This essay considers the administration of the British Empire by focussing on a single administrator: Auber Octavius Neville and the Department of Native Affairs, in Western Australia. The extent to which this particular example of “administering” differs from better-known, more typical accounts is a reminder of the complex and varied experiences of colonial administration, and emphasises the heterogeneous nature of the Empire.

A.O. Neville's childhood was spent in Ford, England. He arrived in Western Australia in March 1897 at the age of twentytwo (Jacobs 25). In his published monograph, Neville constructs this move within the tradition of imperial adventure, as a response to the call of Empire inspired by the imperial heroes he admired as a child and on whom he later modelled his career:

Alongside his self-representation, this passage also reinforces a coherent, homogenous construction of Empire, with no distinction made between the African situation of Neville's role models and his own Western Australian context. In contrast to his own romantic representation of his career, the entry for A.O. Neville in the Australian Dictionary of Biography chronicles his rise through the ranks of the public service in Western Australia as a rather bureaucratic adventure.