The Native Police of Queensland

© 2008 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

History Compass 6/4 (2008): 1024–1036, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00536.x

The Native Police of Queensland

Jonathan Richards*Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

AbstractThe European colonisation of Queensland largely depended on the armed andmounted men of the Native Police – a brutal force which killed many Indigenouspeople on the frontier. Detachments of mounted Aboriginal troopers led byEuropean officers would surround Aboriginal camps and fire into them at dawn,killing men, women and children. The bodies were often burned to destroy theevidence.

Jonathan Richards has spent many years researching this controversial anddistressing subject, finding his way through the secrecy, misinformation andsupposed ‘lost’ files. In this article, based on the first comprehensive study of theforce’s history in Queensland, he argues that the Native Police was a classicexample of ‘divide and rule’ practices. This colonising tactic, successfully used bythe British and other imperial powers, was approved by government and by mostEuropean settlers.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most European powers createdvast colonial empires by annexing land or conquering local rulers. Sometimes,Indigenous people helped colonisation succeed by serving their newmasters. Amidst the turmoil and terror of Europe’s expanding greed forland and resources, some – anxious to survive – served in colonial armiesand police forces. Indigenous soldiers, especially in the settler-colonies ofAustralia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States,were called ‘Native Regiments’ or ‘Native Police’.

These so-called ‘Irregular’ or ‘Native Forces’ often had a reputation forsavagery and cruelty towards other Indigenous people. This was certainly thecase in colonial Queensland, where the officers and troopers of the NativePolice force were involved in the brutal deaths of a large number ofAboriginal people. Their specific task was the immediate suppression of anyIndigenous resistance to European colonisation. The killing of Aboriginaland Torres Strait Islander people in frontier Queensland was called ‘dispersal’.1

Sometimes a coroner saw the bodies, so records of the deaths werecreated. These coronial inquest records are one of the few pieces ofevidence about these ‘genocidal moments’ that have survived. Thecolonial inquest series is generally a good historical source, although

© 2008 The Author History Compass 6/4 (2008): 1024–1036, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2008.00536.xJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

The Native Police of Queensland 1025

records from some towns and districts are scanty. However, the realities offrontier record keeping were as imperfect as the difficulties of colonialpolicing. Many Indigenous deaths were simply not recorded.

Violence against Indigenous people during the colonisation of Australiais a subject that many prefer not to confront. Generally, education, mediaand politicians have encouraged Australians to believe that there was noviolence during the frontier period. This blinkered attitude means thestudy of violence against Indigenous people, which has been ignored andneglected in the past, continues to be seen as irrelevant and not worthcloser examination.

Indigenous people are now a minority in their own country, just asthey are in former other settler-colonies (Canada, New Zealand and theUnited States). Their experience of colonisation often remains hidden.Similarly, the contribution made by some Aboriginal and Torres StraitIslander people to European expansion is not discussed. This means thereal story of the Native Police has not been told to date.

The killings, and the history of the Native Police in Queensland, showsthat the differences between colonial policing and military actions wereextremely blurred. This fact is significant because it contributes to whathistorians in recent years have come to recognise as a complete history ofpolicing in the English-speaking world, including the self-governingcolony of Queensland, proclaimed in 1859. At one extreme, London, andlater the English counties, accepted police so long as they were not likea military force – at the other, mounted and armed forces – ‘soldier-police’ – were imposed without hesitation. The Native Police of Queenslandwas one such armed and mounted colonial force.

European officers led detachments of about six or eight Aboriginaltroopers. Each man had his own horse, gun and uniform, and was paid afew pennies per week. Most of the time, detachments were out on patrol,looking for any news or signs of Indigenous resistance. When an attackof any form was made on settlers, the Native Police responded by trackingthe Aboriginal people to their camps. Once they had been located, thetroopers surrounded the camp, firing their rifles into the sleeping peopleat dawn. The bodies were usually burnt to cover up the killings.

