Chapter 2 Australia then: the architecture of dispossession

Australian society on the cusp of colonisation

It is beyond the scope of the book to describe in any detail the nature of precolonial contact Indigenous societies.¹ The section on Indigenous societies at the threshold of colonisation serves only as a heuristic device to bring into sharper focus the varying impacts of European expansion and its correlate, settler colonial relations of genocide on the essential foundations of Indigenous social formations, as well as cast light on how and why some Indigenous social formations were able to adapt to Australian settler capitalism at various stages in its history and geography. Ultimately, it seeks therefore to shed further light on what was once poignantly described as ‘the great Australian Silence’ – the unacknowledged relation between two social groups within a single field of life (Stanner, 2009, p. 189) [emphasis added]. What I sketch here, and it is only an imperfect sketch given the inherent pitfalls when using Western epistemologies and frames (Attwood, 1994), is what Sansom (1988) called ‘Aboriginal commonality’: those features of social and cultural life held in common by all Indigenous social formations or nations. The Indigenous of Australia have occupied the continent for at least 65,000 years, arguably the oldest civilisation on earth. Their mode of production, or economic figuration in the language of neo-Lemkianism, could be described as hunter-gatherer. By this is meant a mode of subsistence characterised by ‘the absence of direct human control over the reproduction of exploited species, and little or no control over other aspects of population ecology such as the behavior and distribution of food resources’ (Panter-Brick, Laydon and Rowley-Conwy, 2001, p. 2). Whether the forces of production, the means of production combined with labour, can strictly be characterised as hunter-gatherer, is open to debate, with some arguing that, at least in some territories, the Indigenous economic figuration not only changed their environment through burning to ‘manage’ migration of herbivorous herds but also reached a technological peak in eel farming (Butlin, 1993, p. 56; Broome, 1995, p. 124). It has also been speculated that Indigenous societies were on the cusp of agriculture, gardening and the domestication of animals (Tindale, 1974, p. 94). Rhys Jones (1968) and palaeontologist Duncan Merrilees (1968) independently argued Indigenous societies of Australia had for millennia practised a form of ‘fire-stick farming’, which shaped the flora and fauna of ‘The Biggest Estate on Earth’. Heather Goodall (2008, p. 16) has gone as far as to say that no Indigenous society relied solely on ‘nature’, but rather used various techniques and strategies (productive forces) to increase the carrying capacity of their lands. In any case, what is pertinent for the study here is the fact that Indigenous material culture did not, unlike the capitalist system that would be violently imposed on the Australian continent, violate the regulative ecosystemic laws leading to a metabolic rupture, in the fashion described in the section on capitalist ecology in Chapter 1 (Peck, 2013, p. 230).

In fact, the Indigenous social formation’s superstructure, juridico-political and ideological relations, or what Keen (2003, p. 2) refers to as institutional fields such as religion, marriage, cosmology, kinship, governance structures and so on, alongside Indigenous production relations, was embedded in kinship relations which enabled the local clans to ecologically sustain themselves and mitigate the material vicissitudes of the hunter-gather mode, in innumerable ways. Remarking on pre-contact Indigenous social formations in the region of the state of Victoria, Broome (1995, p. 123) noted the significance of ecological responsibilities embedded in the religious world views and kinship systems of Indigenous people:

Each clan owned particular stories about the journeys and creations of the great ancestral beings. The natural world was shaped by, and still contained, the power of these great ancestors. People, land and ancestral beings were bound together in a oneness through a totemic relationship. Each person through their totem had power and responsibility to care for land and living things. [emphasis added]

In Indigenous philosophy, the beliefs in mythic beings who create and shape the natural world is usually referred to as ‘Dreamtime’ or ‘the Dreaming’, primordial forces or totemic ancestors who created the world and its landscapes (Dreaming) and left behind ancestral law that Indigenous societies must follow. This ancestral law, is in a manner of speaking, mapped onto the land, rivers, plants and animals, by ‘songlines’, which traces the trails taken by the sacred spirts of the Dreaming, who left behind marks on the landscape as they created it, imbuing it with spiritual significance, creating a ‘mythic geography’ (Servello, 2010, p. 673). This totemic and animistic philosophy imbued the natural landscapes with religious significance and invested features of the natural world with souls, ensuring that living in harmony with natural rhythms and natural metabolic cycles was a preeminent moral duty (Servello, 2010, p. 672). Sadly, this Indigenous figuration would be violently disfigured and absorbed into the Australian colonial political economy, preserving those aspects that were functional and amenable to its imperatives.

The various phases of genocide that would unfold shortly after the arrival of European, mainly British colonists, broadly speaking can be defined as firstly: Frontier violence, where open and direct physical confrontation and violence was the principle genocidal technique used to bring about the pacification of Indigenous people and suppression of Indigenous sovereignty as a means to securing access to land. The period of frontier violence depended on the region and colony, but it lasted right up until the end of the nineteenth century and even into the beginning of the twentieth in Australia’s Northern reaches: Northern Queensland, the Northern Territory and the Western Australian Kimberly region (Russell, 2005, p. 108). Secondly: Protection (welfare) regimes, wherein colonial authorities increasingly resort to institutional and bureaucratic measures, primarily though ‘protection boards’, to pacify Indigenous people and extinguish Indigenous sovereignty. This phase is defined by attempts to biologically or culturally ‘absorb’ Indigenous people into a homogenous settler-colonial culture, designed to breed out the ‘Aboriginal problem’ (Edmonds and Carey, 2017, p. 380) – at times segregation and concentration are the predominant techniques and at other times ‘integration’, but all serving the ultimate purpose of extinguishment. Finally, the recognition phase, broadly speaking from the late 1980s onwards, and perhaps best symbolised by the High Court ruling which ‘granted’ native title rights to Indigenous people, known as Mabo & Others v State of Queensland (now on in Mabo), will be the main focus of Chapter 3, the second chapter focused on Australia as a site of relations of genocide. In this period Indigenous civil and land rights and eventually self-determination are recognised and even legislated for, but in a manner conducive to the continued (re)production of the settler colonial political economy.

Each stage of the colonial project would need to be legitimated and supported by a system of colonial discourses, representations and racial categories which possess a constitutive logic and structuring power, designed to impoverish meaningful land rights and sovereignty and reduce Indigenous rights to that of occupancy and usufruct (Wolfe, 2006a, p. 391). These colonial discourses ranged from what Moses (2000, p. 9) described as an ‘optimistic Enlightenment anthropology’ to what I descibe as a ‘cynical enlightenment anthropology’. It was optimistic because the position of Indigenous people on the lowest rung of civilisational development was due not to race but environment, rooted in more ‘benign’ abolitionist and evangelical notions of protection, which considered Indigenous people at best itinerant ‘savages’ living in a state of nature, bereft of permanent social structures. This was an ‘optimism’ that still conceived of ‘civilising’ assimilationist initiatives to make Indigenous people adopt the large-scale sedentary farming and grazing of the white colonist. It was cynical once the colonial discourses embraced social Darwinist ideologies which categorised Indigenous people as ‘the lowest link in the connection of the races’ (Banner, 2005, p. 108), and ‘childlike’ and intellectually inferior, where inferiority was attributed to immutable racial characteristics. If the discourse didn’t outright condone extermination and ‘final solutions’ it simply accepted the inevitability of the eradication of Indigenous peoples as their population numbers collapsed due to disease, despair, starvation and other social and psychological dysfunctions caused by the various processes of dispossession and domicide (Moses, 2000, p. 96) – the ‘doomed race’ theory as it was known (Moses, 2000, pp. 95–7; Reynolds and May, 1995, p. 176). This was an increasingly influential theory among colonial administrative circles, which took hold in the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, along with biologically determinist notions of race (Stepan, 1982), peddled by notable explorers and colonial administrators like Sir Harry Johnston (1902) and perhaps best epitomised by the work and ‘humanitarian ethnography’ of Sir George Grey (1840, 1841; see also Lester, 2016). What this entire spectrum of thinking had in common, whether it was optimistic or cynical, was the assumption that their inferiority pushed systems of governance, or indeed Lockean property, beyond their reach (Strang, 1996). In particular, the British believed that the land was terra nullius, or a land without landowners or even civilised beings, and so the land was there for the taking (Lloyd, 2010, p. 26).

The rosy dawn of relations of genocide

However, it is important to understand that the manner in which the genocidal structuring dynamics today, just as they were during the ‘rosy dawn’ of Australian settler capitalism, are ever being conditioned, in the final analysis, by the imperatives of capital accumulation and the global chain of capitalist production and trade (Marx, 1976a, p. 915). In essence, the relations of genocide and settler–Indigenous relations from the outset, and as they passed though the various phases or regimes of genocidal structuring dynamics, were at each historical juncture conditioned by: firstly, the capitalist system and its attendant laws of motion and the corresponding chain of global capitalist production and trade, and the place within the global division of labour that Australian settler capitalist economy would assume; secondly, the balances of social forces between ‘the rapacious alliances in the settler states and capitalist landed, mining and financial classes in all the settler zones’ and the various Indigenous nations resisting their total annihilation and colonisation (Lloyd, 2010, p. 29). Put simply, the historical road to the architecture of dispossession now in present-day Australia and its corresponding genocidal structuring dynamics were conditioned dialectically by the nature and imperatives of Australian settler capitalism, embedded in a global political economy, and the resistance to it in the lead up to the watershed moment of the Mabo case, which would usher in the modern phase of relations of genocide.

I will briefly explicate the manner in which each phase of genocide was conditioned by the above dialectic. The capitalist system was implicated in the ecocide and genocide inflicted on the Australian continent and dispossession of the Indigenous population long before the British Empire first arrived on the Australian continent in 1788, with its first fleet of officers and convicts. The colonisation of NSW and Van Diemen’s Land was driven by the need to offload a surplus population of convicts, vagabonds, prostitutes and, generally, the immiserated and pauperised social layers filling British prisons; the deportation of this ‘surplus’ population acted as a social and political pressure valve (Lloyd, 2010, p. 24; McMichael, 1980, pp. 315–16). This penal settlement became all the more important with the loss of the American colonies in the 1770s. The initial impetus on the part of the British empire to establish a penal colony in Australia as a depository for criminals and then later political criminals, which ultimately set in train a historical process that would unleash ecocidal and genocidal forces, can be explained by the laws of motion of the capitalist system: in particular the general laws of capital accumulation (Crook and Short, 2019). Fundamentally, the drive to cheapen the factors of production and increase the productivity of labour (Marx, 1976a, p. 773) in the long run produces a surplus population or ‘reserve army of the unemployed’, who at various moments in the production cycle can no longer be profitably employed (Marx, 1976a, ch. 25). It would be these layers of society, ‘the lowest sediment … [that] dwells in the sphere of pauperism’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 797), which would commit crimes against the sanctity of property and fill the jailhouses of Great Britain and eventually the fleets sailing to Port Jackson (Sydney). In essence, the population dynamics unique to the capitalist system gave fateful impetus to the establishment of a penal colony on the other side of the globe.

