‘My people had blood on their hands’: uncovering a shocking family secret

I remember my great-grandmother. She had a crumpled face and faded away when I was too young to notice. She was a blank. Stories weren’t told about her. But four years ago, an ancient uncle asked me to find out what I could about Maud Uhr. He knew next to nothing.

It wasn’t long before I found myself staring at a ­picture of her father in the gold-braided uniform of an officer of the Queensland Native Police. Reg Uhr was a professional killer of Aborigines.

Shame hit me like a blow. All this was a long time ago, and I never fired a shot on the frontier. But I was appalled. Then I discovered Reg’s brother D’arcy was also in the massacre business. They were notorious in the 1860s, the bloodiest time on the Queensland frontier.

I was embarrassed, too. I’ve written about race and politics all my career but had never thought to check if my people had blood on their hands. While I was still looking at the photograph, I knew I had to write the story of the Uhr brothers in the Native Police.

What began as an account of the bloody exploits of two men turned into a history of an invasion in which they were foot soldiers. I was drawn into the lives of merchants at both ends of the earth, of the colonial press, wool growers, the church, the law and London’s imperial cowardice. I was determined to make no ­excuses for my family.

Forgive my blunt prose: to be true to the times, I’m using the language of an age when Aboriginal Australians were called natives, Aborigines and blacks.

Reg Uhr is not among the celebrated Old Boys of the King’s School, Parramatta. Military drill was the only certain skill he took away with him when he left in 1861 after three years on that unhealthy stretch of river. It would prove useful.

His father, a Maryborough businessman with political connections in the new colony of Queensland, began almost at once to lobby for his boy to be given a place in the Native Police. Such forces operated throughout the Empire. In India, South Africa and New Zealand, local indigenous troopers led by white officers cleared the way for ­colonists driving their stock deep into black lands. They were an armed wing of government, loyal, cheap and ruthless.

The old man was no friend to the blacks. His brother had been killed by them on the Brisbane River in 1845, the first “gentleman” to die in the occupation of Moreton Bay. For years afterwards, blacks in the ­district were murdered with impunity as “suspected killers of the unfortunate Mr Uhr”.

As a magistrate in Maryborough, he had issued the warrants that sent the Native Police on the infamous invasion of K’gari – Fraser Island – in the last days of 1851 when, according to a local squatter, an unknown number of the island’s Butchulla people were forced into the sea “and there kept as long as daylight or life lasted”.

His boy Reg was 19 when he reported for duty. After a few weeks’ training, he was posted with eight ­troopers to a camp in grazing ­country recently seized in the hinterland of Bowen. There he displayed such “zeal and efficiency” that he was promoted swiftly from cadet to officer.

His black troopers came from far away. They were not ­expected to fire on their own people. And the further they were from their own country, the harder it was for them to desert. Whole detachments vanished at times. But this was rare. They were so far from home.

In the early days, there grew up a certain mystique about the black warriors recruited along the Murray and Murrumbidgee rivers, “in form and gait as fine ­fellows as would be picked up by a recruiting sergeant in an English county”.

Later they were trapped, kidnapped and forced into service. Black prisoners could serve out their terms as troopers. But in the first years there were many willing recruits – young men in a broken world being offered a place, adventure, women, a few pence a day and a lot of food. “Victims,” noted the Wiradjuri scholar Mina Murray, “don’t make good choices.”

The troopers tracked, shot and pursued their quarry into scrub so thick, officers were thought unable to ­follow. But the real reason for leaving them to enter the bush alone was to license slaughter. Sitting on his horse outside, an officer saw nothing and heard only the ­patter of gunfire. The bodies weren’t counted.

In January 1865, Reg Uhr was summoned by Cuthbert “Fethers” Fetherstonhaugh of The Hermitage in central Queensland to avenge the death of two shepherds killed on his run. As was common on the frontier, Fetherstonhaugh and his stockmen joined Uhr and his troopers in pursuit of the blacks.

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“Our trip was quite a picnic,” Fetherstonhaugh wrote in his memoirs. “We did about ten miles a day, tracking all the time.” On the 10th day, they sighted a party of blacks. Reg reported afterwards “shooting six”. Fetherstonhaugh put the death count at a dozen.

