Colonial Constructions of Masculinity: Transforming Aboriginal Australian Men into ‘Houseboys’

In Darwin in the Northern Territory of Australia, Aboriginal men made up more than half of the domestic servant population by 1938. They replaced the Chinese and Malay male servants who had worked for British colonists in the early colonial period. Much of the historical work on male domestic servants in colonial situations plots the construction of the ‘houseboy’ as emasculated, feminised and submissive. In contrast, colonial constructions of Aboriginal men as ‘houseboys’ in Darwin emphasise the masculinity of the Aboriginal hunter. Aboriginal men were characterised as requiring constant discipline and training, and this paternalistic discourse led to a corresponding denial of manhood or adulthood for Aboriginal men. While male domestic servants in other colonial settings were allowed some privileges of masculinity in relation to female workers, amongst Aboriginal domestic workers, it was so‐called ‘half‐caste’ women who, in acknowledgment of their ‘white blood’, received nominally higher wages and privileges for domestic work. Aboriginal men were denied what was referred to as a ‘breadwinning’ wage; an Australian wage awarded to white men with families. Despite this, their role as husbands was encouraged by the administration as a method of controlling sexual relations between white men and Aboriginal women. These sometimes contradictory images can be understood as manifestations of the racialised construction of gender in Australia.     

The technical is political: settler colonialism and the Australian Indigenous policy system

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.     

Salutary Lessons: Native Police and the ‘Civilising’ Role of Legalised Violence in Colonial Australia

Over much of the nineteenth century, recurring problems of covert and opportunistic conflict between settlers and Indigenous peoples produced considerable debate across the British settler world about how frontier violence could be legally curbed. At the same time, the difficulty of imposing a rule of law on new frontiers was often seen by colonial states as justification for the imposition of order through force. Examining all the mainland Australian colonies from the 1830s to the end of the nineteenth century, this paper asks how this contradictory dilemma played out through deployment of ‘native police’ and the ‘civilising’ role of legalised violence as a strategy for managing the settler frontier. In light of wider debate about a humanely administered empire, Australia’s first native police force established in New South Wales in 1837 was conceived as a measure that would assist in the conciliation and ‘amelioration’ of Aboriginal people. In the coming decades, other Australian colonies employed native police either as dedicated forces or as individual assistants attached to mounted police detachments. Over time, the capacity they held to impose extreme violence on Aboriginal populations in the service of protecting pastoral investments came to reflect an implicit acceptance that punitive measures were required to bring order to disorderly frontiers.

By tracing a gradual shift in the perceived role of native police from one of ‘civilising’ Aboriginal people to one of ‘civilising’ the settler state itself, this paper draws out some of the conditions under which state-sanctioned force became naturalised and legitimated. It concludes that, as an instrument of frontier management, native policing reflected an enduring problem for Australia’s colonial governments in reconciling a legal obligation to treat Aboriginal people as subjects of the crown with a perceived requirement to bring them under colonial authority through the ‘salutary lessons’ of legalised violence.     

‘Uncircumcised boys’ and ‘girl Spartans’: Youth,Gender and Generation in Colonial Insurgencies and Counterinsurgency,c. 1954–59

Both male and female youth were significant actors in anti-colonial insurgencies, but their involvement has been neglected in existing historiographies due to the marginalisation of youth voices in colonial archives. This article analyses the causes of youth insurgency and colonial counterinsurgency responses in two British colonies, Kenya and Cyprus, in 1954-59, providing a gendered and relational study of youth as cohort, as liberation generation, as life stage and as kinship position. It argues that a ‘gen[d]erational’ lens is necessary to properly understand how age and gender intersected to shape boys' and girls’ experiences of youth insurgency, and how colonial states punished and tried to ‘rehabilitate’ such rebellious youths. This article argues that colonial responses to youth in insurgency were implicitly shaped by colonial understandings of gender and generation as well as by race and ethnicity, but that counterinsurgency policies failed to effectively integrate gendered and generational perspectives sufficiently into either their security, peno-legal or welfare and developmental responses. The only successful ‘rehabilitation’ programmes focused on male youth, and combined colonial and local understandings of age and gender to provided pathways towards the forms of adulthood desired by youth, rather than just treating them as unthinking, impressionable or irrecoverable children.     

