Defending Country

This database derives from a four year long project to explore the archaeology of the NMP. It is the only publicly available historical and archaeological dataset of their lives and activities. The excavations conducted for this project were the first archaeological investigations of any Native Police force operating anywhere in Australia. The Queensland Native Mounted Police operated for over 50 years, from 1849 until 1904. It was organised along paramilitary lines, consisting of detachments of Aboriginal troopers led by white officers. It operated across the whole of Queensland and was explicitly constituted to protect the lives, livelihoods and property of settlers and to prevent (and punish) any Aboriginal aggression or resistance. This was often accomplished through violence in many forms, leading Henry Reynolds to characterise the NMP as 'the most violent organisation in Australian history'.

Traces the co-ordinated resistance warfare by the Wiradyuri under the leadership of Windradyne, and others such as Blucher and Jingler, in a vast area across the central west of New South Wales. Detailing drastic counterattacks by colonists and punitive expeditions led by armed parties of colonists and convicts that often ended in massacres of Wiradyuri women and children.

Noel Loos has concluded that the Aboriginal people in Queensland had been subject to a genocide, a holocaust different from that inflicted on the Jews in Europe, but equivalent to it.