australia's aboriginal problem

« What does it mean to say that Australia is a settler-colonial society? What impact does the presence of Indigenous as well as non-Indigenous Australians have on the character of social order and social integration in Australia? In this lecture, I’ll try to throw some light on these questions, as a way of expanding on the way we think about national identity. I’ll do that by looking briefly at the history of official policies toward Australian Aborigines since the colonization of the continent by European settlers. Settler-colonial societies like Australia have a very distinct foundation as nationstates.

They both have to come to a particular kind of on- going relationship with their *Indigenous* populations, and they are also constituted from their origins as made up of migrants. The co-existence of these two characteristics of settler-colonial countries, produces specific effects in the policy and practice of social integration, which can be helpful in understanding what’s distinctive about their configuration of national identity. In the Australian setting, there are two distinct but interrelated narratives about social integration: First, that of the Aboriginal population and the question of their assimilation or integration into white Australian society.

Second, that of successive waves of differing types of migrants to Australia, and the tension between assimilation and multiculturalism.

Here I’ll be talking only about the first, and I’ll have leave open the question of its interrelationship with the second. In relation to the Aboriginal population, the key models of integration have been /assimilation/, /integration/, and /self-determination/. An important determinant of the ‘model’ used is the dominant conception of the relationship between individual and collective rights.

Approaches are divided between confinements of the concept of citizenship to one of purely individual rights on the one hand, and a sense that individual rights can only be properly realized in the context of a recognition of collective rights, on the other hand. The original ambition of the British administrators of the colony of New South Wales was to somehow absorb the Aboriginal population into white society.

They relied heavily on the mechanism of converting them to Christianity. However, by the late 19th century, this optimistic understanding of how Aborigines could be integrated was accompanied by a more pessimistic conception of the future of the Aborigines in Australia as being a ‘dying race’. The primary focus of organized attention to them as a population group became to ‘protect’ them in the period of their final decline, to ‘smooth the dying man’s pillow’ (Daisy Bates).

However, as Australian settler-colonialism advanced across the continent over the course of the 19th century, appropriating more and more land, Europeans came into increasing *proximity* to those Indigenous people they did not simply kill.

With proximity comes intimacy, and with intimacy comes sex and babies. The effect of this sexual contact between Indigenous women and non-Indigenous mean was to radically transform the nature of the relationship between colonisers and colonised. The European smugness about the inevitable disappearance of the Aboriginal race turned out to be a little premature.

State administrators became increasingly anxious about the menacing ‘half-caste problem’, the growing numbers of ‘the pie-bald specimens we meet roaming about the country at present’. They became interested in the question of bio- politics, how biological tendencies could be managed and controlled.

The solution to this problem was formulated as the. »