In the years following British settlement in
AustraliaAustralia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the continental mainland , the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans...
,
aboriginalAustralian Aborigines are a class of people who are identified by Australian law as being members of a race indigenous to the Australian continent....
trackers or
black trackers, as they became known, were enlisted by settlers to assist them in navigating their way through the Australian landscape. The trackers'
hunter-gathererA hunter-gatherer society is one whose primary subsistence method involves the direct procurement of edible plants and animals from the wild, foraging and hunting without significant recourse to the domestication of either...
lifestyle gave rise to excellent tracking skills which were advantageous to settlers in assisting them in finding food and water and locating missing persons or capturing bushrangers.
The first recorded use of Aboriginal trackers in Australia was in 1834, near
Fremantle, Western AustraliaFremantle is a port city in Western Australia, located southwest of Perth, the state capital, at the mouth of the Swan River on Australia's western coast. It was the first settlement of the Swan River colonists in 1829...
, when two trackers named Mogo and Mollydobbin tracked a missing five-year-old boy for over ten hours through the rough Australian bush.
In the years following British settlement in
AustraliaAustralia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the continental mainland , the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans...
,
aboriginalAustralian Aborigines are a class of people who are identified by Australian law as being members of a race indigenous to the Australian continent....
trackers or
black trackers, as they became known, were enlisted by settlers to assist them in navigating their way through the Australian landscape. The trackers'
hunter-gathererA hunter-gatherer society is one whose primary subsistence method involves the direct procurement of edible plants and animals from the wild, foraging and hunting without significant recourse to the domestication of either...
lifestyle gave rise to excellent tracking skills which were advantageous to settlers in assisting them in finding food and water and locating missing persons or capturing bushrangers.
The first recorded use of Aboriginal trackers in Australia was in 1834, near
Fremantle, Western AustraliaFremantle is a port city in Western Australia, located southwest of Perth, the state capital, at the mouth of the Swan River on Australia's western coast. It was the first settlement of the Swan River colonists in 1829...
, when two trackers named Mogo and Mollydobbin tracked a missing five-year-old boy for over ten hours through the rough Australian bush. Another notable early event occurred in 1864 when Duff children Jane (7), Isaac (9) and Frank (4) Duff, lost for nine days in
WimmeraThe Wimmera is a region in the west of the Australian state of Victoria.It covers the dryland farming area south of the range of Mallee scrub, east of the South Australia border and north of the Great Dividing Range...
, were found by aboriginal tracker '
King RichardDick-a-Dick was an Australian Aboriginal tracker and cricketer, a Wotjobaluk man of the people who spoke the Wergaia language in the Wimmera region of western Victoria, Australia...
'.
Tracking
When asked how he tracked, Mitamirri, a famous tracker of the early 20th century, said "I never bend down low, just walk slow round and round until I see more."
In 1845
Edward Stone ParkerEdward Stone Parker was a Methodist preacher and assistant Protector of Aborigines in the Aboriginal Protectorate established in the Port Philip District of colonial New South Wales under George Augustus Robinson in 1838...
the Assistant
Protector of AboriginesThe role of Protectors of Aborigines resulted from a recommendation of the report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Aborigines . On 31 January 1838, Lord Glenelg, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies sent Governor Gipps the report.The report recommended that Protectors of...
based at the Loddon Aboriginal Protectorate Station at
FranklinfordFranklinford is a small community in the Central Highlands of Victoria, Australia, located in the Shire of Hepburn. It was the site chosen by Edward Stone Parker to build the Loddon Aboriginal Protectorate station at Franklinford in January 1841 which was an important focus of the Dja Dja Wurrung...
, wrote a letter to the Chief Protector reporting on the murder of a native at Joyce's Station (near Newstead). No witness could be found to the murder but the footprints of five men were tracked by the
JajowurrongDja Dja Wurrung, also known as the Jaara people and Loddon River tribe, is a native Aboriginal tribe which occupied the watersheds of the Loddon and Avoca Rivers in the Bendigo region of central Victoria, Australia. They were part of the Kulin alliance of tribes. There were 16 clans, which adhered...
to open country south of Mount Macedon (Sunbury region). The trackers there met with another man attached to the Loddon Protectorate Station who was on his return from Melbourne. He told the trackers he had met with the group they were tracking and was able to give a description of them.
