Collection of resources giving a view of Australia’s First Peoples, including stories about their treatment in the past and about their aspirations and demands today. Particularly focusses on the Frontier Wars and the related issue of the involvement of Indigenous Australians in our defence forces.

This database derives from a four year long project to explore the archaeology of the NMP. It is the only publicly available historical and archaeological dataset of their lives and activities. The excavations conducted for this project were the first archaeological investigations of any Native Police force operating anywhere in Australia. The Queensland Native Mounted Police operated for over 50 years, from 1849 until 1904. It was organised along paramilitary lines, consisting of detachments of Aboriginal troopers led by white officers. It operated across the whole of Queensland and was explicitly constituted to protect the lives, livelihoods and property of settlers and to prevent (and punish) any Aboriginal aggression or resistance. This was often accomplished through violence in many forms, leading Henry Reynolds to characterise the NMP as 'the most violent organisation in Australian history'.

Boe Spearim is a Gamilaraay and Kooma radio host and podcaster who lives in Brisbane. Frontier War Stories - a podcast dedicated to truth-telling about a side of Australia that has been left out of the history books. Each episode Boe will speak with different Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people about research, books and oral histories which document the first 140 years of conflict and resistance. These times are the Frontier Wars and these are our War Stories.

Image galleries (Frontier Wars, prisoner abuse, freedom fighters, massacres, habitats and villages), plus resources and history with lots of references.

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.

Regularly features articles relevant to First Nations history, the Voice and Frontier Wars