"In the Name of the Law" Topic

I'm currently reading this book, subtitled 'William Willshire and the Policing of the Australian Frontier'. It's by South Australian academics Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster, and was published before their history of frontier conflict in that state, 'Out of the Silence', which I've previously mentioned on TMP.

Constable Willshire served in the South Australian Mounted Police in central Australia in the 1880s and early 1890s. He was also placed in charge of a unit of the small Native Mounted Police force established in the region in 1884. Willshire is notorious for his violence and savagery towards tribal Aboriginal people. He eventually stood trial for murder, but inevitably was found not guilty.

The book opens with the 1874 attack on the Barrow Creek telegraph station by warriors of the Kaytetye tribe, then moves on to a massacre of perhaps 80 to 100 Aboriginal men, women, and children, before relating the story of Willshire and the Native Mounted Police, and the German missionaries who opposed their actions.

Reading this book it's clear that, unlike some other contemporary wild parts of Australia, the central Australian pastoral frontier of the 1880s onwards offers little scope for gaming; the technological imbalance is too great, and for tribesmen on foot against a mounted opponent the country is too open – but the book does contain some useful information, nonetheless.

It might surprise others as much as it did me, but the massacre mentioned above was committed not by settlers or police, but by another tribe – in revenge for an act of sacrilege; and it seemingly can't be attributed to pressure from white pastoralism because it happened before cattle stations became established.

I've been aware for a long time, mostly from occasional vague references in the literature, that tribal warfare in Australia sometimes became more intense than the traditional formalised, ritual pattern, but it's usually explained as a consequence of social disruption caused by white settlement, e.g. it's said that when in the 1840s tribes in Victoria obtained guns, the first thing they did with them was to attack their traditional enemies, with terrible results. But, aside from Ion Idriess' factionalised account of a pre-settlement tribal war related in his book 'The Red Chief', I haven't previously seen any detailed reports. That event was explained as an attempt to restore the social balance when one errant tribe deviated from the continental cultural observance of fixed tribal boundaries and started to become territorially expansionist.

One detail in the book stands out: 'An avenging party of 50 to 60 warriors, mainly Matuntara men, was formed under the leadership of Tjinawariti… . The party formed a tnengka, a body of men large enough to overcome their opponents in a daylight attack. Forming themselves into three groups they waited patiently…'. A rescue expedition searching for Burke and Wills in Queensland in 1861, lead by the former Commandant of the Native Mounted Police, Frederick Walker, was attacked by a large force of warriors who also split into three groups. According to Walker this was a familiar tactic to he and his men, and was used by warriors armed with woomera-assisted spears to allow them to concentrate 'fire' against a part of the enemy force; a crossfire, in effect. The important point is that the same tactic was used decades and hundreds of miles apart, suggesting that it might have been a continent-wide practice, and one would therefore be reasonably justified in incorporating it into any set of rules representing the subject.

Tribal warfare could be very brutal – The Golden Bough details it in gripping detail but there is a great summary in Keegan's History of War

HM,

As a wargamer I applaud your efforts in researching early conflict within 'Australian' history but feel that it's largely a dead end for several reasons. The disparate nature of Aboriginal cultures/societies and (as you say) the technological imbalance is a consistent theme by even the 1850s.

The cultural cringe is another significant impediment given all pretexts are amoral and anti-heroic following the universal colonial pattern of settlement expansion, theft and murder. A largely grubby history makes it difficult to romanticize these conflicts which I find is what drives at least my enthusiasm for any given campaign or period.

In fact, our only cultural saving grace (and it's a thin one) is that our 'Australian' (post 1900) military institutions were spared any connection to our colonial expansion. Compared to the expansionist and colonial practices of European, British and United States armed forces, the formal break through federation allowed us to ignore our past and afforded a chance for our military to start with a clean record (curious concept I grant you). Up until that point, any 'military' atrocities are down to the British army.

Regrettably, our colonial/state police services/forces are not so clean and your research demonstrates that whilst no consistent pogrom existed, cultural trends and aberrations continued care of individuals and interests from within the 'authorities' which over time achieved more of less the same ends.

Interestingly, in the confusion which comes from colonization, I was reading about the Aboriginal involvement in the Eureka conflict which seems to have been just about entirely through their role as mounted police- very much working with the authorities rather than resisting them.

UG – I found your post somewhat impenetrable, but as best I can understand it, it reads to me like just another poorly informed attempt to claim ownership of the frontier conflict debate and stifle interest in the colonial Australian frontier as a prospective gaming subject.

All conflict is grubby. Any imagined 'romance' is entirely subjective. You need your self-imposed 'romance'; others see it where you don't or don't see it where you do – or don't need it.

