Australian Wars were not officially declared and there were no treaties. They must be understood through the real events that make them up. When researching historical accounts bear in mind colonists were often unconcious of or ignored the way Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander saw the country, and the events that took place.

It is necessary to read between the lines and combine with Indigenous people's knowledge and perspectives, and an understanding of the country itself to begin to appreciate the full story.

The main primary sources for information on these events, where, when and why they were fought and why, and the people involved are:

• newspaper reports
• oral history
• government records
• records of 'Protectors of Aborigines' and missionaries
• squatters and other colonists journals, letters and diaries
• country

Some recommended examples of these can be found on the Sources page.

Be aware of guidelines for Indigenous research such as:

• UNDRIP: United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
• AIATSIS Code of Ethics
• CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance
• Local community protocols.

Educate yourself, ask first, be respecful and responsible.

The main primary sources for information on these events, where, when and why they were fought and why, and the people involved are: Newspaper reports

One of the quickest and best ways to get started researching these events is to search the National Library of Australia's Trove.

If you aren't already familiar with it, it is worth spending a morning or afternoon getting used to it, considering you can instantly search millions of pages from more than a thousand historical newspapers.

Tips for searching Trove:

• Use advanced search.
• Use combinations of words related to Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people, and words related to violence. Colonists used words like sometimes using racist language and words we don't use much any more, such as 'outrage'. Some useful terms are: aboriginal, blacks, native, kill, massacre, burn, steal.
• Set a date range to help narrow down to the period of most violence. You can use the dates of a particular war on this website as a guideline. You could also look at the dates of matching articles and use those to narrow down to a particular year or decade.
• Use place names to narrow down to a particular region. Usually the main towns in a region and major rivers are a good place to start. Before colonial towns, colonists often refered to places by river names, or by the names of squatter's runs.
• You may need to experiment with different combinations of words in the 'Any', 'All' and 'Phrase' sections to narrow down your search and filter out too many irrelevant articles.
• Once you find one or two relevant articles use clues from these to help your search. For example if you find the name of a squatters run is used, or an Aboriginal person is named, you can use this in a new search to find other articles.

Here is an example of a Trove search for any of several keywords between 1835 and 1845.

Traditional oral culture includes procedures and customs for keeping stories that contain important knowledge intact and unchanged. Although there are a lot of written records about this violent history, much of it was concealed by a code of silence among colonists. In some cases oral history is the only source of information about particular instances. In some cases colonial and Indigenous perspectives confirm each other, or provide additional details and different perspectives.

Oral histories are sometimes made available through recordings available on the internet. They can also be found in written form in published books and journal articles, or in archives.

Colonial governments and the British government sometimes discussed frontier violence in parliament or produced detailed reports on outbreaks of violence, the activities of military and police. Colonial Governors and other staff also correspondended with the British Government on these topics. There are also police records and correspondence. These sources provide information about specific incidents, the situation on the frontier, and Government attitudes and policies. They are available in different forms. Some have been scanned are available freely on the web. Others can be found in library databases. Some records are scans of extensive and detailed records that may be handwritten, and it can take a long time to find relevant information. In some cases there are large archival collections, only available in microfilm or hardcopy. Some of the most important Government papers are shown on the Sources page. A local or state library can provide help with finding and accessing these kind of records.

'Protectors of Aborigines' were appointed by the Government to act in the interests of Aboriginal people and missionaries acted on behalf of the church, aiming to convert people to Christianity. This ultimately meant removals to reserves and missions, or being directed into labour for colonists. Institutions and the people working in them were responsible for other forms of violence against Indigenous people, including abuse, destruction of culture, control of every aspect of life and eugenics.

'Protectors' and missionaries were also sometimes very interested in culture and language, and made records that are valuable today, and were outspoken against frontier violence. They kept detailed records of people's names and sometimes acted as intermediaries. They sometimes prevented open violence of colonists and reported it. Protectors and missionaries papers can be a valuable source on culture, named individuals, and violent incidents that otherwise went unrecorded.

