Abstract

Amongst other issues, the ‘History Wars’ raise the question as to

whether or not sites of conflict on the Australian colonial frontier

will be preserved in the archaeological record. We explore this

question through a consideration of what the expected nature of

any such evidence might be, based on general and specific

historical accounts and an understanding of site formation

processes. Although limited success has been achieved to date in

locating definitive evidence for such sites in Australia, we

conclude that there are some specific situations where archaeology

could usefully be applied to give rise to a more multi-dimensional

understanding of the past.

In recent years the extent and nature of colonial frontier

conflict has been at the fore of Australian public

consciousness as a result of the widely publicised ‘History

Wars’ – a fierce academic debate that has garnered extensive

media coverage (Attwood 2005; Attwood and Foster 2003;

Birch 1997; Blainey 1993; Clark 2002; Connor 2002;

Keating 1992; Macintyre and Clark 2004; Manne 2003;

Stanner 1968; Windschuttle 2000a, 2000b, 2002, 2009). The

crux of the argument is historiographical and also founded

in issues associated with the nature and reliability of social

memory, and the manner in which stories about the

relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples have

been constructed. As various scholars have demonstrated,

archaeology has the potential to provide alternative views of

the past, and in particular of Indigenous-settler relationships

(e.g. Harrison and Williamson 2004; Murray 2004; Paterson

et al. 2003; Silliman 2004; Stein 2005). Accordingly, some

historians have called for archaeologists to engage in

explorations of frontier conflict events through the

application of archaeological techniques (e.g. Attwood and

Foster 2003: 23). Such an approach affords the opportunity

to inform the historiographical debate, through elucidating

written and verbal renditions of frontier conflict events

and/or satisfying the lacunae evident in some historical and

oral accounts.

While most archaeologists are aware of the adage that ‘an

absence of evidence does not necessarily indicate evidence

of absence’, beyond our discipline this is not always the

case. There is concern that some people interpret the

surprisingly small number of massacre sites listed in state

and national heritage registers as further proof as to the

falsity of claims of extreme violence against Indigenous

people on the frontier. In this paper we provide an

explanation as to why so few massacre sites have been

identified archaeologically to date and, through a

consideration of their expected archaeological signatures,

discuss how researchers might effectively engage in the

investigation of such sites. We suggest that such

investigations do not necessarily run the risk of satisfying

revisionist arguments (cf Barker 2007: 12), if discussions of

site formation processes are well incorporated in published

accounts thereafter. Despite arguments by Barker (2007)

that the nature of Australian frontier conflict was such that

there is little probability of massacre events being

manifested in the archaeological record, anecdotal accounts

from archaeologists and Indigenous people dispute this, and

we argue below that evidence from particular types of

frontier massacres are more likely to be preserved than

others. While these might be comparatively rare, there is

little doubt they will be of extreme cultural significance to

Indigenous people. They will additionally be of high social,

historical and scientific significance to non-Indigenous

people and are worthy of identification, investigation and

protection.

The language of conflict

Given the emotive and contentious nature of the topic of

frontier conflict, and the perils of becoming enmeshed in

semantics, it is important to provide clear definitions for the

terminology we utilise in this paper. However, we wish to

make clear that in doing so we, like others before us, do not

intend in any way to ‘detract from the complex range of

suffering experienced by both Aborigines and colonists on

the frontier’ (Rowland 2004: 2).

Frontier

We follow the definition provided by Grguric (2008: 59) of

the frontier being ‘any area where colonial settlers were

using the land for agricultural, mining and/or livestock,

whilst Aboriginal people were still maintaining their

Archaeol. Oceania 46 (2011) 105–117

105

Looking for the proverbial needle?

The archaeology of Australian colonial frontier massacres

MIRANI LITSTER and LYNLEY A. WALLIS

Keywords: frontier conflict, massacre sites, History Wars, colonial Australia, site formation processes

ML: Archaeology and Natural History, College of Asia and the

Pacific, The Australian National University, Canberra ACT

0200. Email: mirani.litster@anu.edu.au. LAW: Dept. of

Archaeology, Flinders University, Adelaide SA 5001.

traditional life-ways in the area’. As we discuss later, land-

uses varied across Australia and sometimes resulted in

specific patterns of conflict, and therefore have implications

for site formation processes.