The Frontier Death Toll

A close investigation of Native Police activities invariably leads to thesubjects of frontier violence and genocide. The force, which came intoexistence in a context of aggressive colonial expansion, was one of the majorcauses of Indigenous deaths in frontier Queensland. Killing and revengeparties organised by private settlers may have killed as many or even moreIndigenous people, but fewer records of such episodes have survived.

General estimates and reports on racial violence on colonial frontiersare mostly unreliable, so can we find numbers of Native Police killings in

1026 The Native Police of Queensland


scattered reports and newspaper stories that corroborate each other?Accuracy demands close and careful scrutiny of all sources. From therecords, how many settlers did Aboriginal people kill? The interest in thispart of Australian history arises from the absence of records, and theunreliability of those one-sided accounts that have survived.

How many people died on the Queensland frontier? We only have oneside of the story, and even then, not all the records have survived. Mostimportantly, some official records are unreliable. However, there havebeen attempts to calculate the number. At first, historian Henry Reynoldsthought that well over 5,000 Aboriginal people died on the actual ‘frontier’;throughout Queensland, he said, more than 10,000 deaths were likely.2

Other historians agree, with more than 4,000 violent Indigenous deathsin North Queensland between 1861 and 1896 documented by Reynold’scolleague Noel Loos.3 No equivalent study for Central and SouthernQueensland has been completed to date.

Both historians agreed that about 800 to 850 Europeans died on theQueensland frontier between 1840 and 1900. Reynolds estimatedAboriginal deaths by assuming a ratio of ten Aboriginal people for eachEuropean. On this basis, he claimed at least 10,000 Aboriginal deaths infrontier Queensland.4 Regardless of the death count, large numbers ofIndigenous people were killed in Queensland.

The figures quoted by Loos, and by Reynolds, include deaths that wererecorded in some official documents and those which were only reportedin the newspapers. Historian Richard Broome, who says ‘violence was amarker of the Australian frontier’, estimates that fewer than 1,500 Euro-peans but over 20,000 Aboriginal people died throughout the frontiers ofcolonial Australia.5 Broome warned readers about the exaggeration ofmassacres and the unquestioning acceptance of colonial gossip, whichboth boosted numbers. This is a vital point, as many deaths noted in thenewspapers are completely unsupported by any form of corroboration, orby official records such as inquests. It is also possible that some settlerdeaths were never reported for fear of frightening potential residents.

However, there were other factors at work here as well. The survivingrecords in Queensland show that in some cases the Native Police detach-ments targeted certain groups – young men, who were potential combatants;and old people, who as keepers of traditional law and protectors of tribalculture and sacred country, could ‘sing’ death on these strangers in policeuniforms. Neutralising the young stopped new generations of resistancefighters being born. Killing old people meant the generational transmissionof language and knowledge, central elements of Indigenous culture, wasinterrupted.

Settlers always justified colonisation, prompting newspaper editors andletter-writers to claim that settlers had to ‘exterminate’ Aboriginal peopleif they wanted to hold the country. One letter to the editor of TheQueenslander, published on 31 March 1866, stated: ‘a war of extermination



is the only policy to pursue, the alternative being an abandonment of thecountry, which no sane man will advocate for an instant’. ‘Birralee’ wrotein The Queenslander on 5 June 1880, claiming there were only two coursesopen to colonists: ‘either to abandon our property, or to fight it out tothe bitter end in a war of wholesale extermination’.

Control of the Native Police and the Chain of Command

The men who supervised the Native Police and the men who led thedetachments were the only European members of the force. They filledboth commissioned (Sub-Inspectors, Inspectors, Commissioners) andnon-commissioned ranks (Constables and Sergeants). The chain of commandwas simple: Inspectors passed orders to the Acting Sub-Inspectors,Sub-Inspectors and Constables.6 Constables and Sub-Inspectors answeredto Inspectors, who in turn forwarded their reports and requests to theCommissioner of Police.

