Practices of violence/myths of creation: Mounted Constable Willshire and the cultural logic of settler nationalism

Abstract

This article explores the cultural logic of the late-evolving colonial frontier of Central Australia through the policing activities of Mounted Constable Willshire and his written representations of his work there. Willshire's importance to this particular frontier history lies in the fact that, as Officer in Charge of the Native Police from 1884-1891, he was actively producing a model for law and order on the pastoral frontier, in the service of an emergent Australian nation. Perhaps more than most colonial officials, Willshire exemplifies the contradictions of an embryonic nationalism formed through violence. By his own account, he shot dead an indeterminate number of Aboriginal people in the course of his patrols with the Native Police. At the same time, he was a keen lay ethnographer who collected regional Indigenous vocabularies, accrued Indigenous 'artefacts', and in an aspiration to Australian 'nativeness', wrote of himself as a spiritual affiliate of Indigenous people. These contradictions exemplify what Nicholas Thomas has called the paradoxical logic of a settler nationalism that, at the end of the nineteenth century, seamlessly combined the recognition of and the elimination of Indigeneity.