Colonial Secretary'S Office Inward Correspondence (1829–1880): Dispatches, Protectors' Reports & Frontier Dispossession

Colonial Secretary's Office Inward Correspondence (1829–1880): Dispatches, Protectors' Reports & Frontier Dispossession

Sub-title: Analysis of SROWA Record Series 36: Administrative Inward Letters, Frontier Police Reports, Protectors' Journals and the Bureaucracy of Dispossession

1. Provenance & Scale of SROWA Record Series 36

The Colonial Secretary's Office (CSO) Inward Correspondence (State Records Office of WA, Record Series 36, Consignment 49) constitutes the administrative spinal cord of the early Western Australian colonial state.^[1] Comprising thousands of manuscript volumes, this series preserves all incoming letters, reports, memorials, and petitions submitted to the Colonial Secretary from 1829 onward.^[1]

For researchers of Bibbullmun sovereignty and frontier history, Series 36 is the single most detailed institutional record of the mechanics of invasion.^[1] Within these bound volumes lie the official field reports of resident magistrates, military officers, police constables, explorers, and private settlers, detailing everyday skirmishes, land seizures, food shortages, and the systematic suppression of First Nations resistance.^[1][2]

2. Protectors' Reports: Charles Symmons & Francis Armstrong

In 1840, under pressure from the Imperial British Parliament and humanitarian societies in London, Governor John Hutt appointed formal 'Protectors of Aborigines'.^[2] The incoming quarterly reports submitted by Protectors Charles Symmons (Swan River) and Francis Armstrong (Native Interpreter), preserved in SROWA WAS 34 and Series 36, offer extraordinary insights into the socioeconomic condition of the Bibbullmun people during the 1840s.^[1][2]

Symmons's reports candidly detail the devastating impact of colonial land-clearing upon traditional food resources:^[2]
Fences cut across ancestral transhumance tracks;
Cattle and sheep consumed the delicate warrine yam grounds and trampled riverbank rushes;
Settlers aggressively prosecuted Indigenous hunters for killing introduced sheep, while denying them access to native kangaroo populations.^[2][3]

3. The Bureaucracy of Outlawry & Martial Suppression

Series 36 preserves the primary paper trail of state-sanctioned violence.^[1] When resistance leaders such as Midgegooroo, Yagan, and Munday successfully defended their lands along the Swan and Canning rivers, the Colonial Secretary issued formal Proclamations of Outlawry, offering bounties of dead or alive captures.^[1][4]

The correspondence volumes document the planning and execution of punitive military patrols, including the deployment of the 63rd and 21st Regiments of Foot.^[1] Letters from resident magistrates in York and Vasse repeatedly requested reinforcements, arms, and ammunition to suppress what they described as an unyielding and well-coordinated native insurgency.^[1][3]

4. Reading the Bureaucracy of Dispossession

By reading SROWA Series 36 critically, the modern scholar uncovers conclusive institutional evidence that the Bibbullmun people never surrendered their sovereignty.^[1] Every page of incoming settler correspondence testifies to an ongoing, active contest for territorial control.^[1][2]

The colonial state was forced to construct an elaborate apparatus of armed mounted police, carceral islands (Wadjemup), and punitive laws precisely because the Bibbullmun Sovereign Nation refused to acquiesce to the illegal confiscation of their ancestral country (kalla-boodja*).^[1][5]