The Australian frontier wars were the violent conflicts between Indigenous Australians and mostly British settlers from the colonial period of Australia to at least 1928.
The first conflict took place several months after the landing of the First Fleet in January 1788, and the last conflicts occurred in the early 20th century following the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901, with some occurring as late as 1934. Conflicts occurred in a number of locations across Australia.
Estimates of the number of people killed in the fighting vary considerably.
Background and population
In 1770 an expedition from Great Britain under the command of then-Lieutenant James Cook made the first voyage by the British along the Australian east coast. On 29 April, Cook and a small landing party fired on a group of the local Dharawal nation who had sought to prevent them from landing at the foot of their camp at Botany Bay, described by Cook as "a small village". Two Dharawal men made threatening gestures and threw a stone at Cook's party. Cook then ordered "a musket to be fired with small-shot" and the elder of the two was hit in a leg. This caused the two Dharawal men to run to their huts and seize their spears and shields. Subsequently, a single spear was thrown toward the British party, which "happily hurt nobody". This then caused Cook to order "the third musket with small-shots" to be fired, "upon which one of them threw another lance and both immediately ran away".
Some historians have argued that under prevailing European legal doctrine such land was deemed terra nullius or land belonging to nobody or land "empty of inhabitants" (as defined by Emerich de Vattel). However, terra nullius was not part of British law at the time and Cook was instructed only to take possession of land if he found it uninhabited. Nevertheless, Cook took possession of the east coast of New Holland for Britain on 22 August 1770 when on Possession Island off the west coast of Cape York Peninsula.
The British Government decided to establish a prison colony in Australia in 1786. The law system practised by Indigenous Australians was not necessarily understood or recognised in any official respect by settlers (language barriers made communication extremely difficult), and the English-speaking colony abided by its own legal doctrine. The colony's Governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, was instructed to "live in amity and kindness" with Indigenous Australians and sought to avoid conflict.
The British colonisation of Australia commenced when the First Fleet established a penal colony at Sydney Cove in January 1788. Colonisation spread to present-day Tasmania and Victoria from 1803 onward. Since then the population density of non-Indigenous people has remained highest in this region of the Australian continent. However, conflict with Aboriginal people was never as intense and bloody in the south-eastern colonies as in Queensland and the continent's northeast. More settlers, as well as Indigenous Australians, were killed on the Queensland frontier than in any other Australian colony. The reason is simple, and is reflected in all evidence and sources dealing with this subject: there were more Aboriginal people in Queensland. The territory of Queensland was the single most populated section of pre-contact Indigenous Australia, reflected not only in all pre-contact population estimates but also in the mapping of pre-contact Australia (see Horton's Map of Aboriginal Australia).
The Indigenous population distribution illustrated below is based on two independent sources, firstly on two population estimates made by anthropologists and a social historian in 1930 and in 1988, and secondly on the basis of the distribution of known tribal land.
All evidence suggests that the territory of Queensland had a pre-contact Indigenous population density more than double that of New South Wales, at least six times that of Victoria, and at least twenty times that of Tasmania. Equally, there are signs that the population density of Indigenous Australia was comparatively higher in the north-eastern sections of New South Wales, and along the northern coast from the Gulf of Carpentaria and westward including certain sections of the Northern Territory and Western Australia.
Impact of disease
The effects of disease, loss of hunting grounds and starvation of the Aboriginal population were significant. There are indications that smallpox epidemics may have impacted heavily on some Aboriginal communities, with depopulation in large sections of what is now Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland up to 50% or more, even before the move inland from Sydney of squatters and their livestock. Other diseases hitherto unknown in the Indigenous population—such as the common cold, flu, measles, venereal diseases and tuberculosis—also had an impact, significantly reducing their numbers and tribal cohesion, and so limiting their ability to adapt to or resist invasion and dispossession.
Traditional Aboriginal warfare
According to the historian John Connor, traditional Aboriginal warfare should be examined on its own terms and not by definitions of war derived from other societies. Aboriginal people did not have distinct ideas of war and peace, and traditional warfare was common, taking place between groups on an ongoing basis, with great rivalries being maintained over extended periods of time. The aims and methods of traditional Aboriginal warfare arose from their small autonomous social groupings. The fighting of a war to conquer enemy territory was not only beyond the resources of any of these Aboriginal groupings, it was contrary to a culture that was based on spiritual connections to a specific territory. Consequently, conquering another group's territory may have been seen to be of little benefit. Ultimately, traditional Aboriginal warfare was aimed at continually asserting the superiority of one's own group over its neighbours, rather than conquering, destroying or displacing neighbouring groups. As the explorer Edward John Eyre observed in 1845, whilst Aboriginal culture was "so varied in detail", it was "similar in general outline and character", and Connor observes that there were sufficient similarities in weapons and warfare of these groups to allow generalisations about traditional Aboriginal warfare to be made.