Once the penal colonies had been established, of course, they would have to become self-sufficient, just as the Kenyan colony would have to be, as we will see in Chapter 4. In the beginning this proved difficult, and when it became clear that the settlers were there to stay and competing for game, land and water, low-intensity guerrilla warfare broke out between the Indigenous population and the colonists. It is at this point that we witness the beginning of the phase of frontier violence. By its close towards the end of the nineteenth century, according to one historian as many as 20,000 Indigenous of Australia were killed in a century of resisting the expanding frontier, 10,000 of those killed in Queensland alone (Murray, 1996, p. 19; Reynolds and May, 1996, p. 178). In the same period, Indigenous resistance to colonisation exacted a death toll of 3,000 Europeans and 3,000 more wounded (Reynolds, 1987, p. 133). The combined impact of land seizures, deprivation of food and water sources, exotic diseases and frontier massacres would have devasting effects on population numbers. By some accounts, pre-contact population size was as high as anywhere between 300,000 to 1,500,000 (Bourke, 1998; Butlin, 1993). By the end of the first century of colonial occupation that number had fallen to as little as 100,000 (Kiernan, 2007).

With the onset of the nineteenth century, two logics of imperialism dialectically interacting but distinct (Callinicos, 2009; Harvey, 2003b) would breathe new life into the ailing colony and simultaneously unleash a devasting wave of genocidal destruction on the continent. Firstly, the logic of geo-political competition, or what Harvey terms the territorialist logic of state, and, secondly, economic competition or the politics of production, exchange and accumulation. London was concerned to see off imperial rivals in the region, principally the French (Thorpe, 1992, p. 89). Moreover, the colonies in NSW served a strategic importance, in that they would stymie efforts by the French empire to set up a Pacific trading hub on the Australian continent. In fact, the acquisition of the Australian continent allowed the British to strengthen trading links with its most important colony, India, as well as the Far East and the Pacific, and resume large scale transportation of convicts (Thorpe, 1992). This is a geostrategic logic that, as we will see in Chapter 4, drives the initial colonisation of Kenya, as well.

The logic of capital would eventually get a foothold on the Australian continent with the take-off of industrialisation across north-western Europe (Lloyd, 2004, p. 4). This would drive an increase in trade on the international markets and a rapidly growing surplus population of convicts, a much-needed supply of labour for the burgeoning capitalist economy, and give the Australian colony a renewed significance and importance to the British Empire. The Australian colony, like many others, would become an important outlet for over-accumulated capital and, through geographical expansion, a means of orchestrating what Harvey (2003a, p. 139) called ‘spatio-temporal fixes’ to the capitalist system’s contradictions, and provide an ‘outside’ for British capital (Luxemburg, 1963) seeking higher returns on investment and overseas markets for its capital and consumer goods as well as cheaper inputs, in the form of primary agricultural goods and mineral and fossil resources.

It is in this political economic connection that we find the structural drivers of the frontier violence phase and the otherwise obscured logic of its pacifying role, for it was the thirst for land, wool and minerals that drove accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003b, 2005, pp. 137–82) and the ‘ “creative destruction” of pre-capitalist [Indigenous] ecological-political orders’ (Havemann, 2016, p. 186; Coulthard, 2014). In other words, it was the developmental priorities of the nascent colonial state that proved fatal to Indigenous life: a nascent colonial state rooted in the emergence of a form of Australian settler capitalism, land-extensive and capital intensive, hitched to the rise of the world market created by the European empires and European industrialisation; a world market that involved both flows of capital and labour and manufactured goods into Australia and flows of strategic raw materials out of Australia. This would include the discovery of minerals and base metals such as copper and later gold, tying the fortunes of the burgeoning colonial economy to the ‘industrialising effects of raw material exports’ and yet another form of capitalist extractivism (Lloyd, 2010, p. 27). The temperate climate and extensive grasslands of NSW and later Tasmania and Queensland lent itself to European-style agriculture, and crucially sheep and cattle grazing; wool becoming a crucial export, supplying the textile mills in the colonial metropole (Lloyd, 2010). The thirst for wool in the heart of the empire would drive a land grab throughout Australia from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth that would dispossess the Indigenous population and deprive them of access to their means of subsistence and their way of life more generally (Thorpe, 1992; Rowley, 1970). The ‘sheep and cattle were the shock troops of empire’ (Russell, 2005, p. 77). By the 1860s, 400 million hectares of land in the south-east had been occupied by 4,000 Europeans with 20 million sheep (Moses, 2000, p. 96). This wasn’t just genocidal but ecocidal.

In this connection is revealed the global interconnectivity of the structure of genocide with a larger chain of global capitalist production and trade. Wolfe (2006, p. 394) remarked that settler colonialism:

presupposed a global chain of command linking remote colonial frontiers to the metropolis. Behind it all lay the driving engine of international market forces, which linked Australian wool to Yorkshire mills and, complementarily, to cotton produced under different colonial conditions in India, Egypt, and the slave states of the Deep South.

The forging of the global chain was driven by the extensive expansion of the British Empire, with Australian settler colonisation representing the ‘development of a global process of “primitive accumulation”’ (McMichael, 1980, p. 309).² As argued in the previous chapter, this process embodied both the first stage of the political economy of genocide, namely the extra-economic processes of plunder, fraud or theft, from without the circuits of production and capital accumulation that alienate social groups from their lands through processes such as ‘enclosures’ or imposed private ownership, ultimately reconfiguring new global value chains (Harvey, 2003b, pp. 63–88), which leads to the second stage, what is known as the value-contradiction in radical political economy embedded within the various industrial (and financial) processes operating within the expanded reproduction of the circuits of capital, what Harvey (1981, p. 10) referred to as ‘capitalism’s inner dialectic’. These two stages correspond with Lemkin’s two-stage process of genocide, ‘the destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group: the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor’ (Lemkin, 1944, p. 79). The development trajectory of Australian settler capital and its agents, wool growers or the ‘squattocracy’,³ must be seen as part of a global process, anchored in Pax Britannica, in which, under the doctrine of imperial trusteeship, the Australian colonies were consolidated as regions structurally incorporated into a world imperial division of labour. In short, a mercantilist free-trade system ensured the British imperial economy a steady supply of wool and shaped the developmental trajectory of a settler economy hitched to the export of primary goods exports. And so ‘in the first fifty years the Australian colonies were built on the sheep’s back of the squattocracy’ (Davidson, 1987, p. 203).

The ecocidal nature of rapidly expanding pastoral frontier must not be overlooked. In fact, stock farming not only shifted or expanded frontiers rapidly but also annexed and exploited the resources that hunter-gatherer societies depended on for their survival, consuming water and grazing at a rate beyond the capacity of the ecosystems to regenerate themselves. Moreover, the influx of livestock wrought havoc on the itinerant flows of hunter-gatherer communities, who were, ecologically speaking, as well as from the vantage point of indigenous ontology, a part of the local ecosystems as much as any other form of life. Barta (2010, p. 303) observed that land ‘was something to which they in many profound ways belong, rather than something which belongs to them’. Their hunting, fishing and gathering activities were disrupted, with herds of game, a critical source of food, displaced and edible plants trampled on. This is what the anthropologist Birdsell (1970, p. 117) described as ‘ecological completion’, adding ‘[t]his is a classic ecological replacement situation in which protected animals and dispossessed men competed directly for a wide variety of food staples necessary for the existence of both. In Australia the animals always won’ (1970).

Of course, it was the animals not Indigenous to the land that won. Here, we can vividly see Lemkin’s second stage of genocide, the imposition of the cultural pattern on the occupied space, possessing an ecological dimension. The remorseless process of capital accumulation, in this context unleashed onto the fertile plains of Indigenous land through the conduit of the international markets, would drive the extraction of resources at a rate that the land would struggle to absorb, requiring more and more of a ‘throughput of materials and energy’, leading to a metabolic rift. The imposition of what Barta (1987, p. 239) called an ‘alien economic, social, and political order’ or what Alfred Crosby (2004) called ‘ecological imperialism’ on the Australian continent would have predictable ecocidal consequences. This was what I earlier defined as a mode of eco-genocidal destructive production. In fact, the ecocidal consequences of the pastoral system would have devasting impact on Indigenous life modes, a system which in its wake imported a variety of diseases, microbes, weeds, domesticated plants and animals, or what Crosby (2004, p. 89) described as ‘portmanteau biota’. This in turn, weakened the ability of the Indigenous figuration to fully reproduce itself on the now remade colonial ecologies, furthering the severance of Indigenous people from the land and simultaneously deepening the process of primary accumulation.

Though the balance sheet of genocide in Australia involved the destruction of the vast majority of the over 500 distinct Indigenous nations, after the violence of the frontier phase of colonisation (and the associated theft of land, massacres, ravages of disease and miscegenation) died down by the close of the nineteenth century, some nations or Indigenous groups, partially destroyed, nevertheless managed to maintain some connection to their land and their culture. This would be determined by their outward articulation with the colonial economy and the degree to which they could adapt to its imperatives. What is at issue here is the dialectical and contradictory relationship between the logic of capital accumulation and the logic of Indigenous elimination. To the extent that Australian settler capitalism could find use for its Indigenous population, their modes and ways of life would be spared, at least partially. What Schaller (2008a, 2008b) has previously called situation coloniale, which under some circumstances necessitated the retention of Indigenous labour even if as a group they continued to experience genocidal forces, is evidenced in some parts of remote Australia towards the latter half of the nineteenth century. Due to institutional and academic inertia, a recognition of what is referred to as ‘Aboriginal participation’ in Australian economy has taken time to filter through various disciplines, even Australian labour history taking relatively long to acknowledge Indigenous involvement in the settler economy (Irving, 1994).⁴ What is sometimes referred to as ‘hybridisation’, in which elements of both settler capitalist or market relations and the concomitant forces of production and technologies are fused with the largely nomadic Indigenous mode of production (Altman, 2005), was not the general rule. It was the product of varying degrees of coercion and was confined to those industries that were to some extent ‘compatible’ with those Indigenous communities who, as a necessary precondition, were already partially destroyed by colonisation and its associated techniques of land theft, violence and disease.

The industries that were compatible with the Indigenous mode of life were so because they relied on intermittent and seasonal labour which allowed Indigenous peoples to maintain a conditional though warped connection to their traditions and land. The preeminent example of this form of hybridisation from the mid-nineteenth century were pastoral and cattle stations, where the landholdings, particularly on the land extensive developments in the northern semi-arid zones, could be as large as a million hectares, thus allowing Indigenous workers to live on the land on the pastoral stations, in the forms of family camps. Indigenous people were able to materially subsist, at least in part, by, for instance, going ‘walkabout’ or wandering off the pastoral stations in the Northern Territory and Queensland to hunt bush meat and flora during the wet season (Lewis, 1997, p. 7; Anthony, 2004, p. 126; May, 1994, p. 87). This would permit the maintenance, on colonial terms, of connection to land and of spiritual and ceremonial rites and obligations (Castle and Hagan, 1998, p. 30). In other words, cultural survival (Curthoys, 2015, p. 220). The fact that they were not fully and completely severed from their relationship to the land and thus not fully integrated into the circuits of pastoral capital, their notions of work defying ‘capitalist penetration’ (May, 1994, p. 87), made Indigenous labour suitable to the seasonal nature of the work and increased further the surplus that could be extracted from their labour, since the capitalist agricultural industry didn’t have to concern itself with the costs of their reproduction (May, 1994, p. 88). Some industries required Indigenous labour, such as pearling in western Australia until the late 1880s, but did so in a form that separated Indigenous people from their country and social group (May, 1994, p. 219). Where Indigenous labour was not required, for instance in the south-eastern colonies like NSW which possessed incipient industrialising economies with a relatively high level of technological development of production relations, incarceration in missions and reserves far removed from their traditional land, or domicide, was the norm (Thalia, 2003, p. 279). However, as we will see, a small minority of Indigenous people would be ‘proletarianized’. Indigenous ‘bush skills’ were generally not required for the burgeoning industrial economy in regions like NSW, which instead turned to the much larger pool of white settler labour (Edwards, 1992, p. 190).

