‘The Vulnerability and Delinquency of the Aboriginal Child. Implications of Representations of Indigenous Childhood for Indigenous-Settler Relations’.

The figure of the Aboriginal child features prominently in political narratives within the Australian Indigenous Affairs policy space. In this presentation I want to consider how Indigenous children are represented in Australian political discourse, but also to situate this within the particular context of contemporary Australian citizenship regimes and norms of governance. I argue that representations of both the vulnerability and the delinquency of the Indigenous child play a key role in constituting and producing knowledge about the lives, and personal and political capabilities, of Indigenous people.