Reviews and Comments – The Way We Civilise
In a thorough and compelling way, Dr Kidd’s work corrects the ahistoricism which plagues the vision of Australia as the land of the “fair go”….
Because of her work, more people will doubt the school textbook version of Australian history which positioned Aboriginal people as the dark historical backdrop to the grand adventures of “explorers”. This account does not tell a history of “savages” and unnamed “natives”, but it restitutes Aboriginal people as human beings with a knowable and known past…
Dr Kidd’s detailed analysis of documents throughout the twentieth century opens up new perspectives for our understanding of race relations. This knowledge is essential if we are to counter the regular eruption of ill-informed “race debates”. Her critical revelations of government operations of recent years should give pause for thought to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Queenslanders alike.
More Aboriginal people will be able to go to the sources of Dr Kidd’s [PhD] thesis with a new understanding obtained from reading this book. Good history, such as Dr Kidd writes, can have the effect of assisting in the pursuit of justice. I thank her for her courage, persistence and scholarship.
Marcia Langton. Foreword, The Way We Civilise. [FULL TEXT]
Rosalind Kidd’s The Way We Civilise is especially welcome. It is a broad and penetrating study of the administration of Aboriginal affairs in Queensland from 1840 to 1988…. It works as a book but carries with it the authority of the prior exercise in meticulous scholarship…
If Australian courts determine that governments did have a fiduciary duty towards indigenous people, then Kidd’s research may prove revolutionary because it gets under the bureaucratic and public surface of administration in a way that no previous work has done….
[T]he terrible story of the Queensland frontier has been often told before. Kidd’s distinctive contribution is her study of 20th century administration… Kidd does not tell a simple story … Her study, she declares is one of “eternal optimism and the congenital failure of successive Queensland governments”… the bitter irony of it all is that after many decades of failure the resulting problems are seen as those of the Aboriginal community.
[Marcia Langton accorded Kidd] open access to Government files, ticking away like a dusty time-bomb…. The ultimate outcome [of fifteen months’ research] was the detonation of that bomb in the publication of Kidd’s blistering The Way We Civilise in 1997. Its reverberations are still being felt.
Raymond Evans. Review in Politics and Culture, Issue 2, 2002. [FULL TEXT]
During the sixties both reserves and missions were allowed to run down even further to force the inhabitants out. Just how difficult the realisation of even the most modest ambitions for a tolerably secure life can be in the face of an unsympathetic government has been exhaustively documented by Rosalind Kidd in her book, The Way We Civilise. Kidd has drawn on the archives of the Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Islander Affairs and of missions to build what she describes a ‘a strong narrative’… Kidd’s technique does not allow opportunistic, politically motivated distortion. It is the authentic voices of the white administrators we hear, and that is enough. It is a tale of destitution, degradation and despair imposed and sustained by top administrators…
It is as yet the only comprehensive history of state policy we have. You ought to read it.
Inga Clendinnen. 1999 Boyer Lectures. ABC Radio National. [FULL TEXT]
The department’s history, traced in this disturbing, meticulously detailed and coolly impassioned book, provokes in the reader feelings of stupefaction, vexation and fascinated horror – a suite of responses by now all too familiar in our retrospect of the record of inter-racial affairs in this country.
The Way We Civilise is an archival book. It is also a book of sharp political significance, for it was Rosalind Kidd who provided the documents to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission that made the recently settled case against the Queensland Government….
Strangely, it was the beginning of large-scale resource exploitation in Cape York that shone the spotlight of public attention on Aboriginal life under the department…. Kidd’s chapters on this more recent period in Queensland’s management of Aboriginal affairs make unpleasant reading: hysteria, paranoia and hypocrisy were in ample supply…
On closing this partisan and yet utterly persuasive book, I found myself bereft of conventional reactions: what remains in the imagination is an after-taste of awful sadness…
And so another groundbreaking work of unpalatable Australian history has appeared …Sadly, there is good reason to believe that, both in the emphasis and the detail, every word she transcribes from the archives is accurate.
Rosalind Kidd’s book is distinguished by its sensitivity to the different views of good government which have been contested in the field of ‘Aboriginal Affairs’ in Queensland … One of Kidd’s most fruitful themes is the tension between a medical inspectorate and a penny-pinching and locally capricious protectorate…
The gradual inclusion of Aboriginal and Islander people in the national social security system is part of a larger story which dominates the second half of Kidd’s book: the attempt by the State to turn growing Commonwealth interests in Indigenous welfare to its own financial advantage, without losing any policy autonomy… the other great theme for Kidd’s second half is the Presbyterian fight to assert the land rights of the Wik and other Cape York peoples whose lands were rich in minerals…
If Kidd’s splendid book has a weakness, it is that she does not adequately show the workings of the colonial patronage – the colonial authorities’ elevation of ‘good’ Indigenous people to positions of petty responsibility and greater material reward … Kidd’s focus is elsewhere – on questions of finance and political tactics in the wider political sphere…
The distinct and valuable contribution of Kidd’s work is her attention to tensions among colonial authorities: State/Commonwealth, church/state, medical/bureaucratic, union/employer … Yet one fundamental point about Indigenous agency emerges with great weight. To the extent that Indigenous Queenslanders appear in our news media as unhealthy, disorganised, prone to violence and despair (and these are unavoidable themes of many reports) there is now Kidd’s story of cynical, dishonest misgovernment to which we can turn for much explanation…
Tim Rowse. Review in Aboriginal History, Vol 22, 1988. [FULL TEXT]
Rosalind Kidd’s research challenges, in a compelling way, the parameters of race relation debates. Revealed are the vested interests which competed to retain cheap labour, the strained relations between church and state, and the enormous influence over Aboriginal lives wielded by three powerful individuals. The manuscript is a rich source of not only historical facts, but also anecdotal evidence. As remarkable as the breadth of her coverage (Dr Kidd takes us from the mid 1800s to the late 1980s) is the lucidity of her writing style…
The book is bound (like Dr Kidd’s PhD thesis on which it is based) to cause excitement and controversy. Dr Kidd’s book makes a valuable and much needed contribution to scholarship on Aboriginal issues.
