Interracial intimacy, indigenous mobility and the limits of legal regulation in two late settler colonial societies

A large body of scholarship has explored how interracial marriages and informal sexual contracts alike became the target of state regulation in settler colonial societies, as categories ofracial identity and their classifications in law became increasingly fixed through the late nineteenth century. In late colonial western Canada and Western Australia, settler governments deployed different legal strategies to manage the shared perceived problems of Indigenous prostitution and interracial cohabitation. As part of a wider program of Aboriginal governance, these governmental interventions were tied not only to late colonial ideologies about racial purity but also to an objective to contain Indigenous people's mobility and their access to settler cities and towns. In both countries, however, authorities were confronted with the limits of the law in regulating interracial contact.