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ABSTRACT
The Northern Territory of Australia is often described by historians as marginal and anomalous, characterised by plurality and set apart from the settler colonial south(east). But it has long been subjected to practices of government designed to articulate settler colonialism upon and through its distinctive character. In this article, I take one such governmental project in order to read the antagonistic work of Indigenous and settler sovereignties alongside each other. By examining the imposition of restrictions on Chinese people’s capacity to work and to employ Aboriginal labour in Darwin around 1911, I locate a racialised labour politics and capitalism as central to the obstruction and production of sovereignties. In doing so, this article engages with two recent criticisms of settler colonial studies: one that impresses upon scholars the need to write not only of settlers but also of Indigenous peoples; and another that insists on attending to the specific conditions of settlers of colour or precariously racialised migrants to settler colonies.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jane Carey, Lorenzo Veracini, Maria Elena Indelicato and Sarah Walsh, who read earlier versions of this article and whose comments helped frame it. Thanks also to the two anonymous referees.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 On ‘marginality’, see Gabriella Haynes, ‘Shifting Foundations: A Short History of Subversive Spaces on the Pioneer River,’ Australian Historical Studies 48(4), 2017, pp. 536–553.
2 J J Symes to W Baldwin Spencer, 14 February 1912; Petition to the Honorable Josiah Thomas, Minister of State for External Affairs, n.d., National Archives of Australia: A1, 1912/6611; Notes of Deputation from Chinese Residents of Darwin Which Waited Upon the Minister for External Affairs (Hon. Josiah Thomas) at that Place on 6th May, 1912; Wing Cheong Sing et al to Josiah Thomas, 7 May 1912, NAA: A1, 1912/10547.
3 Notes of Deputation from Chinese Residents of Darwin Which Waited Upon the Minister for External Affairs (Hon. Josiah Thomas) at that Place on 6th May, 1912, NAA: A1, 1912/10547; Atlee Hunt to Administrator of the NT, 30 May 1912, NAA: A1, 1912/6611.
4 J Kēhaulani Kauanui, ‘“A Structure, Not an Event”: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity’, Lateral 5(1), 2016, (http://csalateral.org/wp/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-settler-colonialism-enduring-indigeneity-kauanui/). See also Audra Simpson, ‘Whither Settler Colonialism,’ Settler Colonial Studies 6(4), 2016, p. 440.
5 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, London: Cassell, 1999, p. 2; Patrick Wolfe, ‘Introduction’ in The Settler Complex: Recuperating Binarism in Colonial Studies, Patrick Wolfe (ed), Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2016, p. 9.
6 Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp. 53–74. See also Patrick Wolfe, ‘Introduction’, p. 4.
7 Crystal McKinnon, ‘Expressing Indigenous Sovereignty: The Production of Embodied Texts in Social Protest and the Arts’, PhD Thesis, Department of Archaeology and History, La Trobe University, 2018, p. 10. See also Joanne Barker, ‘For Whom Sovereignty Matters’ in Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination, Joanne Barker (ed), Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005, p. 21; Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Introduction’ in Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, Aileen Moreton-Robinson (ed), Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2007, p. 2; Minoru Hokari, Gurindji Journey: A Japanese Historian in the Outback, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2011, pp. 215–219, 230.
8 Dean Itsuji Saranillio, ‘Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters: A thought piece on critiques, debates, and Indigenous difference,’ Settler Colonial Studies 3(3–4), 2013, pp. 286, 288.
9 On settler sovereignty as counter-sovereignty see Manu Vimalassery, ‘The Prose of Counter-Sovereignty’ in Formations of United States Colonialism, Alyosha Goldstein (ed), Durham: Duke University Press, 2014, pp. 87–109.
10 Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, p. 1; Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8(4), 2006, pp. 387–409; Ben Silverstein, ‘Patrick Wolfe (1949–2016)’, History Workshop Journal 82(1), 2016, p. 317. See Lorenzo Veracini, ‘“Settler Colonialism”: Career of a Concept’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41(2), 2013, pp. 313–333; Nancy Shoemaker, ‘A Typology of Colonialism,’ Perspectives on History, October 2015, (https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/october-2015/a-typology-of-colonialism); K. Tsianina Lomawaima, ‘Indigenous Studies,’ American Quarterly 68(1), 2016, p. 150; Jerry Bannister, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Future of Canadian History,’ Acadiensis, 18 April 2016, (https://acadiensis.wordpress.com/2016/04/18/settler-colonialism-and-the-future-of-canadian-history/).
11 Patrick Wolfe, ‘History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism’, American Historical Review 102(2), 1997, pp. 399, 418–419; Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, pp. 1–2, 167–168.
12 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, ‘Writing off Treaties: White Possession in the United States Critical Whiteness Studies Literature’ in Transnational Whiteness Matters, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Maryrose Casey, and Fiona Nicoll (eds), Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008, pp. 83–84.
13 This work provides an ontological basis for differentiating between white settlers and those who may instead be termed foreigners. See Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Being of the Occupier: Manifesto for a White Australian Philosophy of Origins, Melbourne: re.press, 2014.
