This blog is about research relating to frontier conflict and especially the Native Mounted Police in Queensland
By Lynley Wallis In a previous post, Alyssa Madden discussed the relationship between telegraph stations and the Native Mounted Police (NMP) across colonial Queensland. Seven years after the first telegraph office in the Southern Hemisphere was opened in Melbourne in 1854 (Gerrand 2014), the line from Brisbane to Ipswich was operational, and was connected to NSW […]
Read More
By Heather Burke .. six of the Native troopers at the Laura [have] done their level best to disperse Sub-inspector Stafford and his camp-keeper … the occurrence shows vividly the dangers to which Native Police officers are exposed from their own men, who when they break the bounds of discipline become so many wild beasts […]
Read More
By Leanne Bateman Food rations were an important lifeline for the occupants of Native Mounted Police (NMP) camps, but it was often a tenuous lifeline at best. The cost of rations was a problem for the government, who had to constantly justify the existence of the NMP force to the taxpayer, who frequently complained that […]
Read More
By Leanne Bateman For centuries regalia manufacturers have adopted elaborate designs for belt buckles, some of which were often imbued with symbolic meaning. One such design is the symbolic depiction of a serpent on belt clasps. Over the centuries this design has proven to be very popular, and is considered to typically represent the dual […]
Read More
By Lynley Wallis In certain parts of Queensland it was the discovery of gold that was the main driving force behind the expansion of Europeans into the traditional lands of Aboriginal people. This was certainly the case in parts of Cape York Peninsula (CYP), where the discovery of the Palmer River goldfield in 1872 resulted […]
Read More
Introducing Sub-Inspector Stanhope O’Connor who worked in the Cooktown region of Cape York.
Read More