Frontier conflict

We define frontier conflict as that which occurred between

non-Indigenous settlers and Indigenous people in the

frontier areas. Thus we are particularly concerned with

conflict following British settlement of Australia during the

late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, though we

recognise that there were isolated instances of conflict

between Indigenous people and others prior to this time.

Massacre

The etymology of the noun ‘massacre’ reveals the term

derives from the Persian maslakh which was then adapted to

the ancient French maçacre (meaning ‘butchery’ or

‘slaughterhouse’) (Dauzat 1938: 462). This linguistic

history provides some understanding of what the term

means when in general usage; however, a comprehensive

definition of what constitutes a massacre in relation to

human deaths is more difficult to assign. Surprisingly, the

term is defined neither in international statute, nor in

modern Australian common law or criminal code (Muozos

2000: 83-4), and the UN cautions against using such a

phrase with ‘a high emotional charge, but no agreed

definition’ (Hoyos 2002: 7). Within this paper we are

concerned with considering the possible archaeological

signatures of massacre sites rather than broader frontier

conflict sites (cf. Barker 2007; Grguric 2008, 2010), and

thus it is necessary to adopt a consistent, explicit definition.

As such, when using the term massacre herein we are

referring to an event involving two parties:

• Victims – a group comprising more than one person,typically possessing inferior weaponry with which todefend themselves; and,

• Perpetrators – another group, who distinguishthemselves from their victims by having the power tokill without substantial risk of physically injuringthemselves, and who might generally be considered tohave instigated the event.

A massacre is also seen as having some temporality –

meaning that victims were killed at approximately the same

time or as a part of the same ‘action’ or ‘event’ over a

constrained period, usually no more than a few days. And

while Indigenous people were also responsible for carrying

out killings, in this paper we are particularly concerned with

massacres of Indigenous people by settlers.

A brief overview of frontier conflict in Australia

I look on the blacks as a set of monkies, and the earlierthey are exterminated from the face of the earth the better.A letter in the Australian, 18 December 1838 as cited inElder 2003:83

Before discussing the potential application of

archaeological techniques to frontier massacre sites, we

briefly review the historical context of such events on a state

by state basis. This provides a framework for understanding

the nature and timing of conflict that occurred, in order to

establish the scaffolding for the subsequent discussion of

how such events might be manifested archaeologically.

While we are concerned with frontier conflict post-1788,

this was by no means the first time that Indigenous

Australians had contact with foreigners. Frost (1987:371)

suggested that Portuguese explorers located the Australian

continent as early as 1530, though there is little written

evidence to support this claim. However, it is clear that

Aboriginal people along the northern shorelines and islands

had contact with Macassan trepangers from at least the mid-

1600s (May et al. 2010), and more regularly through the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Clarke 2000; Crawford

2001; MacKnight 1986; Morwood and Hobbs 1997). The

available historical and linguistic evidence is conflicting as

to the early nature of such relationships (Russell 2004), and

while the archaeological evidence can be interpreted to

indicate there may well have been an initial phase of

hostility (Stone 1999), there is as yet no clear understanding

of such events.

The first well-documented ‘discovery’ of the Australian

mainland by Europeans was at Cape York in the northeast in

1606 – an event that also marked the first recorded instance

of Indigenous-European conflict when one of the crew from

the Dutch vessel Duyfken was fatally speared near the

Wenlock River (Sutton 2008; see Figure 1). It was following

the British 1788 establishment of the Sydney Cove colony

[later to become New South Wales (NSW)] that sustained

conflict commenced. Here there was an active phase of well

documented killings and reprisal, a situation that was

exacerbated when pastoralism and farming spread west of

the Blue Mountains. Relationships disintegrated into

extreme violence and the ‘Black War’ of 1824, during which

106

Figure 1. Location of places and events mentioned in text.

many deaths on both sides were experienced (Pearson

1984), followed a decade later by the Waterloo Creek

massacre. Argued by some to be the largest mass killing in

Australian history, it involved the systematic killings in

1838 of an estimated 300 Aboriginal men, women and

children (Milliss 1992). The increasing incidence of conflict

and violent encounters in NSW ultimately led to the

formation of a colonial cavalry troop (Pearson 1984: 75).

This was arguably the precursor to the first official corps of

Native Mounted Police (NMP) that formed in 1842, which

were given instructions to ‘disperse’ Aboriginal people to

ensure colonial advancement (Reynolds 1991: 15).

