Native Police Corps

Australian native police units, consisting of Aboriginal troopers under the command usually of a single white officer, existed in various forms in all Australian mainland colonies during the nineteenth and, in some cases, into the twentieth centuries. The Native Police were utilised as a cost effective paramilitary instrument in the expansion and protection of the colonial frontier. Mounted aboriginal troopers of the Native Police, armed with rifles, carbines and swords escorted surveying groups, pastoralists and prospectors into frontier areas. They would usually then establish base camps and patrol these areas to enforce warrants, conduct punitive missions against resisting local aboriginal groups, and fulfil various other duties. To maintain the imperial British method of "divide and conquer" and to reduce desertions, the aboriginals within the Native Police were routinely recruited from areas that were very distant from the frontier places in which they were deployed. As the troopers were aboriginal, this benefited the colonists by minimising both the wages of the police and the potential for aboriginal revenge attacks against white people. It also increased the efficiency of the force as the aboriginal troopers were vastly superior in their ability to track down dissidents in often poorly charted and difficult terrain.

The first government funded force was the Native Police Corps, established in 1837 in the Port Phillip District of the then Australian colony of New South Wales (now Victoria). From 1848 another force was organised in New South Wales, which operated mostly within the borders of the later colony of Queensland. This force, sometimes called the "Native Mounted Police Force", was the largest and longest lasting of the mainland forces, and is most well known for conducting widespread extrajudicial shootings of aboriginal people under the official euphemism of “dispersal”. It existed from 1848 to 1905, when the last Native Police camps in Queensland were closed. The method of "dispersal" against aboriginals was also employed by the Native Police of other colonies and also by groups such as pastoral station workers and the colonial British Army.South Australia set up a short-lived Native Police force in 1852, which was re-established in 1884 and deployed into what is now the Northern Territory. The colonial Western Australian government also initiated a formal Native Police force in 1840 under the command of John Nicol Drummond. Other privately funded native police systems were also occasionally used in Australia, such as the native constabulary organised by the Australian Agricultural Company in the 1830's. Native Police forces were also officially implemented in the Papua and New Guinea territories administered by colonial Queensland and Australian governments from 1890 until the 1970s. The Australian government also organised a native police force on Nauru during its administration of the island from 1923 til 1968.

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