Reading list

How Indigenous law has enabled people to survive and thrive in Australia for more than 2000 generations. The sixth in a series on First Knowledges; others cover songlines, architecture, design, land management, botany, and astronomy.

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.

Phil Breslin describes and shows production of Indigenous weapons (ABC TV, six episodes, July-August 2023)

Australia is dotted with memorials to soldiers who fought in wars overseas. Why are there no official memorials or commemorations of the wars that were fought on Australian soil between Aborigines and white colonists? Why is it more controversial to talk about the frontier war now than it was one hundred years ago?

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'.

Based on a forum held at the National Museum in Canberra c. 2003 this book presents a series of essays by leading contributors on the subject of conflict between Aborigines and settlers.

Examines and compares the most prominent statements made in 'The history war', with key primary sources for colonial Queensland's history. Also considers the evidence of white and black victims to frontier violence in north-eastern Australia, providing a full listing of all recorded Europeans and assistants who fell victim during the 19th century to this violence within present day Queensland.

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.

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.