September 19.
Treaty by Glenn Loughrey
Australian Frontier Wars
The Australian frontier wars would continue until the conquest was complete.
...frontier warfare became more violent from the time the government expected settlers to fight for themselves and settlers became better equipped with guns and horses to do so. Broome points out how the cost of firearms dropped and the weapons themselves became more reliable as muskets were replaced with breech-loading rifles. Settlers taking the war into their own hands created vigilante parties to attack Aborigines. As George Faithfull* wrote: 'People formed themselves into bands of alliance and allegiance to each other, and it was then the destruction of the natives really did take place'. Fighting continued on the Australian frontier until at least 1928 with the killing of at least thirty-one Walpiri people by a police punitive expedition at Coniston in the Northern Territory. [1]
While the frontier was more violent after 1838, it was not universally so. Successful settlers followed Peter Cunningham's advice and employed local Aborigines to work around their stations, enabling better relations with the people whose lands they had usurped.
...Warfare on the Australian frontier was not inevitable. Ged Martin points out that, unlike the British colonies in Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, there were no frontier wars on the Canadian prairies. Here the Canadian Dominion government offered treaties to indigenous Canadians, which they were willing to sign because the government provided medical supplies to reservations and impartial law and order through the North-west Mounted Police. [2]
Peter Dennis wrote in 1995 that war 'has been one of the defining forces in Australian history'. [3] The frontier wars defined Australia in two ways. The wars swept away Aboriginal sovereignty and replaced it with British institutions and cultures and six colonies that would form the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901. The British victory was so overwhelming that it determined the relationship between the descendants of the victors and the descendants of the defeated even to this day.
By 1838 the British had established outposts around the coastline of Australia and the invasion of the inland rivers and plains had commenced. On 20 January 1838, almost fifty years to the day since Captain Arthur Phillip established Sydney at the eastern end of the continent, the missionary James Backhouse walked along the Swan River, now part of a British colony in the west. Backhouse wrote in his diary:
In our walk, several places were pointed out, as sites for the destruction of Blacks, either by their own tribes, according to their barbarous customs,** or by the White inhabitants; the others, where white men had been destroyed by the Blacks. [4]
In fifty years, sites of conflict like these had been created across Australia: from the meandering Swan to the broad river-flats of the Hawkesbury, and from the sticky Arnhem Land mangroves to the soft green hills of Tasmania. Men with guns would fight men with spears far beyond 1838, and armed men on both sides would kill unnumbered unarmed men, women and children. The Australian frontier wars would continue until the conquest was complete.
Broome, 'Struggle for Australia' pp.105, 109; letter – George Faithfull to La Trobe, 8 September 1853, Bride (ed.) Letters, p. 221.
Ged Martin, 'Canada from 1815' in Andrew Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, III: 533.
Dennis et al. (eds), Oxford Companion to Australian Military History, p xi.
Backhouse, Narrative, p 539.
Acknowledgment: John Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars 1788-1838, pp. 120-122, 151 n.64, 152 n.66, n.67, n.68
* For more information on William Pitt Faithfull and George Faithfull see Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars, pp. 117-119.
** Do Australian war historians use the same terminology in, say, describing the momentously larger carnage of World War I? – RB.