Australian native police were specialised mounted military units consisting of detachments of Aboriginal troopers under the command of European officers appointed by British colonial governments. The units existed in various forms in colonial Australia during the nineteenth and, in some cases, into the twentieth centuries. From temporary base camps and barracks, Native Police were primarily used to patrol the often vast geographical areas along the colonial frontier, in order to conduct indiscriminate raids or punitive expeditions against Aboriginal people. The Native Police proved to be a brutally destructive instrument in the disintegration and dispossession of Indigenous Australians. Armed with rifles, carbines and swords, they were also deployed to escort surveying groups, gold convoys, and groups of pastoralists and prospectors.
The Aboriginal men in the Native Police were routinely recruited from areas that were very distant from the locations in which they were deployed. That ensured they would have little familiarity with the local people they were employed to control, and would also reduce desertions. However, due to the excessively violent nature of the work, the rate of trooper desertion in some units was high. As the troopers were Aboriginal, the European colonists were able to minimise both the troopers' wages and the potential for Aboriginal revenge attacks against white people. It also increased the efficiency of the force because the Aboriginal troopers possessed highly developed tracking skills, which were indispensable in often poorly charted and difficult terrain.
The first government-funded force was the Native Police Corps, established in 1837 in the Port Phillip District of what is now Victoria. From 1848 another force was organised in New South Wales, which later evolved into the Queensland Native Police force. This force massacred thousands of Aboriginal people under the official euphemism of "dispersal", and is regarded as one of the most conspicuous examples of genocidal policy in colonial Australia. It existed until around 1915, when the last Native Police camps in Queensland were closed.Isabel Ellender and Peter Christiansen, pp 87–90 People of the Merri Merri. The Wurundjeri in Colonial Days, Merri Creek Management Committee, 2001 ; Queensland Legislative Assembly Votes & Proceedings 1861 p 386pp, "Report from the Select Committee on the Native Police Force and the condition of the aborigines generally"; Feilberg, Carl Adolf (anonymous): "The Way We Civilise; Black and White; The Native Police: – A series of articles and letters Reprinted from the 'Queenslander'", Brisbane, G and J. Black, Edward Street, December 1880, 57 pages; Richards, Jonathan: The Secret War. A True History of Queensland's Native Police, St Lucia Queensland 2008, 308 pages incl. ill. and appendixes.
Native Police were also utilised by other Australian colonies. The government of South Australia set up a short-lived Native Police force in 1852, which was re-established in 1884 and deployed into what is now the Northern Territory. The colonial Western Australian government also initiated a formal Native Police force in 1840 under the command of John Nicol Drummond. Other privately funded native police systems were also occasionally used in Australia, such as the native constabulary organised by the Australian Agricultural Company in the 1830s. Native Police forces were also officially implemented in the Papua and New Guinea territories administered by colonial Queensland and Australian governments from 1890 until the 1970s. The Australian government also organised a Native Police force on Nauru during its administration of the island from 1923 until 1968.
Early prototypes of native police The general template for native police forces in Australia was the sepoy and sowar armies of the East India Company. However, the more compact forces of the Cape Regiment in southern Africa and the Kaffir and Malay Corps in Ceylon are a closer comparison. Before the creation of the first official Native Police forces, there were some informal and privately funded examples of using Aboriginal men as enforcers of land occupation by European settlers during colonisation.
Hawkesbury/Nepean Armed Aboriginal men were used to capture runaway convicts in the region and John Macarthur sometimes appeared at public functions with a bodyguard of uniformed Dharawal and Gandangara men.
Bathurst In 1824, at the conclusion of the Bathurst War against the Wiradjuri, Governor Thomas Brisbane sent a letter to Major James Thomas Morisset, commandant of the colonial forces at Bathurst, congratulating him on his efforts. In the letter, Brisbane outlined 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.
Van Diemen's Land
Musquito was a Hawkesbury Aboriginal man who was exiled first to Norfolk Island in 1805, then to Van Diemen's Land in 1813. He proved to be a valuable asset to the government there in tracking down bushrangers. He later became a renegade and was himself tracked down and shot in the groin by another Hawkesbury aboriginal named Teague. Teague was sent by Hawkesbury settler Edward Luttrell to capture Musquito, on the promise of a whaleboat as payment. Teague never received the boat and Musquito was hanged in 1825.
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.
Newcastle/Port Macquarie Up until at least the 1830s, Aboriginal men around the Newcastle and Port Macquarie penal settlements were regularly used to recapture escaped convicts. 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 in return for clothing, blankets, corn and tobacco.
