other countries where the task of native administration was that of ‘the management of an immense settled native population of an appreciable density, in whose Territory the white has intruded as a numerically insignificant section of the population’. While in those other places ‘government is of the native for the benefit of the native’, in ‘this country the native actually has become an intruder in a white man’s country. Politically, the Northern Territory must always be governed as a white man’s country, by the [ 109 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

white man for the white man.’ To this end, ‘general policy must be regulated in the interests of the white intruder and is followed regardless of its destructive effect upon the native social organization with which it is incompatible’. Believing that ‘it is impossible for the aboriginal to survive without some social organization’, Cook thus pursued a course of action engineered to make white life and let Aboriginal people, and Aboriginal societies, die.13 The ‘problem’ of Aboriginal people was, for Cook, spatialised. Aboriginal people on reserves, in anachronistic spaces where they could be imagined as docile or contained, posed little threat to settler dominion. Their future was closed. But he read the presence of Aboriginal people on stations or in cities as a problem demanding his intervention. While he imagined a future free of Aboriginal society, in the 1930s he could not avoid the Aboriginal people, often termed ‘half-caste’, who lived in and around towns and cities and who mixed regularly with white, Chinese, and Malay settlers. Cook’s aspiration for white settlement in the Northern Territory was troubled by the spectre of this mixing. As had many other observers, he projected anxieties about the insecure health of a white population in the tropical north onto racialised public health questions by focusing attention on mixed spaces. This produced health and disease as elements of an anthropomorphic discourse that, as Warwick Anderson has demonstrated, rendered security governable by locating pathology less in environment than in bodies, inciting a practice of Aboriginal ‘protection’ whose object was the health of a white population.14 Following his former mentor Cilento, Cook conceived of Aboriginal people as the carriers of leprosy, hookworm, malaria, venereal disease, and tuberculosis; as threats to the health of the white population. Cook had been appointed Chief Protector after arguing, in applying for the position of Chief Medical Officer, that white health could only be secured through regulating Aboriginal reproduction and managing Aboriginal disease. ‘All medical officers are agreed’, he was to write, ‘that the Medical Service must have full and undisputed control of natives if it is to pretend to perform this function of safeguarding the health of the white people.’15 Aboriginal people here were represented as contaminants, people who might taint whiteness through uncontrolled sexual activity. Whiteness, on the other hand, was imagined as vulnerable in the tropics, beseeching Cook’s intervention to safeguard its future. The unification of offices – Medical Officer and Aboriginal Protector – reflected Cook’s notion that each shared the same goal: producing a healthy and dominant sovereign white race. His approach to Aboriginal communities medicalised a social fear. [ 110 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

NATIV E A DMIN ISTR ATION IN THE NORTHER N TER R ITORY

Hybridity was, for Cook and other white nation-builders, the main concern and potential taint of the north. Amidst a controversy over mistreatment of Aboriginal people at the Bungalow in Alice Springs, the conservative journalist and historian Malcolm Ellis wrote in 1924 that the Territory was peopled by a ‘sinister human broth’ which, particularly on the inland stations, was dominated by ‘either the pure Australian native gone civilised (which means Bolshevik and insanitary), or the hybrid, which haunts every woodheap’.16 The ‘half–caste’ and the ‘tropical disease’ were metaphors of reproduction or contagion for the white anxiety that attended this sharing of space. And segregation was designed not to prevent but to police contact between peoples articulated in an ambivalent relation of menace and desire. In Darwin, for example, Aboriginal people could not be excluded as they were required workers, but were confined to the Kahlin Compound between 1913 and 1938, and then the Bagot Reserve from 1938 onwards, each of which was located on the outskirts of town. Similarly, in Central Australia, the Bungalow housed ‘half-caste children’ next to the Police Station at Alice Springs between 1914 and 1925, then at Jay Creek until 1932 when it was relocated back to the site of the old Telegraph Station at Alice. Cook devoted the bulk of his intellectual and administrative attention to what he termed the ‘half-caste problem’. As his tenure progressed, he was increasingly concerned by the growing number of Aboriginal people with a recent non-Aboriginal biological ancestor, usually their father. He devoted much of his 1931–2 annual report as Chief Medical Officer to the ‘problem’, enumerating a non–Aboriginal population of the Northern Territory of 4549, including 2950 Europeans and a ‘halfcaste’ population (categorised as non-Aboriginal) of 730. But the annual per capita rate of increase for the white population was only 0.3, compared with 16.2 for ‘half–castes’. At this rate, he worried, it would be only 13 years before the ‘white race’ was ‘submerged’.17 It was thus ‘a matter of social and economic urgency’ that ‘half–castes’ be assimilated, both politically and biologically. Absorption was the goal: a future whiteness would be effected by removing children to institutions where they could be trained in menial labour, and by encouraging marriages between white men and ‘half-caste’ women to produce children increasingly alienated from Indigenous communities and to ‘breed out the colour’. He linked these interventions to producing citizens: ‘the Halfcaste must be prepared for … citizenship. … [H]e should be a white boy up to the age of 21 years.’ The easy interchangeability of terms of civilisation and race illuminates colour as a secondary characteristic, nothing more than an ‘indication of miscegeny’. ‘Breeding out’ denoted [ 111 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

the elimination of Aboriginality, not merely the whitening of complexion.18 Cook imagined a future in which Aboriginality would be absorbed, producing whiteness; not blended, producing mixedness. Believing the growing ‘half-caste’ population to be precariously poised between a reservoir of contamination and a more peaceful and healthy incorporation into a White Australia, he sought control over both the lives and the reproductive capacity of Aboriginal people, seeking to extract from the otherwise threatening social body of Aboriginal people individuals who might assist a healthy white race settling the north. This licensed a series of initiatives targeted at Aboriginal bodies, seeking their transformation from threat to instrument of social reform. The Kahlin Beach Compound was a site of such interventions. Kahlin, in the words of its initiator Baldwin Spencer, was ‘capable of easy supervision and situated far enough away from the town to make it possible to isolate the aboriginals when necessary, as, for example, at night–time, and at the same time be near enough to allow of those in employment in Darwin to walk to and from their daily work’. It confined, housed, trained, and supplied a labour force of mainly Larrakia people for Darwin, most of whom worked in domestic settings.19 By the 1930s Kahlin had become a place for Cook’s regime to work towards what he termed the ‘conversion of the detribalised aboriginal in town districts from a social incubus to a civil unit of economic value’.20 This was, at its heart, a gendered project of converting Aboriginal women from practices he represented as parasitic sex to instead perform productive work. Many more girls than boys were brought to Kahlin: Aboriginal women were ever-present at the heart of Northern Territory government, objects of sexualised concern inciting a ‘protection’ that took form in their removal from familial spaces of intimacy into institutional settings of routinised violence.21 Cook had initially refrained from attempting to regulate relationships between white men and Aboriginal women, believing that, in the absence of white women, white men’s ‘sexual passion’ required some outlet.22 But from 1930 onwards there was a discernible shift in both his rhetoric and the laws he drafted. ‘Mating’ between Aboriginal and non–Aboriginal people, and between ‘coloured aliens’ and ‘any female of part Aboriginal blood’, were both banned.23 Cook’s permission was required for the marriage of any ‘half-caste’ woman and was not always granted; from 1933 onwards he became more particular in deciding on the appropriateness of any coupling. ‘If the national ideal of a White Australia is not to be superseded by a modification permitting a coloured north’, Cook wrote in 1933, the Commonwealth must ‘control’ the growing number of ‘half-caste females’. Experience showed, Cook argued, ‘that the half-caste girl can, [ 112 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

NATIV E A DMIN ISTR ATION IN THE NORTHER N TER R ITORY

if properly brought up, easily be elevated to a standard where the fact of her marriage to a white will not contribute to his deterioration. On the contrary … the local population is stabilised’ by such marriages. Though in practice this ‘control’ led to little more than restrictions on Aboriginal movement, it quickly became government policy. Transforming and ‘elevat[ing] the half-caste girl’ was ‘the only instrument of realizing … an All White Australia’.24 Managing marriage, then, was designed to transform Aboriginal women into lawful sexual supplements to the white population, no longer threatening but rather stabilising and strengthening. At the same time, autonomous, ‘mixed’ families were scripted as sites of violence and danger, necessitating intervention.25 Cook’s ambivalent loathing for the ‘half–caste’ was a more explicitly racialised analogue of Lugard’s distaste for ‘detribalised Africans’, each expressing an unease with interstitial subjects. Both the African (or, increasingly, Australian) ‘detribalised native’ and the ‘half–caste’ Aboriginal person complicated the differentiation that enabled colonial rule.26 These terms represented modes of resolving transgression into lack – figures that were not ‘tribal’, or not ‘full–blooded’ – which established the ‘full-blooded tribal native’ as the norm. And Cook’s regular interventions into the relationships of those visible to him – in towns and other places under the scrutiny of the state – were represented as ensuring the racial and sexual health of the nation by rendering relationships he termed ‘mixed’ as abnormal. Criminalising intimacy between Aboriginal women and non-Aboriginal men located it, as Hannah Robert has argued, in a ‘context of sex and vice rather than of reproduction and family’, not so much repressing it as creating a specific space for its enjoyment. Such breaches of the White Australia policy were less prevented than rendered taboo, banishing these encounters and the children who were their issue from the realm of family and the reproductive future of the nation, allowing white men to continue to enjoy illicit sex even as such intimate acts were disavowed and rendered apart from the White Australia to come.27 This emphasis on social transformation was articulated in Cook’s most thorough policy suggestion, made in 1935 as he faced increasing criticism from southern organisations committed to Aboriginal protection. He designed and proposed a system of protection that would ‘honour the Commonwealth’s obligation to the aboriginal, and yet so far meet opposition from the more bitter partisans as not to prove impracticable at the outset’. He argued that contact with white people was unavoidable, desirable, and fatal for Aboriginal society. The ‘process of detribalization’ began with the alienation of young people from their elders, rupturing generational continuity. The ‘ceremonies and sanctions [ 113 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

which held the tribe together are lost and the individual becomes an isolated unit without social background either European or native’. The only way of preserving ‘the tribe’ was by implementing segregation. But this, Cook wrote, was impossible. He would not countenance wastefully preserving ‘idle’ land in inviolable reserves, and argued that it was already too late to save most tribes from contact. Indeed, he suggested, they ought not to be saved. And so Cook recommended that the Commonwealth commit itself to ‘absorbing the aboriginal race to the civilized community’, continuing the biological assimilation policy he had already begun.28 In fabricating this plan, Cook differentiated between different classes of Aboriginal people. Aboriginal tribes which had made contact with white people should ‘be induced to abandon the nomadic habit and live in settlements’, where they could slowly be brought under an educational regime. For ‘myalls … beyond the sphere of civilized control’, Cook had few suggestions beyond the regulation of missions: these were people he expected to die, neglected by his administration, far from white towns and cities. It was those who were ‘detribalised’ and lived in or around cities who formed the main focus of his plan. These subjects should, he wrote, be educated by the Government to develop a capacity for employment. They were to be prepared for the most menial tasks available, serving the white community. And Cook articulated this crucial educational task as that of transferring to them the ‘knowledge of the significance of time and the value of money’, the ability to ‘recognise the significance of contract’, and ‘a high appreciation of the principles of hygiene and personal cleanliness’, while seeking to eradicate nomadic sentiment.29 This was a plan of disciplining new subjects. These elements – time, money, contract, and hygiene – constituted knowledge that did more than remedy an ignorance; this was knowledge that was fundamentally transforming, enabling ‘the subject not only to act as he ought, but also to be as he ought to be’.30 The invocation of a ‘proper’ understanding of the ‘value of time and money, the obligation of contract, and the principles of hygiene and personal cleanliness’ mapped out the bounds of the modern, individuated subject to which Aboriginal people should, in this assimilationist plan, aspire.31 Money, here, was the key referent. In a long-lasting discourse of settler colonial dispossession, it was not only a lack of property in land that signified a lack of civilisation, but the use of money, constituting the basis of property and accumulation. Arguments that Aboriginal people could not appreciate the value of money therefore suggested they had no conception of property: they did not own the land being taken from them and need not be paid for their labour.32 In [ 114 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

NATIV E A DMIN ISTR ATION IN THE NORTHER N TER R ITORY

1929, Queensland Chief Protector J. W. Bleakley reported of the Northern Territory that ‘[v]ery few natives understand the use of money or values of articles … The simple people of the Territories want more education before they can be safely trusted to handle even a part of the earnings in cash without benevolent supervision.’33 Similarly, J. W. Allen, spokesman for the Northern Territory Pastoral Lessees’ Association, was of the more obviously self-serving opinion that without ‘preparation’ for money, payment of wages would cause ‘more harm than good’. As a matter of ‘justice’, Aboriginal people ‘should be gradually led to the appreciation of money’.34 Cook’s plan would provide that training, enabling Aboriginal people to work for wages, a necessary element of the individuation that rendered citizenship imaginable. Money was understood as fungible and alienated, as what the German missionary in Tanganyika Bruno Gutmann described in 1935 as a ‘dead medium of exchange’ which ‘dissolves the organic relations between men’, substituting a structure of convertibility and circulation for value based on gift, obligation, and relationality. Money, Gutmann continued, led to the ‘destruction of the vital interdependence of men’. 35 It represented an objectified and impersonal measure of value, constituted by alienation from the products of one’s labour; work for money was abstract, disinterested work, performed by commodified bodies and producing congealed value that could be appropriated. Through a monetary structure the world was transformed into one of objects, of commodities, in a universalising language of value. And the subject, then, became an individual finding their way among these alienated objects, working for money to purchase commodities in the marketplace. Georg Simmel described the way money constituted personal relations of ‘indifference’; relations that were not fixed but rather subject to the whim of people who possessed the ‘liberty to change them at will’.36 Money, that is, constituted the liberal individual. For Cook and other proponents of assimilation, replacing an imagined pre-monetary society with an appreciation of the value of money was the basis of remaking ‘native’ subjectivity. He and others explicitly linked an inability to appreciate money to a more general unsuitability for modernity. A popular view, as expressed by the Territory carrier Charles Chewings in 1936, was that Aboriginal people ‘have no sense of value’; they thus ‘squander’ money and are unable to ‘reflect and to think along lines we are used to’.37 This represented an inability to ‘understand’ time, or rather to have a sense of time as a condition of historical progress into a future, and to quantify it in terms of valuable units to be spent. It meant living in a way antithetical to time thrift, punctuality, routine, and other forms of behaviour that were considered essential to work in a modern capitalist economy.38 Valuing time, by [ 115 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

contrast, would render Aboriginal people what Giordano Nanni terms ‘vassals of the clock’. It would mean being occupied at all hours, regularising and compartmentalising time; there would be a time for work and a time for leisure, and time was thus ordered in a way that conduced to individuals whose relational responsibilities were to this external and supposedly objective order rather than to their communities.39 Most importantly, such an appreciation of time would enable progress. ‘The black’, asserted W. H. Grant of the Northern Territory Pastoral Lessees’ Association, ‘has no idea of saving up for tomorrow. If he has anything he must spend it.’40 This was a common refrain. Charles Conigrave described the Aboriginal ‘irresponsibility that is unmindful of the future, he feeds to repletion to-day, and does not worry unduly if on the morrow he is on short commons’.41 A perceived inability to comprehend the passage of time would be replaced with a conception of time as inexorably passing, moving, flowing. This not only imagined a distinct past, present, and future, but oriented the subject forwards, away from the past and towards the future; a very modern mode of progress. Time, Nanni argues, was a ‘tool and a channel for the incorporation of human subjects within the colonisers’ master narrative; for conscripting human subjects within the matrix of the capitalist economy, and ushering “savages” and superstitious “heathens” into an age of modernity’.42 Time and money would come together in the provision of individual wages for individual work, in the performance of free labour – a relationship of contract – rather than the compulsion of individual subjection within a regime of status. The freely fabricated relations of contract relied upon the congruence of the unencumbered individual as the embodiment of freedom. This was subjectivation as replacement: together, money, time, and contractual relations would establish an alienated objectivity as the repository of value, replacing Aboriginal moral and philosophical worlds. Cook’s project sought to produce modern individuals, unencumbered by tradition or relationality, people who were freed of obligation. This image of the self as a rational, atomised subject ‘underlay the possibility that individuals could separate from the rest of their being, and sell, their labor’.43 Quantity of effort (time) and medium of remuneration (money) were thus both linked to the transformation of the subject into one able to alienate abstract labour. Cook sought not to mobilise the different and specific Aboriginal modes of understanding real labour, but to destroy them and replace them with a subjectivity conducive to the labour extraction of a developing industrial capitalism.44 Such a split subjectivity, whereby Indigenous people would become able to sell their labour power only by ceasing to be, in some sense, Indigenous, suggests Cook’s inability to come to [ 116 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

NATIV E A DMIN ISTR ATION IN THE NORTHER N TER R ITORY

terms with the ‘working native’. A double alienation, from Aboriginal society, and from one’s labour power, structured his eliminationist politics of the Aboriginal population. But this introduction of money, as well as the concomitant rearticulation of time and timeliness and caring for the self through practices of hygiene and contractual personhood, need not necessarily transform Aboriginal subjectivity in the ways Cook and others imagined. We ought not assume a smooth process of replacement. The introduction of money was rather constituted by experiences of friction and abrasion, of layered contradiction. People ‘cope with money’ in different ways, accommodating it into other systems of knowledge, investing it with value beyond alienated fungibility, and organising its distribution and circulation in ways that confound assimilation.45

Anti-Cook agitation: Towards a colonial biopolitics Cook’s authoritarian and cold style of administration, and his unwillingness to contemplate the survival of Aboriginal communities, had made him anathema to many who fought for a different northern regime. There was no shortage of vitriol, much of it sent south by northern correspondents. The journalist Fred Thompson wrote of the ‘One-Eyed Chief Protector, Dr. C. E. Cook, who has shown himself to be utterly devoid of any feeling of humanity in his dealings with the aboriginals, half-castes and particularly aboriginal leper afflicts … that awful misfit’. Writer, and Acting Administrator of Kahlin Compound in 1935–6, Xavier Herbert described him as an ‘overgrown, clever, bumptious boy’, who was a ‘monster in his attitude to the unfortunate people he is employed to protect. He not only does not understand them, but detests them. Small wonder they hate and fear him.’ Another northern correspondent described him as ‘one of those scientifically inhuman automata, to whom you are not a living personality, but merely Class — Genera — Record — File — and so on … he is too far removed from genuine human feeling’.46 This approach was felt as oppressive by its targets, and considered ill-attuned to modern administration by those who hoped for a practice of government that instead recognised the intricate workings of Aboriginal society. Secretary of the Department of the Interior J. A. Carrodus accused Elkin in 1936 of plotting against Cook and, in 1938, Reverend Morley announced that the ordinarily conservative group Australians for the Protection of Native Races would ‘make a fresh attack on the Departmental system as it is administered at Darwin’ and would seek Cook’s removal.47 For his part, Cook believed humanitarians to be ‘handicapped’ by their ‘propensity to speak authoritatively and volubly on subjects of which they are completely ignorant or actually misinformed’.48 [ 117 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

But for Aboriginal people, it was recognition of their modernity, their dynamism, and their sovereignty that was at issue. Aboriginal people in the south were, through the interwar period, founding a range of vibrant political associations comfortable tending to local, national, and international questions. The earliest of these was the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA), led by Fred Maynard and Tom Lacey along with Elizabeth McKenzie Hatton, a non-Indigenous missionary who acted as organising secretary. Maynard’s and Lacey’s brand of black (inter)nationalism was inspired, John Maynard has demonstrated, by Garveyite movements of self-reliance and black emancipation. The AAPA sought land rights and citizenship, defending their distinct cultural identity and demanding an end to the government practice of removing Aboriginal children from their parents. Formed in 1924, this was the first pan-Aboriginal political organisation, and quickly grew to encompass 11 branches and over 500 members, all of whom were Koori, by the following year.49 The AAPA strove ‘to obtain full recognition of our citizen rights on terms of absolute equality with all other people in our own land’. They took from Marcus Garvey ‘the call for recognising cultural significance and the importance of their own homeland’, and tailored it for Australian Aboriginal conditions by placing land and selfgovernment at the centre of their platform. They sought autonomy and freedom on reserves, which would be ruled under a ‘modern system of government’ administered by ‘educated aboriginals possessing the requisite ability for such management’.50 Claims such as these represented a conception of Aboriginal self–determination influenced by transnational black anticolonialism, as well as a modernising discourse that was at the centre of many contemporary decolonisation movements. These ideas were deeply challenging, and were met with both refusal and outright opposition. The New South Wales State Government consistently dismissed Maynard and the AAPA, and missionaries and protectors resisted their encroachment into the authoritative position they had carved for themselves in the public sphere. Facing harassment and intimidation, carried out by the police at the behest of the New South Wales Aborigines’ Protection Board, they folded after only a few years of active work.51 But the movement did leave a significant and inspiring legacy. By the 1930s, Aboriginal social and political movements had been founded around Australia, and the work of the Australian Aborigines’ League in Melbourne and the Aborigines’ Progressive Association in Sydney was to influence the development of Commonwealth policy as it transformed through the decade.52 These two movements arose, in part, from the circumstances of the Cummeragunja Reserve. Cummeragunja was [ 118 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

NATIV E A DMIN ISTR ATION IN THE NORTHER N TER R ITORY

founded in 1883 on 1800 acres of Yorta Yorta and Bangerang country on the New South Wales side of the Murray River, bordering Victoria, in response to an 1881 petition from residents at the nearby Maloga Mission calling for land on their own country.53 Many Maloga residents relocated, and Cummeragunja replaced Maloga altogether in 1888, expanding to cover 2965 acres and developing into a small and flourishing township with around 400 people living in cottages and working on the farm blocks allotted to families around the reserve. In 1907, the Protection Board seized these farm blocks and insisted that while residents were expected to continue to work in exchange for rations, all profits from their labour would be the property of the Board. Around the same time, the Board began to abduct and remove children from the reserve, increasing residents’ bitterness and transforming the reserve into a site of verbal and physical confrontation. As protests intensified, ‘undesirable residents’ were expelled by legal force. By the 1920s, the reserve was stripped of its land and resources, diminished to 14 acres in size and transformed from a safe haven on traditional land into a prison camp. Many former residents were gone, whether children abducted or adults expelled by the Board, or other adults who fled, preferring to live in exile than under the Board’s control.54 Cooper was one of those who left Cummeragunja, in 1933, moving with his wife Sarah Nelson to Melbourne, where he joined a community of over 100 Kooris that included many fellow exiles from the reserve. By September he had begun circulating a petition to the King calling for Aboriginal representation in Parliament and in 1934 he formed, and became secretary of, the Australian Aborigines’ League. The League was involved in welfare work and community building, celebrating Aboriginal potential and both demanding and performing equality. They repeatedly called for the provision of land and resources so they would be able to develop the means to achieve self-sufficiency and autonomy, again, on their own country. These were claims based both on previous government undertakings, later rescinded, and based on their prior ownership of the land, on their Indigeneity.55 Other exiles from Cummeragunja, including Jack Patten, made their way to Sydney. Living on the suburban reserve at La Perouse, Patten, along with Bill Ferguson and Pearl Gibbs in Dubbo, founded the shortlived but influential Aborigines’ Progressive Association in 1937. It had branches on reserves across rural New South Wales, and fought for Aboriginal self-management and citizenship, along with the abolition of the Aborigines’ Protection Board.56 Dismayed at the results of the Conference of Aboriginal Authorities in 1937, Cooper invited Ferguson to Melbourne to speak at a public meeting of the Australian Aborigines’ League. There, Cooper’s League and Ferguson’s Association agreed to [ 119 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

work together, principally to seek land and citizenship rights. But they also focused on Aboriginal self-government, suggesting that claims made under the sign of citizenship were rooted in the continuing practice of Aboriginal sovereignties. Indigeneity was represented, in other words, as the source of Aboriginal people’s entitlement to rights. These were not simply, as Tony Austin has suggested, assimilationist organisations: the ‘ultimate object’ of the League was ‘the conservation of special features of the Aboriginals culture and the removal of all hardships Political, social or economic’.57 The growing visibility of these Aboriginal movements, alongside news of crisis and emerging disorder around the nation, sparked nonIndigenous protest among white activists who agreed that change was necessary. But while new articulations of Aboriginal cultural and political identities placed Aboriginal survival, citizenship, and history in public discourse, both white humanitarians and government officials struggled with the dissonance produced by this challenge to their conception of a dying race. Rather than positioning themselves as an untouched, uncolonised native remnant, Aboriginal activists articulated Aboriginal political identities and formations as Indigeneity in the heart of White Australia. White activists found themselves unable to recognise these Indigenous articulations. As Alison Holland has argued, it is necessary to situate interwar white humanitarianism in Australia in relation to the ideas and contexts of the imperial setting.58 They preferred to draw their inspiration from the anthropologists and colonial administrators who referred instead to apparently pristine Aboriginal communities whose representational legitimacy took form under the sign of native authenticity. Rather than dealing seriously with the problems facing people like Maynard, Cooper, Gibbs, or Ferguson, they turned their focus to northern Australia, to the spaces opened for anthropological research, and called for reforms there based largely on ideas of colonial practice that circulated around the British Empire. That almost all white humanitarian groups were unable to come to terms with claims such as those of the AAPA in any framework other than that of indirect rule is indicative of the continuing centrality of race: neither black self-government in general, nor Aboriginal self– government in particular, were conceivable as any more than a distant aspiration. For white Australians, the most black people around the Empire could be entrusted with was indirect rule.59 In 1925, J. Chas Genders, a wealthy Adelaide accountant with an interest in Aboriginal welfare, split from the conservative Aborigines’ Friends Association (AFA) to form the Aborigines’ Protection League, with the intention of campaigning to establish an autonomous Aboriginal State in the north.60 He recruited as President Herbert Basedow, the [ 120 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

NATIV E A DMIN ISTR ATION IN THE NORTHER N TER R ITORY

anthropologist and, for a brief moment in 1911, Chief Protector of Aboriginals in the Northern Territory, alongside a number of notable members including Mary Bennett, Constance Ternent Cooke, and Frederic Wood Jones. They drafted a petition calling on Commonwealth Government to ‘cause to be constituted a model Aboriginal State to be ultimately managed by native tribunal as far as possible according to their own laws and customs but prohibiting cannibalism and cruel rites’. While white assistance should be provided, provision was to be ‘made that ultimately the Government may be conducted by aborigines, and that it would be possible at some future time that the Administrator himself could be a native’. Other than officials of the Federal Government, and authorised missionaries, teachers, and agricultural instructors, no non-Indigenous people would be allowed to enter. No Aboriginal people were to be detained in the state against their will, and none was to be forced into the area. Rather, the ‘tribes’ already living within the area of land granted would provide the nucleus of the state’s population. Inspired by Maori representation in New Zealand, the state was also to have representation in Federal Parliament. An accompanying Manifesto elaborated some of the claims and provided more extensive arguments for the establishment of the State, including a suggested location: Arnhem Land.61 In calling for this state, Genders was heavily influenced by the growing hold of both anthropological representations and treatises on the practice of indirect rule. These assemblages of power and knowledge made Indigenous struggles legible to the colonial state by framing them as beseeching a more enlightened colonial government. Genders’s influences were explicit. The Manifesto mentioned the Australian Mandate in New Guinea and the treatment of Maori in New Zealand as inspirations and, in his newspaper, Daylight, he regularly reported news relating to East Africa, New Guinea, Canada, and the United States.62 Bennett introduced Genders to Kenyan politics by lending him a copy of the East Africa Commission’s 1929 Hilton Young Report, and he made the case for indirect rule in Australia in booklets based on Lucy Mair’s Native Policies in Africa and on a survey of Lugard’s writing.63 Genders was particularly influenced by Jan Smuts’s widely published 1929 Rhodes Memorial Lectures delivered in Oxford, which called argued for ‘institutional segregation’, a policy for Africa that would ‘not force her institutions into an alien European mould, but … [would] preserve her unity with her past, conserve what is precious in her past, and build her future progress and civilization on specifically African foundations’.64 The League sought a similar form of segregation: ‘We do not propose to thrust any social machine on the Aboriginals, and heaven forbid that we should desire to impose our social life on [ 121 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

him.’ An idealised ‘tribal government’ could, Genders and the League argued, enable Aboriginal communal life to flourish.65 Bennett, who was to become a key supporter of the League, similarly worked to influence both humanitarians and government towards the pursuit of indirect rule.66 She developed a keen interest in the conditions of Aboriginal life while living in London in the 1920s and was actively involved in a number of social movements, an involvement that was strengthened after her return to Australia in 1930. Bennett was, as Holland has demonstrated, heavily influenced by the Hilton Young Report, which sought to reconcile ‘native paramountcy’ in Kenya with the presence of white settlers, embracing a ‘dual policy’ or bifurcation of the state that articulated indirect rule within a white settler dominion. But she had been taken by the potential of Lugardian methods before that. In 1928 she had called for the Commonwealth Government to appoint a Protector who could understand the ‘marvellous organisation of the tribe[s]’ and would ‘show the tribes how to start simple pastoral and agricultural occupations like keeping goats and growing maize’.67 And in her 1930 work, The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being, she was to cite Lugard to bolster her argument that an understanding of that organisation might produce a form of government that was ‘perfectly adapted to the government of the tribe’. In the case of Aboriginal people, this would take form through ‘administration by a communal council of tribal elders’. Her proposals built directly on Lugard’s textual representation of indirect rule, arguing that Aboriginal people ‘should be secured in the possession of their tribal territories and encouraged to adapt to new needs all that is best in their traditions under their own leaders, under the form of government that they can understand, the direction of their day to day affairs by the tribal council of their own choosing’. In this way, they could ‘evolve gradually in their own way through the pastoral and agricultural stages of culture’. This, she wrote, would deliver justice.68 Bennett was thus a key figure in both advocating for the model state and in expanding the scope of its imperial influence. And the campaign also received some Aboriginal support in South Australia and New South Wales, not least from David Unaipon, who served as a member of the League’s executive.69 Maynard was initially opposed to the model state plan, but was ‘placated’ once it was explained to him that it did not entail the forcible removal of all Aboriginal people into its bounds, perhaps seeing in it a valuable potential for self-determination. By 1928 the AAPA publicly expressed its support, and Cooper too turned slowly and tentatively to support the plan, arguing in 1937 that ‘Now we hear much of developing the north. Why should not our own people develop it? Why will the Government not let us have a chance to do it, make [ 122 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

NATIV E A DMIN ISTR ATION IN THE NORTHER N TER R ITORY

our own State in our own country?’ He called for ‘our own state in our own country’, and in 1939 referred to ‘a “Balfour Declaration” for a national home in Australia’.70 The cautious support provided by these Aboriginal figures reflects their awareness that, for all its limitations, the model state could deliver a new form of government for Aboriginal people, one that envisioned a future of Aboriginal life rather than death. But it did not represent emancipation. The campaign located Australian administration of Indigenous people within an empire of white men governing natives, placing the philosophy of indirect rule in public discourse not only as a colonial policy in Africa but also as a plan to be pursued in Australia, while restricting its potential applicability to the Northern Territory.71 The push for indirect rule in Australia was bolstered when in 1930, as part of a widely read series of magazine articles published in Stead’s Review, Hubert Murray also argued for the applicability of indirect rule to the Australian situation. Murray had been Lieutenant-Governor of Australia’s colony of Papua – formally a Territory administered through the same Commonwealth department as the Northern Territory – since 1908, taking office 11 years after Arthur Gordon’s protégé William MacGregor departed for Lagos leaving a legacy of inalienable Papuan land. Murray directed readers to Lugard, and advocated a system whereby the administrator ‘retain[s] as much as possible of native custom, and as much as he can find of native law and government’. This was not, he cautioned, appropriate everywhere: where the administrator could work only with what he called a ‘nomadic population of hunters’, some elements of direct rule would be necessary. But the government of Aboriginal people, Murray suggested, ought to be reconstructed with indirect rule in mind, removing the ‘injustice’ that ‘reflected little but discredit upon our country’.72 At Genders’s suggestion, the Victorian Aboriginal Group (VAG), a Melbourne–based and exclusively white organisation, studied Murray’s article and advocated for the implementation of further modified forms of indirect rule in parts of Australia.73 This group had been founded as the ‘Study of the Australian Aboriginal Group’ in 1930, inspired by the 1929 publication of the Bleakley Report, and had conducted a programme of reading anthropologists and ethnographers under the guidance of Robert Croll and Alfred Kenyon. Their study, and their idea of Murray’s techniques, led them to advocate a plan of separate development which would ‘reserve enough land for tribes to keep within their own natural boundaries. Let them live in their own way teaching sanitation cut out cruel customs and introduce religion by degrees [sic].’ Mimicking the philosophy of indirect rule, this was a rejection of neither colonial rule nor the territorial logic of settler colonialism.74 [ 123 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

Amy Brown, the Honorary Secretary of the Group, summarised its conclusions after a year of study by declaring that ‘the same land cannot be used by both native & white races’: she did not dispute the claim to exclusive occupation of land so characteristic of settler colonialism. But rather than following Cook and celebrating Aboriginal demise, she instead suggested cordoning off reserves where Aboriginal people could ‘pass through the … stages of development, … from the foodgrabbing stage to the food–growing stage’.75 To understand this process the Group turned to the anthropological knowledge that was coming to fill the public sphere. Elkin’s views regarding a series of controversies in the Northern Territory were regularly reported in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1934, and the issue of the Commonwealth’s government of Aboriginal people in the north became a key public concern. Inspired, the VAG put together a formal proposal to transform the government of the Northern Territory. They called for the appointment, as in Papua and New Guinea, of trained anthropologists as patrol officers who would be the main governmental contact with Aboriginal people, reflecting the conservationist ethic that had been central to Gordon’s Pacific approach. They argued for Aboriginal reserves to be closed and inviolable except to these patrol officers, as well as for the provision of better educational opportunities and special native courts for the trial of native offences.76 This proposal accorded, they considered, with the philosophy of indirect rule, synthesising functionalist anthropological knowledge, separate development, and some limited Aboriginal jurisdictional independence. It reflected their interest in what they termed ‘the methods which have proved so successful under British control in Papua and Africa, or the United States of America in their management of the Indian problem’.77 But without amendment, Brown suggested that these foreign methods would not be effective in dealing with Australian problems. When in late 1936 the British Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society circulated a proposal for ‘Land Trusts for Native Races’ for comment from a range of Australian organisations, the Victorian Aboriginal Group replied characterising the plan as ‘impracticable’, suggesting that ‘African conditions are [not] in any way comparable with Australian’.78 The proposal imagined a moderate form of land rights which, in its final form as submitted to the Australian Government in August 1937, would solve the ‘land question’ by setting aside land for Aboriginal people which they could work and develop, with assistance from ‘the stronger races’, such that they would ‘rise … in the social and economic scale’. The land could be used for stock or crops, providing an Aboriginal– controlled economic base. This, the Society asserted, was a fulfilment [ 124 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

