Chapter 5: Agents of Colonial Rule: Policing Practices in Western Australia and Queensland and Their Contemporary Legacies, c.1864–1914

This chapter examines the policing of marginalised groups in colonial Australia and the legacies of these practices. While scholars have recognised that police officers were at the forefront of the creation of a new social order in the Australian colonies, there have been no substantive comparative analyses of how officers negotiated their roles and operated in practice within the communities that they policed. Focusing on Western Australia and Queensland, this chapter examines the ‘suspect communities’ who were targeted, monitored and criminalised: convicts, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples, and non-European immigrant groups, such as those from China, Melanesia, Afghanistan, Japan and other Asian countries. It draws on a comparative analysis of the evidence provided by Police Gazettes across Queensland and Western Australia, alongside the extensive archival records of policing and parliamentary reports. These sources reveal how policing operated on the ground and how police officers made decisions over who to target and arrest. The decisions taken by police officers to suspect and apprehend individuals from these ‘suspect communities’ in significant and disproportionate numbers shaped and perpetuated wider societal stereotypes of criminality. The official sources examined here, however, do not reveal the experiences of those who were targeted and policed. To draw marginalised voices into the research, this chapter examines how the legacies and memories of the targeted policing practices have been transmitted in colonial and postcolonial contexts, revealing the intergenerational impacts of targeted policing practices.