Aboriginal Mobility and the Search for a Home and a Job in Postwar Victoria

Abstract

Following World War II, the Victorian Aborigines Welfare Board sought to house and employ Aboriginal Victorians as part of its assimilation policy. Crucial to these efforts was controlling Aboriginal mobility, which the Board saw as problematic, being unsettling in its disregard of state borders and its refusal to conform to settler-capitalist ideologies of private property, wealth accumulation and individualism. This is an attitude that permeates descriptions of Aboriginal people's movement in the settler-colonial archive. This article investigates discussions of housing and employment in the Board's papers, drawing together the disparate references that pepper the manuscripts to suggest an alternative interpretation of archival descriptions of Aboriginal mobility. That interpretation centres Aboriginal decision-making and comprehends the unbroken nature of Aboriginal movement to, within and across ancestral lands – a continuation of pre-invasion Indigenous mobility that involved adapting to and incorporating the pressures of the settler-capitalist economy.