Paramilitary Policing

By the mid 1830s, the astonishingly violent outcomes of martial law were causing deep concern in Britain amongst humanitarian politicians who

and Empire 1840-1940 (Cullompton: Willan, 2005), pp.

57-75; Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence: South Australia's Frontier Wars in History and Memory (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2012).

29 Price, Making Empire, pp. 257-60, 267-90.

30 Martial law was declared in the frontier wars in New Zealand in February 1846, March 1860, March 1862, May 1864 and January 1869. However, in The New Zealand Wars, Belich does not directly acknowledge the declaration of martial law, April 1845.

31 Graeme Calder, ‘Routing a Rebellion or Crushing a Crime Wave? Proclaiming Martial Law and a Call-to-Arms in Van Diemen's Land, 1828-1830', Legal History 12 (2008), 129-50, at 145.

32 Julie Evans and Tessa Fluence, ‘Securing the Settler Polity: Martial Law and the Aboriginal Peoples of Van Diemen's Land', Journal of Australian Colonial History 15 (2013), 1-22. considered that the role of the British Empire was to Christianise and civilise the Indigenous peoples rather than exterminate them. A key principle of the 1837 Select Committee Report was that only by bringing Indigenous people within the pale of British law could the empire both achieve peace on its colonial borders and provide justice to Indigenous people. However, this was more easily imagined than achieved on settler frontiers where Indigenous people resisted colonial authority. After the early deployment of military forces to assert Crown sovereignty, local colonial police forces were seen as the principal legal instrument for bringing law and order to Britain's settler frontiers. But whereas civil policing based on the English model of the London Metropolitan Police remained the ideal in settled towns, this was clearly ineffective on frontiers where British jurisdiction remained insecure, giving rise to a typology of paramilitary policing around the British Empire for ‘intermediate' or frontier zones where Indigenous people and settlers competed for territory.^{^[394]} From the late 1830s until the end of the nineteenth century, armed and mounted paramilitary police operated across the settler colonies of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the Cape Colony to extend and protect the authority of the colonial state.^{^[395]}

In all these colonial sites, paramilitary policing became increasingly reliant upon the employment of Indigenous men, although Canada was exceptional in that it never employed dedicated Indigenous forces.

Notably, an original intention of establishing ‘native police' forces in the Australian colonies was not to secure colonial authority through force but to extend a ‘civilising' influence by training young Indigenous warriors in the discipline of British civilisation.^{^[396]} The authorities on the settler frontier in the Cape Colony were more pragmatic. They considered that a native police force formed from defeated Indigenous peoples would be a cheap and effective way of maintaining and extending the settler frontier.^{^[397]} Over time, the latter view prevailed. By the mid nineteenth century, native police forces had become familiar across the empire as a special legal instrument that served as a cheap and effective way of suppressing Indigenous resistance.

The first native police forces established in the settler colonies included those formed in Queen Adelaide Province in the Cape Colony in 1836, in the Port Phillip District of New South Wales in 1837 and in New Zealand in 1841.^{^[398]} Initially recruited from particular Indigenous groups in collaboration with ‘friendly chiefs' and under the supervision of British officers, the recruits were issued with Western-style uniforms and rations at government expense. While the native police in Queen Adelaide Province were initially unarmed, their counterparts in the Port Phillip District and New Zealand not only carried firearms but were also mounted on horseback. Despite these differences, however, they each operated with the same purpose: to apprehend supposed culprits, to protect the white population on the extreme limits of the settler frontier, and to use their specialist knowledge to reconcile their people to settler rule. In the Port Phillip District, those considered ‘culprits' included runaway convicts from New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), but in Queen Adelaide Province and in New Zealand they were exclusively Indigenous people who engaged in livestock theft or broke other laws of the settler hegemony.

The native police quickly became an integral strand in the British web of control over settler frontiers, tracking down livestock theft, operating as informers and acting as messengers between the colonial authorities and Indigenous leaders. In this role they were a second line of defence against Indigenous resistance.

By the mid 1840s, all three groups were operating on the settler frontier as paramilitary forces in suppressing Indigenous resistance. By 1850, they were vastly expanded and deployed in coercing their people to accept British sovereignty. By then, however, the settler frontier had moved on and the forces in Queen Adelaide Province and the Port Phillip District were disbanded. Most members of the force in Queen Adelaide Province promptly deserted to the leading Xhosa chief who opposed the British, allowing several thousand rounds of ammunition to fall into his hands. Some of the Port Phillip native police sought employment in subsequent iterations of the native police force and others became important leaders in their community in promoting their rights as Indigenous people. In the new colony of British Kaffraria and in New Zealand, the duties of native police included regulating the flow of Xhosa and Maori looking for work, trying to control the illicit arms trade, and forcing out Xhosa and Maori squatters from so-called undesirable locations and burning down their homes. The force in New Zealand was disbanded in the mid 1880s.^{^[399]}

While these first native police forces had a temporary role in supporting the imposition of British authority, on the newly expanding frontiers of northern New South Wales and later Queensland the native police had a striking longevity as the first line of defence from their establishment in 1848 until the end of the nineteenth century. They were so successful in suppressing Aboriginal resistance that they became the prototype for the use of paramilitary violence in securing the settler frontier.

The Queensland force became particularly notorious for the way that it ‘dispersed' Aboriginal insurgents, over the course of half a century, without the requirement to declare martial law. From the 1870s, the force was largely deployed in ‘clearing' new frontier regions of Aboriginal resistance before the settlers arrived, and was particularly effective in attacking Aboriginal encampments at night and killing the occupants. The troopers would then force the survivors onto reserves or pastoral runs and if they offered further resistance they could be sent to prison.^{^[400]} Colonial authorities were reliant on the skills of Indigenous people to secure the settler frontier, while Indigenous people themselves undoubtedly had other motivations relating to their own social and political world for becoming involved in colonial policing. In this sense, the impact of ‘native policing' may have been not only coercive but also a form of Indigenous adaptation to the structural changes wrought by settler colonialism.

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

Paramilitary Policing

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