In 1884, the Board for the Protection of Aborigines (Board) presented a request to the Chief Secretary of Victoria, Graham Berry, to amend the 1869 Act with the proposal that the younger (under 35) able-bodied, mixed heritage population, termed “aboriginal half-castes” in the 1869 Act, should “be told” to leave the reserves and earn their own living (whereas under the 1869 Act the reverse was the. [...] In my view, this emphasises that the intent of the legislation was not just to deny the mixed heritage population the right to government support or the right to live on or enter a reserve. [...] The bill was introduced as an Act to amend the 1869 Act, titled “An Act to provide for the Protection and Management of the Aboriginal Natives of Victoria”. [...] But, as he showed in the way he struck out clauses in the final session, he was the one who could determine the final form of the Act. [...] As Patrick Wolfe writes in ‘Traces of History - Elementary Structures of Race’ published in 2016: “The 1886 Victorian Act marks the legislative onset of the Australia-wide policy of Aboriginal child abduction, coordinated in 1937 but administered individually by the separate states, the victims of which would come to be known as the Stolen Generations.
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