Mark Finnane

The uses of punishment and exile: Aborigines in colonial Australia

The European settlement of Australia from 1788 was accompanied by a prolonged dis-possession of the indigenous people, who became British subjects at law. Regimes of punishment played an important role in this dispossession. Focusing on the colonies of latest settlement, Western Australia and Queensland, the evidence here suggests also that conventional modes of punishment were modified to accommodate indigenous offending. Public execution and corporal punishment of Aborigines was practised after their exclusion as options for the settler population - but imprisonment too was shaped to the end of managing a seemingly intractable indigenous population. In completing the process of dispossession, the colonial state developed less violent punitive resources to manage the indigenous population. Incarceration within unique institutions, segregation from the settler population and surveillance and regulation through an expanding bureaucracy were strategies of social control increasingly deployed in an attempt to address the distinctive challenges posed by a dispossessed indigenous population.

The Carrigan Committee of 1930-31 and the moral condition of the Saorstat'

The character of modern Ireland after partition has long been the subject of debate, by columnists, poets, novelists and historians. John Whyte’s outstanding study of the process by which what he called the ‘Catholic moral code’ became enshrined in the ‘law of the state’ summarised the ‘remarkable consensus’ achieved in the years 1923-37, a time when there was ‘overwhelming agreement that traditional Catholic values should be maintained, if necessary by legislation’. Based on personal reminiscences and published documents, Whyte’s contribution is of enduring value to those seeking to understand the culture of modern Ireland. His account is even more impressive when read against the background of materials which have more recently become available in the National Archives. These enable some of the detail to be filled in, but they also provoke some new questions about the state of the country and the means by which a peaceable Ireland was to be constructed in the aftermath of a war of independence and a civil war.

Police and Politics in Australia — The Case for Historical Revision:

Contemporary arguments about policing in Australia have been marked by a concern over an increasingly interventionist role of police in politics. Police, both departments and unions, have been playing a prominent role in public debates over law and order issues, police staffing levels and other policy matters. It is argued that historical scrutiny of policing since the 1890s indicates a continuing role and influence of police in both policy making and law reform. If such has been the case, then understanding the contemporary political role of police in Australia requires re-evaluation of the changing contexts affecting the visibility and prominence of police interventions.

Police corruption and police reform: The Fitzgerald inquiry in Queensland, Australia

The 1989 Fitzgerald Report in Queensland, Australia was one of the countrys most far‐reaching investigations of police corruption and maladministration. Its recommendations, including measures to reorganize the police force and establish new modes of review of the criminal justice system, are made against a background of police reform in other States, including New South Wales and Victoria. The paper reviews the Reports findings in the context of the historical development of policing in Australia, centralized, marked by strong police unionism and with periodic crises of corruption and maladministration over the past century. The prospects for police reform are reviewed.

J V Barry: a Life

JV Barry: A Life is the history of John Vincent Barry: judge, historian, criminologist, civil libertarian and public intellectual before his time. Mark Finnanes authoritative biography traces Barrys development from his Irish Catholic boyhood in rural New South Wales to the deeply felt aspirations and personal conflicts of a judge and intellectual in an era dominated by the Menzies government, the Labor split, and an international Cold War. Seen through the eyes of a keen observer of the times, JV Barry: A Life is also a history of Australian life from the 1920s to the 1960s, documenting the growth of state powers in an age of security concerns, and the significant impact of these on the privacy of individuals. It also documents Barrys role as the intellectual founder of the discipline of criminology in Australia. Drawing on more than 10,000 letters as well as interviews with those who knew him, Mark Finnane looks at Barry in the cultural, political and intellectual milieu of inter- and post-war Australia, and describes Barrys considerable role in the creation of a discourse of justice and human rights in Australia.

