Settlers in Queensland understood themselves to be in a state of open warfare with Aboriginal people. Free from metropolitan pressure and without a strong local church or humanitarian presence, they proceeded to seize the land as quickly as possible. While this was nothing new in the Australian colonies, the paucity of countervailing and complicating forces made dispossession in Queensland exceptionally brutal. Those British officials and commentators who feared that granting self-government to the Australian colonies could prove catastrophic for Aboriginal people would see their worst fears realised in Queensland, though not quite in the way the Colonial Office officials imagined. Where they had envisaged that the colonies might pass legislation authorising the killing of Aboriginal people, and in the colonial constitutions had retained the right of veto to prevent this happening, the frontier policies adopted in Queensland would not rely on legislation. Rather, dispossession depended on the Native Mounted Police. Stories of NMP atrocities led to the appointment of a Select Committee of inquiry (1861), the only proper parliamentary report on race relations with Indigenous people produced in Queensland during the colonial period. The result was the strengthening of the NMP.