Working with ATSI people and communities



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		Police 10.5.1 Historically the police have acted as the most consistent point of Aboriginal contact with colonial power. This is pertinent to the present situation, for past history relating to police action is very much alive in the minds of Aboriginal people. Similarly, police share a certain heritage relating to the treatment of Aboriginal people. 10.5.2 The formative experiences of Australia's colonial police were often in conflicts involving control of Aboriginal people. The police were also empowered to control convicts and ex-convicts, including escapees who took up bushranging. Convicts were a group whose punishment was the earliest rationale for Australian settlement and whose discipline and an array of punishments were enforced by a military administration. 10.5.3 Interventions in the lives of Aboriginal people were condoned for different reasons. With the exception of the early convict colonies, it was the police who mediated conflict between Aboriginal people and Europeans in Australia. This was in contrast to North America where the military played this role. Rather than evolving out of the need for community policing, Australian policing soon took on a centralised militaristic and coercive character akin to the Irish constabulary of the early nineteenth century. Also indicative of its paramilitary style is its descriptive terminology: 'troopers', 'corps' and even police 'forces'. In New South Wales the term 'Force' was only replaced by police 'Service' in 1990. 10.5.4 Aboriginal resistance actions were often the catalyst which led to the establishment of Australian rural police forces. The New South Wales border police were set up after the Myall Creek massacre of 1838. Their role was to curb Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal conflict, yet they were involved in 'punitive expeditions' which amounted to massacres of Aboriginal people. The Western Australian mounted police were set up in the 1830s in response to settler demands for 'protection'. These police were not supposed to manage existing relationships, but to play a 'civilising' role; that is they were not only trying to impose authority and perhaps prepare for the rule of law but also to change Aboriginal people culturally. This meant they were to encourage them to become malleable employees and settle in one place, rather than travel freely over country which Europeans now wanted to exploit. This 'civilising' mission was also in line with new trends in western policing where the values of respectable behaviour were to be instilled as a form of control over the 'masses'. 33 10.5.5 Aboriginal styles of resistance, such as attacking isolated shepherds or killing livestock, were usually classed by non-Aboriginal authority as breaches of the law rather than acts of war. This reflected the failure of colonial authorities to recognise Aboriginal people as original owners with anything to defend, and it also reinforced stereotypes of their savage treachery or barbarity. In fact, many attacks by Aboriginal people were of a judicial nature, intended to punish individual transgressions on their territory. From the Aboriginal perspective, the 'hostile blacks' occasionally portrayed in the school texts were in fact the 'policemen' of their communities. Their policing role was dictated not by a specialist classification but by particular land associations. Mudbura people in the Northern Territory-see similarities between non-Aboriginal policing and their own; they refer to different types of traditional Aboriginal land owners or custodians as 'managers', 'owners' and 'policemen'.34 Although non-Aboriginal police were supposed to represent impersonal authority, Aboriginal people saw the 'policemen' as individuals, and judged them as' good' or 'bad' police officers according to how well they fulfilled the kin-based principles of their own systems of law. 10.5.6 Aboriginal people who attempted to defend their land or communities, however, were classed by non-Aboriginal society as criminals, and if they were not dealt with arbitrarily by settlers, the local non-Aboriginal or native police were called in. Police, therefore, became the de facto arbiters of two sets of laws in conflict. 'Ordinary' Aboriginal behaviour was also classed by police as 'criminal'. 'Right' lay on the side of the most powerful group, who continually judged Aboriginality as deviant in body, mind and action. 10.5.7 Although officially they were required to curb vigilante actions against Aboriginal people, policing on the frontier favoured the protection of the non-Aboriginal population. The police had thus become the State instrument by which frontier pacification was to be established. Once Aboriginal people were 'subdued', police began to serve a role of 'protecting' Aboriginal people. This coincided with the turn of the century belief that Aboriginal people were a doomed race heading for extinction, so protective policies were considered to be only temporary measures to 'smooth the dying pillow'.35 Administrators in Western Australia and Queensland saw the inherent conflicts in appointing police to carry out policies of Aboriginal 'protection', and hoped their appointment was a short-term measure, but its economy meant that this police role became institutionalised. Police who were acting as protectors were still answerable to police department superiors, who had to listen first to continuing European demands for control of Aboriginal people. Individual police were also part of the non-Aboriginal community, and risked ostracism if they sided too closely with Aboriginal people. Police and 'settlers' held common interests, especially in remote areas where they were only a small minority amidst a larger Aboriginal population. To many settlers, a 'good officer' was a practical and experienced man who knew when to shut his eyes.36 10.5.8 Policing and Aboriginal affairs were both centralised in each colonial (and after 1901, State and Commonwealth) government. The police had to implement the various 'protective' legislation which governed the lives of many Aboriginal people. Tensions must have often occurred not only between economic and industrial demands and humanitarian interests but also between local community objectives and the latest State policies regarding Aboriginal people. The police were required to work in closely with the more politically powerful groups like employers. On the Queensland frontier in the 1900s, police assisted the pastoralists in various ways. They were called in to relocate Aboriginal communities when their labour was not needed, or to force them off waterholes and other land which was required for stock. Police therefore participated in restricting their hunting grounds, which led to hunger and ill-health, and made imperative Aboriginal dependence on non-Aboriginal employers and township resources for survival. 