Douglas and the Queensland Native Police, 1878–1880: Authority, Violence and Aboriginal Policy

Douglas and the Queensland Native Police, 1878–1880: Authority, Violence and Aboriginal Policy

On 10 July 1878, as Queensland Premier and Colonial Secretary, John Douglas refused a parliamentary demand for a full inquiry into the Native Police. A little more than two years later, sitting in opposition, he called for such an inquiry himself. The change was real, but it was neither sudden nor a simple conversion from indifference to humanitarianism.

The demand in 1878 came from William Gill Bailey, the member for Wide Bay, who drew attention to newspaper reports alleging that Native Police had shot Aboriginal people wholesale, tortured them, killed children and committed outrages against women. Douglas described the Native Police as “a very exceptional force” and conceded that some actions in the past “could not, perhaps, be justified”. Even so, he rejected Bailey's proposal. Settlers in the unsettled districts still needed protection, he argued, and the force should be withdrawn from the settled “inside” districts and concentrated on the advancing frontier. Allegations of atrocities should be stated circumstantially and referred to the government for investigation.

Douglas was not unaware of the nature of the force he was defending. He believed it could be controlled by restricting where it operated and by proper government supervision. Nor did he regard its continued existence as incompatible with assistance to Aboriginal people. His government maintained the reserves at Durundur and Bribie, supported others and planned further expenditure. At Cardwell, a reserve and Native Police operated in the same district. The two policies existed side by side. However, after Douglas fell from office in January 1879, McIlwraith’s ministry sharply reduced the reserve programme while retaining the Native Police.

There was a weakness in Douglas's reliance on evidence of particular atrocities. Native Police detachments operated in remote country, often beyond the reach of independent witnesses. Aboriginal testimony faced formidable obstacles, while much of the information reaching Brisbane came through the policing system itself. What happened on the frontier could be very difficult to establish.

Douglas did not immediately change his position after leaving office. In August 1879 he still accepted the need for Native Police in the outside districts. During 1880, however, criticism intensified. The Queenslander published a sustained campaign about the treatment of Aboriginal people on the frontier, while allegations and questions about the force increasingly reached Parliament.

By September Douglas's position had shifted. He declared that the allegations must be disproved and that, if they could not be, the Native Police should be abolished. On 21 October he went further and moved for an inquiry, describing his proposal as a “new departure”. The commissioners, he argued, needed sufficient powers to discover what had actually happened.

The government rejected his proposal, but it was already reorganising and reducing the force. During the Estimates debate in September, Colonial Secretary Arthur Palmer disclosed that fifty-two Aboriginal trackers were being transferred to the ordinary police, while 128 troopers remained in the Native Police. Palmer said that the government's intention was eventually to abolish the separate force. For the time being Native troopers would remain in the outside districts, but ordinary police accompanied by Aboriginal trackers would increasingly take their place.

These changes had begun before Douglas moved for an inquiry and were not the result of his October motion. They came amid the wider controversy of 1880, as criticism in the press and Parliament made the existing system increasingly difficult to sustain. The McIlwraith government chose administrative change rather than the independent investigation Douglas wanted.

By October 1880 Douglas still believed that frontier settlers required protection, but he no longer trusted the Native Police system to provide it under adequate control. The man who had rejected Bailey’s inquiry in 1878 was now asking Parliament to investigate the organisation, discipline, powers and operations of the force he had once defended.

Before the premiership: necessity and control, 1874–75

Douglas’s unease with the force predates both his premiership and the later proposals from Duncan McNab, a radical Scottish Catholic priest, missionary, and pioneering Aboriginal land rights advocate who became a fierce opponent of the Queensland government and its Native Police force. In 1875 he told the Aborigines Protection Society that the Native Police was “less effective than it was,” by which he meant “less under control,” and added, strikingly, that in his opinion it was “not strong enough.” He described the frontier as a “sustained guerrilla warfare” producing unsatisfactory results and declared that Queensland was less alive to its duties towards Aboriginal people than any other Australian colony. He attributed part of the failure to expenditure. [1]

The formulation is important because it contains the ambiguity that would persist into his premiership. Douglas did not call for abolition. He believed an armed frontier force remained necessary and could even require greater strength. His complaint was simultaneously humanitarian and administrative: insufficient control, inadequate state attention and inadequate expenditure. This was not yet a critique of the institution’s legal foundation.

The wider governmental context was already contentious. The Aborigines Protection Society pressed for investigation of alleged Native Police atrocities. Governor Cairns sought a “complete and exhaustive” inquiry into alleged malpractice. Commissioner of Police Seymour rejected the allegations, while the Aboriginal Commissioners concluded that no satisfactory inquiry could then be made and that frontier settlement could not be maintained without an armed force. Douglas therefore entered office in 1877 with both allegations of systematic abuse and an official doctrine of frontier necessity already before the colonial government. [2]

McNab and a different model of frontier law, 1876

Duncan McNab supplied Douglas with a more radical alternative in September 1876. McNab argued that Aboriginal people should be treated as human beings rather than “vermin,” that murder by either colonists or Aboriginal people should be treated as murder, that lesser offences should be punished according to their gravity, and that the law should be enforced rigorously and impartially. The distinctiveness of the proposal lay in its insistence on individual culpability and proportional punishment rather than collective reprisal. [3]

Douglas did not simply ignore the proposal. On 11 September he replied that Aboriginal homestead applications were not in accordance with the existing law and could not therefore be entertained, but he said the important questions raised by McNab would receive his attention. The same day he sent the proposal to Bishop Hale and the Aboriginal Commissioners, identifying McNab’s family-based rather than communistic or tribal conception as one of its distinctive features. [4]

McNab did not create Douglas’s concern about the Native Police; Douglas had already criticised its lack of control in 1875. What McNab did was place before him an explicit alternative based on individual responsibility, proportionate punishment and impartial law. By 1880 Douglas’s own criticism of the force had moved much closer to that ground.

Wheeler and the problem of proof, 1876

The government was not dealing only with vague rumours. In 1876 Sub-Inspector Frederick Wheeler was committed on a murder charge after the death of an Aboriginal prisoner, Jemmy, following a severe flogging at the Belyando Native Police camp. Constable Thomas Baker gave sworn evidence that Jemmy was restrained, repeatedly flogged by troopers and Wheeler, and that Baker protested that the prisoner had received enough. Other testimony described extensive injuries. Wheeler absconded after obtaining bail. [5]

The Wheeler case matters for Douglas’s later 1878 insistence that allegations should be circumstantially stated. It shows that specific, sworn evidence of grave abuse was available before Douglas became Premier. The difficulty was not that every allegation was incapable of proof, but that the institutional environment made proof irregular, dangerous and often dependent upon insiders. The government’s October 1876 prohibition on police flogging Aboriginal people was itself an acknowledgement that abuse by members of the force required explicit executive control.

Protection and punishment under Douglas, 1877–78

Reserves, expenditure and Aboriginal agency

Douglas’s Native Police policy cannot be understood in isolation from the protective policy pursued by his government. Named Aboriginal men had asked, through McNab, for land to be set aside for their communities. At Durundur the reserve programme recorded paid Aboriginal labour, and McNab later relayed residents’ own criticisms of management: too many people were concentrated together, industrious workers were not sufficiently distinguished from those who did less, and residents wanted smaller establishments and clearer recognition of what belonged to individuals. [6][7]

Aboriginal people were not simply passive recipients of this policy. The reserves were colonial and paternalistic institutions, expressed in the period’s language of “civilising and utilising” Aboriginal people, but some Aboriginal people sought land, selected localities, negotiated the system imposed upon them and criticised its distribution of work and property. Douglas personally received some of these representations.

On 8 August 1878 Douglas defended expenditure at Durundur and told the Assembly that Queensland could do “very much more.” He argued that instead of £500, £5,000 could be well expended. He described such expenditure as justifiable and indicated that he would support further provision. The Aboriginal Commissioners subsequently sought £1,600 for Bribie, Mackay, Townsville, Bowen, other reserves, travel and a secretary who would also act as Protector of Aborigines. [8]

The reserve programme in practice

The reserve chronology has often been compressed in later accounts, including historical material relied upon in Mabo v Queensland (No 2). It has been said that Durundur, Bribie Island, Cape Hillsborough, Townsville, Bowen and Cardwell were all gazetted in 1877 and that most were cancelled in 1878. The surviving administrative records and Government Gazette show a different sequence. Some were not created in 1877, several were still being created or funded during 1878, and legal reservation of land was not the same thing as the operation or closure of a government-supported settlement. Douglas’s government was still extending and financing the reserve programme in 1878.[9]

Durundur

Durundur was one of the clearest products of the Douglas period. In March 1877 approximately 2,400–3,000 acres were reserved near the Stanley River after Duncan McNab conveyed requests from Aboriginal people in the district for land on which they could live. Contemporary evidence identifies named Aboriginal advocates and also shows that local Europeans such as Henry Wood and John McConnel supported the proposal, partly because it promised stability and a labour pool. Wood and R. J. Smith became trustees, later joined by Frank Nicholson.[10]

The settlement developed a practical labour economy. Wood reported Aboriginal men working on neighbouring properties, ringbarking, cutting firewood, stripping bark and working with stock. For a four-month period he recorded £87 1s 10d in earnings, divided approximately equally between rations and cash. The reserve was therefore not simply a ration depot. Aboriginal residents moved between the reserve and paid employment and returned on weekends.[11]

The Aboriginal residents themselves criticised aspects of the scheme. In October 1877 McNab reported directly to Douglas that residents objected to the manager, to too many people being gathered in one establishment, and to a system in which industrious people gained little advantage over those who did less. They wanted smaller establishments and clearer recognition of individual ownership. This evidence is especially valuable because it shows Aboriginal people negotiating the imposed institution rather than merely receiving policy.[12]