In a landmark essay, Bob Thorpe (1992, pp. 157–221) argued that Indigenous people were kept alive to the extent that they could be profitably employed as ‘colonised labour’, using this framework to analyse Indigenous participation not just in the nineteenth but also twentieth century, whether it was employment in the remote pastoral stations or employment, underemployment and mass unemployment in the most menial jobs in the late twentieth century. Anthony Thalia (2004) has argued that in fact the relation between the pastoralists and Indigenous people in the Northern Territory, and their otherwise competing land claims, are better understood as feudal relations of power and dependence. By not paying them, their mobility in the market was restricted, and instead they were forced to work on the stations and rely, at least in part, on food rations given to them by the station owners and the land they camped on. Thalia (2004, p. 119) rightly rejects the argument forwarded by Ray Evans (1984) that they were slaves, pointing out that their ability to maintain ‘moral communities’ meant they were far from the ‘natally alienated’ plantations in North America and the Caribbean.

These examples serve to underscore the relationship between the form and severity of genocidal techniques and the changing imperatives of the Australian settler colonial economy. For to the extent that Indigenous production relations and lifeways were compatible, they would be partially preserved. Once the terror and violence during the frontier violence phase had settled down, the squatter pastoralists slowly realised that Indigenous people had skills and knowledge of the terrain, hunting and tracking skills that could be harnessed in the cattle industries (Rowse, 1987, p. 84; Thalia, 2004, p. 123). In fact, Indigenous people would be hired as horse breakers, shepherds, stockmen, guides, diplomats and property managers (Reynolds, 1990, pp. 84–6; Russell, 2005, pp. 84–6; Goodall, pp. 66–88). These skills of course, derived from what was earlier described as their hunter-gather mode of production in precolonial times.

To the extent that this relationship prevailed, a system of internal colonialism existed where the Indigenous figuration continued to exist in an asymmetrical relation with the colonial pastoral industry. Pierre-Philipp Rey (cited in Foster-Carter, 1978, p. 218) argued that in what was earlier described as the ‘margins’ between the ever-expanding sphere of capitalist production, trade and investment and the ‘social vitality’ of the non-capitalist world, when capitalist imperial forces colonise a new territory, rather than immediately destroy any proceeding pre- or non-capitalist mode, instead it reinforces those modes precisely to ensure the continued provisioning of labour, goods or resources. Harvey (2003a, p. 146) argued similarly that on occasion primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession, the first key structure in the political economy of genocide, even when co-extensive with proletarianisation, involved some degree of preservation and co-opting of pre-existing cultural and social structures. Wolpe (1980, p. 248), ruminating on the dialectical interplay between two modes of production in a colonial context, observed in South Africa that ‘The capitalist sector benefits from the means of subsistence produced in the non-capitalist MP to the extent that it is relieved of paying a portion of the necessary means of subsistence by way of indirect wages’ [emphasis added].

This observation is apt for our purposes here and mirrors the relationship of Indigenous workers with their pastoral masters on the stations and bears a striking resemblance to the situation coloniale that will be explored in the Kenyan settler colonial space. Philipp Rey (cited in Foster-Carter, 1978b, p. 218) identified three stages in the articulation of the capitalist system with other modes. They were:

1.  An initial link in the sphere of exchange where interaction with capitalism reinforces the pre-capitalist mode.

2.  Capitalism ‘takes root’, subordinating the pre-capitalist mode but still making use of it.

3.  The total disappearance of the pre-capitalist mode.

These stages can be adapted to the present case study. The initial link here was of course the theft of land but also, at a later stage in some regions, the exchange of labour for payment in kind or wages and access to pastoral land for cultural and subsistence reasons. This would lead to the second stage where the Indigenous mode is subordinated, though not entirely destroyed. The third stage is of course arguably the most disturbing and chilling since it posits the complete disappearance of the Indigenous mode for some Indigenous groups at least, with perhaps the caveat that it may survive at the superstructural level, or their culture or cosmology, in the manner suggested by Moreton-Robinson (2009a, p. 11). It is a contradictory process where the articulation undermines and perpetuates the Indigenous figuration in distorted form. The question, when we turn later to the present juncture in Australia (and Kenya) is, do we still find evidence of the second stage, or has this articulation already begun moving towards the third, the total disappearance of the pre-capitalist mode?

This experience is better captured by a theory of a dialectical articulation between two modes of production, under conditions of internal colonialism, in what Laclau (1977, p. 33) called an economic system and what I refer to as a social formation: really existing, historically determined societies in their totality, often made up of many coexisting economies. Rarely, in the history of capitalism, if at all, has the capitalist system existed in pure unadulterated form. Afterall, capitalism itself arose out of the womb of feudalism within the boundaries of the nation-state. Marx (2002) observed such a scenario with multiple coexisting modes of production in nineteenth century France, in his historical treatise The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, where capitalist, feudal, patriarchal and petty commodity production existed side by side. In all such concrete social totalities, the ultimate character of the social formation is determined by the dominant or hegemonic mode, the ‘general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity’ (Marx, 1973, pp. 106–7) and gives it its laws of motion or operation. The concept of internal colonialism serves to remind us of two things about this articulation. Firstly, that this articulation was performed under conditions of asymmetric, colonial power relations. Secondly, that this articulation served to develop the settler colonial society at the expense of the Indigenous social formation. This formulation is arguably superior to what was earlier described as hybridisation, since the latter serves to obscure the asymmetric colonial power dynamic. Moreover, the articulation between modes of production framework allows us to identify the laws of motion of each respective mode of production and the social relations that dominate this relationship.

Hartwig (1978, p. 129) argues that the articulation of two modes does not revolve around the extraction of surplus labour alone, but may include:

1.  The extraction of commodities in different ways.

2.  The extraction, not of the product, but of labour-power. In both these instances the associated political policy is likely to turn on the domination and conservation of the non-capitalist societies.

3.  In other instances the particular mode of economic exploitation may be accompanied by a policy aimed at or having the effect of destroying the non-capitalist societies, such that the producers are ‘freed’ of the means of production. [emphasis added]

In light of my research, the ‘extraction of commodities’, includes raw materials such as fossil fuels or subsurface minerals, and even in some cases factors of production such as land itself, and does under specific historical circumstances entail the partial preservation or ‘domination and conservation of the non-capitalist societies’ as we will see when we examine present day Australia. In essence, those circumstances hinge on a number of factors, but most crucially Indigenous resistance, which shifted the terrain of settler-Indigenous relations onto the field of recognition politics.

With the subsumption of labour to capital, a key moment in the institutionalisation of the capitalist system and the penetration of the labour process by the social relations of production, in its growth out of the womb of feudalism and, I would argue, as it metastasises around the world, it does so ‘on the basis of the technical conditions within which labour has been carried on up to that point in history’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 425) [emphasis added]. The subsumption of labour consists of two stages. First is formal subsumption, where capital subsumes labour on the basis of the technical conditions in which it historically finds it, where labour carries on much as it had done prior to subsumption, or for our purposes, prior to colonisation. This is then followed by real subsumption, where the labour process and social relations are fully transformed through the application of science and technology. The former is based on the extraction of absolute surplus value, the latter, through the application of machinery and technology, relative surplus value. Although Marx spoke of formal and real subsumption in connection with wage labour only, it is, I would argue, applicable to all production relations in which capital extracts, directly or indirectly, surplus value from labour on the basis of ‘the technical conditions in which it finds it’. This may include the semi-feudal relations found on the pastoral stations in Australia, or those we will see on white settler farms in the White Highlands in Kenya in Chapter 4, where again African peasants would negotiate access to settler land in exchange for working on their fields. In a similar fashion, Hardt and Negri broaden the scope of formal and real subsumption to embrace all forms of pre-capitalist production relations, with clear implications for colonial scenarios where two economic systems are forcibly conjoined in the manner argued above. They argue ‘the richness of the category of formal subsumption is indeed that it reveals the economic and cultural differences of labor, land, society, and community that have been subsumed within capitalist production but maintain their connection to the territory and the past’ (Hardt and Negri, 2017, p. 182) [emphasis added].

The important ontological point is that to the extent capital in its forcible articulation with the Indigenous mode can utilise Indigenous labour (or in certain specific concrete historical junctures as we will see when we discuss present day Australia, Indigenous land and resources), and extract surplus value given the technical conditions in which it historically finds it, that social figuration will be preserved at least partially in a deformed state. Thus, for the vast majority of Indigenous people who were not employed in the pearling or pastoral industries for instance, they would be murdered or corralled and concentrated on the reserves and missions, trapped, as we will see below, in a Lefebvrian ‘grid’. Those whose ‘foreign processes of production’ (Hardt and Negri, 1994, p. 15) could not be adapted to the needs of capital would be deemed biopolitically unfit and subject to the most extreme genocidal techniques. This will be underscored by the Kenyan settler colonial experience in Chapters 4 and 5.

The ‘closure of the frontier’ and the beginning of what I term the Protection (welfare) regimes phase of relations of genocide, would see the colonies turn to bureaucratic and legislative measures to control and regulate the lives of Indigenous people (Edmonds and Carey, 2017, p. 378). The purpose was to ‘protect’ Indigenous people by either segregating them or assimilating them into the white settler population. The foundation of these bureaucratic regimes would be the protection boards and protection acts, passed over a period of forty years at various stages across the six colonies. By the turn of the twentieth century, all the six colonies would have protection regimes in place. Although they differed in detail, in essence they severely restricted the freedoms of Indigenous people, controlling everything from where they could live and work, whom they could marry and even who was and wasn’t officially ‘Aboriginal’ (Evans et al., 2003, p. 138). Some protection systems, such as the Queensland model laid down in the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897, placed a greater emphasis on segregation, forcing Indigenous people to live on reserves or missions. By the 1930s, legislation would emphasise instead cultural ‘assimilation’ and ‘biological absorption’, fuelled by a fear of a rising demographic ‘timebomb’ of mixed race or ‘half-caste’ and ‘octoroon’ Indigenous people that might one day become the demographic majority and presumably upend their colonial supremacy, a fear which weighed heavily on the minds of the white settler population (Chesterman and Douglas, 2004). A national policy emerged across the various state and Territory administrations to deal with the ‘problem’ of ‘half castes’ which sought to forcibly integrate them and ‘make the “Aboriginal problem” and Indigenous people disappear’ (Edmonds and Carey, 2017, p. 379). In light of the aforementioned ‘cynical enlightenment anthropology’, only those who were not entirely of Indigenous descent had any hope of becoming ‘civilised’. Tragically, these bureaucratic regimes and the policy of forced assimilation would lay the foundation for the ‘Stolen Generations’ (Tatz, 1999, p. 333), the many thousands of Indigenous children, in particular those deemed ‘half-caste’, removed from their families to be raised and ‘educated’ on church led missions, reserves or compounds.

