'A Halo of Protection': colonial protectors and the principle of aboriginal protection through punishment

Abstract

Scholarship on Australia's colonial protectorates has examined the ways in which protectors largely failed in their humanitarian mission, as well as the ambivalent roles they played as agents of ‘civilisation’. Yet as well as representing ‘friends and benefactors’ of Aboriginal people, colonial protectors worked to bring them within the legal reach of police, courts and prisons. This article will compare the work of the protectorates during the 1840s in Port Phillip and South Australia with that of Western Australia, where a more systematic and forebodingly modern policy of Aboriginal governance existed. It argues that in Western Australia a logic of Aboriginal protection emerged through a principle of discipline and punishment facilitated by the distinctive policy regime of Governor Hutt.