Neighbouring selectors later pressed against the reservation of valuable land, but the reserve was not simply cancelled in 1878. The government continued the scheme; Nicholson was appointed trustee in March 1878, and Douglas publicly defended expenditure there in August. The original boundaries were amended in 1878, reducing or redefining the reserve to about 2,130 acres. Durundur remained an Aboriginal settlement long after Douglas left office and was finally closed only in 1905, when its remaining residents were transferred to Barambah. Any reference to “cancellation in 1885” therefore requires careful distinction between a legal alteration of reserve tenure and the continuing institutional history of the Durundur settlement.[13]

Bribie Island

Bribie was more fragile because it depended heavily on annual support and supervision rather than on a durable institutional structure. Thomas Petrie acted as a practical intermediary and supervisor. McNab promoted the scheme and sought boats, fishing equipment and stronger control over residents, but Douglas was careful to distinguish McNab’s proposals from what government had formally authorised. On 16 October 1877 Douglas told the Assembly that Bribie Island had not been conveyed to trustees for Aboriginal people and that no government money had been placed in McNab’s hands for a boat and gear.[14]

The 1878 papers show both activity and disagreement. Petrie complained that residents left when they pleased and wanted stronger powers to keep Aboriginal people away from Brisbane. McNab reported residents’ own criticisms of management. The Aboriginal Commissioners nevertheless considered Bribie important enough to seek £300 for it in the 1878–79 programme. The reserve therefore remained part of the active Douglas policy during 1878 rather than being cancelled as an abandoned experiment.[15]

The decisive break came after the change of government. Bishop Hale protested in March 1879 that sudden withdrawal of the small government ration and the compulsory dispersal of the Bribie people would cause distress, especially among the old and infirm. William Drew’s later resignation was connected both with the destruction of the Bribie scheme and with the government’s handling of the Cape Bedford killings. The McIlwraith administration’s treatment of Bribie is one of the clearest examples of genuine reversal: the previous government had been discussing expansion and funding; the new government withdrew the support on which the settlement depended.[16]

Mackay and Cape Hillsborough

The Mackay history is particularly easy to misstate because several related reserves and mission locations have been conflated. The first substantial government-supported experiment developed from the Mackay district in the early 1870s under Frank Bridgman and the Association for the Employment and Protection of Aborigines. By 1876 the mission or industrial establishment had shifted to Cape Hillsborough. Cape Hillsborough therefore cannot simply be listed as a reserve first created by the Douglas government in 1877.[17]

Under the Aboriginal Commission the Mackay experiment became the principal model for combining schooling, employment and supervised settlement. Jocelyn Brooke later described his protector duties as protecting Aboriginal people from ill-treatment, making their labour useful, assisting police to identify the actual offender in criminal cases, and keeping Aboriginal people away from townships where alcohol and other abuses were prevalent. This mixture of protection, labour discipline and individual culpability was characteristic of the Commission’s paternalism.[18]

The McIlwraith government terminated the operating experiment. Jocelyn Brooke, the schoolteacher and the carpenter were dismissed with effect from 30 April 1879, the police magistrate was directed to dispose of government property, and Aboriginal residents were effectively left to fend for themselves. The closure of the settlement is therefore a concrete administrative reversal, not merely a reduction in rhetoric. The Mackay reserve or associated land tenure was later formally cancelled, but the operative programme had already been dismantled in 1879.[19]

Townsville / Stuart Creek

A reserve at Stuart Creek, Townsville, was gazetted in 1877 and was an active part of the Commission’s programme in 1878. The surviving correspondence includes Gilbert Elliott’s telegram of 23 May 1878 asking permission to supplement an inadequate supply of blankets from Immigration Department stocks. The Commissioners’ financial request allocated £200 specifically to Townsville. Contemporary evidence also points to educational activity and local relief arrangements.[20]

Townsville is important because it shows that the reserve policy had reached the north rather than remaining a south-east Queensland experiment. It also existed in the same broader region in which Native Police detachments continued to operate. This supports the “dual system” interpretation: incorporation through reserves and relief could develop in one locality while coercive policing continued against groups treated as outside settled authority.
Bowen / Kelsey

Bowen is one of the clearest factual corrections to the Mabo chronology. The Kelsey Aboriginal Reserve was gazetted on 29 June 1878, Queensland Government Gazette, p. 1506. It therefore was not a 1877 reserve cancelled in 1878; it was created during 1878 while Douglas was Premier. Frank Bridgman was appointed its first trustee under the Aboriginal Commission.[21][22]

Its creation followed the removal of an Aboriginal camp from the Botanical Reserve when that area was wanted for Queens Park. The Kelsey scheme was therefore both protective and disciplinary: Aboriginal people were displaced from land desired for urban purposes and assigned another area where supervised residence and labour were expected. That history illustrates why “protection” must not be romanticised even when the reservation of land gave Aboriginal families some security.

Kelsey survived far beyond the Douglas government. Later reports described it as falling into disuse, but it was not formally degazetted until 1931. This single example is enough to demonstrate that the assertion that Bowen was gazetted in 1877 and cancelled in 1878 cannot be sustained.[23]

Cardwell / parish of Pitt

Cardwell is a second direct correction. Official Queensland historical material places the Aboriginal reserve in the county or parish of Cardwell/Pitt in 1878, not 1877. The background included Brinsley Sheridan’s 1877 proposals to reserve islands and his reports of kidnapping, but the mainland reserve belongs to 1878. It later failed to develop as originally intended and the land was eventually used for other purposes.[24]

Cardwell shows the two sides of Douglas’s policy operating in the same district. A Native Police camp had existed there since 1864 and another on the Herbert since 1870. In 1878 his government could reserve land for Aboriginal use while continuing to rely upon armed Native Police nearby. Protection and coercion were simultaneous policies, not sequential alternatives.[25]

What the reserve chronology shows

Once each reserve is separated, the pattern changes. Douglas’s government was not winding down a failed reserve experiment in 1878. It was maintaining Durundur and Bribie, funding Townsville, creating Kelsey/Bowen in June, creating or confirming Cardwell/Pitt, supporting Mackay, and seeking a much larger consolidated appropriation. The reserve programme remained uneven and paternalistic, but it was active.

Taken separately, the reserves show that 1878 was not the year the programme was abandoned. Douglas’s government was maintaining Durundur and Bribie, funding Townsville, creating Kelsey at Bowen, supporting Mackay and preparing a larger consolidated programme. The decisive political retreat came after the change of government in January 1879.

Protection and coercion side by side

This protective activity did not replace frontier coercion. On 10 July 1878, while Douglas was Premier and Colonial Secretary, Bailey raised newspaper allegations that Native Police shot Aboriginal men wholesale, tortured people, killed children and outraged women. Bailey asked for a full inquiry. Douglas declined. [26]

Douglas began by conceding that the Native Police was “a very exceptional force” and that acts in the past could not perhaps be justified. He nevertheless described it as, on the whole, a protective force necessary to maintain settlers in outside districts. His administrative remedy was geographic: detachments should be removed from settled “inside” districts and concentrated on the unsettled frontier. He rejected recent allegations as grossly exaggerated and insisted that atrocities, if committed, ought to be circumstantially stated and referred to government. [27]

Douglas’s policy cannot be reduced to humanitarianism. He had already expressed unease with the Native Police, had considered McNab’s alternative legal model and was prepared to spend substantially more on reserves. Yet when Parliament asked for a general investigation of alleged violence, he preserved the force and trusted executive administration to control it. His refusal was an informed choice, grounded principally in his belief that the active frontier still required exceptional protection.

Why Douglas refused an inquiry in 1878

Douglas refused the inquiry for three main reasons. He believed settlers on the advancing frontier were entitled to state protection and that no practical replacement for the Native Police yet existed. He believed the force could be controlled by withdrawing it from settled districts, concentrating it on the outer frontier and relying on suitable officers. And he distrusted sensational or demonstrably false newspaper stories, demanding particular and circumstantial allegations before accepting the case for a wider investigation.

Each explanation also exposes a failure. Frontier necessity became an institutional justification broad enough to preserve a force Douglas admitted was exceptional. His faith in good officers underestimated structural problems of reporting and evidence. And his proof standard did not adequately account for the very conditions Governor Cairns and later critics identified: remoteness, frightened or compromised witnesses, Aboriginal evidence that was difficult or impossible to admit in colonial courts, and the dependence of government on reports generated within the policing system itself.

Douglas did not create the Native Police and did not regard indiscriminate cruelty as legitimate. He nevertheless carried ministerial responsibility for an institution whose violent character was well known, and in July 1878 he declined the opportunity for a searching inquiry. That decision is central to his record.

Why the force still seemed necessary in 1878

Douglas’s phrase “necessary to maintain the position of settlers in the outside districts” should not be left as an abstraction. In 1877–78 European occupation was advancing rapidly through several distinct northern and western zones at once: new ports serving goldfields, road and pack routes over the coastal ranges, the Hodgkinson and Etheridge fields, the Gulf and Burke district, the Cloncurry field, and pastoral country farther west. Aboriginal resistance, settler vigilantism and Native Police reprisals overlapped. The following examples reconstruct the practical environment in which Douglas made his July 1878 decision.[28]

Cairns, Port Douglas and the Hodgkinson corridor

The Cairns–Hodgkinson corridor was among the clearest examples of an active moving frontier. Cairns and Smithfield had only been formally established in 1876 to serve the Hodgkinson goldfield. Tracks across the ranges carried miners, packers and stock through country occupied by large Aboriginal populations. On 24 June 1877 the Crown Lands Commissioner at Cairns reported concerning the proposed new port at Island Point, later Port Douglas, that Aboriginal people were numerous and that six had already been shot within two miles of the township, making solitary travel dangerous. The report is revealing in both directions: it records settler fear, but also the lethal violence already being inflicted upon Aboriginal people.[29]

By March 1878 Sub-Inspector Alexander Douglas-Douglas, operating in the Cairns district, reported that civilians themselves had “to a great extent relieved the Native Police by taking the law into their own hands”. He complained that there was little point in his patrolling places where other people had been “dispersing” Aboriginal groups the previous day. The statement is important for understanding Douglas’s dilemma as Premier. Withdrawal of the Native Police did not necessarily produce peace or ordinary law enforcement; it could leave armed settlers undertaking their own reprisals. That does not establish that the Native Police were the correct solution, but it helps explain why contemporary administrators could regard a government force as preferable to unregulated private violence.[30]

A Cairns correspondent on 16 March 1878 reported demands for immediate measures to protect travellers and stock. Later that year the Native Police presence extended through Baan Bero/Barron River and towards the Mossman. Commissioner Seymour’s annual report for 1878 subsequently described complaints of cattle killing and hut robbery between Cairns and Cooktown as “never ending”. These were precisely the conditions Douglas had in mind when he spoke of an “outside” frontier.