“We galloped into them. They were running in all directions. The gins [Aboriginal women] lay down, one was shot by mistake. We shot down two blackfellows and got through them and turned back. A shot from one of our fellows hit my horse in the chest – no harm done. In a few minutes all the blacks, twelve of them, were shot. If one or two tried to fight they had no chance.”

Then they rested. “We sat down, and it seemed very cold-blooded that with some of the dead blacks lying close to us, and the gins scowling at us from a little distance off, we ate and enjoyed our pot of tea and our dinner.”

Few of the officers of the Native Police were bushmen. Most found their way into the corps through connections to politicians and colonial officials. The one essential qualification for a commission in the force was social standing. Massacring blacks was work for gentlemen.

Squatters complained for years that these men weren’t fit for purpose. The Member for Ipswich provoked gales of laughter attacking them in the Queensland Assembly in 1861: “This corps was looked upon as a refuge for broken-down characters who, after having spent a fortune and ruined their prospects elsewhere, came here with a basketful of testimonials, made friends with somebody in power, and received an appointment in the Native Police.”

Every morning in camp, the troopers were up early, fed and drilled. Weapons were cleaned and horses groomed. When Reg appeared, his men sprang to their feet and saluted, addressing him as they addressed all their officers as Mamae, Father.

Women lived with the troopers. Many were kidnapped after massacres. There were children about. Recent archaeological digs at campsites across Queensland have turned up countless grog bottles – everyone drank – and children’s toys.

The troopers carried swords and carbines. The guns came with a fine colonial pedigree. Originally designed for hunting big game in Africa, they were used by the Cape Mounted Rifles in murderous frontier wars with the Xhosa. Only slightly modified, these clumsy, ­double-barrelled, muzzle-loaded weapons were issued to the Queensland Native Police.

They delivered a fat bullet a long way. Charles Tom, a squatter, suggested in 1864 that the force might use bird shot instead of bullets to disperse the blacks. “This, I believe, would frequently prevent murder from being committed.” But the government of Queensland was not interested. Killing was the point.

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Officers were expected to show “discretion” in both meanings of that slippery word – judgment and ­secrecy. Their duty was to “disperse” the blacks. An officer at an official inquiry confirmed what that meant: “Firing at them.“

Before Queensland separated from NSW in 1859, the Native Police had been under some restraint. But ­afterwards, all restraint disappeared. The Native Police of Queensland were free to kill anytime, anywhere for any ­reason. The attorney-general of Queensland let it be known that Aborigines could be killed by the Native Police with nothing to ­warrant their deaths but the ­complaints of squatters. Neither proof of some crime nor positive identification of wrongdoers was required. And when the ­police were out to kill, any black would do. Justice was beside the point. The task was to teach the blacks a lesson.

Queensland was only weeks old when Second Lieutenant John O’Connell Bligh led his men on a slaughter through the streets of Maryborough. From the riverbank, half the town watched as he was rowed in pursuit of a Butchulla man swimming away. Standing in the bow of the boat, Bligh shot him in the head.

Lieutenant Frederick Wheeler cut a swathe through Moreton Bay that began with an unprovoked attack on a sleeping camp at Dugandan, near Ipswich, killing two men and abducting at least one woman for the pleasure of the troopers. He then chased the survivors to Fassifern, a few miles away. Next morning, three of their bodies were found in the scrub. All three had been shot; two had their skulls smashed; all were old men.

When the police were out to kill, any black would do. Justice was beside the point.

One of my heroes, Henry Challinor, held an inquest. An Ipswich doctor and magistrate of profound Nonconformist faith, Challinor was no tool of the squatters. He told the attorney-general that the ­“aboriginals were wantonly and wilfully murdered … by Lieutenant Wheeler and the detachment of Native Police on that day under his command.”

He was ignored.

But so appalled were people by these outrages that the government called a parliamentary inquiry in May 1861. It was expertly hobbled. The terms of reference were vague. Seven squatters on the committee held between them more than 3.5 million acres of the Colony. Their shabby report exonerated everyone.

D’arcy Uhr was a nasty piece of work. As a kid in Maryborough, he got his kicks stealing guns and game from Aboriginal hunters. He was always able to lie his way out of trouble. D’arcy was a stranger to shame, with a silver tongue. He was 20 when he joined the force in 1865. “Rather young,” remarked the Maryborough Chronicle, “to have charge of such a gang, engaged in such fearful work as slaying men without responsibility to any human tribunal.”

