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Civilising Process In Australia

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The ‘civilising process’, as theorised by Norbert Elias (1939), entails the social and political practices in a society that construct and define the act of civility. The Civilizing Process sought to explain how Europeans came to imagine themselves as ‘civilised’, in comparison to their more barbaric medieval ancestors (Elias 1939). Elias (1939) went on to suggest that ‘civilisation’ is established through a particular ‘habitus’ and is largely defined by Western colonisation’s perception of being superior and ‘civil’ in an attempt to control violence (Van Krieken 2000:90). However, civilising controls such as paternalistic governance and legal conditions that are an extension of the ‘civilising process’ possibly challenge and delegitimize ‘civilisation’ itself, and instead redistributes violence enabling the ‘decivilising process’ (Van Krieken 2000:249). I will examine the Stolen Generation in Australia in light …show more content…

Aboriginality in the 1900s was widely viewed as a socially primitive culture, whose behaviour was considered barbaric and therefore did not fit in with the values of ‘white Australia’ and ideals of the West about civility (Van Krieken 2000:247; Australian Human Rights Commission 1997). This resulted in the introduction of the NSW Aborigines Protection Board 1883 and the Aboriginal Protection Amending Act 1915 (NSW) that meant Australian government authorities had full control to attain legal guardianship of all Indigenous and half-caste children, to be ‘merged’ into the non-Indigenous population (Australian Human Rights Commission And Equal Opportunity Commission 1997). Conceptions by the State and church about civilisation warranted the intervention

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