Etheridge, Georgetown and the Gilbert Ranges

The Etheridge and Georgetown districts provide a second concrete example. An inquest at Georgetown on 7 May 1878 found that Joseph Manuel had been killed in a camp where numerous Aboriginal tracks and broken spears were found. In July William Steele of Georgetown wrote to government complaining about the organisation of the Native Police in the Burke electoral district. He claimed that Aboriginal numbers and depredations were increasing, particularly in the Gilbert Ranges, because the police were not acting effectively. Steele’s letter also complained of “vested interests” interfering with the operation of the force. Whatever the accuracy of his diagnosis, the correspondence shows that government was receiving demands for more effective frontier policing at almost the same moment that metropolitan critics were demanding investigation of police violence.[31]

The government did not face a choice between the Native Police and an already functioning system of ordinary policing. It was receiving complaints that the frontier police were simultaneously too violent and insufficiently active. Douglas was right that there was a genuine frontier-security problem. His error was allowing that fact to answer a different question: whether the institution dealing with the problem was itself committing unlawful violence.

Cloncurry and the north-west

The Cloncurry goldfield was another active pressure point. In early 1878 residents petitioned against a proposal to move the Native Police detachment from the Cloncurry Goldfield Reserve to Dugald Station. Their stated fear was that relocation would deprive the field of effective protection from Aboriginal attack. This is direct contemporary evidence that at least some settlers believed their personal security depended upon the local detachment.[32]

The broader north-west had a recent history of violent resistance to pastoral expansion, cattle killing and punitive expeditions. The later Kalkadoon conflict did not suddenly begin in the 1880s; the confrontation was already intensifying in the late 1870s. For 1878 the clearest evidence is the Cloncurry petition itself and the government’s continuing movement of detachments into the far west. Later killings around Wonomo/Suleiman Creek and the escalation of Kalkadoon resistance demonstrate how unstable the region remained, but they should not be imported backwards as though Douglas possessed foreknowledge of every later event.

Fort Cooper, Mackay hinterland and Bloomsbury

The government was also trying to rationalise detachments in districts where settlement had advanced. On 31 January 1878 the Mackay District Association asked whether the Native Police were being removed from North Fort Cooper. The official answer was that the detachment was being centralised at Bloomsbury and that the district would continue to be patrolled. The Association later complained about the Colonial Secretary’s refusal to retain police at Fort Cooper. This is exactly the policy Douglas described in Parliament: withdraw or consolidate detachments in more settled districts while preserving patrol capacity and pushing the exceptional force outward.[33]

The episode therefore supports Douglas’s claim that he had not simply maintained the inherited distribution unchanged. He was attempting a geographical transition from Native Police to ordinary administration. The weakness of the policy was that it addressed where the force operated, not whether its operational practices were lawful or adequately scrutinised.

Cardwell, Herbert River and the north-east coast

Cardwell and the Herbert district show why the line between “settled” and “outside” was not clean. The region had decades of violent conflict, and the Native Police remained active while Douglas’s government simultaneously contemplated Aboriginal reserves and protective administration. On 12 September 1878 an inquest at Cardwell concerned two unidentified fishermen whose bodies were found buried in sand at a place described by Sub-Inspector Robert Johnstone as a native oven. The incident occurred only two months after Douglas’s parliamentary defence of the force.[34]

In August 1878 the schooner Louisa Maria was attacked near Whitsunday Island. Its master reported that Aboriginal men came from canoes, attacked the vessel, apparently killed the cook John Morrison, plundered the schooner and set it alight. Native Police reprisals followed. The case later figured in parliamentary argument as an example of why coastal Aboriginal groups could still be considered dangerous even in districts not normally imagined as the far frontier.[35]

These incidents do not validate collective punishment. They do show why parliamentarians could plausibly argue that the frontier problem included attacks on isolated travellers, fishermen, mariners and stock as well as conflict generated by pastoral occupation.

Burke River, Boulia and the far west

By the end of 1878 the government was extending Native Police protection farther west rather than simply shrinking the force. In December a detachment under Sub-Inspector Eglinton was sent towards the Burke River near Goodwood Station, north of Boulia. A contemporary report said the move would be welcomed by “outside settlers”, including families who had gone into the far west. The same report remarked that the Diamantina was becoming comparatively “inside” while the Burke and Herbert represented the advancing edge. This language closely matches Douglas’s own inside/outside distinction.[36]

The importance of the Boulia deployment is conceptual. Douglas’s July 1878 position was not that every existing Native Police station was indispensable. It was that a mobile frontier required the force to be redistributed as settlement advanced. His later August 1879 speech repeated almost the same logic: remove detachments from older coastal and pastoral districts, but retain or increase them farther west and on new goldfields.

A frontier in which settlers also committed violence

The same records prevent the operational case from becoming a settler-centred justification narrative. Sub-Inspector Douglas-Douglas’s March 1878 statement explicitly acknowledged settlers taking the law into their own hands. A 1878 file concerned John Brown, convicted of shooting a disabled Aboriginal man at Warroo station. In November Douglas-Douglas reported from Baan Bero that Aboriginal people had been pushed away from the coast into poor hunting country and were sometimes driven by hunger to kill stock. Some settlers, he added, asked him not to interfere with Aboriginal groups who had not molested their stock. Judge Sheppard in December warned that northern juries could be prejudiced against Aboriginal defendants.[37]

The frontier Douglas was governing was therefore not a simple contest between innocent settlers and predatory Aboriginal groups. European occupation disrupted land and food resources; settlers sometimes killed Aboriginal people privately; Aboriginal resistance ranged from stock taking to attacks on travellers and isolated Europeans; and the Native Police responded through a coercive system in which “dispersal” could mean lethal reprisal. The operational necessity argument must be reconstructed in that full form.

Necessity explains the decision; it does not excuse it

Douglas’s 1878 judgement was made amid attacks, settler fear, demands that detachments be retained, private vigilantism and rapidly advancing occupation. No ordinary police system was ready to replace the Native Police across thousands of kilometres of sparsely occupied country. Even the Aboriginal Commissioners had concluded in 1875 that frontier settlement could not then be maintained without an armed force.

Necessity did not justify refusing scrutiny. A genuine need for protection did not require retaining the existing institution without investigating its methods. Douglas-Douglas’s warning that settlers were themselves “taking the law into their own hands” strengthened the case for an accountable public alternative. Douglas had reasonable grounds to believe a frontier force was necessary; in July 1878 he wrongly allowed that necessity to settle the separate question of whether the Native Police itself required exhaustive inquiry.

McIlwraith reverses course, 1879–83

The election of 1878 and the formation of Thomas McIlwraith’s ministry on 21 January 1879 mark a genuine change in Aboriginal administration. The reversal should not be caricatured as the immediate legal cancellation of every reserve: Durundur and Kelsey, for example, survived. It was instead a reversal of the active policy architecture created under the previous Liberal governments—Commission-led experimentation, growing reserve expenditure, protectors, schools, supervised labour schemes and attempts to create an institutional voice capable of questioning Native Police conduct.

The proposed expansion of expenditure stopped

In August 1878 Douglas had told Parliament that £500 was inadequate and that £5,000 could be usefully spent. Hale’s Commission followed with a detailed request for £1,600 for Bribie, Mackay, Townsville, Bowen, other reserves, travel and a combined secretary/protector. The proposal represented movement towards a small but coherent Aboriginal administration rather than isolated charitable grants. The incoming ministry did not develop that machinery. Contemporary accounts record that the Commission was advised not to authorise new expenditure and the expanded programme did not proceed.

This is the first reversal: Douglas’s government had been trying, unsuccessfully but explicitly, to enlarge the financial and administrative base of protection; McIlwraith’s did not carry that programme forward. Later official histories record continued annual reserve grants in some form, but the Commission’s planned expansion and protector structure stalled.

Mackay was dismantled

The most concrete example was Mackay. The government-supported establishment, including Jocelyn Brooke’s protector work, the schoolteacher and carpenter, was terminated. Their employment ended on 30 April 1879 and the police magistrate was instructed to dispose of government property. Aboriginal residents were no longer to be supported through the same institutional structure. What had served as the Commission’s principal demonstration project was therefore deliberately dismantled within months of the change of government.

The importance of Mackay is that this was not simply failure through neglect. Officials were dismissed and assets disposed of. The McIlwraith administration was actively withdrawing the apparatus through which the previous government had attempted to combine protection, schooling, labour and local supervision.

Bribie was broken up despite warnings

Bribie shows the human consequences of the financial reversal. Bishop Hale warned on 7 March 1879 that sudden withdrawal of the small ration and the dispersal of the Bribie people would cause distress, particularly among older and infirm residents. The complaint was not that a grand institutional scheme had been denied; it concerned basic subsistence for people whom the state had encouraged to gather under an official experiment.

The government nevertheless proceeded with withdrawal. Bribie’s government support was terminated despite Hale’s warning, and the settlement was broken up. William Drew cited the treatment of Bribie among his reasons for resignation.

