Taking Liberty: How British settlers in the Australian colonies gained self-government and Indigenous peoples lost it

This paper arises from a project entitled “Indigenous People, the British Empire, and Self Government for the Australian Colonies”, conducted jointly by Jessie Mitchell and myself.
The project explores a pivotal period in the nineteenth century that established the foundations of the racially based and racially structured self-governing settler colonial democracies that emerged from the British Empire across the world. We explore how British imperial practices in Australia led to the displacement of Aboriginal people by mainly British settlers, laying the foundations for a set of Australian political institutions that continue to wrestle with the consequences of that dispossession to this day. We argue that the economic, political, and cultural losses of Indigenous peoples were foundational for the political gains of the settlers. Furthermore, imperial-settler-Indigenous interactions – unstable, changing, and often contradictory – were constitutive of the political system as a whole.
The paper today focusses on the period immediately after the introduction of responsible government. With the separation of the northern districts of New South Wales to form the new self-governing colony of Queensland in 1859, the stage was set for five of the six colonies to develop new, largely democratic, political systems. With Britain now effectively out of the picture, except in Western Australia (which did not gain responsible government until 1890) the new colonial governments had to develop Aboriginal policies of their own. While the first decade of responsible government produced debate about the future of Aboriginal policy in all self-governing colonies except Tasmania, each had a distinctive focus and character. A comparison of the Select Committees held on Aboriginal affairs in four colonies (Victoria, SA, NSW, and Queensland) in these years reveals a common concern with Aboriginal management but also the growing divergence between the colonies in relation to questions of institutionalisation, rationing, violence, policing, and labour management.

Ann Curthoys is Adjunct Professor at ANU and an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney. She was formerly an ARC Professorial Fellow, and Manning Clark Chair of History at ANU. She is a guest editor of the latest issue, about to appear, of the Journal of Australian Colonial History, on the theme of Indigenous People and Settler Self-Government. She is writing with Jessie Mitchell a book entitled Taking Liberty: How British settlers in the Australian colonies gained self-government and Indigenous peoples lost it.