Queensland Native Mounted Police: Destroy the Evidence

I just want to give a quick overview of what exactly the Frontier Conflict in Australia was. Aboriginal people had been living in Australia for more than 65 000 years. A part of this existence was using sustainable farming methods to live off the land. If you want more information about this, I highly recommend Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu, or if you are short on time, watch his Ted Talk from 2018.

When the pastoralists came, (a pastoralist is a kind of cattle or sheep farmer) they brought with them two things that were detrimental to the First Australians. One, fences that cut them off from the land and resources they had been surviving from for millennia, and two, animals with hooves that are destructive the natural food resources, plus these animals drank from and their poop contaminated their sacred life-giving water sources.

Aboriginal Australians had a deep connection to Country, they did not own the land, that land owned them. I imagine this concept of owning the land was so strange that they initially assumed the foreign invaders would go back to where they came from. But this was not the case, and so the Frontier Conflicts began. If you want to see a visual, check out Lyndall Ryan’s Colonial Frontiers Massacres map  it shows just how pervasive the massacres were. The interactive map shows both massacres by colonisers and by Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders, and for each site, you can see what sources were used to document the massacre and how strong the corroborating evidence was. There are disproportionately more Aboriginals killed by whites.

One of the issues with evidence from this time, it that the evidence is ALL from the coloniser’s perspective, so it is difficult to find a primary source that is an Aboriginal perspective. Most of the Aboriginal perspective we have now has been passed on through oral history. Another issue is that writers would use euphemisms, or more polite and acceptable phrases, to speak about the massacres in the more secretive way. Common coded phrases for killing were, “Land Clearing”, “expeditions”, Hunting parties” and “dispersal”.

But I want to emphasise that this was not a one-sided fight, there were many Aboriginal warriors who struck fear in the hearts of the settlers. Dundalli was a fierce defender of the country from the Brisbane region, Libby Connors has a fantastic book called Warrior about his life, and the Kalkadoon warriors from outback Queensland fought heroically.

I have barely scratched the surface of the Frontier Conflict, there are so any stories to tell, in fact if you want to go extremely deep into the topic, listen to the Frontier Wars Stories Podcast.

However, I want to talk about how the Queensland government decided to deal with the ongoing conflict. They created the Native Mounted Police to do their dirty work.

Who were the Native Mounted Police and what exactly did they do? The Native Mounted Police were a police force- and yes, I use force- not service as our current Police are called. It was made up of white officers who had under their command 5-8 Aboriginal Troopers. A prominent Australian Historian Henry Reynolds described them as “the most violent organisation in Australian history.” Their key job was to “disperse” the local Aboriginal population from Queensland, well at least the parts of Queensland that were viable economic opportunities for white pastoralists.

In an 1850 newspaper report a journalist explains, “The Native Police… went in pursuit of the blacks who have been committing aggressions among the cattle for the last three months. After following on their tracks for four days…the natives were dispersed with some loss, and I have no doubt, from the lessons taught them, that it will render the safety of this part of the country permanent.” It is clear that in the beginning there was support for what the Native Mounted Police were doing.

Often after the Aboriginal locals were killed, they would use different methods to dispose of the bodies in order to destroy the evidence that any killing actually occurred. Sometimes they might throw the bodies in a water hole, or sometimes they would burn the corpses, but not in a ceremonial respectful way. An article in an 1884 Brisbane Newspaper called “Alleged slaughter of Aborigines” tells the story of 2 escaped male prisoners, when the Native Police came across a tribal elder, two women and a 6-year old child, they were clubbed and shot for not telling them where the escapees were. “A fire was then made and the bodies thrown into it.” A local doctor went out to visit the scene, “but on arriving there and visiting the scene of the slaughter, not a vestige of human remains were visible, a large fire having been evidently built on them the previous night.”  This is one of the reasons that getting concrete numbers of the amount of Aboriginal people killed is so difficult. Firstly, because they were not counted as citizens on any census until 1967, secondly because of the euphemisms and secrecy behind the killings, official records were never made of many of the atrocities and finally because of the propensity of the Native Police to destroy the evidence.

