Amanda Nettelbeck

Policing Indigenous Peoples on Two Colonial Frontiers: Australia's Mounted Police and Canada's North-West Mounted Police

Abstract This article examines the ways in which colonial policing and punishment of Indigenous peoples evolved as an inherent part of the colonial state-building process on the connected 19th century frontiers of south-central Australia and western Canada. Although there has been some excellent historical scholarship on the relationship between Indigenous people, police and the law in colonial settings, there has been little comparative analysis of the broader, cross-national patterns by which Indigenous peoples were made subject to British law, most especially through colonial policing practices. This article compares the roles, as well as the historical reputations, of Australias mounted police and Canadas North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) in order to argue that these British colonies, being within the ambit of the law as British subjects did not accord Indigenous peoples the rights of protection that status was intended to impart.

The Transfigured Body and the Ethical Turn in Australian Illness Memoir

Within the fields of social medicine and the medical humanities, chronic illness is acknowledged not just as an individually but as a socially transformative experience. The proliferation of published ‘illness narratives’ in recent years attests to the socially compelling nature of this particular story of transformation. Indeed, illness narratives have, in the past decade or so, become a rich source of interest in sociological and medical anthropological work for their capacity to map the material transformation of person to patient, of an assumed to a newly fluid model of subjectivity. Their significance is particularly visible in the cultural context of the west, where more people live both to be diagnosed with chronic illnesses (such as cancer) and to survive them. With a focus on two recently published Australian works, Eating the Underworld: A Memoir in Three Voices (2001), by the psychologist Doris Brett, and Tiger’s Eye: A Memoir (2001), by the historian Inga Clendinnen, this paper will consider how the illness experience marks a transformation of embodied subjectivity that, in turn, triggers transformations of other kinds. These works have quite different intents, but they provide models for exploring how physical and individual transformation through illness becomes the occasion for reconsidering the body of history, and of the resonances of history in social memory.

Reading the elusive letter of the law: Policing the South Australian frontier

This paper considers the nature of policing policy and practice against Aboriginal people on the frontiers under South Australian jurisdiction over the nineteenth century. The principle of assimilating Aboriginal people into peaceful settlement as British subjects was a civil ideal founded on contradictory aims that frequently surfaced in interpretations of police duties under the law. In practice, the letter of the law could be fulfilled when conditions were amenable; yet the conditions of the frontier were often not amenable, and the reality of Aboriginal resistance required that police employ violence to impose peace.

Colonial judiciaries, Aboriginal protection and South Australia's policy of punishing "with exemplary severity".

Abstract The ways in which Europeans experienced the legal system for crimes against Aboriginal people needs more systematic research. Although for the first fifty years of Australian settlement Aboriginal legal status was protractedly ambiguous, the foundational principle of later-established South Australia was that Aboriginal people were British subjects and settler crimes against them would be punished ‘with exemplary severity’. This paper puts this foundational principle to the test by examining the working of the legal system where Europeans were investigated for the deaths of Aboriginal people. Ultimately, we argue, the principle of protecting Aboriginal people as British subjects not only failed, but became inverted into a principle of Aboriginal punishment.

“As fine a body of men”: how the Canadian Mountie brought law and order to the memory of the Australian frontier

Abstract Primary amongst the legal instruments that would implement British law across Britains Empire were colonial mounted police forces, and one of their shared purposes was to ensure Aboriginal peoples compliance to colonial rule. Although the land wars that accompanied the imposition of British rule are an integral part of national historical memory in some parts of the “British west”, Australia and Canada have always been framed by national foundational narratives of peaceful settlement through the rule of law. This article will compare the history and historical memory of colonial mounted police forces in Australia and Canada in relation to their role in subduing Aboriginal resistance to colonial sovereignty. While by the late nineteenth century the operations of Australias colonial mounted police forces had achieved little purchase in a foundational story of developing Australian nationhood, over the first decades of the twentieth century, the omnipresent image of the Mountie as the foundational figure of Canadian nationhood not only helped to shape a parallel Australian story of a “fine body of men” who brought law and order to Australias frontiers, but also served both to obscure and to justify the violence in Australias policing history against Aboriginal people.