NATIV E A DMIN ISTR ATION IN THE NORTHER N TER R ITORY

not only of Australia’s responsibility as a Trustee – citing land policy in Kenya, Nigeria, Southern Rhodesia, and North America – but also a fulfilment of the model state plan, providing a place where Aboriginal people could ‘work out their own destiny’.79 There were two critically important aspects to this plan. First, it imagined the development of Aboriginal reserves: ‘the empty, undeveloped Reserve is of little material benefit to the native, or to the Government, except perhaps as a place of refuge from the white man’. And second, echoing the dual mandate, it considered that this development could be carried out by, and thus in the interests of, Aboriginal people who were not to be differentiated ‘from the hinterland Indians living in the remote Sierras of South America, or parts of Bechuanaland and Central Africa, or from the nomadic tribes of Kenya or Tanganyika, and the detribalised aboriginal Indians of Canada’.80 As Bennett identified, this would ‘focus attention on the fact that the native IS EDUCABLE’. Cooper described the proposals as ‘splendid’, and suggested they not be confined to the north, but also implemented at Cumeroogunja as well as other places in the south-east.81 Reflecting a preoccupation with race as an index of progress, the Commonwealth Government in its response characterised Aboriginal people as unable to govern. Based on ‘knowledge’ derived from the colonial administration ‘of the natives of Papua, the Mandated Territory of New Guinea and many parts of the Pacific’, they declared there to be ‘a fundamental difference between the Australian aboriginals and the natives of these territories and parts’.82 While a wide range of reformers, including anthropologists, missionaries, and humanitarians, mobilised the Papuan example as a referent in their push to change Commonwealth policy, the racialised distinction between Aboriginal people and Islanders remained, in the mid-1930s, an insurmountable one in the official mind of Australian settler colonialism.83 The AntiSlavery Society did not desist in the face of this disagreement, but rather forwarded their proposal once again as part of their response to the 1937 Conference of Aboriginal Authorities. Once again, it was refused by the Commonwealth.84 The incessant focus on the north in general, and the Northern Territory in particular, in schemes propagated by the Aborigines’ Protection League, the Victorian Aboriginal Group, and the Anti-Slavery Society, reflected an inability, or perhaps a refusal, to recognise the continuing vibrancy and modernity of Aboriginal communities and organisations around Australia. Though Holland has argued that Bennett’s vision stood apart from other interwar humanitarians in Australia in its anticolonialism, she too found herself unable to imagine a future inspired by trends other than those of native administration, writing that the [ 125 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

‘opposite policy to “breeding out the colour” is the democratic policy of encouraging village communities’.85 Like other humanitarians, Bennett’s proposals did not engage with the dynamic articulations expressed by Aboriginal activists like Maynard or Patten, but rather sought to recover native society. This recapitulated the blind spots of functionalist anthropological knowledge and, in doing so, displaced black activism in favour of white science. This turn to anthropological authority over Aboriginal domains was observed and protested by Aboriginal activists. On hearing that the New South Wales Government would restructure its Aborigines’ Protection Board in 1938, Cooper wrote on behalf of the Australian Aborigines League to William Morley, President of the Association for the Protection of Native Races, to insist that the new administration include some representation of Aboriginal interests. He wanted ‘someone to whom we can look as one who will urge our viewpoint and whom we can contact in cases that we feel need being ventilated before the Board. An anthropologist does not fill the bill as you will appreciate.’86 The anthropological appropriation of authority may have worked to displace more punitive methods for governing Aboriginal people, but it could not yet generate a space of Aboriginal emancipation. This Aboriginal protest is best understood not simply as oppositional, but as counter-hegemonic. It was generating a crisis of legitimacy. And while white activists translated the challenge into a call for a shifting mode of hegemony, few were placated. By 1938, a new militancy began to characterise Aboriginal movements. Cooper wrote in that year that ‘our natives are boiling over with indignity at the way the managers and matrons are oppressing us, often using the color of law to aid them’. Aboriginal ‘administration’ of stations and reserves could, though, provide a ‘step to our full emancipation’.87 Looking north, Pearl Gibbs wrote to the League of Nations to request that it enforce the Mandate system in the Northern Territory.88 And in February 1939, during a visit from Jack Patten, Aboriginal residents of Cummeragunja staged a walk-off protesting the loss of their land, the stealing of their children, and their continuing struggle to survive under oppressive conditions. This was one of the first of a wave of walk-offs that were to take place around Australia over the following 40 years. Supported and visited by Cooper and Patten, they moved the campaign beyond deputations and petitions and towards a demand for immediate land rights and self–determination.89 But this increased stridency is best exemplified in the Day of Mourning staged in January 1938. In January 1937, Cooper had responded with horror to the commemoration of John Batman’s arrival in Melbourne to found the colony of Port Phillip. He wrote to the organiser, Isaac [ 126 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

NATIV E A DMIN ISTR ATION IN THE NORTHER N TER R ITORY

Selby, in March to disabuse him of the notion that this invasion was remembered fondly by all Australians. ‘[W]hat is a memorial of the coming of the Whites’, he wrote, ‘is a memorial of death to us.’ Selby passed Cooper’s letter on to the Herald, and its publication generated substantial interest.90 Seizing the opportunity, at the meeting between the League and the Aborigines’ Progressive Association held later in 1937 Cooper suggested taking advantage of the forthcoming white celebration of the sesquicentenary of the First Fleet’s arrival to organise a National Day of Mourning and Protest. After a month of publicity, public meetings were held in both Melbourne and Sydney on 26 January 1938. Cooper, along with the League’s Vice-President Douglas Nicholls and Treasurer Margaret Tucker, was present in Sydney as Aboriginal people marched through the city characterising the arrival of the First Fleet not as a beginning to be celebrated, but rather as the beginning of an end to Aboriginal autonomy. Around a hundred people marched from Sydney Town Hall to the Australian Hall in Surry Hills, dressed in mourning attire, where they met and endorsed a manifesto that demanded voting rights, equality of citizenship, and the abolition of Protection Boards alongside access to basic citizen rights.91 They demanded both recognition of their special status as Aboriginal people and treatment as equals, articulating Indigenous and civil rights to great effect. This dramatised the crisis of legitimacy that characterised the 1930s, calling into question the character of Australian settlement. Absent a just settlement with Aboriginal people, it was argued, Australian history was to be mourned, not celebrated. The pressure on those who desired just relations and those who desired to exercise legitimate authority increased. Cooper had written to the Prime Minister describing the Conference of Aboriginal Authorities as ‘only a waste of time’, delivering little more than ‘the confirmation of our humiliation’.92 After the failures of 1937, the pressure he applied in 1938 would perhaps deliver the ‘Magna Carta’ for Aboriginal people he hoped for.

Notes 1 William Cooper to Prime Minister, 16 January 1937; A. P. A. Burdeu to Secretary, Department of the Interior, 18 April 1937, NAA: A659, 1942/1/8104. Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus have instead suggested that the League sought ‘civil rights rather than indigenous rights’. See Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus, Thinking Black: William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines’ League (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004), p. 13. 2 Commonwealth of Australia, Aboriginal Welfare: Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities held at Canberra, 21st to 23rd April 1937 (Canberra: Government Printer, 1939), p. 5. 3 Ibid., pp. 11, 14, 21. 4 Robert Manne, ‘The Stolen Generations’, in Peter Craven (ed.), The Best Australian Essays 1998 (Melbourne: Bookman, 1998), p. 31. See National Inquiry into the

[ 127 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Their Families (Canberra: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997). 5 Commonwealth of Australia, Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities, pp. 34–5. 6 Cooper to Prime Minister, 26 October 1937, NAA: A432, 1937/1191. 7 Russell McGregor, Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal People and the Australian Nation (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2011), p. 7. 8 Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016), pp. 5, 18; Nadine Attewell, Better Britons: Reproduction, Nation, and the Afterlife of Empire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), p. 72. 9 The 1934 Caledon Bay affair, along with other controversies around the same time, marked something of a turning point in public interest. A. P. Elkin, ‘Aboriginal Policy 1930–1950: Some Personal Associations’, Quadrant, 1:4 (1957), 28; Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998), p. 215; Jane Lydon, The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the Emergence of Indigenous Rights (Sydney: NewSouth, 2012), p. 28; Fiona Paisley, ‘An Echo of Black Slavery: Emancipation, Forced Labour and Australia in 1933’, Australian Historical Studies, 45:1 (2014), 108. Stanner disagreed with Elkin’s assessment that 1934 represented a ‘turning point’, describing it rather as ‘just another year on the old plateau of complacence’. He instead dated a shift to the 1938 policy announcement to be discussed in the following chapter. W. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming: Black and White Australians – an Anthropologist’s View (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1969), p. 19. 10 Alison Holland, ‘The Campaign for Women Protectors: Gender, Race and Frontier between the Wars’, Australian Feminist Studies, 16:34 (2001), 30; A. P. Elkin, ‘The Place of Sir Hubert Murray in Native Administration’, Australian Quarterly, 12:3 (1940), 26. Bain Attwood and Peter Biskup agree that the main influences or inspirations for this new activism were the discourses of anthropology and humanitarianism, the former emphasising racial difference and the latter a common humanity. Bain Attwood, Rights for Aborigines (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003), p. 82; Peter Biskup, Not Slaves, Not Citizens: The Aboriginal Problem in Western Australia, 1898–1954 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1973), p. 87. 11 Cook recounted later in life that he was inspired to study Tropical Medicine after hearing a speech by William MacGregor, then Governor of Queensland, and formerly an administrator under Arthur Gordon in Mauritius and Fiji before serving as Governor of British New Guinea, then as Lugard’s predecessor in Lagos. Transcript of Interview with Dr C. E. Cook, 1–2 March 1981, p 18, NTAS: NTRS 226, TS 179. 12 Despite his scepticism regarding the administrative value of social anthropology, in 1930 Cook took leave from his position to study the short course under RadcliffeBrown at the University of Sydney. C. E. Cook to C. L. A. Abbott, 7 January 1928; Abbott, Memorandum, 4 March 1929, NAA: A1, 1931/2597; P. E. Deane to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, 30 May 1929, Elkin Papers, P130/41/45. 13 Cook to Robert Weddell, 7 October 1935, NAA: F1, 1938/46; Cook to J. McEwen, 2 September 1938, NAA: A452, 1952/541. In his study of biopower Michel Foucault diagnosed a form of power that draws a distinction between what may live and what must die, a power that does not ‘take life or let live’ but instead is constituted by a right to ‘make live and let die’. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (London: Allen Lane, 2003), p. 241. 14 Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002); Alison Bashford and Maria Nugent, ‘Leprosy and the Management of Race, Sexuality and Nation in Tropical Australia’, in Alison Bashford and Claire Hooker (eds), Contagion: Epidemics, History and Culture From Smallpox to Anthrax (Sydney: Pluto Press, 2002). 15 Cook to McEwen, 2 September 1938, NAA: A452, 1952/541.

[ 128 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

NATIV E A DMIN ISTR ATION IN THE NORTHER N TER R ITORY 16 M. H. Ellis, Daily Telegraph (1924) quoted in Tony Austin, Never Trust a Government Man: Northern Territory Aboriginal Policy 1911–1939 (Darwin: NTU Press, 1997), p. 97. 17 Commonwealth of Australia, Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities, p. 14. The approximately 18,677 ‘full-blood’ Aboriginal people caused no such worry, though the ‘high birth rate … featured by other coloured races’ suggested that without some intervention, the Territory ‘could be expected in a few years to evolve a colour problem of no little gravity’. Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory for the Year Ended 30th June, 1932, Cmd. Paper No. 124, 1933, pp. 3, 28. 18 ‘Report of the Chief Protector of Aboriginals’, in Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory for the Year Ended 30th June, 1932, Cmd. Paper No. 124, 1933, p. 8; ‘Report of the Chief Protector of Aboriginals’, in Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory for the Year Ended 30th June, 1933, Cmd. Paper No. 203, 1934, p. 7; Cook in Notes on Conference regarding the payment of Halfcastes and Aboriginals in Country Districts, 1930, p. 5, NAA: A1, 1938/329; Cook to Weddell, 2 February 1932, NAA: A452, 1952/414. 19 W. Baldwin Spencer, Wanderings in Wild Australia (London: Macmillan, 1928), Vol. II, pp. 612–14; Julia Martínez and Claire Lowrie, ‘Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into “Houseboys”’, Gender and History, 21:2 (2009), 305; Samantha Wells, ‘Labour, Control and Protection: The Kahlin Aboriginal Compound, 1911–38’, in Peter Read (ed.), Settlement: A History of Australian Indigenous Housing (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2000). 20 Cook to Weddell, 8 July 1936, NAA: A1, 1937/70. Cook transformed these institutions from derelict spaces. Joe McGinness remembered very little surveillance and control in his early years as an inmate at the Kahlin Compound in the 1920s. He received no schooling and was left to his own devices during the days when his mother was at work. Joe McGinness, Son of Alyandabu: My Fight for Aboriginal Rights (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1991), pp. 9–10. Similarly, Clarence Smith recalled only one and a half hours of schooling each day in the Alice Springs Bungalow before leaving in 1927. Transcript of Interview with Clarence Smith, February–April 1988, Tape 1, p. 3, NTAS: NTRS 226, TS 486. 21 Kathy Mills and Tony Austin, ‘“Talking About Cruel Things”: Girls’ Life in the Kahlin Compound, by Daisy Ruddick as told to Kathy Mills and Tony Austin’, Hecate, 15:1 (1989). 22 C. E. Cook, ‘The Native in Relation to the Public Health’, Medical Journal of Australia, 1:18 (1949); Andrew Markus, Governing Savages (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990), pp. 93–4, 96. 23 J. A. Perkins, Memorandum to Cabinet, 31 July 1933, NAA: A659, 1940/1/408. 24 Cook to Weddell, 27 June 1933, NAA: A659, 1940/1/408. Elizabeth Povinelli, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 17. For all its centrality to Cook’s policy, there were rarely many such marriages. In 1932–3, he approved ‘the marriage of seven female half-castes, four with Europeans and three with half-castes’. Three applications were refused. Despite the increased scrutiny of couplings, this represented a slight increase. 1931–2 had seen four such marriages, while in 1930–1 there were seven, though only one to a ‘full-blood European’. ‘Report of the Chief Protector of Aboriginals’, in Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory for the Year Ended 30th June, 1932, Cmd. Paper No. 124, 1933, p. 8. 25 On Cook’s interventions into such families, see Ben Silverstein, ‘“Possibly they did not know themselves”: The Ambivalent Government of Sex and Work in the Northern Territory Aboriginals Ordinance 1918’, History Australia, 14:3 (2017). 26 On the ‘rule of colonial difference’, see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

[ 129 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES 27 Hannah Robert, ‘Disciplining the Female Aboriginal Body: Inter-racial Sex and the Pretence of Separation’, Australian Feminist Studies, 16:34 (2001), pp. 69–70. Criminalisation did not necessarily lead to prosecution, but could be marshalled as threat to regulate employment and sexuality. It rarely targeted ‘casual’ sexual relationships. Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), p. 86; Ann McGrath, Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), p. 19. 28 Cook to Weddell, 7 October 1935, NAA: F1, 1938/46. 29 Ibid; Cook to Weddell, 8 July 1936, NAA: A1, 1937/70. His proposed policy was forwarded with approval by Weddell, and the urban assimilation component was endorsed by the Minister in February 1936 but only announced publicly in June 1937. Cook complained about these delays. Weddell to J. A. Carrodus, 11 October 1935, NAA: F1, 1938/46; Carrodus to Weddell, 19 February 1936 and ‘Welfare of Aboriginals. New Settlement at Darwin’, Statement for Press, Department of the Interior, 29 June 1937, NAA: A1, 1937/70; Cook to L. H. A. Giles, 17 March 1937, NAA: A1, 1937/6167. 30 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 318–19. 31 ‘Welfare of Aboriginals. New Settlement at Darwin’, Statement for Press, Department of the Interior, 29 June 1937, NAA: A1, 1937/70. 32 See, for example, John Locke’s claim that ‘in the beginning all the world was America, and more so than that is now; for no such thing as Money was any where known. Find out something that hath the use and value of money amongst his neighbours, you shall see the same man will begin presently to enlarge his possessions.’ John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964 [1689]), Vol. 2, Chap. 5, [49]. See also Jessica R. Cattelino, High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 98–103. 33 J. W. Bleakley, The Aboriginals and Half-Castes of Central Australia and North Australia, Cmd. Paper No. 21, 1929, p. 8. 34 J. W. Allen to Arthur Blakely, Minister for Home Affairs, 3 July 1930, NAA: A1, 1938/329. 35 Bruno Gutmann, ‘The African Standpoint’, Africa, 8:1 (1935), p. 7. 36 Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge, 3rd enlarged edn, 2004), p. 298. 37 Charles Chewings, Back in the Stone Age: The Natives of Central Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1936), pp. 18, 119, 48. 38 Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 250; E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, 38:1 (1967). 39 Giordano Nanni, The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 18; Bain Attwood, ‘Space and Time at Ramahyuck, Victoria, 1863–85’, in Read (ed.), Settlement, pp. 52–3. 40 W. H. Grant in Notes on Conference regarding the payment of Halfcastes and Aboriginals in Country Districts, 1930, p 50, NAA: A1, 1938/329. 41 C. Price Conigrave, North Australia (London: Cape, 1936), p. 176. 42 Nanni, The Colonisation of Time, p. 4. 43 Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 64. On the relationship between abstract labour and temporality see also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 47–71; ‘The Time of History and the Times of Gods’, in Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (eds), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).

[ 130 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

NATIV E A DMIN ISTR ATION IN THE NORTHER N TER R ITORY 44 Money, as Marx demonstrated, ‘actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers’. The eliminationist nature of Cook’s project was strengthened by the way it would have obscured the colonial relations between a rapacious settler capitalism and Indigenous dispossession and exploitation. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 66. 45 Sharon E. Hutchinson, Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Nicolas Peterson, ‘Cash, Commoditisation and Authenticity: When Do Aboriginal People Stop Being HunterGatherers?’, in Nicolas Peterson and Toshio Matsuyama (eds), Cash, Commoditisation and Changing Foragers (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 1991). 46 Fred Thompson to Rev. E. R. Gribble, 8 October 1929, APNR Papers, S55/7; Xavier Herbert to Elkin, 23 January 1937, Elkin Papers, P130/41/628; Herbert to Elkin, 21 May 1937, APNR Papers, S55/7; Letter from a correspondent in the Territory, n.d., Amy Brown Papers, MS9212, 3654/1(k). 47 Carrodus, Memorandum, 12 February 1936, NAA: A1, 1937/70; Rev. William Morley to Rev. J. Jones, 14 December 1937, APNR Papers, S55/7. 48 Cook to Administrator of the Northern Territory, 10 July 1933, NAA: A659, 1942/1/8104. 49 John Maynard, ‘“In the Interests of Our People”: The Influence of Garveyism on the Rise of Australian Aboriginal Political Activism’, Aboriginal History, 29 (2005), 16–17; John Maynard, ‘“Light in the Darkness”: Elizabeth McKenzie Hatton’, in Anna Cole, Victoria Haskins, and Fiona Paisley (eds), Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal History (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005). See also Heather Goodall, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770 –1972 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996), pp. 149–70. 50 Fred Maynard to J. T. Lang, Premier of New South Wales, 3 October 1927 in Bain Attwood and Andrew Markus (eds), The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999), p. 68; Maynard, ‘“In the Interests of Our People”’, 18. 51 John Maynard, Fight for Liberty and Freedom: The Origins of Australian Aboriginal Activism (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007), pp. 130–9. 52 Activists also formed the Australian Half-Caste Association in Darwin, the Native Union in Western Australia, and the Australian Aborigines’ Association in South Australia. Sue Stanton, ‘The Australian Half-Caste Progressive Association: The Fight for Freedom in the Northern Territory’, Journal of Northern Territory History, 4 (1993); Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, pp. 32–3, 40; Russell McGregor, ‘“Breed out the Colour” or the Importance of Being White’, Australian Historical Studies, 120 (2002), 115; Maynard, Fight for Liberty and Freedom, pp. 126–7. 53 ‘Maloga Petition, 1881’, in Attwood and Markus (eds), The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights, pp. 51–2. 54 Goodall, Invasion to Embassy, pp. 150–6; Diane Barwick, ‘Coranderrk and Cumeroogunga: Pioneers and Policy’, in T. Scarlett Epstein and David H. Penny (eds), Opportunity and Response: Case Studies in Economic Development (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1972), pp. 44–63. 55 Richard Broome, Fighting Hard: The Victorian Aborigines Advancement League (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2015), pp. 8–12; Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, p. 37; Andrew Markus, Blood from a Stone (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2nd edn, 1988), pp. 9–20; Attwood and Markus, Thinking Black. The petition to the King was finally sent to the Commonwealth Government in 1937, signed by 1814 Aboriginal people. 56 Jack Horner, Vote Ferguson for Aboriginal Freedom: A Biography (Sydney: Australian and New Zealand Book Co., 1974). 57 Cooper to N. M. Morley, 7 March 1936, Elkin Papers, P130/12/148; Austin, Never Trust a Government Man, p. 159. 58 Alison Holland, Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett’s Crusade for Aboriginal Rights (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2015), p. 39.

[ 131 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES 59 On white concern for Aboriginal rights in this period, see Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts, pp. 216–44; Fiona Paisley, Loving Protection: Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights 1919–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000). 60 The AFA was a consistent opponent of the proposal. Rev John H. Sexton to Secretary, Home and Territories Department, 16 March 1925; Sexton to Thomas Glasgow, 15 November 1926, AFA Papers, SRG 139/1/65. 61 ‘Petition: A Model Aboriginal State’, in Votes and Proceedings of the House of Representatives, 1926 –28 (Canberra: Government Printer, 1927), Vol. I, pp. 691–4; ‘The Proposed Aboriginal State: Manifesto (For distribution with the forms for Petition to the Federal Parliament)’, AFA Papers, SRG 139/1/65. The petition was presented to the Commonwealth Government in October 1927 with over 7000 signatures. ‘State for Aborigines’, News (15 April 1926), p. 5; J. Chas Genders, The Australian Aborigines (Adelaide: Aborigines’ Protection League, 1937), p. 1; Michael Roe, ‘A Model Aboriginal State’, Aboriginal History, 10 (1986), 40. 62 Daylight (31 May 1927), p. 187 in NAA: A1, 1932/4262; ‘Report of Hon Sec and member of executive (Colonel Genders) to the State Executive’, in Aborigines’ Protection League, Australian Aboriginals: A Statement by the Aborigines’ Protection League Explaining Its Basic Principles and Proposals and Discussing Statements in the Public Press and Recent Reports and Recommendations (Adelaide: Aborigines’ Protection League, 1929); Kevin Blackburn, ‘White Agitation for an Aboriginal State in Australia (1925–1929)’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 45:2 (1999), pp. 165–8. 63 Mary Bennett to Travers Buxton, 7 January 1930, ASAPS Papers, MSS Brit Emp S 19, D 2/24; Genders, The Australian Aborigines, p. 3; A Member of the Aborigines’ Protection League, ‘A Native Policy for Australia’, n.d., NAA: A1, 1932/4262; Lucy Mair, Native Policies in Africa (London: Routledge, 1936). 64 Jan Christiaan Smuts, Africa and Some World Problems, Including the Rhodes Memorial Lectures Delivered in Michaelmas Term, 1929 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), pp. 78, 92; J. Chas Genders, Letter, Advertiser (13 February 1930), p. 18; J. Chas Genders, ‘Australian Aborigines: “Extinction not Inevitable”’, Advertiser (4 June 1930), p. 18. 65 Aborigines’ Protection League, Australian Aboriginals, pp. 3, 6; ‘Petition: A Model Aboriginal State’. 66 M. M. Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being (London: Alston Rivers, 1930), pp. 128–9; Bennett to Cooke, 26 March 1929, Cooke Papers, GRG 52/32/25; Holland, Just Relations, pp. 42–50. 67 Holland, Just Relations, pp. 87, 350; Bennett to Buxton, 13 September 1928, ASAPS Papers, MSS Brit Emp S 19, D 2/21. 68 Bennett, The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being, pp. 139–41. 69 In South Australia, see George Rankine, Letter, Register (26 January 1928), p. 4; Narrunga Johnny, Letter, Register (2 February 1928), p. 4. In London, Mary Bennett also tried to enlist the exiled Aboriginal protester Anthony Martin Fernando in support. Bennett to Buxton, 8 February 1929, ASAPS Papers, MSS Brit Emp S 19, D 2/21. Thanks to Fiona Paisley for pointing me towards this source. See Fiona Paisley, The Lone Protestor: AM Fernando in Australia and Europe (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2012), pp. 60–2. 70 ‘Aborigines Want Racial Equality. Appeal to Churchmen’, Sydney Morning Herald (15 November 1927), p. 11; Copy of Letter from B. Rountree, General Secretary AAPA, to Genders, 2 March 1928, ASAPS Papers, MSS Brit Emp S 19, D 2/21; Clive Turnbull, ‘Aborigines Petition the King’, Herald (7 August 1937) in Attwood and Markus, Thinking Black, p. 80; Cooper to McEwen, 3 January 1939, NAA: A659, 1940/1/858. 71 Inspired by this movement, Tim Rowse has imagined what would have occurred had an Aboriginal state been created in Central Australia. His state would have been ruled by Fred Maynard, Pearl Gibbs, and David Unaipon, none of whom were Indigenous to that area. See Tim Rowse, ‘What If the Federal Government Had

[ 132 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

NATIV E A DMIN ISTR ATION IN THE NORTHER N TER R ITORY Created a Model Aboriginal State?’, in Stuart Macintyre and Sean Scalmer (eds), What If? Australian History as It Might Have Been (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006). 72 Sir Hubert Murray, ‘The Trend of Native Administration’, Stead’s Review (1 August 1930), pp. 4–6. Stead’s Review published this as part of a series entitled ‘The Aborigine Passes’, also featuring Mary Gilmore, Professor F. Wood Jones, ‘Miriltkna’, R. H. Croll, Revd J. R. B. Love, and J. W. Bleakley. For a comparative account of Murray’s biopolitics of protection in Papua and Spencer’s biopolitics of assimilation in the Northern Territory, see Tony Bennett et al., Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 51–87. 73 Genders to Brown, 15 October 1930; Brown to Genders, 28 November 1930, Amy Brown Papers, MS9212, 3653/1a. 74 VAG Minutes 1930–1931; VAG Minutes 12 June 1930, Amy Brown Papers, MS9212, 3652A; Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, p. 85. The VAG formally splintered off from the Citizens’ Educational Fellowship, a Christian organisation, in 1933. 75 Report and Conclusions, 1930; Brown to Genders, 28 November 1930, Amy Brown Papers, MS9212, 3653/1a, 3655/1a. 76 Victorian Aboriginal Group, Quarterly Letter, 30 June 1934, Amy Brown Papers, MS9212, 3654/1(J); Public Meeting, 19 September 1934, ‘A Policy for the Australian Aboriginal’, Amy Brown Papers: MS9212, 3652A. The idea for trained anthropologists was drawn from Elkin and Murray’s influence. I. C. Campbell, ‘Anthropology and the Professionalisation of Colonial Administration in Papua and New Guinea’, Journal of Pacific History, 33:1 (1998). 77 Brown to the Prime Minister, 17 July 1930, Amy Brown Papers, MS9212, 3653/1a. The VAG corresponded with Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs John Collier largely via Matthew Sniffen, Secretary of the Indian Rights Association in Philadelphia. Matthew K Sniffen to Brown, 10 July 1936, Amy Brown Papers, MS9212, 3654/1(l). 78 John Harris to affiliated Australian committees, 25 November 1936; Brown to Harris, 4 January 1937, ASAPS Papers, MSS Brit Emp S 22, G 378. 79 Harris to J. A. Lyons, 10 August 1937, NAA: A431, 1948/273, PART 1. The Society had resisted actively supporting the model state plan, though it had ‘regard[ed] it with benevolence’. Buxton to Constance Ternent Cooke, 27 July 1927, ASAPS Papers, MSS Brit Emp S 22, G 381. 80 Ibid. See also Harris to Lyons, 5 December 1938, ASAPS Papers, MSS Brit Emp S 22, G 379. For discussion of this plan, see Alison Holland, ‘Saving the Race: Critics of Absorption Look for an Alternative’, in Tim Rowse (ed.), Contesting Assimilation (Perth: API Network, 2005), pp. 88–9. 81 Bennett to Harris, 7 March 1937; Cooper to Harris, 10 January 1937, ASAPS Papers, MSS Brit Emp S 22, G 378. 82 P. Strahan to Harris, 18 January 1938, NAA: A431, 1948/273, PART 1. 83 J. S. Needham, White and Black in Australia (London: National Missionary Council of Australia, 1935), p. 163; A. P. Elkin, ‘The Aborigines, Our National Responsibility’, Australian Quarterly, 23 (1934), 58; Elkin to W. H. Nelson, 2 November 1934, Elkin Papers, P130/41/51; W. E. H. Stanner and Diane Barwick, ‘Not by Eastern Windows Only: Anthropological Advice to Australian Governments in 1938’, Aboriginal History, 3:1 (1979), 40–5; Annual Report of the Association for the Protection of Native Races Presented at the Nineteenth Annual Meeting held on March 11, 1930, p 2; Annual Report of the Association for the Protection of Native Races Presented at the Twenty-first Annual Meeting held on April 21, 1932, p. 6, APNR Papers, S55/2; Bennett to Buxton, 13 September 1928, ASAPS Papers, MSS Brit Emp S 19, D 2/21. 84 John Harris to Secretary, Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities, 6 April 1938, NAA: A659, 1942/1/8104. 85 Holland, Just Relations, p. 14; M. M. Bennett, ‘Liberty to Marry the Partner of Mutual Choice,’ n.d., Duguid Papers, MS 5068, Series 11/1.

[ 133 ]

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

86 Cooper to Rev. W. Morley, 5 November 1938, APNR Papers, S55/7. 87 Cooper to Rev. William Morley, 5 November 1938, APNR Papers, S55/7. These claims echoed their 1937 petition to the King which sought, among other things, political representation in Commonwealth Parliament. 88 Paisley, The Lone Protestor, p. 166. 89 On the Cummeragunja walk-off, see Attwood and Markus, Thinking Black, pp. 21–2. 90 Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, p. 72. 91 Ibid., 18–21, ‘Our Historic Day of Mourning & Protest’, Abo Call (April 1938), p. 2. 92 Cooper to Prime Minister, 26 October 1937, NAA: A432, 1937/1191.

