June 13.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
“Dispersal” = killing
Queensland’s Native police – their recruits, their officers and their brutal statistics
Although the idea of native police was tried out in many parts of Australia, it was in Queensland that the strategy had its most active – and therefore its most sinister – expression. Young Aboriginal men, typically from communities already damaged and lacking both hope and direction, were drafted into a paramilitary force. They were invariably sent to localities distant from their own. Uniformed and armed, they formed mounted contingents under the control of a white police officer. Each band was virtually a law unto itself. They were widely used to 'disperse' (slaughter) Aborigines who were causing trouble to settlers by spearing cattle or in other ways. The settlers knew that when they were called in, the 'problems' would disappear. Numerous cases have been recorded while many more were never reported at all.
To give just one example. D'Arcy Uhr was a Sub-Inspector of Police attached to the Queensland 'black force'. [1] Among his more notorious exploits were the massacre, in 1868 near Burketown, of approximately thirty Aboriginal people for spearing some horses, and a similar number in the same locality following the spearing of a man named Cameron. [2]
See article in South Australian Register, 10 September 1884.
Noel Loos, Invasion and resistance, 1982, p. 37
Acknowledgment: John Harris, One Blood, pp.482-483, 526 n.117., n.118.
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In June 1868, a report from Burketown emerged in the Queenslander and Port Denison Times detailing a 'dispersal' on local Aborigines performed in March that year by Sub-Inspector Wentworth D'Arcy Uhr (1845-1907). The crime for which these people was punished was, that they had 'speared and cut steaks from the rumps of several horses'. There was no mention of white casualties leading up to this attack, making it fairly safe to state that there were none. Yet no less than twenty-eight indigenous people were killed during one such 'dispersal'. Immediately following this event one white man, a certain Mr W. Cannon at Little & Hertze's station was indeed killed by the Indigenous people and so also a Mr R. Manson and a Chinaman. The reasons for these killings were not known, but it seems possible that it was a simple act of retaliation for the previous episode. Sub-Inspector Uhr then went out again but the Indigenous people were better prepared this time, so he managed to round up and 'disperse' only thirty-one indigenous people on three separate operations. The writer of this report added that:
Everybody in the district is delighted with the wholesale slaughter dealt out by the Native Police, and thank Mr Uhr for his energy in ridding the district of fifty-nine (59) myalls. [1]
The anonymous correspondent evidently did not entirely share this enthusiasm, he rather preferred to pass on some bragging he had picked up either from the officer or his troopers that 'one black...would not die after receiving eighteen or twenty bullets, but a trooper speedily put an end to his existence by smashing his skull'. There are no signs that an investigation was ever performed. The indicated ratio in human life, however, will in this case be something like 59:3. [2]
Queenslander 13 June 1868, p. 7e ('Carpentaria Column') & Brisbane Courier 16 June 1868, p. 2 c-d.
Port Denison Times 4 July 1868 p.3. Footnote from Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance, p. 257 n.27: P.D.T., 4 July 1868. from Burketown correspondent to the Brisbane Courier. Other newspapers reprinted this article e.g. Queenslander, 13 June 1868, 'Carpentaria'. The name 'Liddle' seems to be 'Little' in a letter which has been previously referred to.
Acknowledgment: Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited, pp. 51-52, n.87, n.88.