#native police

[scrapironflotilla]

Persian Police recruits on parade at Resht, c1918.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"When Henry Dana and the native police went to the Wimmera in 1845, the contingent was drawn from the force instituted in 1842. Mooted in the Bigge Report, the possibility of investing Aboriginal men as native constables became an actuality in the Port Phillip District. This model of law enforcement went through three distinct phases with Aboriginal Police Corps being instituted in 1837, 1839 and 1842. The native police came to be a devastatingly effective instrument used by the colonial authorities against other Aboriginal people.

In July 1845, Dana wrote to La Trobe about an armed encounter between his men and some Jardwadjali of the Choorite balug clan. The events leading up to this encounter, told from the perspective of settler Thomas Baillie, were detailed in a sworn statement enclosed with Dana’s letter. Baillie and his business partner Hamilton occupied land near a lake about 15 miles from Mt Arapiles. On Thursday 10 July 1845, while Baillie and his shepherd were attending the sheep ‘several Natives rushed from the Forest and took away the whole flock’. The station owner and his shepherd pursued them, recovering some sheep.

Hamilton fetched Dana and his native police who tracked the missing animals. After travelling 30 miles, they ‘came up with a number of sheep with their legs broken’. They found 200 sheep ‘in a bush yard’ and some Aborigines nearby. In the fracas that followed, Dana = explained how ‘the Ringleader of the party was cut down after a long resistance, by Yupton a corporal of the native police and made a prisoner of; he is badly wounded. I have ordered him to be marched to Melbourne as soon as his wounds will permit’. The ‘ringleader’ was Yanem Goona, also known as Yanengoneh (‘spring from the earth’) or Old Man Billy Billy. Dana justified opening fire, killing at least three Choorite balug men and wounding others, by claiming he and his men were at risk, but may have exaggerated the danger.

Robinson, the Chief Protector of Aborigines, claimed the native police openly boasted they ‘were not going to take prisoners but to shoot as many of the blacks as they could’. A history of retributive killings is evident in a newspaper report on the loss of Baillie’s and Hamilton’s sheep that stated ‘the tribe who committed this serious depredation is the same which Messrs Powlett and Dana at different times thinned of its fair proportions in a skirmish with the black rascals’."

- Kristyn Harman, Aboriginal Convicts: Australian, Khoisan and Māori Exiles. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2012. p. 108-109.

[tenth-sentence]

Had these men been Europeans, and suspected of the same atrocious crime, and done the same as the blacks did, the police would have been quite justified in shooting them, and the verdict would have been justifiable homicide; but because they tire* at these useless savages – a race of men about as good as themselves – say the police ought to be hung.

* Fire a broadside.

"Killing for Country: A Family History" - David Marr

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Sub-Inspector Myrtil Aubin and four troopers had raided a sleeping camp at Morinish in the hinterland of Rockhampton to avenge the theft of a pound of tea from a shepherd's hut. The Brisbane Courier reported that the miners, woken by shots, went to the scene.

The camp was deserted, but around the fires nearest to the township lay the scanty garments of men, gins, and piccaninies, many of them saturated with blood, while the track of the fugitives could be easily traced by the trail of blood leading from the fires in every direction. At the fire nearest to the Creek, which separates the camp from the township, and around which a number of blacks apparently had been sleeping, two pools of blood and brains showed where foul murder had been perpetrated.

"Killing for Country: A Family History" - David Marr

[tenth-sentence]

It soon emerged the Native Police had attacked the wrong camp.

"Killing for Country: A Family History" - David Marr

[tenth-sentence]

That they were the worst of the kidnappers was a constant provocation to violence.

"Killing for Country: A Family History" - David Marr

[whats-in-a-sentence]

Sub-Inspector Otto Paschen gave the government no more than a bare list of these dispersals, a list first published in late June:

June 4th.—On the Sanders Run, near the Expedition Range. The blacks dispersed towards the Comet Range.

June 5th—On the foot of the Comet Range; the blacks dispersed.

June 7th.—In a scrub near the Tryphinia Vale Station; the blacks dispersed . . .

Early on the morning of the 10th June a collision took place in the Expedition Range between the four detachments Native Mounted Police and a party of aboriginals, when the latter were dispersed.

"Killing for Country: A Family History" - David Marr

[tenth-sentence]

Officers were required to keep accounts, write reports, issue stores and pay wages.

"Killing for Country: A Family History" - David Marr