The records clearly show that the Native Police in Queensland operatedunder the direct control of the Executive Council – the colony’s mostsenior administrators. The Governor, with the Colonial Secretary andother senior Ministers, decided where to deploy the Native Police, whoto appoint and which officers to dismiss, but there is no evidence that anymembers of the Executive or of the Legislature, the best-informed peoplein the colony, ever took responsibility for frontier violence. Studying thehistory of the Native Police allows insights into colonial life: the movementof men in and out of the Native Police suggests that the force (and itsactivities) was not a secret, but rather a normal part of government.

Like other colonial and frontier security forces, the Native Police wasloosely modelled on the Irish Constabulary. The force operated within atight budget that failed to attract, train or hold the best officers, but somemen had lengthy careers in the force. Other officers transferred from theNative Police to other government departments after they discovered thejob was one they did not particularly enjoy.

The removal of officers from the force for using ‘excessive violence’against Aboriginal people suggests the Commissioner or the Governmentor both had intermittent reservations about the force’s activities. Thoseindividuals dismissed were usually not charged with any criminal offence,despite clear evidence against them. Rather, Queensland’s first PoliceCommissioner, David Seymour, (probably with the consent of thegovernment) tried to keep matters out of the public gaze. In fact, thecommissioner appears to have sometimes misled the government concerningthe force’s activities, its strength and officers’ misbehaviour. In public,Seymour denied criticisms about the Native Police but he may haveprivately been embarrassed or repulsed by what he heard.

Seymour was unable, throughout his thirty-two-year career as commis-sioner, to make any major changes in the Native Police or frontier policing



tactics in Queensland. Caught between the liberal rhetoric of urbanpoliticians and the harsh realities of the frontier, he could do little morethan hope that all the men under his command would remember theconstant need for discretion and circumspection as they went about their‘special duties’.

Inter-Colonial Comparisons

By the time Queensland became a British self-governing colony in 1859,the use of armed Indigenous forces was a well-established colonial practicethroughout the British Empire. The same problems (recruiting, disciplineand loyalty) that plagued colonisers across the empire also worriedQueensland colonial officials. Records clearly show that finding sufficientAboriginal recruits and retaining them were perennial problems for NativePolice officers. Supplying rations and other stores were also constantissues. The force’s cost was always contentious, and some taxpayersdamned it as an unnecessary drain on the public purse.

Queensland settlers used the Native Police for the same reasons thatIndigenous soldiers were used in other colonies. There were shortages ofskilled and experienced Europeans in many colonial situations, andQueenslanders, like other colonisers, often complained about the labourshortage. The Bishop of Sydney, sending ‘A Warning to the Destroyer ofAborigines’ in The Queenslander of 15 September 1866, said: ‘If we hadknown how useful these blackfellows could be, we should not have shotso many of them’.

Indigenous men were able to operate in difficult conditions such astropical swamps and impenetrable scrub generally considered ‘impossible’for Europeans to traverse. The exceptional tracking skills of most Indigenouspeople were also deemed ‘useful’. Most importantly, Native forces couldbe used for tasks that Europeans ‘might feel squeamish about’, especiallythe violent suppression of Indigenous resistance.7 Native troops and policewere usually preferred to Europeans in most colonies because they hadmuch lower death and disease rates than Europeans (especially in thetropics). They could also usually understand or speak local languages anddialects, another useful attribute. Finally, they cost colonisers less thanEuropeans.

Native forces enjoyed a reputation as fearless and determined warriors.According to one English officer, ‘irregular [i.e. Indigenous] warriorspossess the cunning which their mode of life engenders’.8 Officials knewthat Native recruits became exceptionally fierce when they were fightingother Indigenous communities. Particular Native groups, identified as‘martial races’, were preferred as recruits. However, throughout the colonialworld, the recruiting, training and arming of Indigenous soldiers or policewas only tolerated by settlers when they were satisfied that such practicesoffered no major threat to their own expansion and progress.



