Protective governance and legal order on the colonial frontier

The concept of protective governance that shaped British colonial policy towards indigenous people from the 1830s is often regarded as having its greatest expression in the 1837 report of the Select Committee on Aborigines, which carried forward the reformist energy of the abolitionist era and re-centred it on Indigenous people. But the program of protection that came to focus on Indigenous people in this decade did not just emerge from a humanitarian agenda, nor did it originate with abolitionism in the British Empire. Rather, protection carries a much longer and more complex history as an instrument of imperial governance, as a growing body of recent scholarship explores. This chapter situates the place of Aboriginal protection programs in the Antipodean colonies within this wider history of governance. While the first colonial Protectors of Aborigines have most often been remembered for their immersion in the ‘civilising mission,’ they were also legal officials, usually empowered as magistrates so that they could represent the reach of law and the presence of good government on unstable colonial frontiers.