Book Review: End of an era: Aboriginal labour in the Northern Territory

Abstract

At last the findings of the Berndts, 1946 report on Vestey's stations are available to a wider audience. The two anthropologists, Ronald and Catherine Berndt, were commissioned to look into the situation of the declining numbers of Aborigines on the company's pastoral properties in the 1940s. They innocently surmised this was intended to establish ways to improve Aboriginal living conditions, but not long into their survey, realised that Vestey's primarily hoped to use them to recruit Aboriginal bush-dwellers as additional labour.