Of further note in the history of colonial frontier violence

in NSW (and to which we refer later) was the Myall Creek

massacre, also in 1838. This massacre involved a group of

stockmen who rode into a pastoral station and killed most of

the Aboriginal inhabitants (Barber 1993; Connor 2002;

Elder 2003; Rowley 1972). Word of the killings soon

became common knowledge and the action eventuated in a

trial in which seven of the eleven stockmen involved were

found guilty of murder and hanged on 18 December 1838

(Reece 1974:140, R v Douglass, R v Kilmeister). This repre-

sented the first killing of Aboriginal people whereupon the

perpetrators were punished, ultimately resulting in the

emergence of more clandestine – rather than overt – acts of

frontier violence against Aboriginal people.

Settlement in the southeast soon encroached beyond

NSW towards the new colonies of Victoria in the south

(with an initial settlement in 1803 being abandoned before

successful official resettlement in 1834) and Queensland

(QLD) to the north (where settlement commenced from

1825 with official separation from NSW in 1859). While the

former witnessed conflict associated with pastoralism

similar to that experienced in NSW (Critchett 1990: 28-9),

the latter experienced pressure from the expansion of

additional industries including mining and fisheries (Loos

1993: 11). As had been the case in NSW, the NMP were also

adopted in QLD, an event which Rowley (1972: 39)

considered to be ‘the final bankruptcy of frontier policy’.

The actions of the QLD-based NMP are sufficiently

recorded in newspapers and archives (even excluding

instances of clerical errors or exaggeration) to confirm them

as ‘one of the major causes of violent Indigenous deaths in

colonial Queensland’ (Richards 2008: 207).

Tasmania was settled as a penal colony in 1804 and the

frontier conflict that ensued in this state is amongst the most

widely acknowledged by historians (e.g. Ryan 1981; cf

Windschuttle 2002). A notable occurrence here was the

1804 massacre at the Risdon Cove settlement, involving the

death of between probably two and 50 members of an

Aboriginal hunting party at the hands of settlers and

soldiers. This event arguably set the scene for how

participants of that state subsequently viewed each other

(see Tardiff 2003). By 1835, after George Augustus

Robinson had travelled Tasmania trying to locate surviving

Aboriginal people to remove them to settlements on

offshore islands, it was estimated that of at least 4000

(probably many more) inhabitants at the time of British

arrival (Jones 1974; Pardoe 1986; Stockton 1983), only ca

150 remained (Birmingham 1992; Plomley 1966, 1987).

Indeed, Indigenous-settler conflict in Tasmania was

arguably so sustained, brutal and systematic that some

historians have suggested it might represent a case of

genocide (e.g. Armand 2003; Elder 2003: 29-48).

South Australia (SA) was settled as a free colony in 1836;

however, despite initial attempts by the British Crown to

protect local inhabitants (Rigney et al. 2008), here too

colonisation was severely detrimental to the lives of

Aboriginal people. As the interior became more settled,

more clandestine episodes of violence occurred: ‘for settlers

who were a long way from Adelaide and often well beyond

the range of police and other government officials,

utilitarian concerns prevailed’ (Foster et al. 2001: 5). A

demonstration of the extent of violence in this free

settlement – where convicts and military personnel did not

form the basis of the population – is clear when examining

the effects of settlement on the Ngarrindjeri, the Traditional

Owners of the lower reaches of the Murray River and

Coorong region. In 1836 it was estimated there were 3000

Ngarrindjeri (Jenkin 1979); by 1875 only ca 100 remained

(Taplin 1879). And while some of the deaths were

attributable to the effects of disease (Campbell 2002), at

least a portion were the result of deliberate violence by

settlers (Foster et al. 2001).

Owing to slower rates of settlement and increased

remoteness from the southeastern hub, Western Australia

(WA; with an initial settlement at King George Sound in

1826 followed by a settlement at the Swan River – later to

become the capital Perth – in 1829) and the Northern

Territory (NT; settled initially in 1825 as part of NSW but

administered by SA from 1863–1911) saw conflict continue

later in time than in the other Australian colonies and states.

