The Border Police of New South Wales was a frontier policing body introduced by the colonial government of New South Wales with the passing of the Crown Lands Unauthorised Occupation Act 1839.
The Colony of New South Wales was expanding rapidly in the late 1830s, and the colonial government was concerned with the illegal occupation of lands and the rights of the Aboriginal people. The colonial government of New South Wales in 1839 legislated for a new policing body that would control these issues. This force was called the Border Police.
The Border Police was organised into a number of sections and these were deployed to the various districts along the frontier. Each section was under the authority of the Commissioner of Crown Lands for that particular district and each commissioner had about 10 troopers. In order to reduce the cost of the force as much as possible, the troopers were taken from the population of convicts that existed in the colony at that time. The convicts assigned were usually ex-soldiers who had been transported to Australia due to crimes of military indiscipline. They were supplied with horses, equipment and rations, but were otherwise unpaid and had to construct their own barracks. The force was funded by a levy imposed on the squatters who were grazing their livestock on the Crown Lands in the frontier regions. The Border Police was largely disbanded by the late 1840s and was replaced in the expanding frontier regions by detachments of the Native Police.
Establishment of the Border Police
In 1836, Governor Richard Bourke passed the "Squatting Act" to allow pastoralists or "squatters", as they were colloquially known, to run their sheep and cattle on New South Wales Crown Lands beyond the limits of white settlement for a small fee. However, the act failed to address the subsequent settler-Aboriginal conflict that the act would inevitable lead to. Beginning with the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, paramilitary units such as the New South Wales Military Mounted Police and the Australian native police and armed settlers were the main instruments of suppressing Aboriginal resistance to European colonization. In 1838, two large mass-killings of Indigenous people occurred on the frontier. One was the Waterloo Creek massacre perpetrated by troops of the New South Wales Military Mounted Police, and the other was the Myall Creek massacre committed by a group of armed settlers.
As part of the response to these massacres, Governor Gipps amended the Squatting Act in 1839 to include the provision of a Border Police force to protect the frontier. The aim of this force was to protect expanding colonists and their land-holdings, while at the same time to attempt to "conciliate" the Aboriginal people, minimising the involvement of armed settlers. Edward Mayne, a Commissioner of Crown Lands, proposed the cost-saving idea of recruiting military convicts as troopers for the Border Police.
Initial districts of operation
In 1839, there were nine districts in New South Wales legislated as being beyond the boundaries of settlement. These districts were Liverpool Plains, New England, Port Macquarie, Bligh, Wellington, Lachlan, Maneroo, Murrumbidgee and Port Phillip. All of these districts were deemed frontier areas and Border Police troopers were assigned to each.
Liverpool Plains Edward Mayne was the first Commissioner to be allocated with a section of Border Police troopers. He was at the time based in the Liverpool Plains district. Mayne initially took the role of conciliator between the Aboriginal people and the pastoralists seriously, investigating the murders perpetrated by both sides in a balanced fashion. In 1839, he arrested five Gamilaraay men for the murder of two whites, and also put out an arrest warrant for Charles Eyles for the massacre of nine Aboriginal people in the same area. However, the warrant for Eyles went unheeded by the senior authorities, while the five Aboriginal men were all sentenced to imprisonment on Cockatoo Island with most of them dying from illness soon after incarceration. From then on Mayne and his fellow Commissioners of the other frontier districts understood that the priority role of their Border Police troopers was to protect the colonisers.
In 1840, Mayne established his Border Police barracks at Somerton on the Peel River. He had additional support further north around the Gwydir River with Corporal William Anderson of the New South Wales Mounted Police taking charge of several Border Police troopers based at Warialda. In the same year, Mayne captured escaped convict James Feeny who had been living with local Gamilaraay people and assisting them in acts of resistance. Feeny was attached as interpreter in Anderson's group, which was tasked with the "most severe duty" in the northern parts of the region. By 1841, conflict between the British settlers and the Aboriginal people beyond the Gwydir River became such a problem that Mayne was allocated an assistant Commissioner named Oliver Fry.
Mayne was replaced by Francis Allman Jnr in 1843, who was a favourite of the squatters and who did not let "the blacks..have everything their own way". Roderick Mitchell, son of the explorer Thomas Mitchell, was appointed assistant commissioner. Allman was the son of Captain Francis Allman, the first commandant of the Port Macquarie penal settlement, and his brother John had also been appointed Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Wellington district.
A notable Border Police trooper who served in the Liverpool Plains district up to October 1845 was Richard "Dick" Walker. On one occasion near the Castlereagh River, Walker's group shot dead thirteen Aboriginal people after they murdered and then ate a white girl.
