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The colonial Australian frontier war was unofficial, undeclared and unrecorded, and the official actions of government forces was typically veiled as "policing" and "law-enforcement." The reason was simple and put by numerous primary sources, police was not constitutionally allowed to engage in acts of warfare. Thus it was noted in 1868 by chief justice Charles Lilley in Queensland that the Native Police Force is an unlawful "avenging force" and that there were "not a single line" to make this force "a legal force". Indeed, "there was nothing in the common law of England, or in the law of nations, to justify the conduct of the white population towards the aboriginal inhabitants of the country".〔Queensland Political Debate Legislative Aassembly Thursday, 6 Feb 1868, p948-963.〕 In 1879 a former officer in the Queensland frontier force stated openly that; "Of all semi-military or police organizations under the British flag, the native mounted police of Queensland is certainly the most anomalous. Successively has such a force operated in protecting pioneer occupation in both Victoria and New South Wales, but never from its origin to its existence in Queensland at the present moment, has its legitimacy been defined. In point of fact it stands as the most illegal force ever constituted, having the powers of life and death, without the sanction of militarians, as provided by enrollment under the Articles of War and the Military Act. Not being so, it is nevertheless a life-destroying instead of a criminal arresting force, and carries out its sanguinary will without the intervention of judge, jury, or law. Practically, there is no appeal from its almighty vengeance."〔Town and Country Journal 15 Mar 1879, p31a-c.‘Reminiscences of The Native Mounted Police of Queensland’〕 Similar and contemporary comments on this issue can be found numeros places〔See among others W. Ross Johnston's book on the Queensland police force, "The Long Blue Line", chapter 9, 1992, pages 86, 88-95; see also the editorial in the Brisbane Courier 11 May 1863, p2c, with references to the unconstitutionality of the so called "police". see also debate in Queensland legislative Assembly in 1868 (Quensland Political Debate 15 Jan 1868. ‘POLICE EXPENSES’ (as per Brisbane Courier Jan 16 1868, p3f-4c.)〕). Frontier collisions and punitive expeditions against indigenous people on Australia's frontier were thus generally veiled in secrecy due to fear of possible legal consequences, especially following the Myall Creek Massacre in 1838.〔A Dirk Moses, 'Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History,' in A. Dirk Moses (ed.) ''Genocide And Settler Society: Frontier Violence And Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History,'' Berghahn Books, 2004 pp.3-48 p.24. Cf.pp.165,167,204.〕 In cases where reports had to be written the records can at times be seen as having been later destroyed. Recent studies into the most significant and notorious case of this kind, that of Queensland and its Native Police Force, show that all Native Police reports and monthly enumerations of patrols originally stored in the Queensland Police Department went missing sometime after 1905 when the last station closed.〔Ørsted-Jensen, Robert: ''Frontier History Revisited'' (Brisbane 2011), chapter 5 and appendix B 'What do the Archived Records Reveal about the Reports of the Native Police Force?'〕 It is generally acknowledged that the European as well as indigenous death toll in frontier conflicts and massacres in Queensland exceeded that of all other Australian colonies, yet it is certainly not possible to map out more than a small percentage of the numerous massacre sites in Queensland. We can calculate in various ways the minimum amount of frontier 'dispersals' performed by the Native Police Force (as was indeed done recently by Dr Raymond Evans and Robert Orsted-Jensen based on a small portion of monthly native police summaries of now lost 'collision reports' stored in the archives) the approximate amount dispersals performed by the native police during half a century. However, we will never be able to locate or describe in detail more than a small percentage of these events. Thus any attempt to list all events of this kind will of nature (at least in Queensland), be more deceptive than revealing.〔Evans, Raymond & Ørsted–Jensen, Robert: 'I Cannot Say the Numbers that Were Killed': Assessing Violent Mortality on the Queensland Frontier” (paper at AHA 9 July 2014 at University of Queensland) publisher Social Science Research Network. See also Evans, Raymond: ''The country has another past: Queensland and the History Wars,'' in ‘Passionate Histories: Myth, memory and Indigenous Australia’ Aboriginal History Monograph 21, September 2010. Edited by Frances Peters-Little, Ann Curthoys and John Docker.〕 The concepts of invasion, frontier wars and massacres, although frequently mentioned and debated in the early Australian legislatures, has become a highly contentious issues in modern Australia. For discussion of the historical arguments about these conflicts, see the articles on the History Wars and in particular the section on the "black armband" view of history, plus the section on impact of European settlement in the article on Indigenous Australians. In total at least 20,000 indigenous Australians died from conflict and massacre with white Australians whilst between 2,000 and 2,500 white Australians died. The following provisory list tallies a few of the better documented massacres of Aboriginal Australians, which took place mainly during the colonial period. ==Some frontier collisions and massacres on record== 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「List of massacres of Indigenous Australians」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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