Indigenous · History Classes · Grades 10–13 · College · University

Australia — Frontier Wars and Removals

History Class · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University

DRAFT — CULTURAL REVIEW PENDING. These history classes are a publisher’s draft blend of the Collection’s Indigenous history research, standing on its own website. Indigenous cultural review precedes any public release of this strand. Readings carry the research labels unchanged: Documented Fact · Tradition — the people’s own account · Debated / Claim. This page carries no advertising.

English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.

For the teacher — teacher-facing guidance for this class stands in this box only; the reading below is the student reading. Senior band only. Three disciplines: (1) every figure is taught at the level its source carries — the massacre map's floor is a floor for mapped massacres only, never a frontier total, and no Australia-wide death total exists in this class because no source carries one; (2) the census finding is the second lesson — mainland Australia files zero verified exterminated peoples in this pass not because nothing happened, but because for every candidate worked, descendants are living and on the record, and filing the living among the dead repeats the colonial error this strand exists to correct; (3) the word "genocide" is taught only as classed in §7 — an inquiry's conclusion, a historians' debate, a claim — never as this class's own settled verdict. The companion class, Tasmania — The Palawa Are Living, carries the island's record separately; the two lands are never merged.

The map is a floor. It is not a total.

Class: RESEARCH. Compiled documented record. Before British colonisation in 1788, over 250 languages and 500–800 dialects were spoken across Australia (AIATSIS; the dialect seam is the sources' own). Of those languages, 145 are still spoken on one carried count, 123 — only 14 of them strong — on another; the counts are printed as their disagreement, not averaged. The Colonial Frontier Massacres Digital Map Project (University of Newcastle, led by Lyndall Ryan, concluded 2022, final check reported February 2025) documents at least 438 colonial frontier massacres and at least 10,657 people killed in them — 10,374 of them Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people killed by colonists — with about half the massacres of Aboriginal people carried out by police and other government agents. A massacre in the project means six or more killed in one operation. Smaller killings, disease and starvation after dispossession are outside the map — so the map can never be read as the whole frontier's toll.

1. Myall Creek, New South Wales, 1838 — the one prosecution (Documented Fact)

On 10 June 1838, eleven stockmen led by John Fleming bound at least 28 Wirrayaraay people of the Gamilaraay nation — mostly women, children and old men — led them to a gully at Myall Creek station, killed them and burned the bodies. Seven of the men were hanged that December after a second trial: the first and only successful prosecution of settlers for a massacre of Aboriginal people in the colonial record carried here. The map project notes what followed: the government could no longer use the military the same way, and police forces became the pattern of frontier violence instead.

2. Battle Mountain, Queensland, 1884 — and the figure that is not carried (Documented Fact; later figures Debated / Claim)

Queensland's frontier was worked substantially through the Native Police, whose official word for killing operations was "dispersals." In September 1884, six Native Police under Sub-Inspector Frederick Urquhart, with settlers, fought Kalkadoon warriors gathered on a rocky outlook near Cloncurry, after a Chinese shepherd was killed on Granada station. The massacre map's sourced entry records 30 Aboriginal people killed — and its narrative warns that later accounts are many and some sensationalised, while the contemporary report itself records "an unknown number." Later claims of more than 200 killed, and of only 29 survivors, are not carried in this class as figures: they have no contemporary confirmation. What ended the argument is simpler — the Kalkadoon people are living, organised in the Kalkadoon Tribal Council, whose memorial reads: "The spirit of the Kalkatunga tribe never died at battle, but remains intact and alive today."

3. Warrigal Creek, Victoria, 1843 (Documented Fact; single-site figures as a range)

In July 1843, after Ronald Macalister was killed near Port Albert, Angus McMillan's party of about twenty colonists rode from camp to camp in Gippsland killing Brataualung people of the Gunai/Kurnai. The massacre map's grouped entry for the five Warrigal Creek sites gives an estimated 125 killed; single-site retellings range from 60 to 150, and the class carries the grouped figure and prints the range unresolved. The Gunai/Kurnai stand today as the Gunaikurnai nation, with native title recognised.

