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'In the 1930s, a series of crises transformed relationships between settlers and Aboriginal people in Australia’s Northern Territory. This book examines archives and texts of colonial administration to study the emergence of ideas and practices of indirect rule in this unlikely colonial situation. It demonstrates that the practice of indirect rule was everywhere an effect of Indigenous or ‘native’ people’s insistence on maintaining and reinventing their political formations, their refusal to be completely dominated, and their frustration of colonial aspirations to total control. These conditions of difference and contradiction, of the struggles of people in contact, produced a colonial state that was created both by settlers and by the ‘natives’ they sought to govern.
'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 rethought 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. Australian settler governmentality, in other words, was not entirely exceptional; in the Northern Territory, as elsewhere, indirect rule emerged as part of an integrated, empire-wide repertoire of the arts of governing and colonising peoples.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Governing Natives : Indirect Rule and Settler Colonialism in Australia’s North by Ben Silverstein
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Aboriginal History Journal , no. 46 2022;
— Review of Governing Natives : Indirect Rule and Settler Colonialism in Australia's North 2018 multi chapter work criticism 'Ben Silverstein’s Governing Natives: Indirect Rule and Settler Colonialism in Australia’s North is a deeply researched, theoretically sophisticated and highly readable book, which makes the new and compelling argument that the Aboriginal New Deal, a major reform of Commonwealth policy in the Northern Territory in 1939, can be interpreted as a form of ‘indirect rule’. The book opens with an account of the death in 1937 of a Pintubi man at a pastoral station on the Ormiston River in Central Australia during an intra-tribal argument. This event prompted a visiting patrol officer, Ted Strehlow, to ponder what he should do when (as Silverstein puts it) ‘Aboriginal people had acted as though unconcerned by the spectre of his authority’ (p. 1). Strehlow was unsure as to whether any of those involved should be charged and tried; the applicability of settler law was at least questionable. The case highlighted the problems of physical and jurisdictional coexistence; of Aboriginal people who were essentially self-governing and were also choosing to move through settler spaces around pastoral stations.' (Introduction)
-
Governing Natives : Indirect Rule and Settler Colonialism in Australia’s North by Ben Silverstein
2022
single work
review
— Appears in: Aboriginal History Journal , no. 46 2022;
— Review of Governing Natives : Indirect Rule and Settler Colonialism in Australia's North 2018 multi chapter work criticism 'Ben Silverstein’s Governing Natives: Indirect Rule and Settler Colonialism in Australia’s North is a deeply researched, theoretically sophisticated and highly readable book, which makes the new and compelling argument that the Aboriginal New Deal, a major reform of Commonwealth policy in the Northern Territory in 1939, can be interpreted as a form of ‘indirect rule’. The book opens with an account of the death in 1937 of a Pintubi man at a pastoral station on the Ormiston River in Central Australia during an intra-tribal argument. This event prompted a visiting patrol officer, Ted Strehlow, to ponder what he should do when (as Silverstein puts it) ‘Aboriginal people had acted as though unconcerned by the spectre of his authority’ (p. 1). Strehlow was unsure as to whether any of those involved should be charged and tried; the applicability of settler law was at least questionable. The case highlighted the problems of physical and jurisdictional coexistence; of Aboriginal people who were essentially self-governing and were also choosing to move through settler spaces around pastoral stations.' (Introduction)