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1. Policing and Protection
Rachel Standfield
Monash Indigenous Studies Centre
content warning – this presentation contains
racialized language

2. Legislation around the country
• Victorian Aboriginal Protection Act 1869
• Victorian Aborigines Protection Law Amendment Act 1886 changed the definition of
who was Aboriginal to exclude many people.
• The Queensland Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897
set up a “system of segregation, surveillance and control” that was to provide the
model for later laws.
• The Western Australian Aborigines Act 1905 set up reserves, controlled employment
• The NSW Aborigines Protection Act 1909, excluded Aboriginal children from schools.
• The South Australian Aborigines Act 1911 allowed the government custody of
Aboriginal children, controlled movement of people, only allowed Aboriginal people
to live on reserves or to camp at the fringes of towns.

3. Police roles in Protection
legislation – police as Protectors
• the second Victorian protection Act passed in 1886, the role of the police
was to “remove people when called upon by station superintendents”
(Cunneen, 2001, p. 63) From the 1880s in NSW, when an Aboriginal
protection Board was established, “the Commissioner of Police” sat on the
board, “to supervise the work of police who were to be appointed as
protectors”.
• In more remote places in Australia, for example in different places in the
Northern Territory and Queensland, police held dual roles as regular police
and as Protectors.
• For example, the Northern Territory Aborigines Ordinance, remaining in
place until 1957, extended the powers of the Protector to include the power
to “assume the care, custody or control of any Aboriginal or half-caste if, in
his opinion, it was necessary or desirable in the interests of that person for
this to be done” (quoted in Thomson, 2018).
• In Queensland the Police Commissioner was the Chief Protector.
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4. Police roles in Protection
legislation – police as enforcers
• Protection legislation denied basic citizenship
rights, criminalising movement, marriage,
employment, and other aspects of life. The
criminalisation of these aspects of Indigenous life
became part of the everyday functions of policing.
• the criminalisation of Indigenous people for alcohol
offences and their subsequent incarceration began
with the introduction of the Western Australian
protection legislation in 1905.
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5. Other aspects of criminalization –
separate courts
• In Queensland and Western Australia, reserves
often had their own court system, subjecting
Indigenous people to distinct forms of regulation
and control.
• behaviours such as ‘untidyness’ and ‘immoral
conduct’ were punishable with incarceration, and
that “almost every defendant pleaded guilty, and
virtually all were found guilty” (Tatz, 1963 in
McGrath, 1995).
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6. Policing and the NSW Aborigines
Protection Act
Police functions under the NSW Aborigines Protection Act, operating between 1909 and 1969 . (Jennett, 1999).
1. Issue rations to Aboriginal people.
2. Reduce the ration lists by investigating all applicants and issuing rations only to ‘deserving’ cases.
3. Force children to attend school by withholding rations if they did not comply.
4. Refuse rations to Aboriginal people in order to ‘persuade’ them to go to another locality or to move on to an
Aboriginal reserve or station.
5. Decide whether or not an Aboriginal person was sick enough to see a doctor.
6. Patrol and maintain order on unsupervised Aboriginal reserves.
7. Recommend on the disposal of reserve land.
8. Expel ‘trouble makers’ from Aboriginal reserves.
9. Remove children from their parents and send them to the Board’s ‘training homes’, on the grounds that they
were ‘neglected’ or that they were 14 years of age.
10. Institute proceedings against Aboriginal parents who took their children away from Aboriginal reserves or
from school in an attempt to escape the Board’s decision that their children be removed from them and
‘trained’.
11. Expel people with light-coloured skin from Aboriginal reserves and stop them from returning to their
families still living on reserves.
12. Institute proceedings to remove whole Aboriginal communities from certain localities, under section 14 of
the Act.

7. Quote from Stan Grant
• The journalist Stan Grant, discussing his family
history
• “My great grandfather, who was jailed for speaking
his language to his grandson (my father). Jailed for
it! My grandfather on my mother's side who
married a white woman who reached out to
Australia, lived on the fringes of town until the
police came, put a gun to his head, bulldozed his tin
humpy and ran over the graves of the three
children he buried there” (Grant, 2015).
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8. Police roles in child removals
• Police were heavily involved in government policies
of removing children from their families.
• This included taking children from their parents to
be institutionalised in missions and children’s
homes.
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