Indigenous Politics

Abstract

As recently as the third edition of his introduction to Australian government and politics, J. D. B. Miller remarked: ‘The smallness of [Aborigines’] numbers means that these dark people are not a political force, and are never likely to be one’ (Miller 1964, 18, emphasis added). The ANU’s L. F. Crisp sustained this view the longest, getting to his textbook’s fifth (and last) edition in 1983 without noticing that: a constitutional referendum in 1967 had attracted a uniquely high vote in favour of (what was promoted as) a new inclusiveness and racial equality; Neville Bonner had been in the Senate since 1971; the Coombs Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration (1974–6) had discussed the place of Aborigines in the Commonwealth Public Service; and that the Commonwealth’s devolution of ‘self-government’ on the Northern Territory in 1978 had reserved to the Commonwealth legislature powers over Aborigines’ statutory land tenure (Crisp 1955–1983, 5th edn). By then, however, the proliferation of Australian political science textbooks had begun to offer an alternative to this habitual un-interest in Indigenous matters. In 1969, Henry Mayer’s ‘Second Reader’ mentioned ‘Aborigines’ eight times, and from there the topic grew. Peter Loveday’s APSA Presidential address (Loveday 1983) and the textbooks mentioned in the following table mark the ‘arrival’ of the Indigenous topic in Australian political science.