Eventually, policies that sought to control the fertility and offspring of Indigenous women, as well as stipulations regarding who Indigenous people could marry, would become increasingly the focus of the various protection regimes. With the passing of the federation of the six Australian colonies into the newly born Australian nation, this system of protection regimes would endure, with its logic of miscegenation as a technique to eliminate the Indigenous problem by forcibly incorporating ‘half-caste’ children into the body of white settler society. What one historian described as a ‘surveillance and control network’ would persist until the 1970s (Kidd, 2007, p. 13). Fundamentally, the control regimes constituted an example of what Lemkin understood as biological destruction”. However, the import and intended effect of the control regimes was not limited to biological destruction.

Indeed, the role it played in the reproduction of the settler colonial economy was a just as crucial, if poorly understood, function of the protection regimes. For instance, in Queensland, the ad hoc Indigenous labour arrangement on the cattle stations was formalised under the auspices of the protection regime. An amendment to the protection legislation was passed in 1904, giving powers to protectors to regulate Indigenous labour by requiring a formal contract in which part of the wage would be paid into a trust account. This administrative system determined how Indigenous people could spend their wages as well as who they could work for, thus functioning as a means of enforcing cultural assimilation (Castle and Hagan, 1997, p. 66). However, it would also diminish labour costs and thus facilitated the reproduction of the pastoral system. Alongside the economic and cultural ‘adaptability’ of Indigenous labour to the needs of the pastoral economy and its ability to reproduce itself, at least partially outside the circuits of pastoral capital, the racialised exploitation of Indigenous labour through the ‘protection regimes’ played a crucial role in the viability and reproduction of the pastoral system. In fact, these regimes were designed not just as a solution to deal with the ‘demographic problem’, either as system of racial apartheid or biological absorption, but as a prop to the pastoral industry.

First and foremost, by concentrating and incarcerating the Indigenous population ‘the land outside the reserves could productively be utilised by pastoralists, miners, settlers and agriculturalists’ (Jackson, 2018, p. 82) and resistance more easily managed (Edmonds and Carey, 2017, p. 378; Maddison, 2017, p. 428). In this sense they were yet another technology of planning – a form of ‘social spatialisation’, what Fields and Fields (2012, p. 18) call racecraft or what I call ‘racial spatialisation’, central to the reproduction and expansion of capitalism (Lefebvre, 1974). These are technologies or spatial practises such as segregation and concentration of a racialised population enabled through mapping, cadastral planning, surveying and ultimately issuing of Crown land under various forms of licences and leases. The control regimes and their associated spatial practices perform two vital functions for the settler colonial regime. Firstly, they were key to erasing the cultural maps of Indigenous societies, reconstituting land as a blank map bereft of settlement and ‘ripe for the taking’. Secondly the defining, controlling and regulating of spaces with prescribed relations that governed who could and couldn’t utilise the land and the forms of social life that could flourish within them (Jackson, pp. 72–3). These processes, termed ‘internal territorialization’ by Vandergeest and Peluso (1995, p. 387), were necessary for both the consolidation of the colonial state formation and, in the final analysis, the rebranding of geographical space with the hot iron of exchange value, essential to facilitate the expansion of the capitalist system, throughout the history of the colony, to the present day. As Blomley (2003, p. 127) sharply observed, ‘maps and cadastral surveys are generally treated as the handmaiden of property’. In the final analysis, the protection regimes and their systems of concentrating Indigenous people on reserves were a crucial part of racial spatialisation and ensured Indigenous struggle for sovereignty and land were ‘contained and defined in their spatiality and trapped in its “grid”’ [emphasis added].

But the utility of the protection regimes did not end there. They were a disciplinary technology, a form of biopolitics that would acculturate Indigenous people to the new work ethic and work patterns of a capitalist economy and society (May, 1994, p. 75). Among the many control measures were included stipulations regarding Indigenous property, work and payment of wages, which implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, condoned non-payment. Often the wages were diverted into state-managed accounts held in trust for Indigenous workers, though often these wages would be misappropriated and never returned to Indigenous workers (Kidd, 2007, p. 8). This system of fraud and embezzlement, would eventually be replicated right across Australia (Kidd, 2007).

Ultimately, having already driven the push to find a dumping ground for a swelling convict population, a mode of eco-genocidal destructive production would eventually manage to gain a foothold on the Australian continent, which once consolidated, would unleash a structural logic of its own: a logic of elimination, driven by a logic of accumulation. The combined necessities of ‘exiling politically and socially dangerous convicts from all parts of the Empire and of finding raw materials formed the dynamic of Australia’s development’ (Lloyd, 2004, p. 4). But the logic of elimination, driven by a logic of accumulation, is just one side of the dialectic of the settler–Indigenous relation. One important legacy of the structural logic would be to forge a new historical actor, in the form of the ‘Indigenous proletariat’ that would have huge consequences for the political economy of genocide in Australia and usher in the recognition phase. The road to the reconciliation period, which we are still living through, where the state formally began a process of seeking redress for the crimes of settler colonialism, was paved with Indigenous resistance; a resistance qualitatively influenced by the emergence of this new historical actor.

Indigenous peoples for itself

It is beyond the scope of this book to offer a detailed account of the history and evolution of Indigenous struggle. However, a brief sketch of this topic and its most salient features will help us appreciate the role it played in shifting the terrain of relations of genocide onto the terrain of reconciliation and the emergence of a new Indigenous historical actor. As we saw earlier, resistance began almost immediately, and attempts at redress, cynical or not, began very early in the life of the settler colony. What would eventually become articulated as ‘land rights’ in the modern vernacular of human rights were from the very beginning opposed by those who gained most from the dispossession of Indigenous people. They were, broadly speaking, the pastoral industry, landed interest and settler colonists (and through trade, moneyed interests and industrialists in the metropole) and, as shown below, mining interest or the mineocracy (Foley and Anderson, 2006, p. 83). Resistance during the frontier violence stage of the colonisation of Australia was low-intensity armed struggle or guerrilla warfare. Occasionally it consisted of large, pitched confrontations, but usually it consisted of small low level ‘stealthy revenge expeditions’ that killed shepherds, speared sheep and cattle and ransacked settlers’ property (Goodall, 2008, p. 78). With the eventual closing of the frontier and the shift to more bureaucratic means of control, resistance did not simply cease. Despite the draconian and totalitarian measures imposed on the reservations and missions on Indigenous life, many still continued to resist. In fact, the reservations and missions were often the locus for the transmission of culture and sites of resistance (McLisky, 2007). Those who would escape the clutches of the protection regimes would do so for a variety of complex reasons, with circumstances differing from state to state and region to region.

With the nature of ‘control’ shifting between segregation and cultural assimilation or biological absorption across region and time, conditioned by the vagaries of local and global economic and political events, various ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors would compel the migration of some Indigenous people to the towns and cities. The self-explanatory desire to escape the draconian conditions of the protection regimes could be compounded by exogenous factors, such as increasing pressures on land and increasing social and cultural hostility from nearby white settler communities. Just such a confluence of factors would prove fateful for resistance to relations of genocide and the birth of the Indigenous land rights movement.

In short, the combined ‘push’ of the desire to escape the draconian protection regimes and by the beginning of the twentieth century, lawfully mandated protection board dispersal policies that sought to break up Indigenous communities surviving under colonial terms in the reservations and cattle stations, where they previously practiced their culture, traditions and rituals, and maintained links with their ancestral lands and the wider kingship network, abetted by mutable definitions of indigeneity (McCorquodale, 1987), and the ‘pull’ of demand for labour during and after the First World War, led to the exodus of ‘lighter caste’ Indigenous people from reserves (Read, 1994, p. 55). For instance, in NSW, according to Goodall (1995, p. 76) ‘[t]he Board believed it was necessary to push adult Aborigines into the white working class as isolated labourers and aimed to make them live independently of government and separate from any other Aborigines’ [emphasis added]. This was primarily motivated by fears of a fast-growing population of ‘full-blood’ Indigenous people that would irrevocably ‘pollute’ the Anglo-Australian culture and of course, shift the balance of power (Goodall, 1995, p. 76).

This sort of forcible assimilation would for some lead to their migration to the bigger cities looking for employment where they would join the ranks of an industrial workforce. It would be their forcible integration into the body of the Australian working class, in a manner not too dissimilar from the enclosures in England that played a very significant role in both the development of Indigenous political consciousness and the consequent form the resistance would take throughout the twentieth century. This would pave the road to the period of recognition of land rights, native title and the period of ‘reconciliation’. It was with the rise of modern civil rights and equal citizenship campaigns, and with it the demand for land, in the 1920s and 1930s, stretching into the 1960s, that we saw the birth of the modern Indigenous land rights movement (Foley and Anderson, 2006). This new Indigenous movement would leave behind the tactics of guerrilla war and adopt what Russel (2005, p. 130) described as ‘European political technologies’. Critically, this new modality of struggle involved building alliances with sections of the white settler community. These collaborative struggles were in part a function of the creation of what historian of Australian labour history and Indigenous history Padraic Gibson (author interview, 10/02/2017) calls the ‘Aboriginal proletariat’ in the urban sectors in the towns and big cities.⁵ This development was crucial in the transmission of these ‘European political technologies’ back to the rural areas and building links with sections of the white community and ultimately the rise of a pan-Indigenous consciousness and identity central to the Indigenous land rights movement.

The vast majority of Indigenous people, even in the more industrially developed regions of Australia such as the South East, lived and (until very recently) still do live in remote rural areas. A significant number became agricultural workers with important implications for later forms of Indigenous struggle. In fact, in the period of the birth of the modern civil rights movement in the early twentieth century, the majority of Indigenous labour was deployed in the pastoral and agricultural industries or on the missions and stations (Rowley, 1971b, pp. 217–348). However, despite its numerical size, it was the conditions of class formation in the cities, and of course the impetus given to industry by the capitalist economic mode that led to the rise of an urban Indigenous proletariat and thus the basis for new forms of political struggle. To coin a phrase, the settler colonial bourgeoisie produced their own Indigenous gravediggers. Indeed, Heather Goodall (2008) and John Maynard (2007) have shed light on the pivotal role Indigenous activists forged in the crucible of industrial capitalism in the towns and cities played, especially Melbourne and Sydney. In fact, Indigenous proletarians – two NSW Indigenous wharf labourers, Fred Maynard and Tom Lacey, in particular – were key to founding the first Indigenous political organisation of the twentieth century, the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA), formed in the 1920s (Foley and Anderson, 2006). The 1930s saw the emergence of the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA) in NSW and Australian Aborigines League (AAL) in Victoria. Again, Indigenous wage workers were key (Horner, 1994, pp. 38–41). Bill Ferguson, who was a founder of the APA, was heavily involved in union activism, being a member of the Australian Workers Union (AWU), and in organising unemployed Indigenous and white workers in the Depression hit 1930s (Goodall, 1996, p. 19). The dialectical relationship of influence moved in both directions. For instance, the role of these organisations in fostering a pro-Indigenous sentiment within parts of the union movement and the broader workers’ movement was important (Horne, 1994, pp. 105–16).

