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There is little doubt that Willshire received a reasonable education but, as a young man, he commenced work as
a drover. He appears to have been an active and alert man—a good horseman, cameleer and competent bushman.
At 1.7 metres (5 feet 8 inches) he was of average height for the times. Surviving photographs suggest a pride in his
appearance and, in their pose, a self-image of the heroic, which also emerges from his writings.
In January 1878, he joined the South Australian police force and, after early training in Adelaide, served at
country police stations for the next four years. He received notification of his imminent transfer to Alice Springs in
1881 and, after a very short time at Melrose, South Australia; in 1882, he travelled to Central Australia.
Willshire arrived at the perfect time to fulfil what was evidently his self-image, seeing himself ‘welcomed back
to civilization with the acclamations of the world, praised by princes, made the familiar of kings, idolized in the
drawing-room’.
He took up his duties at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station police-camp in August 1882. The region he had to
patrol was immense—an area of some 300 kilometres radius from Alice Springs which, beyond the cattle station
country, was but poorly known to white Australians. Every indication is that he initially worked hard and well, in
his first year establishing good relationships with the pastoralists and other ‘working men’, but also exerting his
authority over Aborigines by forcing Aboriginal women to pass through an Aboriginal men’s sacred area. An early
trying experience was his search for Mounted Constable Shirley and party, overdue while on patrol; six of the
seven-man party, including Shirley, perished of thirst and Willshire helped find and bury them.
An extended dry spell commenced in 1883, and with the Aborigines retreating from their secondary waters,
they came in to their traditional major waterholes to find cattle present. Cattle spearing became rife in the Central
Australian range country and Willshire, despite his efforts, was unable to cover sufficient country to be able to curb
the attacks. The South Australian government was petitioned stating that ‘additional police protection was urgently
required to save life and property’.
Shortly thereafter, additional police officers were sent to the Alice Springs district to assist Willshire. A form of
guerrilla warfare developed, with police parties under Willshire and the other police being composed of not only
the police but also cattle station owners and managers, station-hands and other bush workers. In 1884 Willshire
was given authority to employ and train native police: this he did, helping to maintain his authority over them by
allowing them to have sexual relationships with the womenfolk of Aboriginal groups met with in the course of
police patrols.
Exact evidence of what happened on the patrols is scanty and often conflicting, but it appears that Willshire and
his fellow officer, Wurmbrand, were particularly ruthless and that the degree of support from station people was
so widespread that details were normally withheld from both the senior police officers and government officials
based in Port Augusta and Adelaide. One account suggests that all but a few of a party of 150 to 170 Aborigines,
who had recently attacked Owen Springs Station homestead and also killed cattle, were shot by a police party
consisting of cattlemen, overland telegraph station staff and police. And on the basis of the available evidence,
probably 500 (and possibly as many as one thousand) Aborigines were shot within a radius of 300 kilometres from
Alice Springs in the period 1881–91.
In 1884, Willshire ‘succeeded in organising and getting under full control’ a Native Police corps and in 1885, he
‘worked them on the Roper and Daly rivers for ten months’. There is no doubt that his job, of necessity—given the
prevailing attitudes of the time—led him into confrontation and conflict with Aborigines. As he was later to
observe of his work, ‘A good Winchester or Martini carbine, in conjunction with a Colt’s revolver... are your best
friends, and you must use them too.’ Willshire was commended for his work with native police, but it is doubtful
whether the senior officials who complimented him knew the full details of his work with them.
Upon his return to Alice Springs Willshire settled in to Central Australian police work again and shifted the
location of the police camp from the Telegraph Station to Heavitree Gap.
In 1886, having read a newspaper appeal for information about Aboriginal culture, Willshire began compiling
material. The Commissioner of the South Australian police force sanctioned the work and, as a result of his
recording of some aspects of the Aboriginal language of the Alice Springs district and his habit of keeping a daily
journal, The Aborigines of Central Australia was published in 1888.
This initial work, although expressing the prejudices of the era, also contains reasonably accurate information
about the Aranda.
In a bid to control cattle killers in the more remote country to the west and southwest of Alice Springs, Willshire
established a police camp at Boggy Hole on the Finke River. This led him into contact with the Hermannsburg
missionaries, and rumours came to the mission of him shooting Aborigines rather than arresting them, and of white
settlers shooting down ‘everyone they could reach with their firearms’ at one Aboriginal camp. The missionaries
laid formal complaints about Willshire, who in turn made counterclaims: at the inquiry in 1890, both Willshire
and the mission were ‘whitewashed’. There was considerable condemnation of the missionaries for accepting
unsubstantiated information and, despite a generally favourable verdict on Willshire, a suggestion amounting to a
directive that he should move his police camp further south, away from the Hermannsburg Mission.
As a result of the recommendation that he move from Boggy Flat, Willshire established a series of camps on
Tempe Downs Station, well to the south of the mission. From that time on, all missionaries were bitterly denounced
by Willshire, who had previously written favourably of the Hermannsburg people.
If Willshire had been ‘under a cloud’ in 1890, a year later he was in very real trouble. He had encouraged
his native police to attack a camp of sleeping Aborigines and, when two were shot, made large fires and burnt
the bodies. Word reached Alice Springs of these murders and Frank Gillen (of the Overland Telegraph Station
and a Justice of the Peace for the district) investigated the situation with Mounted Constable William South,
who had known Willshire for fourteen years and ‘always considered him eccentric, with an inordinate love of