ABSTRACT
This chapter explores these questions of mobility, belonging, rights and governance through a focus on a key moment, the passing by the British Parliament of the Australian Colonies Government Act of 1850, which established a framework for increased representative government in the colonies. It describes the competing notions of rights and governance that underpinned imperial settler-Indigenous relations at the time. The British government had also witnessed during the 1840's the failure of missions established by the metropolitan missionary societies and of the Aboriginal Protectorate it had itself ordered established in the Port Phillip District to protect Australia's Indigenous people from population loss. The British Government's abandonment of Aboriginal people to the settlers alarmed the Aborigines Protection Society in London. The colonial government subsequently closed the Port Phillip Protectorate, which had been struggling for some years, in 1849. British liberty had indeed been transferred across vast distances to the settlers, just as they had demanded.