Collisions in the NT and northern WA related largely to the

expanding pastoral industry (Roberts 2005: 1-23). In the

south, clearance and farming of substantive tracts of

Aboriginal land were the main sources of conflict where, for

example, the 1834 Battle of Pinjarra saw the killing of

between 15 and 80 Nyungar people, though Aboriginal

accounts suggest the victim count was in the hundreds

(Connor 2002: 76-83; Reynolds 1987). In WA and the NT

the more recent occurrence of conflict has sometimes

resulted in relatively better historical records of such events,

as well as increasingly convincing oral testimony. For

instance, the Forrest River massacre of 1926 (Fitzgerald

1984; Green 1995) and the Coniston Station massacre of

1928 (Cribbin 1984) were both punitive expeditions that

were later subjects of legal inquiry and as a result generated

large bodies of related archival material. Like the massacre

at Wounded Knee in North America, the Coniston Station

massacre is generally regarded as marking the ‘closing’ of

the Australian frontier.

As illustrated, the nature and timing of frontier violence

varied across Australia, though certain general patterns to

the interaction can be discerned, following Elkin (1951). He

considered that initial encounters, typically with explorers,

were part of ‘a transition phase marked by observation and

107

careful contact’, with the underlying assumption on the part

of Indigenous parties that the ‘newcomers are temporary

sojourners only’ (Elkin 1951: 166-7). Yet there were

exceptions. For example, Frederick Walker’s exploration

party of 1861 (in search of the ill-fated Burke and Wills

expedition) encountered a group of approximately 30

Aboriginal men in the vicinity of the Stawell River who

were fired on, the result being that ‘Twelve were killed, and

few if any escaped unwounded … The gins [sic] and

children had been left camped on the river and as there was

no water there our possession of the spring was no doubt the

cause of the war’ (Walker, 31 October 1861). Likewise, the

establishment of the Canning Stock Route saw violent

clashes causing deaths on both sides, resulting in a Royal

Commission being held to scrutinize the treatment of

Aboriginal people by exploration party members (Bianchi etal. 2010). When it became clear to Indigenous people that

the visitors and those following in their wake intended to

remain, clashes over resources became commonplace, with

Indigenous people beginning to offer overt and determined

resistance (Elkin 1951: 167; see also Loos 1982: 35).

Settlers, the police and sometimes even the military were

responsible for killing Indigenous people, who would then

sometimes engage in retributive actions, though in some

cases the killings were initiated by the latter in response to

some misunderstood transgression by the intruders.

The archaeological signatures of frontier massacres

A review of the literature makes it apparent that

archaeologists have only recently become engaged in

debates about Australian frontier conflict (eg Anderson

2005; Free and Markwell 2005; Harkins 2009; Litster 2006;

McKewin 2006; Rowland 2004). As shown in Figure 1,

there have been investigations at the massacre sites of

Panton River (Smith et al. 2005), the Woolgar River (Wallis

et al. 2005) and Irvinebank (Genever 1996)1, the latter being

the only published case thus far to definitively suggest the

location of a massacre based on the survival of physical

archaeological evidence. In addition to these accounts, there

are speculated to exist considerable materials in the form of

unpublished documents and oral histories which are not

easily accessed, though are often referred to in heritage

register listings of massacre events, as is the case with the

Myall Creek massacre (DEWHA 2010). In the remainder of

this paper we explore why massacre sites are not more

common given the ubiquitous violence on the Australian

frontier (Clarke 1995: ix), considering various factors that

will affect their likely archaeological preservation

including: the location of such events; the relative number

of victims and the spatial nature of the events; who the

perpetrators were and the mode of killing they adopted; and

finally the treatment of victims after death.

1. Informal communication of the location of other massacre

site investigations by archaeologists has also been made, but

at the request of the investigating researchers details cannot

be included in this paper.

Locations of massacres

The locations where massacres were perpetrated will have

an important impact not only on what physically survives,

but also whether such sites are able to be relocated.

Massacres were generally staged on the more isolated

boundaries of the frontier rather than in the immediate

vicinity of settlements where there were larger congrega-

tions of settlers (though there are some exceptions, such

as at Risdon Cove). The reasons for this patterning are

multiple, though not difficult to understand. As settlements

grew in size and Aboriginal populations in their immediate

vicinity declined (through deliberate killing, death by

disease or through the tactical retreat of Aboriginal people to

safer country beyond the frontier), the possibility of

hostilities occurring in close proximity to townships became

slimmer. Furthermore, after the Myall Creek massacre, the

increased risks of violence against Aboriginal people being

witnessed and reported (either in verbal or written form)

served to minimise the possibility that indiscriminate

killings would occur in locations with high non-Indigenous

populations. In several settlements local authorities

prominently displayed pictographs illustrating that such

violence would not be tolerated, and while it is doubtful

such measures prevented violence per se, they did have the

effect of pushing it beyond the official administrative,

policing and judicial system of the settlements to the less

regulated frontiers (Broome 2003).