This is not to ignore the immediate drivers of the formations of these organisations: the above-mentioned policies of forcible disbursement and assimilation and the consequent sharp reduction in Indigenous reserve land and the nature of the draconian protection boards. In fact, the consequences of these policies were threefold. Firstly, the emergence of a minority of Indigenous proletarians who were forcibly dispersed by (or willingly escaped from) the regimes of control as part of the authorities’ population transfer policies into ‘the white working class’ (Goodall, 1995, p. 76) and mainstream society more generally, in an attempt to destroy Indigenous alterity. Secondly, by this process was brought about the creation of historical subjects, ‘black émigré’ communities in cities and towns across the country that would retain organic connections with their communities and their ontological relationship to land and who could not only leverage their new found structural power by virtue of their proletarian relation to capital but transmit back to the rural communities forms of political organisation developed in the cities (Russell, 2005, p. 132). For instance, Fred Maynard, the founder of AAPA, whilst he worked on the docks in Sydney, maintained his connection to his community. It was the issues of land theft, child removal and the tyrannical nature of the boards in the rural areas that motivated him to form the AAPA (Maynard, 2007, p. 17). But it was the lessons he learned as a dock worker involved in radical trade unionism with the Waterside Worker’s Union that taught him how to agitate and organise (Russell, 2005, p. 132). Thirdly, and crucially, it was their lived experience in the cities as workers, workers who were connected to the rest of the world through an international chain of capitalist production and trade that exposed them to international networks involved in anti-colonial struggles and the radical and revolutionary traditions of the global labour movement that allowed them to garner a generalised awareness of the plight of Indigenous people right across the country (Goodall and Cadzow, 2009, pp. 142–50).

These new organisations, which gradually built regional networks that fostered organisational and ideological connections between Indigenous communities, undoubtedly played an important role in fostering a sense of pan-Indigenous identity, an Indigenous peoples for itself, symbolised most potently by the Day of Mourning protest in 1939, a protest which reflected an awareness of the common struggle to resist colonisation and invasion (Russell, 2005, p. 135). This pan-Indigenous nationalism would be further bolstered in the post-Second World War period by a growing resistance from Indigenous proletarians in the rural and pastoral industries, most notably the Pilbara strike of 1946 and the Wave Hill Strike of 1966. In the former, Indigenous stock workers in Western Australia took strike action which impacted 6500 square miles of pastoral land and was supported by dozens of trade unions and trade and labour councils. One trade union, the Australian branch of the Seaman’s union, banned the transport of wool from affected areas (Foley and Anderson, 2006, p. 86). Their action would inspire the later Wave Hill strike. In 1966, 200 Gurindji stockmen in the Northern Territory walked off the station, due to the decision to delay the granting of equal pay under the federal industrial awards in 1965 (Chesterman and Galligan, 1998, p. 194; Goodall, 1995, p. 383) and the refusal of international meat-packing company Vestey Brother to pay out wages. The Gurindji would eventually set up an independent camp in Wattie Creek twenty kilometres away, closer to the community’s sacred sites. This was a symbolic act that represented the wider aims of the action beyond mere industrial equality and a bold demand for the return of ancestral land. The dispute would run for seven years until the coming to power of the Labour Whitlam government, a radical administration by the measure of Australian politics, determined to establish Indigenous land rights. The Gurindji dispute played a significant role in hastening the passing of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 (ALRA), a cornerstone of the modern legal land rights regime, as did a series of (failed) legal challenges to commercial development in Indigenous land in the post Second World War era, including most notably what became known as the Gove case, in which Indigenous Yolngu people in the Gove region took the Commonwealth and the mining corporation Nabalco to the Supreme Court, seeking an injunction to prevent the opening of a mine on their lands. Sadly, Mr Justice Blackburn ruled that the plaintiffs had no case since there was no basis for native title in Australian law.

This was also the period of a global anti-colonial movement and an international post-war regime traumatised by the horrors of the Second World War, in large part rooted in ‘the almost metaphysical obligation to rule subordinate, inferior, less-advanced peoples’ (Said, 1994, p. 10). The response from the West was a faltering belief in their ‘metaphysical obligation’ and a growing awareness, driven by the wave of anti-colonial struggle around the world, that universal principles would need to form the basis of a new world order, one which cast notions of racial hierarchy and civilisational superiority, if not into the dustbin of history, at least in a light that was more palatable. A new global political space was emerging, grounded in emerging global information technologies and the rise of new international political fora like the UN, couched in the ideological and legal rhetoric of human rights. Naked exercise of imperial power was no longer tenable and an accommodation to a growing decolonisation movement could not be avoided.

The new international order was and still is flawed, however. Not least due to which is the maintenance of a global political economy that all but reproduced relations of imperial and (neo)colonial domination, a global political economy that we will examine more closely when we consider the fate of modern Kenya in Chapter 5, and an international legal and political architecture that lacked teeth (Alston, 1998; Carraro, 2019, p. 1081), and did little to bring substantive and concrete change to those who were once described as the ‘Fourth World’, Indigenous peoples. Despite the commitment from the UN to decolonisation and self-determination, the latter being a core principle enshrined in the UN Charter motivated by the desire from most of its member states to create obstacles to the exercise of imperial or colonial power, this commitment would have limits. In what become known as the ‘blue water’ thesis, the new decolonisation regime would be restricted to overseas territories formerly ruled by European states and stop short of applying to Indigenous peoples subject to continuing forms of internal colonisation, for fear it would encourage secessionist movements (Iorns, 1992, p. 212). It could only apply to aggregate populations of independent states and not any of its ‘substate’ groups (Anaya, 2004, p. 77).

Nevertheless, arguably without the changes the new regime wrought, and the international pressure exerted on Australia, later legal and political reforms such as the Mabo case discussed below could not have been possible (Russell, 2005, p. 135). But this new international environment did not just consist of a new international legal and political architecture founded by sovereign states, but of course was buffeted by the winds of the anti-colonial movement which, as earlier, continued to transmit its ideological radicalising influences. The new wave of Indigenous activists of the 1960s and 1970s were increasingly influenced by the black power movement, just as their counterparts in the 1920s had been, this time by the likes of Malcolm X and the US Black Panther Party (Foley and Anderson, 2006, p. 88). Again, just as it was in the 1920s and 1930s, the loudest voices calling for the return of ancestral lands to Indigenous people were the thousands of Indigenous activists based in the major cities like Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, who by virtue of their location and class position were situated at the crossroads of radical class politics, the radicalising influences of the black power and anti-colonial movement of overseas, whilst maintaining connections with their communities in the rural areas. Some of these rural areas now began to organise a ‘homelands movement’ in central Australia, leaving reservations and missions and returning to set up camps on their ancestral land (Foley and Anderson, 2006, p. 91).

Rattled by this groundswell of resistance on multiple fronts, the prime minister at the time in a forced error made a statement on Indigenous land rights that would have consequences for decades to come. Prime Minister McMahon chose the occasion of 26 January 1972, ‘Invasion Day’, to issue a statement repudiating the very idea of Indigenous rights to land. Almost immediately, Indigenous activists assisted by the CPA embarked on the journey to the capital to set up the ‘Aboriginal Tent Embassy’ (Short, 2003, p. 33). What the Tent Embassy demonstrated in bold and poignant relief was, despite regional differences, the maturing of an idea; the intersubjective notion of a united pan-Indigenous movement (Bennett, 1991, pp. 13–14). This movement would increasingly focus on the necessity to claim land and assert self-determination.

Given the lack of a history of treaty making with its Indigenous population, unlike the histories of Indigenous settler relations in Canada, North America and New Zealand, the notion of treaties between Indigenous nations and the settler colonial state began to acquire increasing importance within the Indigenous political movement (Short, 2008, p. 33). With the commencement of a campaign for a treaty between Indigenous peoples and the state adopted by the National Aboriginal Conference in 1979, a forum established by the federal government in 1977 for the expression of Indigenous views, and shortly after the Aboriginal Treaty Committee (ATC), a think tank made up of white academics whose establishment credentials and social capital gave the campaign a degree of respectability it had hitherto not had (Short, 2008), then Prime Minister Bob Hawke was presented with the Barunga Statement (AIATSIS, n.d.) by representatives from the Central and Northern Land Councils, statutory bodies established by the aforementioned ALRA.

The statement called for the granting of the full range of civil, political, religious, economic and social and cultural rights, the same rights pronounced with such fine lofty words on the treaties and declarations that were promulgated in the UN human rights system in the post-war era. But more than this it demanded compensation for lost lands, access to sacred sites, the right to be educated in their own language, culture and history and the respect for Indigenous identity, and the rights to manage their own affairs, but above all it demanded a system of Indigenous land rights. What followed was the bowdlerising of these demands and their watering down, as they filtered through the corridors and chambers of Australia’s political system, until gone was the language of land and justice and in its place the language of education and reconciliation, epitomised by the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Act of 1991 (CARA). That created the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (CAR), formed to lead the reconciliation process. This act established a ten-year reconciliation process, which would redirect the lobbying efforts and political energy of the Indigenous treaty movement towards what Short (2008, p. 1) described as ‘a more equivocal open ended “reconciliation” initiative’. According to the Hawke government at the time, the Australian people would not accept a treaty till they were first educated. The era of recognition and reconciliation was born.

In this new phase of relations of genocide, the modus operandi of colonial power takes on a new form, recasting settler–colonial Indigenous relations and effecting accumulation by dispossession through forms of discursive and administrative genocide made possible by the colonial-settler state (Alfred, 2009; Povinelli, 2007). Now relations of genocide operate primarily through forms of colonial governmentality, or what Coulthard (2014, p. 3) described as ‘asymmetrical exchange of mediated forms of state recognition and accommodation’. In other words, state recognition and accommodation are used to reproduce settler colonial relations, not attenuate them (Reinhardt, 2016, p. 54). Nevertheless, despite the ‘cunning of recognition’ (Povinelli, 2007), it was the dialectic of resistance that forced the settler colonial state onto the plain of recognition politics, shifting the relations of genocide into this new phase. This new phase in the relations of genocide will be epitomised by the passing of the Native Title Act of 1993 (NTA), legislation that ostensibly offered land rights to all Indigenous people across Australia on a federal level, but in practice did so in a manner that only deepened colonial relations of genocide.