In 1830, Bob Barrett was made a non-commissioned officer and given charge of a group of 11 other Aboriginal men in a paramilitary force that was to be sent to Tasmania to fight in the Black War against the Aboriginal people there. The detachment was to be headed by the commissary officer at Port Macquarie George James MacDonald, but the colonial authorities disbanded the unit before it was deployed.
Port Stephens At Port Stephens, the Australian Agricultural Company had obtained a million acre land acquisition. In the early 1830s, the superintendent of the company, Sir Edward Parry, established a private native constabulary to augment a small garrison of soldiers. The black constables, such as Jonathan and William, were involved in dispensing lethal summary justice to Aboriginal people accused of murdering a company employee, and were also permitted to shoot armed runaway convicts. Parry was later officially accused of putting a price on the heads of certain Aboriginal people, which he unequivocally denied. By 1841, the new superintendent P. P. King still employed black constables, but their duties may have been limited to dingo culling.
Goulburn Also in the 1830s, Major Edmund Lockyer a magistrate in the Goulburn region, employed at least one Aboriginal constable, who captured murderers and gangs of armed bushrangers in the region.
Port Phillip District and surrounds (later known as Victoria) In the late 1830s, the NSW government found it was having trouble financing the NSW Mounted Police, a corps of mounted soldiers that, since 1825, had operated as the main enforcers of colonial rule in frontier areas. Officials looked at cheaper alternatives and came up with two solutions. One was the Border Police, which was a mounted force of armed convicts under the command of a commissioner, and the other was the trial of a force of armed and mounted Aboriginal police under the command of white officers.
By 1840, the Border Police became the main replacement for the NSW Mounted Police along the frontier, while the Native Police Corps, as the Aboriginal force was known, was limited initially to one division in the Port Phillip District of the colony, around Melbourne. Requests for the establishment of a Native Police Corps were made from as early as 1837 when Captain William Lonsdale proposed legislation for its formation.
Establishment In October 1837, Christian Ludolph Johannes de Villiers was appointed to command the first official Native Police troopers from their station at Nerre Nerre Warren, in spite of warnings against the use of native police from the House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines, based on the argument that "uncivilized men" enlisted "in defence of order" would "become the victims of their own zeal". It was disbanded briefly in January 1838 but reorganised in April of the same year with its new headquarters in Jolimont, where the Melbourne Cricket Ground car park is now situated.
Due to funding problems, the force was again dissolved in 1839. The same problem delayed the reformation of the corps until 1842, when Superintendent Charles La Trobe indicated he was willing to underwrite the costs. A significant factor in the restoration of the force was the successful capture of five Aboriginal Tasmanians (one of whom was Truganini) near Westernport in 1840 by local Aboriginal men who were attached to a party of Border Police and soldiers.
Henry Dana was selected to command the corps in 1842. Except for a brief period during which the corps was based at Merri Creek, the headquarters was at the Aboriginal Protectorate Station at Nerre Nerre Warren, near to present day Dandenong, about south-east of Melbourne. The force initially made use of around twenty Aboriginal men as troopers mostly from the Woiwurrung and Bunurong tribes, directed by several white officers with Dana as commandant. The force had two goals: to protect the colonists from Aboriginal resistance, and to assimilate the Indigenous troopers into the military aspect of European society. Both La Trobe and William Thomas, Protector of Aborigines, expected that the men would give up their traditional way of life when exposed to the discipline of militia work. To their disappointment, troopers continued to participate in corroborees and ritual fighting, although not in uniform.
As senior Wurundjeri elder or ngurungaeta of the Woiwurrung people, Billibellary's cooperation in the proposal was important for its success and, after deliberation, he backed the initiative and even proposed himself for enlistment. He donned the uniform and enjoyed the status of parading through the camp, but was careful to avoid active duty as a trooper which involved having to leave his home country. After about a year, Billibellary resigned from the Native Police Corps when he found that it was to be used to capture and kill other Aborigines. From then on, he did his best to undermine the corps and, as a result, many native troopers deserted and few remained longer than three or four years.
The troopers were provided with uniforms, firearms, food rations, and a small cash salary. In the colonial society that was hostile and oppressive to the Indigenous population, joining the Native Police was one of the very few ways that Aboriginal men could achieve some degree of respect and survival.
Duties
The Native Police Corps of Port Phillip District has in the past been framed as being established to uphold the early colonial public peace and capture Aboriginal criminals. However, as La Trobe himself stated, the primary purpose of the force was to quash aggressively any Indigenous resistance to British colonisation and to remove the need for the settlers themselves undertake armed "vindictive reprisals" against the "natives".