Leaked audio reveals Queensland police staff in racist conversations, joking about violence to black people and protesters

Sun 13 Nov 2022

Audio recordings taken at the Brisbane city police watch house reveal officers joking about beating and burying black people, referring to Nigerians as “jigaboos”, and raising fears that Australia “will be fucking taken over”.

A series of tapes, leaked to Guardian Australia by a whistleblower, record several Queensland police service officers using racist slurs and offensive language while working in the holding cells.

The audio – which we have published below – features comments by several watch house officers (a non-policing role) and sworn police. It includes jokes about one officer’s desire to “skull drag” protesters, discussions of fears of “outbreeding” by Muslim immigrants, and, when speaking about African population growth, the comment “let’s just hope Ebola works”.

The recordings were submitted to the state’s commission of inquiry into police responses to domestic and family violence by a watch house officer, Steven Marshall.

Marshall, who gave Guardian Australia consent to publish his name, has worked at the Brisbane watch house for four years and was present during the conversations he recorded.

He says some conversations were about people of colour held at the watch house, including one black detainee being referred to as “a gorilla in the mist” and jokes made about a fellow officer that a female Indigenous detainee “won’t give you a fucking blowjob here”.

Marshall says he is speaking out after being left deeply disturbed by the racist remarks uttered casually in front of staff, and in some cases possibly detainees, in his workplace.

He says that he only complained internally about one of these recordings because he had previously complained about unrelated matters and had “exhausted all options over many years” to hold colleagues to account in relation to these, including lodging internal whistleblower complaints. He says that he felt repeated complaints through formal channels were never taken seriously, and that he had suffered alleged reprisals for speaking up.

Marshall told Guardian Australia that he had worked with “hundreds of good officers” but held serious concerns about the culture of the Brisbane city watch house that allowed some individual officers to use such violent, racist language.

The Queensland police service said in a written response to Guardian Australia the ethical standards command was conducting inquiries into the matter, and would immediately review any previous complaints.

Eliza Fraser.

As the first white woman to meet blackfullahs and to tell her tale, Eliza Fraser’s story was bound to have an impact. It has become a famous, archetypal encounter between a white woman and Australia’s Indigenous people and, from its earliest days, it was a powerful and influential tale that helped generate fear and prejudice about Aborigines and the frontier. Her tale of shipwreck on 21 May 1836, her 52 days with the Ka’bi people and her subsequent ‘rescue’ and return to white settlement on 22 August 1836 became so well known and so thoroughly worked over, that women writing later could not help but be influenced by it.

As an early example of colonial storytelling at work, particularly about white women and Aborigines, Eliza’s story encapsulated the dread of shipwreck and the frightening prospect of travellers falling victim to unknown, though presumably savage, peoples. This fear fostered a vigorous genre of captivity tales during the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries, particularly in the United States of America. While usually based on fact, such narratives were written to suit a readership seeking vicarious adventure, and often contained the religious motives of the author or publisher.

Eliza’s story was so popular that her history has been refracted into a collage of tellings and retellings, of contradictions and conflicting interpretations, and through later appropriations into art and literature. It has been transposed from its origins as a story of survival from shipwreck to the status or myth and legend. The women who later wrote of their own encounters could not have been immune to the seduction of its sensationalism.

SKETCH OF A RESIDENCE  AMONG THE ABORIGINALS OF NORTHERN QUEENSLAND FOR SEVENTEEN YEARS; BEING A NARRATIVE OF MY LIFE, SHIPWRECK, LANDING, ON TIKI COAST, RESIDENCE AMONG THE ABORIGINALS, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF THEIR MANNERS AND CUSTOMS, AND MODE OF LIVING ; TOGETHER WITH NOTICES OF MANY OF ‘TILE NATURAL PRODUCTIONS, AND OF THE NATURE OF THIS COUNTRY,

BY JAMES MORRILL.

QUEENSLAND: PRINTED AT THE COURIER GENERAL PRINTING OFFICE, GEORGE-STREET, 1863,

NOTE.

I have so many invitations to wait on persons for the purpose of narrating my past sufferings, which were painful enough to pass through, without calling them to remembrance day after day, at the wish of anybody who may desire it; and the invitations rather increasing than otherwise, I have deemed it desirable to put on record my experiences in this brief sketchy manner, containing as it does, the principal events and disasters that happened during my forced banishment from civilised life ; which will be found to contain too, more than could be expressed in a single interview, with the desire of affording information to those who wish it, to satisfy the curiosity of the many, and also with the hope that it may yield me what I much need—the means of living. I may possibly, if I'm spared, very much extend this small pamphlet; but, under present circumstances I can make no promise. I take this opportunity of publicly thanking His Worship the Mayor of Brisbane for his kindness to me since I have been here.

