From the first British settlement in 1788 to the end of the nineteenth century, the occupation of Australia proceeded through a series of local frontier conflicts as pastoralists took land and water and Aboriginal groups resisted. The University of Newcastle's Colonial Frontier Massacres project, which defines a massacre as the deliberate killing of six or more relatively undefended people in a single operation, has documented 438 massacre sites across the continent between 1788 and 1930, with approximately 10,657 people killed, a figure the project describes as indicative rather than definitive and deliberately conservative. The Yoorrook Justice Commission's presentation of the Victorian data records 50 massacres there between 1834 and 1860, with 978 Aboriginal people and 10 colonists killed, and 47 of the 50 carried out by colonists. Alongside the killing, introduced disease, the destruction of food resources and the confinement of survivors on reserves and missions under protection legislation transformed Aboriginal society. Systematic removal of Aboriginal children, which became large-scale in the twentieth century and was investigated in the 1997 Bringing Them Home inquiry, has its legislative origins in the protection acts of this period.
British colonists, native police and colonial governments dispossessed Aboriginal peoples across the Australian continent, killing them in massacres and confining survivors on reserves and missions
Estimates for 1788 are contested and have risen over time: A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's early figure of about 300,000 was long standard, Noel Butlin argued for 1-1.5 million on epidemiological grounds, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics has cited a range from at least 315,000 to 750,000 or more, with some scholars going higher. By the 1901 census the Aboriginal population had fallen to roughly 90,000-95,000. Frontier death tolls are similarly disputed, from Lyndall Ryan's massacre-project count of 11,000-14,000 to national estimates of 30,000 (Reynolds) and 100,000 or more (Ørsted-Jensen and Evans).
The lower figure is the count of people killed at documented massacre sites compiled by the University of Newcastle's Colonial Frontier Massacres project for 1788-1930, built from newspapers, government records, archives and oral histories under a strict corroboration standard; it counts only killings of six or more people in a single operation and the project describes it as indicative and conservative. The upper figure reflects the broader estimates of total Aboriginal deaths in frontier violence advanced by historians such as Henry Reynolds, which include smaller-scale killings, shootings by native police in the course of dispersal, and deaths that left no documentary trace. Neither includes the far larger mortality from introduced disease and the destruction of subsistence.
The University of Newcastle's Colonial Frontier Massacres project and the Yoorrook Justice Commission document massacres of Aboriginal people by colonists, settler parties and native police, and the destruction of camps and denial of access to water and food resources, drawing on newspapers, official records, archives and Aboriginal oral history.
Australia