A compendium of the Frontier Wars in Wide Bay, Burnett, Dawson and Leichhardt Districts 1840 – 1866 An account of just twenty-six years of the conflicts for the control of grazing lands and water resources. The defenders were full-time warriors, trained to a warrior’s code and the newcomers were the end of the emigrant generation and the beginning of the colonial-born generation. The Colonial Government introduced the Native Police into this conflict with small mobile, heavily armed patrols of a white officer and usually from four to six semi-trained killers out in the bush looking for mayhem and carnage. They became central to everything good or evil that happened on this frontier and help break the power of the clans for the sake of the Colony’s coffers.

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.

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.

An impressive work of historical sociology. Covers Aboriginal labour patterns, environmental history (masculinity, hunting and attempts to eliminate native fauna), issues in colonialism, post-colonialism and Australian Studies, social structure (class, race and gender), colonial political economy and intercolonial and global connections, the so-called 'Queensland difference'. (Full text available at URL)

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.

Goorie author Melissa Lucashenko tells two extraordinary stories set five generations apart. Torches Queensland’s colonial myths, while reimagining an Australian future.