I didn't actually post anything like your '… the technological imbalance is a consistent theme by even the 1850s' (whatever that might mean). The negative assessment of gaming potential I posted was in relation to a very specific time and place: 'the Central Australian pastoral frontier from the 1880s onwards..'. In fact, I've stated on numerous occasions on TMP that I consider the period up to the mid-1870s quite gameable, and that I'd go beyond this end-date within very particular geographical limits.

This information is patently presented for any interested or curious readers. I'm long past engaging in pointless exchanges with those who aren't interested, whatever their purported self-justifications might be, and I've got absolutely no time for those who feel it's their God-given duty to try and deflect others from an interest in the subject. I am however, happy to discuss the martial and tactical detail with any TMPer who's conducted research of equal breadth and depth – but as yet I haven't encountered any such.

I should also point out that amongst the settlers and police who were the primary agents of colonial conquest in Australia were many born in this country, so I fail to see the point of the attempted whitewash. I'm afraid I'll have to disagree with what I suspect is the main thesis driving your post, that 'the formal break through Federation allowed us to ignore our past'. Feel free to ignore a past that troubles you if you wish, but don't expect others to follow suit.

There was no Native Mounted Police involvement in the Eureka Stockade events. The corps did serve on the goldfields for a short time in the same capacity as the white Goldfields Police, but was disbanded in June 1852, more than two years before the attack on the Eureka Stockade.

The NMP in question was the Port Phillip District (Victoria) corps only; administratively separate NMP forces were also established in NSW/QLD, SA, and the NT. The last independent NMP sections in QLD weren't disbanded until shortly before WW1.

I thought it worth resurrecting this thread briefly to return to the point I made in response to Unlucky General about the inadvisability of generalising the one-sidedness of the Central Australian pastoral frontier from the 1880s on to the whole of Australia and the entire colonial period. Also, some of what follows will hopefully enlighten non-Aussies (and some locals too) as to the fundamental realities of frontier conflict in colonial Australia.

We need to keep in mind that the vast majority of conflict incidents on the frontier will remain forever unknown to us thanks to the 'code of silence' that caused them to go unreported and unrecorded. Now, people commonly assume that the sole purpose of 'the code' was to suppress details of massacres of Aboriginal people, but in fact settlers saw it as imperative that any incident that involved the killing or attempted killing of natives must remain hidden – including skirmishes. This was because the authorities had asserted on numerous occasions over the years that all Aborigines were regarded in law as British subjects amenable to both the penalties and protections of that law; they could not be treated as aliens or citizens of a foreign nation against whom war could be waged, frontier violence could only be dealt with as a law and order issue rather than military resistance, and as with any white subject, any fatalities had to be reported and an investigation undertaken. Frontier settlers therefore felt they were in an impossible position, often effectively engaged in warfare, but always having to consider the potential legal consequences of their actions: hanging over their heads was the fear that they might suffer the same fate as the seven stockmen hanged for the Myall Creek Massacre, or at the very least, a long jail sentence. In practice, even in cases of blatant murder this rarely happened, but settlers were forever haunted by the possibility all-the-same; hence the secrecy that shrouded the subject.

The implication for anyone attempting to construct a clear picture of the patterns and dynamics of frontier conflict is a relative paucity of evidence compared to contemporary parallels. We're reduced to assembling the story from fragmentary reports and commentaries from a few authoritative voices.

On the question of the frequency of Aboriginal tactical victory, of the small number of detailed first-hand accounts of skirmishes I've read, some were defeats of varying degree for the settlers/police, and there are others cited amongst the much larger number of less substantial references to frontier conflict I've seen. In the 'authoritative voice' category we have the likes of the well-known squatter G.S Lang, a man with much first-hand experience of frontier conflict, who published a pamphlet called 'The Aborigines of Australia' in 1865, in which he says 'I must say this for the whites, however, that (although I have known brutal exceptions) whenever they can bring the blacks to a fair fight they do fight them fairly,and not unfrequently (sic) have been beaten, for the chances of such a contest are not so unequally divided as they may be supposed. A blackfellow, with some eight or ten spears in his hand and some paddy-melon sticks, will throw them all while a white man is reloading after firing two shots; and I have known one man to be pierced in the thigh by two spears successively, thrown at seventy yards off.'

I had to leave this incomplete due to TMP system maintenance yesterday, so….

What I'm saying is that this 'code of silence' is at the crux of what distinguishes frontier conflict in Australia from parallel events on other continents. Because of it, like so much else about the subject, we can never know with any sort of precision the relative proportions of tactical victory and defeat – but I believe it's probable that instances of settler defeat were MORE likely to have been covered up than victories because of the 'loss of face' factor.