The rise of the mineocracy

The forcible integration of the Australian colony into the global economy would bequeath a legacy that is crucial to illuminate if we are to understand the present juncture in the history of Australian relations of genocide. Firstly, an Australian political economy which although not subject to underdevelopment and relations of dependency that other former colonies of the European empires in the Global South still suffer from, including Kenya, nevertheless through its integration into the British-led global imperialist chain of capitalist production and trade (Scammell, 1968, p. 126), would become an export-orientated extractivist state significantly dependent on the overseas sale of primary goods; in particular, as we will see, the extraction of fossil fuels. What I call the ‘mineocracy’, the hegemonic mining fraction of the Australian ruling class, will play a crucial role in shaping modern relations of genocide. Secondly, due to the above examined Indigenous struggle dovetailing with a global decolonisation movement and the rise of a global human rights regime (Arfat, 2013), as well as the rise of the mineocracy, a period of ostensible reconciliation with Indigenous communities and recognition of their rights would take place in a form that would denude and disembowel those rights (Samson, 2020), in large part due to the mineocracy. It is crucially, the convergence of a resurgent mineocracy shaped by global political economic dynamics with the shifting terrain of settler Indigenous struggle brought about by Indigenous resistance that will determine the present historical juncture and the nature of relations of genocide in today’s Australia. Having discussed the role of Indigenous resistance in the previous section, we will now turn to the second of these dialectically interwoven legacies.

The reorganisation of capitalism known under the ‘rubric of neoliberalism’ (Harman, 2007) was an essential background enabling factor for the continued dominance or resurgence of the mining lobby or fraction of capital in Australia, the mineocracy. One which reorganised capital, on a global and national scale, and its conditions of expanded reproduction, to attempt to restore profitability to a system that had suffered systemic crises from the mid-1970s onwards. Chief among them was the long-term decline in the rate of profit, beginning as early as the late 1960s (Choonara, 2013), combined with rising oil prices, reaching a dramatic peak with the ‘OPEC’ oil shock of 1973–4. These structural and proximate causes would combine to give rise in the US, UK and, to a lesser extent, other OECD countries to ‘stagflation’; neoliberalism, in policy and governance circles, was the response (Harman, 2007).

As a form of reorganisation of capital, or in effect class warfare, it involved two dimensions. Firstly, a regime of orientation/war of manoeuvre which involved a frontal assault on the labour movement and dismantling of embedded social democratic institutions (Davidson, 2010, 2013). To that I would add frontal assaults on all communities who, as Wolfe put it dryly (2006, p. 388), are simply ‘in the way’, most pertinently for this book, Indigenous people. Secondly, a regime of consolidation/war of position, which involved a molecular process of gradual commodification of new areas of social life and the construction of neoliberal institutions (Davidson, 2010, 2013; Bargh, 2007) [emphasis added]. This commodification process will, as we will see below, implicate Indigenous territory and when we turn to focus on Kenya in Chapter 5, previously ‘unconquered’ spheres of nature in new forms of neoliberal environmentalism.

Finally, these two logics of neoliberalism manifest as government policies in response to the aforementioned structural crisis. They include, inter alia, privatisation of state industries, commodification of services (for example water or energy), or even pollination or carbon molecules (Chapter 5); financial deregulation; flexible labour markets; removal of protective tariffs and subsidies and exchange controls (domestically and internationally, in the latter case leading to globalisation); monetary policy; regressive taxation and even policies that could be described as forms of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003a, p. 145). Indeed, as Gordon (2006, p. 18) argues, neoliberalism involves ‘the intensification of … accumulation by dispossession’ for Indigenous peoples. In essence, the reworking of state–market–civil society-relations to facilitate expanded reproduction, extended accumulation and the extension of the commodity form to hitherto untapped spheres of nature–society relations (Heynen et al., 2007, p. 10), necessarily involves another round of ‘enclosures’ of Indigenous land (and occasionally labour) at what was previously called the ‘margins’ of the capitalist world (Anderson, 2016a). These processes of enclosure, understood as the termination of complex assemblages of communal rights, under neoliberalism are, as we have seen in Australia and will see in Kenya, merely extensions of historical processes that stretch back many hundreds of years justified by and which gave shape to John Locke’s moral defence of private property (Heynen et al., 2007, p. 10). Increased penetration of land, and in some cases commodification of Indigenous labour, are key to the success of the neoliberal project (Gordon, 2006).

What Sassen (2013) has described as the ‘disassembling of national territory’, to make it more amenable to global corporate interests and thus facilitate land grabs for extractivist purposes, involved transforming nation-state ownership over land and resources, undermining national sovereignty and driving new struggles over land. Territoriality is still settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element, only this time, rather than foreign colonial powers violently seizing land through military occupation, it is achieved through global economic regimes of trade, investment, privatisation and financialisation, which oblige states both in the Global South and the Global North to implement neoliberal reforms in a race to the bottom. The role of what Harvey (2003a, pp. 127–30) calls ‘mediating institutions’ like the IMF or World Bank, through the manipulation of credit and debt management, is crucial to understanding how the prescriptions of neoliberalism can be imposed globally. As Sassen (2013, p. 27) avers, ‘formal sovereignty can easily coexist with coloniality’.

The intended effect of this reorganisation of capital and the associated policies was of course to restore levels of profitability to the preceding post-war boom that lasted from the end of the Second World War to the late 1960s (Campbell, 2005). The success of these manoeuvres and policies have been contested and arguably have been mixed (Brenner, 2006; Davidson, 2013). Nevertheless, a necessary outcome of this political process was the reorganisation of global economic governance along neoliberal lines. Critically, where Australia is concerned, this is enabled by an unholy alliance between global corporate interests and resources or ‘extractivist states’, restructured by foreign capital for the purpose of territorialisation of Indigenous land for extractive purposes (Bebbington et al., 2008; Howlett et al., 2011; Lyons, 2018).

What concerns us here is the impact this has had on capitalist extractive development and the co-extensive land grabs in Australia in the twenty-first century. Australia has always been dependant on mineral development; not long after initial colonisation, it assumed its role in the international division of labour as a political economy based not just on colonial pastoralism but, particularly towards the latter half of the nineteenth century, also the extraction of minerals and fossil fuels (Crook and Short, 2019; Howlett and Lawrence, 2019, p. 822). Indeed, the roots of the extractivist state, in its ‘developer’ role (Davis et al., 1993) and its pact with the mineocracy, which has endured to this day, were laid in the early nineteenth century (Howitt, 2001). Through processes of neoliberal globalisation, what Howlett et al. (2011, p. 317) described as the ‘largest expansion of mining and energy’ in its history took place, worth AUD $190 billion per annuum or 15 per cent of the economy (Cleary, 2011, p. 5), the proximate cause, made possible by globalising forces, which Clearly (2012, loc. 187)⁶ calls a resources ‘super-cycle’ – the influx of investment tied to the industrialisation of China and India. In recent years, the commodity prices boomed, which saw prices become treble what they were in 2004 (Clearly, 2012, loc. 205), and fuelled the resource rush in Australia. These have now started to show signs of waning, explained in part by a global energy transition to renewables spurred by international agreements through the UNFCC (Lyons, 2018, p. 1). Nevertheless, it seems rising global demand for energy, combined with the slow-paced nature of that energy transition on the supply side (in part due to perfunctory efforts on the part of governments in international agreements), means higher energy prices are here to stay for the foreseeable future (Sen, 2021).

This has catalysed and deepened the process of state-corporate-led land grabbing and extractivism. In Australia, regulation of the extractive industries is not handled by independent statutory bodies but overseen by state government departments who directly report to ministers. In turn, these governments, given their dependency on royalties from energy extraction, have a financial interest to approve proposed developments and feed their ‘growing addiction to mining revenue’ (Cleary, 2012, loc. 270, 880), particularly if one considers Australia’s unique fiscal arrangement where the Commonwealth will receive the lion’s share of tax revenue, leaving states dependent on royalty payments from various forms of mineral extraction (Howlett and Lawrence, 2019, p. 823). In fact, its regulatory regime is so streamlined and optimised for the enticement of foreign direct investment in its energy sector that the Behre-Dolbear Group (2014), one of the oldest mineral industry advisory firms in the world, ranks Australia as only second to Canada in terms of leading investment destinations, due to the minimal ‘political risk’ (2014, p. 1) posed by its regulatory and legal regime. No doubt its ‘auspicious’ Indigenous land rights regime, forged in the crucible of the neoliberal restructuring of Australia, goes someway to minimising this ‘political risk’. According to United Nations’ criteria, Australia’s commodity exports are so dominated by mineral and energy resources that Australia is classified as a mineral-dependent economy (Altman, 2013, p. 132). As Cleary (2012, loc. 45) observes with a palpable sense of alarm ‘[i]n less than a decade, the frenzied pace of Australian resource development has tipped the balance of coexistence to the point where mining dominates our society, our economy and even our political system’.

In the current world division of labour, Australian settler capitalism is positioned within it as a major exporter of mineral and fossil fuels. According to many, the mineral export trade is in the ‘national interest’ (Cleary, 2011, p. 5). Arguably, this global economic connection as a mineral-dependant exporter, historically and especially in the current period, emboldened the Australian settler-state as a colonial institution and delayed its demise on the ash heap of history, giving it a new lease of life and obstructing meaningful decolonisation, begun in the late 1960s as discussed above; the fabrication of a national crisis in the wake of Mabo and the institutionalisation of Indigenous land rights under the Native Title Act of 1993 (NTA) testify to this structuring dynamic.

Beware of genocidaires bearing gifts: the phase of recognition

Understood dialectically, history is characterised by both continuities and sharp breaks with the past. Settler–Indigenous relations, or relations of genocide, are no less subject to historical change: architectures of dispossession have a history (Crook and Short, 2019). Since the dawn of the land rights era in the 1970s, inaugurated with the passing of the ALRA, and arguably brought about by Indigenous struggle as argued above, the mineocracy, insolubly woven into the global chain of capitalist investment, production and trade, has persistently and effectively reconfigured the state to diminish the substance and leverage of those rights in any negotiations with Indigenous nations (Altman, 2012); the social construction of a ‘national crisis’ mounted to enfeeble the NTA (discussed in detail below) would not be the first such campaign in Australian history (Altman, 2012, p. 54). The ALRA was the first of several important land titles to emerge in the land rights era. Passed by the Liberal-Country Party Fraser government, but given important impetus by the previous radical Labour Whitlam administration in the wake of mounting pressure from a resurgent Indigenous land rights movement and an increasingly militant Indigenous proletarian movement in the rural and urban areas examined above, the ALRA was stripped down to make it more acceptable to the mineocracy.

That is not to say that in its own terms it did not mark a significant advance of Indigenous land rights. Firstly, it created a new category of inalienable land title known as ‘Aboriginal freehold’. This land would be held by land trusts on behalf of Indigenous landowners and managed by statutory bodies known as Land Councils (Altman, 2013, p. 122). Moreover, these Land Councils, funded by mining royalties, are statutorily empowered to advocate on behalf of the relevant Indigenous community in negotiations with commercial interests and claim land. The councils using the royalties to provide Indigenous communities with a degree of financial independence from the government is an interesting innovation (Altman, 2012, p. 54). Critically, ALRA would enable the legal and political architecture, and more specifically a degree of self-determination and self-governance that supported what would become known as the ‘outstation movement’, where Indigenous people in large numbers left their former reserves and missions to reclaim ancestral land (Austin-Broos, 2009, pp. 185–93).

