The formation of contemporary Aboriginal settlement patterns in Australia

Many writers have described how Aborigines were subject to dispossession, pacification by force, protection and assimilation, in the words of Elkin (1964: 363), or displacement and decimation, coalescence and concentration, dispersal and diffusion, in the words of Smith (1980a: 194). It is not necessary to repeat the detail of unequal warfare, massacre, rape, casual murder and theft of land that eventually led to the concentration of

remnant Aboriginal populations in reserves and missions. For present purposes, it is sufficient to note that the single central aspect of government policies and programmes for Aborigines was, at the very beginning, to control mobility by removing Aboriginal people from their land and confining them in concentration camps.