'You'll get nothing out of it'? the inquest, police and aboriginal deaths in colonial Queensland

Australian Historical Studies

Volumn 35, Issue 123, 2004, Pages 84-105

  Finnane, Mark ^a   Richards, Jonathan ^a  

^a GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845245353     PISSN: 1031461X     EISSN: 19405049     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10314610408596273     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. Tim Rowse, 'Historians and the Humanitarian Critique of Australia's Colonisation', Australian Historical Association Bulletin 96 (2003): 83-9
2. cf Keith Windshuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002)
3. Tom Griffiths, 'The language of conflict' in Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, eds S.G. Foster and B.M. Attwood (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003), 139
4. The point may be made by consulting the index of almost any general history of Australia. Three exceptions, Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia: A History (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997)
5. Alastair Davidson, The Invisible State: The Formation of the Australian State 1788-1901, Studies in Australian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
6. and John Hirst, Convict Society and Its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983), are interpretations of colonial society and social formations that take law seriously
7. The principal specialised works dealing with the subject include David Neal, The Rule of Law in a Penal Colony: Law and Power in Early New South Wales (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
8. Alex Castles, An Australian Legal History (Sydney: Law Book Co., 1982)
9. Bruce Kercher, An Unruly Child: A History of Law in Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995)
10. Paula J. Byrne, Criminal Law and Colonial Subject: New South Wales, 1810-1830, Studies in Australian History (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
11. Hilary Golder, High and Responsible Office: A History of the NSW Magistracy (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1991)
12. See, for example, Gary Highland, 'A Tangle of Paradoxes: Race, Justice and Criminal Law in North Queensland, 1882-1894' in A Nation of Rogues? Crime, Law and Punishment in Colonial Australia, eds David Philips and Susanne Davies (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994)
13. Susanne Davies, 'Aborigines, Murder and the Criminal Law in Early Port Phillip', Historical Studies 22, no. 88 (1987): 313-35
14. Mark Finnane and John McGuire, 'The Uses of Punishment and Exile-Aborigines in Colonial Australia', Punishment and Society 3, no. 2 (2001)
15. The institution of inquest, originating in the King's prerogative to know about his subjects, was itself in the process of changing during the nineteenth century, being used in England as an instrument of social reform, especially of institutions see for example, Ian Burney, Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest 1830-1926 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)
16. See also John Weaver, 'Violent Crime, Race and Common Law Justice' (unpublished paper delivered at Australian Historical Association Conference, Brisbane, Qld, 2002) for an emphasis on the links between the inquest and social reform in Queensland colonial culture. There does not appear to be any study of the history of the inquest in Australia, but an invaluable source for the operation of the office in Victoria, focussed on inquest records for suicide
17. is Simon Cooke, 'Secret Sorrows: A Social History of Suicide in Victoria, 1841-1921' (PhD. University of Melbourne. 1998)
18. See also, Harold Love, James Edward Neild: Victorian Virtuoso (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1989), on the social role of an urban medical coroner in nineteenth-century Melbourne
19. Golder, 117-20 on the evolution of the office of coroner in NSW; Patricia Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840-1918 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 14, 'Male deaths in the bush', for extensive use of inquest and mortuary data
20. Inquests of the Death Act of 1866 (30 Vic, no. 3). See D.J.R. Watson, Police Court Practice: A Guide For Queensland Justices (Brisbane, 1903), 281-7 for an annotated commentary. Section 1 of the Act empowered a single justice of the peace with the authorities of a coroner, while section 8 empowered them with the ability to commit a person to trial
21. Golder, High and Responsible Office, 119
