Abstract
PRELUDE | a beginning by way of introduction to something else epic in search for an impossible origin of the event, a preview-awakening to the positioning of things, a warning:
Women may have been the boundary markers of empire. But it was the gendered and racialized intimacies of the everyday that women, men, and children were turned into subjects of particular kinds, as domination was routinized and rerouted in intimacies that the state sought to know but could never completely master or work out.
(Stoler 2006a: 57)
In 2018, the South Australian government’s Aboriginal Lands Parliamentary Standing Committee identified Indigenous stolen wages as a matter requiring further investigation.1 It acknowledged that, while significant progress had been made in other states following the Australian Senate’s 2006 National Stolen Wages Inquiry, this was “not yet explored in South Australia” (Secretary to the Aboriginal Lands Parliamentary Standing Committee, pers. comm. 24 June 2019). In June 2019, the Committee called for witnesses to present information regarding the extent and impacts of stolen wages practices affecting Aboriginal people in South Australia and I was invited to present an overview of my current research on South Australian Aboriginal domestic service history. This included some context to the burgeoning Aboriginal domestic service workforce in the early twentieth century, such as: the assimilation-based rationale for interdependent
policies of child removal, institutionalisation and training; the labour conditions
Aboriginal women were subject to; and the question of payment and the state’s management of
trust fund accounts. This evidence exemplifies those intimate boundary markers of empire, to
which Stoler (2006a) refers above.
Women may have been the boundary markers of empire. But it was the gendered and racialized intimacies of the everyday that women, men, and children were turned into subjects of particular kinds, as domination was routinized and rerouted in intimacies that the state sought to know but could never completely master or work out.
(Stoler 2006a: 57)
In 2018, the South Australian government’s Aboriginal Lands Parliamentary Standing Committee identified Indigenous stolen wages as a matter requiring further investigation.1 It acknowledged that, while significant progress had been made in other states following the Australian Senate’s 2006 National Stolen Wages Inquiry, this was “not yet explored in South Australia” (Secretary to the Aboriginal Lands Parliamentary Standing Committee, pers. comm. 24 June 2019). In June 2019, the Committee called for witnesses to present information regarding the extent and impacts of stolen wages practices affecting Aboriginal people in South Australia and I was invited to present an overview of my current research on South Australian Aboriginal domestic service history. This included some context to the burgeoning Aboriginal domestic service workforce in the early twentieth century, such as: the assimilation-based rationale for interdependent
policies of child removal, institutionalisation and training; the labour conditions
Aboriginal women were subject to; and the question of payment and the state’s management of
trust fund accounts. This evidence exemplifies those intimate boundary markers of empire, to
which Stoler (2006a) refers above.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies |
| Editors | Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, Steve Larkin |
| Place of Publication | United Kingdom |
| Publisher | Routledge, Taylor & Francis |
| Chapter | 11 |
| Pages | 147-161 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9780429440229 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781138341302 |
| Publication status | Accepted/In press - 2020 |
Keywords
- Aboriginal Labour
- Violence
- Colonial Archive
