In Alice Springs, a street name honouring a 19 ^th  century police officer continues to divide residents. Willshire Street, named after William Henry Willshire, is a street in a suburb called The Gap.

The landscape around Alice Springs is defined by mountain ranges, which are part of the Caterpillar (ayeperenye) Dreaming. The Arrernte people are the traditional custodians. The Arrernte place name for the site of Alice Springs is Mparntwe.

This was the landscape that Mounted Constable Willshire encountered in 1884, after pastoralists petitioned Adelaide for police presence in the region to respond to cattle-killings and property attacks -  a period when Aboriginal resistance to settler invasion was at its height.  

Alex Nelson, a local historian, says Willshire Street wasn’t named until 1958, in the post-war era when Alice Springs underwent a major population boom. He says residents wanted “to ensure the memory of those earlier European residents wasn’t forgotten.”

Suki Dorras-Walker, a past resident of The Gap who in 2020 began a petition to change the name of Willshire St, disagrees with the idea that changing the name somehow erases history.  

“I think the argument about keeping history is a very thinly veiled racist argument… Australia has a long way to go with that [truth-telling] process.” 

In 1891, Willshire was arrested for the murder of two Aboriginal men, Donkey and Roger. The arresting officer, M.C. South, wrote “[I] have doubts of M.C. Willshire’s sanity.  I have known him for nearly 14 years, & have always considered him eccentric, with an inordinate love of Notoriety.”  [1]   

At trial, Willshire’s statement of events was read out to applause from the public gallery. A jury acquitted him after a fifteen minute deliberation.  

A  letter  published 16 July 1891 in The Advertiser said: “Men living within the region of civilisation can scarcely conceive the deprivations, hardships, and danger M.C Willshire has had to endure…and he still retains the greatest esteem and best wishes of all those whose property and lives he has had to protect…”.  

In another  letter  published 7 August 1891 in the Evening Journal, the writer said they were present at the trial and “never heard a more entirely one-sided affair.” They complained about Aboriginal witnesses being unable to give evidence, no interpreters being provided, and an ineffective prosecutor.

“No man should be left very long in the position Willshire occupied, for his character and perception of right and wrong must inevitably deteriorate,” he wrote.  

Central and Northern Australia were some of the last areas of Australia to be colonised and Willshire was born into an era of frontier expansion and national myth-making.

Referring to anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose, Amanda Nettelbeck and Robert Foster in In The Name of The Law (2007), write “the frontier is a site of anticipated nationhood, the place that dismantles the Aboriginal past and casts the shape for the nation’s future.” They see Willshire symbolising the creation of the nation-to-be by violent dispossession sanctioned by law.  

“There are stories and histories in the background that are completely overlooked or forgotten including by people who lived here most or all of their lives…” Alex says.

Referring to her experience living in Alice Springs, Suki says “There’s a strong sense of the history being present everywhere and ongoing oppression and colonisation and no attempt to grasp that.”

And there are other controversies about Willshire.  

Referring to Aboriginal women in his memoirs, Willshire wrote “…perhaps the Almighty meant them for use as He has placed them wherever the pioneers go.”  Dick Kimber, a Central Australian historian, in a 2008  interview  said Willshire’s relationships with Aboriginal women were ‘almost certainly teenage girls’.

Responding to an 1896 letter from the South Australian Museum about the provenance of a human skull in its collection, Willshire described a skull he had given as a spittoon to a station manager.  [2]  

But these kinds of accounts are not how Willshire is generally remembered.  

Alex Nelson says some people “stoutly defend the reputation of Willshire on the basis of the court’s findings in his murder case notwithstanding what history clearly shows.”  

In December 2020, at an Alice Springs Town Council  meeting , a Councillor suggested we are ‘not judge nor jury’ in the matter. That Councillor is now the Alice Springs Mayor, Matt Paterson. The Mayor was contacted for comment but did not respond before deadline. The Mayor at the time, Damien Ryan, did not support the change on the basis that the street's residents rejected the change.

Changing the street name was initially raised in 2020 by Suki, who door-knocked residents of Willshire Street and wrote to Council about the issue. She says out of the 12 residents she surveyed, most were open to the change. One resident, she says, said "over my dead body."

“The question I put to council was – what are we as a town? What history are we going to validate? What does it mean when we put a name on a street?” 

The proposal wasn’t successful – the saga included conflicting survey results, and what one Councillor referred to as an ‘embarrassing’ consultation process.  

Alex says Suki wasn’t the first person to try change the name.  

“You can look at decades earlier and find similar debates – because there is such a high population turnover here there’s a lack of corporate memory so these themes get repeated.”

While he’s not hopeful for change in the near future, Alex does think it will come.  

“With the passage of time I think attitudes will change. I’m sure we won’t hear the last of it.”

Footnotes

 [1]  Erwin Chlanda interview with Dick Kimber, 'Was Willshire a murderer?' Alice Springs News, Nov 20 2008, < https://www.alicespringsnews.com.au/1543.html >

 [2]  Amanda Nettelbeck (2008) 'Practices of violence/myths of creation: Mounted Constable Willshire and the cultural logic of settler nationalism', Journal of Australian Studies, 32:1, 5-17, p10