The Aboriginal Commission was rendered ineffective

This distinction is important. Official Blue Books continued to list the Aboriginal Commission for several years, so it would be inaccurate to say that a statute or proclamation instantly abolished it in January 1879. In practice, however, its capacity to operate collapsed. Graham and McNab had already resigned in late 1878 for separate reasons. Drew resigned in 1879. Members were not effectively replaced, funds were not supplied for the programme they proposed, and the ministry refused to cooperate with the Commission when it sought information about Native Police violence.

The result was administrative death without a single dramatic abolition instrument. Contemporary critics described the Commission as practically finished. That language is supported by function rather than merely polemic: an advisory body deprived of money, personnel and answers from the department responsible for police could no longer perform the role Douglas’s government had envisaged for it.

Cape Bedford exposed the reversal in accountability

The February 1879 Cape Bedford killings provide the clearest example of the new ministry’s attitude towards scrutiny. Sub-Inspector Stanhope O’Connor and six Native Police troopers carried out a punitive operation after two Europeans were wounded. Contemporary reports alleged that more than twenty Aboriginal men were shot, with others presumed drowned. Bishop Hale, as chairman of the Aboriginal Commission, sought official information.

The response from the Colonial Secretary’s office was not a cooperative inquiry. Queensland State Archives summarises the surviving file as Hale receiving a brief reply “declining to answer any questions”. William Drew resigned in protest at both the Native Police action and the government’s response. An official annotation described his reasoning as “a downright absurdity”. The episode demonstrates that the shift was not merely financial. The Commission’s claim to ask questions about frontier violence was itself rejected by the administration responsible for the force.

This contrast with Douglas must be drawn carefully. Douglas himself had refused a parliamentary inquiry in July 1878, so the preceding government cannot be portrayed as a model of transparency. The difference lies elsewhere: Douglas had supported the Commission, reserve experimentation and increased expenditure while trusting ministerial control of the police; the McIlwraith–Palmer administration simultaneously dismantled much of the protective machinery and resisted the Commission’s attempt even to obtain an account of a specific major incident.

The Native Police retained operational priority

The practical asymmetry is stark. During the same period in which Mackay and Bribie support was withdrawn and the Aboriginal Commission lost effective capacity, Native Police operations continued on the northern and western frontiers. The state did not abandon expenditure on Aboriginal affairs in an absolute sense; rather, its coercive arm remained operational while the small protective-administrative arm contracted.

The reversal was therefore substantive. In 1878 Douglas had maintained a dual system: coercion on the active frontier alongside reserves, protectors, schooling, paid employment and supervised local administration. McIlwraith did not abolish coercion and replace it with ordinary policing; he reduced much of the protective half of the system while retaining the coercive one.

Reserve survival did not negate the policy reversal

Durundur remained in existence and Kelsey/Bowen legally survived for decades. This prevents us from writing that McIlwraith simply “cancelled all the reserves”. Some modern secondary accounts make that claim, but the legal histories do not support it. The more accurate statement is that his administration abandoned or reduced the active government programme that had been developing around those reserves.

The difference between a gazetted parcel of land and a functioning supported settlement is crucial. A reserve could survive on paper after funding, staff, schooling or active supervision had been withdrawn. Conversely, a settlement could be administratively dismantled before the legal reservation of its land was formally revoked. The Mabo chronology appears to conflate these different processes.

The earlier course was not restored

Queensland did not immediately replace the Douglas-era programme with a comparable alternative. Later official histories describe the 1880s as a period in which reserve administration continued unevenly and church missions gradually assumed a greater role. A more coherent colony-wide statutory protection system emerged only with the policies developed in the 1890s and the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897. The intervening gap makes the 1879 reversal historically consequential rather than a brief administrative interruption.

The extent of the reversal

The contrast can now be stated precisely. Douglas left office with an Aboriginal Commission still functioning, a reserve network still expanding, a proposal for substantially increased expenditure, and an embryonic protector role under discussion. Within months, the incoming government had stopped the expansion, dismantled Mackay, broken up Bribie despite warnings about the old and infirm, failed to sustain the Commission’s personnel and finances, and refused its chairman substantive answers about Cape Bedford. Yet Native Police deployment continued.

That record does not absolve Douglas for 1878. It does, however, make it impossible to describe the two administrations as pursuing essentially the same Aboriginal policy. Douglas’s system was paternalistic, underfunded and internally contradictory, but it attempted to combine coercive frontier protection with increasingly organised Aboriginal welfare and administration. McIlwraith’s first ministry sharply reduced the latter while preserving the former. This is a substantive policy reversal.

The reversal in Parliament, 1879–80

Parliament made the new government’s position explicit on 8 September 1879. During Supply, McIlwraith’s Minister for Lands admitted that he had no recent information about Durundur and did not know what was being done at Townsville. McIlwraith then said that the park and reserve votes would probably disappear from the Estimates within a year or two and that he had “long thought” the vote for Aboriginal people was “the most wasted money of the whole.” The retrenchment was deliberate policy, not administrative drift.

The same debate also exposes the practical consequences of the change. A member reported that the Mackay reserve had worked “fairly well” and was sufficiently valued locally that, after the government money expired on 30 June, it had been kept going by voluntary subscriptions while Parliament’s decision remained uncertain. In other words, the government-supported establishment had already lost the financial continuity it possessed under the previous administration. Local subscription temporarily filled the gap. That is an exceptionally clear example of public responsibility being shifted away from the colonial government.

Durundur produced an equally revealing contrast. Garrick argued that its 2,500 acres of good agricultural land should ultimately be thrown open to selection. The Minister for Lands knew little about its current operation. Douglas then defended the reserve from the Opposition benches. He explained that it had been fenced into two paddocks, one used by Aboriginal people for camping and a government-purchased herd of cattle, the other let annually with the proceeds used for Aboriginal benefit. Aboriginal workers might be absent for weeks stripping bark or cutting cedar, he said, but they treated Durundur as their headquarters and returned to it. His strongest argument was dispossession: because “the whole territory of the blacks had been forcibly taken from them,” settlers should not begrudge them a small piece they could regard as their own. He urged that it remain reserved so long as it served that purpose. The exchange shows Douglas defending the substantive principle of reserve land against both settler pressure and ministerial ignorance only months after leaving office.

Palmer then made a particularly revealing intervention. Rather than take responsibility for developing the reserve, the Colonial Secretary “strongly recommend[ed]” that the Minister for Lands not interfere and leave the late government to “work out” the arrangement. The remark was partly parliamentary sarcasm, but it captures the incoming ministry’s disposition: Douglas’s reserve experiment was treated as something inherited from political opponents rather than as an expanding responsibility of government.

Native Police accountability in 1880

On 13 September 1880 Palmer rejected the demand for a Royal Commission in language closely resembling the evidentiary position Douglas himself had taken in July 1878. Palmer accepted that there had been “bad native police officers”—indeed, men as bad as could be found—but argued that past cases were no reason to rake up old matters. If a member supplied the name of an officer and a specific allegation of shooting, Palmer promised an inquiry “to the bitter end”. But anonymous or press allegations were, in his view, of “no practical use whatever”. A Royal Commission might spend £10,000 or £20,000 and still get no nearer the truth.[38]

Palmer in September 1880 was defending almost exactly the position Douglas had taken two years earlier: proof first, broad inquiry only after a specific allegation had been substantiated. Griffith identified the weakness. Witnesses who had participated in reprisals could refuse to incriminate themselves, so an ordinary departmental inquiry could never uncover the whole truth. A Royal Commission backed by statute and witness indemnity was needed because the ordinary machinery of proof was inadequate.

Douglas then pressed Palmer to separate the Native Police vote from the ordinary police appropriation. He offered to vote the general police amount and the money for fifty-two trackers if the government would postpone the vote for 128 Native Police troopers. Palmer refused. Douglas answered that substantial complaints had been made to high authorities outside Queensland, that the matter should be “thoroughly sifted out,” and that he was “not content to go on from year to year doing nothing.” He said public feeling had been sufficiently aroused and that he believed deliberate, cold-blooded murders unjustified by retaliation had repeatedly occurred in the north.

The exchange is important for assessing the McIlwraith government. By September 1880 its Colonial Secretary had not merely failed to initiate an inquiry; he explicitly rejected the institutional logic of one. He preferred case-by-case departmental investigation, insisted upon named and conventionally provable allegations, and refused to delay Native Police funding while the larger question was examined.

Palmer’s defence of coercion

When Douglas formally moved for a Royal Commission on 21 October 1880, Palmer argued that the “native black of Australia was essentially a treacherous animal,” that Aboriginal people would spare neither people nor livestock, and that the “firm hand” required to keep them down depended upon demonstrating that whites were superior and could “beat them down”. He maintained that government pursued this policy with as little bloodshed as possible. This was not merely a defence of operational necessity; it rested openly upon racial hierarchy and coercive submission.[39]

Palmer said a Royal Commission would do no good and mocked the likely expense of commissioners travelling through the north. He challenged Douglas to explain how such a body would work, even though Douglas’s resolutions specifically proposed compulsory testimony and indemnity. Palmer’s preferred remedy for frontier disorder was striking: he said the way to prevent Aboriginal “atrocities” would be to quadruple the Native Police Force, although Parliament would never vote the money. He was experimenting with attaching some Aboriginal troopers to the ordinary white police as trackers, but did not regard institutional investigation of the existing force as necessary.

The contrast with Douglas could hardly be clearer by this point. Both men still accepted that settlers required protection and neither proposed surrendering colonial occupation. Palmer’s answer was stronger coercive capacity, good officers and selective investigation of named cases. Douglas’s answer had become institutional: determine what powers the force actually possessed, compel evidence, indemnify witnesses, investigate in the districts where violence occurred, and reconstruct the system if necessary.

