Archaeology on the Frontier

This blog is about research relating to frontier conflict and especially the Native Mounted Police in Queensland

From the Horse’s Mouth: Horses and the NMP

04/26/2018.Reading time 27 minutes.

By Lynley Wallis and Heather Burke Today we don’t think twice about travelling vast distances by car at great speed, so it’s hard to imagine what life was like before the invention of the internal combustion engine. The First Fleet that arrived in southeast Australia in 1788 included horses, and by the time colonists began […]

Recruiting Aboriginal boys and men to the NMP: Part I

04/13/2018.Reading time 16 minutes.

By Lynley Wallis, Heather Burke, Bryce Barker and Noelene Cole One of the infamous euphemisms in historical documents relating to the Native Mounted Police (NMP) is “dispersal”. This word has now been convincingly demonstrated to actually refer to the shooting and killing of Aboriginal people (Richards 2008). We suggest here that another euphemism is the […]