Austlit

'Bill Rosser, formerly a timber cutter and bullock driver, began writing in 1974 after he discovered the suppression and brutality directed at his people in an Aboriginal reserve on Palm Island, which was set up under Queensland's Aboriginal Act. His third book, Up Rode the Troopers, is an account of how the mounted Aboriginal native police in Queensland were cajoled by white police into killing their own kind in the 1800s.'

Source: Kate Challis RAKA Award website, http://www.australian.unimelb.edu.au/public/awards/raka.html
Sighted: 22/03/2007

Award-winning Aboriginal author Bill Rosser writes a chilling story of the infamous Queensland Native Police Force, a murderous band of black troopers led by white officers. Rosser's investigations were triggered by the story of Cyclone Jack of the Bandjalung people, who recounts the atrocities witnessed by his grandfather and father (then a boy of five). Cyclone Jack's disturbing oral account is backed and skilfully crosscut with careful documentary research and leavened with gentle, at times, raucous, humour. [Rosser] has produced a compellingly readable account, in vivid, flesh-and-blood terms, of little-known events from Queensland's suppressed past. (Back cover).