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In 1864, Theo Sumner, Vice-President of the Victorian Central Board for the Protection of Aborigines (CBPA) noted with some frustration that members of the Board worked ‘under severe disadvantages at present [and] many of their schemes are thwarted’.1 According to his annual report, the instantiation of the Board at the request of the Governor after an 1858 Select Committee represented a chance to ‘attend to the wants of the blacks’ who were clearly struggling for survival in the wake of the violent transformations of settler colonial dispossession and its continuing effects.2 However, Sumner argued the CBPA occupied an untenably ambiguous position within the legislative and institutional frameworks of colonial governance. This was not simply an appeal for more financial support; the CBPA’s projects of protection, Sumner argued, were ‘thwarted and some have been abandoned solely for the want of power to give effect to them’. The CBPA asked for legislative authority to intervene into the lives of Aboriginal people, their relationships with the colonial state and their engagements with colonial employers. Sumner regretted that whilst ‘a very short Bill would contain all that is necessary to enable them to extend their labours ... their urgent solicitations for some amendment of the laws affecting the blacks have not yet received attention’.3 To be fair, endemic government instability in the 1860s in Victoria meant that many reforming projects struggled to negotiate the game of musical ministers that unfolded in colonial parliament. Finally, however, in 1869 the CBPA’s desire for more power was fulfilled. As what would become the Aborigines Protection Act 1869 (Vic) made smooth progress between the upper and lower houses of colonial parliament, legislators suggested this was ‘the performance of a very tardy act of justice to a long neglected portion of the human family ... whose lands we have to a large extent usurped’. Sumner must have been pleased to finally hear parliamentarians acknowledge that the ‘enlargement ... of the powers of the Board’, would enable the CBPA and its

The 1869 Aborigines Protection Act: Vernacular ethnography and the governance of Aboriginal subjects