On northern frontiers, Australian colonisers assumed local powers over Aboriginal people. These colonisers were almost invariably pastoralists. The Adelaide Advertiser reported in 1904 regarding Western Australia, ‘As the settlement extends farther out the country formerly occupied exclusively by the natives passes into the hands of the pastoralists.’^[28] The pastoralists used their powers to take Aboriginal land and exploit their labour. Pastoralists’ direct control over Aboriginal people was a counterpoint to the weak centralised authority that rested in the hands of the colonial government in the nineteenth century and the Aboriginal Chief Protector in the twentieth century.

Historians such as Rosalind Kidd and Bain Attwood employ Foucauldian notions of fragmented power to explain the power distribution on the northern frontier.^[29] They infer that there is no order between the decentralised powers of pastoralists and the centralised power of the state. This approach overlooks the unity of the pastoralists’ and the state interests to retain land and sovereignty against Aboriginal people. This represents a feudal dissemination of power, in which the government is complicit to the landholders’ jurisdiction. This is because the landholder can most effectively exploit land and labour.

Therefore, while pastoralists transgressed government controls of Aboriginal lives outside of stations, governments tended to sanction their powers. Pastoralists had a mandate to manage Aboriginal people working on their stations due to the profits they reaped.^[30] In Queensland, land was leased on the condition that Aboriginal inhabitants would be removed by the pastoralist.^[31] In the Northern Territory, Regulation 14 under the Aboriginals Ordinance 1918 gave the pastoralist the power to maintain the worker, their relatives and dependants.^[32] These examples demonstrate that pastoralists’ rights to land conferred entitlements to rule.

The proclamations of pastoralists and administrators reveal the concurrent view that pastoralists were the legitimate dispensers of Aboriginal justice. Pastoralists in the Northern Territory claimed that they were ‘far removed from the restraints of formal law’ and therefore ‘every man was his own policeman’.^[33] In 1904 the Northern Territory Government Resident, Charles Dashwood, claimed the lack of police in pastoral areas obliged pastoralists to contend with native depredations.^[34] In 1890 the South Australian Minister responsible for the Northern Territory, JL Parsons, declared, ‘Leave the native question alone and the natives will be obliterated.’^[35]

Pioneering pastoralists inculcated in Aboriginal minds the notion that they possessed an indeterminate amount of force. Northern Queensland commentator Sir Raphael Cilento stated, ‘In the absence of law, the squatters took their own vengeance, and it was devastating.’^[36] In the first decade of Northern Territory settlement, Lindsay Crawford, the first manager of the Victoria River Downs station, asserted, ‘we have held no communication with the natives at all, except with the rifle’.^[37] Prominent missionary and Protector of Aborigines in the East Kimberley, Reverend JB Gribble, in 1884 noted the disproportionate punishment exacted by Queensland settlers who ‘go out in parties fully armed’ in reaction to Aborigines spearing their cattle.^[38] These punitive raids, despite being public knowledge, went unchecked by governments. By exercising their own force, pastoralists installed their dominant reign mercilessly. This went on to be a powerful instrument for the discipline of Aboriginal labour even after such force had subsided.