ABSTRACT
Recent years have seen a revival of historical interest in Aboriginal protection as a concept that gained critical momentum in British imperial politics after the abolition of slavery. A body of new scholarship has explored the different ways that ideas of ‘humane governance’ shaped indigenous policy around the British settler colonial world, and in how these became modified over time. This chapter contributes to this body of scholarship by examining how protection was imagined and refashioned in the antipodean colonies, initially as part of a wider imperial project but later as a feature of state-driven Aboriginal policy in the self-governing settler colonies. In doing so, it considers the potential and the limits of biographical approaches as a means of gaining deeper insight into the history of protection and its intermediaries.
