Book Description
Secondhand. Very good condition. Minor wear to book corners and edges. Interior and binding are excellent.
Settlers, Servants and Slaves documents the exploitation of both European and Aboriginal children by the settler elite of nineteenth-century Western Australia.
From the 1870s, Aboriginal children were widely "employed" in a complex web of contract and apprenticeship law in the pastoral and pearling industries in the North West. Often kidnapped by "blackbirders", the children received no wages and had no opportunity to attend school.
Settlers, Servants and Slaves also shows how concern over "the problem" of children of mixed descent in the last decade of the nineteenth century was to provide the rationale for infamous twentieth-century "solutions": the removal of children from their parents and the establishment of Aboriginal Reserves. (back cover)