10.5.9 Police frequently ordered Aboriginal people around at the request of non-Aboriginal residents. In the Northern Territory and South Australia, they moved people's camps because their noise might disturb bullocks or their presence might deter animals drinking there. Their actions contravened covenants in pastoral leases or legislation which allowed Aboriginal people access to pastoral lands to hunt and camp, but this was overlooked. This was the case in Queensland, South Australia and the Northern Territory.37 Towns or other places used by non-Aboriginal people often became prohibited areas to Aboriginal people. They were subject to many restrictions, and in most States were prohibited from drinking and possessing firearms practices which were widely and publicly observed by the rest of the rural community. 10.5.10 In the Northern Territory in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, police visited cattle stations about once every three months. As 'protectors' of Aboriginal people, their duties included checking to see if station conditions were satisfactory, taking a census, rounding up the ill, treating minor ailments and detaining and arranging transport for the diseased to be taken away and quarantined. They also had to remove children of mixed descent from their families. It is not surprising that many Aboriginal people avoided and attempted to withhold information from them. Many residents of cattle stations left when they heard that the police were about to make their quarterly visits. They wanted to protect a diseased relation who would be taken away forever, and not allowed to die in his/her country, or hide a little light-skinned daughter, son or grandchild whom they would probably never see again. In addition to their role as 'protector' the police also 'hunted' Aboriginal people for other reasons. They arranged Aboriginal people as labour for the police station, for tracking, and for other Europeans. They sought out and detained cattle spearers, those involved in tribal murders, and those in possession of opium or alcohol. In towns, they detained those who went into areas prohibited to Aboriginal people, those 'loitering' in a township, found drunk, using obscene language, or carrying a nulla nulla. 10.5.11 In New South Wales towns during the same period, police were required by the Aboriginal Protection Board to issue rations to 'deserving' Aboriginal people. The Board was able to withhold rations in order to force relocations, or to force children to attend school. The Board could decide whether an Aboriginal person required medical treatment. It had the right to patrol and maintain order on unsupervised reserves, to expel 'trouble makers' from such places, to recommend on disposal of reserve land, to remove children from parents to 'Training Homes', to charge parents who attempted to prevent their children's removal, and stop the children returning to Aboriginal camps. The powers conferred by the Board were wide indeed, and this did not include their usual duties of administering justice in the towns, often at the request of local municipal councils or powerful individuals. 38 10.5.12 Police also interacted with mission and government reserve authorities, and were requested to take away 'recalcitrants' to more distant reserves and sometimes gaols. Police were the intermediaries of non-Aboriginal authority reflecting wider social and structural relations of power. As the main points of contact with non-Aboriginal society, they were logically the most accessible points from which Aboriginal people might gain knowledge of non-Aboriginal 'law', yet Aboriginal people often decided it was best to avoid them at all costs. 10.5.13 Police surveillance of Aboriginal communities in turn shaped their perceptions, and they came to think their duties towards Aboriginal people a 'nuisance'. They most often came into contact with those who no longer had the dignity of supporting themselves, or who regularly got into trouble with the law. Contemporary thinking defined Aboriginal people living alongside Europeans as degenerate remnants. Non-Aboriginal police were supported by this thinking and found it easy to stereotype Aboriginal people accordingly. The character of racial thinking changed over time, but structural factors locating Aboriginal people at the bottom of the social hierarchy remained. 10.5.14 In the 1920s and in the post- 1940s era, the continuing police role in rationing the 'indigent', handing out other forms of welfare, managing trust funds (containing a large proportion of all money earned by Aboriginal people according to State policies), and general surveillance of Aboriginal activities often necessitated regular association with police and forced many Aboriginal people into dependence upon them. The paternalistic nature of the policing role requires further analysis. Many sincerely wanted to help Aboriginal people, though their role could be restricted or overruled by more powerful interest groups such as employers and government, as well as their own department, who did not consider Aboriginal-related work a high priority. Loyalty to their employers or fear of the consequences often stopped Aboriginal people complaining to police. 