Border Police of New South Wales

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The Border Police of New South Wales was a frontier policing body introduced by the colonial government of New South Wales with the passing of the Crown Lands Unauthorised Occupation Act 1839.

The Colony of New South Wales was expanding rapidly in the late 1830s, and the colonial government was concerned with the illegal occupation of lands and the rights of the Aboriginal people.^[1] The colonial government of New South Wales in 1839 legislated for a new policing body that would control these issues. This force was called the Border Police.^[2]

The Border Police was organised into a number of sections and these were deployed to the various districts along the frontier. Each section was under the authority of the Commissioner of Crown Lands for that particular district and each commissioner had about 10 troopers. In order to reduce the cost of the force as much as possible, the troopers were taken from the population of convicts that existed in the colony at that time. The convicts assigned were usually ex-soldiers who had been transported to Australia due to crimes of military indiscipline. They were supplied with horses, equipment and rations, but were otherwise unpaid and had to construct their own barracks. The force was funded by a levy imposed on the squatters who were grazing their livestock on the Crown Lands in the frontier regions.^[3] The Border Police was largely disbanded by the late 1840s and was replaced in the expanding frontier regions by detachments of the Native Police.