The difference between the two administrations

• Financial: McIlwraith regarded Aboriginal expenditure as peculiarly wasteful, while Douglas had argued only thirteen months earlier that expenditure could usefully be increased many times over.
• Administrative: the new ministry did not sustain the Commission-led network of reserves, protectors and experiments; Mackay lost government support, Bribie was dispersed, and ministers showed limited knowledge of surviving reserve administration.
• Accountability: when the Aboriginal Commission sought information after Cape Bedford and when Parliament later sought wider inquiry, the ministry resisted mechanisms capable of producing evidence beyond ordinary departmental channels.
• Conceptual: Douglas increasingly separated the necessity for frontier protection from the legitimacy of the existing Native Police institution. Palmer continued to treat necessity, racial hierarchy and firm coercive control as mutually reinforcing reasons for retaining the force.

This does not make Douglas’s 1878 record disappear. Palmer’s 1880 defence is powerful partly because it resembles Douglas’s own earlier reasoning. The crucial historical difference is developmental. Douglas moved away from that position between August 1879 and September 1880; the McIlwraith–Palmer government did not. In the same period it reduced the protective-administrative programme while defending the coercive institution against systemic inquiry.

Money, men and the scale of the Native Police

The financial record reinforces the contrast between protection and coercion. The surviving figures mix actual expenditure, annual votes, supplementary requests and retrospective estimates, so they cannot be treated as a single year-by-year accounting series. They are nevertheless sufficient to show the scale and direction of policy.

Reserve expenditure before the 1878 expansion proposal

During the Supply debate of 8 August 1878 the Minister for Lands set out expenditure already incurred on Aboriginal administration. Mackay accounted for £459 18s 9d; Bribie Island £273 16s 8d; Barrow River £13 3s 5d; Sandy Cape £10; the Aboriginal Commission £60; and Lands Department stores and clothing £24 2s 4d. These items total a little over £841. They are valuable because they demonstrate that the reserve programme was already consuming real public money before Douglas proposed expansion.

The ordinary estimate before the Committee contained £500 for Aboriginal reserves. Douglas regarded that amount as manifestly inadequate. His argument was not that a few charitable experiments should continue at minimum cost, but that government ought to spend on a much larger scale where useful schemes could be established.

Douglas argues for greater expenditure

On 8 August 1878 Douglas said that “instead of £500, £5,000 could be well expended” upon Aboriginal purposes. He described such expenditure as particularly justifiable and said that he had encountered great difficulty in giving effect to proposals, not because members lacked sympathy, but because they believed the money would be wasted. The statement is important because it provides a direct benchmark for Douglas’s own preferred scale of expenditure: ten times the £500 vote then before the Committee.[40]

This was not a formal £5,000 appropriation and should never be represented as money actually voted. It was a statement of what Douglas believed could usefully be spent if suitable machinery existed. Its significance is political rather than accounting: the Premier was publicly arguing for a dramatic expansion of Aboriginal expenditure shortly before his government left office.

The Commission’s £1,600 programme

The Aboriginal Commission then translated general ambition into a specific administrative proposal. Hale’s 1878 request allocated £300 to Bribie Island, £500 to Mackay, £200 to Townsville, £100 to Bowen, £150 to other reserves, £200 to a secretary who would also act as Protector of Aborigines, and £150 for travel and incidental expenses: £1,600 in all. The distribution is revealing. Almost one quarter of the total was for administrative capacity rather than rations alone: a protector-secretary and travel were intended to create supervision across districts.[41]

A contemporary account later reproduced in The Way We Civilise reported that Douglas moved the £1,600 grant in committee in September 1878 and that it was rejected without division because opponents believed an expiring Parliament should not embark on a new undertaking. The newspaper account accords with Hale’s surviving £1,600 request and with Douglas’s August declaration that he intended to place a larger sum on the Supplementary Estimates.

McIlwraith did not revive the programme

The McIlwraith administration inherited the unfulfilled £1,600 programme but did not revive it. By September 1879 Mackay’s government support had expired and local subscriptions were keeping activity going; ministers displayed limited knowledge of Durundur and Townsville; and McIlwraith described the Aboriginal vote as, in his long-held view, “the most wasted money of the whole”. The contrast is therefore not between a successfully funded £1,600 Douglas system and a zero-funded McIlwraith system. Douglas’s proposed expansion had already been defeated by Parliament. The change lies in ministerial direction: Douglas sought to overcome that resistance; McIlwraith regarded further expenditure as wasteful.

Native Police expenditure was on a different scale

The coercive side of Aboriginal policy operated at a much larger financial scale. In October 1880 Douglas told the Assembly that more than £300,000 had been spent on the Native Police during the preceding twenty years. The figure was his parliamentary estimate, not an independently audited total, and should be presented as such until reconstructed from annual Estimates. Nevertheless, it gives a reliable sense of the order of magnitude against which the reserve programme was debated.

The contrast is striking. In 1878 Douglas was struggling to secure hundreds of pounds for individual reserves and £1,600 for an expanded colony-wide protection programme, while a Native Police institution costing many thousands of pounds annually had been maintained for decades. Even if Douglas’s £300,000 retrospective figure is later adjusted, the disparity between coercive and protective expenditure will remain large.

1880: reduction, not abolition

The 13 September 1880 Estimates debate provides a firmer quantitative snapshot of the Native Police establishment. Palmer stated that Native Police troopers had been reduced from 200 to 128, while a separate 52 Aboriginal trackers were being attached to ordinary white police. He described the change as a gradual movement towards eventual abolition of the Native Police, not an immediate termination. The 128 troopers would remain for service in outside districts.

Palmer also said that there was not a mail from the north or north-west that failed to bring applications for Native Police assistance. His figures placed 113 members of the force in coastal districts and 73 in the interior. The arithmetic appears to relate to the wider black police/tracker establishment rather than simply the 128 troopers, and should therefore not be used without qualification. What is secure is the institutional direction: reduction and redistribution, while retaining a substantial armed frontier force.

The limits of the financial figures

In the same debate the Colonial Secretary moved £30,775 for police salaries and contingencies, stating that the vote was the same as the previous year. That was a departmental figure, not the cost of the Native Police alone: the Estimates embraced ordinary police, Native Police and trackers. It therefore provides context for the scale of policing, but not a stand-alone Native Police budget.

A financial comparison

Date	Item	Amount / strength	Status
1877–78	Recorded Aboriginal reserve/Commission expenditure cited in Aug. 1878 debate	c. £841	Actual expenditure items reported to Parliament
1878	Ordinary Aboriginal reserve vote	£500	Estimate/vote before Committee
8 Aug. 1878	Douglas’s preferred possible expenditure	£5,000	Political statement, not an appropriation
Sep. 1878	Aboriginal Commission expanded programme	£1,600	Requested; contemporary account says moved and rejected
1879	Mackay government support	Expired 30 June; voluntary subscriptions followed	Administrative contraction
Sep. 1879	McIlwraith on Aboriginal vote	Called it the “most wasted money of the whole”	Statement of ministerial attitude
Sep. 1880	Native Police establishment	200 reduced to 128 troopers; 52 trackers separately	Confirmed parliamentary strength figures
Oct. 1880	Douglas retrospective Native Police expenditure estimate	> £300,000 over about twenty years	Parliamentary estimate; requires independent reconstruction

What the figures show

The financial evidence does not prove that every pound spent on reserves was benevolent or that every pound spent on Native Police produced violence. Nor does it show that Douglas’s preferred £5,000 programme would have succeeded. It does establish a structural imbalance. Queensland was willing to sustain a comparatively expensive coercive institution across the frontier while repeatedly treating even modest protective expenditure as discretionary, experimental or vulnerable to retrenchment.

Douglas’s significance lies partly in recognising that imbalance before he had rejected the Native Police institution itself. In 1878 he simultaneously defended the force and argued that Aboriginal protection deserved much greater expenditure. By 1880 he had gone further: he was questioning whether the coercive institution receiving the larger and more secure commitment possessed a defensible legal and evidentiary structure at all.

1879: a force still fixed at 200 troopers

The 4 August 1879 Supply debate shows that the Native Police establishment was still fixed at 200 troopers. Douglas argued that this was no longer justified as a uniform establishment. Bloomsbury, the lower Burdekin and the Herbert could be relieved, he said, while the Etheridge and other active goldfields required greater protection; the Warrego no longer required Native Police, but country a few hundred miles farther west did. The 200-man establishment therefore concealed a redistribution problem: the political question was increasingly where the force should operate, not simply whether Queensland should retain the inherited network of camps.[42]

The same debate gives a rough contemporary measure of cost. One member observed that pastoral rents were estimated at £150,000 and that “nearly one-tenth” of that sum went to maintaining the Native Police. This implies an annual cost in the vicinity of £15,000, but it is an argumentative estimate made in debate, not an audited departmental total. It is useful only as an order-of-magnitude check against Douglas’s later statement that more than £300,000 had been spent over about twenty years.[43]

1880: 128 troopers and 52 trackers

The 13 September 1880 Estimates give a clear establishment breakdown. The general police vote for salaries and contingencies was £30,775, while a separate executive-salaries vote contained the personnel establishment. Palmer stated that Native Police troopers had been reduced from 200 to 128. Fifty-two Aboriginal trackers appeared separately in the Estimates and were intended for attachment to ordinary white police. The proposed reform therefore divided Aboriginal police personnel into 128 Native Police troopers serving principally in outside districts and 52 trackers serving with ordinary police.

