AustLit

'Rosalind Kidd's singularly important history of the administration of Aboriginal Affairs in Queensland seeks to range "beyond the conventional repression/liberation frameworks which have dominated aboriginal studies during the last twenty years". Kidd doesn't want to think of government as an "effect of ideology" where different institutions - church, state, health, media etc. - all run the same repressive racist line. Rather, the picture of government that emerges in this work is a picture of liberal government in the widest sense: government as a site of the formation, administration and problematisation of various objects (in this instance "aboriginal population") as well as government as a kind of brokering agency, an institution that negotiates with and trades off the various competing interest groups who are constituted as "stake-holders" in relation to those objects of governance.' (Introduction)