Between 1869 and the 1960s every Australian colony and state enacted protection legislation placing Aboriginal people under the authority of a Protector or Board with power to order where they lived, whom they married, what work they did and how their wages were held. People were moved onto missions and government settlements — Coranderrk, Cherbourg, Palm Island, Moore River, Yarrabah among many — where passes were needed to leave, families were separated, languages were suppressed and earnings were controlled by the state, the basis of the later 'stolen wages' claims settled in Queensland and New South Wales in the 2000s and 2010s. Palm Island in Queensland served explicitly as a place of banishment for those deemed disruptive. The legislation also supplied the legal machinery for child removal, which the atlas covers separately as the Stolen Generations for 1945-1970; the confinement regime itself ran for a century and reached a far larger population. Protection statutes were repealed between the 1960s and 1970s, following the 1967 referendum.
Australian colonial and state governments confined Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to missions and reserves under protection legislation, controlling their movement, employment, marriage and wages
Official counts of the Aboriginal population around federation are unreliable because Aboriginal people were excluded from the census and remote populations were estimated rather than enumerated; the figures generally used are of the order of 90,000-100,000 for 1901, against modern estimates of 750,000 or more before 1788 and a counted population of 115,953 at the 1971 census, the first after the 1967 referendum. The protection acts, from Victoria's in 1869 to Queensland's 1897 Act and its successors, at their height controlled residence, employment, wages, marriage and the custody of children for most of that population.
There was no mass killing under the protection regime, which followed the frontier violence the atlas covers separately. Mortality on settlements was high from tuberculosis, influenza and poor conditions, and is documented in settlement records and later inquiries, but was never aggregated nationally.
State archives of the protection boards, and the Bringing Them Home inquiry of 1997, document removal orders, controlled wages, restrictions on movement and the separation of children under the protection statutes.
Australia