10.5.15 To sum up, relations between Aboriginal people and police were complex, and changed according to differing government policies, but in most States throughout both centuries, police played an important role not only in arresting and charging Aboriginal people for 'criminal' offences but for carrying out 'protective' roles. These roles intervened in Aboriginal control and management of their own lives and impinged on realms usually defined by Australian society as 'private': residence, diet, self-sufficiency, illness, work, education and child rearing. From the late 1940s on, welfare officers took over much of the surveillance, but police still had to enforce removal, detention and other orders. 10.5.16 The gender implications of Australian policing also require consideration. Police were virtually always non-Aboriginal males, and the interaction which followed was generally one between a non-Aboriginal male and an Aboriginal male, and sometimes a female. Aboriginal women would consequently view 'police work' as 'men's business'. In rural areas, police were often single and their position empowered some of them to select females from the Aboriginal communities for whom they worked. Aboriginal women also saw the possibilities which might flow from having an intimate relationship with a man in such a powerful position over their family's lives. Many police officers had sexual relationships with Aboriginal women, and some even had 'harems'. In the Northern Territory, at least, various welfare officers also had promiscuous reputations. The fact that some of these men biologically fathered the children they later seized for State institutions adds a cruel twist to the story. In terms of Aboriginal gender relations, the nature of policing potentially reinforced male authority, while the desire of some to exploit the women would have caused concern mainly if the women stayed too long with the non-Aboriginal police officer or if he did not fulfil his reciprocal obligations by distributing goods to her family. 10.5.17 The short-term stays of many non-Aboriginal police officers (especially in remote areas) disrupted Aboriginal attempts to incorporate them within their own network of reciprocal obligations. In Western Australia and the Northern Territory, many Aboriginal people never claimed their trust moneys because a different police officer had taken charge of their area, and they thought it improper to ask for anything from the stranger. The role of Native Police 10.5.18 Aboriginal police and police trackers played important roles during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people assume that they must have been traitors. It was true that a divide and rule strategy was often effectively used by imperial powers, and clan rivalries were exploited by colonial police. However, frontier struggles were not polarised solely according to one's place as coloniser or colonised. Aboriginal Australia was not one 'nation'; it was many. And like all societies, it was not static. Aboriginal contributions to policing can be seen as adaptation and cooperation to changed historical circumstances 10.5.19 The first experiments with 'native police' forces commenced in Victoria in 1837, with subsequent forces set up in 1839 and 1842. Paramilitary in character, the prestigious Port Phillip Native Police Corps were proudly uniformed and mounted on good horses. As well as providing a deterrent to Aboriginal attacks on pastoral properties, they played a wider policing role, capturing non-Aboriginal offenders, and later policing the diggings and escorting gold into Melbourne. Their story was one of cooperation with Europeans; leading Aboriginal men applied for recruitment and then actively pursued their position to their own advantage. They refused to capture kinsmen by claiming inability to track them, while eagerly pursuing someone from an 'enemy' group. It seems they were also involved in some murders of other Aboriginal people. 10.5.20 New South Wales and Queensland native police had a well-deserved reputation for violence. The Queensland force was called in specifically to dispense 'justice' towards Aboriginal people. They were ordered to 'disperse' any large numbers of Aboriginal people and, in the words of a contemporary senior police office, the term meant 'nothing but firing at them'.39 This made Aboriginal meetings and ceremonies impossible. In the Northern Territory, Aboriginal people were often employed as police trackers, though frequently on a casual basis. They were sometimes engaged by police after spending a time in gaol. They were offered shorter sentences for agreeing to work. Sometimes they took the opportunity of being armed (firearms were otherwise prohibited for Aboriginal people) to carry out attacks against enemies. In some cases where they took the blame for shootings, it seems they served as scapegoats for over-zealous non-Aboriginal police. 10.5.21 Members of the native police forces were all male. Many Aboriginal men and some women worked as police trackers. Their bush expertise was used to assist in police hunts on a casual basis, while others worked for longer stints, with duties such as doing the rounds, grooming horses, and offering general assistance. Often they were only paid a few shillings a week, with rations supplied to their families. Aboriginal trackers were immortalised in Aboriginal oral histories and in fictional works such a Ion Idriess' Mantracks and in the detective series of Arthur Upfield's Boney. Henry Reynolds' With the White People depicts their important role in Australian history.40 10.5.22 Aboriginal communities gradually came to use the police, Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal, as an outside authority structure which could be employed for internal policing purposes. Trouble-makers could be sent away, sympathetic kin could protect someone due for a tribal punishment or likely to do something 'dangerous' to others. Sometimes gaol was used to discipline or calm someone down. Aboriginal law enforcement structures were not as strong as they once were owing to forced migration, illness, alcohol, unemployment, and the intrusive power of Western culture. Western control mechanisms could thus be easily used by Aboriginal people to meet their own agendas--though this strategy proved problematic, for they often encountered people who did not understand their language, actions or intentions. Source Royal Commission in Aboriginal Deaths in Custody National Report Volune 2 Chapter 10 Australian government Publishing Service Canberra 1991 Full report available on the web.