In the early 1970s, Australian governments began to treat Aborigines and Torres Strait Islander as 'peoples' with capacities for self - government. Forty years later, confidence in Indigenous self - determination has been eroded by accounts of Indigenous pathology, of misplaced policy optimism and of persistent socio - economic 'gaps'. In his new book, Tim Rowse accounts for this shift by arguing that Australian thinking about the 'Indigenous' is a continuing, unresolvable tussle between the idea of 'people' and the idea of 'population'. <i>In Rethinking Social Justice</i>, Rowse offers snapshots of moments in the last forty years in which we can see these tensions: between honouring the heritage and quantifying the disadvantage, between acknowledging colonisation's destruction and projecting Indigenous recovery from it. Rowse asks, not only 'Can a settler colonial state instruct the colonised in the arts of self - government?', but also, 'How could it justify doing anything less?'