Frontier: Stories From White Australia's Forgotten War

1788 - 1830 They Must Always Consider Us as Enemies Soldier/Administrator David Collins sailed to Sydney with the first fleet expecting a few natives on the sea coast who would run away. The British were confident they could win over the remaining Aborigines with 'amity and kindness' but as violence escalated Collins became the first official to acknowledge that Blacks and Whites were locked in a grim struggle for the land. When Collins was sent to Tasmania to set up a second settlement Tasmania too became embroiled in a "Black War". The fighting ended only after a verbal treaty acknowledged some Aboriginal rights in the land. Yet the government broke its promises and Aborigines were rewarded with exile.

1830 - 1860 Worse Than Slavery Itself By 1830 there had been a dramatic moral shift in Britain as the British public were stirred by an anti slavery campaign. Missionaries and humanitarians began to take up the cause of native peoples in the Empire. The official message to Australia was that Aborigines had legal rights as subjects of the crown. However this new mood did not go down well on the frontier and horrific massacres took place in the bush. When seven white killers were arrested, tried and hanged the sustained white backlash exposed the humanitarian mood as fragile and short lived. By 1860 a new, more ruthless, more secretive wave of killing had started.

1860 - 1938 The Government Should Shut Its Eyes When the land wars moved north to Queensland the Aborigines resisted and after two infamous aboriginal attacks, vigilante bands and the Native Police set out to clear the land of blacks. An estimated ten thousand Aborigines were shot dead and the colonial government turned a blind eye. Towards the end of the century governments across Australia began what they believed was a mopping up operation. Officials adopted a new fad - Social Darwinism and assumed Aborigines would die out as a natural consequence of competition with the white race. The next fifty years saw various attempts to fulfill the prophesy. Blacks would be imprisoned on reserves, have their children taken from them, be encouraged to "breed" themselves out. But even as massacres continued in the remote outback, Aborigines started to organise politically and would inform white Australia that they had no intention of dying away.