Through meticulous examination of the records of the government agencies charged with Aboriginal and Islander administration, Dr Kidd is able to demonstrate how the actions of successive Queensland governments, the Aboriginal affairs bureaucracy, and the management of the competing interests of those involved with indigenous people impacted so disastrously on the lives of Aborigines and Islanders… while there are obviously many circumstances in which the oral evidence of Aboriginal and Islander people is of paramount importance, Dr Kidd’s research indicates that there is also much crucial evidence in the archival record to substantiate what people knew or suspected but could not prove. The Queensland Government’s subsequent measures indicate all too clearly their interest in hiding the truth about the past rather than facing up to it in the true spirit of reconciliation…
The Way We Civilise is an important book for everyone who cares about the future of this country.
Baiba Berzins. Review in Archives and Manuscripts. Vol 25, No 2, 1998. [FULL TEXT]
With support from Marcia Langton, Kidd’s unprecedented access to sensitive state government documents has resulted in an immensely powerful and provocative account of the interplay of conflicting ideas and assumptions about the so-called “Aboriginal problem”. Of course, it has never been an “Aboriginal problem”. As Kidd argues forcefully in this meticulously documented book, the problem consistently has been one for government to confront…
When I first reviewed this book in manuscript form more than a year ago, I was struck by the sustained force of Kidd’s account. The academic style which made some parts of the draft heavy going have been reworked into a readable and compelling – at times, almost journalistic – text…. Journalism at its best seems capable only of documenting interruptions to the processes of life. Here, Kidd has managed to chart its course …
This is a history which belongs to us all and we must acknowledge it if race relations in Queensland are ever to move beyond a state of superficial tolerance to one of mutual respect.
Michael Meadows. Review in The Courier-Mail. 16 August 1997. [FULL TEXT]
The Way We Civilise places the story of State and Federal administration of Aboriginal affairs in Queensland under rigorous academic scrutiny. Sub-titled the “untold story” the book mines previously restricted archival material dating back 150 years, to forge a chilling narrative of maladministration and systemic corruption…
Although this material, gleaned during a fifteen month stint in state archives, is deeply disturbing, the tone of the narrative is restrained, with an overlay of sober humour… On the whole she lets the administration damn itself in its own words…
Her purpose was to get to general readers who would never normally touch history or academic material, with knowledge which she insists is rightfully the property of all Australians…
The Way We Civilise is a unique resource for any reader who wishes to understand better, how the machinery of government has operated, and how social engineering and all the politics of expediency have impacted on Aboriginal people.
Maggie Helass. ‘Queensland’s Stolen Generation’ in Independent Monthly. July 1997. [FULL TEXT]
[The Way We Civilise is a] disturbing, painful and shameful record of governmental control of Aboriginal people… I am left in no doubt after reading this book that it succeeds in disrupting the silence surrounding the history of Australia’s indigenous people….
[T]he research reported here is a meticulous chronicle of the intricacies of governmental practices concerning the administration of Aboriginal affairs over the past 150 years and the impact of these practices on Aboriginal lives…
Quite simply, Australia’s indigenous people did not exist in the texts of my youth. Kidd’s work provides a history which effectively remedies this. Using excerpts from government correspondence, diaries, reports and newspaper accounts, Kidd skilfully weaves many an untold story. The result is a highly readable and intensely interesting account…
This book is essential reading for all Australians. Through the careful uncovering of the details of White Australia’s disgraceful treatment of Aborigines in Queensland, Kidd provides us with material to effectively counter racist arguments regarding Aboriginal welfare which we may encounter. It may also inspire each of us to participate more fully in the much needed process of reconciliation.
The Way We Civilise tells a remarkable story…[It] makes a fundamental contribution to the history of Aboriginal affairs in Queensland. There is no doubt that the materials it presents – almost all drawn directly from departmental files – form a distressing “black armband” view of history. It is, however, the kind of history that those who make the call for our historians to write only “white-wash” history would do well to read for themselves. It would be marvellous to think that those same politicians and administrators could learn something from its pages.
David Baker. Review in Queensland Review, October 1997. [FULL TEXT]
A study of the way Aboriginal protection policy affected the daily lives of Aboriginal people and also denied them access to their own history. Kidd makes excellent use of previously closed archival sources of the Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Islander Affairs, showing that the failure to achieve stated objectives of Aboriginal welfare was a result of direct and systemic racism in thought and deed at all levels of a closed and centralised bureaucracy.
This work, a pioneering and controversial account of the bureaucratic management of race relations, is strengthened by the tempered balance of the author’s analysis.
Judges’ Comments, 1998 New South Wales Premier’s History Award. The Way We Civilise shortlisted.