Frontier Wars

The remains of hundreds of First Nations people, dug up from sacred ground and once displayed in museums all over the world, are now stored in a Canberra warehouse. When will they be given an appropriate resting place? Some were passed off as victims of frontier violence between tribesmen – but mostly were defending traditional lands on the pastoral frontier – and colonial troops, paramilitary police forces, settler militia and raiding parties. Their bodies were cut up for parts that became sought-after antiquities across Australia and in cultural, medical and educational institutions globally.

Nowhere was resistance to white colonisers greater than from Tasmanian Aborigines, but within a generation only a few had survived the Black War.

Henry Reynolds says the frontier war - his term for the violent dispossession of First Nations peoples - raises questions of global importance about the ownership of an entire continent

... You can start by prosecuting those black abo, useless, drag on OUR Australian economy, grub eating mongrels. From the second letter of Max Milton Macalister esquire

Capitalism could not flourish without crushing the resistance of people who wanted to live differently ... wage labour and the drive to accumulate capital were incompatible with Aboriginal society. That incompatibility was the basis of the genocide. Across a vast stretch of northern Australia, extending at least from Borroloola to the Kimberley, Aborigines tell the tale of a murderous white man. He stands for whites in general, and is seen as an invader. As quoted in a paper by anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose; "shooting all the people [and] getting ready for the country, trying to take it away".

Before the new curriculum has even been taught, Extreme right wing Minister Christopher Pyne, raises questions over teaching of Aboriginal history and wants a strong slant on the benefits of white colonisation.

Standard Media - Kenya