Policing the Victorian frontiers

From the beginning, the nature of policing in the Port Phillip District, Victoria after 1851, was profoundly influenced by the need to overcome Aboriginal resistance to dispossession.[1] Aboriginal resistance expressed itself in a type of guerrilla warfare involving sporadic attacks on settlers, who were generally well armed and often shot Aboriginal people indiscriminately.[2] It is estimated that at least 20,000 Aboriginal people and approximately 3,000 settlers were killed across Australia in one hundred and fifty years of prolonged conflict.[3] The intensity of this conflict and Australia’s convict origins, accounts for the paramilitary nature of the settlement’s first police who, unlike their British counterparts, were heavily armed and military in appearance and operation.[4] Australia was the original police state.[5] Because Port Phillip was a free colony, not a penal settlement like NSW or VDL, Aboriginal people, rather than convicts, tended to be the major preoccupation of the colony’s early police.

When police were initially deployed around Port Phillip in 1836 their main task was to create a space in which settlement could grow, by keeping Aboriginal people off their own land once it was deemed fit for pastoral use. Alienation from the land deprived Aboriginal people of the material and spiritual basis for existence and all but destroyed their society. Although the official mandate of Port Phillip’s first police included protecting Aboriginal people and minimising conflict, the police sided with settlers, not only failing to protect Aboriginal people but joining in the killing.[6] This is hardly surprising given that police at the time were under the supervision of local magistrates, who were dominated by pastoralists. By the late 1830s, Aboriginal resistance in Port Phillip was met by a combination of Mounted, Border and Native Police. It was the latter force, however, established in 1837 and recruited from local tribes, who were in the vanguard in overcoming Aboriginal resistance. Port Phillip’s Native Police are said to have been relatively benign compared to their counterparts in other parts of the colony. ‘Relatively’, used in this context, must be kept in perspective. During the first years of European settlement, massacres, rapes and casual killings of Aboriginal people were so common they barely rated discussion. It is not possible to quantify precisely the extent of the carnage inflicted upon Aboriginal people by the Native Police of Port Phillip, because, as Bridges puts it, ‘naturally enough the more colourful, but illicit, exploits of the Corps were not enshrined for history in its official records’.[7]

Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence to indicate that the killing of defenceless Aboriginal men, women and children by Port Phillip’s Native Police was of a scale that would be deemed unthinkable if it involved non-Aboriginals as victims. Summing up the role of the Native Police Corps in Port Phillip, Bridges maintained:

‘What it did do was to make the rule of force more effective through summary punishment, while operating to all appearances within the law, and by inhibiting depredation through fear. The Corps’s true task was a more basic one than that of white police for whites. If the Aborigines’ status as British subjects was ever to have any meaning, and if they were to live in peace with the destroyers of the native economy, they had in fact to be subjected to the will and code of the invader. The Corps was an instrument for forcing them to face this unwelcome fact.’[8]

Occasionally the Governor of Port Phillip encouraged prosecutions over the murder of Aboriginal people. Frontier society, however, was so dominated by those whose interests directly opposed those of its native inhabitants that prosecutions inevitably failed. For the most part, crimes against Aboriginal people by police and settlers were ignored; the charging of three Border police over the killing of two Aboriginals marking the exception rather than the rule. Police were not neutral in the conflict between settlers and Aboriginal people; instead they provided military reinforcement for the forced expansion of white settlement, thereby presiding over the wholesale destruction of Aboriginal society. The thoroughness of the destruction of Aboriginal life achieved with the help of Port Phillip’s police is attested to by the fate of its Native Police Corps. By the early 1850s, less than twenty years after the first police were sent to the district specifically to deal with the ‘Aboriginal problem’, there were so few Aboriginal people left that not only did the corps no longer have a reason to exist.[9]

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[1] Ibid, Connell, R.W. and Irving H., Class Structure in Australian History: Poverty and Progress, p. 35 and ibid, Sturma, M. ‘Policing the criminal frontier in mid-nineteenth-century Australia, Britain and America’, p. 23.

[2] Bridges, B., ‘The Native Police Corps, Port Phillip District and Victoria, 1837-1853’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, Vol. 57, (1971), pp. 113-142; Davies, S. ‘Aborigines, Murder and the Criminal Law in early Port Phillip’, 1841-1851’, Historical Studies, Vol. 22, (1987), pp. 313-335; Reynolds, H., Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land, (Allen & Unwin), 1987, pp. 7-22; Broome, R., ‘The struggle for Australia: Aboriginal-European warfare’, 1770-1930 in McKernan, M. and Browne, M., (eds.), Australia: Two Centuries of War & Peace, (Allen & Unwin), 1988, pp. 102-103; and Elder, B., Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Australian Aborigines since 1788, (Child & Associates), 1988.

