Willing agents of destruction
Phil 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.
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The reputation of the native police has been a flashpoint for skirmishes in the history wars. Historians Keith Windschuttle and Henry Reynolds, commanding generals in this ideological conflict, have locked horns over the subject. In a public debate in Sydney in November 2000 they argued about the extent of frontier violence during the 19th century.
Reynolds cited the Queensland Native Police as a leading perpetrator of that violence and even of mass murder. He described it as “a paramilitary force which rode the frontier from 1848, continuing in a modified form to 1907″. “I believe my estimate of 20,000 Aborigines killed on the frontier is modest and utterly sustainable by vast amounts of evidence,” Reynolds claimed.
Windschuttle begged to differ. “Over the past 20 years, Australian historians have grossly exaggerated the degree of violence between Aborigines and colonists in Australia,” he said, claiming historical records did not support Reynolds’s claims.
The author of The Secret War, Queensland-based historian Jonathan Richards, admits there are gaps in the colonial records. However, he has spent a decade studying the available material and builds a convincing case, which supports Reynolds’s basic contention that the colonial frontier was a violent place, and nowhere was more violent than Queensland. Richards, a research fellow with the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas at Griffith University in Brisbane, writes: Despite the evidence, some people in 21st-century Australia still don’t accept that large numbers of indigenous people were killed in frontier clashes during the British annexation of the continent The Queensland Native Police played a crucial role in the dispossession of Aboriginal people from their land, the almost complete destruction of Aboriginal law and the disintegration of Aboriginal families.
What evidence does he have to back these claims?
He offers this: By collating the police staff files and the inquest files, with general correspondence and newspaper items, a reasonably good idea of how the native police operated …can be formed. The omission of frontier violence in published histories is inextricably linked to the denial of prior Aboriginal occupancy and ownership of land. Much of the frontier history written relies too heavily on the work of a small groupof men with an interest in perpetuating the stereotyped perceptions of the force.
Using a variety of sources, including diaries, police reports, newspaper columns, literature of the day and parliamentary records, Richards paints a picture of the native police as a brutal, often uncontrollable arm of an imperial power determined to usurp or subjugate the original inhabitants so their land could be taken over.
The British used similar tactics throughout their empire. Richards points out that locally recruited Sepoys were used to conquer and hold India and that elsewhere “armed indigenous units were deployed against local resistance to colonisation, and to advance imperial ambitions”.
In Queensland, the native police served under European officers. The official line was that they were supposed to uphold the law of the land, but in the wilds of colonial Queensland the law was open to interpretation, particularly when dealing with people Europeans regarded as savages. Resistance to colonisation was met with deadly force and, as well as warriors, women and children were often killed as justice was meted out indiscriminately, often by the native police.
Certainly there were massacres on both sides, but Richards agrees with Reynolds that revenge killings of Aborigines were far more widespread, and the evidence he has unearthed supports this. No doubt opinion on these matters will continue to divide along factional lines and this book will be seen by some to support the black armband view of Australian history. However, Richards’s study contends rather convincingly that there was widespread organised racial violence and mass murder on the Queensland frontier, often at the hands of the native police. His research also shows that many people abhorred the violence and injustice inflicted on the original inhabitants. But colonial settlement was an unstoppable force.
Importantly, Richards also highlights the military nature of the native police: Native police camps were opened, dosed and shifted as the frontier of settlement moved northwards and westwards — just as army posts were in other colonial wars. A number of officers in the native police were former members of British armed forces, and fought in other parts of the empire.
In their “secret” war the Queensland Native Police used military strategies and guerilla tactics to deadly effect. The idea that conflict between the colonial military or police forces and Aborigines could ever be regarded as a fair fight is a joke.
Writing about the Battle of Pinjarra, an 1834 confrontation between colonial forces and Aborigines in what is now Western Australia, Windschuttle described it as “not a massacre of innocent Aborigines but a genuine battle between two armed, warring parties with casualties on both sides”. But what chance did spears have against guns? “It is safe to assume,” Richards writes, “based on my research, that the members of the native police killed thousands of indigenous people in Queensland.”
And though the colonial authorities did not directly sanction such killings, Richards argues that is where ultimate responsibility lies, because the force’s actions had the implicit approval of the government and public service. Was this, therefore, a form of genocide? Richards writes: The difficultly with using genocide in a technically correct way arises because there must, according to the commonly understood definition, be clear evidence of government intention. Aboriginal people in Queensland and other Australian colonies were killed for their land, but there were no official orders for the action.
As another Queensland-based historian, Raymond Evans, has pointed out, the native police were assisted by settlers who helped accomplish “genocidal outcomes” and were never prosecuted for atrocities against Aboriginal people.
Richards’s fascinating, sometimes horrifying, but thoroughly credible account of this bloody aspect of our past shows that the history of race relations in Australia is as complex as it is tragic. In light of this, Kevin Rudd’s recent apology to indigenous people seems long overdue.
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