[ 134 ]

CH A P T ER SI X

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

From a White Australia to an Aboriginal New Deal

John McEwen was appointed the new Minister for the Interior in Joseph Lyons’s Coalition Government in November 1937, days after Ted Strehlow had returned to Jay Creek in a state of uncertainty with the protagonists in the Ormiston Murder, and just two weeks after Bill Ferguson travelled to Melbourne to meet with William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines’ League. McEwen wrote in the Argus of taking office to find on his desk two different but related reports: Thomson’s report on Arnhem Land calling for a protective segregation of native societies; and Payne and Fletcher’s report on Northern Territory development and administration, which emphasised the importance of cheap black labour to pastoral-led development. McEwen considered these reports, and the problems of governing development and Aboriginal people, together. He embraced what were considered great national challenges and described himself as the ‘Pooh-Bah of the North’, celebrating the breadth of responsibility he had accrued in northern Australia. McEwen represented the interests of rural capital as well as a commitment to empire, and he energised Territory policy by devising plans that would link Aboriginal administration to territorial development.1 These reports were on McEwen’s mind when, just two months into his tenure and two weeks after publishing that article, Koori activists met in Sydney for the national Day of Mourning and Protest. The following week, on 31 January, about twenty of the conference delegates met with the Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, his wife Enid Lyons, and McEwen at Martin Place. Jack Patten presented the Prime Minister with a statement of national claims, calling for a national Department of Aboriginal Affairs with a staff at least half of whom were Aboriginal people. The aim of this Department should be, he declared, to ‘raise all Aborigines throughout the Commonwealth to full Citizen Status’. Lyons described this as an impossible proposition.2 Historians have tended to assume that the policy-making process was not influenced [ 135 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

by Aboriginal political action. But Enid Lyons felt that the meeting with the Day of Mourning delegates left a significant impression on herself, the Prime Minister, and McEwen.3 It certainly consolidated the importance of governing Aboriginal people in the Lyons Government’s agenda, and embedded this concern alongside the problems of northern development. The day after the meeting, McEwen signed off on a Cabinet submission in which he declared himself to be ‘virtually a representative of the aboriginals of the Northern Territory’. This assumption of authority authorised McEwen’s advice, to which Cabinet acceded on 7 February, not to convey Cooper’s petition to the King. Instead, McEwen declared, he would take responsibility for transforming policy, developing a new direction for the Australian government of Aboriginal people.4 To this point, this book has traced the development of a number of crises: of the reproduction of the pastoral mode of production; of sovereignty and the limits of white administrative power; and of legitimacy amidst the emergence of counter-hegemonic social movements. As these crises fused, McEwen and others made sense of them as the effects of ‘native society’ out of balance with its external milieu, demanding further and better informed government. This was the political rationality that underlay indirect rule. And they met these crises with a common response, one that located the government of Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory as a colonial problem that could be informed by practices of native administration that circulated around the Empire. These settler colonial crises, and their responses, coalesced in McEwen’s office in early 1938. A few weeks after asserting his responsibility to Cabinet, and with the two reports, the petition, and the delegation’s claims fresh in his memory, McEwen met with the Secretary of the Department of the Interior J. A. Carrodus and the Sydney anthropologist A. P. Elkin to discuss the framework for a new Aboriginal policy. It would not have the national aspirations set out in the claims endorsed by delegates at the Day of Mourning, but would deal solely with the Northern Territory. This meeting synthesised settler tendencies of the era, from rural capital to the national requirements of government to a functionalist political rationality. In the words of Elkin’s biographer, Tigger Wise, ‘Jack “I am the Country Party” McEwen and A.P. “I am Anthropology” Elkin took to each other immediately.’5 The policy – which Wise described as ‘pure Elkin’ – was put into a formal draft by April, and in June McEwen set off on a trip around the Territory, a traditional initiation ritual for new Ministers for the Interior. As was customary, on this trip he was accompanied by administrators, advisers, and representatives of major economic interests, including Carrodus, the Administrator of the [ 136 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

FROM A W HITE AUSTR A LI A TO A N A BOR IGINA L NEW DEA L

Territory C. L. A. Abbott, the Commonwealth Railways Commissioner G. A. Gahan, and A. MacBlain, a pastoralist. Unusually, he also travelled with E. W. P. Chinnery, then on leave from his position as Government Anthropologist in New Guinea and seconded as Commonwealth Advisor on Native Affairs.6 Aboriginal people were now a critical subject of government in the Territory, and the contribution of anthropological knowledge was considered essential to understanding the field. Chinnery had been a patrol officer in Papua between 1910 and 1917, before working in New Guinea as a labour adviser on the mines, as Government Anthropologist, and as Director of Native Services and Native Affairs. He had trained in ethnological research under Haddon and Rivers at Cambridge in 1919–20 and had read on the functionalist shift in social anthropology.7 Given the exigencies of administration, his brand of practical anthropology had been concerned with ‘the cultural development of the natives’ through modifying native social institutions away from ‘primitive life’ and towards ‘civilisation’.8 Chinnery was committed, however, to the philosophy of indirect rule, writing when working as a labour adviser that ‘[i]t has been found in other countries governing native subject races that the most successful administrators are those who rule as far as possible according to the laws and customs of the peoples themselves’. It was, therefore, ‘essential that the labor policy should be founded on an intimate knowledge of the various natives employed’.9 Once Elkin became aware of Chinnery’s involvement on mainland Australia, he commenced a correspondence that would be crucial in ensuring that when McEwen finally announced his new policy, the original draft remained substantially unchanged. It was also Elkin who, with the policy practically finalised, first broached with Chinnery the possibility of being seconded to the new Northern Territory Branch of Native Affairs as its Director.10 McEwen announced the new policy, dubbed the Aboriginal New Deal, in mid-December 1938, a week after he revealed plans to overhaul land administration and pastoral development.11 This latter, the Government’s long–awaited response to the Payne-Fletcher Report, was thorough. McEwen set out a strategy for northern development that would, he hoped, ‘presage a new era of settlement and development in the north’. He declared a five-year plan of ‘vigorous’ road construction and stock-route development, and the introduction of a system of coordinated sea, rail, and road transport to reduce freight charges. The government would advance money to settlers to assist in developing their holdings, and income from primary production, mining, and fisheries would be exempt from both Commonwealth and Territory income tax for the next ten years. This policy sought to develop the north on the back of pastoralism: ‘The cattle industry is, and, in my [ 137 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

opinion, will, as far ahead as we can see, remain, the principal industry in the territory.’12 It was also, then, a part of a plan for native administration. ‘Naturally,’ McEwen wrote to Elkin, ‘the policy for the welfare of aboriginals has been closely connected with the general developmental policy.’13 The two policies were designed to be complementary, working together to develop the north through a pastoral industry reliant on Aboriginal workers. McEwen’s resolution to the contradictions of northern development suggested the possibility of articulating the ethnographic ‘native society’ with pastoral production, a formation conducive to indirect rule. The Aboriginal New Deal was expressed in terms of citizenship, a thorough policy of Aboriginal advancement that could be positioned as ostensibly benevolent by reference both to the claims of the Day of Mourning activists and to the pathway to citizenship pursued by Elkin and his fellow travellers.14 But in the Aboriginal New Deal citizenship was a distant goal, one that would only be reached in several generations, if at all. The underlying emphasis of this Aboriginal government is best appreciated by thinking of it in the way McEwen and his contemporaries did, alongside pastoral policy and in the interests of northern development. The new dispensation represented an attempt to frame a policy which provided for the reproduction of a replacement society in the north, one which explicitly incorporated Aboriginal society. This was an incorporation that reflected the peculiarly colonial nature of the Northern Territory, seeking an economic articulation of producing societies, a relationship that in some respects differed but in others reflected those formations examined in Fiji or Nigeria in Chapter 2. It took form as an Australian adaptation of an art of colonial government, influenced by the need to frame administration with respect to the dual mandate and presenting a novel synthesis of elimination – the logic of the settler colony – and exploitation – the rule of colonial difference. Critically, it linked all Aboriginal people, spanning across the entire Territory, in a chain from reserves to pastoral stations to towns, a performative framing of policy that narrated development as it sought to generate different kinds of workers in each space of production. The way it imagined the government of different subjects in these spaces is discussed in detail in this and the following chapter. This chapter addresses the first of these spaces, the Aboriginal reserves, and the interventions targeted at the people, understood in the policy as ‘Myalls or aboriginals in their native state’, who lived there. The meaning and function of reserves in the Northern Territory had been debated in government circles since they were first proposed in the early years of Commonwealth control. McEwen’s Aboriginal New Deal presented [ 138 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

FROM A W HITE AUSTR A LI A TO A N A BOR IGINA L NEW DEA L

a resolution to this debate by framing reserves as instigating a process of assimilation and consequently distant erasure, representing a necessarily stable basis for a project of change and development whose end would be a settled north. And the policy relied upon this process as a functional one; articulating reserves outward allowed them to produce workers for the pastoral industries that would ultimately, in the narrative set out in the policy, envelop them. This chapter positions debates over reserves, and their resolution in 1938, in the wider context of British imperialism and the nexus between colonial development and native administration. We find here an Australian instance of the implementation of indirect rule, governing a ‘native society’ by conducting its internal trends and forces in a specific articulation with a colonising society. Assimilation – the elimination of Aboriginality – remained a distant element of the Aboriginal New Deal: it retained the teleological narrative of the frontier. But this narrative was ideological; the New Deal incorporated a series of measures designed to counteract its eliminationist tendencies for certain groups of Aboriginal people. As Frederick Cooper has written in the context of the colonial reconstruction of coastal Kenya, officials ‘backed off from the universality of their transformative goals but not from their desirability’.15 Most importantly, the new policy sought to ensure the continuous availability of black labour to pastoralists; it would therefore work towards developing the north. It was designed to build a replacement society – the basic goal of settler colonialism – in a way inspired by the practice of the British Empire in Africa and the Western Pacific.16 We find, I argue, that reserves were to be ruled indirectly.

Staging settler colonialism When Baldwin Spencer had first proposed establishing Aboriginal reserves in the Northern Territory in 1915, Secretary of the Department of External Affairs Atlee Hunt responded by puzzling over the future implications of such a policy. He wondered if reserves would enable Aboriginal people to continue to live indefinitely as members of Aboriginal communities. ‘My main trouble’, Hunt wrote, ‘is that I cannot see the end that is aimed at. … I want to see the end in view.’17 The obscurity of this end, of Aboriginal people’s place in an Australian future, persisted throughout the interwar period. The Anglican Reverend J. S. Needham proposed reforms in 1935 that would enable Aboriginal people to become ‘a permanent coloured people inside Australia’. But for him this permanence, this Aboriginal survival, was ‘the most puzzling problem of all’.18 And Bill Stanner, after setting out his own [ 139 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

plan for arresting the apparent slide towards Aboriginal extinction in 1939, worried that their preservation would have ‘some end which at the moment is clear to very few of us’.19 Needham and Stanner imagined a settler colonial Australian future in which Indigeneity was consigned to the past; a future that was in conflict with their humanitarian insistence on alleviating the conditions that produced Aboriginal death and governing Aboriginal life. How could these contradictory imaginaries be reconciled in a settler colonial future? In setting out the Aboriginal New Deal, McEwen declared that the ‘final objective’ of the Government ‘in its concern for these native Australian people should be the raising of their status so as to entitle them by right and by qualification to the ordinary rights of citizenship and enable them and help them to share with us the opportunities that are available in their own native land’. This future represented a distinct expression of Lugard’s dual mandate via Cooper, Patten, and Elkin, combining as it did the goals of civilisational and material development; the change and progress that were integral to the practice of indirect rule as imagined in Lugard’s writing. Citizenship was not a status that could be granted immediately. The aim was to render Aboriginal people ‘entitled’ to citizenship, necessitating, McEwen suggested, a pedagogical process that would ‘take not only not only many years, but many generations’.20 In Lugard’s developing imagination African polities would themselves become modern, they would slowly transform their subjects’ work habits and their states would evolve towards more stable and regularised forms of lawful rule. Native societies were threshold points of intervention to generate progress, their social institutions a necessary basis for projects of transformation. For McEwen, the native tribe was similarly the basis of progress in the settler colonial iteration of indirect rule in Australia’s north. But McEwen’s tribe would not itself evolve as or into a state; in the Australian settler colony, it both represented the starting point of a long march and was economically accountable as the productive generator of exploitable black bodies. Australian indirect rule drew on a Lugardian political rationality and articulated it in a novel manner. Through this case study, we can illuminate the civilising mission always inherent in the art of indirect rule; a modern and developmental mode of remaking the world. Elkin had made a substantial contribution to this policy, and it is thus no surprise that it represented the triumph of his particular developmentalist view of native administration, tracing a path from an apparently pristine native society at one end of a continuum to an entirely acculturated citizenship at the other. By figuring change as producing staging points on a long march, the Aboriginal New Deal populated the space between these poles with a range of different but [ 140 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

FROM A W HITE AUSTR A LI A TO A N A BOR IGINA L NEW DEA L

not distinct subjectivities, exhibiting Aboriginalities as phases of evolution, as four linked but distinct classes: ‘Myalls or aboriginals in their native state’, ‘semi–detribalised’, ‘fully detribalised’, and ‘Halfcastes’.21 These not only divided the Aboriginal population in relation to tribe or caste – metaphors for an ahistorical authenticity – but also targeted each group for a different mode of government, organising and mapping out a sequential pathway on the ‘long march’ towards the ‘distant objective’ of citizenship. In its new policy, the Commonwealth governed the distribution of people in space and time, establishing Aboriginal people as ‘not yet’ citizens and describing a road along which they would be marched towards progress. This road was based on what Elkin was to term an ‘understanding of the How and Why of the processes of civilization and of Australian life’ which was ‘necessary for progress towards and in citizenship’. And the march along this road began from reserves, spaces where the work of ‘transform[ing] people from a nomadic state to take their place in a civilised community … must’ begin.22 This work of transformation would be undertaken by a Native Affairs Branch, to be established under Chinnery’s leadership and staffed by patrol officers and district officers. On receiving a draft of the policy from Canberra, this was the element that struck the incumbent Cecil Cook. He noted that it would split the offices he had held since 1928 – Chief Medical Officer and Protector of Aboriginals – and that while there may have been governmental reasons for the restructure, it was also designed to sideline him personally. With this in mind, he found it ‘very difficult to comment dispassionately’ on the proposed policy, noting that ‘[s]o many entirely personal factors are involved in the proposed changes that I am afraid my commentary, so far from appearing to be the well-considered judgment of an experienced official, might appear to be simply the pleading and lamentation of an officer unwillingly superseded’. But he could not restrain himself from such a personal plea, and so produced two memoranda to be sent to Canberra, the first an ‘endeavour [to] completely … unburden my soul on the personal aspects involved’ and the second, written the next day, a more formal policy discussion.23 The basis of Cook’s complaint was that the new policy proposal substantially reflected his own ideas – it retained his intention to produce a white north – but ‘with the variation that it is considered necessary to appoint another officer to implement it’. Most historians have largely agreed with Cook’s interpretation, focusing on personal politics and neglecting the political and discursive shift marked by the new regime.24 The personalities do matter here, and there certainly had been a concerted campaign mounted to displace Cook. In his first [ 141 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

memorandum in response to the 1938 draft policy, Cook painted himself as someone who had devoted his life to the care of Aboriginal people, a calling for which he had ‘incurred the displeasure and, oftentimes, the hatred and abuse of practically every employer of aboriginal labour in the Territory’, suffering ‘personal abuse, libel and slanderous stories concerning my professional ability and even my private life’. He felt that he had become the ‘most hated man in the Territory’, a title earned, he believed, through constant action in defence of Aboriginal people. If Aboriginal administration had suffered, it was due to the poor staff he had been forced to work with by Canberra. ‘For the most part,’ he wrote, ‘this office has been the dumping ground for the unwanted incompetents of other Branches.’ It was not, for Cook, his or his Department’s failures, but rather a southern humanitarian campaign that had brought him to the verge of dismissal, sacrificed as a ‘scapegoat’.25 But discussion of these personal animosities should not exhaust an analysis of the changes wrought in instituting a new policy. The Aboriginal New Deal marked, rather, a more substantial shift from Cook’s eliminationist necropolitics to a developmentalist biopolitics, a shift explored below by tracing the political and symbolic economy of Aboriginal reserves in the Northern Territory. The new system envisioned the objects of Native Administration as a series of incompletely differentiated peoples spanning the course of history, mapping the Northern Territory spatially and temporally in the form of imagined Aboriginal movement from reserve to station, and onwards towards the town; from nomadism to civilisation, from tribalism to citizenship. It operationalised social anthropology in shifting from a schema of intelligibility based on the genetic (blood) with an evolutionary social correlate (the savage) to a civic spectrum. It was a synchronic expression of a diachronic and imperialist evolutionary narrative, representing and producing a progressive series of peoples on the move towards an ultimate assimilation. But a black subject would never, him or herself, experience the transition from membership of a tribe to citizenship of the nation; the policy was expressed by staging this trajectory through the production of progressive difference through distinct modes of governmentality engaging with each category of people. This simultaneously staged the Northern Territory as slowly becoming a part of a White Australia. Colonialism, Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun argue, ‘constructs narratives of time, in ways that create particular political relationships in the present, and attempts to move itself through time to a certain political future’.26 The story Lugard told was useful and usable in the north Australian context. It enabled the discursive transformation of a colonial situation into a pastoral frontier, establishing [ 142 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

FROM A W HITE AUSTR A LI A TO A N A BOR IGINA L NEW DEA L

a teleological relation between the different articulations manifested in the reserve, the pastoral station, and the town. But this was a narration riven with ambivalence and contradiction. As well as sequentially plotting these spaces, and the subjectivities and economic and cultural relations in them, the New Deal tacitly acknowledged that they were complementary and mutually constitutive. The reserve, in other words, was constituted as an Aboriginal domain in a productive relation to the pastoral occupation that spanned much of the rest of the Territory. And the limited wealth that made towns possible was derived from their relation to the pastoral stations as the only major industry of the north. The New Deal recognised that, though it narrated these as stages of development from an imagined archaic Aboriginal savagery to modern white citizenship, staging progress was not the same as its fulfilment. The performance of the frontier in a colonial situation represented instead a practice of progress which would accommodate northern articulations within the settler colonial nation.27 Settler colonial narrative forms are, as Lorenzo Veracini has argued extensively, distinct from those found in other colonial formations. Stories of colonialism in Africa or Asia tend to be circular in form, represented as an Odyssey in which a protagonist moves outward, interacts with others, and then returns to their original locale. Settler colonial narratives, by contrast, are characterised by a sense of inexorable progress, solidifying settler possession alongside the continuing elimination of Indigenous people. They are geometrically linear, akin to an Aeneid, an incessant forward movement with no possibility of return.28 The issue of jurisdiction is once again illustrative. In colonial and apartheid South Africa, for instance, Africans were imagined by the state to be subject to chiefly rule at all times and in all places. They were tied to reserves or homelands, to which they were administratively consigned when not working in towns, cities, mines, or plantations. In the Northern Territory, on the other hand, movement towards the city – at the far end of the long march – was definitively a movement out of native, and into settler, jurisdiction. There would be no going back and, by this late stage, no throwbacks. The long march animated a linear, forward motion, but one that would take ‘many generations’ and was not necessarily to be made by any individual person. ‘Natives’, in this narrative, began on the reserve as tribal subjects of native societies, moved on to states of full and semi-detribalisation on stations where they became semi-regularised and inescapably racialised labourers, and were finally detribalised to become citizens in modern, usually urban, spaces. This inexorable motion was propelled by the force of history which oriented Aboriginal people towards a transformation that would effect their juridical and [ 143 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

political disappearance. And this disappearance took place as those people moved through the varied forms of settler possession, from mapped reserves, to almost fenced and partially cleared pastoral stations, to settled towns. Native disappearance was refracted through settler presence. The Aboriginal New Deal manifested the long march as a rapacious narrative that incarnated settler colonialism itself. Space was critical to this staging of progress. Settler colonial narratives, as Tracey Banivanua Mar demonstrated, are embedded in the symbolic territorial economy of settler colonialism: landscapes are produced as spaces that affirm metanarratives of dispossession as progress.29 The organisation of the Northern Territory into reserves, buffer stations, pastoral stations, and urban settlements, that were sequential as much as coeval, represented spatial evolution through increasing marks on the land. But this organisation was always precarious. Settler discourse registered the unstable ground on which the long march was narrated in the slippery language of subjectivity. The terms ‘detribalised’ or ‘semi-detribalised’ signify confusion and contradiction, suggesting colonial officials’ grasping attempts to come to terms with black workers.30 In practice, as pastoralists were well aware, the station and stock camps contained many people entirely comfortable with moving between the station and the bush, confounding the ordered logic of the long march. ‘Backyards of cattle stations’, the anthropologist Ursula McConnell wrote of the north in 1936, ‘dovetailed into the front gardens of the primitive hunting-areas.’ Space was blurred. And, as the historian Jan Larbalestier has indicated, it was difficult for pastoralists to reconcile Aboriginal subjectivities into the stability required to index progress. The same people, she wrote, ‘at different times of the year and at different stages of the life cycle could be categorised as station workers, as camp dependants and as station myalls’.31 Subjectivity was unstable and uncertain, emergent and unsettled, constantly in motion and irreducible to a style of thought that read movement as detribalisation as progress. Detribalised Aboriginal people were those imagined as alienated from the kinship ties that held together Aboriginal society, and thus also alienated from the customary drive to work. Frederic Wood Jones described the ‘detribalized native’ as someone ‘bereft of his tribal ceremonies, … an apathetic and moribund derelict lacking all knowledge of his own people’s moral codes and unfitted to embrace a new one that is beyond his comprehension’.32 This imagined figure was a person in transition, neither Aboriginal nor not, nor both, a person lost in the social interstices and beseeching protection and direction. But this was, for pastoralists, a usefully productive phase of social evolution. On stations, Aboriginal people were imagined as still tied to tribal custom, [ 144 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

FROM A W HITE AUSTR A LI A TO A N A BOR IGINA L NEW DEA L

as practising the institutions of native society out of place, as it were. This provided an ideological basis for the employment relationship in which station managers tried to extract labour by mobilising an articulation of what they believed were settler and Aboriginal moral and physical worlds.33 Maintaining a functional Aboriginal community thus coincided with the interests of pastoral development. Its government was indirect, relying on harnessing allegedly native institutions to mobilise its productive forces. Aboriginal work on cattle stations was imagined as communally performed labour, but still conceived in the Aboriginal New Deal as regularised and thus disciplining and improving.34 This improvement promised a settled and ordered future, in which citizens would emerge from Aboriginal society through the mechanism of work. This story told by the Aboriginal New Deal is notable for what Strakosch describes as a ‘peculiar and complicated temporality’. It narrated movement from an Indigenous past, one of native societies in Aboriginal reserves, to a civilised and unified settler future of citizens in modern towns and cities. This temporal narrative possessed a productive contradiction: it declared a perfect settler sovereignty even as it posited a future of sovereign completion and worked in the present towards its achievement, acknowledging its current imperfection. The fantasy of settler sovereign perfection was then confounded but not dissolved by the contradictory practice of Aboriginal sovereignty, animating increasingly intensified efforts to pursue resolution, to fabricate an end to the story.35 But defeat was embedded in this march. Veracini has noted that settler colonial narratives promise an end to the story, the supersession of Aboriginal society that would never come, what Strakosch and Macoun term a ‘vanishing endpoint’.36 The eternal deferral of the end of the story ought not to distract from the productive utility of its promise and anticipation.

Northern reserves In British–ruled Africa, indirect rule was centred on spaces marked as native. As in colonies like Kenya or South Africa, in Australia those spaces were named reserves.37 But there was nothing inherent in establishing a reserve that produced it as a site of indirect rule. Rather, settlers tussled between three competing visions for the Aboriginal reserves of the Territory. Cook saw them as refuges where Aboriginal people would be left slowly and peacefully to die out, their elimination an inevitable result of encroaching modernity. Many humanitarian groups instead sought inviolable reserves, proposing the museum-like preservation of primitivity endorsed at the 1937 Conference of Aboriginal [ 145 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

Authorities. McEwen’s policy drew on both these propositions to cast reserves in a different light. Filled with what he, Elkin, and others imagined were wandering ‘myalls or aboriginals in their native state’, the reserves comprised those small tribal spaces that the New Deal designated as being harnessed to the far end of a process of assimilation, and which could contain a reserve labour force for the pastoral economy. These spaces were governable only through tribal organisation, an apparent limit to settler government that was inferred from the crisis of order sparked in part by the conflict at Caledon Bay. There were only a few reserves in the Northern Territory, and these were certainly not the inviolable spaces humanitarian groups called for. In 1920, the Administrator of the Territory Miles Staniforth Smith, who had previously worked as Hubert Murray’s deputy in Papua, declared three of the reserves previously recommended by Spencer – Groote Eylandt (896 square miles), Oenpelli (2000 square miles) and Daly River (3300 square miles) – as well as the substantial Lake Amadeus Reserve in the south-west corner of the Territory (21,875 square miles), which formed part of the larger reserve also covering parts of South Australia and Western Australia. This last remained formally unpatrolled until Strehlow was appointed as a patrol officer in 1936. The Arnhem Land Reserve was declared in 1931, on Bleakley’s recommendation, and the area around Haast’s Bluff was to be proclaimed an Aboriginal Reserve in 1940.38 But uncertainty surrounded the place of reserves over the first half of the twentieth century. The Aboriginal New Deal confirmed that their establishment need not displace the ‘end’ of settler colonialism in the Territory, but rather could begin a process of assimilation, a slow erasure of Indigeneity. While Chapter 3 described pastoral-led economic development and its need for black labour as the critical issue for government in the Northern Territory, official discussion of native administration engaged this concern through a debate over the nature of the Aboriginal people to be governed. This coalesced around two questions: did Aboriginal people have society of value (could their ‘tribes’ reproduce and thereby provide a source of labour?); and were Aboriginal people and communities improvable (could they assimilate?). These were questions whose affirmative answers might underpin any implementation of indirect rule. To recognise value in Aboriginal societies was to define them in terms of presence rather than absence, to note systems of law and cultural logics, to acknowledge the relevance of Aboriginal cultures and social institutions to governing interventions. And to recognise Aboriginal improvability was to affirm the utility of government, to incite a range of governmental practices that might involve Aboriginal society in bettering the state of both the nation and the national [ 146 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

FROM A W HITE AUSTR A LI A TO A N A BOR IGINA L NEW DEA L

territory. In the interwar period, these questions were often answered by reference to Aboriginal reserves and the people and societies found there. Northern administrators tended, throughout the interwar period, to find little value in Aboriginal society, framing their assessments by reference to the people of Australia’s external colonies. For Staniforth Smith, writing at the end of his tenure as Administrator in 1921, Aboriginal people could only be compared unfavourably with ‘native’ people elsewhere: ‘The greatest difficulty that confronts the administration in dealing with the natives is the fact that they do not form themselves into settled communities, with individual possession in land, as in New Guinea.’ In 1933, then Minister for the Interior J. A. Perkins made a similarly pejorative comparison in noting that the ‘conditions existing in Papua and New Guinea are totally different from those of the Northern Territory. In the former Territories the natives are permanently settled in villages.’ Responding to a draft of the new policy in 1938, Abbott wrote with reference to New Guinea, Papua, the Solomon Islands, and Nauru that a ‘study of Australian aboriginals shows very clearly that these people are a problem entirely unto themselves and that experience of natives in other countries is of very little practical value when the Australian natives are being considered’. In his Aboriginal New Deal policy statement, however, and in the wake of Thomson’s expeditions to Arnhem Land, McEwen confirmed that ‘the Australian aboriginal is not inferior to the natives of Papua or New Guinea. Mr. Chinnery came to this conclusion after visiting the Northern Territory and studying the aboriginals on the spot.’39 Though this position did not conclusively resolve the question of Aboriginal social value, it did present a basis for policy reform. And this reform took shape in the integration of ‘native societies’ in reserves into a thorough scheme for assimilation. Cook had pursued a white north through policies targeting those Aboriginal people who lived in towns or other spaces over which he might seek control; he would make them live. Aboriginal people on reserves had, for Cook, neither a future nor a functional present; he would let them die. By the late 1930s, this view came to be displaced by a logic within which ‘native society’ could be the colonial basis of both production and government. In the terms of the Aboriginal New Deal, ‘the form of uplift’ pursued would ‘aim at preparing the aboriginals gradually to develop in their own way, within their own reserves’.40 These differing assimilationist imaginaries represented the major difference between Cook’s regime and that which succeeded him. The restructure was thus more than merely a belated embrace of Cook’s policies. His overall mechanism [ 147 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

of assimilation was substantially refurbished. Where for Cook, native society was nothing more than something to be ignored or overcome – ‘at the outset we shall be dealing with natives without a background’ – in the Aboriginal New Deal ‘native society’ was linked in an overarching schema with the atomised citizens of the settler-imagined Aboriginal future.41 This represented the turn to govern a colonial north rather than a national frontier; the triumph of these tendencies coming to fruition with Cook’s displacement, framing the Northern Territory in a novel manner and opening the field for the implementation of indirect rule. Cook worked towards both uninterrupted white dominion and white(ned) workers; he imagined whiteness as the sole product of his work. The new regime, on the other hand, saw Aboriginal people rather as a series of developing and differently exploitable classes or castes, each with productive forces from which value could be extracted. Each group was temporally articulated to the group categorised as ‘before’ or ‘after’ it – from tribal to semi–detribalised to fully detribalised, for example – but, located in space, could also be articulated with a proximate settler mode of production. Through conducting the social institutions of each group, these dual articulations could be made dynamic. The production of extractable labour power, under this policy as for Lugard, was an essential correlate of progress. Embedding reserves within this structure of progress reflected a substantial functionalist modification to Thomson’s segregationist vision, a change that was exemplified in the increasing dominance of Elkin’s writing and policy work. In 1934 Elkin had argued that a ‘policy which merely aims at protection and prevention’ was ‘never satisfactory. If, however, we worked out some positive policy with the object of raising the aborigines in social, economic and religious status, we would at least be doing something worthy of our trust. What we are doing in New Guinea we should also do in Australia. There is a growing body of enlightened public opinion with regard to this matter. Indeed, its size astonishes me.’42 Elkin had been committed to a ‘positive policy’ for Aboriginal people since the late 1920s, and it was his vision that was most influential in the development of a new programme. He disavowed the common slur against anthropologists, claiming that no one associated with his Sydney school had any ‘desire to preserve any of the aboriginal tribes of Australia or of the islands in their pristine condition as “museum specimens” for the purposes of investigation’. Social anthropologists, ‘like all good members of a “higher” and trustee race, are concerned with the task of raising primitive races in the cultural scale’.43 This represented a rejection of the humanitarian dream of an inviolable reserve. Amy Brown of the Victorian Aboriginal Group [ 148 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

FROM A W HITE AUSTR A LI A TO A N A BOR IGINA L NEW DEA L

had written that ‘the principle of inviolable reserves and of aboriginal ownership must be maintained. … [R]emoval from tribal lands is the surest way to breakup of aboriginal culture and extinction of the tribe.’ Similarly, Thomson had proposed a system of absolute segregation in the north, arguing that this was the only way to ‘preserve intact their social organization, their social and political institutions, and their culture in its entirety’.44 Contact, for these advocates, was synonymous with destruction, an understandable proposition in light of the very real threat of daily violence experienced by Aboriginal people. But the inviolable reserve idea was not only protective; it was also of symbolic value. Like the inviolable village community in Fiji, an inviolable reserve as museum would work discursively to confine Aboriginality itself through the physical confinement of certain Aboriginal people. Defining inviolable reserves, within which roamed supposedly timeless and nomadic natives, was a practice of dispossession. Inviolability’s logic of the contained pristine produced a double bind: those within either made no mark on the land and thus could not not own it, or they ceased to be Aboriginal. This symbolically marked the land with the script of a narrative that contained and confined Aboriginality within a timeless past, away from the progressive effects of history, interpellating a mobile and transcendent settler subjectivity as its foil. There in the inviolable reserves, constant and unchanging, would be the past superseded; a nomadism that had been overcome in a triumphant story of pioneering. Any move off the reserve was, within this logic, contaminating. The consequence of contact was fatal. Preserving an authentic remnant of ‘native society’, on the other hand, would represent a historical gift to all mankind. Fred Blakely suggested that the great central Australian reserve should be administered under a mandate, and that the value of allowing ‘Natives’ to live within it ‘according to their customs’ would be in handing ‘to posterity something that would be priceless: one patch of the world just as God made it, the last stand of the Aboriginal, the oldest human being preserved for all time’.45 As a place to die, in Spencer or Cook’s formulations, or a place to live, for Brown or Thomson or Blakely, inviolable reserves could not countenance change. Theirs were strictly racialised productions of immutable savagery. The Australian future was white: the distinction here rested on whether Australian settler colonialism would ultimately swamp Aboriginal reserves. Rejecting this symbolic economy turned reserves to signify a different narrative, one of greater material value to a colonial project. The new policy imagined Aboriginal society itself coming to transcend nomadism. The move off the reserve and into labour provided both the mechanism of progress and the cause of a discursive change in the nature of the [ 149 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

reserve. In this subtle shift lay a substantial revision in the system of governmental signification. The Aboriginal New Deal represented an attempt to reconcile ambivalent discursive figures – the othered primitive and the progressing native – and the ideological tendencies they represented. For Elkin, the obligations of the colonial trust did not mean that the entire north – ‘where the natives are still numerous’ – should be given over to Aboriginal people, but rather that Australia was entrusted with a dual mandate to exploit the land, and that this ‘exploitation should be for the good of the natives as well as for the gain of the whites’. Welfare was insufficient; nothing short of a ‘positive policy’ of uplift would do. And, in the spirit of the dual mandate, this uplift would be based on ‘the conviction that there is something, perhaps much, in the native institutions and way of life which is of value during the period of culture change, if not permanently’.46 The establishment and, more importantly, development of reserves were significant elements of Elkin’s positive policy. On reserves, established on the traditional territories of Aboriginal communities, change could be effected. ‘But the change’, he explained to a popular audience in 1934, ‘should be made by them, by their elders, the pastmasters of the secret-life.’ The first action of any plan for changing Aboriginal communities would be, then, to guide its desires through education and inculcating work discipline: ‘institutions should be established on [reserves] … for education and also for giving the natives some new economic interest, such as gardening, pastoral work, carpentry, and so on’. The Arnhem Land Methodist missionary Theodore Webb echoed this call, proposing institutions where Aboriginal people would ‘be helped to a real recognition of the necessity and dignity of labour, for without that recognition, there will be no real development of the qualities of initiative and independence’.47 Productive work would be the mechanism of progress. Reserves were thus reinscribed neither as spaces where Aboriginal people would slowly pass – designed to ‘smooth the dying pillow’ – nor as museums of primitivity, but as spaces for functioning Aboriginal communities, providing the performative basis for a logic of assimilation.48 Jeremy Beckett has described the ideological contradiction in harnessing reserves to a project of producing citizens. Such a policy ‘used the goal of eventual entry into the community as a justification for segregating Aborigines on settlements, and the goal of eventual citizenship as a justification for curtailing their human rights’. The apparent contradiction is resolved, however, when segregation is cast less as repression than as the practice of a modernising ideology that represented native social organisation as a structure itself to be evolved towards modernity.49 Both extinction and assimilation have, in a way, the same end within [ 150 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

FROM A W HITE AUSTR A LI A TO A N A BOR IGINA L NEW DEA L

a dominant settler colonial discourse – the elimination of nativeness – but they followed importantly different paths. In the path adopted in the establishment of the Native Affairs Branch in 1939, Aboriginal communities and economies would be temporally and spatially articulated in different ways with pastoral capitalism. This resembled a resolution common to colonial societies around the Empire, conducting progress through mobilising labour: a positive policy indeed.50 It would provide the pastoral industry with what Ronald and Catherine Berndt recognised it came to need by the late 1930s: an ‘active, contented, healthy and increasing group of people, a potential reservoir to keep the industry going’.51 The reserve as reservoir presupposed a selfmanaging native community which responded to external stimuli – including the raising of taxes, the stimulation of desire for commodities, and the restriction of land – to induce a greater or lesser outflow of labour. This community would inhabit a space of indirect rule.52

Spaces of indirect rule Though governed indirectly, the regime of administration in the reserves envisioned by the Aboriginal New Deal would not reflect the formal institutional model of indirect rule as expressed in African native administration. There would be no chief appointed (or recognised) and no formally codified native law and custom to be implemented by a Native Authority. Here we must return to the administrative and anthropological debates over the nature of the Aboriginal people to be governed first discussed in Chapter 4. Aboriginal social structure was considered importantly different to African or Pacific social structures. Anthropological work of the 1930s, however, demonstrated that ‘statelessness’ did not indicate an incapacity for self–government within a structure of indirect rule, but rather that that self–government would work differently. As Lugard had argued in his Dual Mandate: Let us realise that the advanced communities form a very minute proportion of the population of British Tropical Africa. The vast majority are in the primitive or early tribal stages of development. To abandon the policy of ruling them through their own chiefs, and to substitute the direct rule of the British officer, is to forgo the high ideal of leading the backward races, by their own efforts, in their own way, to raise themselves to a higher plane of social organisation, and tends to perpetuate and stereotype existing conditions.53

For Lugard it was here, amongst people considered ‘primitive or early’, a primitivity signified by the absence of a suitable administrative structure that could be harnessed to the colonial state, that indirect rule faced the test of its progressive mode. [ 151 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

The principle of indirect rule, that of incorporating native social organisation, is often confused with the details: the establishment of a tax–collecting Native Authority, led by a chief (traditional or not). Indirect rule, as I have argued, was an art of government which articulated the governing elements of native society within colonial networks of production and trade, and which had as its end the expansion of that society’s productive forces. It was not simply constituted by administration through a chief. Lugard advised that ‘[p]rinciples do not change, but their mode of application may and should vary with the customs, the traditions, and the prejudices of each unit’. A ‘slavish adherence to any particular type, however successful it may have proved elsewhere, may, if unadapted to the local environment, be as ill–suited and as foreign to its conceptions as direct British rule would be’.54 Instead, we need to look to contemporary anthropological and administrative understandings of Aboriginal social organisation to contextualise the Australian art of indirect rule. The Aboriginal New Deal did not envision the establishment of a formal bifurcated state structure which would include a series of juridical Native Authorities. Rather, reserve boundaries were constituted to demarcate the limits of settler state power, a spatial register of articulated and bordered modes of governmentality. Bordered space was here a mechanism of articulation, an adjustment to the techniques of colonial government developed by Lugard and his followers in Africa. Framing government in relation to land and territory reflects what Patrick Wolfe identified as a tendency, prominent within Australian settler colonialism, to articulate a relationship directly between colonisers and the land. In his argument, this suggests the elimination of native societies, a ‘negative articulation’ between settlers and natives.55 But it need not do so. To be sure, declaring and mapping reserves was a technique of occupation, inscribing the entire territory within the spatial inventory of colonial expansion; what John Noyes has described as the coloniser’s ‘mythical mastery of space’.56 And those native societies within the reserves were located in relation to a practice of elimination, at a definable point in an evolutionary and assimilatory march. But in plotting the reserve in this specific relation to other colonial territorialities – the station, the camp, the town – which required for their reproduction a native people, northern colonialism was structured around the certain and indefinite deferral of that elimination. The practice of elimination and the requirement for a continuing supply of black labour constituted a dialectic whose uneasy synthesis was expressed through reiterating the privileged value of territory in a settler colony, but refracting that territory through native society and government: a specifically northern articulation. This established a new [ 152 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

FROM A W HITE AUSTR A LI A TO A N A BOR IGINA L NEW DEA L

contradiction at the heart of that northern articulation, an ambivalence that was a feature of indirect rule in a settler colony. It imagined a future end of Aboriginal elimination, but this was an end that would render the production of a replacement society impossible. Settler colonialism could not cohere; the eliminationist performative was self-defeating. The language of government obscured the productive work done by declaring reserves and identifying the types of societies within them. While reserves were described as limits to settler government, as idealised spaces of Aboriginal autonomy, their existence as ‘reserves’ was a function of the very encroachment of that autonomy. Reserves were not final frontiers, lawless places beseeching domination and requiring settler intervention to bring order. They were established as an effect of invasion, a negotiation of Aboriginal people’s limited success in insisting on spatialising their autonomy and northern settlers’ increasing need for functioning Aboriginal societies. Reserves, then, were considered in the official mind to contain what Elizabeth Povinelli has described as the ‘structure and function of primitive society [which] would serve as an organic administrative apparatus’.57 What was this structure? Aboriginal society was theorised by anthropologists like Thomson as stateless but nevertheless possessing a system of law. So-called ‘primitive law’ in acephalous societies was structured by reciprocity and order, with measurable consequences for compliance or transgression. In Australia, ‘primitive law’ spoke ‘through religion’; shared religion was then the basis for the ordered sociality of Aboriginal society.58 To leave a cultural or religious space for the sacred sites of Aboriginal life was, then, a way of fabricating a spatial structure for both law and work, each governed by religious ritual.59 F. J. Durnam, a regular columnist in the Northern Standard under the pseudonym ‘Crown Colonist’, celebrated this innovation as the introduction of the finest British colonial principles of government. He commended to his readers the works of Lugard and Hailey, and suggested that the policy might best be effected by naming the Administrator of the Northern Territory as paramount chief, a reflection of the structure then prevailing in some parts of British Africa. Of the reserves, he wrote that If some system of indirect rule was adopted in the native reserves there seems to be a great opportunity for collaboration between administrative officers and anthropologists in demarcating the initial units of self– government and later planning for their enlargement by amalgamation. I know this seems pompous in connection with the Territory reserves, but it is really only the application on a very reduced and primitive scale of a system of proved value.

