Australian frontier wars
| Australian frontier wars | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Mounted police engaging Indigenous Australians during the Slaughterhouse Creek Massacre of 1838 |
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| Belligerents | |||||
| European settlers | Indigenous Australians | ||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||
| Minimum 2,000–2,500 dead | Most common estimate: 20,000 minimum dead | ||||
The Australian frontier wars were a series of conflicts that were fought between Indigenous Australians and mainly British settlers that spanned a total of 146 years. The first fighting took place several months after the landing of the First Fleet in January 1788 and the last clashes occurred as late as 1934. The most common estimates of fatalities in the fighting are at least 20,000 Indigenous Australians and between 2,000 and 2,500 Europeans. However, recent scholarship on the frontier wars in what is now the state of Queensland indicates that Indigenous fatalities may have been significantly higher. Indeed, while battles and massacres occurred in a number of locations across Australia, they were particularly bloody in Queensland, owing to its comparatively larger pre-contact Indigenous population.
Far more devastating in their impact on the Aboriginal population, however, were the effects of disease, infertility, loss of hunting grounds and starvation. There are indications that small-pox epidemics may have impacted heavily on some Aboriginal tribes, with depopulation in large sections of what is now Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland up to 50% or more, even before the move inland from Sydney of squatters and their livestock. Other diseases hitherto unknown in the Indigenous population—such as the common cold, flu, measles, venereal diseases and tuberculosis—also had an impact, significantly reducing their numbers and tribal cohesion, and so limiting their ability to adapt to or resist invasion and dispossession.
In 1770 a British expedition under the command of then-Lieutenant James Cook made the first voyage by Europeans along the Australian east coast. On 29 April Cook and a small landing party fired on a group of Tharawal people who sought to prevent the British from landing near their camp at Botany Bay, by Cook described as "a small village". Two Tharawal men made threatening gestures and a stone was thrown to underline that the whites were not welcome to land at that spot. Cook then ordered "a musket to be fired with small-shot" and the elder of the two was hit in a leg. This caused the two Tharawal men to run to their huts and seize their spears and shields. Subsequently a single spear was thrown at the whites which "happily hurt nobody". This then caused Cook to order "a third musket with small-shots" to be fired, "upon which one of them threw another lance and both immediately ran away." Cook did not make further contact with the Tharawal, but later established a peaceful relationship with the Kokobujundji people when his ship, HM Bark Endeavour, had to be repaired at present-day Cooktown.
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