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Frontier Wars (1788-1934)

When we look back in history, especially the 18^th through the 19^th century, we can clearly see a pattern of European powers creating colonial empires. The Europeans did this by annexing land or conquering local rulers, and the interactions almost always came with prolonged and horrendous violence (Richards, 2008). An infamous method to conquer a country or a preexisting empire, is to divide and conquer, instead of solely taking the empires head on. The divide and conquer technique was especially more apparent in the cases of the United States, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia. In this article, we are focusing on the case of Australia, and we are seeing how the European colonizers outnumbered and overpowered the Aboriginal Australians using such tactics in what are now called the Frontier Wars.

To understand the impact that the wars had on Aboriginal Australians, we should first look at the death toll. The number is not precise, due to there being undocumented killings and even genocides, but historians were able to piece together an approximate number – around 800 Europeans died on the Queensland Frontier between 1840-1900, compared to at least 10,000 Aboriginal Australians deaths (Richards, 2008). Some historians speculate that the number is too high or too low, but it’s been agreed upon that the death ratio between the Aboriginal Australians versus the Europeans was extremely disproportionate. The 10,000 deaths were recorded is in Queensland alone, which is daunting in itself, and it’s believed that the total number of deaths across Australia was around 1,500 Europeans and over 20,000 Indigenous Australians (Burke et al., 2018).

Ever since the First Fleet (the arrival of the first Europeans to set up settlements in Australia) in 1788, violence in Australia between Europeans and Aboriginal Australians was ubiquitous. The first interactions started off relatively cordial, but it was clear that the Europeans’ motives weren’t to be a visitors or observers, but to be colonizers and assimilators. The overarching conflicts between the Aboriginal Australians and the colonizers were thus called the Frontier Wars. These long-fought wars resulted in thousands of casualties, and gradually overtime, it led to a plethora of Indigenous Australians becoming aliens in their own country. The colonists were out of their element, due to Australia being known for its unique and harsh climate, and the Indigenous Australians were predominately very skillful hunter gathers who knew their land like the back of their hands, giving them somewhat of an advantage in that area. The colonists needed insiders that could relay information about certain fighting styles or tactics that the Indigenous Australians used, and this is where the Native Police came in.

Who Were the Native Police?

Because colonists saw Aboriginal people as disruptive and dangerous lawbreakers who needed to be brought under control, they founded units known collectively as the Native police. There’s not 100 percent accuracy when one tries to find the exact date that the Native Police came into existence, due to the possibility that there were less officially known sources of the Native Police. The data does however suggest that the more official Native Police forces were established in Port Phillip in 1842, in New South Wales in 1848 (Officially in 1855), and in Queensland in 1842. All of the different stations differed considerably in their alleged purposes (Broome, 2020).

For instance, the Port Phillip Native Police aimed to civilize the Indigenous men they recruited into being “role models” for the other Aboriginal Australians, by adopting a European oriented work ethic and values. For example, they wanted to instill the typical lifestyle of having a wife and kids, being a “hard worker”, and trying to deter the Aboriginal Australians from being hunter gatherers and engaging in their typical lifestyles. The Queensland force was extremely different, because it didn’t have much educative or humanitarian intentions to it, it was instead more focused on deadly war tactics. For this article, we are going to be more focused on the Queensland forces, via this Native Police force being the longest in length (three times as long as any other Native Police force). When we talk about the Native Police being used in warfare, the Queensland force and what they did is what we picture more times than not.

Recruiting Process

Forced/ Coercion

There were multiple ways that the Native police were recruited, but it wasn’t a very orderly process like one would think when hearing the term “recruitment” (Burke et al., 2018). There was no draft board or signup sheet; many Indigenous Australians did it out of fear and/or coercion; some did it voluntarily; and some were thought to not have any other option. It’s been seen that there is no easy generalization or an umbrella that all the Native Mounted Police (NMP) fall under. The Aboriginal Australians at the time were not new to warfare, there were a variety of different tribes, kinship rules, and conflict arose between the tribes, be it over land, resources, etc. However, none of the Indigenous Australians at the time had ever seen the artillery that the Europeans were using. They never really seen entire fleets of white-skinned people besides the common occurrences of explorers or whalers here and there, therefore the Indigenous Australians or their ancestors never experienced anything quite like what the Europeans were trying to do.

