'Some non-Indigenous Australians, like John Howard when prime minister, claim that Australians today cannot be held responsible for what happened to Indigenous Australians decades ago. That is not the point. The point is that Australians today, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, confront the trauma that has flowed from those past events and, together, Australians today need to deal with that trauma as it exists today. Guilt for those past events may not be inherited; responsibility for dealing with their effects is.' ('Why the Australian Frontier Wars are important: Defending Country repost', 11 November 2024)
Associate Professor Julie Moschion, School of Economics, University of Queensland, and 12 other authors are working on a project titled 'Historical Frontier Violence: drivers, legacy and the role of truth-telling' (HFV Project). The project has an Indigenous-led Steering Committee, and includes Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers.
One output from the project is a visualisation map, 'Historical Frontier Violence Project Map'. The map covers the whole of Australia. One of its aims is to 'encourage truth-telling and healing by acknowledging the legacy of history, understanding that what we do is a result of what happened, not who we are'.
The map has aggregated data that can be overlaid to get a sense of how the locations of historical massacres of First Nations people, and First Nations institutions (reserves, stations, missions) correlate with voting patterns in the 1967 and 2023 referenda. For example, the three Queensland federal electorates of Capricornia, Flynn and Maranoa all recorded 'No' votes of more than 80 per cent in 2023. These electorates were the sites of around 40 massacres of First Nations people in the decades after the first settlement of Queensland in the 1840s.
There is also information on pre-settlement First Nations populations and settlers' characteristics. taken from census data, as well as information about water availability. The map shows a correlation between massacre sites and the availability of water, as settlers drove First Nations people out of well-watered, prospective grazing land.
Defending Country published a post in January 2025 based on the HFV Project's evidence to the Victorian Yoorrook Justice Commission. The project's work continues and the group is working on papers that it hopes will be published during 2026.
The project was funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council Discovery Project scheme (ARC DP220101336). It follows the Colonial Frontier Massacres project, led by the late Professor Lyndall Ryan and funded via the ARC Discovery Project scheme (ARC DP140100399).
Picture credit: Detail of map of Queensland 1890, with the carve-up into counties indicating the extension of settlement into Indigenous Country (Wikimedia Commons; Queensland Government). Note the predominance of English names for the counties.
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