1st Edition
Aboriginal Protection and Its Intermediaries in Britain’s Antipodean Colonies
This collection brings together world-leading and emerging scholars to explore how the concept of "protection" was applied to Indigenous peoples of Britain’s antipodean colonies. Tracing evolutions in protection from the 1830s until the end of the nineteenth century, the contributors map the changes and continuities that marked it as an inherently ambivalent mode of colonial practice. In doing so, they consider the place of different historical actors who were involved in the implementation of protective policy, who served as its intermediaries on the ground, or who responded as its intended "beneficiaries." These included metropolitan and colonial administrators, Protectors or similar agents, government interpreters and church-affiliated missionaries, settlers with economic investments in the politics of conciliation, and the Indigenous peoples who were themselves subjected to colonial policies. Drawing out some of the interventions and encounters lived out in the name of protection, the book examines some of the critical roles it played in the making of colonial relations.
Part I: The Conception and Circulation of "Aboriginal Protection"
1. Imagining Protection in the Antipodean Colonies: Actors, Agency and Governance
Samuel Furphy and Amanda Nettelbeck
2. Culture and Policies: Sir George Grey, Protection and the Early Nineteenth-Century Empire
Richard Price
3. "The British Government Is Now Awaking": How Humanitarian Quakers Repackaged and Circulated the 1837 Select Committee Report on Aborigines
Penelope Edmonds and Zoë Laidlaw
4. Philanthropy or Patronage?: Aboriginal Protectors in the Port Phillip District and Western Australia
Samuel Furphy
5. Protective Governance and Legal Order on the Colonial Frontier
Amanda Nettelbeck
Part II: Interpreting Protection on the Ground: Actors and Practices
6. Spanning Two Worlds: Protection, Assimilation and the Role of Edward Meurant, Government Interpreter, New Zealand, 1840-1851
Shaunnagh Dorsett
7. Edward Shortland and the Protection of Aborigines in New Zealand, 1840-1846
Marjan Lousberg
8. Systematic Colonisation and Protection in Western Australia: The Origin and Nature of John Hutt’s Colonial Governance of Aboriginal People
Ann Hunter
9. Protecting the Protectors: Evaluating the Agency of Missionary-Protectors in the New Settlements of Adelaide and Melbourne, 1838-1840
Skye Krichauff
Part III: Refashioning Protection
10. A Short and Simple Provisional Code: The Pastoralist as "Protector"
Tim Rowse
11. Lawful Conduct, Aboriginal Protection and Land in Victoria, 1859-1869
Joanna Cruikshank and Mark McMillan
12. Robert John Sholl: Protection "Pilbara-Style"
Malcolm Allbrook
13. "Protection Talk" and Popular Performance: The Wild Australia Show on Tour, 1892-1893
Maria Nugent
Biography
Samuel Furphy is Research Fellow in the National Centre of Biography, School of History, at the Australian National University.
Amanda Nettelbeck is Professor in History at the University of Adelaide and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
