Rosalind Kidd–The Way We Civilise

Born in 1944, Rosalind Kidd is a graduate of Griffith University. Her PhD thesis, based on an unprecedented investigation into the files of Queensland's Aboriginal department, provided the groundwork for this book.

At Griffith University, she served as student representative on the Humanities Course Review Committee, and has been a member of the steering committee of the university's Queensland Studies Centre for several years.

Kidd has worked as senior researcher for an international study on criminology, and also submitted a report to the 1996 Stolen Children Inquiry. From this background of intensive research into official records, she writes fulltime on a variety of projects.

In April 1996 Kidd served as expert witness for the Aboriginal complainants at the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission Inquiry into underpaid wages on Palm Island.

Presently she works as a freelance researcher, unaffiliated with academic or political bodies, investigating official records and providing reports for various claimants in native title cases. She lives with her artist husband and two dogs on the outskirts of Brisbane; and has three children and two grandchildren.

"This account does not tell a history of 'savages' and 'natives', but it restitutes Aboriginal people as human beings with a knowable and known past." from the Foreword by Marcia Langton

This is a groundbreaking history of government's intervention in the lives of Aboriginal people. 

For more than a century, who they married, where they lived, how their wages were managed, all were determined by bureaucrats.Queensland has the highest population of indigenous people in Australia and this comprehensive account, based on previously restricted material, documents the extraordinary history of a century of Aboriginal affairs in the state. It moves beyond racial conflict to provide new perspectives on government practices.

The often strained relations between churches and the government reveal the struggles and appalling conditions of under-funded missions and settlements. Documents also show that vested interests unscrupulously competed to retain cheap or unpaid labour.Between 1914 and 1986 three powerful individuals controlled Aboriginal affairs. Kidd describes how they wielded enormous influence over every aspect of the lives of Queensland's Aboriginal population. 

She reveals the bitter conflicts between state and federal politicians, and examines why governments failed to turn the rhetoric of reform into reality.Timely and significant, this disturbing account is essential to an understanding of Aboriginal grievances today.