Armed Indigenous units were deployed throughout the various Europeanempires, to counter local resistance to colonisation, and to advance imperialambitions. The British managed to conquer and hold India with theassistance of large, locally recruited Sepoy armies, while in Ceylon (nowSri Lanka) mercenaries were used. In the Caribbean, former slaves wererecruited for the West Indian Regiments, which served as garrison forcesthere and in West Africa. As well, Japan, an expansionist power thatadapted the practices of European empires, used Native police in Taiwanand its other Pacific territories, beginning in the 1890s.

Other colonial policing arrangements, and their influence on theNative Police, are worth briefly considering. Queensland’s first Governor,Sir George Bowen, named several colonial forces in his Despatches to theSecretary of State for Colonies as models for the Native Police. Accordingto Bowen, the Native Police were protecting the margins of the Empireand contributing to the expansion of British domains. In an 1861 ExecutiveCouncil Minute on ‘Imperial Defence’, Bowen said the force was

a contribution towards the general defence of the Empire, since the inlandboundary of Queensland is the boundary also of the Empire, which it isnecessary to protect from the numerous and hostile savages of this portion ofAustralia.9

He compared the Native Police with other similar units, the Malay Corpsin Ceylon, the Cape Regiment in the Cape Colony (South Africa) andthe Native units of the Indian army.

Bowen’s awareness of these contemporary units shows how colonialadministrators thought about their jurisdictions in relation to other partsof the empire. They were aware of practices throughout an emergingworld empire because the empire was itself a textbook for oppression.Each force mentioned is worth closer examination, as they provide uswith an understanding of how the operations and evolution of the NativePolice in Queensland matched those in other colonial settings. Bowen’sletter clearly shows that the Native Police was not unique.

Native armed forces used by the British in Ceylon evolved from unitsthat first fought under the Dutch. Malay soldiers, originally recruited fromthe islands of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), were taken toCeylon and absorbed into the British Army when the Dutch surrenderedthe island in 1796. The use of armed Native forces during the earlydecades of the nineteenth century firmly established new tactics andpolicies.

The Malay Corps (formed in 1802) and later renamed the Ceylon RifleRegiment, shared many characteristics with the Native Police of Queensland.Both forces depended on men recruited from outside the areas they‘policed’ or ‘pacified’. They also used similar tactics. In Ceylon, mounteddetachments were sent to the island’s highland interior, where they madefrequent patrols to destroy resources and terrify the Singhalese. They



burned villages, destroyed crops and drove cattle away. The British quicklyrealised that local knowledge was the key to success, and one officerreported the only way to defeat the Kandyans ‘requires the aid of theircountrymen’.10 Malay Corps soldiers helped the British to defeat theKingdom of Kandy in 1815 and many former members of the force laterjoined the Ceylon Police.

From 1804, British officials in Africa and India sent mercenaries whenconventional military forces seemed incapable of securing Ceylon. TheKaffir Corps, composed of armed and mounted African soldiers, conducteda campaign of terror and destruction against the Singhalese until it wasdisbanded in 1825. When difficulties arose in securing Malay recruits fromSoutheast Asia, British officials briefly considered using Africans from theCape Colony (South Africa).

In South Africa, members of an African pastoralist group called theKhoekhoe, but known by Europeans as the ‘Hottentots’ (and, morerecently, as the ‘Cape Coloured People’), lived in the territory called byEuropeans the Cape Colony. The Dutch and the British recruited themas soldiers. The Corps Bastard Hottentotten, composed of 400 Khoekhoeand ‘Bastards’ (people of mixed race origins), was led by two Europeanofficers. Formed in 1781, it was disbanded soon afterwards. A secondformation, the Pandour Corps, was established in 1793. These two unitswere the precursors to the Cape Regiment, formed by the British in 1806and later renamed the Cape Mounted Rifles. Khoekhoe men joined theCape Regiment from 1806, and then the Cape Mounted Rifles. Thisformation fought in a number of frontier clashes until disbanded in 1870.