The remote location of many massacres not only reduced

the likelihood of eye-witnesses, but also increased

substantially the time that might elapse between the event

itself and the possible discovery of the crime scene, either

by contemporaries or modern archaeologists. It is still the

case that much of northern Australia, whose main industry

continues to be pastoralism, remains isolated and remote

even today. Such landscapes are typically not well named,

traversed or even known by more than a handful of non-

Indigenous people, and thus relocating specific locations

within them, at which massacres occurred decades ago, is

challenging, a point made by Barker (2007: 9). However,

exceptions are likely to exist in specific cases where there

was either (a) some form of documented investigation of the

event soon after its occurrence, or (b) where strong oral

testimony by people (usually but not always Indigenous)

with an intricate awareness of the landscape has survived.

Support for the existence of such exceptions is offered by

the Irvinebank massacre. In October 1884 a detachment of

NMP officers allegedly killed several Aboriginal people

near the mining town of Irvinebank. Local residents visited

the crime scene within a day or two of the killing, and

subsequently reported the event to Police Magistrate

Mowbray who investigated (Genever 1996). Mowbray and

the Government Medical Officer visited the site where they

found burned bones, though they were ‘so badly burned that

the doctor was unable to state categorically whether or not

they were human’ (Genever 1996: 9). The survival of a map

drawn in 1884 showing the location of the killing, along

with the detailed inquest documentation, enabled the site to

be relocated in 1996, at which time ash and charcoal still

108

remained on the ground surface, along with several Snyder

cartridges, pieces of lead bullets, buttons, tins, billy cans and

other items (see also sections below on “Specific Mode of

Killing Adopted” and “Treatment of Victims after Death”).

The Rufus River massacre (Nettelbeck 1999) is another

event where the comparatively substantial documentation

(see “Perpetrators of Massacres and Specific Modes of

Killing Adopted” below) affords the strong opportunity for

archaeological detection. While we are not suggesting that

archaeological evidence will exist in all or even most cases,

the Irvinebank case study does demonstrate that in some

situations it will be possible for archaeological evidence of

killings to be relocated, even when more than a century has

passed. Indeed, the isolation and remoteness that served to

make massacres on the frontier less likely to be detected

after they occurred, may also have served to protect such

locations from destruction by modern development.

Relative number of victims and the spatial distribution of events

Related to the general location of massacres, another

concern related to the potential archaeological evidence of

these events is the relative number of victims and the spatial

distribution of events. In response to criticism from Wind-

schuttle (2000a, 2000b, 2002), Broome (2003) attempted to

reconcile the differing statistics relating to the numbers of

victims of frontier conflict, noting that historians before him

had offered estimates ranging from 1500 European deaths to

ca 20,000 Aboriginal deaths Australia wide (Broome 2003:

96). While he acknowledged these figures as ‘guesstimates’

only and that any frontier violence statistics ‘are certain to

be inaccurate’, on the balance of available evidence they

(and other such figures for specific regions) are certainly not

the ‘fabrications’ alleged by Windschuttle; archaeology may

offer one independent means of verifying the disputed

numbers of victims in some instances. And though we will

never know how many people were killed on the frontier, a

very important consideration associated with the

archaeological investigation of massacres will be the

relative number of victims and the spatial nature of killings.

As with most archaeological site types, where evidence is

clustered in a discrete location, as opposed to thinly spread

over a greater expanse, and the greater the abundance of that

evidence, the greater the likelihood for preservation,

survival, detectability and recovery.

We can consider this with specific reference to the

general nature of massacres in Australia, as summarised in

Table 1. We stress that even though we refer to numbers of

victims in Table 1, as Rowland (2004) discussed, we are not

attempting to invalidate the emotional weight of the

individual killings themselves. Our use of ‘numbers of

victims’ is only in order to illustrate the nature of such sites

in Australia and the potential difficulty in archaeologically

locating such sites when the numbers of victims are low. As

illustrated, massacre events with high victim counts and a

high density of skeletal and ordnance evidence (see the

following section) will have the most potential for

archaeological discovery and investigation. This is perhaps

one reason why archaeologists have had success in North

America in investigating the massacres of American

Indians, where massacres often occurred as large military

skirmishes with victims numbering in excess of 200 (see

NPS 2000a and 2000b for examples). In the Australian

context, although there are some well-known incidences

where large numbers of Indigenous people were killed, such

as the Battle of Pinjarra (see Cribbin 1984; Green 1995),

many massacre events were staged as punitive expeditions,

which involved killing small numbers of individuals,

sometimes over large distances [in what Barker (2007: 10)

called opportunistic ‘hit-and-run attacks’]; hence their

chance of incorporation into the archaeological record is

low. Further, the archaeology of such small-scale, short-

lived events is also strongly affected by the treatment of

victims after death (see below).

