Massacres

by Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck,
with extensive footnotes, index and photographs.

...Regardless of all the nice talks, policies and promises in England during the 1830s, South Australia was invaded in 1836. The British government called it settled instead and pursued a new approach to the treatment of Aboriginal people that would hopefully avoid the horrific violence that had been part of earlier Australian settlement. From now on any acts of violence or injustice towards Aborigines would be punished 'with exemplary severity'.

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".