Conflict and disease

According to the historian Geoffrey Blainey, in Australia during the colonial period: "In a thousand isolated places there were occasional shootings and spearings. Even worse, smallpox, measles, influenza and other new diseases swept from one Aboriginal camp to another ... The main conqueror of Aborigines was to be disease and its ally, demoralisation".[38]

Conflict in the Hawkesbury Nepean river district near the settlement at Sydney continued from 1795–1816.[citation needed] Pemulwuy's War (1795–1802), Tedbury's War (1808–1809) and the Nepean War (1814–1816) as well as the interwar violence of the 1804–1805 Conflict. It was fought using mostly guerrilla-warfare tactics; however, several conventional battles also took place. The wars resulted in the defeat of the Hawkesbury and Nepean Indigenous clans who were subsequently dispossessed of their lands.[citation needed]

Even before the arrival of European settlers in local districts beyond coastal New South Wales, Eurasian disease often preceded them. A smallpox epidemic was recorded near Sydney in 1789, which wiped out about half the Aborigines around Sydney. Opinion is divided as to the source of the smallpox. Some researchers argue that the smallpox was acquired through contact with Indonesian fishermen in the far north and then spread across the continent, reaching the Sydney area in 1789. [39][40] Other research by Craig Mear,[41] Michael Bennett,[42] and Christopher Warren)[43] argues that, despite controversy, it is highly likely that the 1789 outbreak of smallpox was a deliberate act by British marines when they ran out of ammunition and needed to expand the settlement out to Parramatta.[44] Smallpox then spread well beyond the then limits of European settlement, including much of southeastern Australia, reappearing in 1829–30, killing 40–60 percent of the Aboriginal population.[45]

The impact of Europeans was profoundly disruptive to Aboriginal life and, though the extent of violence is debated, there was considerable conflict on the frontier. At the same time, some settlers were quite aware they were usurping the Aborigines place in Australia. In 1845, settler Charles Griffiths sought to justify this, writing; "The question comes to this; which has the better right—the savage, born in a country, which he runs over but can scarcely be said to occupy ... or the civilized man, who comes to introduce into this ... unproductive country, the industry which supports life."[46]

From the 1960s, Australian writers began to re-assess European assumptions about Aboriginal Australia—with works including Alan Moorehead's The Fatal Impact (1966) and Geoffrey Blainey's landmark history Triumph of the Nomads (1975). In 1968, anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner described the lack of historical accounts of relations between Europeans and Aborigines as "the great Australian silence."[47][48] Historian Henry Reynolds argues that there was a "historical neglect" of the Aborigines by historians until the late 1960s.[49] Early commentaries often tended to describe Aborigines as doomed to extinction following the arrival of Europeans. William Westgarth's 1864 book on the colony of Victoria observed; "the case of the Aborigines of Victoria confirms ...it would seem almost an immutable law of nature that such inferior dark races should disappear."[50] However, by the early 1970s historians like Lyndall Ryan, Henry Reynolds and Raymond Evans were trying to document and estimate the conflict and human toll on the frontier.

 
Proclamation issued in Van Diemen's Land in 1816 by Lieutenant-Governor Arthur, which explains the precepts of British Justice in pictorial form for the Tasmanian Aboriginals. Tasmania suffered a higher level of conflict than the other British colonies.[51]
Truganini, a Tasmanian Aboriginal who survived the outbreak of disease and conflicts which followed the British colonisation of Van Diemen's Land.Many events illustrate violence and resistance as Aborigines sought to protect their lands from invasion and as settlers and pastoralists attempted to establish their presence. In May 1804, at Risdon Cove, Van Diemen's Land,[52] perhaps 60 Aborigines were killed when they approached the town.[53] The British established a new outpost in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) in 1803. Although Tasmanian history is amongst the most contested by modern historians, conflict between colonists and Aborigines was referred to in some contemporary accounts as the Black War.[54] The combined effects of disease, dispossession, intermarriage and conflict saw a collapse of the Aboriginal population from a few thousand people when the British arrived, to a few hundred by the 1830s. Estimates of how many people were killed during the period begin at around 300, though verification of the true figure is now impossible.[55][56] In 1830 Governor Sir George Arthur sent an armed party (the Black Line) to push the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes out of the British settled districts. The effort failed and George Augustus Robinson proposed to set out unarmed to mediate with the remaining tribespeople in 1833.[57] With the assistance of Truganini as guide and translator, Robinson convinced remaining tribesmen to surrender to an isolated new settlement at Flinders Island, where most later died of disease.[58][59]