‘Narratives of Survival in the Post-Colonial North’

Scholars have recently paid more attention to narratives of colonial contact in Australia, as elsewhere (cf. Hill 1988). Western elements and characters (such as Captain Cook) have been widely documented in Australian Aboriginal narratives which nevertheless are clearly not close accounts of past events. This has promoted reconsideration of the distinction between ‘myth’ and ‘history‘. If we follow Turner's (1988) suggestion that myth is the formulation of ‘essential’ properties of social experience in terms of ‘generic events‘, while ‘history’ is concerned with the level of ‘particular relations among particular events’, we need not restrict ourselves to seeing myth as charter for a social order distinct from western influence. In the paper I examine two stories of cultural and physical survival from the Katherine area, Northern Territory, and seek to identify in them fundamental themes and enduring narrative precipitates of social experience lived in intense awareness of colonial and post-colonial relationships between Aborigines and whites.     

The Great Shoe Store Robbery1

This article contributes to the significant debate on the effects of the Australian criminal justice system on Aborigines and in particular Aboriginal youth. This debate fed into nation-wide concern over an ever increasing number of Aboriginal deaths in custody, recently culminating in the Federal Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Through the use of case studies and other ethnographic data drawn from investigations in the country town of Port Augusta, South Australia, the author illustrates how the agents of the legal and welfare systems in this state operate to present a view of Aboriginal juvenile crime as a normal response to these children's social environment and social conditioning. This process in turn, it is argued, reinforces and legitimates Aboriginal juvenile crime and contributes to its continuance, and the subsequent over-representation of Aboriginal youths at all stages of the juvenile justice system. Yet it is forcefully pointed out that Aboriginal children are not passive victims of the legal and welfare systems. Rather, they form their own interpretations of these systems and their ‘criminal’ activities are often attempts at defiance and capturing some form of control of their own lives in the face of a legal/welfare system seeking to impose control over them. Unfortunately, it is these very activities which return Aboriginal children to the legal and welfare systems they act against.     

Timeline History and the Anzac Myth: Settler Narratives of Local History in a North Australian Town

This paper explores rural Australian settler historical narratives through an examination of the landscape of public history in the northwestern Queensland city of Mount Isa. In various sites of public history, including the city's 75th anniversary festivities, tourism sites, and popular historical literature, certain narrative themes are predominant. Themes of ‘discoverers’, ‘firsts’, and ‘pioneers’ coalesce into a ‘timeline’ approach to history, in which the past is ordered sequentially in a linear pattern of development and progress. Aboriginal people are incorporated into linear histories in various ways, notably through the concept of ‘the last of the tribe’, which separates an aboriginal past from a European, colonial present and presumes colonial authority to be effectively established. Aboriginal people, particularly the Kalkadoon, are also incorporated within a second narrative tradition, the Anzac legend, for their heroic, desperate and failed battle in 1884 against European invaders. Aboriginal leaders in Mount Isa use these settler narrative traditions to advance native title claims and to create a respected public space for Aboriginal people in the city. In short, settler historical narratives, while being conservative in language, are continually being reshaped and metaphorically extended to new contexts, and are mobilized for both conservative and critical political agendas..     

Recognise what? The limitations of settler colonial constitutional reform

In settler colonial societies such as Australia, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people have turned to constitutional reform as a means of addressing historical exclusions and colonial injustice. In practice, however, the promise of constitutionalism has revealed clear limits. This article explores these limits in the context of the current Australian campaign for the constitutional ‘recognition’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, where the loudest dissenting voices have come from Indigenous people themselves. In light of this, this article proposes a more agonistic engagement of diverse and dissenting opinions, with a view to opening up a more radical, decolonising space for constitutional politics.     