Only months later, he and his troopers joined the first government expedition to the Gulf of Carpentaria. The plan was to establish the greatest commercial port in Australia – Melbourne and Singapore all rolled into one. But Burketown was 30 miles from the sea on a river choked with sandbanks and prowled by crocodiles. An unidentified fever was sweeping the place, killing settlers by the dozen.

D’arcy’s response was to desert his men to chase horse thieves hundreds of miles south – a long and pointless pursuit he sold to the press as a heroic colonial adventure. We know so much about D’arcy Uhr ­because of his passion for publicity.

His contribution to law and order in the shanties of Burketown was nil. He was a prankster who hung about with the lowest of the low. Even in the eccentric world of the Native Police, he might have been sacked for these delinquencies. Instead, he was ­promoted, for his cousin’s husband, the noted bore Robert Ramsey Mackenzie, had become premier of Queensland.

In early 1868, D’arcy went to war. Military ranks had given way to police ranks. He was now a Sub-Inspector. The Brisbane Courier took a close interest in his exploits. When ­several horses were speared a few miles from Burketown, “the Native Police, under Sub-inspector Uhr, went out, and, I am informed, succeeded in shooting upwards of thirty blacks.”

D’arcy then took his men east to avenge the death of two shepherds and a drover on the Flinders River where, the paper reported, his “success” was complete. “One mob of 14 he rounded up; another mob of nine, and a last mob of eight, he succeeded with his troopers in shooting. In the latter lot there was one black who would not die after receiving 18 or 20 ­bullets, but a trooper speedily put an end to his existence by smashing his skull ...

“Everybody in the district is delighted with the wholesale slaughter dealt out by the ­native police, and thank Mr Uhr for his energy in ­ridding the district of fifty-nine (59) myalls [Aborigines].”

D’arcy’s massacre was reported across Australia and up and down the UK. Most British newspapers deplored the bloodshed under headlines like: “Exterminating the Natives in Australia.” But the government of Benjamin Disraeli did nothing. British inaction over D’arcy’s killings in the Gulf in 1868 was a clue to the future. Whether the Liberals or Tories were in power, Queensland would no longer even be compelled to make excuses to London for the bloodshed as its frontiers moved north and west.

The Colony’s first governor, George Bowen, didn’t see any problem. He celebrated the expansion of the settlement as a triumph of civilisation, “not of war but of peace … not for this generation only, but for all ­posterity; not for England only, but for all mankind”.

Most officers in the Native Police lasted about half a dozen years. Killing wrecked them. Reg Uhr was one of many who would emerge from the force a drunk. After the Hermitage slaughter, he and his men were posted to the new port of Cardwell, between Townsville and Cairns. “Our black brethren have been keeping quiet lately,” reported the Port Denison Times. “No doubt they have been kept in awe from the fact of our gallant ­Sub-Inspector and his ‘brave army’ having been amongst us, preventing them from ‘kicking up a row’.”

The following year Reg was back in Bowen, where he and his men “dispersed a mob of over two hundred ­encamped near Euri Creek”. No one had died. No stock had been killed. Nothing had been stolen. But the townsfolk were nervous the blacks were “bent on ­mischief of some sort”. The number Reg killed that day was never reported.

Soon after his 25th birthday, Reginald Charles Heber Uhr was appointed a magistrate, part of a ­deliberate policy of promoting Native Police to the bench. Sympathetic men were needed in the bush. The last thing the government wanted were magistrates taking a strict view of the law – for no law ever authorised massacres by the Native Police.

Reg’s appointment troubled the Gladstone Observer, which was willing to admit sarcastically that he had “rendered good service to the State in assisting to ­apprehend criminals, and ‘punishing’ – that is the ­correct term, we believe – blacks; but experience of this sort is not the only kind required by a Police Magistrate”. Such qualms counted for nothing in the squatter-led Colony.

D’arcy’s exit from the force that year was a shambles. Deeply offended when he lost command of the police in the Gulf, D’arcy refused to obey the officer sent north to take charge. At first, his political connections ­protected him but he was eventually sacked. As he left, he took brutal revenge on every official he blamed for his humiliation.

