Aborigines and Australian Frontier War

Van Diemen’s Land saw sustained frontier warfare from 1826 to 1831. Governor George Arthur mobilized 10 percent of the male civilian population along with soldiers and police in 1830 and had them march across the settled districts to clear these areas from Aborigines in an operation that became known as the “Black Line.” The operation failed to capture many Aborigines, but its scale disheartened the raiding parties, and gradually each group came in and agreed to leave their land for the Flinders Island reservation.

From the late 1830s, settlers and their sheep and cattle spread rapidly onto aboriginal land, bringing conflict throughout inland eastern Australia. In what is now Victoria, aboriginal warriors deliberately dislocated the legs of hundreds of sheep so that they would be useless for pastoralists. In what is now Queensland, there were about 10 cases in which settlers probably poisoned Aborigines with fl our laced with arsenic or strychnine. In the 1880s, fighting flared in western Queensland and the north of western Australia. The Kalkadoon were defeated in 1884 when they foolishly abandoned their raiding tactics after six years of success and openly attacked settlers at Battle Mountain, near Kajabbi in Queensland. In western Australia, one pastoral company claimed it lost 7,000 sheep to Aborigines in 1888 alone. Fighting continued in the Northern Territory at a sporadic level into the twentieth century. When a Walpiri man killed a white miner at Coniston, the local police officer mounted a punitive expedition and killed at least 31 Aborigines. An action that once had been condoned was now finally criticized, and there was an official inquiry into the massacre.

The frontier wars remain a controversial part of Australian history. According to Ernest Scott, the first great Australian historian, there had not been any frontier conflict at all. He wrote in 1910 that “Australia is the only considerable portion of the world which has enjoyed the blessed record of unruffled peace.” In the 1970s, this view was revised as historians began examining official and private records and found example after example of frontier warfare. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Keith Windschuttle led a conservative critique of most that has been written about frontier conflict, arguing that other historians had exaggerated the level of violence and the number of casualties. A second dispute revolves around whether “genocide” was perpetrated on the Australian frontier. There is no instance of government authorities ordering the extermination of Aborigines, so this argument considers whether there is evidence of individuals and small groups showing the intent and having the means to commit genocide. Both debates are certain to continue for some time.