[ 153 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

To implement indirect rule was not, he noted, to ‘herd’ the ‘natives … into reserves’ where they might be ‘left to their own devices’. It means instead ‘that the Government builds up from native foundations’.60 In his terms, and in those of Elkin and McEwen, the constitution of functioning and self–governing reserves in the particular circumstances of the Northern Territory in 1939 should be considered an Australian adoption of indirect rule, effectively and productively recognising Aboriginal society. And it did so in a distinctive manner. In setting them out as Aboriginal domains – spaces of law which, if respected, could be relied upon as part of an ordered colony – the reserves of the New Deal were spatial registers of the ontological assimilation inherent in indirect rule as governmentality. In the Aboriginal New Deal, reserves, pastoral stations, and towns were linked in a chain of progress, expressing an historical evolution by plotting each quite literally in sequential time. The subterfuge of reserve anachronism, masking its modern constitution, was critical to staging the logic of the frontier in the north. The story of settler colonial history is one of white progress, subduing land and natives and becoming modern. This is a modernity encoded within a racial logic of whiteness and a purposefully capitalist production. To reckon openly with a fundamentally colonial dependence on Aboriginal people for northern development would be to disrupt this narrative. Staging settler colonial modernity thus depended on effacing the dissonance posed by a potentially coeval ‘native society’.61 By scripting progress onto both territorial semiotics and developing subjectivities, on the other hand, the labour-producing reserves of the modern north were discursively produced as anachronism, relegated to, and surpassed as, an earlier moment in history. But staging this narrative of progress also suggested the permanence of the reserves; registering the distinction between becoming and being modern. The Aboriginal New Deal organised the Northern Territory’s fundamental reliance on the reproduction of black labour power into a representation of progress, staging the settler colonial north as real without yet – indeed never yet – making it so. ‘Each staging of the modern’, Timothy Mitchell has argued, ‘must be arranged to produce the unified, global history of modernity, yet each requires those forms of difference that introduce the possibility of a discrepancy, that return to undermine its unity and identity.’62 Indirect rule in a reserve thus symbolically articulated with ‘modern’ spaces marked a new narration of colonialism in the north, one which sought to contain the signs of the Other through staging difference in a register of progress. This link represented a final rejection of inviolability. Stanner wrote in 1939 that though inviolability had long been a ‘cardinal principle’, [ 154 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

FROM A W HITE AUSTR A LI A TO A N A BOR IGINA L NEW DEA L

any ‘close scrutiny of the history of reserves would probably show that not one has gone unviolated’.63 Its value was instead largely in its performative permanence. But, by linking the reserve to the labour camp and to the city in an unbroken temporal chain, the Aboriginal New Deal postulated the ultimate end of the reserve, albeit an end located in the distant future: it would never yet be. A developmental logic loomed much larger in the Australian iteration of indirect rule than it did elsewhere. Settler colonialism contemplated an ultimately complete dominion, and the Aboriginal New Deal consequently oriented northern reserves outwards in an emphatically transformative manner. The imaginary move to new environments would mark the production of new subjects and forms of social organisation. As Elkin wrote, however well ‘adapted’ Aboriginal ‘tribes’ might have been in relation to their geographical and social environment, white settlement had effected a ‘sudden and all pervading’ change in these conditions, ‘going right to the roots of their religious and mental adjustment’. The anthropological problem of administration, as we follow the march away from its earliest beginnings, was thus whether Aboriginal people were able to work out a ‘fresh adaptation’ to the changed conditions, adjusting the ‘economic, social and spiritual life’ of native society to a new ‘geographical and social environment’.64 This government neither purported to work from a tabula rasa nor sought completely to erase Aboriginal culture. The Aboriginal New Deal referred interchangeably to ‘aboriginals in their native state’ and ‘natives in their tribal state’.65 Reserves were thus believed to contain specifically tribal communities, whose nature needed to form a part of any plan of government. Elkin wrote, for example, that efforts to force an Aboriginal transition from a hunter–gatherer economy to gardening and agricultural work would be unsuccessful until the economic system could be ‘correlated with ritual and animistic belief’. In other words, Aboriginal culture (glossed as religion) was both real and needed to be taken into account in order to effect a successful assimilation. Aboriginal tribes and their tribal cultures ‘provide[d] an important base from which the next step can be taken’.66 As Charles Rowley identified, perhaps on the basis of his knowledge and experience of Papua and New Guinea, Aboriginal institutions, ‘as instruments of assimilation …, would now be the means of processing individuals to make them acceptable in the general community’.67 The reserves of the Aboriginal New Deal were designed to perform dual and mutually reliant functions: the remote reproduction of labour, and a base from which progress towards citizenship and development would begin. This labour would, as is discussed more fully in the following chapter, be a disciplining force towards such development. In the symbolic economy instituted by the [ 155 ]

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

Aboriginal New Deal, work, as practice and as discipline, would propel Aboriginal people along the ‘long march’ to civilisation.

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Notes 1 John McEwen, ‘A New Minister and His Job: “The Pooh-Bah of the North”’, Argus (13 January 1938), p. 10. 2 ‘Our Ten Points’, Abo Call (April 1938), p. 1; Jack Horner, Vote Ferguson for Aboriginal Freedom: A Biography (Sydney: Australian and New Zealand Book Co., 1974), pp. 68–71. 3 Geoffrey Gray, ‘From Nomadism to Citizenship: A. P. Elkin and Aboriginal Advancement’, in Nicolas Peterson and Will Sanders (eds), Citizenship and Indigenous Australians: Changing Conceptions and Possibilities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 56; Stephanie Gilbert, ‘“Never Forgotten”: Pearl Gibbs (Gambanyi)’, in Anna Cole, Victoria K. Haskins, and Fiona Paisley (eds), Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal History (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005), p. 112. After this meeting, Pearl Gibbs commenced a correspondence with Enid Lyons, entreating her to lobby her husband on matters of Aboriginal administration. See Pearl Gibbs to Dame Enid Lyons, 5 March 1938, NAA: A1, 1938/4793. 4 John McEwen, ‘For Cabinet: Australian Aborigines’ League – Petition to His Majesty the King’, 1 February 1938; Cabinet Minutes, 7 February 1938; J. A. Carrodus to F. Strahan, 23 February 1938; Strahan to Cooper, 2 March 1938, NAA: A461, A300/1 PART 3. 5 Notes on the discussion are contained in Carrodus to A. P. Elkin, 3 March 1938, NAA: A452, 1952/541; Elkin to Carrodus, 7 March 1938, Elkin Papers, P130/41/621; Tigger Wise, The Self-Made Anthropologist: A Life of A.P. Elkin (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1985), pp. 143–4. See also A. P. Elkin, ‘Aboriginal Policy 1930–1950: Some Personal Associations’, Quadrant, 1:4 (1957), 30. 6 Department of the Interior, Northern Territory Visit Arrangements, 1938, NAA: A1, 1938/3592; E. W. P. Chinnery, ‘Preliminary Notes on Trip to Northern Territory’, n.d., Chinnery Papers, MS 766/8/1. 7 Geoffrey Gray, ‘“Mr Chinnery Should Be Given the Recognition He Deserves”: E.W.P. Chinnery in the Northern Territory’, Journal of Northern Territory History, 15 (2004), 24; Geoffrey Gray, ‘There Are Many Difficult Problems: Ernest William Pearson Chinnery – Government Anthropologist’, Journal of Pacific History, 38:3 (2003). 8 E. W. P. Chinnery, ‘The Application of Anthropological Methods to Tribal Development in New Guinea’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 49 (1919), 39, 41. 9 E. W. P. Chinnery, Draft Statement for 1923 Pan-Pacific Science Congress, 1923, Chinnery Papers, MS 766/13/1. 10 Elkin to Chinnery, 22 June 1938, Chinnery Papers, MSS 766/8/2; Chinnery to Elkin, n.d; Elkin to Chinnery, 5 December 1938, Elkin Papers, P130/41/84. Elkin and Chinnery kept up a voluminous correspondence through 1939 as Chinnery began the implementation of policy in Darwin. 11 Department of the Interior, Commonwealth Government’s Policy with Respect to Aboriginals (Canberra: Commonwealth Government Printer, 1939). In describing the policy as the ‘Aboriginal New Deal’, McEwen was presumably referring to John Collier’s Indian New Deal, the Wheeler–Howard (Indian Reorganization) Act which had, in 1934, implemented a form of indirect rule on Native American reservations. William Cooper had forwarded a copy of this legislation to the Commonwealth Government, suggesting that it be adapted and implemented in Australia: Cooper to Prime Minister, 4 July 1938, NAA: A1, 1938/4793. 12 John McEwen in Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 8 December 1938, pp. 2979–86. See, e.g., ‘Development of North’,

[ 156 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

FROM A W HITE AUSTR A LI A TO A N A BOR IGINA L NEW DEA L Sydney Morning Herald (9 December 1938), p. 7; ‘Policy for North’, Argus (9 December 1938), p. 3. 13 McEwen to Elkin, 2 November 1938, NAA: A1, 1938/31785. See, e.g., ‘Aborigines Branch: New Control in North’, Argus (13 December 1938), p. 1; ‘“New Deal” for Aborigines’, Sydney Morning Herald (14 December 1938) p. 18. 14 Elkin had earlier cited the planned resolutions from the Day of Mourning in introducing his 1938 call for a new Aboriginal policy for the sesquicentenary: A. P. Elkin, ‘Our Colour Problem. Plight of the Aborigines. A New Start’, Sydney Morning Herald (1 January 1938), p. 9. 15 Frederick Cooper, ‘Colonizing Time: Work Rhythms and Labor Conflict in Colonial Mombasa’, in Nicholas B. Dirks (ed), Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 225. 16 On replacement, see Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8:4 (2006), 388–9. 17 Atlee Hunt to Baldwin Spencer, 24 March 1916, quoted in Tony Austin, Never Trust a Government Man: Northern Territory Aboriginal Policy 1911–1939 (Darwin: NTU Press, 1997), p. 61. 18 J. S. Needham, White and Black in Australia (London: National Missionary Council of Australia, 1935), p. 151. 19 W. E. H. Stanner, ‘The Aborigines’, in J. C. G. Kevin (ed.), Some Australians Take Stock (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1939), p. 35. 20 Department of the Interior, Commonwealth Government’s Policy with Respect to Aboriginals, pp. 1–2. 21 Ibid., p. 2. A colonial government, as Ann Laura Stoler points out, is a ‘prolific producer of social categories’. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Commonsense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 1. 22 A. P. Elkin, Citizenship for the Aborigines: A National Aboriginal Policy (Sydney: Australasian Publishing Co., 1944), p. 28; Department of the Interior, Commonwealth Government’s Policy with Respect to Aboriginals, pp. 2, 12. 23 C. E. Cook to C. L. A. Abbott, 28, 29 April 1938, NAA: A452, 1952/541. 24 Cook to Abbott, 28 April 1938, NAA: A452, 1952/541. See, e.g., Andrew Markus, Governing Savages (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990), p. 106; Austin, Never Trust a Government Man, p. 305; Barry Hill, Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (Sydney: Knopf, 2002), p. 329. 25 Cook to Abbott, 28 April 1938, NAA: A452, 1952/541. 26 Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun, ‘The Vanishing Endpoint of Settler Colonialism’, in John Hinkson, Paul James, and Lorenzo Veracini (eds), Stolen Lands, Broken Cultures: The Settler-Colonial Present (Melbourne: Arena Publications, 2012), p. 49 (original emphasis). On narrative and policy see Faye Ginsburg and Fred Myers, ‘A History of Indigenous Futures: Accounting for Indigenous Art and Media’, Aboriginal History, 30 (2006), 97. 27 The story of this progress took form through what Tony Hughes-D’Aeth might term the ‘chronotope of settler colonialism’. Tony Hughes-D’Aeth, ‘Cooper, Cather, Prichard, “Pioneer”: The Chronotope of Settler Colonialism’, Australian Literary Studies, 31:3 (2013), www.australianliterarystudies.com.au/articles/cooper-cather-prichardpioneer-the-chronotope-of-settler-colonialism. 28 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 95–116. 29 Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Settler-colonial Landscapes and Narratives of Possession’, in Patrick Wolfe (ed.), The Settler Complex: Recuperating Binarism in Colonial Studies (Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Centre, 2016), p. 25. 30 Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 31 Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), pp. 20–3; Ursula McConnell, ‘Cape York Peninsula: The Primitive Background’, Walkabout, 2:9 (1936), 12; Jan Larbalestier, ‘“… For the Betterment of

[ 157 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES These People”: The Bleakley Report and Aboriginal Workers’, Social Analysis, 24 (1988), 26. 32 Frederic Wood Jones, Australia’s Vanishing Race (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1934), p. 37. 33 Thalia Anthony’s analysis of Australian feudalism illuminates the overlapping and coexisting relationships to land that existed on northern cattle stations, where Aboriginal communities worked for settlers in exchange for the right to remain on country. The management of these relationships and rights established the pastoral lease as a ‘locus of colonial power’. Thalia Anthony, ‘Postcolonial Feudal Hauntings of Northern Australian Cattle Stations’, Law Text Culture, 7 (2003), 298; ‘Labour Relations on Northern Cattle Stations: Feudal Exploitation and Accommodation’, The Drawing Board: An Australian Review of Public Affairs, 4:3 (2004). 34 On the importance of regularised work time to the working subjects of modern capitalism, see E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, 38:1 (1967). 35 Elizabeth Strakosch, ‘Beyond Colonial Completion: Arendt, Settler Colonialism and the End of Politics’, in Sarah Maddison, Tom Clark, and Ravi de Costa (eds), The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation: Non-Indigenous People and the Responsibility to Engage (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2016), p. 21. 36 Veracini, Settler Colonialism, p. 104; Strakosch and Macoun, ‘The Vanishing Endpoint of Settler Colonialism’. 37 Cf. Nicholas Peterson, ‘Capitalism, Culture and Land Rights: Aborigines and the State in the Northern Territory’, Social Analysis, 18 (1985), 89. 38 Annual Report of the Acting Administrator for the Year Ended 30th June 1920, Cmd. Paper No. 119, 1921, p 19; J. W. Bleakley, The Aboriginals and Half-Castes of Central Australia and North Australia, Cmd. Paper No. 21, 1929, p. 34. Both the Anglican Church Missionary Society and the Methodist Missionary Society had missions within the Arnhem Land Reserve, on the Roper River and Groote Eylandt, and on Goulburn Island, respectively. Strehlow’s appointment was, as was that of Thomson the previous year, a response to violence. See J. P. M. Long, The GoBetweens: Patrol Officers in Aboriginal Affairs Administration in the Northern Territory 1936–74 (Darwin: North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University, 1992), pp. 16–18; Hill, Broken Song, pp. 231–5. 39 Staniforth Smith, ‘Handbook of the Northern Territory’, typescript draft, 1921, NAA: A238; Perkins to Helen Baillie, 2 May 1933, Elkin Papers, P130/12/124; Abbott to Carrodus, 28 April 1938, NAA: A452, 1952/541; Department of the Interior, Commonwealth Government’s Policy with Respect to Aboriginals, p. 9. See also Elkin, Citizenship for the Aborigines, pp. 12–13. In his private correspondence, Chinnery departed from this view, writing in early 1940 to the Chairman of the Native Labour Commission at Rabaul of Aboriginal inappropriateness for work when compared with ‘the New Guinea native[.] … Since coming here my opinion of the New Guinea labourer has gone up tremendously. The New Guinea employer is extremely fortunate to have such material and if some of them could spend a short period here they would realize it.’ But such views were deemed irrelevant in setting out the purview of the new regime: the very next week Chinnery produced a report elaborating how those Aboriginal workers might be mobilised. Chinnery to Bob Melrose, 12 January 1940, Chinnery Papers, MS 766/16/6; Chinnery to Abbott, 18 January 1940, Chinnery Papers, MS 766/8/8. 40 Department of the Interior, Commonwealth Government’s Policy with Respect to Aboriginals, p. 8. 41 Cook to Weddell, 28 April 1936, NAA: F1, 1940/203. 42 Elkin to Thomas Paterson, 21 November 1934, NAA: A1, 1938/31785. 43 A. P. Elkin, ‘Anthropology and the Future of the Australian Aborigines’, Oceania, 5:1 (1934), 2–3. Here Elkin was casting himself in opposition to both Donald Thomson and to the Adelaide school of physical anthropology. The denial that reserves were akin to museums resonated with claims for indirect rule made elsewhere. Philip Mitchell wrote in 1929 to a ‘rabid socialist acquaintance’ that ‘[w]e are not going

[ 158 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

FROM A W HITE AUSTR A LI A TO A N A BOR IGINA L NEW DEA L to have any zoological gardens where black men are to be carefully fenced off to develop “on their own lines”. … But a little time is needed while we help the African to modernize his social forms and to adjust himself to the complexities which the present day involves for him.’ Philip Mitchell, African Afterthoughts (London: Hutchinson, 1954), p. 129. 44 A. N. Brown, Letter, Herald (13 January 1934), Amy Brown Papers, MS9212, 3654/1(J); Donald F. Thomson, Recommendations of Policy in Native Affairs in the Northern Territory of Australia (Canberra: Commonwealth Government Printer, 1937), p. 5. 45 John K. Noyes, ‘Nomadic Landscapes and the Colonial Frontier: The Problem of Nomadism in German South West Africa’, in Lynette Russell (ed.), Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 200–1; Geoffrey Parsons, Black Chattels: The Story of the Australian Aborigines (London: National Council for Civil Liberties, 1946), p. 46; Fred Blakeley, Hard Liberty: A Record of Experience (London: George G Harrap, 1938), p. 187. 46 Elkin, ‘Anthropology and the Future of the Australian Aborigines’, p. 16; A. P. Elkin, ‘Wanted: A Positive Aboriginal Policy’, Sydney Morning Herald (13 October 1933), p. 10; A. P. Elkin, ‘The Place of Sir Hubert Murray in Native Administration’, Australian Quarterly, 12:3 (1940), 25. 47 A. P. Elkin, ‘The Aborigines, Our National Responsibility’, Australian Quarterly, 23 (1934), 56; Elkin, ‘Anthropology and the Future of the Australian Aborigines’, p. 6; T. T. Webb, The Aborigines of East Arnhem Land, Australia (Melbourne: Methodist Laymen’s Missionary Movement, 1934), pp. 30, 36. 48 Abbott to Carrodus, 28 April 1938, NAA: A452, 1952/541. 49 Jeremy Beckett, ‘Aboriginality, Citizenship and Nation State’, Social Analysis, 24 (1988), 10; Paul B. Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1990), p. 56. 50 Recognising this, the Model State movement sent its congratulations on the new policy. Charles Duguid, President, APL to H. S. Foll, 17 June 1939, Duguid Papers, MS 5086, 1/2. 51 Berndt and Berndt, End of an Era, 31. Imagining a (future) native labour source as a ‘reservoir’ was not unique: this was the model embraced by, for example, the South African Inter–Departmental Committee on the Labour Resources of the Union: ‘The position may be likened to that of a reservoir with outlets at a certain level.’ Report of the Inter–Departmental Committee on the Labour Resources of the Union, 1930, p 23, NASA: MNW 485, MM2514/19. 52 Julie Wells, who concludes her study of Aboriginal assimilation policy by suggesting that ‘ungovernable’ Aboriginal people in reserves were then ruled as ‘wards’, points here to the nineteenth-century north American conception of wardship, whereby Indigenous sovereignties were subordinated but not necessarily completely erased. See Julie Therese Wells, ‘The Long March: Assimilation Policy and Practice in Darwin, the Northern Territory 1939–1967’ (PhD Thesis, University of Queensland, 1995), p. 235. 53 Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1922), pp. 214–15. 54 Ibid., pp. 193–4, 211. 55 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), p. 2. 56 John K. Noyes, Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa 1884–1915 (Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1992), p. 146. See also Tracey Banivanua Mar, ‘Carving Wilderness: Queensland’s National Parks and the Unsettling of Emptied Lands 1890–1910’, in Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds (eds), Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 57 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 125–6.

[ 159 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES 58 Bronislaw Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1926); Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Introduction’, in H. Ian Hogbin, Law and Order in Polynesia: A Study of Primitive Legal Institutions (London: Christophers, 1934); A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, ‘Primitive Law (1933)’, in Structure and Function in Primitive Society: Essays and Addresses (New York: The Free Press, 1952); Ronald Murray Berndt, ‘Law and Order in Aboriginal Australia’, in Ronald Murray Berndt and Catherine Helen Berndt (eds), Aboriginal Man in Australia: Essays in Honour of Emeritus Professor A.P. Elkin (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1965), p. 201; Herbert Basedow, The Australian Aboriginal (Adelaide: F. W. Preece & Sons, 1925), p. 225. 59 This assemblage was distinct from the homo religiosus Jeremy Beckett identified in the 1960s, whose land contained sacred sites not as well as but rather than hunting grounds. Jeremy Beckett, ‘The Past in the Present, the Present in the Past: Constructing a National Aboriginality’, in Jeremy Beckett (ed.), Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1988), p. 207. 60 Crown Colonist, ‘Aboriginal Policy’, Northern Standard (24 February 1939). Another columnist also identified the new system as corresponding to indirect rule: Darwin Correspondent, ‘Long Range Policy for Aborigines’, Sun (3 February 1939). 61 On the ‘denial of coevalness’, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 62 Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Stage of Modernity’, in Timothy Mitchell (ed.), Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 24. The argument in this paragraph is indebted to Mitchell’s broader suggestion on the nature of modernity. 63 W. E. H. Stanner, ‘The Aborigines’, in Kevin (ed.), Some Australians Take Stock, p. 19. 64 A. P. Elkin, The Australian Aborigines: How to Understand Them (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1938), pp. 20–1. 65 Department of the Interior, Commonwealth Government’s Policy with Respect to Aboriginals, pp. 2, 5. 66 Elkin, The Australian Aborigines, pp. 14–15. 67 C. D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1970), p. 331.

[ 160 ]

CH A P T ER SEV EN

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

The long march: work and the ends of settler colonialism

Producing citizens A long march to citizenship could be imagined in policy form, but how could Aboriginal people be compelled to cooperate, to march out of reserves and onwards to a settled modernity? This was a question Minister for the Interior John McEwen sought to answer when he delivered an address on ‘The Future of the Aboriginal’ to the Church of England Men’s Society triennial conference held at Frankston in October 1939. He outlined the Aboriginal New Deal, unveiled publicly earlier that year, describing the processes by which the new Branch of Native Affairs would act to take advantage of what he described as a fundamental racial equality. McEwen noted that there ‘was nothing inherent in the mentality or physique of the Australian aborigines that should preclude them from reaching a status equal to ourselves’, and described the ‘long march’ they would take to reach that status. But he also worried that ‘many … were being driven back to the ancient tribal customs’ rather than progressing. It would be the task of the Native Affairs Branch to remedy this situation, leaving these tribal ways in the past and substituting for them the practices of citizenship. This change would be driven by Aboriginal participation in new forms of labour. Work was more than simply a set of tasks; it was transformative, the mechanism of progress. McEwen ‘hoped it would be possible to permit native girls to become nurses, maids and stenographers, and ultimately to give educated aborigines all the advantages of Australian citizenship’.1 Responding to McEwen, Doug Nicholls of the Australian Aborigines’ League expressed an Aboriginal ‘desire … to join in the march to nationhood of the land of their forefathers, believing that a common heritage existed with the white and dark races of Australia’. He reiterated the oft-mentioned view that Aboriginal and British Australians shared a common ancestry, that Aboriginal membership [ 161 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

of the Australian nation was possible without troubling its racial unity. And he also echoed McEwen’s insistence on the ‘long march’. Aboriginal people were to ‘join in the march’, to become citizens over time as they progressed into new kinds of work.2 This chapter explores that ‘long march’ as it was envisioned in the Aboriginal New Deal, dividing Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory into four categories and linking them in a progressive narrative of becoming, a transformation from subject to citizen. At its most basic level, this marked a departure from Cecil Cook’s proposals which had foreclosed the possibility of imagining Aboriginal futures. All Aboriginal people were now to be considered ‘redeemable’ or civilisable, though, in the case of most, not yet. Where Cook contemplated the biological eradication of Aboriginality, the Aboriginal New Deal instead set out a plan for Aboriginal survival, staging their progress as a story of human evolution both in space and at the level of subjectivity. But while Aboriginal people themselves would survive, would have a future, the same could not be said for Aboriginal political society. Aboriginal futures were imagined as coming to fruition through marching out of those societies and into citizenship of the Australian nation. This march was to be effected by governing Aboriginal people at work. As discussed in the previous chapter, the Aboriginal New Deal declared that ‘semi-detribalised’ Aboriginal people and ‘Myalls or aboriginals in their native state’ should be ‘left alone and protected from the intrusion of whites’ while living ‘their ancient tribal life’. Such people could take their first steps toward citizenship by engaging in controlled contact with the buffer stations to be established around their reserves. On these buffers between ‘tribes’ and ‘civilisation’, rations and medical care would be available along with training: buffer stations would become ‘a centre from which natives could be drawn for employment and to which they could return after their period of employment had terminated’. The provision of technical and agricultural training would make each station a ‘centre of hope and refuge’, depending on the direction of approach. The reserve, behind the buffer station, was produced as the site of people whose subjectivities were incommensurable with civic government, ‘left alone’ but to be governed, as it were, in accordance with a form of indirect rule.3 Further afield, those apparently ‘fully detribalized natives’ who lived on pastoral stations would remain there. Under the new policy the conditions of Aboriginal labour would be monitored more closely by Branch of Native Affairs staff, but would remain cheap, assuring pastoralists that their super-exploitable workforce would remain.4 These communities lived in a different sphere of indirect rule: directly articulated with the pastoral economy, the station camp represented [ 162 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

WOR K A ND THE ENDS OF SET TLER COLON I A LISM

a self–regulating space which remained partially committed to an Indigenous economy. This commitment suggested a link between Aboriginal people who worked on pastoral stations and those in the reserves, a link mediated by training on buffer stations and representing to settlers both a racial solidarity and the conservation of racialised difference. And the final stages of the long march were located in towns and cities, where Cook’s practice of government as social assimilation would continue to operate and where Aboriginal people would work predominantly in the service economy.5 The long march was reflected in state practice through the bifurcation, or rather trifurcation, of the state; the dispersion of government practice producing and resolving a constellation of subjectivation. Aboriginal people in reserves, imagined as uncivilised and ungovernable by a modern state, would be subjects of their tribes, ruled by a tribal order of traditional law and custom. Aboriginal workers on pastoral stations, marked by the state as detribalised or semi–detribalised, were governed at times by the station manager, at other times by their own tribal order, and at times by both simultaneously, dependent on the season. And finally, so-called ‘half-castes’ and ‘fully detribalised’ Aboriginal people in or around urban areas were located the closest to citizenship, ruled by the modern state to membership of which they were supposed to aspire. The spatial here mapped on to the civic as a denominator of subjectivity. This chapter focuses on the way the policy represented a way of thinking about the spaces of pastoral production through the overlapping and contradictory logics of settler colonialism and indirect rule. Work was imagined as transformative, as propelling Aboriginal people out of their native societies and onwards to citizen status. But pastoral stations were simultaneously dependent on tribalised labour; the pastoral social formation rested upon an articulation of semi-autonomous Aboriginal production with pastoral production that depended, first, on the continued salience of tribal social institutions both to motivate Aboriginal work and to subsidise workers’ survival in the absence of further rations, and second, on the continued survival of Aboriginal societies elsewhere to provide the social reproduction of an Aboriginal workforce. In the ‘long march’, stations, then, were imagined as producing sameness through their dependence on the maintenance and production of difference. The Northern Territory became the site for a governmental synthesis of contradictory colonial projects, rearticulating indirect rule in an ambiguous settler colonial formation. This is a settler colonial articulation of indirect rule, in which the seeds of its own supersession were staged as immanent. The practice, though not the fulfilment, of elimination was built around the [ 163 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

exploitation of native labour. As will become clear, the narrated end was asymptotic. If specifically Aboriginal work was functionally indispensable to northern colonialism, the transformative ideological function of that work would generate its demise. Work, in other words, produced contradiction at the heart of settler colonial indirect rule, transforming workers to transcend the kind of labour for which they were required. That transformation, then, could never actually take place. Progress and Aboriginal disappearance were, instead, staged as becoming, as in process, representing a diachronic narrative of progress in a synchronic schema of time and space to produce a settler colonial articulation of the dependence on and elimination of Aboriginal people. Settler domination remained incomplete and emergent in the official mind of Australian settler colonialism as it reckoned with a compromised balance of forces that transformed economy and community. Northern settler colonialism was limited both by Aboriginal practice and by its own contradictions. The 1939 New Deal not only recognised this dependence amidst multiplicity, but it enshrined it in policy and represented it as a stage on the long march to modernity. This chapter follows the staging of this ‘long march’ in space, tracing the policy’s logic. Its object of analysis is the settler representation of pastoral stations as the middle ground of the Aboriginal New Deal, linking reserves with towns and filling the rural areas of the Northern Territory with elaborate articulations of beef production and functioning Aboriginal societies. These represented, in the policy, a move away from the reserve in both time and space, but one that would not yet erase Indigeneity. Rather, they were sites of a tempered indirect rule, as pastoral production worked through the government of ‘native societies’, conducting their social institutions to mobilise black labour. This chapter traces these processes through the intersections of rationing and kinship, then seasonal labour and walkabout. The work of government was that of articulating tribal societies with white settlement to stage the production of a replacement society through a long march with critical ideological function, but whose material failure was internal, inevitable, and integral.