He kept on killing. He was arrested after an Aboriginal man died at his hands in the hills behind Cloncurry in 1871. But the bush magistrates – one who had D’arcy to thank for clearing troublesome blacks from his Gulf run – dropped the charges.

D’arcy earned a place in bush ­history the following year by ­pioneering a stock route from the Gulf to the Northern Territory. What the Australian Dictionary of Biography doesn’t note in its ­homage to the great drover is that D’arcy killed along the way.

One day on the Cox River, his party stumbled on more than a hundred “beautifully painted” Marra or Alawa men. The drovers had almost certainly disturbed a ceremony, but to white eyes their decoration looked like warpaint. “Mr Uhr was equal to the occasion,” wrote one of the party. “Posting his men to the best advantage he made them fire by files at the word of command … With teeth hard set and frowning brows they kept up a continuous rattle of rifle shots, few of their bullets being allowed to speed in vain.”

When D’arcy went prospecting, he also killed – on the Palmer River of Cape York in the 1870s and the goldfields of Western Australia in the 1890s. Time and again he sold his crimes to the press as colonial adventures.

Reg died at the end of his tether in Queensland at the age of 44. D’arcy survived for another 20 years as a butcher in the gold mining town of Coolgardie in Western Australia. His death in 1907 was ­unmourned by the surviving Aboriginal peoples of the surrounding country who, having been shot, starved and driven from their lands, were living in camps near the town.

In D’arcy’s eyes, they had never had it so good. “Before we came here the natives, who are at present around Coolgardie, had to exist on what? On an ­occasional lizard and a few grubs, getting just enough to keep them from starving … Now they have more provisions than they can use … As to clothing and house accommodation … It is a well-known and ­established fact to all Australians that aboriginals ­always prefer their camp fire to sleeping in any dwelling. It is as natural to them to lie out in the dirt as for us to lie in a bed.”

D’arcy almost outlived the Native Police. Despite the rage and disgust the force provoked over 60 years, it was allowed to go ­quietly out of ­existence shortly ­before World War I – though one camp ­survived, at least in name, on the Coen River goldfield on Cape York, until 1929.

For Queensland’s squatters, the Native Police had done its work well seizing their acres from black hands. We will never know how many it killed during its time. From press reports and the fragmentary records that ­survive, scholars are putting the toll at more than 40,000.

I am not alone. God knows how many descendants are now living of the 442 officers and 927 black troopers of the Native Police. Because I made no secret of what I was writing over the last five years, people have told me of their own murdering ancestors.

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Some were in the Native Police. Others were ­squatters. The great-great-grandfather of a colleague poisoned dozens of Aborigines on the Clarence River in NSW in the 1840s. She will tell that story one day.

I feel for my family. “Must you write this?” they asked me when I began. But by the end, they agreed the story had to be told. One of my sisters added: “But I still hate the fact that our family is involved.” She speaks for Australia.

I spent time in Brisbane over the years with a cousin who has read the history of the frontier wars deeply and written on the subject. He urged me not to focus too much on the fate of the blacks. Australia was always going to be colonised, he said. “To bring 21st-century thinking to the Queensland frontier is a great mistake. We were different then.”

No. Times change, not people. Greed and cruelty have been with us always. So has decency. Good people condemned the massacres as they happened. Protests never ceased. Murder was a crime on the frontier, just as it is now. Yes, the colonisation of Australia was inevitable. But it didn’t have to be so sweeping and cruel.

So many were slaughtered. Kidnapping never ceased. Every acre was taken. Nothing of this vast country was set aside for its ­original inhabitants. None of the huge wealth earned on their lands flowed back to them. Laws counted for nothing. No treaties were made. And when the fighting was done, we set about forgetting that Australia was even conquered.

Books can’t change the past but facing the truth ­together can change the future. Killing for Country is being published as this country is about to decide whether to give Aboriginal Australians a Voice in the country today. At this uncertain moment, I offer a bloody family saga in the hope of us one day reaching the ultimate goal set at Uluru: the coming together after struggle, Makarrata.

Killing for Country: A Family Story by David Marr (Black Inc, $40) is released October 3.

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