In 1840, the American-Canadian ethnologist Horatio Hale identified four types of Australian Aboriginal traditional warfare: formal battles, ritual trials, raids for women, and revenge attacks.
- Formal battles involved fighting between two groups of warriors, which ended after a few warriors had been killed or wounded, due to the need to ensure the ongoing survival of the groups. Such battles were usually fought to settle grievances between groups, and could take some time to prepare.
- Ritual trials involved the application of customary law to one or more members of a group who had committed a crime such as murder or assault. Weapons were used to inflict injury, and the criminal was expected to stand their ground and accept the punishment.
- Some Aboriginal men had effective property rights over women and raids for women were essentially about transferring property from one group to another to ensure the survival of a group through women's food-gathering and childbearing roles.
- A revenge attack was undertaken by one group against another to punish that group for actions of one of its members, such as a murder. In some cases these involved sneaking into the opposition camp at night and silently killing one or more members of the group.
Connor describes traditional Aboriginal warfare as both limited and universal. It was limited in terms of:
- the number of members of each group, which restricted the number of warriors in any given engagement;
- the fact that their non-hierarchical social order militated against one leader combining many groups into a single force; and
- duration, due to social groups needing to regularly hunt and forage for food.
Traditional Aboriginal warfare was also universal, as the entire community participated in warfare, boys learnt to fight by playing with toy melee and missile weapons, and every initiated male became a warrior. Women were sometimes participants in warfare as warriors and as encouragers on the sidelines of formal battles, but more often as victims.
While the selection and design of weapons varied from group to group, Aboriginal warriors used a combination of melee and missile weapons in traditional warfare. Spears, clubs and shields were commonly used in hand-to-hand fighting, with different types of shields favoured during exchanges of missiles and in close combat, and spears (often used in conjunction with spear throwers), boomerangs and stones used as missile weapons.
Available weapons had a significant influence over the tactics used during traditional Aboriginal warfare. The limitations of spears and clubs meant that surprise was paramount during raids for women and revenge attacks, and encouraged ambushing and night attacks. These tactics were offset by counter-measures such as regularly changing campsites, being prepared to extinguish camp-fires at short notice, and posting parties of warriors to cover the escape of raiders.
General history
First British settlement
Initial peaceful relations between Indigenous Australians and Europeans began to be strained several months after the First Fleet established Sydney on 26 January 1788. The local Indigenous people became suspicious when the British began to clear land and catch fish, and in May 1788 five convicts were killed and an Indigenous man was wounded. The British grew increasingly concerned when groups of up to three hundred Indigenous people were sighted at the outskirts of the colony in June. Despite this, Phillip attempted to avoid conflict, and forbade reprisals after being speared in 1790. He did, however, authorise two punitive expeditions in December 1790 after his huntsman was killed by an Indigenous warrior named Pemulwuy, but neither was successful.
Coastal and inland expansion
During the 1790s and early 19th century the British occupied areas along the Australian coastline. These settlements initially occupied small amounts of land, and there was little conflict between the colonisers and Indigenous peoples. Fighting broke out when the settlements expanded, however, disrupting traditional Indigenous food-gathering activities, and subsequently followed the pattern of European invasion in Australia for the next 150 years. Whilst the reactions of the Aboriginal inhabitants to the sudden invasion by the British were varied, they became hostile when their presence led to competition over resources, and to the occupation of their lands. European diseases decimated Indigenous populations, and the occupation or destruction of lands and food resources sometimes led to starvation. By and large neither the Europeans nor the Indigenous peoples approached the conflict in an organised sense, with the conflict more one between groups of colonisers and individual Indigenous groups rather than systematic warfare, even if at times it did involve British soldiers and later formed mounted police units. Not all Indigenous Australians resisted European encroachment on their lands either, whilst many also served in mounted police units and were involved in attacks on other tribes. Colonisers in turn often reacted with violence, resulting in a number of indiscriminate massacres.
European activities provoking significant conflict included pastoral squatting and gold rushes.