Conditional Inclusion: Aborigines and Welfare Rights in Australia, 1900–47

Abstract The first old-age pensions in Australia deliberately excluded ‘Asiatics and Aborigines’. Consistent with the White Australia policy, racial exclusions defined the boundaries of political subjectivity and of who was to be included within the circle of New Protection. By the 1940s, much of this pattern of racial exclusion was being erased, with the barrier of caste removed, though Aboriginal entitlement was still restricted by conditions that reflected emerging ideas of assimilation. This article traces the obscure history of this process through the first half of the twentieth century, posing questions about its implications for our historical understandings of race and assimilation.