ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the 'good demand' for young Aboriginal domestic servants across Australia in detail, outlining the significance of Indigenous child domestic employment in this settler society. It argues that the use of young Aboriginal domestic service not only served an economic purpose but was also presented as a means of reforming a population. Embedded racial attitudes meant that Aboriginal children were not protected from exploitation as workers in the same way as European children. Material from the Northern Territory in the 1930s reveals the anxieties about the Aboriginal race that were becoming increasingly prevalent in that region by that decade. Statistical evidence from Queensland indicates that one in every three Aboriginal domestic servants in the early twentieth century was under the age of eighteen. Rather than enabling Aboriginal children to move past the devastation of colonization, domestic service acted as a form of colonization in itself, reiterating the imperial racial order in a more intimate context.