At the Cape, not all settlers were happy with the use of Native forces,and settlers’ anxieties were aroused in 1851 when deserters from the CapeRifles joined other Hottentots in an abortive rebellion. At the time,Britain was at war with the ‘Kaffirs’, described as ‘experts in guerillawarfare’.11 Only Native forces that could be trusted were wanted. As inQueensland, settlers held grave fears about the risks of an armed Indigenousforce turning against its colonial masters. The British continued to useNative Police in southern colonies of Africa for a further century, butcolonial authorities took colonists’ concerns seriously and limited theMounted Rifles’ powers of arrest, located their barracks on the edges oftowns, and ensured that Black troopers and constables only policed otherAfricans. Queensland adopted many of the same restrictions on Nativearmed forces for the operations of its Native Police.

The widespread use of Native troops or sepoys in India meant thatsmall numbers of British troops were able to control most of the subcon-tinent. Native forces defended the boundaries and enforced colonial lawand order throughout India during the nineteenth century. In 1857, theEast India Company employed 238,000 Indian soldiers. The Britishgovernment, which took over the company’s army and reorganised it afterthe 1857 Mutiny, continued to rely heavily on loyal Indigenous forces.



Native Police Operations

Colonists everywhere despaired when Native soldiers or police were notloyal. Desertion was the greatest problem facing the Native Police inQueensland, and records of the high rate of desertions by recruits suggestthat many new Aboriginal troopers soon understood what their jobsentailed, and changed their minds about serving with the force. Someprobably left because of the cruel and violent treatment they were forcedto endure at the hands of some officers: troopers were beaten or whippedby officers; some were shot.

Some districts in the colony were known as good places to find newrecruits for the force. A newspaper item about Native Police recruiting atMaryborough, published in The Queenslander on 2 March 1872, reportedthat a trooper ‘acting as a recruiting sergeant’ had persuaded eight localyouths to join the Native Police and ‘disperse their countrymen in theNorthern swamps and scrubs’. The writer, who claimed the recruits were‘evidently proud of their dark blue jackets, military caps and striped trousers’,also bragged: ‘we have always heard in the West that the Wide Bay boysmade very smart and serviceable troopers’.

In 1873, the Queensland government started approving remissions ofsentences for Aboriginal prisoners who agreed to become Native Policetroopers. This continued during the 1880s, despite the fact that some ofthem were serving long prison terms for committing violent crimes, oftenagainst other Indigenous people. This was a standard practice in othercolonies, where ‘volunteers’ were sometimes given a choice by a localmagistrate – go to jail or join the colony’s armed forces. It seems that fewsettlers in Queensland knew about this practice.

For Aboriginal troopers, service in the Native Police was dominated byissues such as rations, pay and access to Aboriginal women, although thegovernment was only actually concerned about the first two. Trooper’spay was a particularly sensitive issue, illustrated by Executive Councildecisions in 1862 to reduce and then restore their daily wage of five penceper day. Officers, fearing mass-desertions, complained of dissatisfactionamong the troopers, noting that ‘desertions would not only harm theforce’:

Desertion will eventually prove a serious evil to the community, as it is awell-ascertained fact that discharged or absconding troopers by their knowledgeof firearms and acquaintance with the movements of the force can do muchmischief when associated with the wild blacks.12

The issue of runaway troopers was a major problem with seriousimplications.

Public attitudes towards troopers ranged from those who thought theywere wasteful and grossly inefficient to others who saw them as treacherousand highly dangerous. Only a few defended the actions of the NativePolice. One was pastoralist Phillip Sellheim, who thought ‘all blacks were



dangerous’. ‘Only squatters are competent to judge of the efficiency ofthat much maligned force’, he said in a letter to the Moreton Bay Courierof 16 February 1861.

