Colonial-Aboriginal Wars

I

Introduction

Colonial-Aboriginal Wars, series of battles, police actions, and massacres between Aboriginal Australians and British colonists and their descendants that lasted from 1788 to 1930. The fighting began as relatively minor disputes over small amounts of land but steadily increased into an enduring conflict across the continent. Armed with superior weapons and eventually superior numbers, the British colonists devastated Australia’s Aboriginal population.

II

Background of the Wars

Before the arrival of Europeans, Aboriginal people disputed over marriage arrangements, territory, and illegal acts, or competed for scarce resources. Although disputes were sometimes fatal, wounding rather than killing opponents was typically the main objective. One exception was revenge killing (also called payback), which was carried out against perceived enemies. Another exception were waringari, or “blackfellow wars,” which were a central part of Aboriginal life in northern Australia and pitted Aboriginal people against each other. Otherwise, Aboriginal people across the continent were relatively peaceful.

In the 17th and 18th centuries the Dutch, British, and French became the first Europeans to have contact with the Aboriginal people. On April 29, 1770, British navigator Captain James Cook reached the area of southeastern Australia now known as Botany Bay (local Aboriginal people called it Kamay). There he encountered opposition from the Kadigal tribe and ordered his crew to shoot, wounding one Aboriginal man. Cook voyaged north, landing off Australia’s Cape York Peninsula, and on August 22 took possession of eastern Australia, which he called New South Wales. Cook did not negotiate this transfer of land with Aboriginal people, and many Aboriginal people today regard him as an invader rather than a discoverer.

III

The First Conflicts

Great Britain established its first convict settlement in 1788 at Port Jackson (present-day Sydney). At first, encounters between Aboriginal people and colonists were peaceful, but by 1790 the two sides were engaged in a series of skirmishes known as the Hawkesbury and Nepean Wars. Aboriginal people were led by Pemulwuy, his son Tedbury, and another warrior named Mosquito. Most of their attacks were hit-and-run raids or assaults on the colonists’ sheep and cattle, as the colonists were growing in numbers and expanding their settlements beyond the coast. Aboriginal attackers often carried firesticks, which they used to set the bush on fire, destroy buildings, and burn crops. In later wars other Aboriginal people used the same tactics, occasionally launching full-scale attacks in which warriors threw spears. Larger attacks, however, were successful only against small or poorly armed groups of colonists. By 1805 the British around Port Jackson had subdued Pemulwuy, although Tedbury resisted until 1810.

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In the early 1800s colonists settled in large numbers on the island of Van Diemen’s Land (present-day Tasmania). As colonial settlement penetrated further inland, settlers came increasingly into conflict with Aboriginal people, and in 1807 the Black War—one of the most devastating of the colonial-Aboriginal wars—began. Although at first sporadic and minor, attacks from both sides increased such that British regiments were deployed to stop the fighting. Over two decades, several hundred Aboriginal people and several dozen colonists were killed, and many settlers lost property. Sometimes Aboriginal people united under leaders, including Tarerenorerer, or Walyer, a woman who led the Emu Bay people in the late 1820s. In 1830 Lieutenant Governor Sir George Arthur tried to flush Aboriginal people from their encampments by mobilizing several thousand settlers and soldiers, who marched in a rough line across Van Diemen’s Land. The Black Line, as it became known, did not kill any Aboriginal people and succeeded in capturing only three. But it ensured colonial control of the island. Most Aboriginal survivors of the Black War were collected by George Augustus Robinson, whom the government appointed to persuade Aboriginal people to live in captivity and who was accompanied by Aboriginal guides. Over time, these survivors became the ancestors of today’s Aboriginal communities.

In these and later efforts, neither the British colonies nor independent Australia made official declarations of war against Aboriginal people. Captured Aboriginal soldiers were thus classified as criminals rather than prisoners of war.

IV

Mainland Expansion

On the mainland in the early 1800s the colonies were rapidly expanding into the continent’s interior. Explorers pioneered routes through the coastal mountain ranges, opening large tracts of land to farming and ranching. Many of these lands were traditional Aboriginal hunting and grazing lands, and many of the plants and animals on which Aboriginal people had lived for centuries began to disappear. By 1840 significant parts of present-day South Australia and Victoria had been invaded, and by the 1860s most of southern and central Queensland was occupied by colonists. Large areas of the Northern Territory and Western Australia soon followed.

Virtually all of the British expansion efforts were met with conflicts similar to the earlier wars. Conflicts included the Wiradjuri Wars (1820s), in which Windradyne led his Wiradjuri warriors against colonists in southwestern New South Wales; the frontier wars (1834-1848) of the Port Phillip District (present-day Victoria), where Aboriginal people united under the warriors Jupiter, Cocknose, Winnaberrie, and Koort Kirrup; the Kamilaroi Wars (1830s) of northern New South Wales; the McIntyre River Wars (1840-1849) of southern Queensland, where Dundalli and Eumendi commanded Aboriginal people against settlers and regiments; the Kalkadoon Wars (late 1870s-1883) of northwestern Queensland; and the wars of northern Western Australia (1891-1897), in which Jandewarra, also called Pigeon, led Aboriginal people. Aboriginal tribes usually fought as single entities against the colonists, but on occasion they combined with other tribes—for example, after colonists poisoned several Aboriginal people at Kilcoy in southeastern Queensland in 1842.

While many of the colonial-Aboriginal conflicts could be properly classified as battles, several “battles,” such as New South Wales’ Battle of Pinjarra (1834) and Battle of Waterloo Creek (1838), were nothing of the sort. They were massacres of hundreds of Aboriginal people by well-armed colonists. One of the most notorious of these was the Myall Creek Massacre (1838) in which rural workers, led by a colonist named John Fleming, murdered 28 unarmed Aboriginal people who were camped on colonial ranch property. Periods of extermination were particularly fierce in Queensland after the 1850s and in the Northern Territory after the 1880s. Two of the last recorded massacres of Aboriginal people were in 1926 at Forrest River in northern Western Australia and in 1928 at Coniston in the Northern Territory. At Coniston, a series of police expeditions killed more than 80 Aboriginal people. On occasion, Aboriginal people massacred colonists, as in 1857, when most of a colonial family at Hornet Bank station in Queensland was murdered.