This is such a clever title. Subtitled “A Family Story”, the title works on several levels. “Killing“- who is killing here? Indigenous people killing families, shepherds and hutkeepers in defence of country as the waves of ‘settlers’ and ‘squatters’ sweep across the continent? Or the white officers of the Native Police who turn the other way and let their ‘boys’ of the Native Police loose killing men women and children of other tribes? Or the Native Police troopers themselves, far from ‘country’ and with no links to their victims? Or white squatters and settlers who ride alongside the Native Police, or who distribute poisoned flour and meat? “Country” as used by indigenous people as their spiritual connection? Or ‘country’ as used by white settlers as land to be used; or a political entity to be defined and defended internationally? And “a family story” – David Marr’s own family through genealogical connections of which he was unaware until relatively recently? Or ‘family’ as the protagonists sought and maintained their positions through the networks of connections which bound together the British Empire? This book is all of these and more.
I’m sometimes wary of biographies written by descendants, whose familial connection has been the impetus for the book, and whose depth of research imbues the topic with a significance that it might not necessarily have, in the big picture. In this case, though, Marr leaves the family connection largely to one side to write narrative history which is broad enough in its scope to draw on larger historiographical arguments, while maintaining its focus on his protagonists Richard Jones and the Uhr family brought into Jones’ family orbit through his wife Mary, without laboring (indeed, not even mentioning) the family link. These are important – if increasingly infamous (largely due to this book)- people in their own right, with entries in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
Richard Jones was a merchant, who along with Alexander Riley, had a monopoly on importation to the early NSW colony, which made him for a time very wealthy and politically influential. Like other successful businessmen of the time, he invested heavily in sheep, which gave him an interest in squatter politics in the insatiable hunger for new lands, and which led to his bankruptcy during the economic downturn of the 1840s. However, with some canny land sales and disguise of his ownership in the names of his wife, brothers-in-law and children, he maintained sufficient wealth to support his inclusion in the Legislative Council of the day. There, despite his quietly spoken ways, he formed part of the conservative power-block that thwarted governors and exerted pressure on the Colonial Office to maintain the hold of the squatters on huge leased swathes of land.
It also gave him the connections to have his brothers-in-law and their families, and their sons placed in positions of authority as magistrates and, most importantly for this story, as Officers of the Queensland Native Police, as were Reg and D’Arcy Uhr, Jones’ grandsons. Instituted in 1848 on a model first established in Port Phillip, this force never numbered more than 100 at its peak, headed by 10-14 ‘gentlemen’ officers and half a dozen officer cadets. The officers would stay with the force for five years or so, where they were well inculcated into the methods and ethos of the Native Police, and were then appointed as magistrates, who drew on this knowledge in ensuring that the Native Police remained politically protected. Sometimes the Officers themselves were involved in massacres or ‘dispersals’, other times they would simply direct their troopers to chase down indigenous groups and would close their ears to the gunshots that would ring out in the bush. As a matter of policy, these indigenous troopers themselves were always sent far away from their own country, so that they would not see their victims as brothers and sisters, but as strangers.
What made them strange and dangerous to each other was being away from their own country, the country that made them who they were. Here was a deadly conundrum. While officially denying their connection to land, colonial authorities would rely on that profound attachment
p. 174
Marr does not even attempt to explain or explore the motivations of the indigenous men who joined the Native Police. As he says in his acknowledgements, this is “not my story to tell. I leave it in better hands.” (p. 415) He does say that they were often – but not always- trapped, kidnapped, threatened at gunpoint. Their desertion rate was high, and while settlers were happy to draw on their ‘services’, they were often feared and despised by white society. The legal position of the Native Police was left deliberately opaque by the colonial government and its courts: they were never issued with written instructions and euphemisms like ‘collision’ and ‘dispersal’ and ‘dealt with’ pepper the official correspondence. But it had its own inexorable, if legally dubious, logic:
…pioneer settlers are entitled to protection; blacks attack whites without reason; they grow more dangerous when left unpunished; imprisonment holds no fears for them; chastisement must be swift to be effective
p. 376
Bolstered by the political power of the squatter lobby, of which Richard Jones was a member, colonial governors did not enforce the leasehold and sale agreements that proclaimed that the indigenous people of an area retained right of access to pastoral land for hunting and sustenance. Each governor had protection of indigenous people as part of his instructions when he was sent by the Colonial Office: none of them managed to enforce it. The Colonial Office had stared down slaveholders and the slavery shipping interests elsewhere in the empire (largely through financial reparations which charged further colonial land acquisition), but they did not dare to take on the NSW squatters. There were landholders, ministers of religion and philanthropists who protested the actions of the Native Police, but they were largely ignored or silenced. The Uhr brothers, as officers of the Native Police, could draw on their family connections through their father and grandfather, and marriage connections with Premiers and politicians, to escape censure again and again and again.
Meanwhile, the voracious appetite of pastoralism, and later mining, was not to be sated. Land was eaten out by sheep, so the pastoralists kept moving ever outward, coming to further ‘collisions’ with traditional owners, as they moved across the map. Marr’s book is illustrated with pen and ink drawings of individuals, but also with excellent maps that showed the traditional owners of territory, with rivers and stations marked, often with a skull to show massacre sites spreading across New South Wales, Queensland, Northern Territory and even over into Western Australia right into the twentieth century.
This is excellent narrative history, told with Marr’s deft turn of phrase. It is well researched, with references cited according to page number at the back of the book. I regretted the absence of a bibliography: it’s just too hard to comb through pages of references to find the original publication. In her blurb on the front cover, Marcia Langton notes: “If we want the truth, here it is as told by David Marr.” In his afterword, Marr writes:
The maths is indisputable: we each have sixteen great-grandparents. Reg Uhr was one of mine. I don’t believe he’s tainted my blood. I don’t believe I am responsible for his crimes. But when I learned what he had done, my sense of myself and my family shifted… We can be proud of our families for things done generations ago. We can also be ashamed. I feel no guilt for what Reg did. But I can’t argue away the shame that overcame me when I first saw that photograph of Sub-Inspector Uhr in his pompous uniform….It embarrasses me now to have been reporting race and politics in this country for so long without it ever crossing my mind that my family might have played a part in the frontier wars. My blindness was so Australian.
p. 407,408
The failure of the Voice referendum notwithstanding, truth telling continues. This “bloody family saga” is Marr’s own contribution. He suggests that one day there might be a statue in Canberra to commemorate the Native Police, who are already recognized in the Australian War Memorial Act as a military force of the crown. A statue in bronze, perhaps, of a white officer and a black trooper. And on the plinth? ‘The Native Police in the conquest of this country killed untold thousands. We remember them’.
Yes.
My rating: 9.5/10
Sourced from: review copy Blackink Books.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 