Some colonists, who criticised the force as ‘inefficient’, claimed that‘the troopers’ only real talent lay in the rapid consumption of expensiverations’, and that ‘the blacks would fear a small detachment of armedwomen much more than the aboriginal army of Her Majesty’.13 Othersettlers agreed, with a letter ‘The inutility of the Native Police’ from ‘Onewho has seen too much of the Native Police’ published in the MoretonBay Courier of 17 January 1861. ‘One who has seen too much’ said theforce was ‘inefficient in itself as a protection to the settler, but entails evengreater risk from the rascality of those half-civilized natives, called bycourtesy – policemen. They appear obedient to no command and capableof any atrocity’.

Some colonists, declaring they were satisfied with the force, commentedon its ‘success’. Catholic scientist and author Julian Tenison-Woods wentwith Sub-Inspector Carr and six troopers from the Barron River barracksto a camp of ‘wild blacks’ at False Cape near Cairns. In his letter ‘A Daywith the Myalls’, published in both the Brisbane Courier and The Queens-lander on 25 February 1882, Tenison-Woods described the troopers as ‘asplendid set of fellows’. When the party landed, the troopers ‘divestedthemselves of everything except their shirts and foraging caps’, and hesaid, ‘I cannot convey to my readers what a martial and yet wild appearancethese men had’. Empire, ideology, masculinity and race collided on thebeach before his eyes. His remarks could have applied to other colonialarmed forces at the time.

Discipline and control over the Native Police detachments was not soclear. Service in the force was supposed to be controlled by strict regulations,published in the Queensland Government Gazette. However there weredifferent, ‘practical’ rules for the men in the field. The troopers operatedunder some rough rules of engagement that meant they were supposed toshout a warning before firing at Aboriginal people. They did not alwayscomply with this regulation. Another rule, intended to ensure that thedetachments were free from any form of local control, was also notconsistently obeyed. Native Police Regulation 11 stated:

The officers are not to allow any person unconnected with the Native PoliceForce to interfere with or accompany them, or give orders to any of thetroopers under their command.14

This rule, evidently designed to prevent the public from knowing aboutNative Police tactics, and to deter squatters from riding with thedetachments, or giving them directions. The existence of the force wasallowed to be public knowledge, but the actual violence was not.

It was generally understood that the force was to be used only againstAboriginal people, but very occasionally, troopers were used against



Europeans and others on the Queensland frontier. In 1864, LieutenantHenry Browne’s detachment helped arrest notorious bushranger (outlaw)Frank Gardiner at Apis Creek near Rockhampton.15 Inspector FrederickWheeler ‘volunteered his assistance’ by ‘surrounding the North RoadHotel with his troopers’ when bushrangers held up the Condamine mailfor a second time in 1865.16 It is unclear what they achieved. In 1868,Sub-Inspector Frederick Murray reported that his detachment went fromthe Conway barracks near Proserpine in pursuit of three or four Melanesians(South Sea Islanders) suspected of having killed two Europeans.17 Thetroopers ‘came up with them’, returned fire when shot at, and later foundthe body of one Melanesian man. The death of this man, Murray said,‘was caused by a gunshot wound received in the affray with the troopers’.

Many popular authors and writers blamed the troopers for the force’sviolent reputation during the nineteenth and early parts of the twentiethcenturies. This denial continues to the present day, with some writerscontinuing to blame the troopers for the force’s brutality. Another popularmisconception concerns the end of the Native Police. As Queenslandemerged from the frontier period, liberal politicians, calling for an end tothe force, took control of Parliament. However, Police CommissionerWilliam Parry-Okeden (who replaced Seymour in 1895) recommendedthe Native Police continue operations in the colony’s northern districts.His proposal was accepted, and although the number of detachments hadfallen dramatically from the mid-1880s, several stations remained active inCape York Peninsula until the start of the Great War in 1914. Contraryto popular belief, the force was never officially ‘disbanded’, but rathergradually disappeared as each Native Police camp was closed.