In 1846, Roderick Mitchell was promoted to full commissioner of the district with Richard Bligh as his assistant commissioner. The majority of Mitchell's Border Police troopers were made up of Gamilaraay men from around the town of Tamworth. Mitchell travelled extensively during his tenure, exploring north along Balonne River and west along the Darling River to Fort Bourke where, he was attacked by the local inhabitants. In 1849, Mitchell was transferred to the Maranoa District and his Border Police force were decommissioned prior to this relocation.
New England George James "Humpy" MacDonald was appointed the first Commissioner of Crown Lands in the New England district in 1839. He set up his headquarters and Border Police barracks on a grassy plain which he called Armidale after his ancestral home of Armadale in Scotland. He soon set out on a punitive expedition against a group of Aboriginal people led by a man labelled "Anti-Christ" but was unable to locate them. Local pastoralists expected MacDonald and his troopers to "drive these murderous savages from this quarter and...make an example of some of them."
Due to the New England district up to 1842 extending to the most out-lying pastoral stations to the north, MacDonald was often patrolling areas as far north as Moreton Bay. In 1841, MacDonald and his troopers were involved in a large massacre of Aboriginal people at the junction of the Clarence River and the Orara River. In an early morning raid, an Aboriginal campsite near the riverbank was attacked by his Border Police resulting in many casualties, the bodies of some apparently floating downriver past "The Settlement", now known as South Grafton. The massacre was inflicted as punishment for the theft of materials from Dr John Dobie's Ramornie station.
With MacDonald being absent from the New England district on a regular basis, the local squatters were often left to their own devices to arrange punitive missions against Aboriginal people. The squatters also resented the fact that MacDonald wasn't assigned a flogger to scourge servants as summary punishment for disobedience.
MacDonald left the area in 1848 to take up the position of Crown Land Commissioner in the Lower Darling district. He was replaced in the New England district by Robert George Massie. By this time, the Border Police were being slowly disbanded with Massie only having four mounted troopers by 1854. Most of his work by this stage was involved in maintaining order at the Rocky River goldfields, with the majority of police work being transferred to Lloyd Bradshaw who was chief constable at Armidale from 1847.
Wellington District This district was bounded by the Bell River to the east, the Lachlan River to the south and the Macquarie River to the north. Lawrence Vance Dulhunty was the Commissioner of Crown Lands for the Wellington district from 1837 and in 1839 he was allocated a section of Border Police. Dulhunty was the brother of the wealthy colonist Robert Dulhunty and together in 1828 they had formed the pastoral station of Dubbo. Dulhunty was soon replaced as commissioner by John James Allman in February 1840.
Allman and his Border Police were involved in multiple skirmishes with Aboriginal people on the lower parts of the Macquarie River. In 1840, near Narromine, Allman attacked an Aboriginal camp, separated the men from the women and took seven people prisoner for stealing cattle. Allman received strong resistance during this operation and stated that it was unsafe for colonists to proceed further downriver from the Narromine property.
In 1841, Allman and his Border Police, together with armed settlers and troopers of the New South Wales Mounted Police, were involved in a large massacre of Aboriginal people along the Bogan River 30 km north of Nyngan. Colonists William Lee and Joseph Moulder having decided to ignore Allman's warning of taking up land in the lower reaches of the Macquarie and Bogan rivers, set up a cattle station near Mt Harris on the Bogan River. Conflict ensued with the local Aboriginal people resulting in three shepherds being killed. In response, troopers of the Border Police, the Mounted Police and a number of armed stockmen were sent on a punitive expedition to the area. This force was placed under the command of Commissioner Allman. Once the troopers arrived at the scene, they "fell in with the blacks..they galloped in upon them, firing at them, and cutting them down..they were shot and sabred indiscrimately." At least 12 Aboriginal people were killed. At a parliamentary enquiry the following year Allman attempted to distance himself from direct responsibility for the killings, however no action was taken against him or other members of the patrol. In fact, the parliamentarians were more concerned with Allman taking away Lee's pastoral licence for ignoring his direction to not take up land in that unsettled region.
Allman and his troopers, in a later incident, arrested a white man named George Evans for the killing of Tony, an Aboriginal man. Evans however was acquitted after spending several months in Bathurst jail. Allman was replaced as commissioner for the Wellington district by his brother, Francis Allman Jr in 1843 but he lasted only a couple of months in this position. William Henry Wright became the new Commissioner of Crown Lands.
In 1845, Wright ordered a number of troopers to deal with Aboriginal disturbances at the Macquarie Marshes and at Narromine. This force killed upwards of twenty people in these raids. Thomas Mitchell travelled through this region about 12 months after the raids describing that "All I could learn about the rest of the tribe was, that the men were almost all dead, and that their wives were chiefly servants at stock stations along the Macquarie." By the time of Mitchell's visit, most of Wright's Border Police troopers had been replaced by regular mounted troopers of the New South Wales Mounted Police. In late 1846, these mounted police under the command of Wright conducted another massacre of Aboriginal people living along the Bogan River near Bulgandramine.
Bligh District