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4 law&history 1 (2017)
Billibellary, the Formation of the Native Police Force in the Port Phillip District in 1837 and Its Connection to the Batman Treaty of 1835

handle is hein.journals/lwanhist4 and id is 203 raw text is: Billibellary, the Formation of the Native Police Force in the Port Phillip District in 1837 and its Connection to the Batman Treaty of 1835 Lyndall Ryan Theformation of the native policeforce in the Port Phillip District in October 1837 is well known. However, the established view overlooks the engagement of the Kulin people in the process, and in particular the Kulin clan leader Billibellary, who was a signatory of the Batman treaty in 1835. This article contends that Billibellary played a pivotal role in theformation of the original native policeforce and that he saw it as an extension of the treaty. To make the case, the article reads the published colonial sources 'against the grain' as a way of foregrounding Billibellary's relations with key officials in the Port Phillip District in the period from Bourke's abrogation of the treaty in August 1835 to the formation of the first native police force in October 1837. In taking this approach, the articlefinds that Billibellary considered the treaty and the native police force to be interconnected and an integral part of the complex process of Indigenous treaty making. The formation of the native police force in the Port Phillip District in October 1837 has long been considered the collective plan of the Australian colonies' leading exponents of humanitarian governance.' This august group includes Sir Richard Bourke, the Governor of New South Wales, who supported the concept from the outset; Captain Alexander Maconochie RN, private secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen's Land, who would set out the force's guiding principles; Captain William Lonsdale, police magistrate at Melbourne, who would draw up the first regulations; and Christian Ludolph Johannes de Villiers, who appears to have had some experience of a similar force in the Cape Colony in South For a discussion of humanitarian governance as it was practised in the British Empire in the 1830s, see Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins ofHumanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines Across the Nineteenth Century British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1-36.

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