The Commonwealth had direct control of the Northern Territory from 1911, and Tony Austin therefore deals largely with Commonwealth policy and documents, whereas Kidd is interested in Queensland state policy and its struggles with the Commonwealth across a wider period, but overlapping Austin’s. They are each trying to trace out the relationship between the central administration and different agencies, especially local ‘Protectors’, mission and settlement administrators, and white graziers. Neither writer is interested in easy moralising. Each writer – Kidd more explicitly than Austin – is offering the result of their extensive scholarship to show how massive systemic interracial abuse can operate in the context of a large bureaucracy. Kidd in particular is especially concerned to emphasise that she is making a wide study of the range of administrative ‘voices’ – agencies, optimisms, mistakes, and accidents, and is trying to resist setting out a simple moral melodrama. But the reader is always aware of the human lives that were so grossly affected.

Austin is more directly concerned than is Kidd to document the relationship between racist philosophic presumptions and government policy, and he is also more directly concerned with the sometimes farcical Justice system, while Kidd is more interested in the culture and mentality of Queensland’s successive Aboriginal Affairs departments. Unfortunately for the reputation of white Australia, there are thousands of parallel cases in the Northern Territory and Queensland of both systemic and specific maltreatment, as well as some direct connections between the two jurisdictions. For example, each book documents the underpayment of Aboriginal workers, and Kidd makes a special study of government misuse of pension and wage funds held in trust. What does it mean about white Australia that in 1963, as Aboriginal people were dying of malnutrition in many parts of Queensland, £510,000 of their own money held in trust by the Queensland government was on loan to white hospitals?

Not only was it the same Commonwealth dealing with the same problems in two jurisdictions, and the same Aboriginal and church organisations doing battle with government over the same problems, but many other personnel were the same. Each book, for example, touches on the behind the scenes influence of pioneer anthropologist A.P. Elkin and the influence of the universities of Sydney and Melbourne, at a time when anthropologists were seen in the mind of many local administrators as soft southerners.

More importantly, each author convincingly relates the tenure of individual chief administrators with specific outcomes and policy shifts across the century. Austin organises his narrative around the period in office of Northern Territory Aboriginal Affairs administrators, while Kidd attempts to treat general themes like health and law while also dealing with key departmental personnel. Central to Kidd’s analysis is the fact that in Queensland, only three men held the position of chief administrator between 1914 and 1986. The first of these was John Bleakely, who also advised the Commonwealth about Northern Territory policies in an influential report in 1929.

Bleakley’s predecessor between 1906 and 1914, Richard Howard, had experiences of relations with Aboriginals going back to 1865, and there are clear continuities between what was by any measure our brutal frontier, and what we might like to think of as our more enlightened contemporary attitudes. The historical continuities in Kidd’s book, and the way her factually reportive narrative suddenly pulls us into the recognisable present, bring a white reader to the uncomfortable realisation that we use bland public languages to normalise present attitudes and practices of our forebears, when to any distanced outsider they would seem just as appalling now as they were in the past. Just as London based anti-slavery societies came to the defence of Aboriginals early in the century, contemporary Aboriginal groups need to appeal to the United Nations and other international groups in order to apply leverage to barbaric local governments.

The inescapable conclusion, reading through either book, is that official black-white relations in northern Australia between 1900 and 1967 took the form of a sickeningly repetitive cycle of directives from a central administration, sometimes enlightened, sometimes very damaging, which were chronically ignored by officials at the local level, either because of wilful disobedience and subversion of a centre seen to be too soft or out of touch, or ineptitude, or because of terrible shortages of funds, or all three. On the basis of the evidence in these books, it would be true to say that no Aboriginal living in any kind of church or government collective in northern Australia was ever supported to the level that would be regarded as the minimum for a white person forcibly under the care of the same government, and that, with a few honourable exceptions, the systemic intention was to annihilate the Aboriginal population, by assimilation, by murder, by medical undertreatment, starvation, and political obstruction.

This may seem an exaggeration, but offhand murder was common in the Northern Territory well into the twentieth century, and few guilty whites were ever convicted. One of the most infamous cases is the Coniston killings of 1928 in which an Anzac veteran, Mounted Constable Murray, led a police action that resulted in at least thirty-one dead. The official inquiry, which heard evidence from only one Aboriginal, a tracker, was that all the killings were justified. Racist presumptions about Aboriginal inferiority and sub-humanity existed at the highest levels, and some would say still do.

