March 10.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Whose Law?
Willshire shot dead innumerable Aboriginal people
[The career of] William Willshire [10/3/1852 – 22/8/1925] was primarily played in the Northern Territory during the 1880s and 1890s, at a time when it was administered by South Australia. He commanded the Central Australian corps of Native Police, initially under South Australian and later under the Northern Territory administration, from its establishment in November 1884 until his arrest for murder in April 1891. [1] During this period...Aboriginal resistance to European incursions upon their land was at its height.
...Willshire is the representative of the law, working to make the country safe for the 'brave pioneers who push out the frontier, and are exposed to the full force of the naked barbarians'. [2] He is the hero of nascent national sentiment – the white Australian bushman – at a time when the bushman legend is still in its genesis and the nation is yet to be. By his own pen, Willshire represents himself as the hero of a frontier adventure narrative – and after his trial in 1891, he is its martyr. From his own story, he emerges as a larger-than-life character: self-aggrandizing, autocratic, contemptuous of bureaucratic form but devoted to duty, romantic and violent. By his own admission, Willshire shot dead innumerable Aboriginal people in the course of his patrols in the Interior. He was also an amateur ethnographer who compiled Aboriginal vocabularies, wrote with reasonable familiarity about Aboriginal cultural life, and regarded himself as a guardian, even at times a spiritual brother, of Aboriginal people. The two aspects of his history – his policing activities and his literary representations of them – are mutually reinforcing. Each serves to justify the other.
Throughout the 1880s, Willshire and his colleagues enjoyed an extraordinary autonomy on this isolated and fragile frontier.
Willshire was acquitted, much to the acclaim of his white supporters. A public subscription paid for his legal expenses.
William Henry Willshire, Land of the Dawning, W.K. Thomas & Co., Printers, Adelaide, 1896,pp.52-3
Acknowledgment: Amanda Nettlebeck & Robert Foster, In the Name of the Law – William Willshire and the Policing of the Australian Frontier, pp. 1-2, 185 n.1.
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In Melbourne [William] Cooper became more aware of the actions taken by groups of Aboriginal people throughout Australia. In November, 1926, for example, part-Aboriginal people in the north-west of Western Australia had formed a union 'in order to obtain the protection of the same laws that govern white men' because they were 'tired of being robbed and shot down, or run into miserable compounds'. [1] In the words of one Aboriginal activist, Norman Harris, the objective was to 'get a vote...also one law for us all, that is the same law that governs the whites, also justice and fair play". [2]
In March, 1928, a deputation led by William Harris of Morawa representing the 'Aboriginal Union' spoke with Premier Collier in Perth. Harris said that Aborigines of the southern part of the State did not want to be owned body and soul by the Department; that they objected to being herded into the Moore River reserve, which was a de facto prison; that they found it unjust that they were punished by white law, but not protected or given rights and freedoms under the same law. [3]
Sunday Times, 26 November, 1926.
West Australian, 10 March, 1928.
Ibid.
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, p. 619, p. 683 n. 34, n. 35, n. 36.