Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, ‘THE RULE OF LAW ON THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN FRONTIER’, Legal History 13 (2009):

In the 1830s the British Colonial Office insisted that Aboriginal people be regarded as British Subjects in the hope that the ‘rule of law’ would provide them with protection against the excesses of the settlers. This paper tests the ideal of the rule of law against the realities offrontier violence. We argue that the effective application of the rule of law, in dealings with Aboriginal people, was a virtual impossibility, and offered them little protection. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that the rule of law, unsupported by an adequate administrative machinery to ensure Britains effective occupation in frontier districts, was probably weakened by the few genuine efforts that were made to uphold it.