There are many publications that provide important insights into Australian Indigenous leadership, particularly in its regionally differentiated, gendered and religico-ritual contexts.^[6] Often the terms ‘leader’ or ‘leadership’ are not to be found in the text of these publications, as writers have referred to headmen, chiefs, bosses, elders and so on. Whilst the literature on contemporary Indigenous leadership illustrates a wide spectrum of views, in early colonial Australia descriptions were perhaps even more varied, although possibly more tightly bound by the conceptual constraints of the social evolutionist thinking that prevailed in early colonial accounts of Indigenous Australian life.

Debate has ensued since Captain Cook’s first landing about whether Australian Aboriginal people even had systematic forms of ‘leadership’ and governance, and if they did, what they looked like. Early colonial assumptions and opinions were formed under the ideological umbrella of the European Enlightenment, which Burch and Ellanna (1994: 1) have described as ‘political philosophy, not science’ with its ‘arguments and assumptions … based more on fantasy than fact’. One early commentator, in 1793, was concerned that there did not appear to be ‘any civil regulations, or ordinances … [existing] among this people’ (Tench 1961: 51).

Sixty years later, reflecting a common opinion of the time, a journalist and historian writing in 1853–54 argued that Aboriginal people had ‘authority or unity of no description’ and that they had ‘no chiefs’ (Flanagan 1888: 15).

These early constructs of Indigenous leadership were often based on European military and institutional paradigms as well as past colonial encounters with natives elsewhere. There was a yearning amongst British settlers and observers for visible structures of government, clear hierarchies of power and authority, plus written laws. The assumptions and biases of social evolutionist perspectives that emerged from the colonial era were further developed within public policy and anthropological thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. A summary of these chronological views is given in Table 9.1.^[7]

NB: When the date of observation/description differs from that of publication it is noted in square brackets.

This summary suggests that major shifts in perspectives on Indigenous leadership have occurred at key periods of Australian history. Nineteenth century reports on Indigenous leadership favoured a social evolutionist approach, whilst during the early twentieth century, research began to be informed by the functionalist and structuralist approaches of British anthropology. More recent field-based research has drawn more widely from political science, political economy, and French structuralism, in order to yield more detailed knowledge of the complexity of Indigenous leadership in its local variations.

This more recent literature (see Table 9.1) can be summarised as proposing that Indigenous leadership in Australia has the following characteristics:

Unlike the issues of Indigenous land ownership, territoriality, kinship models and religious life, there does not seem to have been a progression from these useful insights, towards a more cohesive theoretical analysis that illuminates the historical and contemporary conditions, workings and transformations of Indigenous leadership in the inter-cultural context.

Much of the research evidence so far has been developed by anthropologists and others observing specific groups in various areas of Australia. A key related challenge is whether such evidence can be generally applied across the whole of Australia, and whether regionalism and other cultural factors make for influential similarities and differences in the conditions and enactment of leadership.