Governing natives: Indirect rule and settler colonialism in Australia's north (Studies in Imperialism, 155)

In the 1930s, a series of crises transformed relationships between settlers and Aboriginal people in Australia's Northern Territory. 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 re-thought 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. -- Front matter Contents Acknowledgements Note on terms List of abbreviations Strehlow’s problem: colonial transformations and a governmental event The political organisation of the British in their Empire, 1875–1939: transforming indirect rule Reporting on the northern contradiction: conflict and crisis, 1918–45 Thomson in Canberra: anthropologising Aborigines Native administration in the Northern Territory: a white minority in the national community From a White Australia to an Aboriginal New Deal The long march: work and the ends of settler colonialism Never yet: the tense of citizenship Bibliography Index