Squatters and other colonists sometimes kept diaries and journals and sent detailed letters. These can provide very candid versions of what happened. In some cases these survived and in some cases they describe specific events and the attitude of people at the time. These sources can sometimes be hard to find and access. There is a not a large and easy to search source such as Trove. It can be hard to learn were to find these, and when found, there may be large amounts of difficult hand writing to go through. These are usually kept in library archives, often on microfilm. Librarians can help find and access this information. A good place to start is by checking the references and footnotes of history books about the region and the period. Historians have often done a lot of the hard work in going through archives to find this information. They don't always include all the information or all the details, so it is worth checking the source. There may be further clues in the same letters and archives.

Books and articles by historians and academics provide thorough and detailed information and should be well referenced. As well as providing an overview and guide to what happened, the citations and references are a shortcut to tracking original sources.

In brief, the aim our research plan 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.

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 its 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.

Some Australian Wars are already relatively well recognised, such as the Sydney Wars, First Wiradjuri War (Bathurst War), the Black War or Tasmanian Genocide in Lutruwita, the Eumeralla War and the Bunuba Resistance lead by Jandamarra. Other wars are less widely recognised by have been identified through books being about them such as ‘Goodbye Bussamarai’ (Pat Collins), or Surviving New England (Callum Clayton-Dixon). John Connor's 'Frontier Wars' discusses wars that military forces were officially involved in: Sydney, Hawkesbury Nepean, Bathurst (Wiradjuri), Hunter Valley, Northern (Tiwi and Iwaidja), Western (Nyungar), Van Diemen's Land, Liverpool Plains and, Port Phillip District. Some distinct regions of violence are discussed within books about colonial violence generally which focus on topics such as resistance, the Native Police, genocide; resistance leaders of individual colonists, or on specific incidents such as the spearing of Governor Phillip or the Myall Creek Massacre.

Wars and resistance are remembered by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the invasion and defence of their particular homelands. While a good case, grounded in theory and evidence, can be made for calling these conflicts ‘war’ some prefer another term, because of the extreme unfairness and one-sidedness or ‘assymetry’ of the conflict, and so this website uses the term ‘Resistance’ for those situations.

Colonial primary sources indicate that colonists often referred to violence in particular regions as ‘war’. Historical works and primary sources can be found discussing, to a greater or lesser degree, every war or resistance movement marked on the map.

Massacres as evidence

Violent conflict and resistance spread, continuously and contiguously across the content as the colonial frontier spread, as demonstrated by the spread of massacres. There are many decades during which there was at least one known massacre every year. Yet, the genocide in Lutruwita/Tasmania in the early period, is different to the conflict in the Northern Territory and Kimberley in the later period. How can we distinguish each war, one from another, in this continuum of violence?

With some exceptions there were no official declarations of war or treaties, so we must look at the real events that comprise wars. Because they were fought as asymmetrical guerilla wars these events were not pitched battles between large armies, but raids, killings and massacres, usually carried out by small mobile groups or individuals.

Across the continent there are periods of more intense violence in regions. Although it may be difficult to identify where they start and end, and they are all connected, we can still see where and when open violence is most intense. To make an analogy, although the colours of a sunset merge into each other, we can still tell the difference between orange and blue. In some cases there may be a specific event to mark the beginning or end of a war, such as a rape, killing or stock raid, which triggered an escalation of war, but in many cases there is a gradual and overlapping transition to the mission phase, with different forms of violence and resistance.

Massacres are cases of extreme violence against a people. Data on massacres can be used to identify periods and times of intensity in conflict. The Colonial Frontier Massacres, 1788 to 1930 (Ryan et al) data was gathered with a consistent methodology across Australia, with rigorous evidence based criteria for inclusion, and so provides a robust indicator of intensity of violence in places over time. Simply looking at the massacre map we can easily see some areas of intensity at particular times, such as the Eumeralla Wars (western Victoria), the Murray River, the east coast, the central desert and the Kimberley, and that natural barriers make some of these distinctions obvious, such as in Lutruwita/Tasmania and in Nyungar country (south west WA).