Rationing kin: indirect rule and reciprocity At every stage, ‘employment’ was the narrative engine of the Aboriginal New Deal. As Aboriginal people marched off reserves, they would arrive at district or buffer stations, part of whose ‘function’ would be ‘to establish facilities for training young aboriginals in crafts suitable to their own lines of progress’. In pastoral country, the stations would provide ‘technical training in trades associated with the raising of [ 164 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

WOR K A ND THE ENDS OF SET TLER COLON I A LISM

cattle, sheep, etc., such as animal husbandry, woodwork, iron-work, leather-work, etc.’. And in agricultural country, people would be instructed ‘in the cultivation of food plants’ to ‘introduce on organised lines a new and vitally important culture into their lives’.6 Chinnery turned his attention to labour management early in his tenure, distributing a circular requesting information regarding ‘the existing condition of aboriginals – men, women and children – associated with places of employment and aboriginals living elsewhere’. With respect to ‘aboriginals associated with employment’, he asked protectors to ‘please go fully into the conditions of life of the various people affected’, covering details including ‘those connected with dependents and hangers-on’.7 The focus of native administration would, therefore, be on developing Aboriginal communities – including workers and dependants – as labour reservoirs, willing (and exploitable) labour forces on pastoral leases. This would ensure both the pastoral development of the north and Aboriginal survival. The two came to be linked. In advising Ronald and Catherine Berndt as they commenced their fieldwork on Vestey’s stations in the Northern Territory in 1944, A. P. Elkin sought to take advantage of the growing awareness that ‘the future of the Pastoral Industry in the North depends on the aborigines, on their welfare and contentment, and on their continuing to exist’. Aboriginal survival was tied to Aboriginal labour: ‘You should endeavour to keep up the supply of stockmen and other station employees. … What we are aiming at is to build up a contented aboriginal community in the regions to which they are accustomed, and around the Pastoral Industry which they like.’8 And this focus on labour would constitute the mechanism by which Aboriginal people would be propelled along the march to civilisation. The Aboriginal New Deal located Aboriginal workers variously on a continuum between enslavement and freedom, the latter constituting the modern destiny of all subjects. The horizon of emancipation rested on free labour as the triumphant outcome of progress, staging capitalism as the inevitable end of history.9 But, in the Aboriginal New Deal, this freedom could not be immediate. Aboriginal people were not yet modern, and the scope of viable labour relations did not yet encompass free labour. Instead, Aboriginal customary work was narrated as so many forms of unfreedom. Donald Thomson’s ethnographic scholarship was structured by this determining relationship between tribal subjectivity and unfree labour in a way that importantly conduced to incorporating Aboriginal societies as labour reservoirs. In his Economic Structure and the Ceremonial Exchange Cycle in Arnhem Land, published in 1949 but for which the fieldwork had been carried out in the early 1940s, Thomson set out to explore Aboriginal work. Against stereotypes of innate native indolence [ 165 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

or of a primitive communism, he wrote of a society characterised by ‘industry’, in which ‘everybody, man or woman, works hard, and that the work is well organised and runs smoothly’. In Aboriginal society, he found, ‘there is no idleness’.10 Why, Thomson asked, did they work so much? What was it that made Aboriginal people labour constantly? He began by citing texts by Bronislaw Malinowski and Raymond Firth that had established ‘primitive economics’ as a field of study. For Malinowski, the ‘efficient and hard-working’ Trobriand islanders were stimulated to work by the institution of chieftainship and their belief in magic; while personal gain was of little consequence, custom and tradition were powerful incentives to work.11 Though he noted a ‘vast gap … between the relatively advanced Papuo-Melanesian people … and the Australian aborigines’, Thomson’s analysis of Aboriginal work was similar. Aboriginal people were driven to work, he argued, by kinship obligations. Thomson cast the kinship system as one of ‘obligations and counter obligations, and even if he is content merely to discharge these to the extent necessary to maintain his prestige, a man must necessarily work hard’. Kinship relationships here were maintained by continual gift-giving obligations. These obligations, which Aboriginal people were compelled to fulfil, constituted a psychological urge or work drive that was ‘more forceful than any material urge’.12 Such obligations were the result of ceremonial networks of trade, similar to those described by Malinowski in the Trobriands as the kula or by Stanner, with respect to the Daly River region of the Territory, as merbok. In all of these, the exchange was essentially ceremonial. Economic aspects were considered, Thomson asserted, ‘to be … relatively unimportant’.13 Here Thomson drew on Marcel Mauss’s Durkheimian analysis to describe an ongoing gift economy. An unreciprocated gift was equivalent to a rejected gift, causing a breakdown of social solidarity. From this need to maintain social order, Thomson extrapolated in a manner echoing A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, came the ‘urge to carry out the exacting hard work’. The individual’s social position was a consequence of their gift-giving, a practice which induced in the recipient an ‘obligation’ to ‘reciprocate with a gift of at least equal, or if possible greater value, in order to maintain his social status and to enhance his prestige’. The sanction for a failure to ‘meet the obligations imposed, for example by the kinship pattern’, included the loss of ‘face, prestige, in his group’. The avoidance of shame and the acquisition of prestige thus ‘furnishes one of the most powerful mechanisms which underlie the production of food and goods, and the circulation of these’.14 With this analysis, Thomson refurbished Radcliffe-Brown’s model of the horde to incorporate Aboriginal production, or at least the [ 166 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

WOR K A ND THE ENDS OF SET TLER COLON I A LISM

pragmatic existence of Aboriginal people. He linked Aboriginal social organisation with economic organisation. This model theorised the articulation of Aboriginal societies with cattle-station economies, the northern Australian incarnation of capitalism. Thomson’s model enabled a particular resolution to what pastoralists spoke of as the problem of indolence. His question – what makes Aboriginal people work? – had been and continued to be asked by pastoralists. And his answer – kinship obligations – suggested that in order to extract Aboriginal labour sustainably, those pastoralists needed to mobilise kinship structures. The exchange of gifts which structured kinship solidarity represented the transfer of a surplus accumulated purely for the purpose of that exchange. To direct Kiriwinian labour, Malinowski had written, the ‘white man’ should note that ‘tribal standards’ or ‘ambitions and values also dictated by custom and tradition’ were the only ‘effective incentive’.15 Similarly, in the Northern Territory, the task facing pastoralists emerged as one of realigning Aboriginal gift economies such that Aboriginal work would not produce objects to be exchanged within a community but would rather fit into the chain of work tasks on a cattle station. This settler colonial logic of Indigenous labour extraction was encapsulated in an emergent narrative in which pastoralists mobilised relations of reciprocity, granting rations in exchange for an obligation for work.16 Matt Savage, a drover in the Northern Territory in the first half of the twentieth century, reported that Aboriginal people’s ‘frequent generosity has an edge of calculation behind it. When you receive a present from a black you must always give him something in return.’ For pastoralists, the Aboriginal worker was ‘not a machine, but a human being working for an employer’.17 But they appeared to settlers concerned with pastoral production as particular types of human beings; racialised and tribalised in ways conducive to forms of exploitation that harnessed ‘native society’ to beef production. Relational reciprocity, rather than wages, was narrated as their imperative to work. Kinship emerged as the basis of Australian native society. Maine had described kinship as the basis of primitive society, as the central conceptual principle of a primitive politics which structured all social relationships.18 Thomson’s work linked these relationships to gift economies, organising kinship around production and trade. In Australia, this principle of native society was thus understood to indicate that tribalised kinship groups could conceivably be articulated with settler production. Governing the tribe, then, turned on the conduction of kinship. When, for example, Aeneas Gunn, part-owner and manager of Elsey Station in 1902–3, became known as the Maluka, a Djingulu word for ‘old man’ or ‘person in charge’, he meant to insinuate himself [ 167 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

as station owner into the kinship system of the ‘native society’ on his station. Ivor Paine, who managed the same station in the 1950s, reported that Aboriginal people ‘recognise one boss the same as a king of a tribe’. The task of the head stockman, then, was to take that tribal role.19 This instituted a collective relationality, one that established a mutual dependence amidst settler colonial deprivation. And pastoralists often professed to view black labour as an aspect of the syncretic relationship enacted between themselves and the Aboriginal community camped at their station, in which the tribe’s labour was part of a pastoral exchange that also featured rations and the right to live on the land. In 1930 the Northern Territory Pastoral Lessees’ Association (NTPLA) argued that ‘in considering the question of remuneration for aborigines employed on stations, due consideration must be given to the extent to which these stations are accustomed to feeding indigent aborigines and the relations of the aboriginal employees’. They sought to frame the issue less as a question of paying wages to individual workers than as regulating a relationship between the station manager and an Aboriginal community, the collective ‘native society’ exchanging work for upkeep.20 Such was later made apparent at the 1965 hearings into the payment of award wages to all labourers on pastoral stations. The station managers called as witnesses – and no Aboriginal workers were called to respond to claims, nor to put forward their own understanding of the relationship – described a bond between owner/manager and workers that incorporated an assemblage of non–economic elements they cast as originating within Aboriginal custom. They noted Aboriginal people’s ‘attachment’ to the land, and a relation of reciprocity between themselves and the camp. When asked whether he believed that Aboriginal workers thought of themselves as ‘working’ for him, Tony Chisholm of Anningie Station in Central Australia replied: —I don’t think so. I think their feelings are more that they are giving me a hand. —Do they use that phrase? —Yes they do. I have heard them. If you go down and say, ‘I want four men to come up and start work on a muster’, they say, ‘Come on, you fellas, you have to give a hand to the boss.’21

Pastoralists imagined their enterprise as articulating an Aboriginal camp containing a tribe, a social unit whose customary relationship to the land and need for subsistence resources rendered workers available in exchange for the provision of rations and being allowed to remain on that land. [ 168 ]

WOR K A ND THE ENDS OF SET TLER COLON I A LISM

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Rations were an economic technique for constituting this relationship between the white pastoralist and the ‘native society’. Speaking on behalf of pastoralists at a 1930 conference, W. H. Grant explained that providing rations rather than wages underpinned tribal presence on country: I know that on the Stations the policy is to employ as many of these blacks [who belong to that country] as possible. I have here a list of blacks employed on Wave Hill which shows 64 aboriginals employed by the Station. They are employed in all sorts of capacities; stock boys, cow tailers etc. Against those 64 there is a lot of dependents. They run into a total of 107. If they had to be paid only the number actually required would be employed and the others would swell the number of unemployed.

The Territory Administration encouraged pastoralists ‘to ration their employees and their dependents and … to employ more blacks than they want. If we require them to pay these aboriginals they will say we don’t want this one and that one and will send them away from the Stations.’22 The term ‘dependents’ here designated the members of a tribe or kinship body. As V. G. Carrington, Chinnery’s deputy, reported in 1945, ‘dependants might be regarded as the whole of the people who in tribal law be regarded to look to the young and strong of the tribe to support them’.23 The station camp was, then, conceptualised as a traditional community, constituted by tribal customs and structures. Where cash wages would have led to an accounting of individual productivity, efficiency, and necessity, in pastoralists’ conception of the employment relationship rationing allowed the Aboriginal community to exist as a tribe. Tim Rowse has argued that, as well as its function in providing subsistence resources, rationing was important as a ‘site of representations’.24 Rationing the tribe, including ‘dependants’, both constituted and responded to a collective subject, to ‘native society’. Pastoralists regularly stressed the importance of rationing the tribe rather than paying wages to an individual worker as a way of governing labour as a collective enterprise rather than individual wage-labourers. Rations both constituted and responded to that collective subject, signifying ‘the value of labour in terms of the value of relationships rather than the value of money’. As Rowse pointed out, pastoralists had a material interest in preventing any increase of monetary wages owed to Aboriginal workers. But they more importantly ‘argued from perspectives grounded in the specific conditions in which Aborigines became visible to them, as recipients of rations and as occasional workers’.25 We ought, though, [ 169 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

to add that pastoralists were in fact aware that Aboriginal people were more than merely ‘occasional workers’: while they may not have used the term ‘work’ to characterise Aboriginal production, they knew that what they might term hunting, gathering, or foraging were constant Aboriginal practices, practices on which their production relied. The relationship between employer and worker on northern cattle stations was thus not that of the exploitation of abstract labour by capital, but rather a much more involved form of exchange relationship, whose meaning was entirely contestable.26 Elkin was later to portray this arrangement as a balance of forces, of the Aboriginal ‘horde’ – the ‘real master of … workers’ – and the pastoralist adapting to each other as Aboriginal people reached a stage of what he termed ‘intelligent parasitism’.27 This ‘traditionally’ constituted horde or, more popularly, tribe was the subject of indirect rule. Pastoral development, in this reading, did not expand to destroy native societies; it consumed them, relying on their production. The Aboriginal New Deal embraced this tribalised, and thoroughly racialised, narration of the organisation of labour on pastoral stations. Black labour could not (yet) be seen as free, as a commodity to be bought and sold in a marketplace. But it was usable, in the words of Les Penhall, a patrol officer in Central Australia in the late 1940s, as ‘a mutual agreement type of thing’, as part of an exchange. And the subjects of that exchange were, on one side at least, collective: pastoral stations governed a native society, not individual workers.28 The meaning of this exchange remained contested. Rowse concurs with Elkin in arguing that we find ‘no necessary congruity of orientations among the parties to this most mundane of cross-cultural relationships’. These relationships were the effect of ‘a complementarity of interests that did not amount to a cultural convergence’.29 In some parts of the Northern Territory, Aboriginal people represented the station community as the product of ‘station time’, a stage that had important continuities with, but was distinct from, a pre-invasion community, or a community of other overlapping phases of invasion, variously named ‘wild time’ or ‘welfare time’. These were new articulations. Many communities were underpinned by a group who insisted on remaining, if they could, on their own country. And they would also comprise Aboriginal refugees from elsewhere, people who had fled regimes of terror in their own country in the hope of finding pastoralism a lesser threat. The practice of resource distribution amongst residents of the camp was a practice of community, constituting relationships through exchange. This was the work of relationships in a new context, one that incorporated the provision of rations. For pastoralists, on the other hand, these kinds of dynamic and modern articulations of [ 170 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

WOR K A ND THE ENDS OF SET TLER COLON I A LISM

Indigenous communities were almost inconceivable. If ‘native society’ was to be representable as fragile and endangered rather than robust and adaptable, swept up by modernity rather than negotiating change to invent and make local futures, it must at all times be tied down to an unchanging traditional past. When pastoralists witnessed that, in the station camp, ‘[e]verything … was shared quite freely’, they turned to the ethnographic construct of the tribe, whether intact or in various states of breakdown, for a grid of intelligibility.30 They conceptualised their relationship with the station camp as one between land-managing bosses and a community wedded to its tradition, disrupting Aboriginal temporalities and replacing them with linear progress. Other historians have hinted at, or speculated upon, entirely different Aboriginal interpretations of pastoral colonialism. Many Aboriginal stockmen and women may well have considered themselves, for example, to be establishing relationships with managers beneficial to themselves and their communities, drawing settlers into webs of obligation and reciprocity that produced Indigenous entitlements.31 In this context, pastoralists’ projections of control, and their assumption that they were harnessing Aboriginal societies to settler development rather than the other way around, was an exercise of narrative mastery over both people and space. The struggle to impress meaning on the relationship of exchange attended the struggle over the land itself. Settlers were very much aware of the utility of a tentative embrace of  Aboriginal narratives and ideologies – what Nicholas Thomas has described as ‘the fabrication of shared meanings’ – but resisted their dominance. Pastoralists offered rations in exchange for Aboriginal work; they did not consider them owed to Aboriginal owners for settlers’ use of and presence on the land.32 Rationing, for pastoralists, remained a technique of colonial government integral to the establishment of indirect rule. This is indirect rule in the sense set out by Hubert Murray who, in situating his government of Papua as an object lesson for Aboriginal native administration, described his response to a smallpox scare in 1915: We wanted the natives to consent to vaccination, so we told them that there was a very powerful and dangerous sorcerer in the West – that was the quarter from which the smallpox was expected – and that this sorcerer had made a very bad sickness, which he might bring along at any moment. But, though the sorcerer was strong, the government was stronger, and would protect all those who claimed its protection; a mark would be put upon the arm of those who trusted themselves to the government, and the sorcerer, when he came, would see the government mark, and would retire foiled and baffled to his home in the West. This was sailing pretty close to the wind, but it was Indirect Rule all right, and, furthermore, we were successful beyond our wildest dreams.33

[ 171 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

Here Murray was thinking perhaps of Lugard’s suggestion that ‘Where new ideas are to be presented to the native mind, patient explanation of the objects in view will be well rewarded, and new methods may often be clothed in a familiar garb.’34 What Murray effected here was the co-option of Indigenous narratives into the governmentality of the colonial state, rather than (in fact, as well as) the co-option of Indigenous chiefs or political systems. Indirect rule, it will be recalled, represented a repertoire of governmental techniques for articulating colonising and native modes of production, a way of managing and ordering the relationship between what were imagined as colonial and native societies. In the case of the Northern Territory, the social formation was constituted by the articulation of settler and Aboriginal production that appears distinct from the articulations found in Fiji or Nigeria: in the Territory ‘native society’ would provide neither raw materials or commodities for trade. Instead, ‘native society’ would provide the means of reproduction of labour, a contribution integral to the sustainable functioning of northern pastoralism. This reliance, in turn, generated a settler capitalist interest in providing the conditions for continuing Aboriginal survival and social life, for the preservation and reiteration of Aboriginal society. Indirect rule furnished a political rationality that made sense of this colonial social formation; it provided terms of analysis and knowledge alongside techniques for managing the articulation. And in considering the station camp as a traditional society, pastoralists embraced this political rationality, finding utility in the function of anthropologically defined Aboriginal constructions of the relationships between people. The accuracy of such models is not necessarily important here. Their elaboration was performative rather than descriptive. Impressing meaning on stories of rationing and labour was central to the fight for supremacy on the stations of the Territory, and the synthesis established by pastoralists solidified their dominion. They expressed their practice as working through ‘native society’ but articulating it with a dominant pastoralism, a narration which concealed the destructive effects of labour exploitation. All vestiges of the frenzy of acquisition, the anxiety of lawful sovereignty, and the brutality of work-discipline were consigned to a space beyond the stage of historical progress. To move off the reserve and on to the pastoral station was imagined here as a move from a wilderness to a controlled rural environment.35 Such motion would consequently remake Aboriginal people’s relationships to space and time in a way conducive to a progress that took form through the process of becoming regularised, obedient, and purposeful workers. Purposeful, dominant action in space was linked to a mastery of time, to historical progress. Work carried out within [ 172 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

WOR K A ND THE ENDS OF SET TLER COLON I A LISM

the tribe, on the reserve and in an imagined wilderness, signified inefficiency and a failure to dominate nature. The work that Aboriginal people would do on cattle stations, on the other hand, may have been performed in ways consistent with what was considered by pastoralists and administrators as tribal law and custom, discursively constituted as a form of unfreedom and as an element of an incarnation of indirect rule, but it would be performed under the direction and management of station managers and white stockmen. Aboriginal people would work at the will and direction of white people, being disciplined in the efficient and purposive use of time. This disciplining effect rendered station work discursively distinct from work in unarticulated Aboriginal modes of production. Even the continual industry and occupation that Thomson described above could be taken as indicia of timelessness, of a failure to apportion regular times for work, leisure, and rest. In this incessant present, Aboriginal people could not plan for tomorrow, they could not progress, they could not have a future. It was their movement forward from reserve to station that provided them, in the imagination of the Aboriginal New Deal, with the possibility of progress and therefore survival in a new settler colonial world. The partial transformation of modes of work was, as discussed in Chapter 2, an element of a Lugardian governmentality. Lugard’s progressivist condemnation of slavery, which he believed he shared with all ‘thinking men’, was based on two critiques. First, the acquisition of slaves required slave-raids and violent processes of transportation, resulting ‘not only in much human suffering, but also in a decrease of the population, and consequently in a decrease of the productive capacity of the country’. Second, he suggested, ‘no people can ever progress if personal initiative and personal responsibility is denied to them’. Slavery may well have been ‘an institution well suited to the African’, but that ‘existing slaves may be happy in their lot is not argument to the mind of any one who aims at the progress of the race in a remote future’. As Frederick Cooper points out, in encouraging an end to slavery Lugard was not acting to make slaves happier, he was enforcing a progressive – here characterised as efficient and liberating – work discipline.36 The importance of this discourse lay in its linkage of the relations of production and progress, constituting slave relations as unfreedom and hence as anachronism, a concomitant of its narration of the inevitability of progress towards freedom. But the move away from slavery was, for Lugard, one that needed to be made slowly through various stages towards an idealised ‘modern’ future. A British Parliamentary Committee in 1931 declared the purpose of colonial rule as ‘utilising the native root stock of tribal organisation and tradition in order to secure a healthy and vigorous development [ 173 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

of political responsibility’. This was also the subject of Lugard’s successor Donald Cameron’s progressive project ‘to graft our higher civilization upon the soundly rooted native stock, stock that had its foundations in the hearts and minds and therefore on which we can build more easily, moulding it and establishing it into lines consonant with modern ideas and higher standards, and yet all the time enlisting the real force of the spirit of the people, instead of killing all that out and trying to start afresh’.37 In Australia, northern pastoral production was itself based on what might be termed an ‘Aboriginal stock’ that was to be subjected to the progressive influence of labour. For Margery Perham, perhaps Lugard’s greatest advocate, ‘the main idea behind indirect rule is to train tribal organization into the new forms required for modern conditions’. In her account, ‘the preservation of native law and custom is not an end in itself but a transitional stage by means of which Africans may in their own right become members of the civilized world, not as individuals, but as communities’. The subject of indirect rule was the tribe, the native society. And the object was its improvement, its civilisation and consequent entry into modernity without fear of dissolution and disorder.38 Similarly, the Aboriginal New Deal did not envision an immediate move from tradition to modernity. Rationing the camp, rather than paying individual workers, was a way of treating the northern station camp as a single, barely divisible, tribal body which regulated distribution by custom and provided customary labour. This ensured a continuing Aboriginal sociality along the stages of the long march.39

Rationing time: work and walkabout Rations were always too short to enable communal survival, inducing Aboriginal communities to supplement with planting and foraging, if not – and, for pastoralists, preferably not – hunting. Gordon Sweeney, the patrol officer based in Alice Springs, reported in 1944 that stations ‘require stockboys, but many dependants are expensive to maintain adequately … . The stations are generally unable or unwilling to bear the full responsibility for the dependant women and children and old people on their stations.’ The manager at Wave Hill Station justified the regular shortfall by writing that though the rations provided contained no vegetables, Aboriginal people ‘have, in their native state, always eaten certain root crops… [which] they continue to obtain’. He imagined Aboriginal food production as a subsidy to rations enabling a diet that would ideally, though not in practice, prevent malnutrition. In 1951, a Commonwealth dietary survey of the Territory found that supplementation of rations by Indigenous foods was not sufficient to [ 174 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

WOR K A ND THE ENDS OF SET TLER COLON I A LISM

bring Aboriginal stockworkers’ diets up to a subsistence level. These foods were not, and had not been for many years, a ‘significant’ food source.40 Though much time was spent producing Indigenous foods during work times, the principal time of Aboriginal production was the annual ‘walkabout’. While some have explored walkabout as Aboriginal resistance, here I trace the way the practice came to be inscribed within the north Australian logic of labour extraction, how it was narrated as an element of the pastoral economy.41 From the earliest establishment of cattle stations, the Aboriginal workforce would, at times, walk off the job. This was both an individual or collective practice which could be read variously as a strike, as the performance of ceremonial responsibilities, as creating time and space for other communal work, or as another practice altogether. In this sense, it was an instance of everyday resistance, denying employers the capacity to control Aboriginal lives and refusing the imposition of an obligation to respond to command. The walkabout or ‘holiday time’ could be considered a period of Indigenous autonomy. Minoru Hokari reported Gurindji historians describing it as a time of communicating with country, practising cultural economy. Living on ‘bush tucker’ was, then, not simply an effect of the shortfall in rations: it was also an elective practice, the result of Aboriginal insistence, carving out time in the yearly cycle for autonomy and continuity.42 It inflected the annual cycle and was a time of Aboriginal sociability. But in naming this practice ‘walkabout’ it was sedimented with meaning beyond that which it had for the protagonists themselves. Here I am interested in the pastoral, administrative, and popular discourses of walkabout that came to be incorporated into the Northern Territory’s pastoral mode of production. This was an institution that was an effect of Aboriginal practice but that, in being named walkabout, was contained within a colonial framing. The critical question here is not one of determining causation, of adjudicating whether the annual practice was primarily an effect of Indigenous deprivation or of Indigenous autonomy. It concerns, rather, the effect of describing the institution as walkabout. However it functioned for Aboriginal people, naming it a walkabout tended to place it in a natural, rather than political, realm of action. Withdrawing labour, particularly in a non-declaratory and un-unionised manner, was not considered the practice of a disciplined, regularised workforce, and was pathologised popularly and by both employers and anthropologists. Bleakley described the nomadic practice of walkabout as a ‘blood call’, which could not be resisted. The popular Walkabout magazine carried as its byline: ‘The title has an “age-old” background, and signifies a racial characteristic of the Australian aboriginal who is always on [ 175 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

the move.’ Warner wrote of more psychological drives to roam, discussing the ‘uncontrollable desire “to take a walk about,” chiefly under the compulsion of movement from place to place but also because of love for homeland and native culture. The desire to go to other places is forever present in the mental constitution of a black’s behaviour.’ These accounts located the walkabout as a racial practice of Aboriginality, as inevitability.43 Walkabout, then, was understood by many white settlers as compulsive rather than purposeful. In Bill Harney’s glorifying account, it was the practice of atavism. He defined walkabout as ‘wandering aimlessly around and living as one wishes to live’, denoting a precapitalist mode of existence that was characterised by lives that consisted of ‘[w]alkabout a little, then work again … an endless round’. It was thus, in Harney’s popular discourse, a signifier of both the lack of purposive action and a timelessness, or cyclical time, that inhibited progress. Unregulated, this innate nomadism would inhibit the efficiency of a cattle station. As W. H. Grant, speaking on behalf of the NTPLA, complained in 1928: while black workers were ‘useful’, their ‘habit of “going bush” or on a “walkabout” as it is called, when they feel that way affects, of course, their dependability’.44 But it was something pastoralists felt they had to accommodate. Alex Kerr, who ran sheep on Delny Station in Central Australia, recalled being advised by another pastoralist to ‘give in’ once the ‘walkabout urge was beginning to be apparent. “Let him go, no matter how inconvenient; if you don’t, it will be a damn sight more inconvenient for you directly.”’45 Conceived as both counterproductive and incorrigible, the way pastoralists sought to manage the practice they saw as walkabout is instructive. Given the seasonal climate of the Northern Territory, with its long wet season in which station work was limited, it was impractical for pastoralists to employ their full workforce all year round. Though those who worked in the station homestead were required whatever the season, and were sometimes kept from the long walkabout, the rest of the camp was given rations and sent off to fend for themselves in the down time until they were required again in the dry.46 This, it was intended, would fulfil the need for walkabout in a way that complemented, rather than frustrated, pastoral production. The North Australian Workers’ Union characterised it as seasonal employment, of laying off workers when there was no work to do. Robert Toupein spoke at a 1930 conference of ‘cheap labour that they can call up and turn loose when they like’. Pastoralists, on the other hand, described themselves as accommodating Aboriginal communal needs. At that same conference, questioned by unionist Owen Rowe who noted that ‘[i]f the work was there they would not get their walkabout’, Alfred [ 176 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

WOR K A ND THE ENDS OF SET TLER COLON I A LISM

Martin of the NTPLA claimed that ‘[t]hey must have their walk-about whether the work is there or not’.47 But this accommodation was contingent, and pastoralists’ support was always insufficient. The rations transferred at the beginning of walkabout time were unfailingly inadequate, and pastoralists expected their workers to support themselves by hunting for native animals and foraging. Walkabout for many, including Elkin, meant ‘living off the country’.48 This meant, in pastoralists’ logic, that it was Aboriginal production which would support the Aboriginal people from which they took their labour; that pastoralism was openly dependent on the subsidy of a foraging mode of production. The transition between ways of life was symbolised by discarding and returning to clothing; Aboriginal workers had their clothes taken by station managers to be kept over the walkabout/off season. Matt Savage described workers returning to the station from their walkabout of ‘living in the manner of their ancestors’, where the white staff would ‘throw each man a pair of boots, a shirt and trousers’.49 But by the 1930s Aboriginal production was no longer a realistic subsistence practice, producing the crisis explored in detail in Chapter 3. As Rowe reported, ‘I think most station employers will agree with me that after their walk-about they come back considerably leaner than they were when they went away.’ Similarly, one station manager later noted that ‘at the end of “walkabout” it is a pretty miserable bunch of “blackfellas” we get back’.50 This was, in part, the point: Aboriginal workers would return to the station after the wet knowing that they would be provided with the rations that might enable their survival. The arrangement whereby Aboriginal people went on an annual ‘walkabout’, for a few months rather than more regularly and, in the minds of pastoralists, sporadically and unpredictably, was a technique designed to maximise production and minimise cost. When Aboriginal people unilaterally walked off the job during the work season, it was usually treated as desertion and they were brought back by force. Employers instead came to agreements with their workforce to ‘permit’ lengthy breaks that spanned the wet season. Did Smith, who ran Mount Allan Station in central Australia from the late 1940s, described the standard practice of dealing with a new Aboriginal workforce: They’d just go off any time to have a corroboree, you know, in the middle of when we were mustering and so forth. So I tried to convince them that we were running a cattle station and all during the cool weather we had to do the stock work etcetera; autumn and spring we maintained everything; in the summer we took things as easy as we could, and just looked after the bores and that sort of thing.

[ 177 ]

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Around, say, December, Christmas time, they could all go and have their young man corroborees and ceremonies, etcetera, which didn’t take long. And they all agreed to that, and that’s how they operated. So with their ceremonies, etcetera, they worked in with the operation of the property.51

Ann McGrath describes this as the ‘compromise of the off-season holiday’, as it required the movement of ceremonial practice from the dry to the wet season, and the institutionalisation of a bush economy and ceremonial season. Elizabeth Povinelli, on the other hand, writes of a more coercive regime of institutionalising the walkabout: ‘Aborigines were kept from “going bush” during enforced labor periods’ and ‘compelled to “go bush” after a season of work’.52 But contestation over the timing of work, embodied in the struggle over the meaning of walkabout, was long-lasting, not determined by the pastoralists’ determination to regulate their workforce. Theirs was a discipline never complete, as Aboriginal workers, both individually or in small numbers, or as a collective, continued to walk off in ways that frustrated pastoralists’ monopoly on the public narration of experience. This institution of the walkabout represents an articulation of Aboriginal and settler worlds, economies, and social institutions that is specific to the time and place; it is characteristic of the pastoral Northern Territory of the pre-equal wages era. It was an accommodation that was, then, both particular and general, established between pastoral managers and Aboriginal people, but also structured by a colonial mentality that made the society and practices of the latter legible to the former. It reflected the division of Aboriginal labour between two articulated modes of production, constituting a social formation in which autonomous Aboriginal production would provide the basis for a reproducing Aboriginal community that could furnish pastoralists with workers. Aboriginal production, whether in the camp all year round or in the annual walkabout time, was a necessary subsidy to the pastoral industry. And pastoralists spoke of themselves as mobilising that Aboriginal production by governing it through conducting Aboriginal customs. Using rations as economic stimulus, they laid off workers in seasonal employment and generated a subsistence shortfall rendering Aboriginal production necessary. They created a domain within the pastoral work rhythm for Aboriginal cultural practice which was felt to enable the continued existence of Aboriginal communities and economies. This particular articulation did have specific exploitative functions in relation to the enrichment of cattle-station owners, but its character cannot be wholly deduced from the study of those functions: it was, rather, the outcome of struggles and negotiations between different peoples with different historical powers and roles. For Aboriginal people, [ 178 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

WOR K A ND THE ENDS OF SET TLER COLON I A LISM

the walkabout may have been narrated as a practice of resistance or autonomy. Settlers’ struggle was instead to encapsulate it within a logic of indirect rule. Settlers were pushed to accommodate Aboriginal social practice but also ideologically embraced an ethic of incorporation rather than eradication, narrating their articulation of the walkabout with pastoral production as an effect of their wilful (partial) transformation of native society. By institutionalising walkabout as an annual practice, pastoralists regulated time, ordering alternating periods when labour time was owed to, and efficiently spent by, the employer, with periods where time was passed and regulated by Aboriginal people themselves.53 They resolved walking off into a long march. This established the domain of the so-called semi–detribalised Aboriginal class, one that was constitutively both tribal and not, self-determining and ordered by settler capitalism. This interstitial status marked the incompleteness of assimilation, the mid-point of the long march from the reserve to the town, from nomadic wandering to a settled productivity, from subject to citizen. But a language of native society, of race and custom, and of detribalisation both failed to encapsulate the meaning of the articulation and established a narrative contradiction at the heart of the social formation. Walkabout was not a temporary accommodation; it was structurally integral to the pastoral social formation. At the same time, stations were situated in the long march as producers not only of beef, but also progressive and advancing Aboriginal communities. Transcending the walkabout, becoming detribalised citizens rather than tribal members of native societies, would render pastoral enterprises liable for the full cost of the reproduction of their workforce. The burden of paying workers was not one pastoralists were willing to assume.54 The language of detribalisation was a key element of the progressive narrative that would see Aboriginal people march out of the reserves onto to stations and then towns, a march from native society to citizenship. Despite this narration, Aboriginal people would never yet be acclaimed as ready to march on. For settlers in 1939, a future of Aboriginal modernity remained premature.

