Australian native police were specialised mounted military units consisting of detachments of Aboriginal troopers under the command of European officers appointed by British colonial governments. The units existed in various forms in colonial Australia during the nineteenth and, in some cases, into the twentieth centuries. From temporary base camps and barracks, Native Police were primarily used to patrol the often vast geographical areas along the colonial frontier, in order to conduct indiscriminate raids or punitive expeditions against Aboriginal people. The Native Police proved to be a brutally destructive instrument in the disintegration and dispossession of Indigenous Australians. Armed with rifles, carbines and swords, they were also deployed to escort surveying groups, gold convoys, and groups of pastoralists and prospectors.

The Aboriginal men in the Native Police were routinely recruited from areas that were very distant from the locations in which they were deployed. That ensured they would have little familiarity with the local people they were employed to control, and would also reduce desertions. However, due to the excessively violent nature of the work, the rate of trooper desertion in some units was high. As the troopers were Aboriginal, the European colonists were able to minimise both the troopers' wages and the potential for Aboriginal revenge attacks against white people. It also increased the efficiency of the force because the Aboriginal troopers possessed highly developed tracking skills, which were indispensable in often poorly charted and difficult terrain.

The first government-funded force was the Native Police Corps, established in 1837 in the Port Phillip District of what is now Victoria. From 1848 another force was organised in New South Wales, which later evolved into the Queensland Native Police force. This force massacred thousands of Aboriginal people under the official euphemism of "dispersal", and is regarded as one of the most conspicuous examples of genocidal policy in colonial Australia. It existed until around 1915, when the last Native Police camps in Queensland were closed.

Native Police were also utilised by other Australian colonies. The government of South Australia set up a short-lived Native Police force in 1852, which was re-established in 1884 and deployed into what is now the Northern Territory. The colonial Western Australian government also initiated a formal Native Police force in 1840 under the command of John Nicol Drummond. Other privately funded native police systems were also occasionally used in Australia, such as the native constabulary organised by the Australian Agricultural Company in the 1830s. Native Police forces were also officially implemented in the Papua and New Guinea territories administered by colonial Queensland and Australian governments from 1890 until the 1970s. The Australian government also organised a Native Police force on Nauru during its administration of the island from 1923 until 1968.

The general template for native police forces in Australia was the sepoy and sowar armies of the East India Company. However, the more compact forces of the Cape Regiment in southern Africa and the Kaffir and Malay Corps in Ceylon are a closer comparison. Before the creation of the first official Native Police forces, there were some informal and privately funded examples of using Aboriginal men as enforcers of land occupation by European settlers during colonisation.

Armed Aboriginal men were used to capture runaway convicts in the region and John Macarthur sometimes appeared at public functions with a bodyguard of uniformed Dharawal and Gandangara men.

In 1824, at the conclusion of the Bathurst War against the Wiradjuri, Governor Thomas Brisbane sent a letter to Major James Thomas Morisset, commandant of the colonial forces at Bathurst, congratulating him on his efforts. In the letter, Brisbane outlined his desire to give "rewards to the natives who assisted in the police" and advised Morisset that he had "directed £50 subject to detailed accounts of its expenditure" to be at his disposal.

Musquito was a Hawkesbury Aboriginal man who was exiled first to Norfolk Island in 1805, then to Van Diemen's Land in 1813. He proved to be a valuable asset to the government there in tracking down bushrangers. He later became a renegade and was himself tracked down and shot in the groin by another Hawkesbury aboriginal named Teague. Teague was sent by Hawkesbury settler Edward Luttrell to capture Musquito, on the promise of a whaleboat as payment. Teague never received the boat and Musquito was hanged in 1825.