Frontier or History Wars?

Following the settlement of Australia by the British was a series of conflicts, which could also be called minor wars between the white settlers and the native aboriginals. The aboriginals attempted to resist the dispossession of their lands that were being taken by the settlers who were setting up farms and other similar initiatives. This resistance was met with armed force by the settlers which resulted in much aboriginal blood shed across all areas of Australia. However the worst violence towards aboriginals occurred in Tasmania. In the year of 1824 the population of aboriginals in Tasmania was at around fifteen hundred, this number was greatly reduced to about three hundred and fifty in the following years. This was due to groups which assembled and went out on hunts to kill aboriginals. In 1830 Governor Arthur assembled ‘the black line’, this was a line of over one thousand men stretched across an area of Tasmania which conducted a sweep across the land to round up any surviving aborigines.

Historians have overlooked this frontier conflict for a long time, up until the 1970s it was rarely found in any literature. There are a number of suggestions as to why this was. Firstly indigenous history is oral, their history is told through oral interpretation not written accounts of events, it is told from generation to generation. This means that there is the potential for history to be changed as the story is passed from generation to generation which is something historians have always avoided; they tend to rely on written and documented sources. Aboriginals were not recognised as a people until the 1960s when the civil rights movement was gaining momentum in places like America as well as in Australia. Aboriginals had no platform from which to speak out about the injustices there people incurred in the early settler period of Australian colonisation. The 1960s finally gave them rights at citizens and thus they were given the opportunity to speak out about the aforementioned injustices. Australia had been a very conservative nation up until the 1970s, before then it had only been natural to look at white history. The nation already had heroes of the time, the ‘white colonists’ such as Captain Cook and other various figures, it would be contradictory for historians to then write about the bloody conflict which occurred between the settlers and aborigines in which much of the aboriginal population was wiped out, rendering this heroic myth of the settler invalid or tarnished. 

This is an attack by Aboriginal men on the Barrows Creek Telegraph Station. Just one of the many conflicts to take place between local Aboriginals and the Settlers. 

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