Burke et.al (2018) suggests that there are common patterns that emerged in the NMP recruitment, and coercion and forceful recruitment may have been one of the most ubiquitous forms. It is also notable that some of the individuals who did desert their stations were shot and killed, and this led some to rethink if it’d be safe for their own well-being to leave. Other sources said that the desertions were also from the cruel and unusual punishment that the white leading officers subjected the Native Police to, and this led to them to leave without giving any heads up or warning.

Incentives for Enlistment

The article Burke et al. (2018) goes on to say that there are instances where the Native Police joined voluntarily for intrinsic reasons - be it a sense of wonder, a longing for power, or trying to be the mediators between the Indigenous Australians and the European sides - others were persuaded to join for extrinsic reasons. One method of recruiting members for the Native Police without using direct force was by offering enlistment as an alternative to being punished for crimes that the Aboriginal Australians committed. One could argue that this could be considered coerced behavior, because the only other option that the Aboriginal Australians had was going into a European prison system that was known at the time to be quite unpleasant, as one could guess. This became fairly normalized, so much so that in 1878, the Executive Council approved remission for prison sentences for Indigenous Australians who decided to join the NMP. This was approved for even cases of murder, but the cases were murders against the colonists and not their own people, and it could have even been from self-defense.

We have to take into account that many Indigenous Australians couldn’t write at this time, so the majority of the data that we are left to analyze are from the colonists’ point of view. According to Broome (2020), the reasoning as to why some Indigenous Australians joined the Native Police was because, like mentioned previously, they admired the Europeans’ way of life and wanted to live more affluent lives. Some cruder ideations from the colonizers’ point of view suggested that there were no higher motivational factors that contributed to why the Aboriginal Australians wanted to become officers than the childlike desires they had for the Europeans’ clothing and equipment - the uniforms, boots, guns, the horses that they rode on, and even the buttons on their uniforms allegedly attracted them. Some more realistic and non-ethnocentric oriented aspects that lead some Aboriginal Australians to join was because the Europeans offered them better rations if they did, and also joining the Native Police could build their social status and improve their marriage prospects.

Voluntary Enlistment

Like mentioned earlier, the data that’s able to be analyzed are predominately from the colonist’s perspective, so how truthful or accurate the statistics were regarding the voluntary enlistment of the Native Police is virtually unknown. According to Burke et al. (2018), the records do show however, that there were some men that stayed with the Native Police for a relatively long period of time, 177 of the Native Policemen serving for four years or more. Notably, there are no actual trooper staff files that are known to exist, so again, the accuracy of the duration of how long the Native Police served is to this day unknown. However, the data also suggests that the longest known serving Native Policeman served for 21 years, by the name of “Jack Styles” (the man’s original name was not Jack Styles, but there is no record of his actual name), and several other served for 13 years. This could lead us to believe that the recruitment wasn’t entirely forced, but how much autonomy or options that the Aboriginal Australians had given their situation is up for question as well.

What Life was Like for the Native Police

The Native Policemen were feared, and were harsh when punishing or capturing Aboriginal Australians. It’s clear that the Native Policemen were rewarded and encouraged to be malicious more times than not. This led to some Native Policemen to develop internalized racist beliefs, and thus were more prone to hate their own people. This was of course not the case for all, but as one could speculate, the longer the Native Policeman worked with the colonists, the more susceptible they were to being assimilated into the colonial empire. Their duties consisted of prohibiting any type of resistance against the European colonists at any cost, and the killings of Aboriginal Australians and the Torres Strait Islanders in frontier Queensland was called “dispersal” (Richards,2008).