Notes 1 ‘Welfare of Aborigines: Government Action’, Age (23 October 1939), p. 10. 2 ‘Treatment of Aboriginals: Britain Inconsistent, says Doug Nicholls’, Standard (27 October 1939), p. 2. 3 Department of the Interior, Commonwealth Government’s Policy with Respect to Aboriginals (Canberra: Commonwealth Government Printer, 1939), pp. 5–8. 4 Ibid., pp. 4–5. 5 In towns and cities, and for ‘half-castes’, the Aboriginal New Deal maintained the ‘civilising’ project devised by Cook. It embraced vocational training towards

[ 179 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES productivity and citizenship in the Darwin compound, and suggested training ‘half-castes’ for basic work tasks. As Tony Austin has pointed out, even the most radical of southern white humanitarian groups pressed for extreme state control over the lives of northern ‘half-castes’. The Australians for the Protection of Native Races, for example, agreed that the ‘half–caste problem’ constituted a ‘menace to the whole of Australia’, and the Victorian Aboriginal Group considered that their ‘absorption into the white race’ was an ‘enlightened policy’: they should be educated to take their place in the community. Ibid., pp. 5, 9–10; ‘Training Half-Castes. Minister Announced New Type of Schools in the North’, Herald (16 March 1939), NAA: A452, 1952/541; E. W. P. Chinnery, ‘Problems of the Part Aboriginal (Half-Caste) Population’, 1940, p. 9, Chinnery Papers, MS 766/8/4; Tony Austin, I Can Picture the Old Home So Clearly: The Commonwealth and ‘Half-Caste’ Youth in the Northern Territory 1911–1939 (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1993), p. 210; APNR, ‘The Half–Caste Problem’, The Aborigines Protector, 1:1 (1935), 1; Victorian Aboriginal Group, Notes on Proposals for suggested Petition to Commonwealth Government, c1934, Amy Brown Papers, MS9212, 3655/1a; A. N. Brown, ‘The Australian Aboriginal’, The Melbourne Girl, 1 August 1933, p. 5, Amy Brown Papers, MS9212, 3654/1(J). 6 Department of the Interior, Commonwealth Government’s Policy with Respect to Aboriginals, pp. 7–8. 7 E. W. P. Chinnery to T. G. H. Strehlow, 20 May 1939, NAA: F126, 22. 8 A. P. Elkin to R. M. Berndt and C. H, Berndt, 30 May 1944, quoted in Ronald Murray Berndt and Catherine Helen Berndt, End of an Era: Aboriginal Labour in the Northern Territory (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1987), p. 32. See also Ronald M. Berndt, ‘The Changing Face of Aboriginal Studies: Some Personal Glimpses’, in Grant McCall (ed.), Anthropology in Australia: Essays to Honour 50 Years of Mankind (Sydney: Anthropological Society of New South Wales, 1982), pp. 51–4. 9 Gyan Prakash, ‘Colonialism, Capitalism and the Discourse of Freedom’, in Shahid Amin and Marcel van der Linden (eds), ‘Peripheral’ Labour? Studies in the History of Partial Proletarianization (Cambridge: Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 1997), p. 10. 10 Donald F. Thomson, Economic Structure and the Ceremonial Exchange Cycle in Arnhem Land (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1949), pp. 33–4. 11 Ibid., pp. 1, 8; Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘The Primitive Economics of the Trobriand Islanders’, Economic Journal, 31:121 (1921), 2, 6, 13; Raymond Firth, Primitive Economics of the New Zealand Maori (London: G. Routledge, 1929). 12 Thomson, Economic Structure and the Ceremonial Exchange Cycle in Arnhem Land, pp. 8, 35, 38–9. 13 Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978 [1922]); W. E. H. Stanner, ‘Ceremonial Economics of the Mulluk Mulluk and Madngella Tribes of the Daly River, North Australia. A Preliminary Paper’, Oceania, 4:2, 4 (1933/4); Thomson, Economic Structure and the Ceremonial Exchange Cycle in Arnhem Land, p. 53. See also A. P. Elkin, ‘Anthropology and the Future of the Australian Aborigines’, Oceania, 5:1 (1934), 12. It is worth noting that this was specifically conceptualised as an exchange of labour, rather than as a tribute owed to a chief. This attribute of a ‘kinship’ society distinguished Aboriginal production from that of many of the differently stratified communities in British Africa. Thomson’s model resembled that which Emmanuel Terray was later to describe as the lineage mode of production. Terray’s analysis was indebted, among other influences, to Warner’s work on the Murngin. See Emmanuel Terray, Marxism and ‘Primitive’ Societies: Two Studies (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), pp. 137–56. 14 Thomson, Economic Structure and the Ceremonial Exchange Cycle in Arnhem Land, pp. 43–4; Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 1990 [1923]). Cf. Marcia Langton, Odette

[ 180 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

WOR K A ND THE ENDS OF SET TLER COLON I A LISM Mazel, and Lisa Palmer’s critique of the reduction of northern Aboriginal social and economic relations of trade into mere gift exchange in native title determinations of the late 1990s, in opposition to which they position Thomson’s work: Marcia Langton, Odette Mazel, and Lisa Palmer, ‘The “Spirit” of the Thing: The Boundaries of Aboriginal Economic Relations at Australian Common Law’, Australian Journal of Anthropology, 17:3 (2006). 15 Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, p. 156. 16 Jeff Collman, Fringe-Dwellers and Welfare: The Aboriginal Response to Bureaucracy (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1988), p. 247. 17 Keith Willey and Matt Savage, Boss Drover (Adelaide: Rigby, 1977), p. 100; North Australian Industrial Union v J A Ambrose and Others (1924) 20 CAR 507, 516 (Justice Powers). 18 Karuna Mantena, Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 78–9. For Warner, who staged his fieldwork in a similar area to Thomson, the ‘fundamental basis of the society is an elaborate kinship system’, upon which ‘the whole of the social organization is built’. W. Lloyd Warner, A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe (New York: Harper & Bros, 1937), pp. 4, 7. 19 Jeannie Gunn, We of the Never-Never (London: Hutchinson, 1907); Walter Baldwin Spencer, Native Tribes of the Northern Territory of Australia (London: Macmillan, 1914), p. 85; Robert M. W. Dixon, Australian Aboriginal Words in English: Their Origin and Meaning (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 2006), p. 169; Ivor Paine, 1965, quoted in Tim Rowse, White Flour, White Power: From Rations to Citizenship in Central Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 125. 20 Recommendations for the Progressive Development of the Northern Territory, To be Submitted by the Northern Territory Pastoral Lessees Asscn to the Honorable, Arthur Blakely, Minister for Home Affairs, at Canberra on Thursday 27th March, 1930, NAA: A1, 1938/329. 21 Tony Chisholm, 1965, quoted in Tim Rowse, ‘Rationing’s Moral Economy’, in Tony Austin and Suzanne Parry (eds), Connection and Disconnection: Encounters between Settlers and Indigenous People in the Northern Territory (Darwin: NTU Press, 1998), p. 115. 22 W. H. Grant and C. E. Cook in Notes on Conference regarding the payment of Halfcastes and Aboriginals in Country Districts, 1930, pp. 49, 38, NAA: A1, 1938/329. 23 V. G. Carrington to C. L. A. Abbott, 10 October 1945, NAA: A432, 1962/4737. 24 Rowse, White Flour, White Power, p. 25. 25 Ibid., pp. 126–7. 26 On abstract labour, the transformation of concrete labour into labour power, measured by time and paid by wages, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 47–71. 27 A. P. Elkin, ‘Reaction and Interaction: A Food Gathering People and European Settlement in Australia’, American Anthropologist, 53:2 (1951), 167–8. 28 Transcript of Interview with Les Penhall, 1982, Tape 1, pp 7–8, NTAS: NTRS 226, TS 303; Jan Larbalestier, ‘A World after Its Own Image: Ideology and Domination in the Northern Territory’ (PhD Thesis, Macquarie University, 1988), p. 109. 29 Rowse, White Flour, White Power, pp. 5, 127. 30 Willey and Savage, Boss Drover, p. 100; Gordon Sweeney to Chinnery, 1944 Patrol Report, 5 August 1944, NAA: F1, 1943/65. 31 See, e.g., Peter Anthony Willis, Patrons and Riders: Conflicting Roles and Hidden Objectives in an Aboriginal Development Programme at Kununurra, Western Australia (Flaxton: Post Pressed, 2003). 32 Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 171; Rowse, ‘Rationing’s Moral Economy’, p. 97.

[ 181 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES 33 Sir Hubert Murray, ‘The Trend of Native Administration’, Stead’s Review (1 August 1930), p. 5. 34 Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, Political Memoranda: Revision of Instructions to Political Officers on Subjects Chiefly Political and Administrative: 1913–1918 (London: Frank Cass, 3rd edn, 1970), p. 9. 35 This narration, of course, occludes the ways in which Aboriginal people made their environments, and the limited ways in which pastoral settlers remade these Aboriginal landscapes. On wilderness, see Marcia Langton, ‘Art, Wilderness and Terra Nullius’, in Ros Sultan (ed.), Ecopolitics IX: Perspectives on Indigenous People’s Management of Environmental Resources (Darwin: Northern Territory University with Northern Land Council, 1995). 36 Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), p. 124, quoting Frederick Lugard, Instructions to Political and Other Officers (1906). In the commercially published edition, Lugard used substantially less strident language to make the same point. Lugard, Political Memoranda, pp. 222–3. 37 Joint Committee on Closer Union in East Africa, Vol I—Report, Together with the Proceedings of the Committee (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1931), p. 36; Donald Cameron, ‘The Principles of Native Administration and Their Application (1934)’, in A. H. M. Kirk-Greene (ed.) The Principles of Native Administration in Nigeria: Selected Documents, 1900–1947 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 197. 38 Cited in Kathryne S. McDorman, ‘Two Views of Empire: Margery Perham and Joyce Cary Analyze the Dual Mandate Policy’, Research Studies, 50:3–4 (1982), 154. 39 A. P. Elkin, The Australian Aborigines: How to Understand Them (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1938), pp. 103–4. See also Rowse, ‘Rationing’s Moral Economy’, p. 115. 40 Sweeney to Chinnery, 1944 Patrol Report, NAA: F1, 1943/65; A. S. Bingle to Ronald Berndt, 14 November 1944, Chinnery Papers, MS 766/8/42; Winifred Ellen Wilson, Dietary Survey of Aboriginals in the Northern Territory (Canberra: Department of Health, 1951), p. 105. 41 See, e.g., Robert Castle and Jim Hagan, ‘Settlers and the State: The Creation of an Aboriginal Workforce in Australia’, Aboriginal History, 22 (1998), 27; Nicolas Peterson, ‘The Myth of the “Walkabout”: Movement in the Aboriginal Domain’, in J. Taylor and Martin Bell (eds), Population Mobility and Indigenous Peoples in Australasia and North America (London: Routledge, 2004). 42 Minoru Hokari, Gurindji Journey: A Japanese Historian in the Outback (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2011), pp. 194–6; Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), pp. 159–60. 43 J.  W. Bleakley, The Aboriginals and Half-Castes of Central Australia and North Australia, Cmd. Paper No. 21, 1929, pp. 8, 29; Walkabout, 1:1 (1934); Warner, A Black Civilization, p. 148; C. L. A. Abbott, Australia’s Frontier Province (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1950), p. 149; J. A. Barnes, ‘Social Organization: Limits of Contemporary Studies’, in Helen Sheils (ed.), Australian Aboriginal Studies: A Symposium of Papers Presented at the 1961 Research Conference (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1963). Elkin, on the other hand, situated Aboriginal nomadism as an economic, rather than biological, practice. Elkin, The Australian Aborigines, p. 14. This is an extremely suggestive note. Elkin did not suggest, as Labalestier implies, that the ‘walkabout’ was a survival – a relic derived from a nomadic hunter– gatherer economy and persisting among pastoral workers – but rather signified his belief in the continuing importance of Aboriginal economies and production on and around pastoral stations. Cf. Larbalestier, ‘A World after Its Own Image’, p. 275. 44 W. E. Harney, Content to Lie in the Sun (London: R. Hale, 1958), pp. 9, 107; W. H. Grant, in ‘The Pastoral Case: Mr Grant’s Address’, Northern Standard (25 March 1928), p. 3.

[ 182 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

WOR K A ND THE ENDS OF SET TLER COLON I A LISM 45 Margaret Ford, Beyond the Furthest Fences (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1966), p. 100. 46 There were no wet and dry seasons in Central Australia, but between December and February the weather was too hot to continue stock work, and Aboriginal people were sent on walkabout for this period. Pastoralism was entirely at the mercy of the seasons. See Frank S. Stevens, Aborigines in the Northern Territory Cattle Industry (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974), pp. 113–14. 47 Notes on Conference regarding the payment of Halfcastes and Aboriginals in Country Districts, 1930, pp. 40, 57, NAA: A1, 1938/329 48 Nicolas Peterson, ‘Cash, Commoditisation and Authenticity: When Do Aboriginal People Stop Being Hunter-Gatherers?’, in Nicolas Peterson and Toshio Matsuyama (eds), Cash, Commoditisation and Changing Foragers (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 1991), p. 80; Elkin, ‘Reaction and Interaction’, 173. In practice, illicit cattle-killing was the basis of Aboriginal survival in the walkabout economy. Hokari, Gurindji Journey, pp. 196–8. 49 Willey and Savage, Boss Drover, p. 71. See also Julia Martínez, ‘When Wages Were Clothes: Dressing Down Aboriginal Workers in Australia’s Northern Territory’, International Review of Social History, 52 (2007), 280. 50 Rowe in Notes on Conference regarding the payment of Halfcastes and Aboriginals in Country Districts, 1930, p. 63, NAA: A1, 1938/329; Frank S. Stevens, Equal Wages for Aborigines: The Background to Industrial Discrimination in the Northern Territory of Australia (Sydney: Aura Press, 1968), p. 45; Richard Munro Baker, Land Is Life: From Bush to Town: The Story of the Yanyuwa People (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999), pp. 105–6; Erika Charola and Felicity Meakins (eds), Yijarni: True Stories from Gurindji Country (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2016), p. 173. 51 Transcript of Interview with D. L. (Did) Smith, 17 April 1996, Tape 3, p. 5, NTAS: NTRS 226, TS 844. 52 McGrath, Born in the Cattle, pp. 105–6, 58–60; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Labor’s Lot: The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal Action (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 86. See also Baker, Land Is Life, p. 104. 53 See for comparison E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, 38:1 (1967), 61, 95. 54 Once equal wages were introduced, after 1968, pastoralists invested in infrastructure and ended the employment of most Aboriginal workers, forcibly removing those who were disemployed from the stations. This signalled the end of this distinctive north Australian pastoral mode of production. The Situation of Aborigines on Pastoral Properties in the Northern Territory: Report of the Committee of Review, December 1971 (Canberra: Commonwealth Government Printing Office, 1973), pp. 6–7; Bill Bunbury, It’s Not the Money, It’s the Land: Aboriginal Stockmen and the Equal Wages Case (North Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2002), pp. 107–9.

[ 183 ]

CH A P T ER EIGHT

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Never yet: the tense of citizenship

Black men wandering and white men riding in a world without time where sons do not inherit, and money goes mouldy in the pocket, where ambition is wax melted in the sun, and those who sow may not reap. I write of the Northern Territory of Australia, problem child of empire, land of an ever–shadowed past and an ever–shining future, of eternal promise that never comes true. Ernestine Hill, The Territory, 19511

Future citizens The end of the ‘long march’ took form in a promised future of citizenship. John McEwen had declared in the Aboriginal New Deal the need for a ‘final objective’, one that would enable the Government to ‘frame all its policy and action towards the reaching of that objective’. And the end identified was ‘the raising of their status so as to entitle them by right and by qualification to the ordinary rights of citizenship and enable them to share with us the opportunities that are available in their own native land’.2 As other historians have noted, Aboriginal people were formally entitled to citizenship at this time as a birthright of those born in Australian territory. E. W. P. Chinnery agreed, writing in 1942 that ‘[t]he aboriginals are Australian citizens, entitled to the fullest possible consideration’. But this was an empty status, one that came with none of the rights or entitlements of white Australian citizens.3 Aboriginal people’s legal status was mediated by the legislative exclusion of all ‘aboriginal natives’ from any of the rights of citizenship: to vote, for example, or to receive social security. Whatever the formal position of Aboriginal people, it is clear that they were not substantive citizens. Rather, Indigenous people in this era represented the ‘key boundary marker’ of Australian citizenship; ‘Australians But Not Yet Citizens’, in Jeremy Beckett’s phrase.4 [ 184 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

THE TENSE OF CITIZENSHIP

Citizenship here represented on the one hand an expression of allegiance, and on the other a form of civic subjectivity or political, as distinct from pre-political, action. But it is better thought less as a status than as a process. Non-Indigenous Australians regularly reiterated the nexus between civilisation and citizenship, arguing that citizenship was a qualification, not an entitlement. In 1938 Mary Bennett, for example, complained to the Commissioner for Native Affairs in Western Australia, A. O. Neville, that as ‘the whole world is revising interracial legislation, and there is noticeably throughout Australia a growing spirit of goodwill and fair play towards the native race’, the Western Australian practice of ‘making “colour” and not “civilization” the basis of citizenship’ was a problem.5 Qualification ought to be civic, not racial. Citizenship was a process of becoming. When Aboriginal people of the south-east claimed universal citizenship, then, they challenged both these notions of their inferiority. Those at the Day of Mourning and Protest passed a resolution calling for ‘a new policy which will raise our people to full citizen status and equality within the community’. And Bill Ferguson insisted that Aboriginal people were ready to govern themselves now: ‘I ask you … not to worry too much about the stepping stone. That will take care of itself if we have full citizen rights.’ To a nation that insisted they were not yet ready for citizenship, Ferguson and others demanded rights immediately.6 In May 1939, the Australian Cabinet considered and approved a four-part citizenship test developed by Chinnery at McEwen’s direction. There would be, Chinnery estimated, ‘probably not more than ten or twelve … aboriginals’, including William Cooper and Douglas Nicholls, ‘who would be entitled to citizen rights’ in ‘the whole of Australia’.7 But ‘[n]o responsible authority’, the Chief Electoral Officer reported in 1941, ‘would seriously advocate the grant of all political and other rights, powers and privileges, with their concomitant obligations and liabilities, to aboriginals generally. To do so could only result in utter chaos and the opening of the way to extensive abuses.’8 These arguments over qualification for citizenship can occlude the extent to which, in a settler colony, the granting of citizenship would not only protect Aboriginal people as rights-bearing subjects but would seek to do so by transferring their political affiliation from Indigenous nations to the settler nation-state.9 This turn to a civic language did not reject race so much as it reconfigured the work of racialisation. For Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun, settler colonial elimination takes form through the elimination of Indigenous political difference, symbolised by the fabrication of citizens, of people whose political affiliation was to the Australian nation or, more pertinently in the interwar period, to imperial [ 185 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

subjecthood. And in seeking the erasure of Indigenous polities, the Aboriginal New Deal replaced political difference with status as a racial minority. As Joanne Barker argues, the ‘erasure of the sovereign is the racialization of the “Indian”’ or, here, the ‘native’. We might think of the work done by citizenship as what Aihwa Wong describes in a different context as a process of subjectification within a settler polity, one that enables rights, to be sure, but which also seeks to produce subjects of settler sovereignty, constraining and eroding the capacity to practise Indigenous sovereignties. For this reason, Aileen Moreton-Robinson insists that citizenship operates as a ‘weapon of race war’. In her account, transforming Indigenous people into citizens requires that they be emptied of their ‘ways of being’, instead becoming the homogenised Indigenous subjects of a ‘racialized rights discourse’. Becoming a citizen was scripted in the Aboriginal New Deal as becoming a racialised minority; abandoning a disappearing sovereignty.10 This was the form of recognition practised by the Aboriginal New Deal. Some 80 years before today’s debates over the relationship between Constitutional recognition, treaty, and sovereignty, we find here that Aboriginal sovereignty was not just recognised but operationalised in government policy. Domesticated and submerged, Aboriginal sovereignty was to be contained in reserves and within a narrative of supersession, as a starting point away from which ‘natives’ would march on their way to the promised land of citizenship. But, for Aboriginal people, their sovereignties need not be consigned to the reserve or to the past. They could be coeval. As Audra Simpson points out, ‘sovereignty may exist within sovereignty’. The practice and presence of overlapping and abrasive sovereignties need not signify imperfection but rather an empirical norm. Ongoing co-presence and confrontation is how sovereignty works, producing constant normative and jurisdictional complication. The problem of legitimacy is persistent.11 And, in the wake of the Aboriginal New Deal, many Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory refused the trappings of citizenship. In 1940, the Northern Standard reported that a number of ‘half–caste’ men and women entitled to vote had announced that they intended to vote informally or not at all. This, the newspaper editorialised, was ‘in protest at their lack of full Australian citizen rights’, producing the unedifying ‘spectacle of men and women who have theoretical citizen’s rights announcing their intention to destroy their franchise in protest at their treatment as civilians’. But for Chinnery this confounding act indicated their rejection of settler modernity; he read their refusal as evidence of Aboriginal people’s continued allegiance to the communities out of which they had supposedly marched, however assimilated or white they may have appeared in the logic of the state.12 He worried [ 186 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

THE TENSE OF CITIZENSHIP

about their refusal to disavow Indigeneity completely, their insistence on Indigenous political affiliations. In this way, and in many others, Aboriginal people continued to confound the future laid out for them in the Aboriginal New Deal. They disturbed the boundary markers of Australian citizenship by refusing its capacity to enclose their Indigenous identities, instead fabricating overlapping political identities that were neither within nor without settler colonialism, insisting on articulating a novel political belonging through multiple polities.13 The end of the long march, the Aboriginal citizen, remained fugitive. Finality was desired but postponed, vanishing to trap settler colonialism in a permanent state of incompletion.14 The narrative of the long march was asymptotic in form; Aboriginal people would remain on the threshold of citizenship. But anticipating its end shaped articulations of policy and practice, of nationhood and colonialism. We might understand citizenship here as ‘the contour, the configuration’, shaped by the ‘event to come’. For Ann Laura Stoler, this anticipation rendered the colony a ‘provisional configuration that promises something else’, settler colonialism as becoming, not as perfect or complete.15 The colonial state remains emergent, its accomplishment defeated. And it was not only at its purported end that Aboriginal people confounded the logic of the long march. Aboriginal people self-governed on reserves but refused to be confined there, worked on pastoral stations but resisted the command of managers and the dominance of pastoral work rhythms and avoided total submission to a settler colonial timediscipline.16 They found ways of existing in new circumstances, continually reinventing and articulating Aboriginal socialities with the encroaching pastoralist order. They mapped stock routes as paths through and around ceremonial sites, springs, soaks, and hunting grounds, and established temporal narratives on an entirely different basis to the categories of the New Deal. McEwen had written that ‘every step … must be deliberately and consciously directed to the ultimate goal’ of transforming people ‘from a nomadic tribal state to take their place in a civilised community’.17 This ordered movement was confounded by Aboriginal refusal of these terms, continued practice of Aboriginal sovereignties, and insistence, in moments of turmoil, on their protection as rights-bearing subjects. And it was undone by autonomous Aboriginal mobility that did not follow the ‘long march’. Its fragility, however, does not suggest that this settler colonial incarnation of indirect rule was powerless. Ambivalence and contradiction did not represent irregularities but were an integral part of the assimilating mission, enabling changing policies and modes of legitimation. Contingent struggles to make the idealist rationalities of government real dramatised, in Nasser Hussain’s phrase, ‘not a confusion but a condition’.18 [ 187 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

The implementation of both the Aboriginal New Deal and the pastoral development policy were interrupted by the outbreak of war and the consequent militarisation of the Northern Territory. Three months after arriving in Darwin, Chinnery departed in a wartime evacuation and never returned. V.  J. White, the Secretary of the Native Affairs Branch, reported in December 1945 that the infrastructure of the plan remained ‘in the embryo stage only’.19 There had been few new appointments, and the substantial funding increase required was never delivered. By the time elements were implemented under the directorship of Harry Giese, in the Department of Native Affairs’ successor, the Welfare Branch, in the 1950s, times had changed and indirect rule was no longer the fashionable colonial policy it had once been.20 The development of the Northern Territory was similarly frustrated: the pastoral industry remained unprofitable. And the Aboriginal New Deal would be even more comprehensively frustrated by the practice of ‘tribal law’ of the kind that Ted Strehlow encountered at a sheep camp in 1937. Administrators and policymakers were exasperated and confused by what they read as misdirections and discontinuities. But these practices were not evidence of backsliding or degenerate Aboriginalities so much as they represented a failure of orientation itself. They suggest that Aboriginal subjects abandoned little in their move to new sites and new kinds of work; that they constituted lawful or sovereign articulations rather than leaving Aboriginal political society behind when they moved off the reserve. Despite the overbearing progressive logic of the long march, Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory did not so much remain oriented to past experience as they reinvented orientation as itself dispersed. These discrepant ways of being were uncontainable in either the singularity of the ‘long march’ or the artefact of ‘native society’. The dynamism of Aboriginal becoming was made legible to the official mind of Australian (settler) colonialism by staging Aboriginality as disappearing, but this representational economy remained troubled by incessant excess. Administrators worried that Aboriginal practice was less a failure to become modern than evidence of the multiplicity of modernity. Their relentless reiterations of the need to orient Aboriginal people in motion, of the value of staging a progressive trajectory, remind us of the productivity of this unease.21

Structures of recognition This book has argued that indirect rule rests on the recognition of a precarious yet balanced and intact ‘native society’ as the subject of colonial government and takes form as the art of governing its [ 188 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

THE TENSE OF CITIZENSHIP

articulation with colonial production to develop its forces towards modernity. As an institutional form, indirect rule was malleable and contingent, dependent on and produced in colonial encounters where meaning was contested between and amongst colonisers and native or Indigenous peoples. But in its embrace of native society, its determination to work through it, conducting and incorporating it, it set out a form of governing natives, one that was less a template than it was an art. Indirect rule conduced to understanding and governing colonial formations in states of crisis. In India after 1857, Fiji after 1875, and Northern Nigeria after 1902, it rendered legible both the cause of that crisis and its remedy, displacing problems of order and disorder onto native recalcitrance and beseeching a more enlightened and knowledgeable colonialism. And in Australia, the Northern Territory of the interwar years was itself characterised by crisis. This book first traced a crisis of reproduction, as pastoralism, the one potentially viable economic industry of the north, was both dependent on Aboriginal labour and reliant on a rate of exploitation that could only destroy that labour. Second, the increased implementation of the force of law in the interwar period provoked not increased submission to that law, but instead generated intensifying eruptions of Indigenous sovereignties. And third, the emergence of a range of Aboriginal and white social movements called the northern government of Aboriginal people into question, disturbing the legitimacy of the form of white settler government then practised in the Northern Territory. Together, these crises of reproduction, public power, and legitimacy fused to create a more general crisis that demanded resolution. A crisis, as Stuart Hall identified, is less an event than it is a process.22 And here that process includes not just the contradictions and forces that produce a state of turmoil and disorder, but also the political rationalities that made sense of them and suggested ways of acting, governing, and reasserting hegemony in a new mode. The turn to indirect rule in the Northern Territory in the late 1930s articulated that art of government in a settler colonial situation in the novel form of the long march, recognising a series of progressive subjects and framing a biopolitical convergence of change and elimination. The problem of recognition was central to the government of Aboriginal people. And in encapsulating Aboriginal movement in the logic of the walkabout, discussed in the previous chapter, pastoralists reiterated a structure of recognition that embedded difference – and Aboriginal sovereignties – in the colonial social formation, establishing contradiction and contingency as inescapable features of the Aboriginal New Deal and establishing problems such as those Strehlow faced when he encountered Aboriginal laws being practised out of place, as outlined at the beginning of this book. His jurisdictional problem remained. [ 189 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES

As economic need and social practice led Aboriginal people to move consistently between the station and the bush, the mission and the reserve, they confounded the neat categories of recognition through which they were to be governed. And their autonomous movements troubled their incorporation into a narration of progress. The language of recognition in the Aboriginal New Deal masked the contradictory production of a customary order as both the theoretical basis of progress and a repository of immutable alterity. Achille Mbembe has argued persuasively that ‘ultimately, custom was only made specific the better to indicate the extent to which the world of the native, in its naturalness, failed to correspond with our own – that it was, in short, not part of our world, and thus could not serve as the basis for a praxis of living together in a civil society’. Staging progressive alterity was structured by the immutability of race.23 As Amitav Ghosh has suggested, ‘the “not yet” … is in fact a “not yet forever” (which is merely a locution for “never”) and packed into the forever/never is the silenced term which makes this line of reasoning possible – “race”’.24 A northern need for the rule of colonial difference, in other words, collided with the national tendency towards its erasure. In framing Aboriginal society on reserves, as well as in station camps, as moments on a march to civilisation, a structural dependence was thus represented as a temporary measure. Without actually eliminating, staging this trajectory was an almost ideal representation of the logic of elimination. This manifestation illuminates the progressive element always inherent in articulations of indirect rule and accentuated in the settler colonial formation. It was a progress which, by explicitly working through ‘native society’, embedded difference and contradiction within the very nature of development. While languages of law and policy may create an impression of congruence amidst conflict, of rendering the future susceptible to planning and organisation, we might instead wonder at the possibilities of liberating a new future, refusing the horizons of expectation imposed by narrations like the ‘long march’ and instead grasping at futures that cannot be planned. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang describe ‘Native futures’ as ‘the unwritten possibilities made possible by an ethic of incommensurability’, of the co-presence of settler and native in a relationship that refuses negation. This drives us away from ‘futurity-as-inclusion’ and instead towards a futurity as incessantly questioning tension, as persistent indeterminacy that approaches a horizon of justice.25 As I write, a formal process for recognition of Indigenous people in the Australian Constitution has reached yet another crisis. On the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark referendum held in 1967, one which belatedly endorsed the Day of Mourning activists’ resolution [ 190 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

THE TENSE OF CITIZENSHIP

that the Commonwealth assume responsibility for governing Indigenous people across the nation, a First Nations National Constitutional Convention was held on A ṉangu country at Uluru in the Northern Territory. There a majority of the 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community leaders rejected the symbolic constitutional recognition that has been canvassed for and supported by political leaders over the past decade. In their ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ they instead insisted on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty, calling for the establishment of a constitutionally protected First Nations Voice and the commencement of a treaty or Makaratta process of telling the truth about Australian history and making agreements between governments and First Nations. And they described this as a ‘trek across this vast country’, a ‘walk … for a better future’.26 This is not a radical move; it is one that is explicitly engineered to appeal to white conservatives, and one that articulates Aboriginal sovereignties as amenable to a smooth incorporation. And yet in its demand for recognition of dynamic Indigenous modernities it confounded the process of recognition that was under way. We can see the recursion of the form of recognition licensed by indirect rule, its ‘partial reinscriptions, modified displacements, and amplified recuperations’, in the Government’s rejection of the Uluru statement, in its preference for a recognition that would ‘fix’ or ‘complete’ the constitution.27 This is a practice of recognition that incorporates, subsumes, and submerges. It does not disturb but rather maintains and reinvigorates settler colonialism. It plans a future of subordinated coexistence, resolves difference into recognisable terms, and seeks to contain that difference within the Australian Constitution. But it has been confounded by the different Indigenous claims that have been a feature of the process – by those who have participated and those who have refused – since its inception. Resolution is deferred, the completion of settler colonialism postponed once more. The future is not guaranteed. Settlement, as ever, remains incomplete.

Notes 1 Ernestine Hill, The Territory (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1951), p. 1. 2 Department of the Interior, Commonwealth Government’s Policy with Respect to Aboriginals (Canberra: Commonwealth Government Printer, 1939), pp. 1–2. 3 Alastair Davidson, From Subject to Citizen: Australian Citizenship in the Twentieth Century (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 190; David Dutton, One of Us? A Century of Australian Citizenship (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002), p. 11; E. W. P. Chinnery to J. A. Carrodus, 21 May 1942, NAA: F1, 1942/406; Ann McGrath, ‘“Beneath the Skin”: Australian Citizenship, Rights and Aboriginal Women’, in Renate Howe (ed.), Women and the State: Australian Perspectives (Melbourne: La Trobe University Press, 1993), p. 100. Formally, there were no Australian citizens,

[ 191 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

GOV ER N ING NATIV ES rather British subjects, before the passage of the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948 (Cth). 4 Tom Clarke and Brian Galligan, ‘“Aboriginal Native” and the Institutional Construction of the Australian Citizen, 1901–48’, Australian Historical Studies, 26:105 (1995), 536; John Chesterman and Brian Galligan, Citizens without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Jeremy Beckett, ‘Aboriginality, Citizenship and Nation State’, Social Analysis, 24 (1988), 7. Aboriginal people whose Aboriginality was unrecognised, on the other hand, were entitled to full citizenship, a terrible bargain available to or forced upon them by virtue of white ancestry. 5 M. M. Bennett to A. O. Neville, 14 February 1938, Duguid Papers, MS 5068, Series 11/2. The substitution of a level of civilisation for race as the mark of inclusion in Australian citizenship reminds us once again that colour and blood were metaphors for Indigeneity as a sovereign category. Civilisation, as much as deracination, signified in interwar settler colonial discourse a subject’s move away from nativeness. 6 ‘Our Historic Day of Mourning & Protest’, Abo Call (April 1938), p. 2; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 8. 7 E. W. P. Chinnery, ‘Qualities Which Should be Held by any Aboriginal Requiring the Privileges of a European’, 5 April 1939, Chinnery Papers, MS 766/8/14; Department of the Interior, Cabinet Submission, ‘Citizen Rights to Aboriginals’, 4 May 1939, NAA: A461, N382/1/1. 8 Chief Electoral Officer for the Commonwealth to Carrodus, 6 November 1941, NAA: A431, 1949/822. 9 Audra Simpson, ‘Captivating Eunice: Membership, Colonialism, and Gendered Citizenships of Grief’, Wicazo Sa Review, 24:2 (2009), 124. On citizenship as containment see also Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Introduction’, in Aileen Moreton-Robinson (ed.), Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006), p. 6; Nicolas Peterson and Will Sanders, ‘Introduction’, in Nicolas Peterson and Will Sanders (eds), Citizenship and Indigenous Australians: Changing Conceptions and Possibilities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 3. 10 Elizabeth Strakosch and Alissa Macoun, ‘The Vanishing Endpoint of Settler Colonialism’, in John Hinkson, Paul James, and Lorenzo Veracini (eds), Stolen Lands, Broken Cultures: The Settler-Colonial Present (Melbourne: Arena Publications, 2012); Joanne Barker, ‘For Whom Sovereignty Matters’, in Joanne Barker (ed.), Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for SelfDetermination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), p. 17; Aihwa Ong, ‘Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States’, Current Anthropology, 37:5 (1996); Aileen MoretonRobinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), pp. 157, 191–2. 11 Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 10. 12 ‘Treatment of Half-Castes’, Northern Standard (20 August 1940), p. 2; Chinnery to Abbott, 26 August 1940, Chinnery Papers, MS 766/8/20. 13 Kevin Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.–Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 97–8. 14 Irene Watson, ‘In the Northern Territory Intervention: What is Saved or Rescued and at What Cost?’, Cultural Studies Review, 15:2 (2009), 49; Strakosch and Macoun, ‘The Vanishing Endpoint of Settler Colonialism’, p. 52; Elizabeth Strakosch, ‘Beyond Colonial Completion: Arendt, Settler Colonialism and the End of Politics’, in Sarah Maddison, Tom Clark, and Ravi de Costa (eds), The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation: Non-Indigenous People and the Responsibility to Engage (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2016), p. 16.

