ABSTRACT
By the 1840s, the British government had devised the pastoral lease as a way to share effective colonial authority over land and Indigenous people with the Australian colonies’ most land-hungry colonists—the pastoralists—and to reconcile the land needs of the pastoral industry and the Aboriginal people to whom the Crown had a duty of protection. The terms of leases obliged pastoralists and Aborigines to work out the terms on which they could co-exist. This chapter is about the thoughts and actions of the pastoralists in the period 1840s to 1860s. Drawing on pastoralists’ memoirs and on the transcripts of official inquiries into pastoral frontier conditions, the chapter shows the evolution of pastoralists’ acceptance of the risks of co-existence. It also argues that these mid-nineteenth-century conversations among pastoralists about whether and when to ‘let Aborigines in’ to their leases were one source of what has come to be known as the Pioneer Legend. The chapter challenges an assumption frequently made in the study of British colonial protection policies: that the ‘protectors’ were necessarily public officials. Pastoralists’ evolved authority corresponded in many respects with the functions that the Select Committee on Aborigines had prescribed for ‘protectors’ in its 1837 report.
