Methods

Violent conflict occurred across Australia as the colonial frontier spread. How can we disinguish one war from another in this continuum of violence?

These wars were undeclared and there are no treaties. As they are 'unofficial' wars, they must be inferred from real events.

Some wars have already long been identified, such as the 'Black War' in Lutruwita, the Eumeralla War and the Bunuba Resistance in the Kimberley. Others have not yet been distinguished from the overall spread of violence across the continent, or are typically understood focusing on specific incidents rather that the regional context they occurred within.

We would expect warfare in Australia to be different to other parts of the world, such as Europe or Asia. These were very 'asymmetrical' conflicts with sides unevenly matched in almost every regard - culture, technology, size of forces, familiarity with terrain, and so on. These wars were fought in an environment very different to Europe or Asia. We would not expect wars to be fought in a similar manner to Eurasian wars with large massed, evenly matched armies fighting pitched battles on fronts. Instead we would expect the sort of guerilla and anti-insurgent strategies that are evidenced in historical records and Indigenous knowledge. Violence occurred across the entire continent corresponding to the ongoing spread of colonisation. Where and when wars and resistance occurred can be identified by collecting information about specific events.

In Australian history it is important to distinguish between 'de facto' (reality) and 'de jure' (by decree). For example, the British declared Australia to be it's colony, yet did not govern, and had not even seen much of it, with parts remaining unseen by colonists into the 1900s. The history of squatting demonstrates that the government did not actually govern the entire continent, and only progressively gained control. The Australian colonial frontier can be understood as a broad moving region between the first presence of a colonist and the exercise of government control over land and people. In this interim frontier phase there was open conflict between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. This sometimes started with a tentative peace, and the details of events are often complex - things aren't 'black and white'. Sometimes there was conflict among colonists, and among Indigenous peoples, and colonists sometimes recruited Aboriginal people and the role of Aboriginal people in the Native Police is notorious. While resistance continued after this period, this study is limited to the period of open conflict, when the Government could not effectively control individuals and access to land, prior to the exercise of Government control during which they could effectively police and control who 'owned' land, who lived where and could identify and remove individuals to missions and reserves.

Specific wars and resistance movements can be distinguished from each other by identifying periods of intensity of open violence in a region. These clusters of intense violence demonstrate that they were not isolated incidents or the 'crimes' of individuals, but part of a broader mortal conflict between two groups of people over land, water, resources and the ability to exist as a people - ie: a war. While different to 'conventional' warfare, these conflicts meet dictionary definitions of war and canonical theories of war, such as those of Clausewitz (Daase & Davis, 'Clausewitz on Small War', 2015) and the Australian Army. In Australia there has been mortal violence between two groups of people over land, water, resources and the ability to exist as a people. While there are many definitions of and theories about war, it would be hard to argue that such a situation is not war.

The quantitative evidence can make a minimal identification, and reliably establish the kernel of a war, but needs to be validated and adjusted. The approach to identifying wars is to combine quantitative methods with history and Indigenous knowledge. Each of these alone does not provide the full story. As an example of the limitation of clustering methods there is only one massacre recorded in the massacre database on the Eyre Peninsula, so it would not be identified as a cluster, yet intense conflict involving the military is historically documented. In terms of Indigenous knowledge, at Coniston colonists reported massacres on three reprisal expeditions and later hinted they didn’t mention all of them. More massacres around Coniston over a broader area are recorded in Warlpiri, Kaytetye and Anmatjere oral history. Quantitative evidence, history and Indigenous knowledge are all needed to complete the story.

Massacres are only part of the story. Almost all massacres were of Aboriginal people by colonists, and were a strategy of the colonial side, along with rape, blocking access to food, water and resources, abduction, removals, and smaller scale killings. The resistance primarily used raids on stock, stores and buildings, evasion, targeted killing and more rarely massacre and massed forces. The start and end date is taken from the earliest and latest incident in this data. In many cases these are not the best events to regard as signalling the start or end of the war or resistance movement. For example, the abduction of women, or the execution of resistance leaders might be better indicators. The dates, regions, details and names of these wars will change as research improves our knowledge about them.

Steps

  1. Use clustering methods on Colonial Frontier Massacre data to identify and distinguish periods of intense violence in regions. These periods of localised intensity are not isolated incidents. They provide a minimal set of evidence for a distinct war. (complete)
  2. Use historical and available Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge to validate these results and produce a map of the wars. (provisional map complete)
  3. Establish a minimum set of information about each war and provide access to sources. (in progress)
  4. Continue collaborative research and productions in coming years, updating information on the website, and providing access to that research through the website.

Results

The initial step of applying clustering methods to the Colonial Frontier Massacre data to produce a provisional map is complete. Kaine Usher wrote the core functionality of the code, modified by Bill Pascoe to show all results. To see the working, you can view the Jupyter Notebooks which include interactive maps below. Developers may wish to obtain the JupyterNotebooks from the Github repository.