Governing natives

Indirect rule and settler colonialism in Australia's north

Ben Silverstein

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526100047
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In the 1930s, a series of crises transformed relationships between settlers and Aboriginal people in Australia's Northern Territory. By the late 1930s, Australian settlers were coming to understand the Northern Territory as a colonial formation requiring a new form of government. Responding to crises of social reproduction, public power, and legitimacy, they re-thought the scope of settler colonial government by drawing on both the art of indirect rule and on a representational economy of Indigenous elimination to develop a new political dispensation that sought to incorporate and consume Indigenous production and sovereignties. This book locates Aboriginal history within imperial history, situating the settler colonial politics of Indigeneity in a broader governmental context.

CHAPTER ONE
Strehlow's problem: colonial transformations and a governmental event

It was November 1937 when anthropologist and patrol officer Ted Strehlow realised he had a problem. He had travelled 130 km through the central Australian desert from Alice Springs to Hermannsburg Mission to investigate an apparent murder that had taken place some weeks earlier at Thira, a sheep camp on the upper Ormiston River. There he found that a forceful and unwanted marriage proposal had sparked a disagreement between a number of people he described as Pintubi and Ngalia. When four Pintubi women began fighting, he was to write, their husbands felt themselves compelled to act. Witjitji and Wantu's husband Kulaia ‘sprang up and hit Mungana over the head once with a boomerang’, and Mungana's husband Ngulunta ‘took his spear in order to punish Kulaia’. Kulaia, in response, seized his own spear and shield. A marital dispute now became, in Strehlow's breathlessly evocative prose, a mystical tribal feud: ‘The two men advanced upon each other. It was a moonless night, and the fires were burning low, and midnight was approaching. Everyone in the camp began to stir. Ngulunta threw his spear first, but Kulaia dodged it. The spear’, Strehlow wrote, ‘sped on’, almost becoming an agent of its trajectory, determining its own path. It ‘buried its point in Tjukutai's left side, just over the hips. Tjukutai had walked across the spear's line of flight a few feet behind Kulaia.’¹ Tjukutai, the younger brother of Witjitji and Wantu, died almost immediately and, a few days later, the thrower of that spear, Ngulunta, was himself speared through the left thigh by Nananana, a relative of the deceased.

What, Strehlow wondered, should he do? Encountering the aftermath of this situation, in which Aboriginal people had acted as though unconcerned by the spectre of his authority, he was deeply unsure. He elected to take charge through a demonstration of force, taking all those involved most of the way back to Alice Springs and holding them at the Jay Creek station. But confirming his immediate physical control only amplified his uncertainty. He wrote to his superiors in Darwin to relate the unfolding events and ask if anyone should be charged and tried, whether Ngulunta for the initial murder of Tjukutai, or Nananana for the spearing that followed; a spearing that ought to be understood, he noted, as a lawful Aboriginal response. All these men, Strehlow pointed out, were ‘relatively untouched by civilisation’, and though there were ‘no real tribal considerations’ involved, the applicability of settler laws was at least questionable. On the other hand, ‘these people had been warned off the settler areas previously, and told to live their own lives in the unoccupied land at Haast's Bluff’. The problem, he suggested, was one of coexistence; of people and of laws. If Kulaia, Ngulunta, and Nananana wanted to ‘live their own lives’, they would have to do so in their own spaces. And so long as they ‘continue[d] to leave their own tribal territories’ in order to ‘hang around the stations and camps of white men’, he preferred not to respect their jurisdiction.²

