Colonial Bureaucracies: Politics of Administrative Reform in Nineteenth Century Australia

Abstract

This book is an abridged version of my PhD thesis submitted to the University of Sydney nearly three decades ago. All these years the thesis was lying on shelves collecting dust as my areas of interest and priorities changed. A few years ago, I felt the urge of sharing the contents of the study with a larger audience and enabling them to appreciate contemporary changes in Australian public bureaucracy in the backdrop of changes that started occurring more than one hundred and sixty years ago. It is important to scan the pages of history to perceive why administrative changes occurred in the way they did and what forces were at play in shaping those changes. I therefore decided to give the thesis the shape of a book by thoroughly editing and substantially reducing the original study and making it more focused and readable. I was particularly interested in exploring the manner in which the formative phase of public administration unfolded in a distant land whose 'colonial' history began only two and a quarter centuries ago. There, 'modern' political and administrative institutions developed in an indigenous social-cultural milieu that had not felt the need for any organized system. The native heterogeneous tribal groups scattered throughout the vast continent followed traditional lifestyles and social relations were based on complex kinship structures and rules. Thus, these institutions had to be created from scratch and were mainly based on British patterns to meet the demands of new and expanding colonies far away from the colonizing country.