Palmer also supplied a distribution figure: 113 members of the black police establishment were then in coastal districts and 73 in the interior. Because 113 plus 73 equals 186, rather than either 128 or 180, these figures plainly use a wider category than the Native Police troopers alone. They should therefore be reproduced as Palmer gave them, not silently reconciled into a figure the source does not support.[44]

On the narrow trooper count, 72 of 200 positions had disappeared, a reduction of 36 per cent. But the addition of 52 trackers means the total explicitly identified Aboriginal police personnel in the Estimates was 180, only 10 per cent below the former 200-trooper establishment. The reform was therefore as much a change in organisation and supervision as a simple reduction in Aboriginal police manpower.[45]

1882: the geographical result

A surviving quarterly return forwarded by Commissioner Seymour on 14 April 1882 allows the distribution to be reconstructed much more precisely. On 31 March the Queensland Police Force contained 112 Native Police troopers and 65 Native trackers. The troopers were concentrated in the northern and north-western districts represented in the return; the southern and central districts added trackers but no further Native Police troopers.[46]

Within the Cooktown–Port Douglas–Barron River group the return carried forward 48 Native Police troopers and seven trackers. The next block—Townsville and the northern coast, followed by Blackall, Boulia, Burke River, Cloncurry, Carl Creek, Dunrobin and other western and Gulf stations—brought the cumulative totals to 112 troopers and 40 trackers. The final Rockhampton, Roma and south-western block added no Native Police troopers but raised trackers to 65. This is strong quantitative evidence for the geographical transition: specialised Native Police were being concentrated on the northern and north-western frontier while Aboriginal trackers were increasingly integrated into ordinary policing elsewhere.[47]

The 1882 return gives concrete examples of the remaining concentrations: Barron River ten troopers; Port Douglas five; Laura seven; Glenroy seven; Normanby seven; McIvor six; Carl Creek sixteen; Cloncurry sixteen; Dunrobin ten; Burke River six; and McKinlay Downs six.[48]

The establishment in transition

Date	Native troopers	Native trackers	Police votes identified	Interpretation	Source
Aug. 1879	200	Not separately stated	Whole police vote debated; Native Police component not isolated	Douglas urges redistribution; establishment still unreduced	QPD, 4 Aug. 1879, 1082–92
Sep. 1880	128	52	£30,775 salaries/contingencies; £70,553 executive salaries etc.; neither is Native Police alone	36% fall in troopers; trackers shifted towards white-police supervision	QPD, 13 Sep. 1880, 664–78
31 Mar. 1882	112	65	Strength return, not financial return	Troopers concentrated north/north-west; trackers more widely dispersed	QSA, 82/2098, pp. 1–5

How a small force exercised extensive frontier power

The annual trooper totals are potentially misleading because a Native Police detachment was not simply a group of Aboriginal troopers. The operating unit was a small mounted body commanded by one or more white police officers and supported by horses, firearms, ammunition, rations, camps and the wider Queensland Police administration. Contemporary and later reconstructions consistently describe the force as detachments of Aboriginal troopers under white officers; a common field detachment was only several troopers strong. The small size of each party was therefore a feature of the system rather than evidence of limited reach.[49]

The 1882 return confirms that the Native Police existed inside a much larger police establishment. It lists six first-class inspectors, four second-class inspectors, seven first-class and thirteen second-class sub-inspectors, twelve senior sergeants, forty sergeants, eighty-two senior constables, 322 constables, sixteen supernumeraries, 112 Native Police troopers and sixty-five Native trackers. These categories are not a single Native Police headcount: they show the much larger European-ranked and ordinary-police establishment within which the 112 troopers operated.[50]

The station-by-station return is particularly revealing. Places carrying Native Police troopers normally also carried members of the European-ranked establishment. Glenroy, Laura, McIvor, Normanby, Port Douglas, Barron River, Glendhu, Burke River, McKinlay Downs, Carl Creek, Cloncurry and Dunrobin all appear with combinations of white-ranked police and Native troopers. The trooper figure therefore represented field manpower within a wider command and administrative structure.[51]

This also corrects a potentially misleading phrase such as “Cloncurry had sixteen police”. The return records sixteen Native troopers at Cloncurry, but the station also carried European-ranked police. Likewise Carl Creek’s sixteen Native troopers operated within a station commanded and administered through white officers. The appropriate unit of analysis is therefore the detachment or station, not the trooper count alone.[52]

Mobility multiplied its reach

The force was mounted. A small detachment could patrol far beyond its camp, pursue groups over considerable distances and move when the frontier shifted. Earlier official returns show the importance of horses to the whole Queensland Police system: in October 1866 the force possessed 386 government horses, while the Native Police and ordinary police were distributed across fifty-two stations. Twenty of those stations then contained Native Police—ten mixed European-and-Native stations and ten Native Police stations. The basic organisational principle was therefore already established: a dispersed network of small mounted detachments rather than large garrisons.[53]

This helps explain the force’s disproportionate historical impact. Its coercive reach depended less on concentrating large numbers in one place than on maintaining armed, mounted parties at strategically located camps. Detachments could be transferred as settlement advanced, patrol from a fixed base, and, when necessary, operate in conjunction with other detachments or with ordinary police. A force numbering only a few hundred across the colony could consequently project violence or the threat of violence over a much larger area than its raw headcount suggests.

The importance of the white officers

The white officer was central to the system. The Aboriginal troopers supplied tracking skill, mobility and most of the field manpower, but European inspectors and sub-inspectors carried formal command authority, reported to Commissioner Seymour and were responsible—at least administratively—for discipline and operations. This makes the quality and accountability of individual officers exceptionally important. A single poorly supervised sub-inspector commanding half a dozen armed troopers in a remote district could exercise substantial coercive discretion with little immediate external scrutiny.[54]

That institutional structure helps explain why the Native Police generated controversy out of proportion to its numbers. The central problem was not simply how many troopers existed, but how much discretionary force could be exercised by small parties far from courts, magistrates, newspapers and senior police supervision. Douglas’s 1875 complaint that the force was “less under control” and his 1880 concern about powers that lacked an intelligible legal foundation become more significant when read against this organisational reality.

Trackers and ordinary police

The transition from Native Police troopers to Native trackers also complicates any simple numerical story of decline. In September 1880 Palmer described a reduction from 200 Native Police troopers to 128 while separately providing for fifty-two trackers to serve with ordinary white police. By March 1882 the corresponding figures were 112 troopers and sixty-five trackers. The specialised Native Police arm was contracting, but Aboriginal police labour remained substantial and was being redistributed into the ordinary force.[55]

The personnel figures need three separate categories: Aboriginal Native Police troopers, Aboriginal trackers attached to ordinary police, and white officers who actually commanded Native Police detachments. Ordinary white constables serving at the same station were not part of the Native Police unless they had an operational connection with the detachment.

Settler violence extended coercion beyond the official force

Nor did the official police establishment represent all armed coercion on the frontier. The 1878 Cairns correspondence already shows Sub-Inspector Alexander Douglas-Douglas complaining that civilians had effectively relieved the Native Police by taking the law into their own hands and “dispersing” Aboriginal people before police patrols arrived. In other districts settlers petitioned for detachments, supplied information, accompanied searches or retaliated independently. The Native Police therefore operated within a wider frontier security system in which official police, settlers and local administrative officers could interact.[56]

This point must be handled carefully. It would be wrong to count every armed settler as an auxiliary Native Policeman. But it would be equally misleading to infer from 112 troopers that only 112 men were capable of participating in coercive frontier operations. The effective coercive environment was larger than the formal Native Police establishment.

How the system worked

The numerical paradox can therefore be resolved. The Native Police was small in absolute manpower but highly leveraged. Its effectiveness rested on a combination of white command, Aboriginal tracking and bush skills, mounted mobility, firearms, dispersed camps, government supply and the capacity to shift detachments towards active frontiers. The force did not need to occupy every district continuously. Its presence at selected frontier nodes, and the possibility of patrol or reinforcement, gave a relatively small establishment a reach far beyond its numbers.

For Douglas this organisational fact cuts in two directions. It helps explain why he could regard the force as indispensable when there was no ordinary police network capable of protecting settlers across enormous frontier districts. At the same time, precisely the features that made the force effective—small mobile parties, remoteness and considerable discretion—made meaningful supervision unusually difficult. The argument from necessity therefore intensified rather than answered the problem of accountability.

Personnel and operational layers in 1882

Layer	Number identifiable	Role	Treatment in totals
Native Police troopers	112	Mounted frontier field force	Count as Native Police
Native trackers	65	Tracking with ordinary police / transitional policing	Count separately, not as troopers
European-ranked Queensland Police	500 recorded in European ranks	Command, ordinary policing, supervision and support	Context only

From redeployment to institutional challenge, 1879–80

Douglas’s change of position cannot be dated to his fall from office in January 1879, nor simply to the Cape Bedford killings the following month. His speech of 4 August 1879 demonstrates substantial continuity with the policy he had defended as Premier. More than six months out of office, he still accepted that Native Police were required on an advancing frontier; his complaint was that the establishment had become larger than current requirements and that detachments should be withdrawn from districts where settlement had overtaken them.[57]

He argued that places such as Bloomsbury, the lower Burdekin, the Herbert and Hodgkinson could increasingly dispense with Native Police, while protection remained necessary farther west and in newly occupied country, including parts of the Etheridge and the Carpentaria frontier. This was the same inside/outside geographical model already traceable to Seymour in 1874 and implemented during Douglas’s premiership.[58]

The August 1879 speech is crucial to the chronology. Whatever effect Cape Bedford, the collapse of the Aboriginal Commission or the change of government may eventually have had upon Douglas, none produced an immediate rejection of the Native Police institution. As late as August he continued to believe that an armed Aboriginal frontier force could be legitimate if restricted to the active edge of settlement.

The 1880 press campaign

The major intervening development was the sustained 1880 newspaper campaign later collected as The Way We Civilise: Black and White; The Native Police. The National Library catalogues the pamphlet under Carl Adolph Feilberg, but the Queenslander campaign itself contained material by more than one writer and should not be treated as Feilberg’s work alone.[59]

The campaign did more than repeat atrocity allegations. It attacked the institutional assumptions on which Douglas had relied in 1878: that executive supervision could adequately control the force, that critics should first provide conventionally provable cases, and that frontier necessity justified exceptional methods. It progressively argued that the Government itself had to create the means by which allegations could be tested.

Of particular importance was the proposal for a Royal Commission equipped to obtain evidence from witnesses who might otherwise expose themselves to criminal liability. The campaign thus shifted the burden of proof. The problem was no longer simply whether critics could produce evidence acceptable under ordinary conditions; it was whether ordinary conditions were structurally incapable of producing the evidence necessary to judge the force.