Strehlow's problem derived from his recognition that this was not a simple common-law criminal matter. What he saw was less a lawless mob than it was a people who sustained the operation of Aboriginal laws through practising Aboriginal relationships and remedies. This recognition, framed by his anthropological expertise, was characteristic of the colonising practice of indirect rule. But he was uncertain about its consequences. How could Aboriginal laws be incorporated into the government of the Northern Territory? Were there limits to the reach of settler legal force? These are questions that appear anomalous to today's observer. Though historians of Australia have turned in recent years to the study of legal pluralism, it has generally been supposed that questions of jurisdiction had largely been settled by what Lisa Ford termed the ‘juridical death of Aboriginal people’ in the 1830s. As Heather Douglas and Mark Finnane extensively illustrate, this ‘juridical death’ was a settler fantasy which has incited continued struggle over the scope of law and sovereignty. But for them, the ‘protracted struggle over what it might mean to assert jurisdiction over the Indigenous peoples of the Australian colonial territories was a nineteenth-century story’.³ Strehlow's problem reminds us of the continuing renegotiation of such matters. At heart, his problem emerged from the puzzle of government in a territory ruled by Australian settlers who encountered peoples who ruled themselves; peoples who appeared, in all important aspects, to be practising sovereignty. How, Strehlow essentially asked, was he to govern a people who were self-governing, who had their own laws? How could they be fixed in place, and where, and under what circumstances could their laws be both recognised and respected? How could government be ordered?⁴

These were questions being asked across the Northern Territory as in other sites across the British Empire. The problems that produced them were not universal problems of colonial government, but nor were they unique: Strehlow's uncertainty was far from his alone. It was to be found everywhere administrators sought to work with indirect rule, an art of government that became a standard in the interwar period and which we can trace from Fiji and Northern Nigeria to London and ultimately, in this study, to the Ormiston River in the Northern Territory. This part of Australia was far from the halls of colonial power in London or Lagos, distant and marginal to the British Empire as a whole and rarely considered by historians as a site for the elaboration of techniques of colonial government. But it represents a valuable entry point into considering the nature and implications of this moment in British colonialism.

This book charts the turn to indirect rule as a practice of governing the Northern Territory in the 1930s. As a series of developing crises in Australia's north accrued and condensed, the Australian Government was compelled to reform its administration of ‘native affairs’ in the Northern Territory. Forced to reckon with Aboriginal manoeuvring and confounding acts, the official mind of Australian settler colonialism was pushed to recognise that Aboriginal social reproduction was not a threat to the fabrication of a new society in the north; in fact, it was indispensable.⁵ This recognition, and the 1938 policy reform that was its product, signified the reception of indirect rule; a political rationality that identified ‘native society’ as its subject, and the art of incorporating it, in some form, into the colonial state. It imagined government as dispersed, as the work of conducting customary institutions and traditional laws to articulate native society with colonial interests, ordering by striving not to dissolve but to preserve apparently intact but vulnerable traditional societies.

In telling this story, this book traces the emergence of several crises of north Australian settler colonialism: material, administrative, and of public power. The hegemony of the Northern Territory administration was failing, frustrated by the intensifying contradictory forces at work in a capitalist social formation whose main industry was reliant on super-exploited unfree Aboriginal labour, and not least by Aboriginal people's continuing practice of sovereignty in ways that confounded settler colonialism. The future of the Northern Territory seemed bleak. In response, government administrators and policymakers turned to the newly archetypal response to colonial crises, displacing instability onto native precariousness or recalcitrance, a move being made elsewhere across the Empire. By the 1930s, we can observe indirect rule in northern Australia on the cusp of enunciation; a product of the settler idea that Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory could best be governed by reference to an imperial repertoire of ‘governing natives’.

