The Australian Frontier Wars: An Overview (1788–1930s)

For about 150 years, British colonization of Australia met armed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander resistance. Historians now call these conflicts the Australian Frontier Wars.

When the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove in 1788, the land was already governed by hundreds of Aboriginal nations, each with its own country, law and language. As the colony pushed outward for farms and grazing land, those nations defended their country.

The fighting was rarely a set-piece war. It was a long series of raids, reprisals, punitive expeditions, and massacres, stretching from the Sydney basin in the 1790s to the Coniston massacre in the Northern Territory in 1928. Colonial governments sometimes used soldiers, sometimes mounted police, and often relied on armed settlers acting on their own.

Why the name matters

For much of the twentieth century, school histories described the settlement of Australia as largely peaceful. From the 1970s onward, historians working from colonial records, settler diaries and Aboriginal oral history showed that violence was widespread and that Aboriginal people fought back. The term “Frontier Wars” recognizes that resistance.

On this shelf

The readings that follow cover the Hawkesbury and Nepean Wars, the Bathurst War and martial law of 1824, the later siege at Glenrowan, and three major works of scholarship. Some of this history is violent and distressing. It is presented so that it can be understood and remembered.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.