Australian native police were specialised mounted military units consisting of detachments of Aboriginal troopers under the command of White officers appointed by colonial governments. These units existed in various forms in colonial Australia during the nineteenth and, in some cases, into the twentieth centuries. From temporary base camps and barracks, Native Police were primarily used to patrol the often vast geographical areas along the colonial frontier in order to conduct indiscriminate raids and punitive expeditions against Aboriginal people. The Native Police proved to be a brutally destructive instrument in the disintegration and dispossession of Indigenous Australians. Armed with rifles, carbines and swords, they were also deployed to escort surveying groups, gold convoys and groups of pastoralists and prospectors.
Native Police unit, Rockhampton, Queensland, 1864
Tracker-turned-bushranger and resistance leader Musquito
Native Police of Port Phillip, 1850
Frederick Walker
Queensland is a state in northeastern Australia, the second-largest and third-most populous of the Australian states. It is bordered by the Northern Territory, South Australia and New South Wales to the west, southwest and south respectively. To the east, Queensland is bordered by the Coral Sea and the Pacific Ocean; to its north is the Torres Strait, separating the Australian mainland from Papua New Guinea, and the Gulf of Carpentaria to the north-west. With an area of 1,723,030 square kilometres (665,270 sq mi), Queensland is the world's sixth-largest subnational entity; it is larger than all but 16 countries. Due to its size, Queensland's geographical features and climates are diverse, including tropical rainforests, rivers, coral reefs, mountain ranges and sandy beaches in its tropical and sub-tropical coastal regions, as well as deserts and savanna in the semi-arid and desert climatic regions of its interior.
Captain James Cook claims the east coast of Australia for the Kingdom of Great Britain at Possession Island in 1770
Fighting between Burke and Wills's supply party and Aboriginal Australians at Bulla in 1861
Aftermath of the 1861 Cullin-La-Ringo massacre in which 19 settlers were killed by Aboriginal people, the deadliest attack on settlers in the frontier wars
Blackbirded South Sea Islanders on a Sugarcane plantation in Queensland.