What if the federal government had created a model Aboriginal state?

Until the 1970s, Australian governments denied Indigenous Australians the security of having their own land, and they have since then conceded only part of the self-determination that Indigenous Australians have demanded. Yet in the remote north and centre of the continent the Indigenous domain has retained much of its vitality, in part because the forms of colonial authority" such as pastoral land use and the declaration of remote reserves" did not impose the rapid cultural transportations that were typical of the more temperate agricultural zones of Australia in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Could Australian governments have recognised that parts of Australia remained effectively 'Aboriginal', despite the formal assertion of British law, and could they have done so by declaring such a region to be a model Aboriginal state? The Commonwealth government declined this option when it was presented in 1927. In this counterfactual essay, I ask: Under what circumstances might the Commonwealth have found that proposal attractive? And what would life have been like in that 'Model Aboriginal State'? I have come to the conclusion that while some of the abuses of colonial authority would have been punished under a model Aboriginal state, some of the welfare processes of the frontier would have been much the same. I have learned from observing Indigenous communities in Alice Springs in the 1980s that a change in the racial background and cultural outlook of those with authority over Indigenous welfare does not necessarily bring about a change in the structures of cultural difference nor in the techniques of intervention.