In 2019, the Australian War Memorial declined to include the Frontier Wars in its permanent exhibition. The decision sparked intense public debate. Critics argued that the omission of the longest armed conflict in Australian history — spanning more than 140 years — was itself a political act. Supporters argued that the Frontier Wars were not a "war" in the conventional sense and therefore fell outside the War Memorial's remit.
This debate was a continuation of a controversy that has run through Australian public life — particularly intensely since the 1990s — about whether the history of violent dispossession is acknowledged sufficiently, and about the nature of Australian national identity itself: can a nation built on the dispossession of its first inhabitants acknowledge that history without undermining the foundations on which it was built?
This article introduces the concept of the Frontier Wars, the historiographical debates surrounding them, and the reasons why these conflicts were, for so long, absent from Australia's public historical memory.
Terra nullius and its consequences
The foundational legal concept that shaped how colonial violence was recorded — and not recorded — is terra nullius — "land belonging to no one." When Britain claimed sovereignty over the Australian continent in 1788, it did so on the basis that the land was either unoccupied or occupied by peoples whose land use did not constitute legal ownership under British law. This claim was legally convenient but historically false: the continent was home to hundreds of distinct language groups with sophisticated legal, social, and spiritual systems that had governed their relationship with Country for tens of thousands of years.
The doctrine of terra nullius had profound consequences for how colonial violence was conceptualised and recorded. If the land was legally empty, then Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had no legal standing as owners or sovereigns. Their resistance to colonisation could be classified not as warfare — which would imply the legitimacy of the resisting party — but as criminal violence requiring policing, not military response. This framing shaped what records were kept. Colonial authorities recorded conflicts as "dispersals," "punitive expeditions," or "encounters" rather than battles. The language of warfare was reserved for "real" wars against recognised enemies.
Terra nullius was finally overturned in 1992, when the High Court of Australia ruled in Mabo v Queensland (No. 2) that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had a continuous legal relationship with their land before and after colonisation. But the legal overturning of terra nullius did not immediately transform public understanding or historical acknowledgement.
What are the Frontier Wars?
The term Frontier Wars refers to the extended series of armed conflicts between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and British colonists and their colonial military and police forces, from the earliest settlements in 1788 to the 1930s. The term was developed by historians including Henry Reynolds and has been formally adopted by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and the National Museum of Australia. It emphasises that these were genuine military conflicts — involving organised resistance, coordinated tactics, and military and paramilitary forces on both sides — rather than isolated incidents of criminal violence.
The scale of these conflicts is documented through the Colonial Frontier Massacres project at the University of Newcastle, led by Lyndall Ryan, which has identified more than 400 massacre sites — locations where six or more people were killed — across Australia between 1788 and 1930. The total death toll from all forms of frontier violence is estimated in the tens of thousands. These deaths occurred through direct military action, punitive expeditions carried out by the Native Police and settlers, and the deliberate destruction of food and water sources.
Three structural reasons for the historical silence
Legal and ideological suppression: The terra nullius doctrine defined resistance as criminality rather than warfare. Colonial authorities had no legal framework within which to record or acknowledge the Frontier Wars as wars. The very language available to colonial record-keepers prevented accurate description of what was happening.
Settler colonial identity: Australia's national identity was built partly on narratives of pioneering achievement — the "opening up" of the land by brave settlers. This narrative required a frontier that was peaceful or at most lightly contested. Acknowledging that the frontier was violently contested by its Indigenous owners required a fundamental revision of the national story that many settlers and their descendants were unwilling to make.
Deliberate suppression of evidence: Colonial officers who ordered or participated in killings had strong incentives not to document their actions. Some records were later suppressed or destroyed. The evidentiary record is incomplete not by accident but by design — the silence was actively created and maintained.
The historians and the history wars
The debate over how to write the history of colonial violence — known publicly as the "history wars" — is among the most significant historiographical controversies in Australian history. It has shaped public policy, legal decisions, and political language. Understanding the key positions is essential to understanding both the history and its ongoing significance.
Four dimensions of the historical silence
The historical absence of the Frontier Wars from Australia's public memory was not a natural consequence of limited evidence. It was produced by specific legal, ideological, political, and evidentiary mechanisms. Understanding these mechanisms as historical phenomena is itself an analytical skill.
Comparative settler colonial histories
New Zealand / Aotearoa has a different — though not uncomplicated — relationship with its colonial history. The Treaty of Waitangi (1840), signed between the British Crown and Māori chiefs, provides a founding legal and constitutional framework that explicitly acknowledges Māori prior sovereign status. New Zealand's Waitangi Tribunal hears historical grievances, and there is broad — though contested — public acknowledgement that colonial history involved injustice. The comparison highlights the significance of Australia's complete absence of any treaty between Britain and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Canada has gone further than Australia through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2007–2015), which documented the residential schools system and made 94 Calls to Action. The 2021 discoveries of unmarked graves at former residential schools renewed and intensified these debates. Canada's experience demonstrates both what formal acknowledgement can achieve and its limits when unaccompanied by structural change.
What breaking the silence requires: Serious historical engagement with the Frontier Wars began in the 1970s and 1980s, driven by the land rights movement, the work of historians like Reynolds, and changing attitudes among younger Australians. The process continues and is incomplete. The 2023 referendum on the Voice to Parliament demonstrated that questions of recognition and sovereignty remain deeply contested. The War Memorial debate continues. And the most fundamental questions — what does Australia owe the peoples whose lands were taken, and what would genuine reckoning look like — remain unresolved.