Seven papers covering overview of race relations, Aboriginal occupation before European settlement, impact of European settlement, Aboriginal resistance and European repression, sexual relations between Aborigines and Europeans. law, administration and the press, Aborigines in the local economy, failure of assimilation, fate of local clans.

A historically informed, critical analysis of Aboriginal affairs and the ongoing political movement for land rights, treaty, sovereignty and the cessation of genocide. Featuring the best of blak music. Arts, Current Affairs, Environment, Human Rights, Indigenous, Local Communities, Protests.

Buried: Archaeology, frontier conflict and the Queensland Native Mounted Police investigates the Australian frontier through the historical and material legacies of the Queensland Native Mounted Police (NMP). Constituted in 1848 as a colonial force to subdue Aboriginal Peoples’ resistance to white incursions in their traditional lands, the NMP were a crucial force for race relations and the main colonising instrument across Queensland throughout the second half of the 19th century. In operation for 80 years, they were the longest lasting force of their kind in Australia – and notoriously the most brutal – but much of their activity has not been preserved in archives. Deriving from a four-year project to find and record the camp sites of the Queensland NMP, Buried combines archaeological evidence for the NMP’s activities – both violent and mundane – with historical evidence and oral histories from descendants of NMP troopers, officers and massacre survivors. Presented as part-archaeological investigation and part-social history of a still poorly understood frontier policing force, Buried tackles some of the most complex issues surrounding frontier violence, and challenges us to think more broadly about both the colonial past and its historical legacies in the present.

Coniston, Central Australia, 1928: the murder of an itinerant prospector triggered a series of police-led expeditions that ranged over vast areas for two months, with the ‘hunting parties’ shooting down Warlpiri victims by the dozen. The official death toll, declared by the whitewash federal inquiry as being all in self-defence, was thirty-one. The real number was certainly many times that.

The Coniston massacre, August-October 1928,  was the last known officially sanctioned massacre of Indigenous Australians and one of the last events of the Australian Frontier Wars. Between 31 and 200 Indigenous Australians were killed. The Wikipedia article is very well sourced.

The Queensland frontier was more violent than any other Australian colony. From the first penal settlement at Moreton Bay in 1824, as white pastoralists moved into new parts of country, violence invariably followed. Many tens of thousands of Aboriginals were killed. Europeans were killed too, but in much smaller numbers.