Book Review: The People's Force: A History of the Victoria Police
| Date | 01 December 1987 |
| Published date | 01 December 1987 |
| DOI | 10.1177/000486588702000406 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
286
BOOK REVIEW
(1987) 20
ANZJ
Crim
The People's Force: A History of the Victoria Police, Robert Haldane, Melbourne
University Press (1986) xv, 372 pp.
For the Australian audience, this is one of the more important books to emerge on
the topic of police and policing in recent years. It is emphatically an Australian
book, being a history of the police of Victoria written by a member of that police
force, with the endorsement and support of the Chief Commissioner of the Victoria
Police (the foreword comments that it is a ". . . book that two policemen willed").
The work itself is based upon a doctoral thesis presented to La Trobe University.
The book in its six substantive chapters covers the history of the Victoria Police
from the founding of Melbourne up through the contemporary era. In fact, well
over half the book is devoted to developments within the Force in the 20th century.
The major strength of the book rests in its richness of historical detail. It provides
important insights into the type of men recruited into the police in the 19th century,
and the difficulties in maintaining discipline. In the section dealing with the Ned
Kelly affair, for example, there is a discussionof the extent to which the early police
of Victoria consisted primarily of those from Ireland, many with experience in the
Royal Irish Constabulary. Another section (in the chapter entitled "Drunks,
Soldiers or Policemen?") points out that the problem of drunkenness (in the
author's phrase, "paying homage to the Shrine of Bacchus") was great enough to
require the establishment of a special prison for policemen in the 1850s.
Haldane makes good use of the records available to build up a portrait of the
working life of the early police. It is interesting to observe the many different duties
expected of the early police (inspectors of slaughteryards, court-house cleaners,
goldfields bailiffs and, even for a time, manning the steam sloop which made up
Victoria'a navy). He draws upon a variety of diary and log materials to make up a
portrait of "the policeman's lot" in the middle to late 19th century, including an
account of daily working routines as suggested by such documents as daily logs kept
by individual police.
One of the more significant sections deals with the whole topic of the movement
towards unionisation, and then the well-known Police Strike of 1923. The book
contains adetailed description of the events which led up to that strike, many of
them taking place well before the actual strike itself. Given the importance of the
impact of that strike on later attempts to organize police unions and associations
throughout Australia, this section is of particular importance, and sheds light on
aspects of this sad affair that heretofore have not been widely known.
Other
less well known events of this same period are recorded, including the ugly
confrontation between police and strikers at Prince's Pier in November 1928, where
there were serious injuries to both police and strikers, the event including the police
firing revolvers into the mass of strikers. Brief mention is also made of a
confrontation with unemployed workers in 1932.
In this reader's opinion, the book loses a little of its incisiveness as it moves into
events closer to the present time. Much of the material relating to the past 20 years
or so sounds a bit like police promotional material, and concentrates overmuch on
mechanical matters of personnel and hardware (I am not sure that a serious,
scholarly book really needs a full page photograph which shows "The Police
Helicopter above Melbourne"). Still, there is an intersting discussion of the
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