In 1838, at least twenty-eight Aborigines were murdered at the Myall Creek in New South Wales, resulting in the unprecedented conviction and hanging of seven white settlers by the colonial courts.[60] Aborigines also attacked white settlers—in 1838 fourteen Europeans were killed at Broken River in Port Phillip District, by Aborigines of the Ovens River, almost certainly in revenge for the illicit use of Aboriginal women.[61] Captain Hutton of Port Phillip District once told Chief Protector of Aborigines George Augustus Robinson that "if a member of a tribe offend, destroy the whole."[62] Queensland's Colonial Secretary A.H. Palmer wrote in 1884 "the nature of the blacks was so treacherous that they were only guided by fear—in fact it was only possible to rule...the Australian Aboriginal...by brute force"[63] The most recent massacre of Aborigines was at Coniston in the Northern Territory in 1928. There are numerous other massacre sites in Australia, although supporting documentation varies.

From the 1830s, colonial governments established the now controversial offices of the Protector of Aborigines in an effort to avoid mistreatment of Indigenous peoples and conduct government policy towards them. Christian churches in Australia sought to convert Aborigines, and were often used by government to carry out welfare and assimilation policies. Colonial churchmen such as Sydney's first Catholic archbishop, John Polding strongly advocated for Aboriginal rights and dignity[64] and prominent Aboriginal activist Noel Pearson (born 1965), who was raised at a Lutheran mission in Cape York, has written that Christian missions throughout Australia's colonial history "provided a haven from the hell of life on the Australian frontier while at the same time facilitating colonisation".[65]

 
Aboriginal farmers at Loddon Aboriginal Protectorate Station at Franklinford, Victoria in 1858.
Hermannsburg Mission in the Northern Territory.The Caledon Bay crisis of 1932–34 saw one of the last incidents of violent interaction on the 'frontier' of indigenous and non-indigenous Australia, which began when the spearing of Japanese poachers who had been molesting Yolngu women was followed by the killing of a policeman. As the crisis unfolded, national opinion swung behind the Aboriginal people involved, and the first appeal on behalf of an Indigenous Australian to the High Court of Australia was launched. Following the crisis, the anthropologist Donald Thomson was dispatched by the government to live among the Yolngu.[66] Elsewhere around this time, activists like Sir Douglas Nicholls were commencing their campaigns for Aboriginal rights within the established Australian political system and the age of frontier conflict closed.

Co-operation
Frontier encounters in Australia were not universally negative. Positive accounts of Aboriginal customs and encounters are also recorded in the journals of early European explorers, who often relied on Aboriginal guides and assistance: Charles Sturt employed Aboriginal envoys to explore the Murray-Darling; the lone survivor of the Burke and Wills expedition was nursed by local Aborigines, and the famous Aboriginal explorer Jackey Jackey loyally accompanied his ill-fated friend Edmund Kennedy to Cape York.[67] Respectful studies were conducted by such as Walter Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen in their renowned anthropological study The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899); and by Donald Thomson of Arnhem Land (c. 1935–1943). In inland Australia, the skills of Aboriginal stockmen became highly regarded and in the 20th century, Aboriginal stockmen like Vincent Lingiari became national figures in their campaigns for better pay and conditions.[68]

Removal of children
The removal of indigenous children, which the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission argue constituted attempted genocide,[69] had a major impact on the Indigenous population.[70] Such interpretations of Aboriginal history are disputed by Keith Windschuttle as being exaggerated or fabricated for political or ideological reasons.[71] This debate is part of what is known within Australia as the History Wars.