AUSTRALIAN BLACKS

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 50, 21 May 1927, Page 12

AUSTRALIAN BLACKS

ALLEGED POLICE CRUELTY ARMING BLACK TRACKERS The question of the employment of armed native trackers by the police in the north-west of Australia was ventilated in Perth recently from two opposite standpoints when the Royal commissioner (Mr. G. T. Wood, S.M.), who is investigating the alleged killing and burning of natives by a police search party heard further evidence. Mr. A. O. Neville, chief protector of aborigines, expressed himself as uncompromisingly opposed to the arming of trackers. Mr. Connell, the commissioner of police, disclaimed personal acquaintance with conditions in the north-west, and based his support of the practice on reports of his officers. He held that it would be impracticable to employ unarmed trackers. Mr. Neville contended that it would be far better to send a sufficient number of white men to make arrests rather than a number of natives, probably from different tribes. In the camps they entered they would in ordinary circumstances be regarded as enemies armed with rifles and anxious to show their superiority. Probably they would be quite unable to restrain their natural impulse to shoot, if not to kill. The tracking system seemed to have developed from the employment of an indispensable single tracker to the employment of mobs of black to accompany the police and round-up camps, and, as had been done on some occasions, to shoot promiscuouslj r . That was what he objected to. When they arrested a black he was* not treated in the same way as they would treat a white man in similar circumstances. A tracker was a hero among his own people, and it was a black’s highest ambition to become a tracker, so that he could use his power over other blacks. A black taken from the wild tribes north of Derby who might have been sentenced to a considerable term of imprisonment was released, and then made a tracker and sent back to his own country. He became a king among his people, whom he intimidated and treated as he liked.