Kal Ellwood was about six years old when she first discovered her family's connection to Queensland's Native Mounted Police.

Her great-great-grandfather Jack Noble, a Butchulla man from Fraser Island, was an Aboriginal trooper in the state-funded force which patrolled the colonial frontier.

Warning: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains images of people who have died.

Her dad told her that her ancestor, Jack, was one of five Indigenous troopers taken to Victoria to help track down the infamous bushranger Ned Kelly.

"After that, we'd always ask dad about Ned Kelly, and our great-great-grandfather being an Aboriginal policeman," she says.

But it wasn't until much later that Kal fully understood what her ancestor did as a Native Police trooper.

"We were never told they actually shot blackfellas," she says.

Her great-great-grandfather was part of a police force notorious for its violence against Indigenous people.

Queensland's Native Mounted Police ran from the late 1840s until about 1904. It was Australia's longest-running Native Police.

It was governed by white officers who commanded detachments of about six or seven Indigenous troopers.

"Fundamentally, the goal of Native Mounted Police was to provide protection to settlers on the frontier," says Lynley Wallis, an archaeologist and a chief investigator on a four-year research project into the Native Police.

"The goal was often to move Aboriginal people off the land by whatever means necessary to ensure European colonisation could take place."

Native Mounted Police with Snider Enfiel rifles at Coen, North Queensland, ca 1896. ( Supplied: Queensland Police Museum )

Fellow archaeologist Bryce Barker, also a chief investigator on the research project, agrees it's "totally unequivocal what their role was".

"There's only one reason that the Native Police were there — to kill Aboriginal people and to facilitate the theft of land," he says.

The Native Police killed 24,000 Indigenous people across the state, according to one historian's estimate.



Another estimate puts the death toll at just over 41,000.

'They were hunted down like animals'

Vince Harrigan is a traditional owner for the Balnggarrawarra people in far north Queensland.

When he was growing up, he heard stories about what the Native Police did to their people.

Vince Harrigan says his grandfather told him about a massacre that took place at a waterhole next to an old Native Police camp. ( ABC RN: Georgia Moodie )

"My old grandfather would say, 'Righto, you fellas, listen now. I'm going to tell you a story about this massacre'," Mr Harrigan says.

His grandfather told him about a massacre that took place at a waterhole next to an old Native Police camp.

"They were hunted down like animals, and shot there. It's a very sad place," he said.

"I can still hear the kids crying, and all of the old people. No-one else might hear it, but I do."

Indigenous people policing other Indigenous people

One of the most disturbing things about Queensland's Native Police is that most of the men responsible for these massacres were Indigenous themselves, albeit acting under the orders of white officers.

"There's a whole lot of reasons — from the purely economic through to the creepily sociological — for using Indigenous people to police other Indigenous people," says Heather Burke, also a chief investigator on the research project.

"You're exploiting the traditional enmities that might exist between groups and deliberately playing them off against each other."

Archaeologists Bryce Barker and Lynley Wallis are chief investigators on the research project into the Native Mounted Police. ( ABC RN: Georgia Moodie )

Professor Barker says they were "deliberately recruited from areas that were far away from where they were going to be working, so they had no kin relationship with the people that they were going to be killing".

"It was also effective distance for [preventing] desertion," he says.

"If you're that far away from country, it's going to dissuade you from running away."

Dr Burke says the Native Police often recruited vulnerable Indigenous men "from anywhere they could get them".

"Often they would take them from local settlers, or they'd go to missions and recruit people," she says.

"Some of them would have been survivors of massacres themselves, taken as small children by the Native Police.

"The Native Police was the institution that was doing a lot of the kidnapping of Aboriginal children after massacres and giving them to settlers to be domestics or pastoral labourers."

Their research project, The Archaeology of the Native Mounted Police, has also uncovered instances of Indigenous men who volunteered to be part of the lethal force.

"You have to look at it in the context of a society that had been utterly disrupted," cautions Professor Barker.

"They'd had loved ones and kin killed, their wives raped and their land taken off them.

"These young men were trying to make something of themselves in these new circumstances."

All of this rings true with Ms Ellwood, whose ancestor Jack was a Native Police trooper for more than 20 years.

Jack Noble was an Aboriginal trooper in the Queensland Native Mounted Police which patrolled the colonial frontier from the late 1840s until about 1904. ( Supplied: Archaeology on the Frontier )

"Jack would have been 14 or 15 when the whitefella from the Native Police at Rockhampton picked him out from Fraser Island," she says.

"He might have just seen shiny buttons, or got enamoured because his cousins were also Native Policemen, and they were well fed.

"I can't think of what he was thinking about when he joined, or when he was stolen.

"I don't know what ran through his head when he went through training, or what ran through his head when he was shooting blackfellas."

Ancestral ties to a heartbreaking history

Hazel Sullivan, a Yulluna woman from central-west Queensland, is another Indigenous person with a complex relationship to Queensland's Native Police.

Her grandmother Ruby survived an 1879 massacre carried out by the Native Police and white settlers, in which 100 Indigenous people are thought to have been killed.

But her grandfather Ernest Eglinton, a white officer in the Native Police, was the man who engineered those killings.

Yulluna woman Hazel Sullivan has a complex relationship to the Native Police. ( ABC RN: Georgia Moodie )

"It's very heartbreaking to know that you're actually that man's granddaughter," Ms Sullivan says.

"It's like having a murderer in your family.

"He just came here to butcher a whole lot of people, and yet he lived with an Aboriginal woman."

Ms Sullivan's son Lance believes his great-grandmother Ruby was forced to become Eglinton's mistress.

"I think she had no choice but to go with him," he says.

"I think she did it to survive, and for her family to survive."



Making sense of a brutal past

For many Indigenous people in Queensland, the legacy of the Native Police is complicated and difficult.

Ms Ellwood, whose great-great-grandfather was an Aboriginal trooper in the Native Police, is still trying to make sense of her family's past.

"A lot of tears are shed, a lot of despair," she says.

"We can't change it, but you gotta think on it."

Mr Harrigan, whose people were massacred by the Native Police, has no anger in his heart towards the Aboriginal troopers.

"It wasn't a very good thing what they did, but I reckon you wouldn't wish that on anyone," he says.

"It was their job, they were made to do it."

Ms Sullivan says her family's connection to Ernest Eglinton "is not an embarrassment".

"It was a job he was sent out to do, that's how I see it," she says.

Her son agrees.

"Don't have anger towards the trooper Eglinton, even though he killed a lot. Don't be ashamed of the old man, be proud of him," Mr Sullivan says.

"We are survivors, we survived."

Lance Sullivan says it's important to recognise what happened. ( ABC RN: Georgia Moodie )

And although their ancestors fought on different sides of the frontier about 140 years ago, Ms Ellwood, Mr Harrigan and the Sullivans all want the same thing now — for Australia to properly acknowledge the history of Queensland's Native Police and its brutal impact on Indigenous people.

"Recognition that it happened is more than enough for me," Ms Ellwood says.

"Because we remember today what was done to us."

"It's just got to be told how it is," Mr Harrigan says.

"Then we can move on as a nation."

Mr Sullivan agrees we "shouldn't forget what happened".

"Writing books and talking about it would be a good healing process for Australia," he says.

In the meantime, he's focusing on teaching his kids about their culture.

"The best way to fight is with knowledge. Have knowledge of your country, your songline, and always keep that in your heart," he says.

"The best way to really survive is to pass on that knowledge to the younger generation."