'Keep the magistrates straight': Magistrates and Aboriginal 'management' on Australia's north-west frontiers, 1883-1905

Between July and September of 1887, a disagreement unfolded between Western Australia’s Attorney General Charles Warton and one of the magistrates who represented the face of the law in the colony’s north. As an assurance of the law’s even-handed operations at the colony’s peripheries, the Attorney General regularly reviewed the case reports of Aboriginal people summarily tried and convicted by regional magistrates. In the latest reports forwarded by Roebourne’s Resident Magistrate Colonel Edward Angelo, Warton noticed that an Aboriginal man had been sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour without evidence that an offence in any legal sense had actually been committed. When Warton called Angelo’s attention to his ‘slipshod’ approach to the matter of evidence, the magistrate was dismissive, and set out to enlighten Warton about the law’s value in his district. As a magistrate, he argued, he was bound to protect not only Aborigines but also settlers. Although the ‘“legal assumptions” no doubt are that the native has been punished’, his imprisonment was ‘nominal’ compared to ‘the real punishment’ suffered by the settler whose rights and property were threatened. In short, when Aboriginal people behaved to the ‘obvious detriment’ of settlers, ‘they must be taught they cannot do so’. On receiving this reply the Attorney General complained to the Colonial Secretary that ‘I do what I can to keep Magistrates straight though I could easily save myself much time and trouble by making no remarks’, but ultimately he decided ‘it is utterly hopeless to attempt to instil into the mind of Col. Angelo the simple idea of the laws of evidence’.1