Indigenous colonial court cases 1788-1838

• Records in the index have been extracted from the following series: NRS 13477, NRS 13696, NRS 3397, NRS 3016, NRS 845, NRS 897, NRS 2700, NRS 2702, NRS 2703, NRS 2704
• Entries in the index: approx. 250

A note on the entries

Museums of History NSW is unaware if this database is a complete record of Aboriginal people and the law held as NSW State archives in the period 1788-1838.

Deceased persons

Users should be aware that, in some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities, hearing the names of deceased persons may cause sadness or distress, particularly to the relatives of these people.

Language

Users of this index are warned that there may be words or descriptions which may be sensitive to some Aboriginal people.

Some of the information contained within the records may be viewed as being offensive to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people because of the context in which they were created. Often the language and opinions expressed in the records may be considered as highly offensive.

This index was prepared in 1988-9 by Victoria Jane Barclay Gollan (born 1958) as a research and writing aid for a Doctorate of Philosophy on Aborigines and the Law for Sydney University. She held a Bachelor of Law and a Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours in French. She did not complete the thesis before she died in 1996.

Victoria used the indexes and guides available in the then Archives Authority of NSW to trace records of persons, whose recorded names suggested Aboriginality and non-European origins, before the law. She recorded cases of persons charged for crimes against named Aboriginal people and Aboriginal people charged with a crime. She intended to include a chapter in her thesis about the inequity suffered by Aboriginal people before the law in colonial Australia.

She recorded cases she suspected were of indigenous people from other countries, as well as cases that seemed to be concerned with Australian Aboriginal people, to assist her in describing the particular disadvantages Aboriginal people suffered. She was interested in the changes in New South Wales of the operation of British Law, as it affected Aboriginal people, within the first half of the nineteenth century and in the attitudes of individual judges.

She chose to enter her records in a relational database so that she could search her records easily. Her choice of this research technique has resulted in record that may be of use to other researchers. She made her database available to me during the early 1990s and using that generosity as a guide to Victoria’s intentions, her mother, Mrs Beverley Gollan, has made it available for researchers in Aboriginal history.

Victoria's interest in Aboriginal history is marked in a scholarship for an Aboriginal student in the Faculty of Law at Sydney University known as the Victoria Gollan Memorial Scholarship for an Aboriginal Student.

Barbara Le Maistre