Taking up the role of resident magistrate at the short-lived Camden Harbour settlement on the northern Kimberley coast in 1865, Robert John Sholl’s instructions emphasised that he should take a defensive stance towards the ‘troublesome and treacherous’ Aboriginal people of the location. One year later, Camden Harbour was abandoned and Sholl moved south to become resident magistrate at Tien Tsin Harbour (Cossack) from where, in 1866, the town of Roebourne was established. 

During his fifteen-year tenure at Roebourne, Sholl’s policies were characterised by ambiguity, mistrust, and violence, as he sought to balance the demands of the nascent pearling and pastoral industries with an Aboriginal presence that was variously perceived as threatening and requiring ‘pacification’, or ‘indolent’. At least two large-scale massacres (Flying Foam and Minderoo) occurred on his watch. The violence of the northern frontier eventually brought such odium to the colonial government that the Imperial government reserved powers over Aboriginal people on the grant of responsible government to Western Australia in 1890. The introduction of a system of protectors pursuant to the Aborigines Protection Act 1886 and the Aborigines Act 1898 did little to mollify international condemnation. The system was still ‘protection Pilbara-style.’