Looting on the Frontier: Colonial Police and the Taking of Aboriginal Property

Police played an important role in the collecting of Aboriginal objects for colonial and imperial museums. Although ostensibly in a policing role, after 1835 the colonial police acted as a paramilitary force in frontier colonies, enabling colonisation. Although most scholars have noted the unequal power relationship that occurred when police ‘collected’ Aboriginal objects on the frontier, scholarship has not previously explored the ‘authority’ of the police to collect objects. Recent research by Knapman and Boonstra has demonstrated that colonial plunder, far from being an unregulated activity – as previous scholarship has assumed – was actually highly regulated by Western law, although rarely enforced. This article examines three police collections to investigate the formal powers that police had to abide by in order to collect objects at the time. The article examines the collecting activities of three colonial police constables: Harry Ord (who sent Aboriginal cultural material to the British Museum), Ernest Cowle (whose collections are in the South Australian Museum and Museum Victoria) and William Willshire (whose large collection has disappeared but some objects were purchased at an auction by the South Australian Museum in the 1990s). The article argues that in best case scenarios, police collecting may have represented an unequal exchange, but more than likely police collecting was illegal under Western law and can be better described as illegal plunder. The taking of Aboriginal objects was theft under Western law and unsupported by any colonial legal regimes.