Protection Regimes

The term ‘protection’ in Australia is closely associated with the practices and institutions of assimilation imposed upon Indigenous people through much of the twentieth century. These practices and institutions were backed by laws that granted state governments wide-ranging powers of control over Indigenous lives, purportedly for their own good. The multi-generational impacts of assimilative policies continue to resonate for Indigenous communities today. Yet apart from the legal regime of assimilation that defined Indigenous policy through the mid-twentieth century, protection has a longer and more complex history in Australia, as it does globally. This chapter traces Australia’s history of protection, from its nineteenth-century origins as a program designed to build Indigenous people’s status as British subjects, to its twentieth-century expressions as a legally-empowered system of state guardianship. While the history of protection is one of legal authority, it is also a history of Indigenous political action.