Sharing the colonial burden: Treaty‐making and reconciliation in Hul’qumi’num territory

This article explores different understandings of reconciliation within the context of modern treaty making in British Columbia, focusing on the role of the BC treaty process in resolving the longstanding dispute between Aboriginal Peoples and the Crown over rights to land. Although the treaty process was created to reconcile competing interests in the land, Crown and Aboriginal negotiators often have contradictory understandings of how this reconciliation is to take place. Drawing on a case study of the Hul’qumi’num Peoples, a group of Coast Salish First Nations, I examine how different understandings and approaches to reconciliation impede progress at the treaty table. I conclude that progress towards treaty and reconciliation in this case will require coming to terms with the Hul’qumi’num territory's colonial history and geography, something that the current treaty process actively avoids, plus the crafting of a treaty agreement that allows for a more equal sharing of the burden that colonialism has created in this place. More particularly, meaningful reconciliation will require a fuller recognition of Aboriginal title and rights across the breadth of the territory and a commitment to meaningful compensation of Hul’qumi’num Peoples for the wrongful taking of their lands.     

Pre-deployment ‘gender’ training and the lack thereof for Australian peacekeepers

In the area of peacekeeping training, Australia has a reputation of promoting ‘best practice’ internationally. Training for Australian police peacekeepers has been described by the United Nations as ‘one-of-a-kind’ and ‘a world-class model of best practice’. This article provides a case study of how gender training is conducted, and how ‘gender’ is understood from a critical feminist perspective. This article focuses only on the pre-deployment training stage and is informed by confidential interviews with staff from the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Defence Force, as well as observing training in 2013–14. The findings suggest that the training is inadequate because it is not carried out for all peacekeeping personnel, despite international and national requirements to do so. In addition, the findings suggest that ‘gender’ is understood in a very limited way that does not problematise power relations between the sexes and is only covered as a way of understanding the peacekeeping context, and not in relation to the attitudes and behaviours of peacekeepers themselves. This raises the question of whether and how other troop-contributing countries conduct the training and to what standard, given the documented problems of Australia's supposedly ‘best-practice’ training.     

Rethinking Cultural Genocide: Aboriginal Child Removal and Settler‐Colonial State Formation

This paper examines the use of the concept of cultural genocide to understand one particular episode in Australian legal, political and social history, the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, mostly during the 20th century. After outlining the approach of Australian courts to the idea of cultural genocide, the paper examines the construction of the UN Genocide Convention, particularly the clause concerning the forcible removal of children, which illustrates the underlying instability of the boundary between a cultural and a physical understanding of genocide. It then explores how this instability was manifested in the development of early 20th century Australian legislation concerning the ‘protection’ of Aborigines, indicating the underlying racially‐oriented coerciveness of conceptions of Aboriginal ‘welfare’, and concludes by reflecting on the wide range of ways in which the concept of genocide can and should be used, especially in capturing the experience of Indigenous peoples under settler‐colonialism.     

Still Under the Act? Subjectivity and the State in Aboriginal North Queensland

ABSTRACT Both the colonial encapsulation and post‐colonial recognition of North Queensland's Aboriginal population have been achieved through legislative demarcation. This paper explores the way such demarcation has extended the influence of the state within local Aboriginal life‐worlds, focusing on the State of Queensland's Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 and the Commonwealth's Native Title Act 1993. Drawing on ethnographic and historical material from Central Cape York Peninsula, and recent anthropological theorization of the state, I argue that anthropologists need to seriously consider Aboriginal claims about what Michel‐Rolph Trouillot calls ‘state effects’. But careful examination of these claims suggests that the state no longer simply imposes its projects on fundamentally distinct Aboriginal life‐worlds. Not only is the state now deeply engaged within these life‐worlds, it is also deeply interwoven into post‐colonial Aboriginal subjectivities.     

