This blog is about research relating to frontier conflict and especially the Native Mounted Police in Queensland
We’ve complained before about the general lack of records detailing the day-to-day realities of NMP life. This is most apparent in the lack of surviving Patrol Diaries and Camp Diaries from the Force’s 80 year existence. When at the Queensland State Archives recently, however, we came across a catalogue reference to a “Letterbook – police”, […]
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By Heather Burke A soundscape is made up of the natural and human-made sounds that help to define an environment or a place. Although we tend to consider some sounds as “noise” — usually those things we find undesirable within our own cultural frame of reference, including other people’s preferred forms of music — all […]
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By Lynley Wallis and Heather Burke As with much history, the stories of women are largely missing from histories of the Native Mounted Police (NMP). Yet despite this absence it’s clear that most NMP camps were also occupied by women, both Aboriginal and European. Like most colonial women, the European wives of NMP officers faced […]
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By Nic Grguric The stranger turned round and revealed a rather prepossessing face, and I noticed a row of glittering buttons, which at once proclaimed the native police officer (Queenslander, 25 January 1879, p.109). A considerable assemblage of uniform buttons were recovered from the archaeological fieldwork carried out at six Native Mounted Police (NMP) sites […]
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By Iain Davidson, Heather Burke, Lance Sullivan and Lynley Wallis The nature of historical knowledge is complex, involving oral history, archaeology and (less often than is generally supposed) written documents, many of which begin with some sort of oral telling. Here we outline the historical knowledge of a particular series of events in northwest Queensland […]
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When we launched our online database as a public research resource in December 2019 we hoped that people would make use of it to understand more about frontier conflict in Queensland and especially the role of the Native Mounted Police (NMP). Two hundred and forty-seven people have logged on to our database since then, […]
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By Noelene Cole, Lynley Wallis, Heather Burke, Bryce Barker and Rinyirru Aboriginal Corporation A day after setting up camp near the dray track which connected Cooktown to the Palmer Goldfield in south-east Cape York Peninsula, Sub-Inspector O’Connor and 24 troopers of the Native Mounted Police (NMP) were attacked by ‘daring and war-like’ Aboriginal land owners […]
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By Heather Burke A map is a frail thing, although the politics that underlie its construction and naming practices are not. In 2017 Queensland removed several racist place names from the map, prompting debate over whether memorials to Robert Towns and John Mackay—the namesakes of both Townsville and Mackay—should tell their history more fully, given […]
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By Lynley Wallis In an earlier blog post I wrote about the challenges of finding contemporary physical evidence of deaths from the colonial frontier, and why such efforts are often akin to looking for a needle in a haystack (cf. Litster and Wallis 2011). Despite this, there are some rare instances where the specific location […]
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By Frank Uhr Although the Native Mounted Police (NMP) were primarily tasked with putting down Aboriginal resistance on the frontier, the Force also did various “normal” police duties. These sometimes included road making, gold escort duty, finding lost or missing persons, and tracking down regular criminals. In the 1897 words of the Commissioner of Police, […]
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