Plan

In brief, the aim is to combine:

  • Indigenous Knowledge
  • Archival research
  • IT methods, communications and organising

using:

  • evidence
  • reason
  • ethics

to make for each war:

  • maps of events
  • lists of people
  • honest histories

The academic process welcomes debate and criticism intented to get closer to the truth. This is a large undertaking, and one person in one place can't know everything about everywhere, so local and knowledge and independant research often helps. Contact us with any feedback.

Theory

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. One of the main characteristics of the colonial frontier is the practice of squatting, in which colonists would drive stock into areas and set up pastoral runs, without acquiring permission from either Aboriginal people or the British government who regarded these lands as Crown Lands. In 1826 Governor Darling declared the Limits of Location which made this issue clear and official. Colonists were not permitted to settle beyond these limits (19 counties within a wide arc around Sydney), within which the government would exercise control. These limits were ignored. Later laws gained some control over squatting, but did not prevent it. 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 colonists (sometimes including government forces) and 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.

Following this frontier period, colonisation, violence and resistance continued in various forms and persist to this day. This study is limited to the frontier period of open violence, prior to Government control of a region. Generally this period of frontier violence was followed by the 'mission phase', during which the Government could effectively administer and police who 'owned' and had access land and water, and could identify and remove individuals to missions and reserves where every aspect of life was tightly controlled.

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.

Assess Feasibility (complete)

In 2022, the first year of the ARC funded Historical Frontier Violence project, Dr Bill Pascoe built on accumulated knowledge from the Colonial Frontier Massacres project to assess whether it would be feasible to map Australian Wars and Resistance across the whole of Australia. This included:

  • Considering whether there is a sound theoretical basis for regarding colonial frontier conflict in Australia as 'war', and the types of objections that might be raised.
  • considering whether it would be ethical to do this work, and how it can be done ethically
  • reviewing what data of various kinds of information would be relevant, available for the whole continent, or could be gathered within the scope of a funded project lasting a year to several years.
  • a review of primary and secondary historical literature, to determine whether something has been written on each region in Australia, and that sources would be available providing the necessary evidence.
  • that clustering methods using point data of historical incidents, specifically massacres, could be used to distinguish and identify wars, and that these identifications both a) correponded with wars already identified, or b) identified wars that have not yet been distinguished but which when checked against historical information can reasonably be regarded to as a distinct war.

The results of this indicated that, although it is a large undertaking, the work is feasible to complete.

Unfortunately, due to other priorities on that research project, it was not possible to take the next step and conduct the research. Hence we are seeking funding to continue this important work.

Distinguish & Identify Wars (complete)

Use computational 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.

The initial step of applying computational clustering methods to the Colonial Frontier Massacre data to produce a provisional map is complete.

These methods identify events that are grouped close together in space and time. These periods of localised intensity are not isolated incidents. A cluster of massacres indicates a sustained conflict over land, water, and the ability exist as a people. They provide a minimal set of evidence for a distinct war. These were compared with historical sources and available Indigenous Knowledge to confirm the groups identified made sense, at what scale to draw the distinction and to make adjustments based on other information. Wars are not limited to massacres. To establish the preliminary map in 4 cases (Tiwi Islands, Second Wiradjuri War, Flinders Ranges and Eyre Peninsula) events that are not massacres have been added for wars that are already recognised by historians. The plan is to research and identify more incidents related to wars and add them to the map.

Kaine Usher wrote the core functionality of the clustering 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.

IT & Workflows for Research & Display (fund raising)

IT is needed to handle the vast scale of this undertaking, in gathering and organising information, both during research, in reasoning about it and in making it available to the public. Without IT the work would not be feasible.

IT methods are needed to organise and make sense of large amounts of information once it has been gathered. The structured organisation of information in the Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788- 1930 project (Ryan et al) made it accessible to millions online, and hundreds still visit every day. The timeline reveals patterns and stories over time. Details and sources about each are available at the click of a button. Now that the project has finished and the information is as robust as we could make it, we have been able to use clustering analysis to distinguish times and places of more intense violence, and to infer where and when distinct wars occurred.

This has also enabled comparison with data from the The South Australian Frontier and its Legacies (Foster et al) and The First Wiradjuri War map (Gapps, 2025) to estimate that for every massacre 10 to 40 other events may be identified in historical archives and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge. This means, with 438 known massacres, there may be roughly 10,000 (between 4000 and 18,000) incidents to be researched.

In addition there are thousands of people who can be identified as participating in these wars and resistance. Dr Robyn Smith has listed more than 600 named colonial and Aboriginal perpetrators of massacres. To this can be added hundreds of named and thousands of unnamed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

To handle this scale, computational methods are needed for processing text to identify and connect places, people, and sources and report it in a way that can be checked by humans. The workflow leads to interactive maps, lists of people involved, and narratives. Quantitative analyses and IT methods help reveal patterns in large amounts of information, and help organise and visualise it, but considered alone are not adequate. An analysis based on massacres alone cannot be the full story – it is not complete without Indigenous knowledge and history to validate the results.

Systems are required to automate:

  • Identification of places in texts.
  • Identification of people in texts.
  • Date entry and corrections of structured data for associating people, place, events and sources.
  • Display of the main map derived from 'convex hull' of locations, linking to a page for each war.
  • Display of map of events, metadata and list of people for each war on its page.

Basic Details and Sources for Each War (in progress)

As it will take some time to raise funds and to conduct research on all wars, it would be ideal to at least provide a basic set of information about each war for visitors to the website. This would include:

  • Name and altername names of the war
  • Start date and event regarded as the start of the war.
  • End date and event regarded as the end of the war.
  • A brief summary of the war.
  • Key sources and recommended reading.

Research Collaborations on Each War (fund raising)

Dedicated collaborative research needs to be conducted on each war. Some wars are relatively well researched and other less so. Work up to this point has involved consultation and collaboration with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Funding for research into each war will commence involve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander of the communities whose country the war and resistance occurred in. We estimate that $30,000 funding for each war would be enough to research each war, split evenly as follows. This estimate may be revised after working on one or several wars:

  • Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community
  • Archival Research
  • Organisation, communications and IT

Conclude

Unless an institution takes on responsibility for the ongoing maintenance and updates to the data and the website into the future the project must end. Once a substantial amount of information is presented for each war and major issues resolved, a stable archive of the data will be created and deposited in a research repository. Our work will provide a good basis for future generations to continue truth telling.

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