The need for Aboriginal labour in the northern colonies by the late nineteenth century meant that pastoralists continued to control Aboriginal lives, but in a more refined manner. On cattle stations pastoralists assumed the role of welfare provider.^[39] This offset the powers of the bureaucratic ‘protectorship’ that controlled virtually every aspect of Aboriginal lives on the ‘outside’.^[40] Rosalind Kidd points to the role of pastoralists as ration distributors, which gave them ‘horrifying’ power to punish Aboriginal people by withholding rations.^[41] Nonetheless, Aboriginal people on stations were able to transgress government controls, and to a degree, negotiate their relationship with their pastoral managers. This was a result of the new employment relationship that had elements of mutual dependence, obligations and loyalties, despite the dominant position of the pastoral lord.

The shift in control strategies from violence to labour discipline was consolidated in the 1930s when Aboriginal people were being born on stations and had become accustomed to their labour relationship with pastoralists.^[42] Consequently, there was a reduction in Aboriginal people’s physical resistance to pastoralists’ occupation. In addition, pastoralists realised by the 1930s that ‘white’ labour was not going to fill the labour needs of the industry.^[43] The Territory’s Chief Protector of Aboriginals, Baldwin Spencer, noted that pastoralists had become ‘dependent’ on Aboriginal workers.^[44] Aboriginal labour was not only abundant, with thousands of Aboriginal people on stations, but also highly skilled. Their familiarity with the environment made them competent stockworkers, and their hunting abilities translated into mustering abilities. They were a stable labour force as they lived on station property (which was usually their traditional country), as well as a cheap labour source because pastoralists did not generally pay them wages.^[45] Aborigines were therefore revalued in terms of their ‘usefulness’ to ‘whites’.^[46]

The shift represented, in Foucauldian terms, the ‘normalisation’ of power.^[47] Normalised discipline is just as powerful as violent punishment as a means of social control.^[48] It ‘hierarchizes’ power, rather than displays it ‘in its murderous splendor’.^[49] Modernist political philosophers, such as Max Weber,^[50] conflate normalisation (or ‘civilisation’) with the development of the modern bureaucratic state, and indeed this would apply to the bureaucracy formed to police the Aboriginal protection legislation. However, in the pastoral north, normalised power remained localised.

Contemporary writings reveal that pastoralists conceived themselves as the new paternalists.^[51] In We of the Never-Never (1907), one of the best-known and earliest literary representations of Northern Territory labour on Elsey Station, Jeannie Gunn, wife of pastoralist Aeneas Gunn, projected the new compassion. Contrasting colonisers’ relentless approach to cattle spearing on the frontier,^[52] she advocated ‘the judicious giving of an old bullock at not too rare intervals’ in order to keep the Aborigines ‘fairly well in hand’. Her response of ‘granting fair liberty of travel, and a fair percentage of calves or their equivalent in fair payment’ reflects changing mentalities from frontier violence to paternalism.^[53] Furthermore, Albert Wright perceived violence towards his Aboriginal stockmen and their dependants as an undeserved wrong on ‘his own people’.^[54] These portrayals represent the changing attitudes towards Aboriginal people as their labour contribution increased.