page_title: Australian native police
section_title: 1864 restructure of the police
hierarchical_section_title: Australian native police / New South Wales and Queensland / 1864 restructure of the police
caption_attribution_description: English: portrait of David Thompson Seymour
context_page_description: Australian native police units, consisting of Aboriginal troopers under the command usually of a single white officer, existed in various forms in all Australian mainland colonies during the nineteenth and, in some cases, into the twentieth centuries. The Native Police were utilised as a cost-effective and brutal paramilitary instrument in the expansion and protection of the British colonial frontier in Australia. Mounted Aboriginal troopers of the Native Police, armed with rifles, carbines and swords, escorted surveying groups, pastoralists and prospectors into frontier areas. They would usually then establish base camps and patrol these areas to enforce warrants, conduct punitive missions against resisting local Aboriginal groups, and fulfil various other duties.
  The Aboriginal men within the Native Police were routinely recruited from areas that were very distant from the frontier places in which they were deployed. As the troopers were Aboriginal, this benefited the colonists by minimising both the wages of the police and the potential for Aboriginal revenge attacks against white people.
context_section_description: In 1864, all sections of police enforcement in Queensland underwent a major restructuring. Administration of the police, including that of the paramilitary Native Police, became centralised in Brisbane under the command of the Queensland Police Commissioner. The role of Commandant of the Native Police was abolished and the title of Lieutenant was replaced with Inspector. Although these changes to the Native Police appeared to give the force a more civilian role, in reality it remained a brutal instrument of enforcing British control in the colony. The new Commissioner, David Thompson Seymour, took up the position after resigning from the role of commanding officer of the British Army detachment in Queensland. Seymour recognised the importance of the Native Police in the British invasion of Aboriginal lands, and was focused on improving and expanding its capabilities. Seymour remained in the commanding role of the Native Police for thirty years, a period in which around 20,000 Aboriginal people were killed by this force.
  The mid 1860s was a period of great expansion of the British into the coastal and inland areas of north-eastern Australia. All these areas were of course inhabited by local Indigenous communities and the restructured, re-enhanced Native Police had a major role in the ruthless elimination of Aboriginal custodianship of the land. For example, in April 1864 the first British surveying group to assess the future site of Townsville left Bowen with the armed protection of eight troopers under the command of Inspector John Marlow and sub-Inspector E. B. Kennedy. This unit of Native Police conducted around four dispersals on this journey resulting in the deaths of at least 24 Aboriginal men. An unknown number of women and children were killed but it is recorded that 15 females were abducted by the troopers and taken back to the Don River barracks as "wives". Inspector Marlow, who had replaced Inspector Powell at Bowen in 1863, continued his work of "clearing the blacks" off the land after returning from this foundation expedition to Townsville. Earlier on in that year, Marlow had also provided a Native Police escort for the voyage of George Elphinstone Dalrymple to establish the town of Cardwell. Marlow's troopers here also "dispersed" and "rather cut up" some local Aboriginal people.
caption: David Thompson Seymour
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