IND/Protection Acts

Prior to 1860 there was no official legislation dealing with Aboriginal peoples. In 1860 a Board of Protection was established in Victoria. By 1862 it superintended seven reserves and twenty-three small camping places. The Governor of Victoria could order the removal of any child to a reformatory or industrial school. The Protection Board could remove children from station families to be housed in dormitories. By 1869 about 50% of the Victorian Aboriginal population was living on missions or reserves.

After this time Aborigines Protection Acts were introduced colony by colony. The earliest, again, was introduced in 1869 in Victoria, as an Act to Provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria, which was later transformed into the Aborigines Protection Law Amendment Act 1886. This was “the first statute to legislate for the differential treatment of ‘full-blood’ and ‘half-caste’” reflecting the type of thinking about ‘race’ and skin colour that we read about above (Haebich, 2000, p.165). The Queensland Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 set up a “system of segregation, surveillance and control” that was to provide the model for later laws that were passed in Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory in the early years of the twentieth century (Haebich, 2000, p. 171).

In NSW, a Protector of Aborigines was appointed in 1881 and a Aboriginal Protection Board was established in 1883. The NSW Aborigines Protection Act was introduced in 1909 and was not abolished until 1969. Indigenous people in New South Wales had their lives controlled by the Aborigines Protection Board and with the passing of this law Aboriginal people were forced to “merge with the wider community. This would lead, the Board hoped, to the eventual ‘withering away’ of the communities” (Haebich, 2000, p. 182).

In Queensland, J. W. Bleakley, Chief Protector and Director of Native Affairs from 1913 to 1942, exercised a major influence over Queensland policy and the practices of officials and the missions. He believed firmly in the segregation of Indigenous people from non-Indigenous people. As he outline in 1919:

It is only by complete separation of the two races that we can save him (‘the Aborigine’) from hopeless contamination and eventual extinction, as well as safeguard the purity of our own blood (Chief Protector Report 1919).

While policies in Queensland continued to emphasise segregation, other states shifted towards policies of cultural ‘assimilation’ and ‘biological absorption’, both of which were aimed at making the ‘Aboriginal problem’, and Aboriginal people, disappear.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, governments put in place extensive controls over the employment, working conditions and wages of Indigenous workers. These controls permitted, both explicitly and implicitly, the non-payment of wages to some Indigenous workers, as well as the underpayment of wages, and the diversion of wages into trust and savings accounts. Many Indigenous people never received the wages that were supposedly held in ‘trust’ for them. Often these funds were misappropriated by governments or sometimes taken by corrupt officials (Commonwealth of Australia, 2006; Kidd, 2007).