In the previous article, you can see the shift in tone toward the slaughter of Aboriginal people. In fact, there was much debate in the newspapers about the legitimacy of this practice. In an 1880 letter to the editor, a local man wrote, “any wholesale massacre

of them such as is daily perpetrated is as unjust as it is horrible in the sight of God and man.”

Over the 50 odd year period from 1849 to 1904 that the Queensland Native Police operated, there were at least 150 police camps. And one of the things that the records have shown that these camps have in common is the lack of a jail or holding cell. This has implications that there were no arrests and trials as in a just law system, but instead they were subject to trial by bullet.

In terms of how and why these Aboriginal boys and men came to join the Police, there are oral testimonies that have been passed down through decedents that tell of experiences of forcible recruitment, threats against their family, kidnapping and coercion. A letter to the editor of the Brisbane Courier in 1880, tells an account of an aboriginal man “taken against his will from his wife” and that he would be kept in irons at night. They would also deliberately recruit men from parts of the country that they were not from. That way they would have no tribal affiliations with the people they were sent to kill.

So why did they need Aboriginal people for this job?  Firstly, there are economic reasons, to have Aboriginal troopers was cheap, they did not have to pay them the same rates as a white officer. I found an article in the Moreton Bay Courier form 1851 that outlined some of the wages at the time. A Lieutenant in the Native Police received ￡300 per year of which there was one in the Wide Bay area, 2 sergeants on ￡30 each per year and 24 troopers who were on threepence per day. In comparison it listed the wage of a turnkey- or jailer. They were on one shilling a day. It is confusing, I know, but a shilling is 4 times the amount of three pence. So, you could get 4 four black troopers for the same amount as one white jailer.

Another reason that Aboriginal troopers were invaluable was their tracking skills. They were much more skilled at hunting down other tribes.   William Strutt an early colonial artist and miner described Aboriginals in the following manner as ‘a useful set of men as could be found for special service; particularly tracking in the wild bush carrying dispatches, and they seemed to lend themselves wonderfully to military discipline, and as to their riding.. you could literally say that man and horse were one’. I do want to point out that even as far back as that 1800s that people were using the word “literally” in the wrong context- just in case you try and blame millennials for that. Jonathan Richard in his book The Secret War explains, “Indigenous men were able to operate in difficult conditions such as tropical swamps and impenetrable scrub generally considered impossible for Europeans.

There were more than 880 Aboriginal troopers who worked in the Queensland Native Police, and when you look at a list of their names, there are literally 100s of them who have the same name and very few are referred to as what their true name might have been. Because the records and letters that refer to them were written by white lieutenants and sergeants, most of the troopers have been given anglicised names and, in many cases, they would just recycle common names. For example, there were 7 Alberts, 20 Billys, surprisingly 3 called Bismarck, 14 Charlies, and I am not even past C yet, don’t get me started on the 19 Harrys, and the innumerable Jacks and Jimmys. This practice of naming, firstly makes the process of distinguishing the Aboriginal troopers from one another in the historical records an extremely difficult process, but it also reveals the cultural assimilation practices that were occurring at the time; Aboriginal people were expected to have a white name in order to work with and function within the society that the colonists had transposed onto the country.

There is so much more to this chapter in Queensland history including the stories of women and children who stayed at the camps, the prevalence of alcohol at the camps, the capture of Ned Kelly, the macabre naming of places- there is a place on the Sunshine Coast called Murdering Creek-  the opposition to the methods of the Mounted police and so much more than I  can’t possibly fit into this episode. But I do have a suggestion of where you can find out more

The Archaeology on the Frontier Blog, where I drew much of my research from and the Frontier Conflict website which is an online database of more than 16 000 sources and a record of all of the archaeological findings from Native Police Camp diga. I would like to give a big thank you from all Queensland History teachers to Lynley Wallis and Heather Burke. They are the archaeologists behind those most incredible online resources. It is such important work they have done and they have proven that incredibly important archaeology work doesn’t have to be in Egypt or Medieval Europe, but in Australia we have stories from the recent past that need to be dug up so we as a nation can acknowledge the wrongs of the past and not deny that atrocities occurred.