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Articles on Frontier Wars

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Reminiscence of John Batman’s house above the Yarra Falls. A group of Aboriginal people camp at the lower right side near the river. Artist: WFE Liardet, 1875. Watercolour, pen, pencil and ink. Courtesy State Library of Victoria.

Eliza Batman, the Irish convict reinvented as ‘Melbourne’s founding mother’, was both colonised and coloniser on two violent frontiers

Eliza Batman has remained largely a footnote to her husband, whose dark deeds in the war over land are now well-known. How should we remember her today?
This sketch depicts the Waterloo Creek massacre (also known as the Slaughterhouse Creek massacre), part of the conflict between mounted police and Indigenous Australians in 1838. Godfrey Charles Mundy/National Library of Australia

Enforcing assimilation, dismantling Aboriginal families: a history of police violence in Australia

Police played a unique role in many settler colonies executing assimilationist policies designed to dismantle First Nations families.
Peta Clancy, Undercurrent 1, from the series Undercurrent, 2018-19, inkjet pigment print, W120 x H85cm each image approx. Courtesy the artist

Peta Clancy brings a hidden Victorian massacre to the surface with Undercurrent

There is a long history of cultural silence on the frontier wars that characterised Australia’s colonisation. Peta Clancy’s exhibition invites us to see this history in the Victorian landscape.
George Hamilton, Meeting natives on the Campaspi plains, Victoria, June 1836. National Library of Australia

Noble horses and ‘black monsters’: the politics of colonial compassion

George Hamilton published An Appeal for the Horse in 1866, a defence of animal welfare well ahead of its time. However, his compassion for Aboriginal people was conspicuously lacking.
In a painting such as Warriors of New South Wales, 1813, we can easily imagine a group of men ready to take to the football field. Australian War Memorial

Did Indigenous warriors influence the development of Australian rules football?

Between the 1830s and the 1850s, hundreds of Indigenous warriors and dozens of British settlers were killed across south-east Australia. Echoes of that conflict recur in Aussie rules.
A picture of strength: lifelong activist Bonita Mabo OA in front of her portrait as a young woman, which features in her granddaughter Boneta-Marie Mabo’s first solo exhibition. Josef Ruckli, courtesy of the State Library of Queensland

Black Velvet: redefining and celebrating Indigenous Australian women in art

Boneta-Marie Mabo’s art responds to a colonial past in which Aboriginal women were fetishised as “black velvet”. But it also celebrates strong women, including her activist grandmother Bonita Mabo.
In some parts of Australia, cattle properties have been hand over to the traditional owners, but for others the return of their land seems further away than ever. AAP/Jordan Baker

Kidman’s sale marks second wave of South Australian colonisation

The company built by ‘Cattle King’ Sidney Kidman is for sale. He enjoyed good relations with the Indigenous inhabitants, but proper recognition of their rights to their land seems ever more elusive.
Aboriginal gargoyles are the Australian War Memorial’s only overt representation, albeit unintentional, of a violent history of colonisation. James Sinclair

Gargoyles and silence: ‘our story’ at the Australian War Memorial

The Australian War Memorial promises to tell ‘our story’ about the nation’s war experience – but it silences many stories about Australia’s nationhood and glosses over Indigenous experience.
The Australian War Memorial recognises wars ranging from Afghanistan right back to pre-Federation conflicts, but not Australia’s first war. Alan Porritt/AAP

On Anzac Day, we remember the Great War but forget our first war

On Anzac Day, Australia remembers its war dead, with one tragic exception. Australia is apparently disinclined to acknowledge the fact or the importance of frontier conflicts. What’s the nexus between…

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