Beneath the skin: Australian citizenship, rights and Aboriginal women

Abstract

When Australia became a nation in 1901, its newly written constitution excluded all Aborigines, male and female, from citizenship. The Australian state was premised upon particular understandings of the bodies within it, based upon assumptions about race, gender and culture. Black people stood outside the white shell of Australia's emergent body politic. Sex, or their different physical constitutions, had long precluded white women from democratic rights within the colonies, though they all eventually rec;eived voting rights with the coming of federation. For Aborigines, 'race', notably skin pigment, set them apart from what is perceived as Australia's national physique. In their traditional cosmology, northern Australian Aborigines also privilege the importance of a metonymic 'skin'. As well as gender, 'skin' or kinship classification is central to identity and social organisation. It determines the individual's place in their socio-political system, relegating responsibilities and rights in relation to everyone else, including areas of work, food and marriage.1 In white Australian rhetoric of the early twentieth century, the emphasis on AboriginaJ 'blood' implied the distinction was not only superficial but one of 'essence'.