Bushrangers and other bandits have a prominent place in Victorian history. They have been immortalised in ballads, poems, films and books. So much has been written about the most infamous of Victorian bushrangers—Ned Kelly—that one book about him published a quarter of a century ago was introduced with the assurance, ‘Yes! There was, after all, room for yet another book on Ned Kelly’. One early bibliography of Kellyana lists over 350 items, and this number increased greatly after the centenary of his death in 1980. While a plethora of monographs have covered such minutiae as Ned Kelly’s school days—his classroom was 15 feet wide—more substantial scholarly publications with differing views on the Kelly saga have included works by Dr Doug Morrissey and Dr John McQuilton; and Dr Justin Corfield’s 525-page tome The Ned Kelly Encyclopaedia.1
Criminals and their activities do have a place in history and literature, and it is perhaps desirable that people know something about the life and influence of men such as Ned Kelly, John Wren, Squizzy Taylor and Carl Williams.2 However, in Australia the focus on bushrangers and others of their ilk for many years contributed to a relative dearth of research and literature about the police. A Mitchell Library catalogue listed fewer than two hundred items in a section on Australasian police forces. The few publications that were available were generally either poor in quality, antiquarian or works fostering police public relations. For two decades only three books of any merit were written about police history in Victoria. Not one of them was by a historian and none of them contains full notes or a bibliography.3
In 1969, Duncan Chappell and Paul Wilson, in their noted sociological text about police in Australia, lamented the lack of published historical material and observed that there were ‘fruitful fields of study still open for PhD and other students who wish to examine aspects of the historical development of Australasian police forces’.4
Since then, substantial works have been published on the origins and development of the police services in Queensland and New South Wales, and lesser works have touched upon Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania.
In Victoria, an ever-expanding list of historical publications, including the Victoria Police 150th-anniversary pictorial history Celebrating 150 Years in the Community, covers such subjects as the history of female police in Victoria, the Transport Branch, the Port Phillip Water Police, Aboriginal trackers, the police strike, the Valour Award and police killed on duty. Several former members have also published their memoirs, including retired chief commissioners Kelvin Glare and Christine Nixon, and long-serving police surgeon Dr John Birrell.
Notwithstanding the publication of these monographs, the field remains ripe for research and offers historians of all persuasions an exciting range of source material, including substantial collections of archives, extensive newspaper reports, and the personal reminiscences of thousands of police employees—men and women, sworn and unsworn, serving and retired—some of whose recollections go back many decades. And in the twenty-first century this rich treasure-trove of primary source material has been greatly enhanced by information technology, digitisation, photocopying and indexing.
The richness of these sources and their neglect for many years by historians and scholars were the two main reasons for this book, and for taking the broad-based approach that has been used. It was a history that had been crying out to be written, demanding to be explored and told not in some narrow contextual framework, focusing on one aspect or era, but in full-blooded style, so that it opened up myriad times and events, stimulating interest, ideas, debate and more research.
This book does not set out to supply details of famous crimes and criminals, catalogues of police uniforms, badges and firearms, or such antiquarian facts as the dimensions and location of the Donkey Hill police station in 1857.
Although it is general and spans more than 170 years, it is not an aimless narrative but a book that is intended to highlight which factors have most influenced the development of the Victoria Police. The book traces the evolution of policing in Victoria from the small beginnings of three drunken, untrained men in 1836, through to 2015, when it was a complex department of more than 17 000 personnel deployed at 329 police stations, equipped with thousands of vehicles, helicopters and boats, to cover a whole state, and having an annual budget of $2.3 billion.
In many respects it is a study of ‘firsts’—turning points and people, the development and introduction of a police uniform, fingerprint analysis, wireless patrols, forensic science (including DNA), and whatever else markedly improved the standard and changed the face of policing in Victoria. However, once in general use these things became part of a working plateau and there is no definitive discussion of them here; such a treatment would soon become merely platitudinous. Similarly, events like the Kelly outbreak, the invention of the motor car, the police strike and both world wars are discussed at some length as events that significantly altered the course of the force’s history, and it is as agents of change that they are here treated; no full narrative account is offered. The revolutionary effect of the motor car on policing is a particularly engaging topic, although in this work it is but a small part of the whole. It remains a subject worthy of fuller attention and is signposted in the hope that more can be made of it.
Above all, this history is about people, but it is not unduly focused on famous detectives or bandits. Relatively few individuals are mentioned or discussed and no apology is made for that. The focus is on people in action collectively, and individuals figure only where they have key roles—such as the chief commissioners—or where there is special reason to set them apart and name them, such as Lionel Potter, who introduced fingerprint analysis, Frederick Downie, who started the Wireless Patrol, and forensic scientists Dr Roland van Oorschot and Max Jones, who, in a world first, discovered trace DNA.
Important to this work is the influence of those people outside the force who shaped it, as well as all those who joined it. Variables such as recruiting, training, work conditions, duties, roles, status and leadership styles have been studied, and from them it is evident that the community gets the police it deserves. The single most important factor in shaping the force has been the influence of the mixed and changing groups that are the people of Victoria—Peter Lalor and the Ballarat miners, political parties, parliamentarians, lawyers, unionists, suffragettes, protest marchers, anti-corruption campaigners, criminals and hundreds of other groups, invariably interwoven and overlapping. Their influence has taken different forms—positive and negative, destructive and instructive, deliberate and accidental, violent and peaceful—but it has been vital. Basic innovations, such as the force’s structure and organisation, the preparation of a police manual, the use of photographs for criminal identification, training classes, promotion examinations, the use of cars, and promotion other than by seniority, were all ideas initiated by people outside the force, and often they had to be pressed upon police who resisted their introduction.
An important element in all of this has been the recurrent public inquiries into the police; they continue to be important forums where grievances are ventilated, ideas are aired and people have been given a genuine opportunity to say what has been wrong with the force and how it can be fixed. People outside the force have selected its leaders, set its recruiting and training standards, and determined its working conditions and pattern of duties. The chief commissioners have been key links in directing the force, and although they sometimes did much to ‘make or break’ it, their performance has been closely tied to that of governments and dictated to a large extent by the events of the day.
Throughout its existence the force has been a conservative, sometimes reactionary institution, lagging behind the general community in many critical aspects of social development. This has not in all ways been bad. A police force is potentially a very powerful section of the community but it should be the community’s servant, not its master. The conservative nature of the force has decreased the chances of its breaking the mould formed by government control, legal process and dependence on wide public support. The force has to a large extent been made up of working men, usually strong six-footers able to fight, read and write but not given to innovative ideas. These men were recruited, trained, paid and treated according to public perceptions and expectations. Had the community wanted it otherwise it could have recruited other kinds of people, paid them more, or in various ways built the force differently. It did not. It has always been the people’s force—ordinary Victorians working for a wage, according to the dictates of this or that section of fellow Victorians, and the desires or defiance of others, but essentially doing what they were told to do within the limits of public acceptability.
Its story is worth telling.