Book Review - The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police
The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police
Written by: Jonathan Richards,
University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2008,
ISBN: 9780702236396, 320 pp.
Reviewed by: Major Murray Stewart
Considering the Australian frontier war raged from 1788 into the 1920s across Australia with the expanding settlement, and about 2000 white and 20,000 Aboriginals were killed as a direct result of armed clashes, it is surprising that it is only now starting to loom in Australian military consciousness. This is even more surprising considering that the European death toll alone was almost four times the number of Australian killed in action in the Vietnam War and seven times that of the Korean War. The Aboriginal death toll was ten times the Maori losses in the New Zealand wars. Around 800 of these white deaths and 5000 to 10,000 Aboriginal deaths probably occurred in Queensland alone. Undeniably the group that was the biggest killer of Aboriginals in Queensland was the Queensland Native Police.
The Queensland Native Police was a police force only in name. It was a paramilitary organisation of the Queensland Government. It operated like an army unit actively engaged with the enemy—a unit whose mission was the immediate and brutal suppression of any indigenous resistance. Separate to the ordinary police, it was made up of Aboriginal Troopers led by white officers who conducted section level patrols, and retaliatory and punitive raids on horseback against Aboriginal warriors, women and children. It never operated against white law breakers and rarely if ever concerned itself with evidence, arrests and trials. Combining white weaponry, the mobility of horses and telegraph communications with Aboriginal field craft, it was a devastating weapon against the Aboriginal resistance. Active from the 1840s to the 1900s it comprised of about 200 all ranks at any one time.
Since the 1970s there has been a growing body of work exploding the myth of a uniquely peaceful settlement of Australia and examining the reality of the Australian frontier war. For a general overview of the conflict in which the Queensland Native Police played a part, the ‘Aboriginal Armed Resistance to White Invasion’ entry in the Oxford Companion to Australian Military History is an excellent starting point as is ‘The struggle for Australia: Aboriginal-European warfare, 1770-1930’ chapter in McKernan’s Australia Two Centuries of War & Peace. For the Aboriginal view, Henry Reynolds’ The Other Side of the Frontier is definitive. For a ground breaking account of the British Army’s actions against the Aboriginal resistance see John Connors’ The Australian Frontier Wars 1788-1838. Connors’ book is excellent for the military historian as it examines in detail the tactics, weapons, major campaigns and clashes of this earlier part of the conflict in the context of the British Army’s actions in other colonial theatres. What is lacking is a similar book of military history on the actions of the settlers and paramilitary forces like the Queensland Native Police in the later part of the conflict. I had hoped The Secret War would fill this gap for the Queensland Native Police.
The Secret War is an excellent book, but it is more of a social than a military history. This is disappointing given its title. The fact that killing Aborigines was technically illegal did little to suppress the actions of these representatives of the law, it just inspired attempts to cover it up. Indeed there is some evidence that the records detailing Native Police actions have been deliberately destroyed. This cover up, both at the time and later on, inspired the title The Secret War. Nevertheless, enough remains to allow the author to detail the activities of this unit.
The book is very readable and excels in detailing the social aspects of the force. Chapters outlining both the Aboriginal and European service and an Annex listing every white member of the force with a brief service record are the book’s strength. It is at its best when it puts the Queensland Native Police in context of general settler racism, levels of colonial violence, and the use of native police in other British colonies such as New South Wales, South Africa and Ceylon.
Readers may be disturbed at the level of racial hatred found in the quotes and actions of our ancestors. A ‘war of extermination’ was being fought said many, ‘A sheep or bullock was killed ... had to be avenged in the blood of the nearest black’. Aboriginals are ‘vermin to be exterminated without mercy’. That a unit routinely killed any Aboriginals they found in the vicinity of an attack, raped, ‘flogs gins’, ‘nigger hunted’ and abducted children while in the service of the forerunners of current state governments illustrates what a brutal place early Australia could be. Jonathan Richards should be applauded for trying to end the secrecy surrounding the actions of the Queensland Native Police.
However, I was disappointed by its lack of detail on the actual armed clashes between the Aboriginal warriors and the Queensland Native Police. For example, there is a table detailing Aboriginal Troopers shot dead by their own officers, a list of the mass desertions of the Troopers, and a list showing the dismissals of white members from the force with date and reasons, but no such list detailing the armed clashes with Aboriginal warriors or massacres of civilians with date, location and casualties. Such a list combined with sources and commentary would have done much to improve the book for the general reader as well as the military historian.
The Secret War is the definitive account of the nature of the Queensland Native Police—how it was recruited; what service was like; who was in it; and police actions under the conditions, context and law under which it operated—but it is let down by a lack of detail about its actual actions. However, its strengths overcome its weaknesses and I would recommend it to all those who seek a fuller understanding of Australia’s military history.
