The Native Americans played a complex and varied part in the 19th-century frontier warfare. Throughout Australia’s colonial history, European settlers and Indigenous Australians engaged in a number of battles known as the “border wars.” Before the arrival of the Europeans, the Aboriginal people had inhabited the country for thousands of years and had formed a strong spiritual and cultural bond with it.
The rights and interests of the Indigenous people who had already lived there were frequently ignored when European settlers started to occupy and claim territory in Australia. The new technologies, weaponry, and diseases that the immigrants introduced had a catastrophic effect on the Indigenous population. Numerous Aboriginal people were slaughtered or driven from their ancestral lands, forever altering their way of life.
Numerous Indigenous groups fought back against the settlers in response to these developments. They resisted the uprooting and dispersal of their people in many ways, including guerilla warfare. The settlers violently responded to this opposition, frequently carrying out punitive expeditions and killings.
Many Indigenous people died during the frontier wars, which were a devastating period in Australian history that also resulted in the eradication of their way of life. Despite this, the Indigenous people persevered in the face of overwhelming hardship and still fight against the effects of colonisation today.
It’s crucial to remember that the word “frontier wars” is new and not universally recognised; some people prefer to use the terms “colonisation conflict” or “invasion” to describe historical conflicts. It’s difficult to fully calculate the number of Indigenous people who died because there aren’t enough records and paperwork. Some estimates place the death toll at 20,000 or even more. Additionally, practises like the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families and the denial of basic rights meant that violence against Indigenous people did not end in the 19th century but persisted long into the 20th.
