In this essay, I have sought to accomplish three major tasks: firstly, to demonstrate how fluctuating was the Aboriginal legal position in the 19th century, secondly, to elucidate the ties between anthropology and colonial policy, and finally, to attribute the variance in Aborigines� legal status to the broader scientific developments shaping the course of Australian anthropology. The question remaining, at the end of such an analysis, is: what do we gain from this view of colonial Australian legal theory? How does arguing for a broader context of influence on the Aboriginal legal position alter our conception of both that legal history as well as the course of anthropology in 19th century Australia?
Viewing legal theory as a product of scientific philosophy, as opposed to anthropological doctrine, carries several major analytical benefits. First, it extends the colonials� efforts to establish a legal �place� for Aborigines beyond the limited study of man to the wider concern for understanding the evolution of the human social world and the role of natural law in that world. In this way, the Aboriginal legal position represents not merely a relationship to British law but also to the history of human progress, interaction, and natural rights. Additionally, recognizing the relationship between legal theory and its broader scientific context allows us to consider Aboriginal legal status not as an isolated development in the colonial project but rather as one thread in a larger web of colonial philosophy. Such a perspective affords a far more sophisticated examination of the complex relationship between the colonizers and colonized, thereby creating a more legitimate footing from which to understand postcolonial conditions.
And what of the colonial anthropologist? How do we gain a greater understanding of the expert scientist by restricting his actions, as we did to legal theory, to those that can only exist under certain political and philosophical conditions? By recognizing the constraints on the development of Australian anthropology, created both by a permanent tie to colonial politics as well as by the dictates of British scientific thought, we can now place the Australian anthropologist among his compatriots in the web of colonial philosophy. The anthropologist in Australia was simultaneously a mover and shaker, contributing directly to the structure of colonial policy, a humanist philosopher, relating his Aboriginal subjects to the larger spatial and temporal schemes of the universe and history, and a compliant beneficiary of British scientific ideals that themselves compelled the direction of colonial politics. He was, in a sense, the unholy trinity of the Australian colonial project.
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