4. Forrest River, Western Australia, 1926 — a royal commission's finding (Documented Fact)

After pastoralist Fred Hay was killed in the East Kimberley in 1926, a police-led party of thirteen pursued for six weeks. The Wood Royal Commission (1927) concluded that 11 people had been murdered and their bodies burned at three sites, with nine more probably sharing the same fate; it found a "conspiracy of silence" and that the patrol had lied. Two constables were charged, discharged by a magistrate, and reinstated. A claim of 300 killed, made second-hand in 1968, is not carried — the Commission's 11 found and 20 probable are the carried figures, printed separately, never added into a slogan.

5. Coniston, Northern Territory, 1928 (Documented Fact; figure Debated above the floor)

After dingo trapper Fred Brooks was killed, Constable George Murray's parties killed Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye people over some two months. The official Board of Inquiry figure was 31 killed; the scholarly range runs higher, and Warlpiri oral tradition holds the number higher still — Tradition — the people's own account, carried at its own weight. The Board found the shootings justified; no one was charged. The Warlpiri stand today, their language strong: a massacre of a living people is not an extinction, in either direction.

6. Protection, missions and the taking of the children (Documented Fact)

After the frontier came administration. In New South Wales an Aborigines Protection Board was established in 1883 and the Protection Act 1909 controlled reserves, movement and children; from 1915 the Board could remove and apprentice children without a court hearing. Queensland's Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 let the Chief Protector remove people onto and between reserves and hold children in dormitories; its Director was legal guardian of all Aboriginal children, living parents or not, until 1965 — and Queensland's Act became the model other states copied. The national inquiry, Bringing Them Home (tabled 26 May 1997), concluded in its own words that "between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities in the period from approximately 1910 until 1970" and that "not one Indigenous family has escaped the effects of forcible removal." The circulating figure of "at least 100,000 children" is a derived estimate built from the report's maximum rate, disputed by lower scholarly estimates of 20,000–25,000; this class carries the report's own range as the finding and both derived figures as Debated / Claim.

7. The official record — at its exact weight (Documented Fact)

In the 1967 referendum, over 90% of Australians voted Yes for the Commonwealth to make laws for Aboriginal people and count them in the census. On 3 June 1992, in Mabo, the High Court by 6:1 rejected terra nullius — the fiction that the continent belonged to no one — and recognised native title. On 13 February 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised as the new Parliament's first business: "We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country… we say sorry." The report Bringing Them Home had concluded the removals involved genocide as defined by international law — that is the inquiry's conclusion, Documented as such, never adopted by an Australian court; for the frontier wars and for Tasmania the word remains Debated among historians (Ryan concluding it occurred in Tasmania; Reynolds and Clements concluding it does not meet the 1948 Convention definition). The class prints each position at its weight and adopts none.

8. Declared gone — and living (Documented Fact)

The census lesson of this class: Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains were written off as extinct within decades of 1836, and their language's last native speaker, Ivaritji, died in 1929 — yet Kaurna descendants regrouped and the language was reawakened from the 1980s–90s, in the community's own framing: it "was only ever sleeping." Kalkadoon, Gunai/Kurnai and Gamilaraay stand the same way. So mainland Australia's verified count of exterminated peoples in this research stands at zero — a floor built by descendant checks, not an empty record: the massacres above are documented at full strength, and the peoples they were meant to end are, case after worked case, still here. The deep catalogue pass — every language worked individually, state by state — is owed and is named as owed in the research file, not filled in here by guesswork.

Sources for this class

Colonial Frontier Massacres Digital Map Project, University of Newcastle (final findings reported 23 Feb 2025; site entries for Battle Mountain, Warrigal Creek group, Forrest River) • National Museum of Australia, Defining Moments: Myall Creek • Bringing Them Home, HREOC, tabled 26 May 1997 • Parliament of Australia, Apology to Australia's Indigenous Peoples, 13 Feb 2008 • Wood Royal Commission, 1927 (findings as carried in the Forrest River record) • AIATSIS, Australian Indigenous Languages Collection; Mabo case record • Queensland Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897; NSW Protection Board (1883) and Aborigines Protection Act 1909, as carried in the protection-acts literature (Haebich 2000) • State Library of NSW, 1967 referendum record • Amery, Warraparna Kaurna!, and the Kaurna Warra revival record • Kalkadoon Tribal Council / Battle Mountain memorial record. Full research file: Australia and Tasmania — Frontier Wars, Removals, Missions and Child Removal, Genocide Record, Region 1 (Worldwide Census).

Back to the Grades 10–13 · College · University classes All History Classes