Proximate Strangers and Familiar Antagonists: Violence on an Intimate Frontier

A generation of scholarship on the experiences of the frontier—spanning models of violent conflict to various kinds of intimacy—has been highly influential in building a nuanced picture of Australias colonial race relations. Regionally-focused histories provide a valuable avenue for bringing these models of frontier historiography together within the same frame, because it is at the localised level of social relations that the cross-hatched intersections between violence and intimacy can emerge into clearest view. This article traces the threads of cross-cultural encounter on one Australian frontier to assess how violent conflict could arise as much from conditions of inter-connectedness and familiarity as from conditions of strangeness and fear, and to ask, under such conditions, what kinds of frontier violence drew the intervention of the law.

Remembering indigenous dispossession in the national museum: The National Museum of Australia and the Canadian Museum of Civilization

Recent decades have seen the escalation of debate across western democracies that were once sites of the British Empire about how to remember the history of colonialism. This essay will consider how these debates have manifested in relation to the history of indigenous dispossession and its remembrance in Australia and Canada, which not only share many parallels in their stories of settlement but also in their recent efforts to come to terms with historical injustices against indigenous peoples. In examining how these debates have taken shape in the representation of national history in Australia’s and Canada’s recently established national museums, this essay will question the degree to which public historical consciousness in these former settler societies demonstrates a political imperative to remember historical injustices on the one hand, and on the other hand an enduring desire to forget them in favour of a more unifying story of the nation.

‘A Halo of Protection’: Colonial Protectors and the Principle of Aboriginal Protection through Punishment

Abstract Scholarship on Australias colonial protectorates has examined the ways in which protectors largely failed in their humanitarian mission, as well as the ambivalent roles they played as agents of ‘civilisation’. Yet as well as representing ‘friends and benefactors’ of Aboriginal people, colonial protectors worked to bring them within the legal reach of police, courts and prisons. This article will compare the work of the protectorates during the 1840s in Port Phillip and South Australia with that of Western Australia, where a more systematic and forebodingly modern policy of Aboriginal governance existed. It argues that in Western Australia a logic of Aboriginal protection emerged through a principle of discipline and punishment facilitated by the distinctive policy regime of Governor Hutt.

Salutary Lessons: Native Police and the ‘Civilising’ Role of Legalised Violence in Colonial Australia

ABSTRACT Over much of the nineteenth century, recurring problems of covert and opportunistic conflict between settlers and Indigenous peoples produced considerable debate across the British settler world about how frontier violence could be legally curbed. At the same time, the difficulty of imposing a rule of law on new frontiers was often seen by colonial states as justification for the imposition of order through force. Examining all the mainland Australian colonies from the 1830s to the end of the nineteenth century, this paper asks how this contradictory dilemma played out through deployment of ‘native police’ and the ‘civilising’ role of legalised violence as a strategy for managing the settler frontier. In light of wider debate about a humanely administered empire, Australia’s first native police force established in New South Wales in 1837 was conceived as a measure that would assist in the conciliation and ‘amelioration’ of Aboriginal people. In the coming decades, other Australian colonies employed native police either as dedicated forces or as individual assistants attached to mounted police detachments. Over time, the capacity they held to impose extreme violence on Aboriginal populations in the service of protecting pastoral investments came to reflect an implicit acceptance that punitive measures were required to bring order to disorderly frontiers. By tracing a gradual shift in the perceived role of native police from one of ‘civilising’ Aboriginal people to one of ‘civilising’ the settler state itself, this paper draws out some of the conditions under which state-sanctioned force became naturalised and legitimated. It concludes that, as an instrument of frontier management, native policing reflected an enduring problem for Australia’s colonial governments in reconciling a legal obligation to treat Aboriginal people as subjects of the crown with a perceived requirement to bring them under colonial authority through the ‘salutary lessons’ of legalised violence.

Intimate Violence in the Pastoral Economy: Aboriginal Women’s Labour and Protective Governance

When ‘Jenny Lind’ was abducted at gunpoint in 1898 from the pastoral station where she was employed as a cook, colonial officials entered into a protracted debate about how to achieve her return. Finding no legal avenue through which to prosecute her abductor, the legal solution was to prosecute Jenny herself for absconding from her employment. Her case speaks to a broader set of questions about the vulnerability of Indigenous women in colonial industries, and to the uncertain place they occupied at the intersection of raced and gendered labour relations. This chapter considers these questions by exploring the law’s limited capacity to provide protection to Indigenous women workers, in an era when statutory powers of ‘Aboriginal protection’ were becoming normative across Australia.