Robert Joel Cooper

Robert Joel (Joe) Cooper (29 February 1860 – 7 August 1936)[1] was a buffalo hunter in the Northern Territory who spent much of his life on Melville Island (Yermalner).

They overlanded horses there and, for the next several years, worked there in the timber industry and began buffalo shooting on the Cobourg Peninsula and surrounding areas.

[1][6] In May 1893 Cooper and Harry moved to Melville Island (Yermalner) alongside Edward Oswin Robinson who had taken a pastoral lease there.

[1] In 1906 Cooper received a visit from German physical anthropologist Hermann Klaatsch who described him as a typical adventurer of the bush who had "a friendly relationship with the blacks".

He also befriended the Commonwealth Administrator of the Northern Territory John Anderson Gilruth and biologist and anthropologist Walter Baldwin Spencer.

After Spencer's 1911 visit he described Cooper as:[13] [A] man equally at home at sea and in the bush, and a mighty hunter ... [who] ... is venerated as a sort of Rajah.It is perhaps based on these friendships that Cooper was made an honorary sub-protector of Aborigines in 1911 and the authorities began sending Aboriginal people from other parts of the Northern Territory who were addicted to alcohol or opium to Yermalner.

[6] Cooper resigned from his position as sub-protector in November 1914 following allegations of cruelty towards Aboriginal people and the use of intimidating practices by his armed 'bodyguards' (a group of Iwaidja)[1] that included his step-son Ted (who was said to have been involved in several murders).

This incident was also witnessed by Richard Webb who signed a statement saying:[6] Cooper entering the house and taking Mary by force ... said "Where are you going to have this, on your legs or on your neck?"

[1][15][16] It is believed that the character of Ned Krater, in Xavier Herbert's novel Capricornia (1938) is based on Cooper and Norman Shillingsworth on his son Reuben although the later is more contested.