The art of indirect rule

In taking indirect rule seriously as a governing art, this book departs from the historical orthodoxy that reduces it to specific constitutional arrangements. Historians usually take a formalistic understanding of Frederick Lugard's Nigerian model of indirect rule as the archetype, describing it in terms of the colonial state's mobilisation of chiefly or Indigenous authority, or its recognition of local sovereignty and use of traditional authorities to govern. Margery Perham, Lugard's friend and biographer, described it as a ‘system by which the tutelary power recognizes existing African societies and assists them to adapt themselves to the functions of local government’.⁶ Such accounts set out an instrumental practice of delegation which robs indirect rule of any ideological specificity, culminating in Frederick Cooper's argument that Lugard's work was little more than ‘an attempt to make retreat sound like policy’.⁷ But to accept the argument that indirect rule represented a ‘retreat’ from the ambition of remaking Africa is to suggest that Lugard's work comprised simply popularising and advocating what was merely a necessary response to limits on colonial power. It presumes rather than questions the constitution of the colonial field. The limits ‘found’ and the scope of ‘necessary’ responses did not emerge naturally. This book argues instead that they were effects of a mid-nineteenth-century ideological turn to understand empire differently, a turn that both influenced and was transformed by Lugard.⁸

This turn, which Coel Kirkby describes as the ‘birth of the native’, can be traced through the wake of the 1857 Indian Rebellion. Responding to this crisis of order, the colonial jurist Henry Maine produced his influential theory of traditional society as simultaneously internally coherent and resting in equilibrium, and yet so fragile that almost any contact with ‘modern’ society produced disintegration. For Karuna Mantena, this was the ontology that underpinned what Mahmood Mamdani has argued became the central problem of colonial government in Africa: that of maintaining order while governing intact yet vulnerable native societies. And this problem was managed by the institution of a racially bifurcated state, where citizens were governed by a civic law while the ‘native’ arm of the state mobilised ethnically or tribally constituted bodies of customary law.⁹ When colonial governors wrote of their practice, or when they surveyed the colonial field, they wrote of discovering limits, of the seemingly permanent intransigence of native society, and of the need for a practice – a new mode of governmentality they termed ‘native administration’ – that might manage, if not overcome, this difference. Disavowing the fundamentally productive nature of their work, they wrote of recognition, not invention; of mobilisation rather than transformation. But the colonial field they ‘found’ took form in the official mind through the ontology of native society, revealing a disjuncture between the writing and the practice of indirect rule.¹⁰ Africans understood themselves to be Hausa or Yoruba, or of any number of complementary or intersecting identities, in diverse ways with different implications. But there was no ‘native society’ prior to its identification in white writing and white imaginations. Recognition conjures its object.¹¹

As Mamdani identifies, to govern tribes individual people needed to be made tribal. Indirect rule was, then, a practice of subjectivation, constituting and maintaining tribal subjects. Lugard, as writer, instead framed the colonial field as one populated by tribes prior to the imperial moment. He imagined native society not as an artefact of the encounter between African peoples and British colonisation but as both a limit and an incitement to colonial power, as a social body whose potential could be harnessed to the colonial social formation. This book thus begins its account of indirect rule in Chapter 2 not with constitutional arrangements but with what David Scott has described as ‘colonial governmentality’; a complex of power and knowledge that produces the ‘targets of colonial power … and the field of its operation’ as ‘effects of rule’.¹²

Reading administrators’ writing critically, we find that indirect rule appears in their works as a whole way of thinking and acting in relation to colonial rule, with specific objects and ends of government. This book identifies two key elements to indirect rule: the tribe, a representation of ‘traditional society’ as its subject and object; and the management of that tribe by conducting social forces to guide customary social institutions. In the language of the South African Native Economic Commiss...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on terms
• List of abbreviations
• CHAPTER ONE: Strehlow’s problem: colonial transformations and a governmental event
• CHAPTER TWO: The political organisation of the British in their Empire, 1875–1939: transforming indirect rule
• CHAPTER THREE: Reporting on the northern contradiction: conflict and crisis, 1918–45
• CHAPTER FOUR: Thomson in Canberra: anthropologising Aborigines
• CHAPTER FIVE: Native administration in the Northern Territory: a white minority in the national community
• CHAPTER SIX: From a White Australia to an Aboriginal New Deal
• CHAPTER SEVEN: The long march: work and the ends of settler colonialism
• CHAPTER EIGHT: Never yet: the tense of citizenship
• Bibliography
• Index