School strikes for segregation: settler protests and First Nations access to education in Western Australia, Victoria and New South Wales

Australia led the world in passing legislation to establish free, secular and compulsory school systems. While school systems were not designed for the education of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, Aboriginal families participated in state school systems, nonetheless. In the early 1900s, as new land acts drove closer settlement, the dynamics in some rural areas, and state schools, shifted. Settler communities protested Aboriginal attendance, staging school strikes to pressure state education departments to exclude Aboriginal children. These departments, anxious to maintain the attendance of white children, responded by adapting school systems to allow the exclusion of Aboriginal students. This article examines how school strikes, carried out by white settler communities, were used to justify the systematic exclusion of Aboriginal children from government schools. It argues that examining how state education systems adapted to Aboriginal students and school strikes produces new understandings of the role of schooling in settler colonialism.