However, although the ARLA (limited to the Northern Territory) does, at least ostensibly, ensure that Indigenous landowners have FPIC on any commercial building on the land, and, moreover, the right to refuse or veto, as well as receive compensation in the form of royalties, the statute stops short of conferring subsurface mineral rights. Justice Woodward, who had provided legal counsel for the Yolgnu people in the Gove case, was commissioned by the government, in what became known as The Woodward Land Rights Commission (Woodward, 1974), to establish a legal architecture for the realisation of Indigenous land rights. It was this legal architecture that became the basis for the ALRA. He advised against the inclusion of mineral rights to placate the mining lobby. Moreover, the right of veto is confined to the ‘exploratory stage’ with no second veto during the ‘mining stage’ (ALRA, 1976, Part IV), a restriction again due to industry lobbying (Rumler, 2011, p. 8) and limited where the ‘national interest’ case exception applies (ALRA, 1976, Section 40(b), Section 43). The exact meaning of national interest is left nebulous and opaque, open to interpretation in a manner conducive to vested interest. In the event that agreement is not concluded within the allotted time it can go to arbitration where again, no veto right applies (ALRA, 1976, Section 46(7)).

This legal architecture therefore structures an asymmetrical field of negotiation which institutionalises unequal bargaining power, a form of what Comaroff (2001, p. 306) described as ‘lawfare’, ‘the effort to conquer and control Indigenous peoples by the coercive use of legal means’, or what I call ‘colonial lawfare’. It played a seminal role in giving shape to the current political economic and discursive landscape of settler colonial Indigenous relations and the struggles that followed. Indeed, the current historical juncture in the relations of genocide in Australia are better understood as what Coulthard (2014) calls in the Canadian context the ‘recognition paradigm’, or what Singh (2014, p. 49) describes as ‘recognition from above’. Coulthard (2014, p. 3) argues:

The now expansive range of recognition-based models of liberal pluralism that seek to ‘reconcile’ Indigenous assertions of nationhood with settler-state sovereignty via the accommodation of Indigenous identity claims in some form of renewed legal and political relationship with the Canadian state. Although these models tend to vary in both theory and practice, most call for the delegation of land, capital, and political power from the state to Indigenous communities through a combination of land claim settlements, economic development initiatives, and self-government agreements, where colonial relations of power are no longer reproduced primarily through overtly coercive means, but rather through the asymmetrical exchange of mediated forms of state recognition and accommodation. [emphasis added]

Once again, the precise form and modality of genocide would be shaped by the imperatives of the settler colonial capitalism. But it is important to note that the terrain upon which settler colonial–Indigenous struggle is fought is the political terrain of reconciliation and recognition. The formative influence of the ARLA gave significant shape to this terrain.

In the Australian reconciliation process, we see precisely the continuation of accumulation by dispossession through this beguiling modality of ‘recognition’ politics and the granting of ‘rights’ to land and procedural rights which merely act to enable the continued dispossession and colonisation of Indigenous peoples and the expanded reproduction of Australian mining capital. In this current post-Cold War historical juncture characterised by the salience of the human rights regime and human rights discourse in international diplomacy (Arfat, 2013), such a reconfiguration of settler state–Indigenous relations and the political economy of genocide became a necessary ideological cloak to secure the expanded reproduction of Australian mining capital, a fraction of the Australian ruling class key to understanding settler colonial–Indigenous relations in the current juncture. Recall Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred’s (1999, p. 58) warning that the legislation of rights for Indigenous people is a legal and discursive weapon of the settler colonial state as it plays a central role in shaping and defining them.

To secure the interests of any particular fraction of the ruling class, and by extension political power and the active consent of those ruled (a necessary prerequisite in Western-type societies with a developed civil society) – the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci argued this would happen, not solely through the exercise of brute strength and coercive fore of armed bodies of the state such as the police or army, but by the exercising of influence through the private institutions of civil society, which would play an educative function and through which the active consent to the hegemonic order could be secured. This extension of the class state into the realm of civil society Gramsci called the ‘integral’ or ‘extended’ state (Liguori, 2016, pp. 1–25). This entailed two processes. Firstly, some concession to the interests of other social groups would be necessary. This would call for at least some sacrifice of the ‘corporate’ interests of mining capital: conceding procedural and consultation rights to affected Indigenous groups under the NTA. Secondly, the elaboration of a sophisticated ideological discourse that could unite disparate class fractions and other social groups: The construction of the ‘recognition’ and ‘reconciliation’ paradigm. The reconciliation process is an exemplary exercise in securing the hegemony of mining interests.

Freeman’s (2002, p. 85) dictum regarding the institutionalisation of human rights is pertinent here. As he argued, human and other rights are the products of balances of power (Freeman, 2002, p. 85), such that during the process of institutionalisation, they are so, in a manner which eviscerates and emasculates them and makes them less able to challenge the structures of power they originally arose to address. We should not be surprised since, as Samson (2020) has so ably demonstrated, the antecedents of latter-day human rights discourse (and I would argue their associated forms of biopolitics and governmentality) are rooted in a constellation of intellectual traditions, namely the Western Enlightenment tradition, nineteenth century liberalism and the American and French revolutionary traditions, all of which were moulded to, and fundamentally shaped by, the prevailing imperatives and exigencies of European colonialism and slavery. As we saw in the encounter of Enlightenment thought with Indigenous people in Australia and will see in the following chapters devoted to Kenya, these roots, given nourishment by notions of ‘cultural hierarchy’ (Samson, 2020, p. 21), would bear poisoned fruits of racialised exception, elision and exclusion to the much-vaunted universalism of human rights.

Reflecting on this tradition, the great postcolonial thinker Aimé Césaire (1972, p. 3) put it more succinctly, perhaps better than anyone, when he inveighed against what he called ‘pseudo-humanism’, describing it as ‘narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist’. By the same token, the discursive manoeuvres woven into the fabric of human rights talk operating through racialised disciplinary knowledges and the ‘outwardly raceless legal prose’ (Samson, 2020, p. 12) make what Aileen Moreton-Robinson (1999) calls ‘whiteness’ invisible, as well as the epistemic, social and political privileges that it confers. This is so, above all, because the Lockean individualist construction of rights rooted in notions of alienable private property (which made possible the colonisation of Indigenous land and domicide in the first place), in their colonial form, presuppose the legitimacy of settler colonial sovereignty, which elides the long history of structural violence that continues to (re)produce the vast inequities on every conceivable social indicator (Samson and Short, 2006, p. 173; ABS, 2018a, 2018b). It is what Samson (2020) describes as the ‘colonialism of human rights’, infused with ‘forms of knowledge affiliated with domination’ (Said, 1994, p. 9) that enables the reproduction and maintenance of colonial relations of power. It is this process of institutional bowdlerisation and pseudo-humanism with all its exceptions and elisions that will characterise the period of recognition that as a phase has yet to come to a close.

This process of emasculation of human or Indigenous rights is aptly demonstrated by what is known as the Mabo case Australia, a pivotal turning point in the history of relations of genocide in Australia.⁷ In 1992, the High Court handed a judgment that acknowledged the rights of Indigenous peoples to native title on land that had not already been forcibly annexed via colonisation. The devil is always in the detail, however. Despite ostensibly appearing to be a great concession on the part of the colonial state, native title could only be asserted if and when the concerned Indigenous groups could prove ongoing ‘traditional connection’ through Indigenous laws and customs and still occupy the land in question, meaning, of course, those who had already been dispossessed no longer had any claim (Short, 2016, p. 131). Short (2007, p. 859) invokes Freeman’s warning when evaluating the nature of the native title regime in Australia and its requirement that Indigenous people pass a series of colonial tests. Wolfe (1999, ch. 6) described this as ‘repressive authenticity’: proof that your nation or clan have maintained occupancy and traditional governance structures since original colonisation in 1788, or that you still practise a culture considered ‘traditional’ and authentic. This was despite the preceding history examined above of mass killing and population collapse wrought by frontier violence, followed by the involuntary population transfers under the ‘protection regimes’ designed to separate Indigenous peoples from the rest of the population, and ‘smooth the pillow’ for a ‘dying race’. Altman (2012, pp. 52–3) aptly describes this repressive authenticity as a discursive logic that either traps Indigenous people in a pre-contact fiction of essentialised ‘traditionality’ ‘as if untouched by colonial history’, or conversely a ‘modernity’ which disqualifies their claims to land, and so ultimately denies the intercultural reality of many Indigenous people. This form of thinking, correctly labelled ‘repressive authenticity’, will raise its ugly head once more in the later chapters examining the plight of Indigenous people in Kenya in the modern period.

To add insult to injury, even those who qualified under all the onerous and highly selective preconditions would not have the right of veto over development on their land, the latter due to laws introduced by the Howard government, the NTA, under the pretext of ‘agrarian reforms’ – once more, a colonial discourse of development that facilitated domicide, forcing them into an unenviable ‘colonial dilemma’. This was a choice between refusing to be party to the ecological destruction of their land but risk having the land expropriated by the relevant state authority any way, if it was deemed in the ‘national interest’, and thus not benefit from any potential royalties (Short, 2007, 2010a),⁸ or embark on the ‘Right to Negotiate’ provisions laid out in the NTA and enter into an Indigenous land use agreement (ILUA) for the proposed development known as a ‘future act’. In recent years the federal government has required that resource developers fund the negotiations themselves, including the payment of travel, accommodation and sitting fees and paying for meetings (Burnside, 2008, p. 57). For the resource developer to fund the negotiations constitutes a conflict of interest and undermines the impartiality of the future act process and fundamentally alters the power dynamic (O’Faircheallaigh, 2006, p. 5). If after six months no agreement is secured between the concerned Indigenous party or ‘registered native title claimant’ and the resource developer, it goes to arbitration, a process or colonial dilemma that generally favours mining interests (Corbett and O’Faircheallaigh, 2006; Ritter, 2009), and often drives a wedge into Indigenous communities and fosters intercommunal conflict (Bebbington et al., 2008). Predictably, in the wake of the 1992 Mabo decision in the Australian High Court and the subsequent NTA passed one year later, native title across large swathes of land was extinguished either by ‘valid grants of interests’ by the Crown (O’Faircheallaigh, 2011), or to validate existing commercial titles that may have fallen foul of the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) 1975, which gave legislative effect to the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) (Short, 2007, pp. 862–3).