[3] Ibid, Reynolds, H., Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land, pp. 7-9; 29-30; 53; ibid, Broome, R., ‘The struggle for Australia: Aboriginal-European warfare’, pp. 116-119.

[4] Haldane, R., The People’s Force: A history of the Victoria Police, (Melbourne University Press), 1986, pp. 5-39; ibid, Connell, R.W. and Irving H., Class Structure in Australian History: Poverty and Progress, p. 35; and, Palmer, D., ‘Magistrates, police and power in Port Phillip’ in Philips, D. and Davies, S., (eds.), A Nation of Rogues?: Crime, Law and Punishment in Colonial Australia, (Melbourne University Press), 1994, pp. 86-90.

[5] Davidson, A., ‘Big brother is watching you’, in ibid, Burgmann, V. and Lee, J., (eds.), Staining the Wattle: A People’s History of Australia since 1788, p. 3.

[6] Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Racist Violence: Report To The National Inquiry Into Racist Violence in Australia, (Australian Government Publishing Service), 1991, p. 39.

[7] Ibid, Bridges, B., ‘The Native Police Corps, Port Phillip District and Victoria, 1837-1853’, p. 126.

[8] Ibid, Bridges, B., ‘The Native Police Corps, Port Phillip District and Victoria, 1837-1853’, p. 130.

[9] Ibid, Bridges, B., ‘The Native Police Corps, Port Phillip District and Victoria, 1837-1853’, p. 130.

Can we shrink the size of the state?

The debate about the proper balance between what the state should provide and what individuals should provide for themselves has a long pedigree and has never been fully resolved.  The critical question is how can we have a ‘good society’ and a ‘good state’?  As the state has grown bigger so those areas that previously would have been left to individuals have been vacuumed up leading to an expanding public sector and higher levels of taxation to fund those services whether through direct or indirect tax or through National Insurance contributions.  This had led to growing concerns that the state is doing too much and that it costs too much (a cost that is unsustainable) and  that individuals are taking little responsibility for their livelihoods.  It is true that over the past century the state has taken responsibility for providing benefits for those in need through the welfare system and provided ‘free at the point of need’ health care through the NHS.  This ‘welfare state’ has proliferated over the last twenty years with a growing number of increasingly confusing benefits that people may claim giving rise to the notion of a benefit culture with an imprecise numbers of people—the so-called ‘scroungers’—being supported by the state from cradle to grave.  This, combined with an aging population that puts pressure on pensions and health-care, has led to calls particularly though not exclusively from the political right that we need to ‘roll back the state’.  The problem is that people want the benefits but don’t actually want to see their personal taxation rise to pay for them and many people are prepared to countenanced benefit cuts as long. of course, it’s not their benefits that are cut.   Cutting the role of the state is fraught with difficulties since many benefits the welfare state provides have been accorded the status of sacred cows making them virtually untouchable by politicians without disastrous electoral fallout.

Therein lies the conundrum, politicians recognise that the current public sector is financially unsustainable and yet its reform requires political courage that most of them clearly do not have.  They are not prepared to say that we cannot continue with a financially burgeoning NHS or that people must (not should) take responsibility for providing certain things for themselves.  So they seek to reform or rather tinker round the edges of the problem hoping to reduced costs sufficiently to allow the unwieldy state to survive in its current form for a few more years.  As a society we have to accept that either we will have to pay more through taxation for the current services or that we will have to take greater responsibility for providing for ourselves through saving.  In Australia, for instance, people save about a tenth of their income for this purpose while in Britain the figure is less than half that.  This applies particularly to saving for old-age and saving to deal with health problems through private insurance.  We insure our private possessions against damage or theft and yet the overwhelming majority of people do not do the same for their own health.  We assume that, irrespective of our health needs, the state will provide free care. The same applies to pensions though recent attempts to make making private provision has been made easier for those in the private sector.  In both cases, this would shift responsibility from the state to the individual.  But, I hear you think, what about those who do not make such provision?  Well you can’t let them starve in old-age or die for want of medical treatment so individual provision has to be mandatory much as it is now with NI contributions but with a private provider not with the state.  But private providers aren’t reliable are they?  Well at present probably not but but there is no reason why they shouldn’t be…we take out health insurance when we travel abroad so why not when we’re at home?  There’s also no reason why private providers cannot do things better than existing state providers…in fact you might think they couldn’t do worse!!