Cairns and McNab had raised parts of this problem in 1876, but the 1880 campaign turned it into a sustained public and political issue. It created the immediate setting in which Douglas abandoned the position he had defended two years earlier.

Rutledge carries the case into Parliament

The argument entered Parliament directly in the debate of 13 September 1880. Arthur Rutledge explicitly relied upon the Queenslander campaign, referring to a succession of published articles and insisting that the allegations had become too numerous and geographically dispersed to be dismissed without investigation. His formulation was careful: settlers were entitled to police protection, but that did not establish that they required protection “of this particular kind”.[60]

Rutledge’s distinction is fundamental because it separated the two propositions Douglas had allowed to run together in July 1878: the necessity of protecting frontier settlers and the necessity of retaining the Native Police in its existing form. Once separated, the case for inquiry no longer depended upon proving that the frontier could immediately be left without coercive protection.

Rutledge also converted the press campaign into a parliamentary evidentiary argument. The allegations should be “put to proof”, but proof required an inquiry capable of obtaining evidence rather than waiting for critics to produce courtroom-ready cases from remote frontier districts. Douglas’s contribution followed within this altered framework.

Griffith and the ordinary law

Samuel Griffith’s intervention on 13 September supplied another component. Griffith insisted that murder remained murder whether committed by a person inside or outside the Native Police. The proposition did not abolish frontier policing; it rejected the idea that membership of an exceptional institution could transform otherwise criminal killing into a legally undefined category of frontier action.[61]

Griffith also recognised the practical evidentiary obstacle: witnesses to Native Police killings might incriminate themselves if compelled to describe what had occurred. This strengthened the argument for special inquiry machinery, including compulsion and indemnity. In effect, the September debate brought together the two problems already visible in 1876—individual criminal responsibility and the inability of ordinary evidence rules to expose collective frontier operations.

Douglas breaks with his 1878 position, September 1880

Douglas’s speech on 13 September marks the first clear parliamentary break with his 1878 position. He no longer treated the absence of conventionally proved cases as sufficient reason to resist a general inquiry. Instead, he argued that serious allegations affecting the honour of the colony had to be disproved and that, if they could not be disproved, the force could not continue in its existing form.[62]

He still did not advocate leaving the frontier unprotected. Douglas said that some force was necessary and contemplated alternatives, including a differently constituted or mixed force. His attempted parliamentary manoeuvre is revealing: he offered to allow the general Police vote while postponing the Native Police establishment, including the 128 troopers, and retaining provision for fifty-two Aboriginal trackers. This distinguished Aboriginal tracking within ordinary policing from the armed Native Police institution.[63]

The change was therefore institutional rather than pacifist. Douglas continued to accept coercive colonial authority and frontier protection. What he no longer accepted was that the existing Native Police could be justified merely by necessity and executive assurance.

Douglas moves for a Royal Commission, October 1880

On 21 October Douglas converted the September argument into formal resolutions. He proposed a Royal Commission into the organisation, discipline, operation and distribution of the Native Police, expressly framed both to protect pioneers and to protect Aboriginal people. He coupled the inquiry with legislation compelling attendance and answers and indemnifying witnesses whose evidence might otherwise expose them to prosecution.[64]

Douglas’s proposed machinery closely resembled proposals advanced during the Queenslander campaign. The campaign supplied the public precedent for a travelling commission able to compel evidence and protect witnesses; Rutledge carried that argument into Parliament, while Griffith reinforced the ordinary-law principle and the problem of self-incrimination. Douglas gave those arguments his own constitutional emphasis.

Douglas nevertheless added a distinct constitutional argument. He questioned the legal foundation of the coercive powers actually exercised by the force. Native Police operated under civil government, yet practices associated with “dispersal” could resemble warfare or martial authority without the legal framework of either. For Douglas, this had become more than a problem of cruel officers: it was a problem of public power whose practical scope was insufficiently defined by law.[65]

His language of a “new departure” is therefore apt. He did not renounce colonial occupation or the right of government to use force. He proposed that coercive power be reconstructed so that its organisation, evidence, discipline and authority could be publicly justified.

What changed — and what did not

Douglas’s underlying objective changed little. He continued to accept colonial occupation, European sovereignty, the protection of settlers and coercion in principle. What changed was his confidence in the means. In 1878 he believed frontier necessity and executive supervision could contain the danger. By 1880 he believed the institution itself frustrated supervision because its powers were ill-defined and its operations unusually difficult to scrutinise.

His approach to evidence changed as well. In 1878 Douglas demanded circumstantial substantiation before treating allegations as grounds for institutional action. In 1880 he accepted that the structure of frontier policing could make conventional proof unobtainable and therefore proposed compulsory evidence and indemnity for witnesses. Government, he now believed, had to create the conditions in which the truth could be discovered.

A third element did not change and must remain visible. Douglas’s language remained hierarchical. His later reference to Aboriginal people submitting to the “lawful mastery” of Europeans captures the combination precisely: “mastery” accepted colonial supremacy; “lawful” increasingly imposed obligations and limits upon those exercising it. His liberalism therefore did not become egalitarian. It became more demanding about the legality and accountability of unequal authority.

Douglas’s responsibility

Douglas believed the Native Police had been necessary to colonial occupation. In 1878, while responsible for the force, he refused a parliamentary inquiry despite grave allegations and despite earlier documented abuse. He accepted the proposition that “outside” settlers were entitled to an exceptional form of protection and trusted executive supervision more than the evidence warranted. He continued to defend the force’s frontier role in August 1879. His racial and civilisational assumptions allowed him to conceive Aboriginal resistance as a problem to be suppressed before ordinary protective government could fully supervene.

His later criticism does not erase these decisions. Nor does the 1880 Royal Commission proposal show that he had always held the same position. Political opponents were entitled to ask why he had not acted while in office, and his answer did not dispose of that criticism. The chronology nevertheless matters: he did not reverse himself immediately upon entering opposition, and the argument he advanced in 1880 was substantively different from the one he had advanced as Premier. Opportunism is therefore an incomplete explanation, not an impossible one.

Douglas’s position developed. He was responsible for preserving an institution he later came to regard as structurally defective. His 1880 acknowledgement that successive governments had been insufficiently alive to their responsibilities is significant precisely because it includes himself. 

Conclusion

John Douglas’s record on the Native Police cannot be reduced to a simple change from support to opposition. In 1878 he accepted an institution he knew was exceptional and capable of abuse because he believed the advancing frontier still required an armed force. He tried to contain it geographically, withdrawing detachments from settled districts and pushing them towards the outer edge of occupation, and he trusted ministerial supervision and individual discipline to keep its violence within limits. At the same time his government was expanding a very different arm of Aboriginal policy through reserves, paid work, schooling, local supervision and the Aboriginal Commission. Coercion and protection were not successive stages of his policy. They existed together.

That dual policy makes the refusal of an inquiry on 10 July 1878 more, not less, important. Douglas was neither ignorant of violence nor indifferent to Aboriginal welfare. Wheeler’s prosecution, the arguments of Governor Cairns, McNab’s proposals and the government’s own regulations had already shown him that serious abuse was possible and that ordinary methods of proof were weak on a remote frontier. Yet he still allowed the perceived necessity for frontier protection to outweigh the case for an independent investigation. As Premier and Colonial Secretary, that was his responsibility.

The change of government in January 1879 altered the balance. McIlwraith’s ministry sharply reduced the small protective-administrative programme: Mackay was dismantled, Bribie lost government support, the Aboriginal Commission became ineffective and its attempts to obtain information about the Cape Bedford killings were rebuffed. The Native Police, by contrast, remained operational. The distinction is fundamental. Douglas had maintained a paternalistic and contradictory dual system; McIlwraith reduced much of its protective half while preserving its coercive one.

Douglas did not reverse himself merely because he entered opposition. In August 1879 he was still arguing that Native Police remained necessary on the active frontier. The break came during 1880, when sustained press criticism and parliamentary debate exposed the weakness in the position he had previously defended. The question was no longer whether settlers needed protection, but whether that protection had to be provided by a force whose practical powers were ill-defined, whose operations were difficult to observe and whose witnesses might incriminate themselves if required to explain what had happened.

By September and October 1880 Douglas had separated frontier protection from the Native Police institution itself. He was prepared to retain Aboriginal trackers within ordinary policing while postponing the vote for the remaining Native Police troopers. On 21 October he sought a Royal Commission with powers to compel evidence and indemnify witnesses. His concern had shifted from the character of individual officers to the structure of the force and the legal basis of its coercive authority.

The change was substantial but limited. Douglas did not abandon colonial occupation, European supremacy or coercion. His own phrase “lawful mastery” captures the boundary of his position: he continued to assume European rule, but increasingly insisted that rule must itself be subject to law. By 1880 he no longer believed that frontier necessity and executive confidence were enough to legitimate an exceptional force whose violence was so difficult to define, investigate and control. That is the central development in his Native Police policy—and the reason his record must be judged both for the inquiry he refused in 1878 and for the institutional challenge he mounted two years later.

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[1] Queensland State Archives, “Queensland Frontier Wars — Stories from the Archives,” citing John Douglas to the Aborigines Protection Society, published in Colonial Intelligencer, 1 June 1875, pp. 202–03.

[2] Queensland State Archives, “Queensland Frontier Wars — Stories from the Archives,” summarising the 1874–75 correspondence between the Aborigines Protection Society, Governor Cairns, the Aboriginal Commissioners and Commissioner of Police David Thompson Seymour; cited archival items include QSA ITM3682634 and QSA ITM3690319.

[3] Duncan McNab to John Douglas, 2 September 1876, in the digitised papers associated with the 1876 Board of Inquiry into the condition of the Aborigines, AIATSIS collection.

[4] John Douglas minute/reply, 11 September 1876, on McNab’s proposals; and Douglas to Bishop Matthew Blagden Hale, 11 September 1876, in the 1876 Board of Inquiry papers.

