Founded by Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane on 7 September 1825,[1] the Mounted Police were recruited from the 3rd Regiment of Foot, stationed in NSW at the time, to protect travellers, recaptured escaped convicts and suppress Indigenous resistance to colonisation.

[3][4] After the Bathurst War between European colonists and the Wiradjuri concluded in 1824, it was deemed necessary that a mounted infantry division be formed in colony of New South Wales.

[5] While the Bathurst division were quickly utilised to capture escaped convicts, the Wallis Plains unit were deployed in the suppression of Aboriginal resistance along the newly colonised areas of the Hunter Valley.

Lieutenant Nathaniel Lowe, who volunteered for the Mounted Police from the 40th Regiment of Foot, ordered multiple executions of Aboriginal prisoners as part of the campaign.

With the aid of armed settlers such as Robert Scott of Glendon, the Mounted Police conducted raids of local Aboriginal camps and by early 1827, resistance in the area ended.

Resistance by the Gamilaraay people to colonisation in the Liverpool Plains area prompted the colonial government of New South Wales to send a large force led by Nunn to suppress this opposition.

In early 1838, Nunn conducted a two-month sweeping operation along the Gwydir and Namoi Rivers that culminated in the Waterloo Creek massacre, where his mounted troopers shot dead at least 50 Gamilaraay people.

[12] By the mid 1840s, the Mounted Police consisted of around 150 troopers in five divisions distributed among 35 stations ranging from Muswellbrook in the north, Portland Bay in the south and Wellington in the west.

It was around this time that they unit was moved from Belmore Barracks, to allow for the construction of the present Central railway station, to a temporary base at Moore Park, and then on to the Bourke Street Police complex at Redfern in 1907.