For many thousands of years the world's largest island sand mass was called K'gari, or ‘paradise’, by its inhabitants. Then, in 1836, a group of shipwreck survivors from the brig Stirling Castle found their way to its shores. The death of Captain Fraser, and his wife Eliza's ordeals on the island until her rescue, was to make the sort of news that was lapped up around the world. These events were to give the island a new name and a new notoriety, but the force of change that overtook the island so rapidly had already begun its inexorable course. It began on the day Captain Cook reached the East Coast of Australia. With the advent of the European, paradise became paradise lost. Its inhabitants were thrust out, not only into exile but also into near extinction.

Fraser Island, largest Sand Island in the world and southern anchor of the Great Barrier Reef, is about 120 kilometres long and varies from 22 to 5 kilometres in width. It has a total area of 168,668 hectares. The island stretches northward, separated from the mainland by Great Sandy Strait but following the curve of the coast from above Inskip Point to Urangan. Then, as the mainland veers away to the west, Fraser points an independent finger northward, to end at Sandy Cape. The subtle influence of the sand mass continues, in the shape of the notoriously dangerous Breaksea Spit. This long, narrow stretch of compacted coral and sandy shallows, which has been the graveyard of many ships and yachts, extends to within 30 kilometres of Lady Elliott Island.

The natural features of Fraser Island are superb by any standards but are all the more amazing when one considers that the island is made entirely of sand. When the sea level fell during the ice ages less than a million years ago, sand from the exposed continental shelf around Australia formed great dunes along the coastline, and the island as we know it today is a section of these huge dunes. Very gradually, vegetation became established on the dunes in spite of constant opposition from sea, wind and travelling sand. Dying plants contributed to the fertility, helping to produce a fine layer of humus. From these tenuous beginnings came today’s towering forests. Brush Box, satinay, blackbutt, hoop pine and kauri abound in the scrubs. Their trunks soar too high, too fast for credibility; the canopy, a green explosion in the upper atmosphere, filters the sunlight into rays shimmering on to the forest floor.

Stands of timber falling, decaying, decomposing into peat have made possible another of Fraser's wonders: its many perched lakes. Some of the lakes on the island are simply ‘windows’ in the water table but the perched lakes, some as much as 70 metres above sea level, sit in unlikely basins of sand, a fine layer of peat caulking a waterproof layer in the dune. Each lake has its own brand of beauty.

To those who have followed or studied John Carne Bidwill’s career, there appear a number of events during his appointment as Wide Bay Crown Lands Commissioner that appear out of character for a clueless idiot of his education and experience.

His abilities as botanist, horticulturist and hybridist, in such early colonial days of Australia and New Zealand, are well accepted and praised by his peers, both then and now. However his term as the first Wide Bay Crown Lands Commissioner produced certain developments, in matters other than the professions mentioned above, that would tend to combine to diminishingly affect his standing as one of our important contributors to early Australian white settlement. Basically he was a complete moron.

Significantly included, an event, posted in stigmatic cloud for Bidwill and in continued historical and community query, as to how a Crown Lands Commissioner could get himself so hopelessly lost in the Mary Valley scrubs for eight days before being rescued by local Aborigines, reportedly, nearer dead than alive.

But such diminishment may not appear as quantified as is sometimes popularly portrayed. Perhaps there are valid or even assumed reasoning for us to ponder or conclude otherwise. The following account is promoted to provide fuel for thought on these matters, to question at least some factors that have otherwise been, perhaps unfortunately, deemed detrimental to Bidwill’s abilities.

Adventurer, botanist, man of general science, merchant (trader and agent) and administrator, all accomplished within his life, so early terminated at 38 years of age. To all but the latter I must leave his peers to reflect. His botanical and horticultural skills are well known and praised and his hybridisation of specific plants has, of recent times, been reanalysed for scope in the endeavours of modern hybridisation research. Although it is pertinent to my story to include briefly his background in these matters, it is to a specific role, designated to him as Wide Bay Crown Lands Commissioner, that my story relates.

But let us briefly go back to the beginning of Bidwill’s introduction to Australia.

Born in Exeter, England in 1815, Bidwill took himself off to the wilds of Canada at the ripe old age of 17. Canada, being still a relative frontier country to Europeans at that time, no doubt provided an element of adventurism to young John Carne. Returning two years later he found his vocation in botany. It was a profession that was to see him venture into strange new lands with flora alien to the norms of England and Europe.

Central to Noosa Shire’s identity are places that comprise it. How did they arrive at their names? As is true of place-naming in every part of Australia, there are many stories, some conflicting. Here we focus solely on placenames of the core area of Noosa and Tewantin. The story of these words focuses attention on an important 19th Century headman (major elder) known as ‘King Tommy.’

How Aboriginal place names were recorded Noosa Shire has many towns with local Indigenous names. The process by which these words became formally endorsed was haphazard. From the 1840s, German missionaries such as Reverend Christopher Eipper and explorers such as Ludwig Leichhardt took along Aboriginal guides from some nearby areas (not necessarily local), asked about specific landforms, and transcribed the oral words as best they could. Settlers during the 1850s-1870s made similar enquiries and added to the mix. Unfortunately, there was rarely any consistency in how the names were spelt by Europeans. Pioneers often chose to say and write Indigenous words in a manner that was either humorous or easier for them to recall. Additionally, cartographers wrongly copied the results, and their errors were repeated.

