Governing Natives: Indirect Rule and Settler Colonialism in Australia's North – By Ben Silverstein

In June 2007 the Australian federal government initiated a policy program that aimed to transform Aboriginal communities in Australia's Northern Territory (NT). In the months following the NT Intervention, several commentators and scholars remarked on the similarity of the policy to the coercive and assimilatory politics of Australia's colonial past. These authors argued that the Intervention represented a 'lack of capacity to abandon past thinking about colonialism'. This article contributes to a settler-colonial analysis of the Intervention by providing the first substantive comparison of the political discourses employed by the Liberal National (Coalition) government and the Labor government on the subject of the NT Intervention. By drawing on the emergent field of settler-colonial studies, I am able to identify the settler-colonial mentality that is shared by the Coalition and Labor governments.

Australian Historical Studies, 2019

Using the papers of the Gibb Committee on the future of Aboriginal communities on pastoral properties in the Northern Territory (1970-72), this article contributes both theoretically and empirically to the history of self-determination policy. It reveals non-Aboriginal authorities' thinking at a crucial moment in the history of the governing of remote Aboriginal Australians: the dissolution of the 'pastoral-feudal' order under the impact of 'equal wages' and access to cash social security. The article argues that the state and pastoralists had to consider two modalities of Aboriginal empowerment: as individual citizen-workers whose labour time had now to be valued as a commodity; and as 'communities' aspiring to autonomy from the authority of pastoralists. The article concludes by arguing that the settler colonial state's imperatives are both 'capitalist' and 'custodial'.

Australian Journal of Political Science, 2018

Contemporary Australian Indigenous policy changes rapidly and regularly fails to deliver its stated aims. Additionally, political and social relationships between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian state remain complex and contested. This article draws on critical Indigenous theory, alongside the increasingly influential scholarly paradigm of settler colonialism, to draw these two elements together. It highlights the ongoing nature of colonial conflict, and the partisan nature of state institutions and processes. While policy is usually framed as a depoliticised, technical practice of public management for Indigenous wellbeing, I suggest that it also seeks to ‘domesticate’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, perform their dysfunction and demonstrate state legitimacy. This is especially the case in Australia, which has a long tradition of framing domestic welfare policy – rather than legal agreements – as the ‘solution’ to settler colonial conflict.

We will examine the evolution of Australia's rules-based order, the sequence of land laws that tightened its control over Aboriginal land, and the orders and proclamations on the lives of Aboriginal people that moved them from custodians of their homelands to trespassers, deportees, and then immigrants to what was once theirs.

2013

the British government passed the Western Australian constitution in 1890, granting responsible government to its sixth and last Australian colony, it sought to keep control over Aboriginal policy to itself. In doing so, it adopted an approach more like that to Natal, in southern Africa, than to the other Australian colonies that had all gained responsible government several decades earlier. Yet British attempts to retain control over Aboriginal policy within the context of responsible government were a failure in both Western Australia and Natal. As Arthur Berriedale Keith -the eminent Scottish jurist, scholar and expert on constitutional questions within the British Empire -wrote towards the end of his life, in 1937, responsible government was 'wholly incompatible with executive safeguards'. Attempts to impose the latter in order to ensure that Britain rather than the self-governing settlers controlled the governance of Indigenous people had 'failed utterly'. 2 Western Australia's similarity in this respect to Natal is intriguing, given their significant disparities. They do not appear at first glance to be candidates for similar approaches to native policy. Although both these peripheral British colonies struggled to attract European immigrants, both having between 40,000 and 50,000 white settlers in 1891, the size and nature of the Indigenous societies they encountered differed markedly. 3 In Natal in 1891, there were almost 470,000

Journal of Australian Colonial History, 2013

In 1939, the Commonwealth of Australia formulated a new policy for ‘native administration’ which mapped a transition from ‘native tribes’ to ‘citizens’, staging a modernising Australia. In this article, I discuss the various processes of subjectivation at each point on the ‘long march’ of colonial ‘progress’ or settler colonial elimination. Writing a history of these linked colonial governmentalities casts light on practices of recognition, difference, and the self in the modern world.

Environment and Planning A, 2010

This paper focuses on the enduring traces of colonialism within the Australian nation-state and the ongoing challenges to Aboriginal peoples' rights, especially land rights. We try to make sense of contemporary federal government and New South Wales state, or provincial, government policy changes which connect land use, access and ownership to social welfare, and which target Aboriginal peoples in remote, or outback, areas and the inner city. We connect these two policy initiatives by pointing to the tension between social and planning policies, conceptions of landownership, and the notion of Aboriginal self-determination. We try to understand the rationale and enactment of these policies through the idea of policy incursions. We argue that policy incursions represent a constellation of settler nationalism, the enactment of a white national imaginary, and the exploitation of crisis that reinscribe Aboriginal people in 21st-century Australia as objects of state policy, while marg...