South Australian Aborigines Protection Board (1939-1962) and governance through ’scientific’ expertise: a genealogy of protection and assimilation.

Abstract

This thesis offers a Foucaultian genealogy of the government policies of protection and assimilation as they affected Aborigines in South Australia up to the 1960s. The central actor in the thesis is the Aborigines Protection Board (1939-1962) because the Board signalled a shift in the form of liberal governance to include 'scientific' experts in the governance of Aboriginal people. Executive 'scientific' experts were appointed from the areas of medicine, protection of women, anthropology, mission organisation, agriculture and education, and in the process a 'two-way street' of expertise was created whereby government drew 'scientific' experts into its structure through networks with University organisations, and bureaucrats infiltrated the Univeristy. As a result, the experts' knowledges created a biopolitcs, which determined methods of governance of Aboriginal people. Government used the rhetoric of 'scientific expertise' both to problematise Aboriginal affairs in ways to make them amenable to governance, and to condone non-liberal practices in this area. Older disciplinary and pastoral techniques based upon 'hybrid' knowledges - a combination of personal experience of the job and 'scientific" knowledge-persisted.