Jonathan Richards

'You'll get nothing out of it'? The inquest, police and Aboriginal deaths in colonial Queensland

Colonisation in Australia entailed the establishment of legal institutions, but very often lagging the extension of the boundaries of settlement. As a common‐law institution of ancient lineage the inquest was an important means of exploring reasons for unexplained deaths, even leading to prosecutions. Yet the protections afforded by rule of law institutions were nugatory where they affected Aboriginal people in conflict with settler society, as shown in this study of the many inquiries in which deaths were attributed to the actions of the police in colonial Queensland.

Aboriginal violence and state response : histories, policies and legacies in Queensland 1860-1940

Abstract During the long era of ‘protection’ (enacted in 1897, flourishing in the interwar years and with effects continuing to this day) policy towards Australian Indigenous people suspected of interpersonal violence was ambiguous in its objectives and its means. Formally, Indigenous peoples in Australia were British subjects entitled to the full protection of the law. As a consequence, violence between Indigenous people was made visible through the conduct of inquests, police inquiries and, in many cases, subsequent arrest and charge with a criminal offence. Disposal of those charged or even suspected of crimes reflects tension between the universalising presumptions of the criminal law and the particularising effects of welfare regimes that ruled the lives of Indigenous people. Drawing on archives of inquests, courts and prisons in the Queensland jurisdiction before 1940, this article examines the policies and decision-making that characterised a state that remained determinedly colonial in its practices and ambitions. In conclusion, we consider briefly the question of how distinctive or how representative was Queensland practice as a state response to Indigenous violence during these decades of colonial subordination.

Book reviews : WHITE FLOUR, WHITE POWER: FROM RATIONS TO CITIZENSHIP IN CENTRAL AUSTRALIA Tim Rowse Melbourne, Cambndge University Press, 1998, xviii, 255 pp.,

All historical questions in Australia are influenced by the introduction of a capitalist mode of production, argued Ann Curthoys (’Rewriting Australian History: Including Aboriginal Resistance’ Arena 1983, 62: 109). Tim Rowse has now placed the phenomenon of rationing-often cast as humanitarian intervention-in such a light. White Flour, White Power is a detailed investigation of the colonial practice of rationing in Central Australia as a fundamental instrument of