[ 192 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

THE TENSE OF CITIZENSHIP 15 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 32–3; Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 118. 16 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Labor’s Lot: The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal Action (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 87–8; Gillian K. Cowlishaw, Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: A Study of Racial Power and Intimacy in Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999), pp. 107–41. 17 Department of the Interior, Commonwealth Government’s Policy with Respect to Aboriginals, p. 2. 18 Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 85. 19 V. J. White to V. G. Carrington, 7 December 1945, NAA: F1, 1945/122. On the postponement, see Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory for Year 1939– 40, Cmd. Paper No. 24, 1941, p 3. 20 See generally Colin Tatz, ‘Aboriginal Administration in the Northern Territory of Australia’ (PhD Thesis, The Australian National University, 1964); Harry Giese, Planning a Program for Aborigines in the 1950s (Darwin: Northern Territory Library Service, 1990). 21 This paragraph is informed by Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 1–47. 22 Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988), p. 167. 23 Achille Mbembe, ‘African Modes of Self-Writing’, Public Culture, 14:1 (2002), 248; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Paladin, 1970), p. 77. 24 Amitav Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘A Correspondence on Provincializing Europe’, Radical History Review, 83 (2002), 148. 25 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1:1 (2012), 36; Amy L. Brandzel, Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016), p. 138; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, ‘The Governance of the Prior’, Interventions, 13:1 (2011). 26 The text of the Uluru statement is available from ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’, 26 May 2017, accessed 29 May 2017, available from https://assets.documentcloud.org/ documents/3755370/ULURU-STATEMENT-FROM-the-HEART.pdf; and ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’, in Shireen Morris (ed.), A Rightful Place: A Road Map to Recognition (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2017), pp. 1–3. Seven delegates walked out of the Convention during deliberations, expressing concern about the erosion of Aboriginal sovereignties. 27 Prime Minister, Attorney-General, and Minister for Indigenous Affairs, ‘Media Release: Response to Referendum Council’s report on Constitutional Recognition’, 26 October 2017, accessed 7 December 2017, available from www.pm.gov.au/media/ response-referendum-council%E2%80%99s-report-constitutional-recognition; Recognise, ‘Why recognition?’, accessed 8 June 2017, www.recognise.org.au/the-facts/ the-constitution/. On recursion, see Stoler, Duress, p. 27.

[ 193 ]

BI BL IOGR A PH Y

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Manuscripts Adelaide State Records of South Australia (SRSA)

Papers of Constance M. Ternent Cooke (Cooke Papers), 1924–1967, Government Record Group (GRG) 52/32.

State Library of South Australia

Papers of the Aborigines’ Friends’ Association (‘AFA Papers’), Society Record Group (SRG) 139.

Canberra National Archives of Australia (NAA)

Correspondence files, Department of Home and Territories (1916–1928), Department of Home Affairs [II] (1928–1932), Department of the Interior (1932–1938), A1. Correspondence files, Department of External Affairs (1912–1916), A3. Draft Handbook of the Northern Territory compiled by The Hon Staniforth Smith, Acting Administrator, 1921, A238. Correspondence files, Department of the Interior (1946–1972), A431. Correspondence files, Attorney-General’s Department (1929–), A432. Correspondence files relating to Civil Defence, A454. Correspondence files, Prime Minister’s Department (1934–1950), A461. Correspondence files, Department of the Interior, A659. Folders of copies of Cabinet papers, A6006. The History and Development of the Northern Territory; Department of the Interior, CP780.

National Library of Australia

Papers of Ernest William Pearson Chinnery (‘Chinnery Papers’), MS 766. Papers of Charles Duguid (‘Duguid Papers’), MS 5068.

Darwin National Archives of Australia

Correspondence files, Office of Administrator, Northern Territory (1915–1927); Office of Government Resident, North Australia (1927–1931); Administrator, Northern Territory (1931–1973), F1 . Correspondence Files, Medical Service, Health and Aboriginals Branch (1933–1939), Native Affairs Branch (1939–1949), F3. Correspondence files, Patrol Officer, Alice Springs and Jay Creek (1941–1942), F126. Correspondence Files, Patrol Officer, Alice Springs and Jay Creek (1936–1942), F127. General Report on the ‘Investigation of Pastoral Leases in the Northern Territory’; Pastoral Leases Investigation Committee (1935), F987.

Northern Territory Archives Service (NTAS)

Typed transcripts of oral history histories, Northern Territory Record Service (NTRS) 226.

[ 194 ]

BIBLIOGR APHY

London British Library

Papers of Arthur Hamilton-Gordon, 1st Baron Stanmore, 1893 (‘Stanmore Papers’), MSS 49242.

Melbourne State Library of Victoria

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Papers of Amy Brown (‘Amy Brown Papers’), MS 9212.

Oxford Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies

Papers of Frederick Dealtry Lugard, Baron Lugard of Abinger (‘Lugard Papers’), GB 162 MSS Lugard; MSS Brit Emp, s 45. Papers of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society (‘ASAPS Papers’), MSS Brit Emp s 19, s 22.

Sydney University of Sydney Archives

Personal Archives of Adolphus Peter Elkin (‘Elkin Papers’), P130. Papers of the Australians for the Protection of Native Races (‘APNR Papers’), S55.

Tshwane/Pretoria National Archives of South Africa (NASA)

Secretary of the Department of Mines and Industries (1902–1950), MNW 485.

Newspapers and journals

Abo Call (Sydney), 1938. Advertiser (Adelaide), 1927–30. Age (Melbourne), 1939. Argus (Melbourne), 1938. Herald (Melbourne), 1939. News (Adelaide), 1926. Northern Standard (Darwin), 1928–40. Northern Territory Times (Darwin), 1929. Register (Adelaide), 1925–8. Standard (Frankston), 1939. Stead’s Review (Melbourne), 1930. Sun (Sydney), 1939. Sydney Morning Herald, 1927–38. The Times (London), 1857–1922.

Government publications and reports

Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, 1857. Staniforth Smith, M., Report on the Federated Malay States and Java: Their Systems of Government, Methods of Administration, and Economic Development, Cmd. Paper No. 32, 1906. Parliamentary Debates, House of Lords, 1907. Northern Territory of Australia, Annual Report of the Acting Administrator for the Year Ended 30th June, 1920, Cmd. Paper No. 119, 1921. Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 1927. Votes and Proceedings of the House of Representatives, 1926–28 (Canberra: Government Printer, 1927).

[ 195 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

BIBLIOGR APHY Bleakley, J. W., The Aboriginals and Half-Castes of Central Australia and North Australia, Cmd. Paper No. 21, 1929. Third Annual Report of the North Australia Commission, 1st January 1929 to 31st December 1929, Cmd. Paper No. 82, 1930. Report on the Administration of North Australia for the Year Ended the 30th June 1929, Cmd. Paper No. 216, 1930. Union of South Africa, Report of the Native Economic Commission 1930–1932 (Pretoria: The Government Printer, 1932). Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory for the Year Ended 30th June, 1932, Cmd. Paper No. 124, 1933. Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory for the Year Ended 30th June, 1933, Cmd. Paper No. 203, 1934. Report of the Board of Inquiry Appointed to Inquire into the Land and Land Industries of the Northern Territory of Australia (Payne–Fletcher Report), Cmd. Paper No. 4, 1937. Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory for the Year Ended 30th June, 1937, Cmd. Paper No. 58, 1938. Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory for Year 1937–38, Cmd. Paper No. 150, 1939. Commonwealth of Australia, Aboriginal Welfare: Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities held at Canberra, 21st to 23rd April 1937 (Canberra: Government Printer, 1939). Report on the Administration of the Northern Territory for Year 1939– 40, Cmd. Paper No. 24, 1941. The Situation of Aborigines on Pastoral Properties in the Northern Territory: Report of the Committee of Review, December 1971 (Canberra: Commonwealth Government Printing Office, 1973).

Law reports

North Australian Industrial Union v J A Ambrose and Others (1924) 20 Commonwealth Arbitration Reports (CAR) 507–26. North Australian Industrial Union v Commonwealth Railways Commissioner (1924) 20 CAR 726–38. North Australian Workers Union v Commonwealth Railways Commissioner (1927) 25 CAR 897–919. Tuckiar v The King (1934) 52 Commonwealth Law Reports (CLR) 335–55. Commonwealth Railways Commissioner, Burns Philp & Co and A E Jolly & Co v North Australian Workers Union (1935) 34 CAR 22–9.

Books and articles

Abbott, C. L. A., Australia’s Frontier Province (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1950). Aborigines’ Protection League, Australian Aboriginals: A Statement by the Aborigines’ Protection League Explaining Its Basic Principles and Proposals and Discussing Statements in the Public Press and Recent Reports and Recommendations (Adelaide: Aborigines’ Protection League, 1929). Adas, M., Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). Adelaye, R. A., Power and Diplomacy in Northern Nigeria, 1804–1906: The Sokoto Caliphate and Its Enemies (London: Longman, 1971). Afigbo, A. E., The Warrant Chiefs: Indirect Rule in Southeastern Nigeria, 1891–1929 (New York: Humanities Press, 1972). Ahmed, S., Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000). Althusser, L., For Marx (London: Verso, 1969) Amadiume, I., Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed Books, 1987).

[ 196 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

BIBLIOGR APHY Amin, S. and M. van der Linden (eds), ‘Peripheral’ Labour? Studies in the History of Partial Proletarianization (Cambridge: Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 1997). Anderson. W., The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health, and Racial Destiny in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002). Anthony, T., ‘Postcolonial Feudal Hauntings of Northern Australian Cattle Stations’, Law Text Culture, 7 (2003). —, ‘Labour Relations on Northern Cattle Stations: Feudal Exploitation and Accommodation’, The Drawing Board: An Australian Review of Public Affairs, 4:3 (2004). APNR, ‘The Half–Caste Problem’, The Aborigines Protector, 1:1 (1935). Asad, T. (ed.), Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973). Ashforth, A., The Politics of Official Discourse in Twentieth-Century South Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Ashton, S. R., and S. E. Stockwell (eds), Imperial Policy and Colonial Practice 1925–1945 (London: HMSO, 1996). Atanda, J. A., The New Ọ yọ Empire: Indirect Rule and Change in Western Nigeria, 1894–1934 (London: Longman, 1973) Attewell, N., Better Britons: Reproduction, Nation, and the Afterlife of Empire (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014). Attwood, B., Rights for Aborigines (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2003). Attwood, B. and J. Arnold (eds), Power, Knowledge and Aborigines (Melbourne: La Trobe University Press, 1992). Attwood, B. and A. Markus, Thinking Black: William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines’ League (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004). — (eds), The Struggle for Aboriginal Rights: A Documentary History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999). Austin, T., I Can Picture the Old Home So Clearly: The Commonwealth and ‘Half-Caste’ Youth in the Northern Territory 1911–1939 (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1993). —, Never Trust a Government Man: Northern Territory Aboriginal Policy 1911–1939 (Darwin: NTU Press, 1997). Austin, T. and S. Parry (eds), Connection and Disconnection: Encounters between Settlers and Indigenous People in the Northern Territory (Darwin: NTU Press, 1998). Bain, A., ‘A Protective Labour Policy? An Alternative Interpretation of Early Colonial Labour Policy in Fiji’, Journal of Pacific History, 23:2 (1988). Baker, R. M., Land Is Life: From Bush to Town: The Story of the Yanyuwa People (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999). Ballard, C. and B. Douglas, ‘“Rough Justice”: Punitive Expeditions in Oceania’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 18:1 (2017). Banivanua Mar, T., Violence and Colonial Dialogue: The Australian-Pacific Indentured Labor Trade (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007). —, ‘Frontier Space and the Reification of the Rule of Law: Colonial Negotiations in the Western Pacific, 1870–74’, Australian Feminist Law Review, 30 (2009). —, ‘Cannibalism and Colonialism: Charting Colonies and Frontiers in Nineteenth– Century Fiji’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 52:2 (2010). —, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). Banivanua Mar, T. and P. Edmonds (eds), Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and Identity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Barker, J. (ed.), Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). Basedow, H., The Australian Aboriginal (Adelaide: F. W. Preece & Sons, 1925). Bashford, A. and C. Hooker (eds), Contagion: Epidemics, History and Culture From Smallpox to Anthrax (Sydney: Pluto Press, 2002). Bateman, F. and L. Pilkington (eds), Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Beckett, J., ‘Aboriginality, Citizenship and Nation State’, Social Analysis, 24 (1988).

[ 197 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

BIBLIOGR APHY — (ed.), Past and Present: The Construction of Aboriginality (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1988). Beidelman, T. O., The Culture of Colonialism: The Cultural Subjection of Ukaguru (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012). Beinart, W. and S. Dubow (eds), Segregation and Apartheid in Twentieth-Century South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995). Bennett, M. M., The Australian Aboriginal as a Human Being (London: Alston Rivers, 1930). Bennett, T., ‘Liberal Government and the Practical History of Anthropology’, History and Anthropology, 25:2 (2014). Bennett, T. et al., Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). Benton, L. A., Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Berndt, R. M. and C. H. Berndt, End of an Era: Aboriginal Labour in the Northern Territory (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1987). — (eds), Aboriginal Man in Australia: Essays in Honour of Emeritus Professor A.P. Elkin (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1965). Bertola, P. and J. Bailey (eds), Frontiers of Labour: Proceedings of the Fifth National Conference of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History (Perth: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 1997). Biskup, P., Not Slaves, Not Citizens: The Aboriginal Problem in Western Australia, 1898–1954 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1973). Bivona, D., British Imperial Literature, 1870 –1940: Writing and the Administration of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Blackburn, K., ‘White Agitation for an Aboriginal State in Australia (1925–1929)’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 45:2 (1999). Blakeley, F., Hard Liberty: A Record of Experience (London: George G. Harrap, 1938). Brandzel, A. L., Against Citizenship: The Violence of the Normative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016). Brenneis, D. L. and S. E. Merry (eds), Law & Empire in the Pacific: Fiji and Hawai’i (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 2004). Broome, R., Fighting Hard: The Victorian Aborigines Advancement League (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2015). Brown, J. M., Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Brown, J. M. and Wm. R. Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume IV (London: Oxford University Press, 1999). Bruyneel, K., The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.–Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Buchanan, G., Northern Territory Development and Administration: Report (Melbourne: Victorian Government Printer, 1925). Bucher, J., ‘The Skull of Mkwawa and the Politics of Indirect Rule in Tanganyika’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 10:2 (2016). Bunbury, B., It’s Not the Money It’s the Land: Aboriginal Stockmen and the Equal Wages Case (North Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2002). Burton, A. and I. Hofmeyr (eds), Ten Books that Shape the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Bush, B. and J. Maltby, ‘Taxation in West Africa: Transforming the Colonial Subject into the “Governable Person”’, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 15:1 (2004). Butler, J., Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). —, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006). Byrd, J., The Transit of Empire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). Campbell, I. C., ‘Anthropology and the Professionalisation of Colonial Administration in Papua and New Guinea’, Journal of Pacific History, 33:1 (1998). Campbell, S. and S. E. Babbitt (eds), Racism and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).

[ 198 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

BIBLIOGR APHY Carey, J. and J. Lydon (eds), Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections and Exchange (New York: Routledge, 2014). Castle, R. and J. Hagan, ‘Settlers and the State: The Creation of an Aboriginal Workforce in Australia’, Aboriginal History, 22 (1998). Cattelino, J. R., High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Chakrabarty, D., Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Chapman, J. K., The Career of Arthur Hamilton Gordon, First Lord Stanmore, 1829–1912 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1964). Charola, E. and F. Meakins (eds), Yijarni: True Stories from Gurindji Country (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2016). Chatterjee, P., The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Chaudhuri, N. D. and M. Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Chesterman, J. and B. Galligan, Citizens without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Chewings, C., Back in the Stone Age: The Natives of Central Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1936). Chinnery, E. W. P., ‘The Application of Anthropological Methods to Tribal Development in New Guinea’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 49 (1919). Chuku, G., Igbo Women and Economic Transformation in Southeastern Nigeria, 1900 –1960 (New York: Routledge, 2005). Clarke, T. and B. Galligan, ‘“Aboriginal Native” and the Institutional Construction of the Australian Citizen, 1901–48’, Australian Historical Studies, 26:105 (1995). Clifford, J., The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). Close-Barry, K., A Mission Divided: Race, Culture & Colonialism in Fiji’s Methodist Mission (Canberra: ANU Press, 2015). Cohn, B. S., An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Cole, A., V. Haskins, and F. Paisley (eds), Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal History (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005). Collman, J., Fringe-Dwellers and Welfare: The Aboriginal Response to Bureaucracy (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1988). Comaroff, J. and J. L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, Colonialism, and Consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Comte, A., System of Positive Polity, Volume Two (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1875). Conigrave, C. P., North Australia (London: Cape, 1936). Cook, C. E., ‘The Native in Relation to the Public Health’, Medical Journal of Australia, 1:18 (1949). Cooper, F., Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). —, Africa since 1940: The Past of the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Cooper, F., T. C. Holt, and R. J. Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Coulthard, G. S., ‘Subjects of Empire: Indigenous Peoples and the “Politics of Recognition” in Canada’, Contemporary Political Theory, 6:4 (2007). Cowlishaw, G. K., Rednecks, Eggheads and Blackfellas: A Study of Racial Power and Intimacy in Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999). Crais, C. C. (ed.), The Culture of Power in Southern Africa: Essays on State Formation and the Political Imagination (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003).

[ 199 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

BIBLIOGR APHY Craven, P. (ed.), The Best Australian Essays 1998 (Melbourne: Bookman, 1998). Crocker, W. R., Nigeria: A Critique of British Colonial Administration (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1936). Crowder, M. and O. Ikime (eds), West African Chiefs: Their Changing Status under Colonial Rule and Independence (Ile-Ife: University of Ife Press, 1970). Darian-Smith, K. and P. Edmonds (eds), Conciliation on Colonial Frontiers: Conflict, Performance and Commemoration in Australia and the Pacific Rim (New York: Routledge, 2015). Davidson, A., From Subject to Citizen: Australian Citizenship in the Twentieth Century (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1988). —, What is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994). Department of the Interior, Commonwealth Government’s Policy with Respect to Aboriginals (Canberra: Commonwealth Government Printer, 1939). Deutsch, J.-G., P. Probst, and H. Schmidt (eds), African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate (Oxford: James Currey, 2002). Dewar, M., The ‘Black War’ in Arnhem Land: Missionaries and the Yolngu 1908–1940 (Darwin: Australian National University North Australia Research Unit, 1992). —, In Search of the ‘Never Never’: Looking for Australia in Northern Territory Writing (Darwin: Northern Territory University Press, 1997). Dirks, N. B. (ed), Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). Dixon, R. M. W., Australian Aboriginal Words in English: Their Origin and Meaning (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 2006). Douglas, H. and M. Finanne, Indigenous Crime and Settler Law: White Sovereignty after Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Dreyfus, H. L. and P. Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Brighton: Harvester, 1982). Durkheim, É, The Rules of Sociological Method: And Selected Texts on Sociology and Its Method (London: Macmillan, 1982 [1895]). Dutton, D., One of Us? A Century of Australian Citizenship (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002). Edmonds, P., Settler Colonialism and Re(Conciliation): Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Egan, T., Justice All Their Own: The Caledon Bay and Woodah Island Killings 1932–1933 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1996). Ekundare, R. O., An Economic History of Nigeria, 1860–1960 (London: Methuen, 1973). Elden, S., ‘A More Marxist Foucault: Reading La société punitive’, Historical Materialism, 23:4 (2015). Elkin, A. P., ‘Anthropology and the Future of the Australian Aborigines’, Oceania, 5:1 (1934). —,‘The Aborigines, Our National Responsibility’, Australian Quarterly, 23 (1934). —, ‘Anthropological Research in Australia and the Western Pacific, 1927–1937’, Oceania, 8:3 (1938). —, The Australian Aborigines: How to Understand Them (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1938). —, ‘Anthropology in Australia, 1939’, Oceania, 10:1 (1939). —, ‘The Place of Sir Hubert Murray in Native Administration’, Australian Quarterly, 12:3 (1940). —, Citizenship for the Aborigines: A National Aboriginal Policy (Sydney: Australasian Publishing Co., 1944). —, ‘Reaction and Interaction: A Food Gathering People and European Settlement in Australia’, American Anthropologist, 53:2 (1951). —, ‘Aboriginal Policy 1930–1950: Some Personal Associations’, Quadrant, 1:4 (1957). Epstein, T. S. and D. H. Penny (eds), Opportunity and Response: Case Studies in Economic Development (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1972).

[ 200 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

BIBLIOGR APHY Evans, J., ‘Where Lawlessness is Law: The Settler-Colonial Frontier as a Legal Space of Violence’, Australian Feminist Law Review, 30 (2009). Fabian, J., Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Falola, T., Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). — (ed.), Britain and Nigeria: Exploitation or Development? (London: Zed Books, 1986). Falola, T. and S. Aderinto, Nigeria, Nationalism, and Writing History (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010). Fanon, F., Black Skin, White Masks (London: Paladin, 1970). Faught, C. B., Into Africa: The Imperial Life of Margery Perham (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012). Fernandes Dias, M. S. (ed.), Legacies of Slavery: Comparative Perspectives (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007). Firth, R., Primitive Economics of the New Zealand Maori (London: G. Routledge, 1929). —, ‘Anthropology in Australia: 1926–1932 – and After’, Oceania, 3:1 (1932). Fisher, M. H., Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System, 1764–1858 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991). Ford, L., Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Ford, M., Beyond the Furthest Fences (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1966). Fortes, M. and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (eds), African Political Systems (London: International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, 1940). Foucault, M., Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (London: Allen Lane, 2003). —, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). —, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). —, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). France, P., The Charter of the Land: Custom and Colonization in Fiji (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1969). Frankel, S. H., Capital Investment in Africa: Its Course and Effects (London: Oxford University Press, 1938). Fraser, N., ‘Legitimation Crisis? On the Political Contradictions of Financialized Capitalism,’ Critical Historical Studies, 2:2 (2015). Fullagar, K. (ed.), The Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Effects and Transformations since the Eighteenth Century (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). Ganter, R., Mixed Relations: Asian–Aboriginal Contact in North Australia (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2006). Genders, J. C., The Australian Aborigines (Adelaide: Aborigines’ Protection League, 1937). George, E., Two at Daly Waters (Melbourne: Georgian House, 1945). Ghosh, A. and D. Chakrabarty, ‘A Correspondence on Provincializing Europe’, Radical History Review, 83 (2002). Giese, H., Planning a Program for Aborigines in the 1950s (Darwin: Northern Territory Library Service, 1990). Gifford, P. and Wm. R. Louis (eds), Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967). Ginsburg, F. and F. Myers, ‘A History of Indigenous Futures: Accounting for Indigenous Art and Media’, Aboriginal History, 30 (2006). Goldflam, R., ‘The (Non-)Role of Aboriginal Customary Law in Sentencing in the Northern Territory’, Australian Indigenous Law Review, 17:1 (2013). Goldstein, A., ‘Colonialism, Constituent Power, and Popular Sovereignty’, J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 2:1 (2014). Goodall, H., Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770 –1972 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996).

[ 201 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

BIBLIOGR APHY Goody, J., The Expansive Moment: The Rise of Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1918–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Gorman, D., The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Gramsci, A., Selections from the Prison Notebooks (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1996). Gray, C. J., Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa: Southern Gabon, ca. 1850–1940 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002). Gray, G., ‘There Are Many Difficult Problems: Ernest William Pearson Chinnery – Government Anthropologist’, Journal of Pacific History, 38:3 (2003). —, ‘“Mr Chinnery Should Be Given the Recognition He Deserves”: E.W.P. Chinnery in the Northern Territory’, Journal of Northern Territory History, 15 (2004). —, A Cautious Silence: The Politics of Australian Anthropology (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007). —, Abrogating Responsibility: Vesteys, Anthropology and the future of Aboriginal people (Canberra: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2015). Griffiths, M. R., ‘Interventions: Race, Culture, and Population via the Thought of A. P. Elkin’, Settler Colonial Studies, 6:4 (2016). Gunn, J., We of the Never-Never (London: Hutchinson, 1907). Gutmann, B., ‘The African Standpoint’, Africa, 8:1 (1935). Habjan, J. and J. Whyte (eds), (Mis)readings of Marx in Continental Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Hafkin, N. J. and E. G. Bay (eds), Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976). Hailey, W. M., An African Survey: A Study of Problems Arising in Africa South of the Sahara (London: Oxford University Press, 1938). Hall, S., ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, Marxism Today (January 1979). —, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso, 1988). Hall, S. et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, 1978). Hall, S. and D. Massey, ‘Interpreting the crisis’, Soundings, 44:1 (2010). Hall, V. C., Dreamtime Justice (Adelaide: Rigby, 1962). Harney, W. E., Content to Lie in the Sun (London: R. Hale, 1958). Hau’ofa, E., We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008). Heath, I., ‘Toward a Reassessment of Gordon in Fiji’, Journal of Pacific History, 9 (1974). Herbert, C., War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Hill, B., Broken Song: T.G.H. Strehlow and Aboriginal Possession (Sydney: Knopf, 2002). Hill, E., The Territory (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1951). Hinkson, J., P. James, and L. Veracini (eds), Stolen Lands, Broken Cultures: The SettlerColonial Present (Melbourne: Arena Publications, 2012). Hobsbawm, E. and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Hogbin, H. I., Law and Order in Polynesia: A Study of Primitive Legal Institutions (London: Christophers, 1934). Hokari, M., Gurindji Journey: A Japanese Historian in the Outback (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2011). Holland, A., ‘The Campaign for Women Protectors: Gender, Race and Frontier between the Wars’, Australian Feminist Studies, 16:34 (2001). —, Just Relations: The Story of Mary Bennett’s Crusade for Aboriginal Rights (Perth: UWA Publishing, 2015). Hopkins, A. G., An Economic History of West Africa (London: Longman, 1973). Horner, J., Vote Ferguson for Aboriginal Freedom: A Biography (Sydney: Australian and New Zealand Book Co., 1974). Howard, M. C., Fiji: Race and Politics in an Island State (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1991).

[ 202 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

BIBLIOGR APHY Howe, K. R., Where the Waves Fall: A New South Sea Islands History from First Settlement to Colonial Rule (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1984). Howe, R. (ed.), Women and the State: Australian Perspectives (Melbourne: La Trobe University Press, 1993). Hughes-D’Aeth, T., ‘Cooper, Cather, Prichard, “Pioneer”: The Chronotope of Settler Colonialism,’ Australian Literary Studies, 31:3 (2013), www.australianliterarystudies.com.au/ articles/cooper-cather-prichard-pioneer-the-chronotope-of-settler-colonialism. Hussain, N., The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). Hutchinson, S. E., Nuer Dilemmas: Coping with Money, War, and the State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Hyam, R., Elgin and Churchill at the Colonial Office 1905–1908: The Watershed of the Empire-Commonwealth (London: Macmillan, 1968). Ikime, O., The Fall of Nigeria: The British Conquest (London: Heinemann, 1977). Iliffe, J., A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). —, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Jacob, W. C., Working Out Egypt: Effendi Masculinity and Subject Formation in Colonial Modernity, 1870 –1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Jeffries, C., The Colonial Empire and Its Civil Service (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938). Joint Committee on Closer Union in East Africa, Vol I—Report, Together with the Proceedings of the Committee (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1931). Kelly, J. H., Northern Australia Cattle Survey: Report (Canberra: Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Department of Commerce and Agriculture, 1949). —, Report on the Beef Cattle Industry in Northern Australia (Canberra: Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Dept. of Commerce and Agriculture, 1952. Kevin, J. C. G. (ed.), Some Australians Take Stock (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1939). Khatun, S., ‘Beyond Blank Spaces: Five Tracks to Late Nineteenth-Century Beltana’, Transfers, 6:3 (2015). Kirk-Greene, A. H. M. (ed.) The Principles of Native Administration in Nigeria: Selected Documents, 1900 –1947 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). — (ed.), Lugard and the Amalgamation of Nigeria: A Documentary Record (London: Frank Cass, 1968). Kirkby, C., The Birth of the Native and the Reconstitution of the British Empire (forthcoming 2018). Knapman, B., Fiji’s Economic History, 1874–1939: Studies of Capitalist Colonial Development (Canberra: National Centre for Development Studies, 1987). Kowald, M. and W. R. Johnston, You Can’t Make It Rain: The Story of the North Australian Pastoral Company 1877–1991 (Brisbane: Boolarong Publications with North Australian Pastoral Co., 1992). Kuper, A., The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth (London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2005). Laidlaw, Z., ‘Investigating Empire: Humanitarians, Reform and the Commission of Eastern Inquiry,’ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 40:5 (2012). Lake, M. and H. Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008). Lal, B. V. (ed.), Politics in Fiji: Studies in Contemporary History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986). Lambert, D. and Lester, A. (eds), Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Langton, M., ‘Urbanizing Aborigines: The Social Scientists’ Great Deception’, Social Alternatives, 2:2 (1981). Langton, M., O. Mazel, and L. Palmer, ‘The “Spirit” of the Thing: The Boundaries of Aboriginal Economic Relations at Australian Common Law’, Australian Journal of Anthropology, 17:3 (2006).

[ 203 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

BIBLIOGR APHY Larbalestier, J., ‘“… For the Betterment of These People”: The Bleakley Report and Aboriginal Workers’, Social Analysis, 24 (1988). Legge, J. D., Britain in Fiji, 1858–1880 (London: University of Western Australia Press, 1958). Lester, A., ‘Colonial Networks, Australian Humanitarianism and the History Wars’, Geographical Research, 44:3 (2006). Lewis, D., A Wild History: Life and Death on the Victoria River Frontier (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2012). Ling, T., Blame and Martyrs: The Commonwealth Government and the Northern Territory Cattle Industry, 1911–1978 (Darwin: Historical Society of the Northern Territory, 2015). Litchfield, J. S., Far-North Memories: Being the Account of Ten Years Spent on the Diamond-Drills, and of Things That Happened in Those Days (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1930). Locke, J., Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964 [1689]). Lockwood, D., The Front Door: Darwin, 1869–1969 (Adelaide: Rigby, 1968). Long, J. P. M., The Go-Betweens: Patrol Officers in Aboriginal Affairs Administration in the Northern Territory 1936–74 (Darwin: North Australia Research Unit, Australian National University, 1992). Low, D. A., Lion Rampant: Essays in the Study of British Imperialism (London: Frank Cass, 1973). Lowe, L. and D. Lloyd (eds), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). Lowrie, C., Masters and Servants: Cultures of Empire in the Tropics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016). Lugard, F. J. D., ‘The Fight against Slave–Traders on Nyassa’, Contemporary Review, 56 (1889). —, ‘Tropical Africa’, Edinburgh Review, 229:468 (1919). —, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1922). —, ‘Education and Race Relations’, Journal of the African Society, 32:126 (1933). —, Political Memoranda: Revision of Instructions to Political Officers on Subjects Chiefly Political and Administrative: 1913–1918 (London: Frank Cass, 3rd edn, 1970). Lydon, J., The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the Emergence of Indigenous Rights (Sydney: NewSouth, 2012). Lyon, P. and M. Parsons, We Are Staying: The Alyawarre Struggle for Land at Lake Nash (Alice Springs: IAD Press, 1989). Macintyre, S. and S. Scalmer (eds), What If? Australian History as It Might Have Been (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006). MacLeod, M. J., ‘The Sociological Theory of the Taxation of the Peasant’, Peasant Studies Newsletter, 4 (1975). Maddison, S., T. Clark and R. de Costa (eds), The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation: Non-Indigenous People and the Responsibility to Engage (Singapore: Springer Nature, 2016). Mafeje, A., ‘The Ideology of “Tribalism”’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 9:2 (1971). Magubane, B., ‘A Critical Look at Indices Used in the Study of Social Change in Colonial Africa’, Current Anthropology, 12:4/5 (1971). Maine, H. S., Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (London: Murray, 1930 [1861]). Mair, L., Native Policies in Africa (London: Routledge, 1936). Makin, J., The Big Run: The Story of Victoria River Downs Station (Adelaide: Rigby, 2nd edn, 1983). Malinowski, B., ‘The Primitive Economics of the Trobriand Islanders’, Economic Journal, 31:121 (1921). —, ‘Ethnology and the Study of Society’, Economica, 6 (1922). —, Crime and Custom in Savage Society (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1926).

[ 204 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

BIBLIOGR APHY —, ‘Native Education and Culture Contact’, International Review of Missions, 25 (1936). —, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967). —, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978 [1922]). Malinowski, B. et al., Methods of Study of Culture Contact in Africa (London: International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, 1938). Mamdani, M., ‘Historicizing Power and Responses to Power: Indirect Rule and Its Reform’, Social Research, 66:3 (1999). —, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Kampala: Fountain Publishers, 2004). —, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Mamdani, M. and E. Wamba-dia-Wamba (eds), African Studies in Social Movements and Democracy (Dakar: Codesria, 1995). Manela, E., The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Mantena, K., Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). Markus, A., Blood from a Stone (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2nd edn, 1988). —, Governing Savages (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990). Martínez, J., ‘When Wages Were Clothes: Dressing Down Aboriginal Workers in Australia’s Northern Territory’, International Review of Social History, 52 (2007), 280. Martínez, J. and C. Lowrie, ‘Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into “Houseboys”’, Gender and History, 21:2 (2009). Martínez, J. and A. Vickers, The Pearl Frontier: Indonesian Labor and Indigenous Encounters in Australia’s Northern Trading Network (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2015). Marx, K., Capital: Volume I (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976). Matera, M., M. L. Bastian and S. K. Kent, The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Mauss, M., The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 1990 [1923]). May, D., Aboriginal Labour and the Cattle Industry: Queensland from White Settlement to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Maynard, J., ‘“In the Interests of Our People”: The Influence of Garveyism on the Rise of Australian Aboriginal Political Activism’, Aboriginal History, 29 (2005). —, Fight for Liberty and Freedom: The Origins of Australian Aboriginal Activism (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2007). Mbembe, A., On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). —, ‘African Modes of Self-Writing’, Public Culture, 14:1 (2002). —, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture, 15:1 (2007). McCall, G. (ed.), Anthropology in Australia: Essays to Honour 50 Years of Mankind (Sydney: Anthropological Society of New South Wales, 1982). McClendon, T. V., White Chief, Black Lords: Shepstone and the Colonial State in Natal, South Africa, 1845–1878 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010). McConnell, U., ‘Cape York Peninsula: The Primitive Background’, Walkabout, 2:9 (1936). McDorman, K. S., ‘Two Views of Empire: Margery Perham and Joyce Cary Analyze the Dual Mandate Policy’, Research Studies, 50:3–4 (1982) McGinness, J., Son of Alyandabu: My Fight for Aboriginal Rights (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1991). McGrath, A., Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987). —, Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015). McGregor, R., ‘“Breed out the Colour” or the Importance of Being White’, Australian Historical Studies, 120 (2002).

