December 30.
“A Portrait of Australia With Important Bits Missing” by Glenn Loughrey
Targeting of groups
An armed instrument of colonial government
In Queensland the Native Police played a major role in the dispossession of Aboriginal people from their land, the almost complete destruction of Aboriginal law, and the disintegration of Aboriginal families. As a major instrument of colonial authority and order, the Native Police of Queensland were, for Aboriginal peoples, the symbol of Native policy, invasion and dispossession throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.
...Aboriginal people were never offered the same protection as European citizens...Of course, discrimination against the Aboriginal population was also common among other agents of colonial law and order, such as justices of the peace, stipendiary magistrates, and commissioners of Crown land. Technically, killing Aboriginal people was unlawful, but the police, the courts and the government did not act.
...Colonialism is inherently violent...The object of colonisation was the acquisition of land, minerals, timber and other resources and in Queensland the Native Police was an essential instrument of government policy in achieving this aim. ‘Aborigines are unnecessary to a capitalist Australia. The land they live upon may be required’. [1] There was a direct link between the legal recognition of the land grab by squatters and the development of specific forms of policing’. [2] The tactics used by the Native police were typical under the rules of frontier colonisation. It readily imposed a regime of terror, confusion and suffering on the enemy.
...[The Native Police] were a body of armed and mounted Aboriginal men led by European officers...Their specific task was the immediate and brutal suppression of any Indigenous resistance to European colonisation.
...The surviving records in Queensland show that in some cases the Native Police detachments targeted certain groups. Although the records don’t tell us everything, sometimes they reveal crucial details such as the age and gender of the victims. Inquest witnesses told of children and old people being killed. Young men were potential combatants, and old people as keepers of traditional law and protectors of tribal culture and sacred country, could sing death on these strangers in police uniform. Neutralising the young stopped new generations of resistance fighters being born. The killing of old people interrupted the generational transmission of language and knowledge, central to Indigenous culture.
[This police force’s] purpose was the protection of squatters’ lives and property in the aftermath of resistance by Aboriginal people to the taking of their traditional land.
Nonie Sharp, ‘Aboriginal Resistance’, Arena 35 (19740, 4.
Chris Cuneen, Conflict, Politics and Crime: Aboriginal Communities and the Police (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2001), 47.
Acknowledgment: Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2017 pp. 5, 8-11, 14-15, 182, 269 n.6, n.7.
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Aboriginals as “servile labour”.
Like colonisers with their projects everywhere, Queenslanders complained there was never enough servile labour. The frontier labour shortage was obliquely noted in 1866: ‘If we had known how useful these blackfellows could be, we should not have shot so many of them’, said the Bishop of Sydney, sending ‘A Warning to the Destroyer of Aborigines’ in the Queenslander of 15 September 1866.
Acknowledgment: Jonathan Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2017 p.124.