Australian native police

In this letter, Brisbane outlines his desire to give "rewards to the natives who assisted in the police" and advised Morisset that he had "directed £50 subject to detailed accounts of its expenditure" to be at his disposal.

[18] In the 1830s, John Batman also used armed Aboriginal men from the Sydney region such as Pigeon and Tommy to assist in his roving parties to capture or kill indigenous Tasmanians.

Awabakal men such as Bob Barrett, Biraban and Jemmy Jackass would track down the runaways, disable them with spears or firearms, strip them and return them to the soldiers for payment of blankets, tobacco, clothing and corn.

These black constables, such as Jonathan and William, were involved in dispensing lethal summary justice to Aboriginal people accused of murdering a company employee,[22] and were also permitted to shoot armed runaway convicts.

There was a large punitive operation in late 1846 at the mouth of the Snowy River involving the forces being split into 3 groups to surround and engage Aboriginal people residing in the estuary area.

[5] In the late 1830s, Western Australia was in a similar situation as the eastern colonies in that the regular Mounted Police force were proving expensive and increasingly ineffectual in subduing resisting Aboriginal people.

John Nicol Drummond, a young man who had grown up amongst Aboriginal people in the areas of the Swan and Helena Valleys, was able to capture the perpetrator due to his knowledge of the local tribespeople.

This situation gave Drummond complete freedom to subdue the natives around Geraldton in whatever method he deemed appropriate and a massacre of Aboriginal people conducted by the police and armed stockholders at Bootenal swamp near Greenough was the result.

This force was consolidated and trained by Walker at Deniliquin before traveling to the Darling River where the first Aboriginal attack occurred 100 miles below Fort Bourke at a place called Moanna, resulting in at least 5 natives being killed by the troopers.

Marshall, with the native troopers and contingents of armed stockmen, conducted punitive raids at Tieryboo, Wallan, Booranga and Copranoranbilla Lagoon, shooting Aboriginal people and destroying their camps.

[6] In 1851, Commandant Walker with his newly appointed officers Richard Purvis Marshall, George Fulford, Doolan and Skelton conducted wide-ranging and frequent operations resulting in many dispersals and summary killings.

Dempster, having fallen sick, then allowed Johnson to take charge of his division and lead it to Yamboukal (modern-day Surat) where a lot of Mandandanji working peacefully on this pastoral station were subsequently killed.

For instance, in 1852, after the murder of an American worker at Deniliquin, Sergeant O'Halloran from Moulamein imported both native and White troopers from Victoria to shoot Aboriginal people as a collective punishment.

[88] At the same time, Commissioner for Crown Lands for the Albert District, G. M. Perry, had organised another six Native Police troopers based at Moorana, an administrative town that used to exist just west of Wentworth.

This was, at the time, the largest loss of life suffering by European settlers in conflicts on the Australian frontier and with the concurrent Indian Rebellion being brutally suppressed, the military response was merciless.

[6] In addition to the official government Native Police response, there were at least three other private militias formed in the Dawson River area to conduct wholesale killings of Aboriginal people.

[109] Danish-born Australian journalist and Indigenous rights advocate Carl Feilberg wrote many articles and editorials in the Brisbane Courier and The Queenslander decrying the government's policies towards its Aboriginal inhabitants, in particular the use of Native Police.

Aboriginal people from the Nogoa River area, near modern-day Emerald, attacked Horatio Wills' newly formed pastoral station, resulting in the deaths of nineteen white settlers.

One of the survivors, cricketer and Australian rules football founder Tom Wills, blamed the incident on Jesse Gregson, a local property manager who had previous to the attack went out and conducted a punitive mission with the aid of a detachment of Native Police under the command of A. M. G. Patrick against Aboriginal people in the area.

For example, in April 1864 the first surveying group to assess the future site of Townsville left Bowen with the armed protection of eight troopers under the command of Inspector John Marlow and sub-Inspector E. B. Kennedy.

[130] In May 1865, after leading a shooting raid upon a camp of Aboriginal people at Pearl Creek near the modern day town of Duaringa, Inspector Cecil Hill was assassinated in a surprise revenge attack.

[126] In 1872, in the far north of the colony sub-Inspectors Robert Arthur Johnstone and Richard Crompton undertook a sweeping search of Hinchinbrook Island and surrounding islets, in response to the alleged murders of two fishermen.

[146] Also that year, allegations that Johnstone conducted massacres along the coast north of Cardwell during reprisal raids for the killing of the captain of a shipwrecked vessel Maria were raised in parliament by the Queensland Premier Arthur Hunter Palmer, to which he emphatically denied.

[148] Johnstone and his troopers allegedly committed numerous massacres at various places along the coast following the killing of Whites at Green Island[149] and during the 1873 North Queensland exploratory expedition led by George Elphinstone Dalrymple.

[153][154][155] In 1875, sub-Inspector H. M. Chester even managed to lead his troops in a number of pillaging raids of native villages along the Fly River as part of Luigi D'Albertis' journey to the uncolonised southern New Guinea region.

Sub-Inspectors Alexander Douglas-Douglas, Aulaire Morisset, George Townsend, Lionel Tower, Tom Coward and Stanhope O'Connor amongst others, conducted regular "dispersals" throughout the 1870s at these sites.

We were very lucky the trackers were ahead of us and cleaned this bit of country of the blacks"[157] A journalist in Cooktown recalled how Douglas' troopers would make notches on the stocks of their rifles for every person they killed in the "nigger raids".

Examples of the further conflict include reports by sub-Inspector James Lamond, based at the Carl Creek barracks near the Lawn Hill run of Frank Hann, that the Native police shot "over 100 blacks" from 1883 to 1885 on that pastoral lease alone.

[194] Continued newspaper focus on incidents, an increasingly influential social criticism, and the shifting of the colonial frontier into the Northern Territory and British New Guinea eventually had some effect on changing the Queensland government's policy of "dispersal".

[188] While travelling near the Wenlock River, Reverend Gilbert White and anthropologist Walter Roth were shown the remains of four local Aboriginal men shot dead by Native Police in a surprise attack.