The Gulf country was a harsh and in places impassable wilderness. To explorers, it promised discovery, and to bold adventurers like the overlanders and pastoralists, a new start. For prospectors, it was a gateway to the riches of the Kimberley goldfields. To the 2,500 Aboriginal inhabitants, it was their physical and spiritual home. From the 1870s, with the opening of the Coast Track, cattlemen eager to lay claim to vast tracts of station land brought cattle in massive numbers and destruction to precious lagoons and fragile terrain. Black and white conflict escalated into unfettered violence and retaliation that would extend into the next century, displacing, and in some areas destroying, the original inhabitants.

The memoirs of five pioneering families who in the 1860s 'opened up' part of the Channel Country in southwest Queensland. The writers of these memoirs had much in common. And yet a careful reading of these accounts reveals startling differences in how the pioneering experience is portrayed.

The frontier wars were a series of violent conflicts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While conflicts and skirmishes continued between European land holders and Traditional Owners, the military instrument of the Queensland Government was the Native Police. The Native Police was a body of Aboriginal troopers that operated under the command of white officers on the Queensland frontier from 1849 to the 1920s. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men were often forcefully recruited from communities -- already diminished due to colonisation -- that were normally a great distance from the region in which they were to work. They were offered low pay, along with rations, firearms, a uniform and a horse. Many deserted. Although we will never know exactly how many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were killed during the frontier wars, estimates range from thousands to tens of thousands. Regardless of the number, many First Nations peoples were killed on the land that became known as Queensland.

Noel Loos has concluded that the Aboriginal people in Queensland had been subject to a genocide, a holocaust different from that inflicted on the Jews in Europe, but equivalent to it.

A gripping reckoning with the bloody history of Australia's frontier wars. David Marr was shocked to discover forebears who served with the brutal Native Police in the bloodiest years on the frontier. Killing for Country is the result – a soul-searching Australian history. This is a richly detailed saga of politics and power in the colonial world – of land seized, fortunes made and lost, and the violence let loose as squatters and their allies fought for possession of the country – a war still unresolved in today's Australia.

Aims to visually (digitally) present the resistance wars in south-eastern Queensland 1820-50 in an easily-digestible and informative manner, by combining maps, images and brief explanations. Dr Kerkhove seeks to better illustrate the typical lifestyle of settlers and Aborigines caught in the resistance wars. He also seeks to develop historical maps that better reflect what was happening from an ‘Aboriginal resistance’ perspective.