AustLit

'In the 1930s, a series of crises transformed relationships between settlers and Aboriginal people in Australia’s Northern Territory. This book examines archives and texts of colonial administration to study the emergence of ideas and practices of indirect rule in this unlikely colonial situation. It demonstrates that the practice of indirect rule was everywhere an effect of Indigenous or ‘native’ people’s insistence on maintaining and reinventing their political formations, their refusal to be completely dominated, and their frustration of colonial aspirations to total control. These conditions of difference and contradiction, of the struggles of people in contact, produced a colonial state that was created both by settlers and by the ‘natives’ they sought to govern.

'By the late 1930s, Australian settlers were coming to understand the Northern Territory as a colonial formation requiring a new form of government. Responding to crises of social reproduction, public power, and legitimacy, they rethought the scope of settler colonial government by drawing on both the art of indirect rule and on a representational economy of Indigenous elimination to develop a new political dispensation that sought to incorporate and consume Indigenous production and sovereignties. This book locates Aboriginal history within imperial history, situating the settler colonial politics of Indigeneity in a broader governmental context. Australian settler governmentality, in other words, was not entirely exceptional; in the Northern Territory, as elsewhere, indirect rule emerged as part of an integrated, empire-wide repertoire of the arts of governing and colonising peoples.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This collection traces the legacy of Richard Broome’s pathbreaking work in Aboriginal history by presenting innovative work that assesses and transforms a broad range of important debates that have captured both scholarly and popular attention in recent years.

'The book brings together a range of prominent and emerging scholars who have been exploring the contours of the field to make notable contributions to histories of frontier violence and missions, Aboriginal participation in sport and education, ways of framing relationships with land, and the critical relevance of Aboriginal life history and memoir to re-considering Australian history.

'Readers will be interested in the novel arguments on Indigenous networks and mobilities, of memoirs and histories, frontier violence, massacres, and the History Wars, as well as Noel Pearson and issues of paternalism in Aboriginal politics.' (Publication summary)

'On 18 February 2016, in the morning, one of the most original, committed, and giving historians of colonialism ceased his work. In Patrick Wolfe's death, an immeasurable loss has been sustained by those of us thinking about and trying to challenge settler colonialism around the world.' [introduction]

'The possibility of a new beginning was central to celebrations of the advent

of native title in Australia. A re-imagined history of white invasion

and settlement could, as then Prime Minister Paul Keating proclaimed,

provide the possibility for a new foundation “because after 200 years, we

will at last be building on the truth.” This “truth” was embodied in the

recognition of the presence of Indigenous communities, their laws, and

their dispossession. Unlike such British colonies as India or Nigeria, the

colonization of Australia proceeded on the basis that there were no Indigenous

people who held property rights and who therefore had any entitlement

to remain on the land or to govern. This is central to the logic of

settler colonialism, which erases the traces of Indigeneity such that settlers

replace Indigenous peoples, sovereignties, and communities on the land.

This logic has been reflected in Australian jurisprudence around settlement,

the origins of property, and the reception of British law.'