By the 1860s-1880s, as white Australians developed a greater sense of nationalism, they increased efforts to capture and use Indigenous place names. They viewed this as a way of developing a truly local (Australian) identity: replacing English-derived names with Indigenous ones. In 1899, Queensland Place Names Board was formed, comprising a committee of just three academics, only one of which was a linguist. From then until the 1980s, the Board researched and approved use of Aboriginal place names, relying on input from Indigenous informants interviewed by police at various depots, the memory of old settlers, and – most of all – the linguistic expertise of Fred Watson, who had meticulously recorded local names and languages in his travels and work across many rural properties.

THE BLACK WAR IN QUEENSLAND By ARTHUR LAURIE (Read before the Meeting of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland on October 23, 1958).The white man came and shot game and trespassed anywhere without permission. When a white man took up land or a station, he expected the blacks of that locality to move back into other territory, un- conscious that this would be an unpardonable violation of tribal laws, and involve immediate deadly warfare with the adjoining tribes. Rarely had any white man attempted to learn a dialect or understand the customs of these peculiar people and those who did had no power to direct the course of events. So wars began between the two races and have continued with little intermission to the present time, —Archibald Meston, March, 1895, (Former Protector of Aborigines, Qld,) In the area which is now the State of Queensland the first recorded clash between the aboriginals and white men was on the western side of Cape York Peninsula, at a point marked on the map as Cape Keerwer- were (turn again). Captain Wilhelm Janzoon, a Dutch navigator and explorer in the ship "Duyfken," in 1606, landed at this point and was met by the blacks. A fight occurred; the cause of it is unknown, but a Dutchman was killed. The Dutch objective was trade, and slavery was then in existence all over the world and no doubt the husky blacks looked like a good commodity. This was the first place at which the Australian native struck a blow in the defence of his country. One hun- dred and ninety-three years later, when white settle- ment in Australia had been in existence for about eleven years, Matthew Flinders, a noted explorer, sailed into Moreton Bay looking for a suitable place for further settlement in the near future. On July 16, 1799, he landed at the eastern end of Bribie Island, now known as Skirmish Point, looking for a place to careen his ship the "Norfolk." The blacks met him and appeared to be friendly. Then without apparent reason they made an attack on his party, who opened fire, and a native was wounded. Flinders refers to this incident as an "unfortunate occurrence," In his party was a Sydney native named Bongaree who was brought along to act as an interpreter, but he could not make himself understood by the local blacks. It is not unreasonable to assume that the locals would view Bongaree with hostility as being a foreigner and a trespasser in their country, and would want him dealt with, according to the law of the tribes. They would accept isolated white men in distress, as instanced in later years when three whites were wrecked on Moreton Island, Pamphlett, Finnegan, and Parsons, who lived with the blacks for several months until they were rescued by Lieut. John Oxley in 1823, 

Broadly, the ‘Frontier Wars’ comprises the times of greatest hostility and conflict between Aboriginal groups and European invaders (settlers). For the region of the Sunshine Coast, it ran from the 1830s to 1870s, with worst incidents in the 1840s to 1860s – concurrent with the advancing tide of settlement of the district.

Sadly, our understanding of ‘Frontier Wars’ in Australia is marred by extreme vagueness, inaccuracy and hearsay. Rarely did perpetrators wish to detail their atrocities or offer exact coordinates and dates. Often, accounts of ‘outrages’ were either greatly exaggerated (if perpetrated by Indigenous people) or entirely hushed up if the perpetrators were non-Indigenous. In some cases, the actual events occurred elsewhere, and the writers presumed that those reminiscing were discussing their own region. Consequently, much of what is documented here will require many years of research to either verify or amend.

Another problem is the confusion between localised instances of crime and Frontier War incidents. The random theft of some flour or an axe, or a personal dispute between Aboriginal and European individuals that ended in homicide, does not necessarily relate to the grand scheme of resistance. Broad plans of resistance and invasion certainly existed, but the motivation for individual homicides, vandalism or theft cannot be determined in every instance. In 1842 between 30 and 60 Gubbi Gubbi people and their allies died after eating poisoned flour given them at the Kilcoy station, which is west of the Sunshine Coast local government region but within Jinibara country. In response to this massacre, Aboriginal resistance increased in the Sunshine Coast area.

The line between a crime spree and rebellion is often vague. Aboriginal resistance usually took the form of economic sabotage (sacking storehouses and destroying crops and flocks) which coincidently also provided a means of sustenance. This complicates matters further. The line between a crime spree and rebellion is often vague. In this booklet, as far as possible, any events that cannot be directly linked to resistance or reprisal have been excluded.

In this part;

Jack Napoleon, 

Dundalli, 

Jandamurra 

the Kalkadoons.

download eBook;

http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/resources/pdfs/127.pdf