'Merging' the Aboriginal population: welfare, justice, power and the separation of Aboriginal children in Victoria.

ABSTRACT

This paper sets out some of the parameters of social intervention in the family in Australia around the turn of the 20th century in ways which permit interventions in Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal populations to be broadly compared and contrasted. It focuses on forms of intervention underpinned by the kind of liberal political reasoning that allowed administrators to intervene on the basis of assessments of the capacity of families to govern themselves (Hindess 2000, 2001). The paper draws on archival material in Victoria, and the evidence of interventions in Aboriginal populations focuses on the removal of Aboriginal children from their communities in various parts of the state during this period. 'Race' comes to be constructed in terms that allow legislators and administrators to make discriminations within Aboriginal populations in order to manage them.

KEY WORDS

Aborigines; family; child removal; sociology; history

Introduction

The enduring aspect of Donzelot's The Policing of Families (1979) is his analysis of the family as a technology of governing and its legacy in studies of the workings of power in relation to family. This can been seen in the inquiries deriving from Foucault's studies of 'governmentality', studies that utilise concepts such as 'psy' techniques of governing, the public/ private distinction as an artifact of government, the role of human sciences' expertise in the arts of self-governing, the growth of actuarial techniques of assessment, and the intrusion of law and legal practice into family welfare (Foucault 1991; Burchell et al 1991; Barry et al 1996; Dean and Hindess 1998; Dean 1999). Donzelot showed that from the late 19th century the 'responsible autonomous family' became a major target of health interventions in Europe, and a vehicle for linking public concerns with private aspirations in the areas of health and well-being (Rose 1990:129). He analysed the family as a 'strategy', a point of intersection of a range of different practices--educational, medical, moral, psychiatric, judicial--concerned to shape and regulate the social sphere.

The strategy of 'familialisation' was for Donzelot a 'moving resultant, an uncertain form whose intelligibility can only come from studying the systems of relations it maintains with the sociopolitical level' (Donzelot 1979:xxv; Hirst 1981). Expertise took charge of a range of prophylactic techniques to intervene in the family, utilising medical, educational and philanthropic institutions but also with links to law and legal practice. In this period the family along with the school became key agencies underpinning modern Western 'liberal' forms of governance. Health and well-being would be governed by strengthening family as a technique of governing--the conduct of conduct--at some distance from central forms of rule (Rose 1990; Rose 2004:170). Australia borrowed from English social policy initiatives that focused on strengthening the family as the main vehicle through which to target social reform, and charity backed up by judicial forms of intervention were the central means for prudential government to 'police' the family (van Krieken 1990).