New South Wales government

The New South Wales government is named as a sponsor of the Clintoff family’s 1893 voyage to Australia, sharing the cost of their first-class passage with the British Army and the Victorian government. Its direct role in the narrative is limited, but the reference places it within a larger contrast between state-supported migration and the colonial authorities whose expansion endangers Aboriginal communities and family life.

Support for the Clintoffs’ Voyage

As the Clintoff family prepares to sail aboard the SS Aberdeen, Louisa describes a route around the Cape of Good Hope and onward to Melbourne, a journey expected to take about eight weeks in favourable conditions. The family is travelling first class, with the passage provided through the British Army and the Victorian and New South Wales governments. The government’s presence is therefore practical and material: it helps make the family’s migration possible.

The passage does not explain the New South Wales government’s specific motives, the terms of its support, or its later dealings with the Clintoffs. Its appearance nevertheless ties the family’s private journey to public institutions and to the broader movement of settlers into Australia.

Colonial Expansion and Unequal Authority

That migration reference acquires a darker context in the novel’s account of settlement in the high country. The Ngarigo people are described as having ancient connections to the land, while newcomers take territory, establish fences, and drive Aboriginal people away from their homelands. In this account, colonial authority restricts seasonal movement and makes survival increasingly precarious. The New South Wales government is not specifically identified as directing these acts in the cited passages, but its sponsorship of settler migration sits within the same colonial setting.

The narrative also shows how local settlement is advanced through meetings among white men. Charles Edwards advocates developing the outpost of Cresthill into a town and argues that Aboriginal people must be managed; the men’s agreement is quickly put into effect. This is a local decision-making process rather than an action attributed directly to the New South Wales government. The distinction matters: the novel presents colonial power as operating through institutions and public policy as well as through local settlers and officials, without making every act of dispossession the responsibility of a single named authority.

Classification and the Threat of Child Removal

The government’s broader colonial context is also relevant to the threat facing Molly Johnson’s children. Miss Shirley labels them with a racial classification and appeals to Judge Eisenmangher, who signs an authorization for their removal in the name of their safety. Molly recognizes that such classification can separate children from their family, drawing on her own childhood memory of adults discussing her possible removal. The New South Wales government is not named as the author or executor of this order; the scene instead identifies the judge’s authority and Miss Shirley’s intervention.

The novel’s author’s note connects the story’s concern with cultural loss to the writer’s own interest in Aboriginal history and to government policies that prevented the author’s mother and grandparents from passing on their culture. This retrospective statement does not identify the New South Wales government as the specific source of those policies. Read together, the migration sponsorship and the child-removal episode place public authority on two unequal sides of the novel’s historical world: supporting settler movement in one instance, while colonial systems of classification and custody threaten Indigenous kinship and cultural continuity in another.