14 Veracini, Settler Colonialism, pp 17, 30. See also Lorenzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 44–48. Nadia Rhook has similarly described a triangular settler colonial structure, building on the spatial metaphor to describe triangles of mobility, of affect, and of subjectivity that inflect the form and substance of settler colonialism. Nadia Rhook, ‘“Annamese Coolies” at Australian ports: Charting Colonial Geographies of Emotion, and Settler Memory, from French Vietnam to New Caledonia via Interwar Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 48(3), 2017, p. 402.
15 Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011, pp. xix, xxxix, 53, 119. See also Shona N Jackson, Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, p. 3; Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie, Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods, New York: Routledge, 2015, p. 68. For Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein, Byrd’s invocation of the arrivant ‘destabilize[s] the settler/native binary’ rather than instantiating a supplementary third positionality. Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues, and Alyosha Goldstein, ‘On Colonial Unknowing’, Theory & Event 19(4), 2016.
16 And they have, as well, often disrupted the other. See Wolfe, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.
17 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’, Decolonization, 1(1), 2012, p. 7. See also Patrick Wolfe, ‘Race and the Trace of History’ in Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity, Culture, Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington (eds), Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, p. 289; La Paperson, ‘A Ghetto Land Pedagogy: An Antidote for Settler Environmentalism,’ Environmental Education Research 20(1), 2014, p. 116.
18 On the question of ‘settlers of colour’, see Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, ‘Decolonizing Antiracism,’ Social Justice 32(4), 2005, p. 134; Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, ‘Decolonizing Resistance, Challenging Colonial States,’ Social Justice 35(3), 2008–2009, p. 123.
19 See, for example, the Australian government publication that is intended to be read by all those seeking to become Australian citizens, which instructs readers that by ‘joining the Australian community, you will inherit this history’ of nation-building on Indigenous land. While the publication acknowledges that ‘Australia is an ancient land’ and that ‘[o]ur [note the crucial possessive] Indigenous cultures are the oldest continuing cultures in the world’, it also reminds readers that citizenship will signal their affiliation to settler law. Indigenous sovereignty is the silent referent here, alluded to in a spirit of disavowal as new citizens are instructed in the ways they can commit to a multicultural nation. See Commonwealth of Australia, Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond, Canberra: Department of Home Affairs, 2018, pp. 3, 9, 51.
20 Patrick Wolfe, ‘Recuperating Binarism: a heretical introduction’, Settler Colonial Studies 3(3–4), 2013, p. 263; Dean Itsuji Saranillio, ‘Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters: A thought Piece on Critiques, Debates, and Indigenous Difference,’ Settler Colonial Studies, 3(3-4), 2013, p. 282.
21 Iyko Day, ‘Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique’, Journal of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association 1(2), 2015, pp. 106–7; Nadia Rhook, ‘“Turban-clad British Subjects: Tracking the Circuits of Mobility, Visibility, and Sexuality in Settler Nation-Making’, Transfers 5(3), 2015, pp. 104–122; Shaista Patel, ‘Complicating the Tale of “Two Indians”: Mapping “South Asian” Complicity in White Settler Colonialism Along the Axis of Caste and Anti-Blackness’, Theory & Event 19(4), 2016; Andonis Piperoglou, ‘Greeks or Turks, “White or Asiatic”: Historicising Castellorizian Racial-Consciousness, 1916–1920’, Journal of Australian Studies 40(4), 2016, pp. 387–402.
22 Byrd, Transit of Empire, p. xx; Saranillio, ‘Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters’, p. 281.
23 Candace Fujikane, ‘Asian Settler Colonialism in the U.S. Colony of Hawai’i’ in Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’I, Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y Okamura (eds), Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008, p. 9.
24 Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015, p. 11.
25 Moreton-Robinson, ‘Writing off Treaties’, p. 84; Haunani-Kay Trask, ‘Settlers of Color and “Immigrant” Hegemony: “Locals” in Hawai’i’ in Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai’I, Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y Okamura (eds), Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008, p. 48. See also J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, ‘Tracing Historical Specificity: Race and the Colonial Politics of (In)Capacity’, American Quarterly 69(2), 2017, pp. 259–263.
26 Stuart Hall, ‘Pluralism, Race and Class in Caribbean Society’ in Race and Class in Post-Colonial Society: A Study of Ethnic Group Relations in the English-Speaking Caribbean, Bolivia, Chile and Mexico, UNESCO (ed), Paris: Unesco, 1977, p. 162.
27 Beenash Jafri, ‘Desire, Settler Colonialism, and the Racialized Cowboy,’ American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37(2), 2013, p. 76.
28 See, eg, Joanne Barker (ed), Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005; Ann Laura Stoler, ‘On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty’, Public Culture 18(1), 2006, pp. 125–146; Kevin Bruyneel, The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.–Indigenous Relations, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2007; Aileen Moreton-Robinson (ed), Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2007; Lauren A Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
29 For Dennison, studying the relationships and negotiations between the Osage nation and American county, state, and federal governments, this entanglement constitutes an inescapable web. Jean Dennison, ‘Entangled sovereignties: The Osage Nation’s interconnections with governmental and corporate authorities’, American Ethnologist 44(4), 2017, p. 685. See also Jessica Cattelino’s description of ‘sovereign interdependencies’. Jessica Cattelino, High Stakes: Florida Seminole gaming and sovereignty, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008, pp. 161–191.
