‘Well-Set-Up Men'

The social tumult of the Victorian gold rushes of the 1850s produced two profound and interconnected transformations in policing. The first was the centralization of policing in 1853, placing all police services under the command of a single administrator – the chief commissioner of police – accountable to the Lieutenant-Governor of the Colony. The advent of a centralized policing bureaucracy was contentious and far from inevitable, but it was nevertheless a development with significant ramifications for the future of policing in the colony. Responsibility for policing was removed from local communities and vested in a centralized state. Additionally, centralization facilitated the development of a highly bureaucratized, hierarchical and rule-bound organization in which discipline was a vital principle of governance. The second fundamental reform was the adaptation in Melbourne of the London Metropolitan model of policing. Along with uniforms and the beat system of patrol, the theories informing London policing were translated and redeployed within the colonial context. Through discipline, drill, uniforms and the regular patrol of the beat, the London police constable assumed a powerful symbolic role as the neutral and objective representative of impersonal central authority, idealized as the embodiment of the collective will of the people. ¹ This chapter explores how this administrative vision of the respectable, disciplined and deferential policeman was inscribed on the body of the constable through an idealized notion of organizational masculinity. It was a vision that aimed to function both externally and internally – projecting out an idealized civic masculinity intended to promote order and cohesion and projecting internally through the police organization to cement adherence to discipline and regulation. This idealized notion of masculinity was simultaneously symbolic, instructive and disciplinary. Although signifying the rational authority of the state, the police constable was also deployed as an exemplar of virtuous manly conduct who would serve to instruct those policed in the appropriate values and norms of respectability. In addition to these civic functions, police leaders sought to promote an institutional masculinity built upon deference and obedience that would secure internal discipline within the police organization.