The police in Australia have, since the foundation of the state, played an essential role in maintaining Australian capitalism, and in the early years of the colony, extending its reach against Indigenous resistance.
The NSW Police proudly notes on its website that its origins date to the very earliest stages of the British penal colony. In 1789, nine of the “best behaved” convicts were selected to form a Night Watch and Row Boat Guard, ten years before the first police force in Britain.
Initially, in the hellish British prison camp at Sydney Cove, convicts and their jailers were largely left to their own devices to scrounge out their own survival. One of the First Fleet marines, Watkin Tench, described the situation: “I every day see wretches pale with disease and wasted with famine, struggle with the horror of their situation”.
In this context, the colonial authorities maintained their rule over their unfree and bonded convict labour force with an iron fist. In the first year of the new “civilisation” on these shores, the Historical Records of New South Wales records that twelve men were executed, most for theft.
If the symbol of tsarist oppression in Russia was the knout, in Australia it was the lash. A product of British naval discipline, which was never applied to officers, lashings involved a person being tied to a triangle of three posts and struck with a whip, usually the cat-o’-nine-tails. This was how such punishments were described by Robert Jones, chief jailer at Norfolk Island:
“The flogger was ... a very powerful man and took great pleasure in inflicting as much bodily punishment as possible, using such expressions as ‘Another half-pound, mate, off the beggar’s ribs’. His face and clothes usually presented an appearance of a mincemeat chopper, being covered in flesh from the victim’s body.”
The lash was not a punishment of last resort, but typical. Convicts James Williams and William Lane, for example, were sentenced to 500 lashes and 2,000 lashes respectively for stealing biscuits.
This was the social order that the early police in Australia were founded to defend and maintain. While a small minority of senior military officers and administrators used their control over convict labour and the budding machinery of state to enrich themselves, most of Sydney’s population, 20,000 by 1837, lived in slum-like conditions.
Tom O’Lincoln, in his book United We Stand, noted of the “free” working population of Australia in the early nineteenth century:
“Special laws governed friendly societies, vagrancy, hawkers and peddlers, Sunday observance, public entertainments, party processions and the behaviour of servants, apprentices and seamen.”
The primary role of the police in Australia’s cities was to maintain this social control, with police in NSW receiving a portion of fines levied for drunkenness, indecent behaviour, obscene language and similar misdemeanours until 1850. Such was the importance of maintaining this order for Australian capitalism that by 1814, “constable” was the fourth-largest occupation in NSW.
A particularly odious level of police harassment, which frequently descended into extortion and corruption, surrounded the issuing of miners’ licences during the Victorian gold rush from 1851. Driven by outrage at the police and bound up with general democratic demands, the Eureka rebellion of 1854 was the first large-scale confrontation between nascent organised labour and the police. This marks a pattern repeated many times since. A combined police and military operation crushed the armed uprising of the miners at Ballarat at the cost of around 30 dead.
While the early resistance of the Indigenous Eora and Dharuk peoples in the immediate vicinity of Sydney was crushed over a decade of intermittent conflict, it was not primarily the fledgling police but the British marines of the NSW Corps who carried out this warfare.
As the colony expanded beyond a penal settlement and began to develop as an economically viable site for exporting to the broader British and imperial markets, encroachments on Indigenous land rapidly increased. This also led to a greater demand from the Australian ruling class for a dedicated armed force to protect farmers and pastoralists—who were engaged in the dispossession of Aboriginal people—from reprisals, particularly following the 1824 Bathurst war against the Wiradjuri.
This dedicated force was the NSW Mounted Police, formed in 1825, which set the mould for a slew of similar police organisations that defended and expanded the colonial frontier over the next 100 years. While the Mounted Police, which operated until 1850, was recruited from British soldiers, its role was later taken on by the Native Police.
A Native Police unit was first formed in 1837 in Victoria, but was most long-lasting in NSW and Queensland, where it remained a component of the police force until 1915. The Native Police comprised Indigenous troopers variously kidnapped, cajoled or conscripted into service, led by white police officers.
The Mounted Police and the Native Police functioned as paramilitaries to crush Aboriginal resistance, carrying out a state-endorsed policy of punitive expeditions and massacres to punish any Indigenous group that threatened pastoralist, mining or farming interests as the entire continent was colonised.
From Melbourne to Cape York, these paramilitaries left a trail of slaughter. Historians Mark Finnane and Jonathan Richards, in a recent article in the Asia-Pacific Economic History Review, estimated the toll in Queensland to be at least 20,000 dead. As the centenary history of the Queensland police published in 1964 admitted, the real role of this force was to fight a “sporadic frontier war”, with no consideration for justice or humanity.
As Henry Reynolds related in The Other Side of the Frontier, the 100-year frontier war was driven by the incompatibility of the communal Indigenous societies with the cancerous growth of Australian capitalism, based on private property, wage labour and profit.
With the consolidation of capitalism across the continent, the extermination of Indigenous societies was reduced in favour of what became a policy of apartheid-like police control over Indigenous lives under the name of assimilation. While such policies, and the subsequent establishment of the mission system, date to different periods in the conquest of Australia, all of them follow the line of reasoning of Queensland Police commissioner David Seymour in 1885:
“The blacks are now deprived of their means of existence and naturally enough when in want of food will kill whatever they come across. It would be useless to direct the Police to arrest them, for to carry out such orders every Black in the Colony would have to be made a prisoner ... While settlement was sparse and large tracts of country were open to the Aborigines, it was possible for the Police to keep them back from the settlers, but now in driving them back from one occupied locality they merely are driven to another.”
From the inception of capitalism on the shores of Australia, the police have acted as the armed, violent toadies of that system. Whether as paramilitaries operating outside the law to slaughter Aboriginal men, women and children, or the jailers and persecutors of the convicts and working class, the police played a vital role in constructing the new social order.