30 Vimalassery, ‘The Prose of Counter-Sovereignty’, p. 88.
31 See also Mark Rifkin’s study of ‘the ways settler sovereignty continually is activated, circulated, and materialized within and through the “lived hegemony” of everyday experience’, at least in part through the ‘historical and persistent deferral of Native sovereignty’. This, then, demands an attention to the processes and practices of ‘sovereignty-making’. Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, pp. 11, 14.
32 Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive, pp. 11–13; Moreton-Robinson, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. A similar argument, with reference to eastern Cape York, is made by Marcia Langton, ‘The Edge of the Sacred, the Edge of Death: Sensual Inscriptions’ in Inscribed Landscapes: Marking and Making Place, Bruno David and Meredith Wilson (eds), Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002, p. 255.
33 Alexis Wright, ‘On writing Carpentaria’, HEAT, 13, 2007, pp. 79–80, 84; Alexis Wright, ‘A Weapon of Poetry’, Overland 193, 2008, p. 21. See also Anne Brewster, ‘Indigenous Sovereignty and the Crisis of Whiteness in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria’, Australian Literary Studies 25(4), 2010, p. 88.
34 This argument on the nature of Indigenous dispossession draws on Glen Coulthard’s work on ways the Dene experience the ‘settler colonial relationship’ in northern Canada. Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, pp. 6–7, 11, 13.
35 Baldwin Spencer, Wanderings in Wild Australia, London: Macmillan, 1928, Vol II, pp. 612–14; Samantha Wells, ‘Labour, Control and Protection: The Kahlin Aboriginal Compound, 1911–38’, in Settlement: A History of Australian Indigenous Housing, Peter Read (ed), Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2000, pp. 64–74.
36 Xavier Herbert quoted in Risk v Northern Territory of Australia [2006] FCA 404, [285].
37 Pauline Baban quoted in Saltwater People: Larrakia Stories from around Darwin, Samantha Wells (ed), Darwin: Larrakia Nation Aboriginal Corporation, 2001, p. 79.
38 Northern Land Council on behalf of the traditional owners, Kenbi Land Claim to vacant crown land in the Cox Peninsula Bynoe Harbour and Port Patterson areas of the Northern Territory of Australia, Darwin: Northern Land Council, 1979, pp. 170–173.
39 See also Donna Odegaard Robb, ‘Two Laws – One Land: Reflections of a Larrakia Woman,’ Newcastle Law Review 7(1), 2003, pp. 35–52.
40 ‘Daisy Ruddick’ in Under the Mango Tree: Oral Histories with Indigenous People from the Top End, collected by Peg Havnen, Darwin: NT Writers’ Centre, 2001, p. 45.
41 The Chinese deputies described their call for the right to employ Aboriginal workers as a call for ‘the right to live’. Government reports described white settlers’ reliance on Aboriginal domestic and stock workers in similar terms. George Buchanan, Northern Territory Development and Administration: Report, Melbourne: Victorian Government Printer, 1925, pp. 14–15; Report of the Board of Inquiry Appointed to Inquire into the Land and Land Industries of the Northern Territory of Australia, Cmd. Paper No. 4, 1937, p. 72.
42 Littleton Groom, second reading speech, Northern Territory Acceptance Bill, Parliamentary Debates, 30 July 1909, p. 1880; Lee Batchelor, Northern Territory Acceptance Bill (No 2), Parliamentary Debates, 6 October 1910, p. 4250.
43 Alfred Deakin, Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, 15 October 1909, pp. 4579, 4628–30; James Fenton, Northern Territory Acceptance Bill (No 2), Parliamentary Debates, 13 October 1910, p. 4542.
44 Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, Melbourne: Government Printer, 1911, vol. II, p. 904; Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics, Official Yearbook of the Commonwealth of Australia, Containing Authoritative Statistics for the Period 1901–1920 and Corrected Statistics for the Period 1788 to 1900, Melbourne: Government Printer, No. 14 of 1921, p. 988.
45 Wing Cheong Sing et al to Josiah Thomas, 7 May 1912, NAA: A1, 1912/10547.
46 Ah Chong et al to Mr Justice Mitchell, 22 March 1911, NAA: A1, 1912/10547; Petition to the Honorable Josiah Thomas, Minister of State for External Affairs, n.d., NAA: A1, 1912/6611.
47 See Ben Silverstein, Governing Natives: Indirect Rule and Settler Colonialism in Australia’s North, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019.
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Ben Silverstein
Ben Silverstein is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Australian National University, working on the ARC Laureate Fellowship program titled ‘Rediscovering the Deep Human Past’, which seeks to engage with the long duration of Indigenous history in Australia. He has researched in colonial and Indigenous histories, engaging questions of race and settler colonialism, as well as contests over sovereignties and colonial government. His first book, Governing Natives: Indirect Rule and Settler Colonialism in Australia’s North, was published by Manchester University Press in 2019.