Food and governance on the frontiers of colonial Australia and Canada’s North West Territories

Abstract

In recent decades historians have been turning from a national towards a transnational framework to examine the patterns and processes of colonial governance. This paper aims to contribute to those debates by examining the roles and outcomes of ration distribution as an institutionalised tool of Aboriginal governance on the nineteenth century settler frontiers of colonial Australia and north-west Canada. In so doing it is not our aim to rehearse established scholarship on the history of rations policy in specific times and localities,2 but to consider the degree to which the evolution of rationing policies reflects shared administrative goals and dilemmas in Aboriginal governance across different colonial contexts. To date, there has been little attention to the role of rationing policy across Australia's colonies, let alone in comparison with other jurisdictions of British settlement. In some key respects, Australia from the 1840s and western Canada from the 1870s represent two ends of a spectrum in shared colonial policy across British settler colonies. On the one hand, they shared a set of similarities in the issues and problems their governments faced with the rapid expansion of settlement after the mid-nineteenth century, of securing Aboriginal people's amenability to British rule, and of approaching the management of Aboriginal populations through a mixture of conciliatory and coercive measures. On the other hand, administrative approaches to Aboriginal peoples in these two jurisdictions evolved in light of some crucial differences.