In Queensland, as in the other Australian colonies in the nineteenth century, European settlers wrested control of the land from its indigenous owners by force and the threat of force. All colonies used police for this purpose, but Queensland went further than any other in creating a police corps specifically for the subjugation and dispossession of the Aborigines. Queensland’s Native Police comprised small units of indigenous troopers, commanded by European officers. These were moved around the colony to wherever on the leading edges of European expansion the Aborigines were most ‘troublesome’. Their tactics were simple and brutal. Whether the targets were entire Aboriginal groups or individual suspects, their standard strategy was lethal force in engagements that were known euphemistically as ‘dispersals’.

Other historians, notably Henry Reynolds and Noel Loos, have written about Queensland’s Native Police, but none with such detailed familiarity with the historical sources that Jonathan Richards demonstrates. Earlier historians suggested that the records of Native Police actions had been destroyed, or lost, or had never existed. Richards shows this to be untrue, though he acknowledges that the available records are fragmentary, and that his account of Native Police actions required many years of diligent grubbing through archives, newspapers, personal papers and government documents. He also acknowledges that his account of the role and conduct of the Native Police relies to a significant extent on the exercise of a disciplined capacity for inference. Unlike Keith Windschuttle (who is wisely kept off-stage in this book), Richards maintains that inference, informed by empirical evidence, is not only a valuable but an essential tool of the historian.