Native Mounted Police
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While the activities described here took place in New South Wales and Queensland, similar bodies subsequently operated in South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
Native Mounted Police — specialised detachments of Aboriginal troopers, commanded by European officers appointed by the colonial governments— existed in various forms across colonial Australia during the nineteenth century. The force was explicitly constituted to protect the lives, livelihoods and property of settlers and to prevent and retaliate against Aboriginal resistance. Operating from temporary base camps and barracks, Native Police were primarily used to patrol the colonial frontier, escort exploratory and surveying expeditions, gold convoys, and groups of pastoralists and prospectors.
The Queensland version, continuing a practice adopted by the New South Wales authorities before Separation in 1859, operated across the whole of Queensland until 1904. In its initial incarnation, the New South Wales authorities established a Native Police Corps to operate in the Port Phillip district in 1837. Frontier conflict on the Darling Downs prompted the New South Wales government to fund a new section of the Native Police, based on the Port Phillip model, in 1848.
The force, commanded by station manager and court official Frederick Walker, comprised fourteen native troopers from four different language groups in the area around the Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers, beginning a practice where Native Police troopers were routinely recruited from areas far from where they would be deployed. The practice ensured the troopers had no connections with those they were employed to suppress and minimised the risk of desertion.