22. Telegram from Police Magistrate Samwell at Cloncurry, to Colonial Secretary, 23 April 1888, in COL/A545/88/4202. The Police Magistrate said, 'If these murders happened it was two years back, when some blacks may have been shot in self defence.' For the role of Aborigines in the work-force see Dawn May, Aboriginal Labour and the Cattle Industry: Queensland from White Settlement to the Present, Studies in Australian History (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
23. Bill Thorpe, Colonial Queensland: Perspectives on a Frontier Society (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1996)
24. See Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts (Sydney: Allen & UnWin, 1998)
25. In addition to the inquest records, the cases discussed in this article are drawn also from police, court, prison and colonial secretary office files, as well as the Queensland Police Gazette and parliamentary inquiries, as reviewed by Jonathan Richards, "A Question of Necessity": The Native Police in Queensland' (PhD, in preparation, Griffith University, Queensland)
26. See for example, Jalland, 267-8; Griffiths, 'The language of conflict', 144-7
27. In spite of judgments about the difficulty of direct control over far-flung outposts, see for example, Joanne Scott et al., The Engine Room of Government: The Queensland Premier's Department 1859-2001 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2001), 36
28. the text (minus some annotations) is published in George Ferguson Bowen and Stanley Lane-Poole, Thirty Years of Colonial Government: A Selection From ⋯ [His] Despatches and Letters (London: Longmans Green, 1889), vol. 1, 203-5
29. Henry Reynolds, With the White People (Melbourne: Penguin, 1990), 53
30. There is no study comparable to that of Fels on the Port Phillip police (Marie Hansen Fels, Good Men and True: The Aboriginal Police of the Port Phillip District 1837-1853 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988)
31. but see Noel Loos, Invasion and Resistance: Aboriginal-European Relations on the North Queensland Frontier 1861-1897 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1982)
32. Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders, and Kathryn Cronin, Exclusion, Exploitation, and Extermination: Race Relations in Colonial Queensland (Sydney: Australia and New Zealand Book Co., 1975), ch. 'Black Troopers'
33. W. Ross Johnston, The Long Blue Line: A History of the Queensland Police (Brisbane: Boolarong, 1992)
34. Bill Rosser, Up Rode the Troopers: The Black Police in Queensland (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1990)
35. See also Jonathan Richards, 'Moreton Telegraph Station 1902: The Native Police on Cape York Peninsula', in Policing the Lucky Country, eds Mike Enders and Benoit Dupont (Sydney: Hawkins Press, 2001)
36. The pre-Queensland period is extensively documented in Leslie Edward Skinner, Police of the Pastoral Frontier: Native Police, 1849-1859 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1975)
37. For policing in relation to Aboriginal administration in Queensland more generally see especially Rosalind Kidd, The Way We Civilise: Aboriginal Affairs-the Untold Story (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1997)
38. Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia's History (Melbourne: Viking, 2001), 101-2
39. contra Alison Palmer, Colonial Genocide (Adelaide: Crawford House Publishing, 2000), 50
40. On the connotations of 'disperse' and 'dispersal' see Richard Hall, 'Windschuttle's myths' in The Best Australian Essays 2001, ed. Peter Craven (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2001), 125-6
41. Marlow to Carr, letter from 'Native Mounted Police Camp, Maranoa River', 22 October 1861, COL/A23, and associated correspondence through the QNP officer by Carr, Murray and Bligh to the Colonial Secretary, Herbert, who in turn referred this to the Executive Council where it was initialled by Governor Bowen. These deaths occurred in the aftermath of the Cullinlaringo massacre of nineteen Europeans. For an idea of the antagonistic climate in which such police actions could take place see Evans, Saunders, and Cronin, 52-3 and Denis Cryle, The Press in Colonial Queensland: A Social and Political History, 1845-1875 (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1989), 70-1
42. See Roger Joyce, Samuel Walker Griffith (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1984), 114
43. R. Evans and B. Thorpe, 'The Massacre of Aboriginal History', Overland 29 (2001)
44. These numbers sustain Markus' observations that 'settlers were rarely tried for violence against Aborigines', but they include three more cases to add to the table published in Andrew Markus, Australian Race Relations 1788-1993, Australian Experience (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 47
45. Martin Krygier and Robert van Krieken, 'The Character of the Nation' in Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History, ed. Robert Manne (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2003), 103