European officers typically led detachments of six to eight Aboriginal Native Policemen, although this wasn’t the only way that the Native Police operated. Each man had their own horse, uniform and gun, and were paid a few pennies per week. The detachments spent most of their time on patrol, essentially looking for anything that could be seen as threatening to the Europeans, or any Aboriginal Australians at large. When the colonists were attacked, the Native Police responded by tracking Aboriginal Australians back to their camps. What usually happened next was the Native Police surrounded the camp, waited until dawn, and then shot and killed the Aboriginal Australians in their sleep. The dead bodies in a lot of cases were also burned to cover up the killings (Burke et al., 2018)

According to Richards (2008), The demotion process or the removal of the Native Police officers for using “excessive force” did happen, and this suggests that there were some boundaries to what the Native Police did. On the other hand, this article also shown that the individuals who were dismissed for their use of excessive force were rarely charged with criminal offenses, even if there was clear evidence against them. Instead, Queensland’s first Police Commissioner, David Seymour, attempted to keep these mishaps under the public radar. It was also shown that Seymour more or less mislead the government in regards to what the Native Police were actually doing, the power that they had, and their actions. It could be speculated that he might have been repulsed or embarrassed in what the Native Police were being told to do, and thus denied criticisms publicly.

The colonists used the Native Police for the same reasons that other Indigenous people were used in other colonies. There were shortages of skilled and experienced Europeans in many colonial situations, and they had a pretty big labor shortage. The Bishop of Sydney, sending ‘A Warning to the Destroyer of Aborigines’ in the Queenslander of 15 September 1866 said, ‘If we had known how useful these blackfellows could be, we should not have shot so many of them ( Burke et.al, 2018). This quote signifies that the Native Police and the Indigenous Labor force were far from equals, and one could see why a Native Policeman would be so bewildered about their identity. They were seeing thousands of their people and other people from different tribes die, so the life that they once knew would be changed forever, regardless what they did. To add on to that, they were met with blatantly racist quotes like this, probably on the daily. We also have to keep in mind, this quote was from a Bishop that was on record. One could only imagine what was being said behind the scenes to the Native Police by European soldiers and other colonists.

The Native Police Today

There is debate today regarding if the Frontier Wars should be represented in Australia’s Military history (Rowse & Waterton, 2018). When one thinks about a veteran, one would tend to think as somebody who’s heroic, or visualizes a group of people that are fighting for the greater good of their country. The debate then ponders the question, should the Native Police be considered veterans? Some believe that the colonization of Australia was not noble or righteous, it instead could be contemporarily considered along the lines of genocide. To what degree should we label a person a veteran, a victim of the oppressing forces, or just another stepping stone to European Colonization?

Drawing back to the question of whether the Native Police should be considered veterans, the answer to this question could be seen as being more difficult to answer than if The Frontier Wars should be a part of Australia’s military history. One could argue that the Frontier Wars meets all the criteria for warfare, and should be considered military history, and instead of trying to forget or fabricate history and it be a grey area in the countries’ history books, it could be better to educate the people about what happened during that time, so history doesn’t repeat itself. The Native Police, and the Aboriginal Australians in general, could be seen as victims of the colonization of Australia. Yes, there was some degree of autonomy among the Native Policemen, and some actually were prideful about their work, but one could beg the question of what other choice did they have?

The question of whether the Native Police should be considered veterans is especially difficult, because there is no umbrella term that describes all Native Policemen, like thinking about a WW2 or Vietnam veteran for instance. There are of course variations for all veterans that fight in wars, but the Native Police’s “enlistment”, and situation in general has a much different context than the typical veteran does. There is no right or wrong answer here, but this question should be pondered when talking about the Frontier Wars. Are the Native Policemen Veterans, or were they individuals that fell victim to coercion, temptation, fear, and not having viable options?