Aboriginal Protection and Its Intermediaries in Britain’s Antipodean Colonies

edited by Samuel Furphy and Amanda Nettelbeck

264 pp., Routledge, 2021,

ISBN: 9781032092133 (pbk), $77.99

Review by Lisa Ford

UNSW Sydney

Composed of 12 short essays and an outstanding introduction, Aboriginal Protection and Its Intermediaries in Britain’s Antipodean Colonies provides an invaluable snapshot of the latest research into protection in Australia and New Zealand before the advent of local statutory protection regimes.

A key contribution of the volume is its effort to move beyond the much-studied, but short-lived, Port Phillip Protectorate, staffed by missionaries from 1839 to 1849. Nettelbeck and Furphy both take this project on squarely in their individual chapters, demonstrating in different ways how the Port Phillip experiment differed from other regimes in Australia (Furphy contrasts it with Western Australia) and how policing and jurisdiction were, from a very early period, the dominant concern of most early protection efforts (Nettelbeck). Timothy Rowse implies that these adjustments of view do not take us far enough. Drawing on select committee reports, diaries, newspapers and published histories, he challenges us to think through what protection looked like, particularly to pastoralists, in colonial borderlands largely beyond the control of the state.

The real locus of the book (and another strength) is careful microhistories – recovering protection through small instances, single documents and individuals. Penny Edmonds and Zoë Laidlaw highlight the importance of sifting out the ‘afterlives’ and ‘instability’ of the famous and much studied Select Committee Report on Aborigines by Quaker activists. They argue that Quaker redactions, additions and framing materials reflect key strategy shifts as different and differing actors struggled to prod Friends and settler officials into action to protect Aboriginal peoples.

Most chapters focus on people. Some examine individuals with power to transform systems from above. Richard Price and Ann Hunter explore and complicate our understandings of Sir George Grey (early governor of South Australia and New Zealand) and John Hutt (governor of Western Australia). Price reminds us that even some of Grey’s most historically problematic policies were utopian, at base. Grey imagined an empire without violence, that helped humans to achieve their potential as Christian equals in a multiracial world. Hunter’s Hutt is a pragmatist – committed both to systematic colonisation (for the good of the diligent poor) and to Indigenous education and discipline to allow them to achieve ‘civilised independence’.

Others track understudied actors on the ground, but in the process all do much more than to recite life stories: they retell protection regimes through people. This is important because, as Furphy and Nettelbeck point out, protection’s ground-troops had to navigate complicated local, colonial and imperial politics. So their lives, connections, arguments and failings mattered enormously.

This instructive layering is exemplified by Skye Krichauff’s chapter explaining the fundamental difference between the protection regimes in Port Phillip and South Australia through the experiences of William Thomas (Port Phillip), and Clamor Schürmann and Christian Teichelmann (South Australia). Krichauff convincingly shows how multiple layers of colonial politics operated to empower or constrain the capacity of these men to do good – a goal which they all aspired to in their very nineteenth-century way. Shaunnagh Dorsett and Marjan Lousberg explore the fast-changing contexts of protection in New Zealand through the life and ever-changing work of Edward Meurant (an interpreter and go-between) and Edward Shortland (Sub-Protector of Aborigines, police magistrate and land claims interpreter and advisor).

Malcolm Allbrook follows the career of Robert John Sholl, Government Resident in the Pilbara from 1865 to 1881. Sholl, operating largely outside government supervision and control, made up his own rules of protection – rules that corralled and controlled Indigenous workers on stations and retaliated fiercely against (and allowed the exploitation of) others. Maria Nugent uses Archibald Meston’s Wild Australia Show in 1892–93 to unpack southern settler anxieties about the north: Meston’s show viscerally and probably intentionally reminded people of the limited power of the colonial state to control and coerce the Indigenous people in North Queensland. Both chapters remind us of the power of Tim Rowse’s observation that the north/south divide is of enormous and enduring importance in Australian history.

Several of the chapters do much more than to explore richly how protection was conceived of and instantiated, they also provide rich glimpses into how Indigenous peoples interfaced with or ignored often flimsy governance regimes. Dorsett’s Meurant not only interpreted Māori language but he also lived in a Māori community and his myriad public and private duties provide a tantalising archive of Māori uses for settler legal institutions to resolve disputes and make claims. In the reports of protectors in Port Phillip and South Australia, Krichauff finds telling admissions by protectors that, on certain subjects, their interference was unwelcome. Joanna Cruickshank and Mark McMillan’s contribution is particularly helpful because it invites scholars to look for moments of negotiation and pushback for examples of ‘the coming into relation of indigenous and non-indigenous jurisprudences’. In the decade before the passing of Australia’s first protective legislation in Victoria in 1869, they find many instances where state actors listened to and understood demands by Aboriginal people for access to country. Though they seldom recognised it, these intermediaries were engaging in ‘lawful relations’ with Indigenous people.

Every scholar interested in the field should have this rich collection to hand.