The Discipline of Dress: Uniform Buttons and Accoutrements of the Native Mounted Police in Queensland, Australia

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Grguric, Nic
Burke, Heather
Wallis, Lynley A
Cole, Noelene
Barker, Bryce
Hatte, Elizabeth
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2023
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Abstract

Clothing is capable of providing a range of insights into aspects of identity, authority, power, and hierarchy. Here we present the results of an analysis of an assemblage of uniform buttons and accoutrements from seven 19th-century Native Mounted Police (NMP) camps in Queensland, Australia. As part of wider colonial structures of discipline and expropriation, the NMP uniform was a powerful symbol of control: over troopers’ bodies, over NMP detachments by officers, and over “wild” and “savage” Indigenous peoples by the NMP. Exploring the history and development of the NMP uniform, its intent in constructing officers and particularly troopers, the indexical qualities it acquired as a symbol of violence and fear amongst Indigenous people, and some of the alternative ways in which uniforms could be worn provides a variety of insights into the role, nature, and experience of the Queensland NMP.

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Historical Archaeology

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© The Author(s) 2023. Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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This publication has been entered into Griffith Research Online as an Advance Online Version

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Archaeology

Historical studies

Social Sciences

uniforms

buttons

Queensland

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Grguric, N; Burke, H; Wallis, LA; Cole, N; Barker, B; Hatte, E, The Discipline of Dress: Uniform Buttons and Accoutrements of the Native Mounted Police in Queensland, Australia, Historical Archaeology, 2023

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