Sexual exploitation of women and girls by the nearest white males was also so much of a given that, as each book makes clear, the central administrators routinely incorporated counter measures in their plans, for example by attempting to ensure that only married police were posted to remote areas. In 1960, four years after the Melbourne Olympic Games at which we all felt so superior to the totalitarian Eastern Bloc, the Deputy Director of the Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Islander Affairs was still able to think of the planned relocation of Mapoon residents as a ‘dispersal’. The unpopular forced relocation itself was achieved by a party of armed police who arrived at night, gave a ‘show of uniform’, confined all the residents until deportation by boat at dawn, and demolished and burned their houses and furniture.

If these books were important for no other reason it was because they get more valuable government Aboriginal records out into the open – safer now in the public memory than they ever will be in the hands of the government. Each author has dealt with an amount of material so great that it is difficult to shape into a narrative, let alone review in one article like this. Of the two authors, Kidd is more successful at putting an interpretive framework around her archival material, and Austin’s analysis feels a little too dependent on the direction suggested by the content of each of his archive boxes. Curiously, while Kidd is more helpful to her reader in this respect than Austin, neither author provides the clear chronology and lists of key players that would make the accounts easier to follow. While chronology is clearly implied in each book, at no time in either is it possible for the reader to be confident about the precise date and place reached in the narrative, and in neither book does the thematic analysis sufficiently compensate for the absence of clear narrative chronology. But Never Trust a Government Man and The Way We Civilise are packed with important information.

The survival of records is one of the great ironies of the age of state surveillance. Residual nineteenth-century administrative banality and tidiness, combined with the professionalisation of archive and library services, has led to the dutiful filing of documents from Gulags, Concentration Camps, and government-controlled indigenous settlements that provide an incriminating counter-discourse which would clearly be unwelcome to the suppressive authorities if they stopped to think about it. This is much more likely to be an oversight – connected with the undervaluing of education and the written word – than a twentieth-century outbreak of honesty and democracy, and it is surely only a matter of time before Australian State and Federal governments wake up to the fact that the records they hold and make publicly available might actually be powerful instruments in the struggle to shift some of the nation’s land and wealth base back to those from whom it was taken by force.

Even if we overlooked the centrality of government records in the preparation of current Native Title cases, to anticipate future denials of access to state archives, (or even the deliberate destruction of records) might seem indulgent hyperbole were it not for the fact that part of the research underpinning The Way We Civilise has already been used in the well­publicised Palm Island wage justice case against the State of Queensland. Rosalind Kidd’s research began when Marcia Langton, then a senior member of the Queensland Public Service, (the first senior woman Aboriginal civil servant?) was able to authorise Kidd’s access to government records in the Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Islander Affairs. Those records have all since been shifted to the Queensland State Archives, and no reader of either of these books could remain complacent about what, to be sure, the Queensland Government would characterise as merely an administrative convenience that makes the records more accessible and central. Both Langton and Kidd go to great pains in their prefatory remarks to frame Kidd’s access to the records as both legitimate and well regulated, but would it have been so easy with a non­Aboriginal male in charge?

While Rosalind Kidd set out to demonstrate it more directly than did Tony Austin, each book in its own way confirms a pessimistic meta-thesis about the nature of governments held by the present reviewer and no doubt countless millions of others: ‘To govern’ in any white colonial society is not to apply a moral order of any kind – rather it involves the maintenance of a cycle of exploitation and domination in which the concept of ‘the state’ or the national good is invoked to mask the intentions of those whites with power and wealth. ‘The Government’ always means ‘the whites’.

Their intention is to use the most effective means, including if necessary the military and policing arms of their ‘state’, to retain power in order to retain wealth and privilege. State and national governments are merely slightly more sophisticated versions of the army of developers and real estate agents who turn up on local municipal councils. For example, Rosalind Kidd’s narrative connects the land-greed and violent suppression of Aboriginal resistance in the 1860s with the extraordinary manoeuvres made by the Bjelke-Peterson government in 1976 and 1977 to actually prevent the Aboriginal Land Fund Commission from legally acquiring leasehold land.

In the John Koowarta case the land in question was gazetted as a National Park only in order to prevent it falling into Aboriginal hands. The Queensland Lands Minister, according to Kidd, saw ‘the northern half of Australia’ under threat. There is a depressing inevitability about this cycle of racial hatred and the clear intention by opportunist ruling whites to suppress an effective Aboriginal presence.

Perhaps a cause for optimism is that each book documents a process whereby the Commonwealth Government, sometimes against its will, became the conduit and focus for a wider national and often southern conscience, as well as a national agency to whom Aboriginal activist groups could appeal. But white occupation of Australia at the expense of indigenous people is recent and continuing. We need a new definition of Australia that includes the truth of our origins and the ground of our political identity.