Pan-Indigenous Encounter in the 1950s: ‘Ethnic Dancer’ Beth Dean

From 1950, ‘ethnic dancer’ Beth Dean made her living on a lecture-demonstration touring circuit of the dance traditions of Australia, New Zealand, the Cook Islands and North America. To assert her expertise, she claimed to have studied Māori and Australian Aboriginal cultures for a number of years. This article investigates how Dean’s didactic performances drew on American traditions of ethnic dance to present apparently authoritative representations of Indigenous cultures, supported by Adult Education Boards in New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia and national arts organisations. I argue that Dean exploited the symbolic potential of ‘corroboree’ as a performance of intercultural communication to establish her authority to speak about and perform Australian Aboriginal dance.     

‘Tomorrow comes when tomorrow comes’: Managing Aboriginal Health within an Ontology of Life‐as‐Contingent

ABSTRACT The authors have worked in Australian Aboriginal communities within the Wiradjuri area of central‐western New South Wales. Examining what appear to be distinctive Aboriginal approaches to time, we argue that these stem not from a different notion of time as such but, rather, from the relationship between the social and the self which places a distinctive value on the use and management of time. One way to access the dynamic between time and self is to realise that life is understood as fluid and contingent rather than predictable. This continually subverts the idea that time is measurable and controllable; that life is lived within domesticated sedentary space; and that planning ahead and self‐discipline are virtues. Yet these are notions central to practices associated with contemporary health care. A majority of health care providers, whether Aboriginal or not, are trained in the Australian mainstream health system and may consequently underestimate the implications of different ways in which a person acts on the temporal/spatial dimensions of her life, and how this influences ways in which she manages time in relation to her health and well‐being. Temporal concepts, such as ‘planning’, ‘discipline’, ‘future’, ‘boredom’, or ‘patience’, as well as that of the ‘long‐term’ with regard to managing illness or money, interact with the ways in which Aboriginal people experience themselves as ill or in need of health care, influencing how they act on medical advice. We argue that the key to understanding the use of time lies not in the concept of time per se but in what is involved in developing a responsive social self when the time/space dimensions of the day to day are informed by a fluid and thus contingent ontology of that day to day.     

‘If anything is to be done with the Indian,we must catch him very young’: colonial constructions of Aboriginal children and the geographies of Indian residential schooling in British Columbia,Canada

Although not fully conceptualized as such by geographers, children and concepts of childhood were focal points of colonialism. Well into the twentieth century, Aboriginal peoples in Canada were discursively constructed by colonists as child-like subjects in need of colonial intervention in order that they ‘grow up’ into de-Indigenized Canadian citizens. Further, an important aspect of the colonial project entailed confining Aboriginal children in institutions known as Indian Residential Schools wherein, through material and curricular means, efforts were made to transform the children and dispossess them of socio-cultural identities. Much of the literature on children's geographies contemplates the socially constructed nature of childhood and critiques the pervasive (yet under-evaluated) understanding that childhood is a clear and demarcatable state of being prior to adulthood. Little attention, though, has been paid to historic or social discourses that relegated groups of people to a perpetual state of truncated childhood while simultaneously removing their children in order that those children mature into adults who embodied radically different cultural traits than their ancestors. This paper explores how Aboriginal peoples were doubly confined; firstly, by colonial constructions about children, childhood, and Othered (Aboriginal) peoples and then, secondly, within the material geographies of colonial residential schools.     

Sovereignty and inconvenience: The significance of Bentham's exasperation

This article explores the meaning of ‘inconvenience’ and ‘convenience’ in legal and philosophical reasoning. The argument is that such considerations were crucial in the practice of Australian courts in marking out the boundaries of judicial propriety in relation to parliamentary proceedings. This argument is made with recourse to usages of the terms in constitutional debates of the seventeenth century. The older meanings of these terns have now been lost to Australian constitutional law. Hence, I argue, the problem of the boundaries of judicial propriety must be the subject of broader or more theoretical considerations such that the political preferences of judges will be less capable of insulation from their judgments.     

