Australian frontier wars

"Australian frontier wars" is the name historians give to the long series of violent clashes between Indigenous Australians and mostly British colonists that followed the founding of Sydney in 1788. Fought as local conflicts across the continent rather than as one campaign, they continued into the twentieth century, with some killings as late as the 1920s and early 1930s. Their scale remains the subject of research and public debate.

When the First Fleet arrived in 1788, Governor Arthur Phillip was instructed to live in "amity and kindness" with the Indigenous inhabitants, and no treaty was made. Relations deteriorated within months as the colonists cleared land and took fish, and five convicts were killed in May 1788. From the 1790s the Bidjigal warrior Pemulwuy led raids around Parramatta, and Darug people fought settlers along the Hawkesbury River from 1795. In 1816 troops sent by Governor Macquarie ended the Hawkesbury conflict with an ambush that killed 14 people.

As settlers crossed the Blue Mountains, Wiradjuri resistance around Bathurst led to martial law in 1824. On the Liverpool Plains, according to one estimate, 16 colonists and up to 500 Aboriginal people died between 1832 and 1838, the period of the Waterloo Creek and Myall Creek massacres. In Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania, the "Black War" of the late 1820s saw more than 50 colonists killed in what has been described as the most successful Aboriginal resistance in Australian history. In 1830 the "Black Line" mobilised settlers, police and soldiers to sweep the settled districts, and the remaining resisters gradually left their lands for a reserve on Flinders Island. In Western Australia, conflict with Noongar peoples included the Pinjarra massacre of October 1833.

Queensland, which probably had the largest Indigenous population of any future state, saw the most intense violence. From the 1840s settlers poisoned groups of Aboriginal people with laced flour, while warriors such as Multuggerah resisted, and in 1861 Aboriginal fighters killed 19 settlers at Cullin-La-Ringo. The Native Police force, formed in 1848, carried out repeated punitive "dispersals". The Kalkadoon held back settlement in western Queensland for years until their defeat at Battle Mountain in 1884. Resistance continued in northern Western Australia, where the Bunuba leader Jandamarra was killed in 1897, and in the Northern Territory, where police killed at least 31 Aboriginal people in the Coniston massacre of 1928.

Aboriginal groups were small, independent and spread across the continent, so they did not form lasting alliances. They relied on spears, clubs and surprise, and sometimes killed livestock. Colonists gradually gained an overwhelming advantage from horses and, after about 1850, revolvers and breech-loading rifles. Historians such as Geoffrey Blainey argue that disease, together with loss of food sources and starvation, did more than fighting to reduce Indigenous numbers.

Estimates differ widely. The Indigenous population, variously estimated at between 300,000 and 3 million in 1788, had fallen to about 90,000 by 1901. A mapping project led by Lyndall Ryan counts some 11,000 to 14,000 victims of massacres alone; Henry Reynolds has put deaths in the conflicts at over 30,000; and Raymond Evans and Robert Ørsted-Jensen estimated more than 65,000 Aboriginal deaths in Queensland alone, a figure other researchers have criticised as speculative. Perhaps 2,000 to 2,500 colonists and their associates died. Some scholars, and a Victorian truth-telling inquiry, have described events in some colonies as genocide.

For much of the twentieth century historians largely ignored the conflicts, a gap the anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner called "the great Australian silence". Work by Reynolds and others from the 1970s and 1980s brought them back into view, while Keith Windschuttle's challenge in the early 2000s sparked the "history wars". The Australian War Memorial has long excluded the frontier wars, although in 2022 its council promised a fuller depiction. The conflicts continued after the Federation of Australia in 1901.

Our maps from 1800 to 1900 show British colonies spreading across Australia within the British Empire, though the borders drawn do not show the Indigenous nations whose lands they covered.