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This paper investigates the Western Australian colonial authorities' attempts at defining and categorising a "politically relevant" Aboriginal population from first settlement in 1829 until 1850. Studies of colonial enumeration allow us to understand how colonial authorities viewed the spaces and boundaries of settlement and beyond, and who would be included as part of the community inhabiting that space. Enumeration of Aboriginal people in this period mirrored the Western Australian colonial authorities' conception of their sovereignty: the territory which they could effectively control was not the entire western third of the continent, as the map dictated, but rather the surveyed country, within the "limits of settlement." While other studies of colonial census making reveal enumeration as an instrument of control, this paper identifies colonial census making about Indigenous Western Australians in this period as an instance of state incapacity to govern and control. While "control" was the colonial authorities' key objective in their enumerations, the census reports reveal their inability to know the Aboriginal population.

AbstractIntellectual networks linking humanitarians in Britain, Western Australia, and New Zealand in the 1850s and 1860s operationalized the concept of native "protection" by arguing contra demographic pessimists that native peoples could survive if their adaptation was thoughtfully managed. While the population-measurement capacities of the colonial governments of Western Australia and New Zealand were still weak, missionaries pioneered the gathering of the data that enabled humanitarians to objectify natives as populations. This paper focuses on Francis Dart Fenton (in New Zealand), Florence Nightingale (in Britain), and Rosendo Salvado (in Western Australia) in the 1850s and 1860s. Their belief in the necessity of population statistics manifests the practical convergence of colonial humanitarianism with public health perspectives and with "the statistical movement" that had become influential in Britain in the 1830s. We draw attention to the materialism and environmentalism of these three quantifiers of natives, and to how native peoples were represented as governable through knowledge of their physical needs and vulnerabilities.