Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, Dec 22, 1997 - History - 277 pages
This is the first comprehensive study of the ways in which Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders have been excluded from the rights of Australian citizenship over the past 100 years. Drawing extensively upon archival material, the authors look at how the colonies initiated a policy of exclusion that was then replicated by the Commonwealth and State governments following federation. The book includes careful examination of gove rnment policies and practice from the 1880s to the 1990s. It argues that there was never any constitutional reason why Aborigines could not be granted full citizenship.

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Contents

The Citizenship Divide in Colonial Victoria
11
Under the Law Aborigines and Islanders in Colonial Queensland
31
Is the Constitution to Blame?
58
The Commonwealth Defines the Australian Citizen in association with Tom Clarke
84
The States Confine the Aboriginal Noncitizen
121
The Slow Path to Civil Rights
156
From Civil to Indigenous Rights
193
Notes
223
Bibliography
256
Index
269
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