Many Australians have little pause to deeply consider their interactions with police. But for many First Nations families, interactions with police and the judicial system are imbued with violent and often deadly experiences handed down through the generations and correspondingly documented by the white state.
A critical final finding of the Colonial Frontier Massacres Digital Map Project – that half the massacres of Aboriginal people on the Australian frontier were carried out by government forces, including police – reinforces how contemporary Indigenous deaths at the hands of state law enforcement agencies are part of a history of violence that began with European invasion in 1788.
Memories of terrible massacres perpetrated by police on the colonial and postcolonial frontier remain at the forefront of the sensibilities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Until recently the survivors of some of the most brutal attacks were still alive; the Central Land Council’s remarkable Every Hill Got a Story project documents the disturbing first-hand oral accounts of some, including the 1928 Coniston massacre in the Northern Territory.
Is it any wonder, then, given the frontier experience and the ongoing shame of Aboriginal deaths in custody, that so many First Nations people harbour a deep suspicion and fear of police. Non-Indigenous Australians should dwell on this as they contemplate the latest findings of the massacre map. Denial – of the collective conscience, of national misdeeds of the past – is succoured by wilful ignorance. Knowledge and understanding are the fuel of ongoing reckoning. And reckoning is at the heart of the massacre map project.
Part of that reckoning is understanding that some police forces have at their genesis a purpose to “disperse” (a genteel white frontier euphemism, along with “tranquilise”) the troublesome “native” or “aborigine”.
Take the New South Wales mounted police unit, established in 1825 by the then colonial governor, Thomas Brisbane, after the Bathurst wars with the Wiradjuri to further quell Aboriginal resistance. You will struggle to find mention of that in the proud NSW police writing of its history. But the state mounted police involvement in the notorious Waterloo Creek massacre of 1838 and numerous other orchestrated killings is firmly established history with a disturbing resonance for some Aboriginal people (and their defenders).
The Northern Territory police has its own shameful history of acute violence against Aboriginal people that manifests in the profound contempt many NT Indigenous people have for the force.
Some individual NT police – beginning with Paul Foelsche – stand out for their barbarity and for the historical stain their actions bequeathed to the NT mounted police (which evolved into the territory’s chief law enforcement agency). Today Foelsche would be called a gun-nut for his obsession with firearms, and a ghoul for his twin fetish for Aboriginal ethnology and penchant for collecting Indigenous human remains.
The outback justice historian Tony Roberts wrote of Foelsche, who was in charge of the NT force from 1870 until 1904: “... the man who masterminded more massacres in the territory than anyone else was Inspector Foelsche. A former soldier he was cunning, devious and merciless with Aboriginals … Some considered him an expert on Aboriginals, not knowing that the skulls he studied were not merely collected by him.”
Foelsche is celebrated in territory history as a rough, resilient pioneer. So much so that a street was named after him in Darwin.
His contemporary William Willshire, a constable posted to Alice Springs in 1882, oversaw 20 years of disproportionate outback reprisal against the local Aboriginal people. He detailed some exploits in several books, not least The Land of the Dawning, which point to the psychopathy that led him to be charged with murder and, perhaps inevitably, pardoned. The settlers all but mutinied in his defence and he was not dismissed from the force. He resigned in 1908 – the first but not last territory police officer to be charged with murdering an Aboriginal person.
It seems imponderable that he could write The Land of the Dawning in 1896, while still a serving police officer and while continuing to mete out extreme violence. He writes of encountering a big group of Aboriginal people at Victoria River: “... camped amongst rocks of enormous magnitude and long dry grass ... They scattered in all directions, setting fire to the grass on each side of us, throwing occasional spears, and yelling at us. It’s no use mincing matters – the Martini Henry carbines at this critical moment were talking English in the silent majesty of those great eternal rocks.”
Of Indigenous women, Willshire mused: “Men would not remain so many years in a country like this if there were no women, and perhaps the Almighty meant them for use as He has placed them wherever the pioneers go … what I am speaking about is only natural, especially for men who are isolated away in the bush at out-stations where women of all ages and sizes are running at large.”
Willshire has a street named in his honour in Alice Springs.
Then, of course, there was George Murray – the former Anzac who became an NT constable and orchestrator of the 1928 Coniston massacre where, according to the accounts of some Indigenous witnesses, up to 170 people were killed. Murray, also revered at the time and for decades after as a heroic frontiersman, was cleared in a government inquiry.
Bill McKinnon was the NT cop who murdered the Anangu man Yokununna at Uluru in 1934 and in so doing drove his people away from their home around what was for many years renamed Ayers Rock. McKinnon also lied to an official inquiry to cover his tracks, though his evil was exposed decades later, after his death, by the archive he left.
This is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the territory police’s history of violence against Indigenous people. In the context of that bloody history, the tortured sensibilities and emotions of so many during and after this year’s trial of police officer Zachary Rolfe are easy to understand.
A jury acquitted Rolfe of murder last Friday over the 2019 shooting of Kumanjayi Walker in Yuendumu. The court heard that Walker was shot three times, with Rolfe arguing he had acted to protect his and his partner’s safety.
There is no suggestion that the events outlined in the Rolfe trial mirror the course of massacres and murders in the 19th and early 20th century referred to above.
But there is no doubt that the anguish of the Warlpiri people of Yuendumu at the verdict has its roots in that traumatic history. Not least because the 1928 massacre of Warlpiri at nearby Coniston is still very much alive in familial memory around Yuendemu, where distrust and suspicion of police has a very long tail.
Now, with the findings of the massacre map project, there is a national paradigm through which to view such simmering suspicion and distrust.
First Nations people have for 200 years seen police across this continent shoot Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – and face few, if any, consequences.
After the Rolfe verdict Scott Morrison said he respected the decision of the “justice system”.
But frontier history tells a different story when it comes to the police killing of Aboriginal people – and justice for those victims and their families.
The Killing Times is based on data from the Colonial Frontier Massacres Digital Map Project led by Prof Lyndall Ryan at the University of Newcastle’s Centre for the 21st Century Humanities.
For more information about the analysis conducted by Guardian Australia and the research methods of the University of Newcastle’s colonial frontier massacres research team, please read the “About” section here.
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. In the UK Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org
