At a deeper level, Rowse delivers an important message (no doubt startling for many), that in spite of their paternalistic, intrusive character these policies were fundamental in ensuring the survival of Aboriginal populations today. Today’s self-identified Aboriginal population of Victoria derives entirely from those men, women, and children who were ‘known and institutionalised as “Aborigines” in the middle of the nineteenth century’. Nineteenth-century ‘protection’ policies may have contained elements indefensible today, but the strength and revival of Aboriginal identity ‘among the descendants of those then institutionalised’ is an indicator for Rowse that those very policies were instrumental in ensuring that Victorian Aborigines ‘did not disappear into the wider community but remained a self-conscious and conspicuous responsibility’ of the State.

This is a revisionist history, certainly, but Rowse is far from an apologist for paternalistic policies. He recognises their effect on diminishing the lives of Aboriginal people and reducing their agency. He has spent enough time working with and around anthropologists to understand the compromises forced upon ‘tribal’ Aboriginal people under government regulation, the rapid erosion of elders’ authority, the displacement of complex kinship protocols by more generalised structures of power, allowing for the rise of new cultural brokers during the early Federation period. These men and women and their descendants would play key roles in shifting government policies of the twentieth century from ‘protection’ to ‘assimilation’ and ‘self-determination’. The influence and agency of these leaders would become particularly evident in the push for land and sea rights, resulting in the transfer of almost half of Australia’s land area to some form of Indigenous ownership or control during the past four decades.

Rowse’s treatment is so comprehensive as to deal with all the key areas in which Aboriginal lives and social cohesion have been affected directly by state and federal policies since 1901. One or two are overlooked or under-analysed; there is no discussion of the joint expeditions mounted during the 1930s and 1950s by Norman Tindale and Joseph Birdsell which produced the first intensive demographic study of Aboriginal missions and settlements during the ‘protection’ era. But the study is enriched by Rowse’s inclusion of a range of remarkable surveys undertaken among Aboriginal people themselves during the mid-twentieth century, gauging their aspirations as the policies of the assimilation era took effect. Rowse has an impressive command of obscure and forgotten social science sources which are apposite to his convincing thesis. The scope of the book might have been extended by consideration of Aboriginal creativity during the entire period, rather than concentrating only on the performing and visual arts during the glasnost years of Whitlam’s administration. Some of the key initiatives for those cultural programs actually commenced during the earlier assimilation period, under more conservative governments.

That said, Rowse navigates adroitly through the succession of policy developments, regressions, blunders, and successes. He takes us through the end of the ‘dying race’ paradigm to the advent of the concept and practice of ‘protection’, the establishment and evolution of missions until government takeover and, ultimately, community governance, subject to intervention in the recent past. He examines the rationale behind the removal of Aboriginal children perceived to be ‘at risk’, against the background of hardening discourse over ‘race’, expressed particularly in the phrase ‘the half-caste problem’. This key policy fixation of the 1930s led readily to a comprehensive attempt at ‘assimilation’ of the Aboriginal other, until Whitlam’s accession signalled the era of proposed self-determination, recently declared a failure by Peter Sutton in his trenchant The Politics of Suffering (2011). Oddly, given his book’s breadth, Rowse doesn’t mention this work, although it is clear that he takes an entirely different line to Sutton, almost optimistic in tone and rarely, if ever, judgemental. In an interesting way, this restraint and balance allows Rowse more room to explore and unpick the logic of policy formation and to express some candid observations. Taken together, those observations are to the effect that social policy for Aboriginal people has not been the unmitigated disaster so often depicted. In fact, as Rowse ably demonstrates for all the examples he cites, the institutionalisation of Aboriginal people (widely regarded as a retrograde act emblematic of colonialism’s destructive force) had the effect of ensuring the survival of a people. Rowse’s view is that this effect was neither accidental nor incidental.

For some historians, an appreciation of the actual damage done to Aboriginal people by colonialism can cause bias to affect their work. The reputation of certain Aboriginal Protectors, such as A.O. Neville in Western Australia for their role in creating the ‘stolen generations’ often colours interpretation of this period. Rowse is more concerned to explain the logic driving the paternalistic ethos of ‘protection’, exposing the dilemma facing the Protectors as they shifted their emphasis from ‘protecting’ the shrinking full-descent population in south-eastern and south-western Australia, to regulating the lives of the burgeoning mixed-descent population which would ultimately develop its own connected web of autonomous identity, across the continent.

The rise of an Indigenous middle class forms the subject of Rowse’s penultimate chapter and confirms his general thesis: that despite its inconsistent, often contradictory trajectory, Aboriginal policy formation cannot be simply characterised as an arm of colonialism. When viewed across the century since Federation, the succession of policies applied to Aboriginal people has been underpinned by an assumption radically different to that prevailing in South Africa, for example, during the same period. The assumption was that Aboriginal people would aspire to join ‘a single field of life’ (W.E.H. Stanner’s term) and would expand their own agency to meet that objective. Understandably, in making this proposition, Rowse has more to say about those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have made that transition and less to say about those who remain on the wrong side of the gap. His point is that the aspiration exists nevertheless, and that despite the obvious challenges and set-backs, the gap will eventually close.

This book fills a gap of another kind – a deficit in understanding the origins of how contemporary Aboriginal societies have been shaped and affected by government policy during the past century. Rowse provides a finely modulated, thoroughly researched and engaging account of that process, and of the extraordinary part played by Aboriginal people themselves in shaping the social and political landscape of Australians today, more and more resembling a ‘single field of life’ in which the Aboriginal past and present becomes a key reference.