[ 205 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

BIBLIOGR APHY —, Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal People and the Australian Nation (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2011). Meillassoux, C., Maidens, Meal and Money: Capitalism and the Domestic Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Metcalf, T. R., Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860 –1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Miller, P., G. Burchell, and C. Gordon (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Mills, K. and T. Austin, ‘“Talking About Cruel Things”: Girls’ Life in the Kahlin Compound, by Daisy Ruddick as told to Kathy Mills and Tony Austin’, Hecate, 15:1 (1989). Mitchell, P., African Afterthoughts (London: Hutchinson, 1954). Mitchell, T., Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). —, ‘Everyday Metaphors of Power’, Theory and Society, 19:5 (1990). — (ed.), Questions of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Money, J. W. B., Java; or, How to Manage a Colony. Showing a Practical Solution of the Questions Now Affecting British India (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1861). Moreton-Robinson, A., The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). — (ed.), Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2007). Morris, H. F. and James S. Read (eds), Indirect Rule and the Search for Justice: Essays on East Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Morris, S. (ed.), A Rightful Place: A Road Map to Recognition (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2017). Mudimbe, V. Y., The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Mulvaney, D. J. and J. H. Calaby, “So Much That Is New”: Baldwin Spencer, 1860–1929, a Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1985). Myers, F. R., Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1986). Myers, J. C., Indirect Rule in South Africa: Tradition, Modernity, and the Costuming of Political Power (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008). Nanni, G., The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children and Their Families (Canberra: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997). Needham, J. S., White and Black in Australia (London: National Missionary Council of Australia, 1935). Neumann, K., N. Thomas, and H. Ericksen (eds), Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1999). Newbury, C., ‘Bose Vakaturaga: Fiji’s Great Council of Chiefs, 1875–2000’, Pacific Studies, 29:1/2 (2006). —, Patronage and Politics in the Victorian Empire: The Personal Governance of Sir Arthur Hamilton Gordon (Lord Stanmore) (Amherst, MA: Cambria Press, 2010). Nicolson, I. F., The Administration of Nigeria, 1900 –1960: Men, Methods and Myths (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). Northern Australia Development Committee, Development of Northern Australia (Northern Australia Development Committee, 1947). Noyes, John K. Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa 1884–1915 (Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1992). Nwabughuogu, A. I., ‘The Role of Propaganda in the Development of Indirect Rule in Nigera, 1890–1929’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 14:1 (1981). Ong, A., ‘Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States’, Current Anthropology, 37:5 (1996).

[ 206 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

BIBLIOGR APHY Ormsby-Gore, W. G. A., Report by the Hon. W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore M.P. (Parliamentary under-Secretary of State for the Colonies), on His Visit to West Africa During the Year 1926 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1926). Padmore, G., How Britain Rules Africa (London: Wishart, 1936). Paisley, F., Loving Protection: Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights 1919–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2000). —, The Lone Protestor: AM Fernando in Australia and Europe (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2012). —, ‘An Echo of Black Slavery: Emancipation, Forced Labour and Australia in 1933’, Australian Historical Studies, 45:1 (2014). Parsons, G., Black Chattels: The Story of the Australian Aborigines (London: National Council for Civil Liberties, 1946). Pasternak. S., ‘Jurisdiction and Settler Colonialism’, Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 29:2 (2014). Pateman, C. and C. W. Mills, Contract and Domination (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). Pearson, M and J. Lennon, Pastoral Australia: Fortunes, Failures and Hard Yakka: A Historical Overview 1788–1967 (Melbourne: CSIRO Publishing, 2010). Pedersen, S., The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Peers, D. M., ‘Is Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again?: The Revival of Imperial History and the Oxford History of the British Empire’, Journal of World History, 13:2 (2002). Perham, M., ‘A Re-Statement of Indirect Rule’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 7:3 (1934). —, Lugard: The Years of Authority 1898–1945 (London: Collins, 1960). —, Native Administration in Nigeria (London: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1962). Peterson, N., ‘Capitalism, Culture and Land Rights: Aborigines and the State in the Northern Territory’, Social Analysis, 18 (1985). —, ‘“I Can’t Follow You on This Horde-Clan Business at All”: Donald Thomson, Radcliffe-Brown and a Final Note on the Horde’, Oceania, 76:1 (2006). Peterson, N. and T. Matsuyama (eds), Cash, Commoditisation and Changing Foragers (Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, 1991). Peterson, N. and W. Sanders (eds), Citizenship and Indigenous Australians: Changing Conceptions and Possibilities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Phillips, A., The Enigma of Colonialism: British Policy in West Africa (London: James Currey, 1989). Pietsch, T., Empire of Scholars: Universities, Networks and the British Academic World 1850 –1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). Povinelli, E. A., Labor’s Lot: The Power, History, and Culture of Aboriginal Action (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993). —, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). —, The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). —, ‘The Governance of the Prior’, Interventions, 13:1 (2011). Powell, A., Far Country: A Short History of the Northern Territory (Darwin: Charles Darwin University Press, 5th edn, 2009). Prakash, G., Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Price, A. G., The History and Problems of the Northern Territory, Australia (Adelaide: n.p., 1930). Rabinow, P. (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., The Andaman Islanders: A Study in Social Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922). —, ‘Black Australia’, Australian Museum Magazine, 4:4 (1930). —, ‘Editorial’, Oceania, 1:1 (1930). —, ‘The Social Organization of Australian Tribes’, Oceania, 1:1, 2, 3 (1930).

[ 207 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

BIBLIOGR APHY —, Structure and Function in Primitive Society: Essays and Addresses (New York: The Free Press, 1952). Rattray, R. S., Ashanti Law and Constitution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929). Read, P. (ed.), Settlement: A History of Australian Indigenous Housing (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2000). Read, P. and J. Read (eds), Long Time, Olden Time: Aboriginal Accounts of Northern Territory History (Alice Springs: Institute for Aboriginal Development, 1991). Reynolds, H., This Whispering in Our Hearts (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998). Rich, P. B., Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1990). Richards, A. I., ‘Practical Anthropology in the Lifetime of the International African Institute’, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 14:6 (1944). Rifkin, M., ‘Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the “Peculiar” Status of Native Peoples’, Cultural Critique, 73 (2009). —, Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). —, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). Rigsby, B. and N. Peterson (eds), Donald Thomson: The Man and Scholar (Canberra: Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, 2005). Robert, H., ‘Disciplining the Female Aboriginal Body: Inter-racial Sex and the Pretence of Separation’, Australian Feminist Studies, 16:34 (2001). Roberts, A (ed.), The Colonial Moment in Africa: Essays on the Movement of Minds and Materials, 1900 –1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Robinson, R. and J. Gallagher with A. Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961). Roe, M., ‘A Model Aboriginal State’, Aboriginal History, 10 (1986). Rose, D. B., Hidden Histories: Black Stories from Victoria River Downs, Humbert River and Wave Hill Stations (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991). Rose, N., Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Rose, N. and P. Miller, ‘Political Power Beyond the State: Problematics of Government’, British Journal of Sociology, 43:2 (1992). Roth, G. K., Native Administration in Fiji During the Past 75 Years; a Successful Experiment in Indirect Rule (London: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1951). Routledge, D., Matanitu: The Struggle for Power in Early Fiji (Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1985). Rowley, C. D., The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1970). —, The Remote Aborigines (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1971). Rowse, T., White Flour, White Power: From Rations to Citizenship in Central Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). —, Rethinking Social Justice: From ‘Peoples’ to ‘Populations’ (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2012). — (ed.), Contesting Assimilation (Perth: A.P.I. Network, 2005). Russell, L. (ed.), Colonial Frontiers: Indigenous-European Encounters in Settler Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Salemink, O. and P. Pels (eds), Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999). Scott, D., Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Scott, J. C., Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Searcy, A., In Australian Tropics (London: George Robertson, 2nd edn, 1909). Seth, S., Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

[ 208 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

BIBLIOGR APHY Seth, V., Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500 –1900 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Seward, A. C. (ed.), Science and the Nation (Cambridge: Cambidge University Press, 1917). Sheils, H. (ed.), Australian Aboriginal Studies: A Symposium of Papers Presented at the 1961 Research Conference (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1963). Silverstein, B., ‘Submerged Sovereignty: Native Title within a History of Incorporation’, in Julie Evans et al. (eds), Sovereignty: Frontiers of Possibility (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013). —, ‘“Possibly they did not know themselves”: The Ambivalent Government of Sex and Work in the Northern Territory Aboriginals Ordinance 1918’, History Australia, 14:3 (2017). —, ‘The “Proper Settler” and the “Native Mind”: Flogging Scandals in the Northern Territory, 1919 and 1932’, in Penelope Edmonds and Amanda Nettelbeck (eds), The Intimacies of Violence in Settler Colonial Economies: Economies of Dispossession around the Pacific Rim (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Simmel, G., The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge, 3rd enlarged edn, 2004). Simpson, A., ‘Captivating Eunice: Membership, Colonialism, and Gendered Citizenships of Grief’, Wicazo Sa Review, 24:2 (2009). —, ‘Under the Sign of Sovereignty: Certainty, Ambivalence, and Law in Native North America and Indigenous Australia’, Wicazo Sa Review, 25:2 (2010). —, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Simpson, A. and A. Smith (eds), Theorizing Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Sinha, M., Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). Sluga, G., Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). Smuts, J. C., Africa and Some World Problems, Including the Rhodes Memorial Lectures Delivered in Michaelmas Term, 1929 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930). Spencer, H., The Principles of Sociology, Vol. I (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1883). Spencer, W. B., Native Tribes of the Northern Territory of Australia (London: Macmillan, 1914). —, Wanderings in Wild Australia (London: Macmillan, 1928). Srinivas, M. N. (ed.), Method in Social Anthropology: Selected Essays (Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Corp., 1983). Stanmore, A. H-G., Paper on the System of Taxation in Force in Fiji: Read before the Royal Colonial Institute, by the Hon. Sir Arthur Gordon, 18th March, 1879 (London: Harrison & Sons, 1879). —, ‘Native Councils in Fiji (“Na Veimbose Vaka Turanga”)’, Contemporary Review, 43 (1883). —, Fiji: Records of Private and Public Life, 1875–1880 (Edinburgh: R. & R. Clark, 1897). Stanner, W. E. H., ‘Ceremonial Economics of the Mulluk Mulluk and Madngella Tribes of the Daly River, North Australia. A Preliminary Paper’, Oceania, 4:2, 4 (1933/4). —, ‘Anthropology and the Dying Australian Aborigines’, Man, 38 (1938). —, After the Dreaming: Black and White Australians – an Anthropologist’s View (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1969). —, White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays, 1938–1973 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1979). Stanner, W. E. H. and D. Barwick, ‘Not by Eastern Windows Only: Anthropological Advice to Australian Governments in 1938’, Aboriginal History, 3:1 (1979). Stanton, S., ‘The Australian Half-Caste Progressive Association: The Fight for Freedom in the Northern Territory’, Journal of Northern Territory History, 4 (1993). Stevens, F. S., Equal Wages for Aborigines: The Background to Industrial Discrimination in the Northern Territory of Australia (Sydney: Aura Press, 1968). —, Aborigines in the Northern Territory Cattle Industry (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974).

[ 209 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

BIBLIOGR APHY Stilwell, S., ‘Constructing Colonial Power: Tradition, Legitimacy and Government in Kano, 1903–63’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 29:2 (2011). Stocking, G. W., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987). —, The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). —, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). — (ed.), Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984). Stoler, A. L., Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). —, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Commonsense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). —, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Sultan, R. (ed.) Ecopolitics IX: Perspectives on Indigenous People’s Management of Environmental Resources (Darwin: Northern Territory University with Northern Land Council, 1995). Sutcliffe, R. B. and R. Owen (eds), Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London: Longman, 1972). Swenson, A. and P. Mandler (eds), From Plunder to Preservation: Britain and the Heritage of Empire, c. 1800 –1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Tamuno, T. N., The Evolution of the Nigerian State: The Southern Phase, 1898–1914 (Harlow: Longman, 1972). Taussig, M., ‘Culture of Terror—Space of Death. Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 26:3 (1984). Taylor, J. and M. Bell (eds), Population Mobility and Indigenous Peoples in Australasia and North America (London: Routledge, 2004). Taylor, T. G., Geographical Factors Controlling the Settlement of Tropical Australia (Brisbane: Royal Geographical Society of Australasia, Queensland, 1917). Terray, E., Marxism and ‘Primitive’ Societies: Two Studies (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). Terry, M., Hidden Wealth and Hiding People (London: Putnam, 1931). Thomas, M. (ed.), Expedition into Empire: Exploratory Journeys and the Making of the Modern World (New York: Routledge, 2015). Thomas, N., Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Thompson, E. P., ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, 38:1 (1967). Thomson, D. F., ‘The Hero Cult, Initiation and Totemism on Cape York’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 63 (1933). —, ‘Notes on a Hero Cult from the Gulf of Carpentaria, North Queensland’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 64 (1934). —, ‘The Joking Relationship and Organized Obscenity in North Queensland’, American Anthropologist, 37:3, part 1 (1935). —, ‘Fatherhood in the Wik Monkan Tribe’, American Anthropologist, 38:3, part 1 (1936). —, Interim General Report of Preliminary Expedition to Arnhem Land, Northern Territory of Australia, 1935– 6 (Canberra: Government Printer, 1936). —, Recommendations of Policy in Native Affairs in the Northern Territory of Australia (Canberra: Commonwealth Government Printer, 1937). —, Report on Expedition to Arnhem Land, 1936 –37 (Canberra: Government Printer, 1939). —, Economic Structure and the Ceremonial Exchange Cycle in Arnhem Land (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1949). —, N.T.S.R.U., 1941–1943: Northern Territory Special Reconnaissance Unit (Nhulunbuy: Yirrkala Literature Production Centre, 1992).

[ 210 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

BIBLIOGR APHY Thomson, D. F. and N. Peterson, Donald Thomson in Arnhem Land (Carlton: Miegunyah Press, 2005). Tuck, E. and K. W. Yang, ‘Decolonization is Not a Metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1:1 (2012). Turner, S., ‘“Inclusive Exclusion”: Managing Identity for the Nation’s Sake in Aotearoa/ New Zealand’, Arena Journal, 28 (2007). Vaughan, O., Nigerian Chiefs: Traditional Power in Modern Politics, 1890s–1990s (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000). Veracini, L., ‘Towards a Further Redescription of the Pastoral Frontier’, Journal of Australian Studies, 26:72 (2002). —, ‘“Emphatically Not a White Man’s Colony”: Settler Colonialism and the Construction of Fiji’, Journal of Pacific History, 43:2 (2008). —, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). —, ‘“Settler Colonialism”: Career of a Concept’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 41:2 (2013). —, The Settler Colonial Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Ward, C., A Handful of Sand: The Gurindji Struggle After the Walkoff (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2016). Warner, W. L., A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe (New York: Harper & Bros, 1937). Watson, I., ‘In the Northern Territory Intervention: What is Saved or Rescued and at What Cost?’, Cultural Studies Review, 15:2 (2009). Webb, T. T., The Aborigines of East Arnhem Land, Australia (Melbourne: Methodist Laymen’s Missionary Movement, 1934). Willey, K. and M. Savage, Boss Drover (Adelaide: Rigby, 1977). Willis, P. A., Patrons and Riders: Conflicting Roles and Hidden Objectives in an Aboriginal Development Programme at Kununurra, Western Australia (Flaxton: Post Pressed, 2003). Wilson, W. E., Dietary Survey of Aboriginals in the Northern Territory (Canberra: Department of Health, 1951). Wise, T., The Self-Made Anthropologist: A Life of A.P. Elkin (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1985). Wolfe, P., ‘History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism’, American Historical Review, 102:2 (1997). —, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999). —, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research, 8:4 (2006). —, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016). — (ed.), The Settler Complex: Recuperating Binarism in Colonial Studies (Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2016). Wood Jones, F., Australia’s Vanishing Race (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1934). Young, C., The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).

Other published sources

‘Uluru Statement of the Heart,’ 26 May 2017, accessed 29 May 2017, available from https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3755370/ULURU-STATEMENT-FROMthe-HEART.pdf. Prime Minister, Attorney-General, and Minister for Indigenous Affairs, ‘Media Release: Response to Referendum Council’s report on Constitutional Recognition’, 26 October 2017, accessed 7 December 2017, https://www.pm.gov.au/media/ response-referendum-council%E2%80%99s-report-constitutional-recognition. Recognise, ‘Why recognition?’, accessed 8 June 2017, www.recognise.org.au/the-facts/ the-constitution/.

[ 211 ]

BIBLIOGR APHY

Unpublished dissertations

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Larbalestier, J., ‘A World after Its Own Image: Ideology and Domination in the Northern Territory’ (PhD Thesis, Macquarie University, 1988). Martínez, J., ‘Racism in the Northern Territory: The Attitudes of Administrators, Pastoralists and Unionists to Aborigines Employed in the Cattle Industry, During the Depression, 1929–1934’ (Honours Thesis, University of Wollongong, 1995). —, ‘Plural Australia: Aboriginal and Union Labour in Tropical White Australia, Darwin 1911–1940’ (PhD Thesis, University of Wollongong, 2000). Tatz, C., ‘Aboriginal Administration in the Northern Territory of Australia’ (PhD Thesis, The Australian National University, 1964). Wells, J. T., ‘The Long March: Assimilation Policy and Practice in Darwin, the Northern Territory 1939–1967’ (PhD Thesis, University of Queensland, 1995).

[ 212 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

I N DEX

Aba Women’s War (1929) 35 Abbott, C.L.A. 17, 55, 57, 64‒5, 136‒7, 147 abduction of children 107, 119 Aboriginal activists 118–20, 126 Aboriginal communities 16, 63‒7, 70‒4, 82, 84, 93‒5, 99‒100, 109‒10, 117‒20, 125, 138‒9, 144‒50, 153‒5, 162‒8, 172‒4, 178‒9 autonomy for 16 see also native society Aboriginal labour 3, 8, 11, 13‒15, 56, 60‒70, 72, 74, 83, 111–12, 114–17, 135, 138‒9, 145, 148‒52, 155, 161‒70, 174‒8, 189 withdrawal of 66‒7, 175, 177 Aboriginal laws and jurisdiction 2, 6, 9‒10, 17‒18 Aboriginal rights 14‒15 Aboriginal sovereignty 145, 186‒91 Aboriginal State (proposed) 120‒5 Aboriginal women, exploitation of 65‒6 Aborigines Friends Association 120 Aborigines’ Progressive Association 118, 119–20, 127 Aborigines’ Protection League 120‒2 absorption policy 107‒8, 111‒14 acephalous societies 99, 153 African Survey 41 Allen, J.W. 115 Andaman islanders 86 Anderson, Warwick 110 anthropological methods and knowledge 81‒95, 97‒100, 120‒4, 137, 148, 175 see also social anthropology Anti-Slavery Society 124–5 Arnhem Land 89‒98, 135 articulation, processes of 10‒11, 15 Ashforth, Adam 58 assimilation 14, 34, 73, 97‒8, 107, 111, 114‒17, 139, 142, 146‒52, 155, 163, 186‒7 incompleteness of 179 Attewell, Nadine 108 Aurukun Mission 89 Austin, Tony 120 Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA) 118, 122 Australian Aborigines’ League 106‒7, 118‒20, 126–7, 135 Australians for the Protection of Native Races 117

‘babus’ 45 Banivanua Mar, Tracey 144 Barker, Joanne 186 Basedow, Herbert 120‒1 Bastian, Misty L. 35 Batman, John 126 Beckett, Jeremy 150, 184 Bennett, Mary 121‒2, 125, 185 Berndt, Ronald and Catherine 69, 151, 165 Black War of Arnhem Land (1932–34) 6, 81, 89–92, 96 Blakely, Arthur 67 Blakely, Fred 83, 149 Bleakley, J.W. (and Bleakley Report, 1929) 68, 115, 123, 146, 175 Brackenreg, James 59 British Empire 7, 13, 15, 26, 28, 43, 84‒5 Brooks, Fred 68 Brown, Amy 124, 148‒9 Buchanan, Sir George 59, 61, 72 buffer stations 162‒4 Burton, Antoinette 27 ‘bush blacks’ 69‒70 Cakobau, Ratu Seru 28‒9 Caledon Bay 89‒92, 146 Cameron, Donald 174 capitalism 12 Carrington, V.G. 169 Carrodus, J.A. 117, 136‒7 cattle stations 62‒73, 110, 143‒5, 162‒5, 167‒79, 187, 190 Cawood, John 68 ceremonial networks 166 Chamberlain, Joseph 47 Chewings, Charles 115 chiefs and chiefly power 26‒45, 143, 151–2 Chinnery, E.W.P. 15, 17, 137, 141, 147, 165, 184‒8 Chisholm, Tony 168 Church Missionary Society 90 Cilento, Raphael 109‒10 citizenship 15, 107, 111, 115, 118‒20, 135, 138‒43, 150, 155, 161‒3, 179 rights of 184‒7 civilising mission 45, 98, 140 clans 94‒5 Collan, Jeff 56

[ 213 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

INDEX colonialism 11‒13, 24‒43, 69, 82, 86‒8, 98, 113, 138‒9, 142–3, 151, 154, 171, 178 aim of 39‒40, 47, 138, 173‒4 Australian form of 9 Lugard’s principles of 37‒43 see also franchise colonialism; settler colonialism commissions of inquiry 58–62, 71, 74 Comte, Auguste 87 Conigrave, C.P. 96, 116 Coniston massacre (1928) 68, 74 Constitution, Australian 190‒1 Cook, Cecil 14, 16‒17, 54, 64, 67, 106‒17, 124, 141‒2, 145‒9, 162‒3 opposition to 117 Cooper, Frederick 4, 139, 173 Cooper, William 106, 108, 119, 122‒7, 135‒6, 185 crises, colonial 12‒16 Crocker, Walter 72 Croll, Robert 123 Cromwell, Oliver 45 ‘Crown Colony’ system of government 72 cultural change 98 culture, function of 87 Cummeragunja Reserve 118‒19, 125‒6 Curtin, John 55 customary law and institutions 4‒6, 33, 36, 42, 46 Danayarri, Hobbles 67 Darwin 54‒9, 75n.16, 111‒12, 188 Day of Mourning and Protest 135‒6, 185, 190 Deleuze, Gilles 9 Department of Native Affairs 188 detribalisation 44, 46, 97‒8, 112‒14, 144, 162, 179 development, stages of 37–40, 47, 53n.77, 98, 109, 123–4, 137, 138, 140, 142–3, 151, 155 diet 174‒5 Disraeli, Benjamin 24‒7 district officers 40, 141 Douglas, Heather 2 Drake-Brockman, Edmund A. 55 The Dual Mandate 37‒8, 41, 47, 151 Durkheim, Émile 87 Durnam, F.J. 153 education 44‒6, 114‒15 Elkin, A.P. 14‒15, 84, 88, 91, 94‒5, 99‒100, 109, 117, 124, 136‒41, 146‒50, 154‒5, 165, 170, 177 Ellis, Malcolm 111 employment relationships on cattle stations 168‒70 ethnography 96 exchange relationships 168‒70

Falola, Toyin 41 Ferguson, Bill 119, 135, 185 Fiji 13, 25‒33, 36, 40‒2, 138, 149, 172, 189 Finnane, Mark 2 Firth, Raymond 88, 166 Fletcher, John 60 Florida cattle station 68 foraging 177 Ford, Lisa 2 Foucault, Michel 26 franchise colonialism 7, 9, 73 frontier 8, 12, 17, 72, 74, 79n.76, 93, 96, 139, 142–3, 148, 153, 154 Fuller, Hector 69‒70 Gahan, G.A. 137 Garvey, Marcus 118 gender inequality 65 Genders, J. Chas 120‒3 George, Elisabeth 82 Ghosh, Amitav 190 Gibbs, Pearl 119, 126 Giese, Harry 188 gift economies 166‒7 Gordon, Arthur 12, 25‒33, 40‒2, 46, 124 governmentality 4‒6, 19n.9, 20n.12, 26‒8, 42, 142, 152, 154, 172–3, 188‒9 Grant, W.H. 116, 169, 176 Guattari, Félix 9 Gunn, Aeneas 167‒8 Gutmann, Bruno 115 Haast’s Bluff 146 Hailey, Lord 37, 153 ‘half-castes’ 46, 110‒13, 141, 186 Hall, Stuart 189 Hall, Vic 96 Harney, Bill 64, 176 Harvey, Musso 73 Heath, Ian 32 Herbert, Xavier 117 Hill, Ernestine 184 Hilton Young Report (1929) 121‒2 Hofmeyr, Isabel 27 Holland, Alison 120, 122, 125 ‘homoclimes’ 71 humanitarianism 15, 108‒9, 120, 125‒6, 140, 142, 145‒8 Hunt, Atlee 139 Hussain, Nasser 187 hybridity 44, 111 imperialism 25, 27, 32, 47, 139 Indian Rebellion (1857) 4, 24‒8, 32, 45, 108, 189 Indigenous presence 8‒9 ‘indirect method’ for the development of society 199

[ 214 ]

INDEX indirect rule 2‒6, 12‒17, 25‒8, 32‒4, 37, 42‒7, 82‒6, 91, 96, 120‒4, 136‒40, 145‒8, 162‒4, 170‒4, 179, 187‒91 the art of 4‒6 in response to colonial crises 12‒13 spaces of 151‒6 inviolability of Aboriginal reserves 148‒9, 154‒5

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Java 28, 108 Kahlin Beach Compound 111–12, 129n.20, 180n.5 Kelly, J.H. 63 Kent, Susan K. 35 Kenya 121–2, 139, 145 Kenyon, Alfred 123 Kerr, Alex 176 kinship 87, 99, 144, 166‒9 Kirkby, Coel 4 Kulmilya, Snowy 66 Kunoth-Monks, Rosalie 65 Lacey, Tom 118 Laidlaw, Zoë 58 language groups 94‒5 Larbalestier, Jan 144 League of Nations Mandate System 47, 126 Legge, J.D. 32 Lewis, Darryl 69 Litchfield, Jessie 57 Long, Jeremy 96 Lugard, Frederick 4‒5, 12, 16, 24‒8, 32‒47, 58, 88, 113, 121‒3, 140, 142, 148, 151‒3, 172‒4 principles of colonial rule 37‒43 Lyons, Enid 135‒6 Lyons, Joseph 135‒6 MacBlain, A. 137 McColl, Albert 81, 90 McConnell, Ursula 144 McEwen, John 14‒15, 135‒40, 146‒7, 154, 161‒2, 184‒7 McGrath, Ann 178 McGregor, Russell 108 MacGregor, William 123 McKenzie Hatton, Elizabeth 118 Macoun, Alissa 142, 145, 185 Mafeje, Archie 86 Maine, Henry 4, 8, 26, 30, 167 Mair, Lucy 121 Malinowski, Bronislaw 85‒6, 89, 94, 166‒7 malnutrition 174 Maloga Mission 119 Mamdani, Mahmood 4–5, 9, 27 Manne, Robert 106‒7 Mantena, Karuna 4, 26 Maori people 121 marriage 111‒13

Martin, Alfred 177 Matera, Marc 35 Mauss, Marcel 166 May, Dawn 63 Maynard, Fred 118 Maynard, John 118 Mbembe, Achille 190 Miller, H.V. 66 Mitchell, Timothy 154 Money, J.W.B. 28, 31, 108 money, understanding and use of 114‒17 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 186 Morley, William 117, 126 ‘mulla’ groups 94, 98 Murray, Hubert 123, 146, 171‒2 ‘Murray system’ of government 17 Nanni, Giordano 115‒16 native administration 4‒5, 125‒6, 136‒42, 146 Native Affairs Branch 141, 151 native authorities and native administration 34, 39‒45 native society 3‒7, 12‒16, 26‒33, 36‒43, 46, 84‒9, 92‒7, 126, 136‒40, 143‒55, 167‒72, 179, 188‒90 see also Aboriginal communities Needham, J.S. 139‒40 Nelson, Harold 96 Nelson, Sarah 119 Neville, A.O. 106‒7, 185 New Deal, Aboriginal 15, 137‒56, 161‒2, 164–74, 184‒90 New Guinea see Papua New Guinea Newbury, Colin 32 Nicholls, Douglas 127, 161‒2, 185 Nigeria 6‒7, 13, 24‒8, 33‒7, 40‒4, 108, 138, 172, 189 nomadism 98, 142, 176 North Australian Workers’ Union 176 Northern Standard (newspaper) 186 Northern Territory of Australia 3‒4, 9‒18, 46, 54‒61, 69‒74, 82‒4, 95‒6, 99, 106, 109‒10, 123‒5, 136‒8, 142‒8, 151, 154, 163, 167, 172, 178, 184, 189 crisis in the government of 14‒15 population statistics 55, 60, 70, 111 Northern Territory Pastoral Lessees’ Association (NTPLA) 168, 176‒7 Noyes, John 152 ‘open-range’ grazing system 63‒4 Ormiston murder 1–2, 17‒18, 135 Paine, Ivor 167‒8 Papua New Guinea 86, 98, 124–5, 147‒8, 171 pastoralism 13, 15‒16, 54‒74, 95, 135‒9, 143‒6, 162‒79, 187‒9 Paterson, Thomas 54, 60, 106

[ 215 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

INDEX patriarchal stage of development 39‒40 Patten, Jack 119, 126, 135 Payne, William 60 Payne‒Fletcher Report (1937) 13, 15, 56‒63, 72, 74, 135, 137 Pearce, Henriette 82‒3 peasant production 35‒6, 42‒3 Penhall, Les 170 Perham, Margery 4, 25, 91, 174 Perkins, John 91, 147 Philips, Anne 36 Pietsch, Tamson 88 police action 67‒8 Povinelli, Elizabeth 17, 153, 178 Price, Grenfell 58 primitivity and primitive law 39, 151, 153 progress, theory of 46‒7 Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 85‒91, 94, 99, 166 Raggatt, Fred 17 ‘rationing’ 169‒78 Rattray, R.S. 45‒6 reserves, Aboriginal 15–17, 95‒8, 107‒14, 118‒19, 124‒6, 138‒55, 162–4, 172‒3, 186‒7, 190 Robert, Hannah 113 Rose, Deborah Bird 66 Rose, Nikolas 86 Rowe, Owen 176‒7 Rowley, Charles 70, 155 Rowse, Tim 169‒70 Savage, Matt 167, 177 Scott, David 5 Scott, James 86 Second World War 188 segregation of whites from natives 33, 44, 97‒8, 111, 114, 135, 148‒50 Selby, Isaac 126‒7 self-determination 6, 47, 118‒22, 126, 151, 154, 185, 187 settler colonialism 3‒4, 6‒18, 56, 60, 62, 72, 74, 108, 114, 123‒5, 136‒40, 143‒6, 149‒55, 163‒4, 167‒8, 173, 185‒91 distinctively Australian form of 7‒9 recognition of 6‒12 settler sovereignty 10, 13, 18, 61, 81, 145, 186 Shaw, Flora 47 Shepherd, Frank (and Shepherd Committee Report, 1934) 59 Simmel, Georg 115 Simpson, Audra 16, 18, 186 slavery 67, 69, 173 Smith, D.D. 59 Smith, D.L. 177‒8 Smuts, Jan 121 social anthropology 82‒91, 95, 97‒100, 148 functionalist 85‒8, 126, 137 operationalisation of 142

social movements 14, 189 Sokoto 34 South Africa 143, 145 sovereignty 9‒11, 18, 68, 74 see also Aboriginal sovereignty; settler sovereignty Spencer, Baldwin 112, 139, 149 Spencer, Herbert 87 Staniforth Smith, Miles 146‒7 Stanmore, Lord 32 see also Gordon, Arthur Stanner, W.E.H. (Bill) 55, 66, 95, 139‒40, 154‒5, 166 Stocking, George 86 Stoler, Ann Laura 9, 187 Strakosch, Elizabeth 142, 145, 185 Strehlow, Ted 1‒3, 6, 9‒12, 15‒18, 135, 146, 188‒90 Sultan of Sokoto 34 Sweeney, Gordon 69, 174 Tasmania 89 taxation 31, 35, 40‒2 Taylor, Thomas Griffith 71 Ternent Cooke, Constance 121 Terry, Michael 67‒8 Thomas, Martin 93 Thomas, Matt 65 Thomas, Nicholas 171 Thompson, Fred 117 Thomson, Donald 6, 14‒15, 17, 81‒5, 89‒100, 107, 135, 148‒9, 153, 165‒7, 173 Tilmouth, Henry 68 time, conception of 115‒17, 172‒3, 187 Tomlinson, George 27 totemism 95 Toupein, Robert 176 trade 33, 166 trading companies 35 traditional societies 3‒5 ‘tribal’ stage of development 39‒40 tribalism and tribal institutions 2, 5‒6, 16, 26, 43‒6, 86‒8, 93‒6, 122, 140, 144, 146, 149, 155, 169‒74, 179, 188 see also detribalisation Trobriand islanders 166 trusteeship 47, 124‒5 Tuck, Eve 190 Tucker, Margaret 127 Uluru Statement 191 Unaipon, David 122 Veracini, Lorenzo 6, 60, 143, 145 Vestey’s (company) 69‒70 Victoria River Downs cattle station 63 Victorian Aboriginal Group (VAG) 123‒4, 148‒9 violence, use and threat of 65‒9, 149

[ 216 ]

Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

INDEX wages 71, 168, 178 ‘walk-offs’ 126 ‘walkabouts’ 175‒9, 189 Warner, Lloyd 94, 97, 176 Wave Hill station 69‒70, 174 Webb, Theodore 84, 150 Weddell, Robert 54, 90 ‘West African Policy’ 36 White, V.J. 188 ‘White Australia’ policy 8‒9, 14, 56, 61–2, 72, 74, 107, 109, 112‒13 whiteness 39, 110–12, 148, 154 Willeroo cattle station 66 Winpilin, Riley Young 73 Wirrpanda, Dhaakiyarr 81, 91‒2

Wise, Tigger 136 Wolfe, Patrick 7‒8, 108, 152 women Aboriginal 65‒6 resistance by 35 role of 109 see also Aba Women’s War; gender inequality Wong, Aihwa 186 Wood Jones, Frederic 90‒1, 97, 121, 144 Woodah Island 13, 81, 90, 92 Yang, K. Wayne 190 Yolngu 81, 89‒96 Yorubaland 34

[ 217 ]