Native Police
The Port Phillip Native Police Corps was established in Victoria in 1842 and employed aboriginal trackers to carry out duties which included searching for missing persons, carrying messages, and escorting dignitaries through unfamiliar territory. During the goldrush era, they were also used to patrol goldfields and search for escaped prisoners. They were provided with uniforms, firearms, food rations and a rather dubious salary.
In 1879 the services of a group of Queensland black police were requested to help track the
KellyEdward "Ned" Kelly was an Australian bushranger, and, to some, a folk hero for his defiance of the colonial authorities. Kelly was born in Victoria to an Irish convict father, and as a young man he clashed with the police. Following an incident at his home in 1878, police parties searched for him...
gang which were on the run from the Victorian police. Their use was agreed and a party of six native troopers, with a white officer (Sub-Inspector Stanhope O'Conner) reached
BenallaBenalla is a city is an agricultural city of about 10,000 people located just off the Hume Freeway in north-eastern Victoria, Australia, about south of Wangaratta...
about March, 1879.
A similar force was established in New South Wales in 1848 by Governor
Charles FitzroySir Charles Augustus FitzRoy KCH KCB was a British military officer, politician and member of the aristocracy, who held governorships in several British colonies during the 19th century.-Family and peerage:...
and in 1859, Queensland, now a separate colony, took control of the force until 1900.
Famous Aboriginal trackers
- Jimmy Governor
Jimmy Governor was one of the Governor brothers, two Indigenous Australian men who committed a series of murders in the Central West and New England regions of New South Wales around the turn of the twentieth century....
- Jimmy James
Jimmy James OAM was an Aboriginal Australian and member of the Pitjantjatjara people, who was best known as an Aboriginal tracker who helped South Australian Police in tracking criminals over a forty year period....
- Tommy Windich
Tommy Windich was an Indigenous Australian member of a number of exploring expeditions in Western Australia in the 1860s and 1870s.Tommy Windich was born around 1840 near Mount Stirling in Western Australia...
Aboriginal trackers in books and film
- Australia (2008 film)
Australia is a 2008 epic romance film directed by Baz Luhrmann and starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman. It is the second-highest grossing Australian film of all time, trailing Crocodile Dundee. The screenplay was written by Luhrmann and screenwriter Stuart Beattie, with Ronald Harwood...
- The Tracker (2002 film)
The Tracker is an Australian drama film produced in 2002. It was directed and written by Rolf de Heer. It is a set in 1922 in outback Australia where a racist white colonial policeman used the tracking ability of an Indigenous Australian tracker to find the murderer of a white woman...
- Rabbit-Proof Fence (film)
Rabbit-Proof Fence is a 2002 Australian drama film based on the book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara. It is a true story concerning the author's mother, as well as two other young mixed-race Aboriginal girls, who ran away from the Moore River Native Settlement, north of...
- A Cry in the Dark
A Cry in the Dark is a 1988 Australian docudrama film directed by Fred Schepisi. The screenplay by Schepisi and Robert Caswell is based on John Bryson's 1985 book Evil Angels, the title under which the film was released in Australia...
- One Night the Moon
One Night the Moon is a 2001 Australian musical non-feature film starring husband and wife team Paul Kelly, a singer-songwriter, and Kaarin Fairfax, a film and television actress, and their daughter Memphis Kelly as a girl who goes missing in the Outback...
- Black Tracker
- Walkabout (novel)
Walkabout is a novel written by James Vance Marshall, first published in 1959. It is about two children who get lost in the Australian Outback and are helped by an Aborigine on his walkabout. A film based on the book came out in 1971, but deviated from the original plot.-Plot summary:The book opens...