Henry Prinsep’s Empire: framing a distant colony.
This is a critically important book for anyone seeking to understand the history Western Australia’s systems of control of Aboriginal people for most of the 20th century. Many are familiar with the name and work of the State’s third Chief Protector of Aborigines, A.O. Neville, as his work was defined by the implementation of the infamous 1905 Act and in doing so his work defined the Act. Many people and families lived within the framework of that implementation, and many people still live with the consequences of those policies and practises. Nonetheless, people are less familiar with the role of his predecessor, Henry Prinsep.
Henry Prinsep was Western Australia’s first Chief Protector of Aborigines in the colonial government of Sir John Forrest, a period which saw the introduction of oppressive 1905 Act which dominated the lives of Aboriginal people for most of the twentieth century.
Prinsep was also an artist, a horse-trader, member of a prominent East India Company family, and a member of Western Australia’s social and cultural elite, whose identity was shaped by his colonial upbringing in India and England.
In 1898, Forrest offered Prinsep the new job of Chief Protector of Aborigines, and it is this role for which he is best known in the history of Western Australia. He controlled a developing government bureaucracy during a infamous period of history of Empire and how the Colonial Office perceived relationships between colonists and Aboriginal people. Earlier doubts about the colonial government’s ability to guarantee the protection and welfare of Aboriginal populations led the British Colonial Office to retain responsibility for Aboriginal people on the grant of responsible government in 1890. After eight years of control from London, Premier Forrest succeeded in having what was widely seen as a blot on the reputation of the colonial government removed. He then requested Prinsep (whose recent administrative experience was as Secretary of Mines) to establish a new Aborigines Department, primarily to distribute rations to unemployed and indigent Aboriginal people around the colony.
Forrest, who was a self-proclaimed ‘expert’ on Aboriginal affairs, initially retained ministerial responsibility, but had little time for the portfolio and wanted it quashed as a political problem. In Forrest’s view, government had a minimal role in the management of Aboriginal affairs. The system should be designed to facilitate the absorption of Aboriginal people into employment in the pastoral industry, private domestic work and general labour, leaving the government responsible only for those who, for various reasons, could not be employed.
Prinsep disagreed with Forrest and the two men argued. Prinsep wanted much greater powers as Chief Protector and believed that Western Australia should follow the example of Queensland’s 1897 Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act and tighten government controls on Aboriginal people. In 1904, well after Forrest’s departure for a career in the first Australian Federal Parliament, the State government bowed to widespread public criticism of its management of Aboriginal affairs and pressure from the Colonial Office, and established a Royal Commission under Queensland Chief Protector Walter Roth. The subsequent Aborigines Act 1905 represented the culmination of Prinsep’s public career. He left the civil service in 1908 for a long retirement in Busselton, content to leave his legacy to successors, men such as Charles Frederick Gale, who succeeded Prinsep as Chief Protector until 1915, and Auber Octavius Neville, who controlled government administration of Aboriginal affairs from 1915 until 1940. In Neville’s hands, the laws Prinsep had introduced became a grindingly oppressive system which affected almost every Aboriginal family in Western Australia for generations, until the Government started to dismantle the legal apparatus in the early 1970s.
The long term effects of the Aborigines Act 1905 on Western Australian Aboriginal people, particularly its powers to forcibly remove children from their families, became increasingly controversial as the stories and testimonies of those who been affected became better known.
Court cases brought by members of the Stolen Generation, as they came to be known, a national inquiry by the Australian Human Rights Commission, and sustained pressure from a range of community groups, culminated in a Government apology in February 2008, just over a century after Prinsep had retired as WA’s Chief Protector. In the Federal Parliament Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told the nation that policies instigated by Australian governments and the actions of those who had designed and implemented them had been profoundly wrong, had brought ‘indignity and degradation’ onto a ‘proud people and a proud culture’, and that the pain of forced separation on individuals and families had been ‘searing’, ‘a deep assault on our senses and on our most elemental humanity’.
In the States and Territories of Australia, ‘up to 50,000 children were forcibly taken from their families … the result of deliberate, calculated policies of the state as reflected in the explicit powers given to them under statute’. Many would contest that Rudd’s numbers here are conservative.
The importance of family and empire to Prinsep is critical in attempting to understand him. Prinsep and his family were closely involved in the Western Australian colonial enterprise, they also remained active members of the British imperial world. Prinsep kept in regular contact with his extensive network of family and friends in every quarter of the British imperial world.
This volume traces Henry Prinsep’s life from India to Western Australia and outlines how Prinsep laid the foundations for the administration of Aboriginal affairs that defined relationships between the State of WA and Aboriginal people for generations and still has a resonance more than a century later.
The great irony of this volume is its careful balance of portraying the man as part of a family and his role as the architect of the legal framework for the removal of Aboriginal children from their families as communities.

It is available as a free download at: http://press.anu.edu.au/titles/henry-prinseps-empire/ ( )