page_title: Australian native police
section_title: Changing of policy from 1890
hierarchical_section_title: Australian native police / New South Wales and Queensland / Changing of policy from 1890
caption_attribution_description: English: William Parry-Okeden dressed in his military uniform, ca. 1870 Photographer: Tosca, Queen Street, Brisbane.
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: By 1890, atrocities by the Native Police were coming under increased scrutiny from members of the public and the media. A.J. Vogan's novel 'Black Police', published in that year, was closely based on incidents that Vogan said he saw or investigated in 1888–1889.  The book included stories of massacres committed by the Queensland Native Police in close cooperation with settlers antagonistic to the presence of Aboriginal people on or near their runs. Continued newspaper focus on incidents, an increasingly influential social criticism, and the shifting of the colonial frontier into the Northern Territory and British New Guinea eventually had some effect on changing the Queensland government's policy of "dispersal".
  In 1889, two police officials in the Herberton area, Charles Hansen and Andrew Zillman, experimented with allocating rations to displaced Aboriginal people instead of shooting them. They found that the trial was a success with an almost complete reduction in the spearing of cattle and settler casualties. Leading officials of the Queensland government, in particular the Colonial Secretary Horace Tozer, opted to expand the funding of the rationing experiment. As a result, the Native Police budget was dramatically reduced with only 45 troopers and a handful of officers being employed in 1895. 1895 also saw David Thompson Seymour, the long serving Queensland Police Commissioner who commanded the exterminating operations of the Native Police for thirty years, replaced with the more moderate William Parry-Okeden. Also in that year, Tozer commissioned Archibald Meston to conduct a thorough research report into the condition of Aboriginal people in the colony. Meston recommended the often discussed proposal of segregating Aboriginal people from white society and forcibly detaining them on isolated reserves. This report was largely accepted by the government and led to the passing of the Aboriginal Protection Act of 1897. For most Aboriginal people in the colony of Queensland, this meant that they faced a reduced likelihood of being shot but also had almost all aspects of their lives controlled by the government. Even though Meston recommended the immediate disbanding of the Native Police, this aspect was rejected with Native Police units continuing to operate out of a number of barracks on the Cape York Peninsula and in the Gulf Country.
caption: William Parry-Okeden
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