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Article Excerpt
ROCKLANDS MAILMAN REPORTS ON HIS FIRST TRIP MADE. BLACKS VERY TROUBLESOME AT AND ABOUT SEYMOUR RIVER, STRONGLY RECOMMEND A POLICE CAMP BE FORMED AT SEYMOUR RIVER (1)
This short, seemingly innocuous telegram sent from Normanton, a small wild frontier settlement in far northwest Queensland, to the Commissioner of Police, D T Seymour, in Brisbane in 1878, was to change forever the landscape of an immense, remote section of the Gulf of Carpentaria (the region now known as western Burke) and the peoples who dwelt there. The tenuous hold over the land of the pastoral leases of Lawn Hill, Lilydale, Gregory Downs, and Murree (later to become Riversleigh) would be secured, whilst the traditional owners of this country would find themselves thrown into a cycle of violence and despair beyond imagining, legitimised and propelled by white colonial force.
This article examines the construction and nature of the `frontier' through a regional focus on western Burke. It suggests important changes to the `frontier' model as first proposed by Henry Reynolds, (2) and subsequently developed by Ann McGrath, Marie Hansen Fels and others. (3) Primarily, this article argues that on this particular frontier, Indigenous Australians were far more active in the determination and composition of the frontier than has previously been considered. Aboriginal people actively resisted and fought the foreign trespassers with vigour and passion for their land over a prolonged thirty-year period. As a consequence, the frontier was fluid and not firmly established. Their efforts failed, however, due to the actions of other Aboriginal people, albeit controlled by European interests. The Aborigines, members of the Queensland Native police, unlike other Aboriginal Native troopers, were influenced and ultimately controlled by the agenda of local pastoralists rather than a centralised government.
In 1878 the Queensland Native Police established a permanent encampment within western Burke, the effects of which had deep repercussions on the determination of the frontier. The Queensland Native Police in northwest Queensland constituted a tool of force, violence, and oppression unequalled in Australian history. In western Burke, the Native Police soon replaced the private punitive expeditions of pastoralists. However, they soon came to be controlled by the interests of those same pastoralists.
In 1981 Henry Reynolds published the first of his works on nineteenth century Aboriginal-European relations. The Other Side of the Frontier presented a revisionist approach to Australian and Aboriginal history and sought to ground its analysis in Aboriginal experiences. Reynolds proposed a `frontier' model of interactions between Aborigines and Europeans. In this model, relations were primarily dominated by violence on the part of Europeans and active resistance by Aborigines. The model marked a revision of previous theory, in which Aborigines exhibited a passive acceptance of European invasion. (4) Reynolds' subsequent work has also utilised this paradigm, although it has principally tackled the question of land ownership. (5)
Reynolds' argument that the frontier period, particularly in North Queensland, was extended and had a great influence on later relations holds true for western Burke. His primary conclusion--that Aboriginal collaboration with Europeans, in the arena of the Native Police, and in the cattle, pearl, and beche-de-mer industries, was motivated by the need for security in a difficult and dangerous world (6)--has been found to be overly simple in relation to western Burke, where there was a range of reasons for cooperative actions. As this article is a regional study of a particular period, its conclusions are specific to the region and period. The differences discussed here, however, are important qualifiers and developments to the frontier model and its revisions.
Regionally specific studies of Aboriginal-European history have pointed out important oversights in the frontier model. Such developments have raised the issue of other patterns of behavior besides Reynolds' model. McGrath's Born in the Cattle and Fels' Good Men and True point to cooperation as an alternative reaction, and Reynolds himself has subsequently explored this issue in his With the White People. In western Burke, cooperation was not an alternative for Aboriginal people: those who did work for Europeans did so for very different reasons than McGrath or Fels propose.
In Born in the Cattle, McGrath modifies the frontier model through her analysis of Indigenous Australians who worked on the stations of the Northern Territory. McGrath asserts that rather than being a rigid boundary between black and white, the frontier was a more fluid arrangement than Reynolds claims. Aboriginal people were able to cross the frontier from the period after major hostilities had ceased. This process was known as `coming in' and was allowed by the overlapping interests of pastoralists and their demands for cheap labour, and the needs of Aboriginal people for food and access to land. McGrath's argument is strongly persuasive in its challenge to traditional views of the past, but her treatment of the early period of European settlement of the Northern Territory begins after the initial takeover of the land was complete, and to that extent her proposition of a fluid frontier has limited application. In western Burke, the ability of Aboriginal people to cross the frontier was greatly hampered by the presence of the Native Police, who became the boundary riders of the frontier.
There have been very few studies of the Native Police, particularly the Queensland force. Fels' study of the Native Police of the Port Phillip District in Victoria between 1837 and 1852 is one of the few works to examine the social and political complexities of this subject. L E Skinner has provided a detailed narrative of the earliest period of Queensland's Native Police in Police of the Pastoral Frontier, and Bill Rosser in Up Rode the Troopers has sought to reconstruct the realities of the Force through the retelling of a story using oral testimony and then comparing it with archival records. (7) Only Fels relates the Native Police to the frontier model and seeks to expand on Reynolds' work, arguing that the Victorian example constitutes a history of cooperation. Fels claims that there was no frontier of violence and resistance in Victoria in which the Native Police were involved. This was not the situation in northwest Queensland, where there was immense frontier conflict, with the Native Police...
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