'Thls paper focuses on the power and control over Aboriginal lives from the mid 1940s to the 1960s during the period of administration of the Queensland Preservation and Protection Acts, 1939 to 1946, whose provisions - including control of wages, property and people's movements - are indicative of increasing systematic management of Aborigines.
The Acts offered in fact no 'protection' but increasing guardianship and removal of independence. This paper also examines the ways in which ideas of racial assimilation in the 1950s and 1960s were related to policy and to the treatment of Aboriginal people, with government institutionalised racism facilitating inequality in society and employment.' (Introduction)