Computational clustering methods provide a way to more rigorously identify and visualise regions and times of intensity. These methods separate massacres into groups either by how close together they are in kilometres and/or in time, or by grouping based on which events are to each other (see the clustering code for detail on this process). This helps us identify focal points of intense violence that we might not have seen before. What cut off point in terms of kilometres or duration counts as 'near' and 'far' may be debatable, and varies with different terrain and ecology, but it is hard to argue that at least 3 massacres within a few years, in a region about the same size as an Indigenous nation or language group are isolated incidents - this is clearly an intense period of violence between two groups of people.

Massacres are not the only factor to consider. There are many other events. Computational clustering provides evidence of wars, and helps distinguish them, but this must also be considered in relation to over events, historical context and Indigenous knowledge. In all cases of wars identified by clustering, some match already recognised wars, and all have been identified by historians at least through there being some discussion of them as conflict in that particular region, to a greater or lesser degree. For these reasons, some clusters have been adjusted, and some have been identified where there were relatively few known massacres, based on other evidence (Tiwi Islands, Southern Wiradjuri, Flinders Ranges and Eyre Peninsula). Intensity of violence as signified by massacres provides reliable evidence for a distinct war in a place and time. Absence of massacres or there being few massacres in a region does not disprove the existence of a war. The extent of war is not limited to the first and last massacre. Other considerations, such as intensity of other acts of violence, the involvement of military and paramilitary forces, etc, may be evidence of war, and its extent.

Wars within wars

Another difficulty in distinguishing wars is at what scale to make the distinction. At one extreme there is an individual incident, at the other there is colonial frontier violence across the entire continent. When we look at the massacre map we can see broad regions of intensity made up of smaller regions of intensity. Looking at historical descriptions, conflict is sometimes discussed in broad terms, such as the 'Rising' of the entire south east of Australia (Kerkhove, 2023; Gapps, 2025) or in terms of smaller regions (Millis, 1992; Collins, 2022) or individual events (Lydon & Ryan, 2017).

Computational clustering methods depend on what the threshold of distance for 'near' and 'far' is set at. If it is set small, small clusters form, if large then large clusters form. Some clusters are consistent across many scales, others less so. Working form large to small we see wars within wars, or smaller regional conflicts that are part of much larger conflicts. Working through this, the most coherent way to describe the various scales, that accords best with historians and Indigenous people's discussion of these wars and with the clustering methods, is as 4 scales of conflicts within conflicts:

• Periods - There are four broad periods: early, southern, northern and late period. This distinction is based on time.
• Regions - These are broad areas of conflict. This distinction is focused on space. In some cases some wars in a region, are in different periods.
• Wars - These are areas and times of intense and open armed violence between colonists and Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people. At this scale of conflict, the area typically involved one or several peoples or language groups, and often involved the same individuals, neighbours and groups of colonists, such as particular squatters and police officers. This scale usually correspond to an ecological zone, and a region sought after by colonists for economic reasons, such as pastoral regions or for cash crops.
• Stages - Within each war there may be distinct phases, such as an early and late phase, and may involve a flow of conflict from one area to another. Stages help understand the story of a war's ebb and flow. For example, it may begin with attacks near a river and stations, and culminate in the mountains or wetlands.

For more details about the process see the Plan and the computational results.

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.

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.

• Introduction (important explanatory information for understanding the process)
• Identified Map (showing the resulting provisional map using clusters adjusted using historical knowledge)
• Spatio-temporal Distance Based Clustering (the most thorough and exhaustive look at the clusters)
• K-Nearest Neighbour Clustering (the most easy to understand cluster results)

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.

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.

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

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.