Buried

Conflict between Aboriginal Peoples and others (primarily Europeans) on the frontiers of Australian colonial settlement through the second half of the 19th century remains a contentious and confronting topic. In particular, the nature of the frontier experience for Aboriginal Peoples is still largely unknown, despite work on the part of historians to document the extent of frontier violence, the semantics of engagement, the nature of policing and judicial procedures, and the occurrence of massacres.

Buried: Archaeology, frontier conflict and the Queensland Native Mounted Police investigates the Australian frontier through the historical and material legacies of the Queensland Native Mounted Police (NMP). Constituted in 1848 as a colonial force to subdue Aboriginal Peoples’ resistance to white incursions in their traditional lands, the NMP were a crucial force for race relations and the main colonising instrument across Queensland throughout the second half of the 19th century. In operation for 80 years, they were the longest lasting force of their kind in Australia – and notoriously the most brutal – but much of their activity has not been preserved in archives.

Deriving from a four-year project to find and record the camp sites of the Queensland NMP, Buried combines archaeological evidence for the NMP’s activities – both violent and mundane – with historical evidence and oral histories from descendants of NMP troopers, officers and massacre survivors. Presented as part-archaeological investigation and part-social history of a still poorly understood frontier policing force, Buried tackles some of the most complex issues surrounding frontier violence, and challenges us to think more broadly about both the colonial past and its historical legacies in the present.