What the records show is a force typified by cheap, expedient, riskyconduct. Police officers and members of the public sometimes voicedtheir discomfort with the troopers, and some blamed them for theviolence attributed to the Native Police. The expectations of colonistsabout the Native Police were always uncertain and sometimes misguidedbecause the prospect of Aboriginal troopers turning against their colonialmasters was seen as the ultimate frontier nightmare.

One of the most important disciplinary issues that officers had to dealwith was the interaction between troopers and Aboriginal women. Thereis clear evidence that troopers (and some officers) seduced, kidnapped,raped and abandoned (or killed) Indigenous women throughout Queensland.Troopers sometimes took woman who survived Native Police attacks asbooty and as partners. Many of the first group were probably killed orreleased once the troopers had satisfied their lust, but the women in thesecond group were different because they probably saw the troopers ashusbands. These women, some of whom appear to have formed stable,long-term relationships with troopers, are usually referred to in therecords by the derogatory term ‘gins’. Some Native Police officers allowedwomen to accompany their troopers on deployment to northern and



western parts of Queensland, but other government officials condemnedthe practice as bad for discipline. Towards the end of the Native Policeera, married men were preferred, and single troopers were not wanted.

Records show that the detachments often captured Aboriginal women.In 1878, Sub-Inspector Alexander Douglas reported his troopers captureda ‘half-caste gin, about 14 or 15 years old’ while patrolling on the MossmanRiver and kept her overnight in camp.18 Douglas said he released her nextmorning with a message to her tribe, saying that ‘the police had nointention to disturb or interfere with them, so long as they did not spearhorses or cattle’. We do not know how the troopers treated her duringher night in camp. White officers kept quiet or told ‘stories’ about thesexual relations between the men of all ranks and Aboriginal women. Thisepisode appears to highlight another dimension since it implies that officerscaptured women for hostage purposes: the troopers had different motivations.

The incidents involving women and the mass-desertions reveal tensionssurrounding the role of the Native Police on Queensland’s frontiers. As acheap bush force, the Native Police was an attractive solution to colonisers’difficulties with Indigenous resistance, but the desertions and the troopers’unreliability also served the aggression of some squatters. Troopers couldput a shiver of fear down the spine of the very people who found theforce such a convenient instrument. The fact was that the Native Policewas neither perfectly convenient nor a perfect instrument. Its relationswith local Aboriginal women and the substantial desertions made itinconvenient, disruptive and nearly always dangerous.

Some colonists blamed the colonial government for the sins of the troopers.‘Humanity’ wrote to the Cooktown papers in 1880, saying: ‘The ravishingof gins, the stealing of children and wholesale slaughter of the savages bythese half-civilised demons’, are ‘indirectly and directly encouraged by whiteofficials and Government patronage’.19 The writer suggested disbandinghalf the Native Police, ‘who are merely hewers of wood, carriers of water,boot-blacks, grooms, and general household servants for Governmentofficials’. However, many colonists rejected ‘Humanity’s’ attitude.

The troopers’ experiences of life in the Native Police went unrecorded,so we still lack good insights into Indigenous service with the force.Nobody bothered asking the Aboriginal people involved what theythought of the activities they were expected to participate in, just asnobody stopped to consider how Indigenous people felt about beingforcibly removed from their own country and kin. As the Europeanannexation proceeded, many Aboriginal people were forced to witness thecollapse of their own languages and cultures, while uniformed ‘strangers’made sure none of them resisted.

Carrying out ‘Dispersals’ – the killing of Aboriginal people – was aterm that gained special significance in colonial Queensland. It was therationale – the core business, as it were – of the Native Police. They werenot alone, because, as colonialism washed across Australia, racial violence



took place all along the frontier. Indeed, violence and terror against Indig-enous people were central components of European imperialism, everywhere.One hundred years later, historians, writers and politicians, arguing aboutthe extent of the violence, fought their own battles in the ‘History Wars’.Despite the evidence, some people in 21st-century Australia still do notaccept that large numbers of Indigenous people were killed in frontierclashes during the British annexation of the continent. Records prove thatperception completely wrong.

