Willing agents of destruction
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008Phil Brown; 7/5/08,
The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police; Jonathan Richards; University of Queensland Press
The sad emptiness that pervades parts of rural Queensland is a curious residue of colonisation. I felt this keenly when, in the late 1970s, I lived in a small to,wn in central Queensland. The town had an Aboriginal name but there was little other evidence that indigenous people had lived thereabouts. The local historical society ignored the indigenous past and promoted stories about the hard-working, God-fearing folk who settled the district. Of course, for these pioneers to flourish local Aborigines had to be subjugated and “dispersed”, as it was described in colonial times. That euphemism crops up regularly in this disturbing book about a shadowy aspect of our nation’s history. “Dispersed” meant disposed of, run off or killed, sometimes by settlers, often by the much-feared Queensland Native Police, a force of largely. indigenous policemen that terrorised their countrymen and women and helped destroy their way of life.
