The idea of a self-regulating, self-reproducing native group also provided the government and business an economically expedient excuse for the use of Aboriginal men and women as a disposable labor pool. Although virtually every Aboriginal person would have had some form of contact with settlers by 1936, either directly or mediated by trade with neighboring groups, many northwestern, central, and western desert groups maintained some relative autonomy and some relative expressive difference (local language, dress, ritual practice) from white populations. Employers used these commonsense indexes of tribal function to justify their practice of paying Aboriginal laborers meager rations, arguing that a worker's extended Aboriginal family could forage for any extra provisions that might be needed during the work season and during periods when no work was available. Governments likewise justified paltry budgets for indigenous health, housing, and welfare by referring to the fantasy of the tribal function. Even when government compounds ("reservations") were established in the far north in the early 1940s, administrators envisioned them as serving as "refuges or sanctuaries of a temporary nature" where "the aboriginal may...continue his normal existence until the time is ripe for his further development." This all but free labor pool was critical to capital accumulation in the north, where profit margins were thin at best, especially during the global depression of the 1930s.

Traditional expressive culture was emerging as the ground of a very different type of symbolic and economic value. In 1930 the Northern Territory Times printed "A Plea for the Abo" in which it reported that the British Association for the Advancement of Science considered the "Australian aborigine as being among the most valuable living people for the scientific study of the early history of mankind." Christian ministers echoed the argument that "our aborigines are a national asset"; and this theological imprimatur was circulated in the national press. Aboriginal expressive culture (rather than Aboriginal people per se) slowly emerged as a national value, as something that belonged to the nation and thus merited federal protection. Although noting that the Commonwealth government had no constitutional authority to intervene in state indigenous policy, in the shadow cast by these reevaluations of indigenous worth, the Northern Territory Times called on the federal government to provide state and territory governments with trained anthropologists to study local people. In other articles, the Northern Territory Times called on ordinary settlers to provide their own ethnographic insights on the ways of "our Abo." Similar themes were sounded in short educational films such as Art of the Hunter.

Certified as world historic by such internationally recognized scholars as Freud and Durkheim and by esteemed institutions like the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Aboriginal culture lent Australia a symbolic value and luminosity. Anthropologists were not the only settler subjects converting this symbolic capital into economic capital. Two years after announcing the scientific value of Australian Aborigines, the Northern Territory Times ran a four-part series, "Smoke Signals from the Never-Never," reporting on the novel transformation of the rural economy from pastoralism to tourism. In the serialized articles, the emergent voicings of a global cultural tourist market can be heard: "Quite genuine old timers are neglecting the raising of stock or giving it second place in the great new industry of shewing [sic] sightseers round. . . . For a few sticks of tobacco stone age savages will doff the rags of civilization and perform weird rites in full panoply of feathers [s]tuck on with blood. Spears up-raised, they will charge madly down on the row of loaded -- cameras, and rejuvenated business men can take back irrefutable evidence of the tough time they had against the blacks."

Simultaneously an administrative technique and a fantasy of liberal appropriation, the Murray System promised a seamless and peaceful transition from a state of national economic, racial, and civilizational separation to a lucrative business of cultural commodification. As the frontier was absorbed in the nation, Aboriginal people and their customs would gradually lose their "wildness." No longer wild, Aboriginal men and women would longer be recognized as "more or less tribal." The full force of state law would then be extended in concert with the full benefits of citizenship and full panoply of business initiatives. Until that time, the more indigenous groups maintained the native customs that signified and were thought necessary to produce a self-regulating Aboriginal group the less state and private capital had to be expended to maintain and reproduce the Aboriginal labor critical to the appropriation of Aboriginal lands and resources. [pp. 127-129]