Short biography

Jonathan Richards lives in Brisbane, Australia, and has spent many yearstravelling and researching throughout Queensland. He holds degrees inAustralian Studies and history, and was awarded a Doctorate in 2005. Hisresearch work on behalf of Indigenous people is ongoing. Jonathan is alsoan adjunct Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas,Griffith University.

Notes

* Correspondence address: Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, Nathan Campus, Griffith University,170 Kessels Road, Nathan, Brisbane, Queensland 4111, Australia. Email: [email protected].

1 Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police (Brisbane:University of Queensland Press, 2008).2 Henry Reynolds, ‘Violence, the Aboriginals and the Australian Historian’, Meanjin, 31/4(1972): 475; Reynolds, ‘Racial Violence in North Queensland’, in B. J. Dalton (ed.), Lectureson North Queensland History Second Series (Townsville: James Cook University, 1975), 22.3 Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance: Aboriginal-European Relations on the North Queensland Frontier1861–1897 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1982), 190.4 Henry Reynolds, ‘The Unrecorded Battlefields of Queensland’, in Henry Reynolds (ed.),Race Relations in North Queensland (Townsville: James Cook University, 1993), 41.5 Richard Broome, ‘The Statistics of Frontier Conflict’, in Bain Attwood and S. G. Foster (eds.),Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003), 1.6 Constables and sergeants were often in charge of Native Police camps from the 1870s, and incharge of bush patrols in North Queensland from the 1880s.7 V. G. Kiernan, Colonial Empires and Armies, 1815–1960 (Stroud/Gloucestershire: SuttonPublishing, 1998), 161.8 Colonel C. E. Callwell quoted in V. G. (Victor) Kiernan, From Conquest to Collapse: EuropeanEmpires from 1815 to 1960 (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1982), 158.9 ‘Imperial Defence’, Executive Council Minute (7 January 1861), EXE/E3, minute 1 of 1861.10 Cited in Colvin De Silva, Ceylon under the British Occupation, 1795–1833 (New Delhi:Navrang, 1995), 186.11 Robert Giddings, Imperial Echoes: Eye-Witness Accounts of Victoria’s Little Wars (London: LeoCooper, 1996), 146.12 ‘Troopers pay’ (6 August 1862), Executive Council Minute, EXE/E6, minute 34 of 1863.13 ‘Upper Dawson News’, Darling Downs Gazette, 29 July 1859.14 ‘Native Police Regulations’, Queensland Government Gazette, 10 March 1866.15 The Courier, 14 March 1864; The Illustrated Sydney News, 16 July 1864.16 Brisbane Courier, 15 June 1865.



17 Inquest into the death of Lahalowe (a South Sea Islander), JUS/N19, inquest 173 of 1868.For details on the employment of Melanesian labourers in Queensland sugar plantations, seeClive Moore, Jacqueline Leckie and Doug Munro (eds.), Labour in the South Pacific (Townsville:James Cook University of North Queensland, 1990).18 The Queenslander, 12 January 1878.19 Reprinted from the Cooktown Courier, The Queenslander, 1 May 1880, 562.

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Reynolds, Henry, ‘Violence, the Aboriginals and the Australian Historian’, Meanjin, 31/4(1972): 471–77.

Reynolds, Henry, ‘Racial Violence in North Queensland’, in B. J. Dalton (ed.), Lectures onNorth Queensland History Second Series (Townsville: James Cook University, 1975), 21–9.

Reynolds, Henry, ‘The Unrecorded Battlefields of Queensland’, in Henry Reynolds (ed.), RaceRelations in North Queensland (Townsville: James Cook University, 1993), 40–62.

Richards, Jonathan, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police (Brisbane:University of Queensland Press, 2008).

Documents

The Native Police of Queensland