[5] Queensland State Archives, QSA882698, committal proceedings concerning Sub-Inspector Frederick Wheeler and the death of an Aboriginal man known as Jemmy at the Belyando Native Police camp, 1876; related Executive Council material dated 11 September 1876.

[6] Duncan McNab to Governor in Council, 10 October 1876, and related correspondence in the 1876 Board of Inquiry papers, recording requests by named Aboriginal men including Tidy and Prince William for reserves for their communities.

[7] Queensland, “Condition of the Aboriginals at Durundur and Bribie Island,” parliamentary paper ordered printed 10 June 1878, including Henry C. Wood’s report on paid work at Durundur and Duncan McNab’s letter to John Douglas of 16 October 1877.

[8] Queensland Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 8 August 1878, Supply, pp. 1078–80.

[9] Mabo v Queensland (No 2) (1992), historical discussion at para. 59; compare Queensland Government, Community History: Bowen, citing Queensland Government Gazette, 29 June 1878, p. 1506. The legal reservation of land and the operation or closure of a supported settlement are distinct questions.

[10] Queensland, “Condition of the Aboriginals at Durundur and Bribie Island,” parliamentary paper ordered printed 10 June 1878; Queensland Government records on Durundur. The reserve was gazetted in March 1877 and its boundaries were amended in 1878.

[11] Queensland, “Condition of the Aboriginals at Durundur and Bribie Island,” parliamentary paper ordered printed 10 June 1878, Henry C. Wood’s report on employment and earnings at Durundur.

[12] Duncan McNab to John Douglas, 16 October 1877, reproduced in Queensland, “Condition of the Aboriginals at Durundur and Bribie Island,” parliamentary paper ordered printed 10 June 1878.

[13] Queensland Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 8 August 1878, Supply, pp. 1078–80; Queensland Government, Community History: Cherbourg, recording the closure of Durundur and transfer of residents to Barambah in 1905.

[14] Queensland Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 16 October 1877; Queensland, “Condition of the Aboriginals at Durundur and Bribie Island,” parliamentary paper ordered printed 10 June 1878.

[15] Queensland State Archives, ITM846986, COL/A256, 78/1405, Report of Aboriginal Commissioners for 1878; ITM846988, COL/A258, 78/1905, request for the Commission’s £1,600 programme.

[16] Bishop Matthew Hale to Colonial Secretary, 7 March 1879, QSA COL A/287A 79/4428; W. L. G. Drew to Colonial Secretary, 8 May 1879, same file.

[17] For the Mackay and Cape Hillsborough sequence, see the contemporary Aboriginal Commission material and the later reconstruction of Queensland Aboriginal administration cited in the underlying evidentiary paper.

[18] Jocelyn Brooke’s account of his protector duties is reproduced in the contemporary and later administrative material cited in the underlying evidentiary paper.

[19] Secondary reconstruction from the Queensland administrative record: Brooke, the teacher and carpenter were dismissed from 30 April 1879 and government property was ordered disposed of. The underlying primary file should be preferred if this passage is later expanded or directly quoted.

[20] Queensland State Archives, ITM846986, COL/A256, 78/1405, Report of Aboriginal Commissioners for 1878; ITM846988, COL/A258, 78/1910, Gilbert Elliott telegram, 23 May 1878; ITM846988, COL/A258, 78/1905, Commission expenditure request.

[21] Queensland Government Gazette, 29 June 1878, 1506.

[22] Queensland Government Gazette, 29 June 1878, p. 1506; Queensland Government, Community History: Bowen.

[23] Queensland Government, Community History: Bowen, recording that Kelsey later fell into disuse and was formally degazetted in 1931.

[24] Queensland Government, Community History: Hinchinbrook Region, recording reserve areas in the county of Cardwell in 1878; see also the Queensland State Archives material cited in the underlying evidentiary paper.

[25] Queensland Government, Community History: Hinchinbrook Region, noting Native Police camps at Cardwell from 1864 and Herbert River from 1870 and reserve areas set aside in 1878.

[26] Queensland Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 10 July 1878, Supply, pp. 756–58.

[27] Queensland Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 10 July 1878, Supply, pp. 756–58.

[28] Queensland, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 10 July 1878, 756–58.

[29] Crown Lands Commissioner, Cairns, 24 June 1877, Queensland State Archives (QSA), ITM3690242, reproduced in Queensland State Archives, A Selection of Frontier Wars Records at Queensland State Archives (Brisbane: QSA, 2022), item 163.

[30] Alexander Douglas-Douglas to Commissioner of Police, Cairns, 1 March 1878, QSA, ITM3690243, reproduced in Queensland State Archives, A Selection of Frontier Wars Records, item 165.

[31] Inquest into the death of Joseph Manuel, Georgetown, 7 May 1878, QSA, ITM2724458, reproduced in Queensland State Archives, A Selection of Frontier Wars Records, item 166.

[32] Petition concerning removal of Native Police from the Cloncurry Goldfield Reserve, 1878, QSA, Colonial Secretary’s Office In-letter 78/268, ITM846982.

[33] Mackay District Association correspondence concerning North Fort Cooper Native Police, 1878, QSA, Colonial Secretary’s Office In-letters 78/417 and 78/1957, ITM846982 and ITM846988.

[34] Inquest concerning two unidentified fishermen, Cardwell, 12 September 1878, QSA, ITM2724564, reproduced in Queensland State Archives, A Selection of Frontier Wars Records, item 168.

[35] Telegram concerning attack on the schooner Louisa Maria, 14 August 1878, QSA, ITM3690244, reproduced in Queensland State Archives, A Selection of Frontier Wars Records, item 167.

[36] ‘The Far West’, Brisbane Courier, 7 December 1878, 7.

[37] Alexander Douglas-Douglas, Baan Bero, 15 November 1878, QSA, ITM3690245, reproduced in Queensland State Archives, A Selection of Frontier Wars Records, item 169.

[38] Queensland, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 13 September 1880, 673–77.

[39] Queensland, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 21 October 1880, 1130–44.

[40] Queensland, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 8 August 1878, 1078–80.

[41] Matthew Blagden Hale to Colonial Secretary, 1878, QSA, Colonial Secretary’s Office In-letter 78/1905, ITM846988.

[42] Queensland, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 4 August 1879, 1084–85.

[43] Queensland Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 4 August 1879, p. 1091.

[44] Ibid., 666.

[45] Ibid., 664–66.

[46] David Thompson Seymour to Colonial Secretary, 14 April 1882, enclosing ‘Return of the Strength and Distribution of the Police Force for the quarter ending 31 March 1882’, QSA, Colonial Secretary’s Office In-letter 82/2098, ITM847065, digitised file, 1–5.

[47] Ibid., 3–5.

[48] Ibid., 3–4.

[49] Queensland State Archives, “Frontier Wars”, describing the Native Police as Aboriginal troopers under white officers; Jonathan Richards, “A Question of Necessity”: The Native Police in Queensland (PhD thesis, Griffith University, 2005), 112 and passim on command structure and detachments.

[50] David Thompson Seymour to Colonial Secretary, 14 April 1882, enclosing “Return of the Strength and Distribution of the Police Force for the quarter ending 31 March 1882”, QSA, Colonial Secretary’s Office In-letter 82/2098, ITM847065, digitised file, pp. 3–5.

[51] Ibid., pp. 3–4.

[52] Ibid., 4.

[53] Governor George Bowen to Secretary of State for the Colonies, November 1866, QSA, correspondence reproduced in QSA17672, digitised file, 3–4: 278 Europeans, 142 Native troopers, 386 horses and fifty-two stations, including ten mixed and ten Native Police stations.

[54] Richards, “A Question of Necessity”, 112; Queensland State Archives, “Frontier Wars”.

[55] Queensland, Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 13 September 1880, 664–66; Seymour to Colonial Secretary, 14 April 1882, QSA, 82/2098, ITM847065, 5.

[56] Alexander Douglas-Douglas to Commissioner of Police, Cairns, 1 March 1878, QSA, ITM3690243, reproduced in Queensland State Archives, A Selection of Frontier Wars Records at Queensland State Archives (Brisbane: QSA, 2022), item 165.

[57] Queensland Parliamentary Debates, 4 August 1879, 1084–85, Native Police estimates. Douglas argued that the force was larger than current requirements but continued to support Native Police on the advancing frontier.

[58] Ibid. Douglas discussed withdrawal or reduction in districts including Bloomsbury, the lower Burdekin, Herbert and Hodgkinson, with continued or increased protection in frontier districts including the Etheridge and country towards Carpentaria.

[59] Carl Adolph Feilberg, The Way We Civilise: Black and White; The Native Police: A Series of Articles Reprinted from the Queenslander (Brisbane: G. and J. Black, 1880), National Library of Australia, Np 301.291749915 W357. The Queenslander campaign included material by multiple contributors.

[60] Queensland Parliamentary Debates, 13 September 1880, Native Police debate. Arthur Rutledge explicitly referred to the Queenslander articles and distinguished the settlers’ right to police protection from protection “of this particular kind”.

[61] Ibid., 675. Samuel Griffith argued in substance that murder remained murder whether the offender was in the Native Police or outside it, and discussed the legal/evidentiary difficulties surrounding prosecution.

[62] Ibid. Douglas argued that the serious allegations should be thoroughly tested; if they could not be disproved, continuation of the force in its existing form could not be justified.

[63] Ibid. Douglas proposed postponing the Native Police portion while allowing ordinary police provision, distinguishing the proposed 128 Native Police troopers from fifty-two Aboriginal trackers attached to ordinary policing.

[64] Queensland Parliamentary Debates, 21 October 1880, 1135–45, “The Native Police”. Douglas moved for a Royal Commission into the organisation, discipline, operation and distribution of the force and for legislation compelling evidence and indemnifying witnesses.

[65] Ibid. Douglas questioned the legal foundation of the coercive authority exercised in Native Police operations and argued for a “new departure” in Aboriginal and frontier administration.