Books on frontier conflict in Australia must now be written with an eye to the charges Keith Windschuttle has made about the deliberate ‘fabrication’, or at least exaggeration, of Aboriginal deaths. There is no harm in this: unusual care must be taken in an area of such politicised sensibilities. At the same time, the paucity of hard evidence creates serious problems for historians genuinely convinced by a combination of circumstantial evidence and tutored instinct that large-scale killings of Aborigines took place. Patrick Collins’ book, is amongst other things a case study of these problems. It also tends to support the argument pursued by Henry Reynolds, Noel Loos and Raymond Evans that Queensland witnessed what was probably the most extensive and intensive racial violence in Australian history.
The dusty files of the Queensland Native Police that I happened upon in 1964 in search of an MA thesis topic, evoked the bitter frontier violence in central northern New South Wales and what is now central southern Queensland in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Behind the euphemistic formalese of ‘insurgent blacks’, ‘serious depredations’, ‘collisions’, ‘dispersals’ and ‘punitive measures’ was the story of how a squatter-dominated colonial government set up and supported a highly mobile and well-armed paramilitary force designed to ‘pacify’ the Indigenous peoples of the area and ‘settle’ it for permanent pastoral occupancy. Never mind the explicit instructions from the Secretary of State for Colonies, Earl Grey, that pastoral leaseholds were ‘not intended to deprive the Natives of their former right to hunt over these districts, or to wander over them in search of subsistence’. The rush of squatters and their servants from the Liverpool Plains and the Darling Downs after 1847 quickly dispossessed and depopulated the Bigambul, Mandandanji and other Indigenous groups by sheer force of arms and with great bloodshed.
What was being played out in the late 1840s, was a last-ditch Colonial Office attempt to enforce the policy of safeguarding native interests introduced by Lord Glenelg ten years earlier to the dismay of the squatting fraternity. For them, the prospect of self-government meant an end to the ‘canting hypocrisy’ of Exeter Hall (the influential Evangelical humanitarian lobby in Britain) and colonial control over native policy as well as land. My response was to see how things had reached this sorry state, to explain why the last intervention before self-government was to deploy squads of Aboriginal troopers, led by Eureopean officers,