Controlling the ‘alien’ in mid-twentieth century Australia: the origins and fate of a policing role

The capacity of police to manage immigrant populations in times of conflict was developed in the course of the twentieth century through a multiplicity of techniques and strategies. Inter-agency and cross-jurisdictional capability for the ends of population surveillance and crime control was historically contingent on institutional initiatives that are rarely explored. An important origin of such capability in Australia was the Conference of Police Commissioners, first held in 1903. Its agenda after the First World War was pre-occupied with the management of aliens, the immigrant populations of Australia. This paper explores the institutional and political contexts that shaped the control of ‘aliens’ in Australias early and mid-twentieth century with particular interest in the development of policing powers and techniques that operated within and without the crime control and prevention mandates that are most commonly associated with the modern public police. During these decades Australian police leaders, drawing on their own and international experience in two World Wars, expanded their vision of what policing of the alien demanded. By the early post-war years they sought universal surveillance of migrants through the still developing technologies of fingerprint and photographic databases. Their failure to achieve what they demanded at this time was a signal of their subordination in a politics of immigration that prioritised assimilation and integration of large new populations as a national undertaking.

'You'll get nothing out of it'? The inquest, police and Aboriginal deaths in colonial Queensland

Colonisation in Australia entailed the establishment of legal institutions, but very often lagging the extension of the boundaries of settlement. As a common‐law institution of ancient lineage the inquest was an important means of exploring reasons for unexplained deaths, even leading to prosecutions. Yet the protections afforded by rule of law institutions were nugatory where they affected Aboriginal people in conflict with settler society, as shown in this study of the many inquiries in which deaths were attributed to the actions of the police in colonial Queensland.

The origins of criminology in Australia

Is there a distinctive Australian criminology? Was there a criminology before the discipline? Was the formation of the discipline in Australia shaped by the historical contexts of colonial settlement and its aftermath? And how was the international development of the discipline during the middle decades of the twentieth century reflected in the emergence of Australian institutions of criminology, and academic and governmental departments at that time? This article examines these questions as a contribution to a richer historical understanding of the factors that prefigured the late twentieth century acceleration of the discipline in Australia. In particular, it approaches this history through the voices of those who shaped its early concerns and activities. It is suggested that some outstanding features of Australian historical experience from the time of European settlement – above all its penal colony origins and its dispossession of Indigenous peoples – struggled to make an impact on the intellectual shape of the discipline during its formative years. On the other hand, the institutional forms and intellectual concerns traced here demonstrate the importance of trans-national contexts in shaping a discipline from its early days.

Aboriginal violence and state response : histories, policies and legacies in Queensland 1860-1940

Abstract During the long era of ‘protection’ (enacted in 1897, flourishing in the interwar years and with effects continuing to this day) policy towards Australian Indigenous people suspected of interpersonal violence was ambiguous in its objectives and its means. Formally, Indigenous peoples in Australia were British subjects entitled to the full protection of the law. As a consequence, violence between Indigenous people was made visible through the conduct of inquests, police inquiries and, in many cases, subsequent arrest and charge with a criminal offence. Disposal of those charged or even suspected of crimes reflects tension between the universalising presumptions of the criminal law and the particularising effects of welfare regimes that ruled the lives of Indigenous people. Drawing on archives of inquests, courts and prisons in the Queensland jurisdiction before 1940, this article examines the policies and decision-making that characterised a state that remained determinedly colonial in its practices and ambitions. In conclusion, we consider briefly the question of how distinctive or how representative was Queensland practice as a state response to Indigenous violence during these decades of colonial subordination.

Police rules and the organisation of policing in Queensland, 1905–1916

The development of the modern form of policing required a bureaucratic apparatus complete with rules and regulations prescribing police procedures. In spite of the organisational significance of police rule books and manuals, little is known about their origins and composition. Conflict between the Queensland Police Commissioner, W G Cahill (1905–16), and other senior criminal justice system personnel over the content and authorisation of a police rule book for Queensland suggests that the prescription of police practices and procedure was itself the outcome of longer-term changes in the organisation of policing; in particular of an increasing demand for police autonomy of other elements of the criminal justice system.