Towards a ‘Science of Colour': Health, Law, and Aboriginal Child Removal in Australia

This paper documents the first decades of the work of the Aboriginal Protection Board in Victoria, Australia in the mid-nineteenth century as it oversees mission stations established to gather Aboriginal peoples and give protection from settler violence. It examines the social and historical conditions for the emergence of a ‘science’ of racial differences through a number of shifting official versions of the ‘Aboriginal problem’, including Aboriginal morality, mortality and morbidity. The functioning of ‘governmentalised knowledges’ in the production of categories of persons based on race is highlighted in the State’s oversight of child removal and Aboriginal incarceration.