In the Wik Peoples v The State of Queensland, brought to the High Court in 1996 by the Wik peoples, an Indigenous nation from western Cape York Peninsula in northern Queensland, the Court recognised that pastoral leases did not extinguish native title and did allow dual occupancy by both pastoral lease holders and Indigenous peoples. The decision, in fact, balanced the rights of the pastoralists and the rights of Indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, the alleged threat led to yet another socially constructed existential threat to health of the nation. Subsequently, the then Howard government introduced new legislation in the form of the ‘Wik 10 Point Plan’, which the deputy prime minister at the time claimed had ‘bucketfuls of extinguishment’ (cited in Short, 2008, p. 79), further extinguishing native title on vast swathes of pastoral land and narrowing the scope of native title rights in innumerable ways.⁹ Short (2016, pp. 130–31; see also Samson and Short, 2005, p. 11) argues that these reforms were introduced due to the exertion of influence by powerful commercial interests and in particular the extractive industries, who employed ‘a campaign of misinformation’ grounded on fear and spurious arguments about the greater good of development. Critically, this process of institutionalisation of native title was achieved through the construction of native title as a national crisis that jeopardised the wellbeing and future prospects of the Australian nation, largely orchestrated by the Mining lobby and aided and abetted by the national press and executive and legislative branches of the Australian government (Short, 2007). The purpose of the confected national crisis was clear. Short (2016, p. 131) explains:

The 1993 Native Title Act’s primary purpose was the validation of existing commercial titles and the provision of guarantees that future land negotiations would be conducted within the parameters set by existing colonial power inequalities – thus ensuring that the native title regime would offer Indigenous peoples no protection from settler colonial expansionist pressures powered by the engine of global capitalism.

It must be stressed that not all Indigenous groups resist forms of capitalist development on their land, and not all are necessarily coerced, in the strictest sense of the word. Some freely engage with the market or straddle both market and kinship relations in a form of hybridity (Altman et al., 2009). Lemkin was keen to stress the difference between cultural genocide and ‘cultural diffusion’ (Docker, 2008, p. 96). The former might be described as forced assimilation, which for him still equalled a technique of genocide. The latter involves a gradual, relatively spontaneous or voluntary process of cultural exchange and slow adaptation to new events and outside situations where the weaker culture adopts cultural practises that are considered more efficient or advanced (Docker, 2008, p. 11). Determining which it is can only be done empirically. Nevertheless, the denial of veto power amounted to a repudiation of effective Indigenous sovereignty and de facto extinguishment of native title, a right considered foundational under FPIC provisions of UNDRIP (UNGA, 2017). As Justice Woodward (1974) remarked, ‘to deny Aborigines the right to prevent mining on their land is to deny the reality of their land rights’. Moreover, as we will see in the case studies below, very often those within Indigenous communities who choose to engage with the NTA, ILUAs and so on, and in effect adopt the market ‘as the path to development’ (Altman, 2013, p. 132), do so under conditions inherited from the past. Due to a history of dispossession, population transfer, dispersal campaigns, cultural assimilation, mass murder and ultimately forcible articulation with the settler colonial economy, Indigenous communities are already far progressed on the path to its ‘freeing’ from the means of production (Hartwig, 1978, p. 129). Inversely, its precolonial mode and lifeways are increasingly less capable of supporting them (if at all), such that they are through the ‘dull compulsion of economic relations’ (Marx, 1976a, p. 899) compelled to choose employment in the ‘real economy’.

Perhaps even more troubling is what Burnside (2008, p. 57) argues is the accompanying broader discourse of ‘crisis’, in which mining companies play a role in ‘alleviating’ the social and economic marginalisation and disadvantage of Indigenous people, which is recast as pathologies, dysfunctions and a ‘culture of poverty’ (Burnside, 2008, p. 55). In a clear manifestation of neoliberal biopolitics (Foucault et al., 2014), the developmentalist discourse or rationality, as it has done in the past, reconstructs the Indigenous as a subject requiring, as the former Howard government desired, intervention on the part of resource developers. These mining companies are empowered with an ‘industry mandate’ to ‘implement a certain vision of the good Indigenous society’ where Indigenous people ‘participate in the “real economy”’ (Burnside, 2008, p. 57). The vision: to transform kin-based societies into market-based ones (Altman, 2007, p. 308). In essence, the hegemony of the mining fraction of capital in Australia and neoliberal global forces embodied in the form of transnational corporations configure a political economy that coerces Indigenous people to embrace globalisation and the market relations (Altman, 2013, p. 132), and thus, in terms of their development, ‘close the gap’ between themselves and the rest of Australian society. In other words, Indigenous people who seek to maintain their cultural and spiritual connection to their ancestral land in Australia are forced to negotiate with extractive and other development interests, aided and abetted by the various lands rights legislation like the ALRA or NTA and the corresponding statutory bodies set up under such legislation, like the Aboriginal Land Councils erected under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (1983).¹⁰ These have a statutory duty to prudently manage and invest what are called Statutory Investment Funds, various Indigenous assets and mining royalties from various development projects, increasingly in an entrepreneurial vein.¹¹ Consequently, they face the prospect of being transformed into entrepreneurs and rent seekers acquiring a share of royalties from development projects on their land and assimilated into the system of Western, Lockean property regimes and generalised commodity production for the market. In the words of former Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs Jenny Macklin, ‘native title is a right which must be used as a tool to bring about positive change for social, cultural, economic purposes … it must be part of our armoury to close the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians’ (cited in Altman, 2009b, p. 2). This process functions as a means of ‘neoliberal assimilation’ or interpellation (Althusser, 1994, p. 129), what Rose (2004, p. 276) described as the ‘internalising role of property’, where resource companies prepare Indigenous people for greater participation in what Australian policy makers call the ‘real economy’ and ween them off the ‘poison’ of welfare payments (Pearson, 1999, p. 32).

This political decision to tie the fortunes of Indigenous communities to mining royalties and Statutory Investment Funds and ultimately capital accumulation, is redolent of a form of neoliberal governmentality with neoliberal characteristics (Foucault et al., 2014), of the kind discussed in Chapter 1. This time Indigenous populations will be ‘improved’, through arenas like public health or economic productivity, requiring new bodies of ‘expert’ knowledge. In this case, the rationality of government is a neoliberal one which understands the path to improvement is tied to the market and the commodity form. The disciplinary institutions, which function as technologies of government ensuring conformity to new ‘neoliberal’ norms, include not just the broader state government and its various ministries and departments supervising the various resource development projects, but also the institutions and agencies created by the native title and land rights legislation such as the ILUAs and Land Councils.

A similar process can be detected when examining the broader neoliberal reforms to the provision of Indigenous welfare and administration of Indigenous affairs. Where once during the height of the era of the land rights movement in the 1970s federal policy had been predicated on notions of self-determination and the provision and allocation of funding of services accordingly devolved to Indigenous controlled bodies, the revisionist Howard government sort to shift the logic and nature of welfare provision to one that would no longer encourage ‘separatism’ but instead ‘mainstream’ service delivery (Howlett et al., 2011, p. 11). That is to say, no longer would Indigenous services and infrastructure be predicated on the recognition of Indigenous alterity. A major step in that direction was taken by the Howard government when in 2004 it abolished the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) and the public works scheme known as the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP) which involved welfare payment in return for labour, the former being the only body that represented Indigenous people on a pan-national level and one expressly designed to give Indigenous people a representative voice in the self determination of Indigenous policy (Walter, 2007, p. 158). The intention, therefore, was to end the policy determination to foster self- determination of Indigenous people as a people. Now in the age of neoliberalism, for people in general and Indigenous people specifically, individual self-reliance is the only viable and moral course for development (Martin, 2011, p. 209), and unemployment attributable to individual failure. Therefore, welfare provision must be restructured to force those Indigenous people languishing in a state of welfare dependency into self-reliance (Neale, 2013, p. 180). Indigenous welfare recipients who are not deemed to fit the neoliberal ideal of the rational moral life of independence and self-reliance (Martin, 2011, p. 209) are cast as deviants (Moreton-Robinson, 2009b, p. 70).

This reframing of Indigenous people as lazy or work-shy for not imbibing a European work ethic under neoliberal discourse, is of course consistent with early colonial discourse (Moreton-Robinson, 2007, p. 91). This is the rationality of government, the reconstituting of Indigenous people as pathological individuals within the neoliberal framework. The governmental technology and its disciplining institution in this context is what is known as ‘income management’, where state imposed restrictions on welfare payments discipline Indigenous people to conform to imposed norms of behaviour, what Altman (2013, p. 92) calls ‘neoliberal assimilation’. Ultimately, Indigenous communities who participate in the ALRA and NTA process and through the biopolitics of income management and neoliberal welfare are subject to pressures to internalise the corresponding discourses or norms of behaviour (Foucault, 1998, p. 140) that rationalise globalisation and the market as the path to development (Altman, 2013, p. 132; 2009, p. 41).

The reconciliation period that began with the ‘reconciliation’ initiative and the creation of CAR under Hawke’s government in 1991, as a response to the growing demands for a treaty, quickly followed by a succession of Court decisions and laws that failed to provide restitutive justice or acknowledgement of past wrongs as other reconciliation projects had typically done, and rendered land rights effectively meaningless and impotent, presents us with a clear example of administrative genocide. In other settler colonial societies such as Canada, if treaties and other forms of arrangements and agreements were negotiated and signed, they were not worth the paper they were written on as they were often signed under duress, under false pretences, within positions of unequal bargaining power and asymmetrical knowledge and with settler appointed Indigenous ‘leaders’ who held no such rightful claim. Under conditions of asymmetrical exchanges of mediated forms of state recognition and accommodation under the socio-legal regime of the NTA, the very same conditions pertain. What Short (2008, p. 3) describes as a prima facie paradox, namely, a state-sponsored process of recognition and reconciliation with the ostensible aspiration to address Indigenous disadvantage, the theft of lands and the suppression of Indigenous sovereignty, nevertheless undercut by government actions and legislation which effectively precluded such aspirations, can be made intelligible once the political, legal and economic – in short, structural – impediments or relations of genocide that lie buried beneath the surface are excavated.

Notes

1. 1. For more on this topic see Crook (2021).

2. 2. Bukharin (1929, p. 29) makes this distinction between extensive and intensive expansion of the world economy.

3. 3. Those that simply took land without formal Crown authorisation.

4. 4. Two pathbreaking studies in Australian historiography which help unearth the history of Indigenous participation in the settler economy are Rowley (1972a) and Henry Reynolds (1990).

5. 5. I am deeply grateful to Dr Padraic Gibson, historian of Australian labour history and Indigenous History, Sydney based anti-racist activist and trade unionist and Senior Researcher at the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, University Technology Sydney, whose thoughtful comments and insights on this topic were immeasurably helpful.

6. 6. I use the format ‘loc.’ for citations when citing mobi formatted books.

7. 7. Mabo and Others v Queensland (No 2), 1992.

8. 8. Under the later amendments to the NTA, section 39(1)(c) states that if no agreement between Indigenous community and the resource developer is reached, the resource developer has the right to move to arbitration through the Native National Title Tribunal (NNTT), which must take into account ‘the economic or other significance of the act to Australia, the State or Territory concerned’.

9. 9. Native Title Amendment Act 1998 (Cth) [Australia]. No. 97, of 1998.

10. 10. Aboriginal Land Rights Act (1983) [Australia]. No. 42 of 1983.

11. 11. Take for instance the New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council (NSWALC, 2011), which in a rather typical annual report explained their investment philosophy:

The funds to provide compensation for future generations. Prudent financial management is essential to maintain growth. A less risk-averse strategy could increase returns but could clearly increase the risk of losses … changes to the legislation in 1990 allowed LALCs [Local Aboriginal Land Councils] to sell or mortgage their land under certain conditions, Land Councils are developing a more entrepreneurial approach to their land assets. [emphasis added]