This is Not an Answer to the Question “Who is Indigenous?”

‘Indigenous’ is a colonial category, and it is always related to particular colonial configurations of diversity and in relationship to particular colonial/national states. In this paper, the many historical configurations in which the terms ‘Indian’ and ‘Indigenous’ have figured are traced, including the Spanish colonial state and the Argentine state. The ways in which these successive systems of categorization are juxtaposed is described. Finally, post-Western understandings of what it could mean ‘to be Indigenous’ are explored.     

Truth-Telling in the Wake of European Contact: Historical Investigation of Aboriginal Skeletal Remains from Normanton

This study heeds the call for a ‘truth-telling’ of injustices carried out on Aboriginal communities during the colonial acquisition of Australia as stated in the Uluru Statement from the Heart 2017. Here, we discuss the lives of eight Indigenous people buried in Normanton in north-west Queensland (QLD) who died and had their remains collected in the late 1890s as scientific specimens. The remains were later repatriated to the community before being further exposed by erosion in 2015. With the consent and participation of local traditional owners—the Gkuthaarn and Kukatj people—this assessment utilised bioarchaeological, historical and anthropological methodologies to gain a better understanding of Indigenous life and health on the Australian colonial frontier. Gkuthaarn and Kukatj people were engaged throughout the investigation, and statements throughout this piece made by them illustrate how bioarchaeology can inform on past injustices in Australia’s history, bringing them into the public consciousness and aiding the transition to reconciliation through ‘truth-telling’.     

Fishing Lifestyles: ‘Territorians’, Traditional Owners and the Management of Recreational Fishing in Kakadu National Park

The relationships between traditional Aboriginal land owners and other Park users in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory are characterised by competing agendas and competing ideas about appropriate ways of relating to the environment. Similarly, the management of recreational fishing in the Park is permeated by the tensions and opposition of contested ideas and perspectives from non‐Aboriginal fishers and Aboriginal traditional owners. The local know‐ledge and rights of ‘Territorians’[non‐Aboriginal Northern Territory residents] are continually pitted against the local knowledge and rights of Aboriginal traditional owners. Under these circumstances, debates between non‐Aboriginal fishers and Aboriginal traditional owners are overwhelmingly dominated by the unequal power relationships created through an alliance between science and the State. The complex and multi‐dimensional nature of Aboriginal traditional owners’ concerns for country renders these concerns invisible or incomprehensible to government, science and non‐Aboriginal fishers who are each guided by very different epistemic commitments. It is a state of affairs that leaves the situated knowledge of Aboriginal traditional owners with a limited authority in the non‐Aboriginal domain and detracts from their ability to manage and care for their homelands.

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Protecting Tasmanian Aborigines: American and Queensland Influences on the Cape Barren Island Reserve Act, 1912

Early twentieth-century Tasmanian discourses about racial difference reflected trans-imperial connections between England, its colonies, and the United States. This globalised discourse and ideological interconnectedness in turn produced recognisably and intentionally similar policies, although historians bounded by the interests of later nation-states have tended to overlook this. Tasmania's Cape Barren Island Reserve Act 1912 exemplifies how a particular colony's ideology and policy, while attuned to local conditions and particularities, was nonetheless a product of an international framework for regulating the colonised. This legislation was demonstrably modelled on Aboriginal protection legislation passed in the Australian state of Queensland in 1897 and has significant commonalities with the Dawes Act passed in the United States in 1887 to provide for the subdivision of Indian reservations. In Australian historiography, the fact that Tasmania had an Aboriginal reserve and enacted Aboriginal protection legislation has been under-appreciated and even denied. This article redresses these omissions. It also contributes towards redressing the myopic focus on nation and/or colony that has, until recent years, left Australian historiography devoid of a full appreciation of colonial dependence on, and contributions to, a global discourse of race.