The 1869 Aborigines Protection Act: Vernacular ethnography and the governance of Aboriginal subjects

Abstract

In 1864, Theo Sumner, Vice-President of the Victorian Central Board for the Protection of Aborigines (CBPA) noted with some frustration that members of the Board worked ‘under severe disadvantages at present [and] many of their schemes are thwarted’.¹ According to his annual report, the instantiation of the Board at the request of the Governor after an 1858 Select Committee represented a chance to ‘attend to the wants of the blacks’ who were clearly struggling for survival in the wake of the violent transformations of settler colonial dispossession and its continuing effects.² However, Sumner argued the CBPA occupied an untenably ambiguous