Perpetrators of massacres and specific modes of killingadopted

Massacres were perpetrated by a variety of people including

pastoralists, farmers, miners and other civilians; in short, by

people (generally men) whose livelihoods required them to

reside at the frontier and who therefore were most likely to

come into contact with Indigenous people. And the

environment of fear in which they lived cannot be under-

estimated: the frontier was the stage on which settlers

regularly faced what would have largely been an extremely

foreign and threatening environment. This truth is clear

in historical sources (see, for example, Allingham 1988:

130-1; Eden 1872; Fysh 1933; Hill 1907: 30-1), to such an

extent that at times entire townships may have been

abandoned through fear of Aboriginal attack (eg Gilberton

109

Relative number Spatial distribution Frequency of Example Relative likelihood of of victims of the event such events of archaeological recovery

Medium to High Dispersed (i.e. over a large area) Uncommon Coniston Station Massacre, ModerateForrest River Massacre

Medium to High Contained (i.e. over a small area) Uncommon Battle of Pinjarra, HighWaterloo Creek Massacre

Low to Medium Contained (i.e. over a small area) Common ModerateLow to Medium Dispersed (i.e. over a large area) Common Low

Table 1. Likelihood of relocating certain types of massacre events, based upon two variables: the victim count

and the spatial distribution of the event.

in north QLD; see Reynolds 1993: 52). Further evidence

that points to the apprehension of settlers can be seen in the

archaeological record in the form of civilian architecture.

For example, Grguric (2008, 2010) documented the

presence of defensive, fortified structures in colonial SA and

the NT, arguing such structures were testimony to the fear

and need felt by settlers for defence on the frontier (see also

Burns 2009).

With specific regard to north QLD, where frontier

violence is widely acknowledged to have been especially

brutal, Breslin (1992: 6) pointed out that settlers ‘brought

with them the same ideas and attitudes which had given

birth to violence and dispossession in the southern

colonies’. Charles Eden (1872: 40-1) illustrated this point

when he recounted his family’s journey to a remote station

in 1864:

We slept as only tired men do, and at daylight Arthurstarted for Mount McDonnell, to get fresh horses, his lastwords being ‘Look out for blacks, and don’t leave Lucy’.I had not yet had any experience about the blacks and didnot know or think much about them, so asked him, ‘Whatshall I do if they do come?’. ‘Shoot them, of course.Good-bye, old fellow!’ and away he rode. I then began tothink of my position, which was far from an enviable one,with my wife and child; and ... I unable to move twentyyards away for fear of blacks attacking them.

One of the earliest homesteads along the Stawell River

(near where Walker’s party had killed numerous Aboriginal

men a few years earlier) was a fortified stone building ill-

suited to the tropical climate, but a necessary defensive

response to repeated attacks from local Aboriginal people

(Wallis unpublished data). Likewise, Rainworth Fort is

another example of mud and basalt blocks with rifle

embrasures cut into the walls, built shortly after the Cullin

la Ringo massacre (with 19 victims making it the largest

killing of settlers by Aboriginals in Australian history and

which was followed by massive retribution; for further

details see Elder 2003). Visual depictions of violent

confrontations between settlers and Indigenous people by

colonial artists fed the anxiety settlers felt about the frontier

(e.g. Figure 2), contributing to the general sense that

settlement at the colonial boundaries quite literally meant

putting one’s life on the line. Hence, it is clear that many

perpetrators were psychologically vulnerable.

Other than civilians, in many parts of Australia there

were also military or ‘paramilitary’ groups who perpetrated

killings of Aboriginal people. These included the Mounted

Police Force – responsible for the massacre at Waterloo

Creek (Cunneen 2001: 54) – and more infamously the NMP

of NSW and later QLD (Anon. 1880; Haydon 1911: 304,

370-1; Kennedy 1902; Loos 1982; Reynolds 1982, 1991;

Richards 2008; Skinner 1975; Whittington 1964-65). While

there has been debate about the level of government

knowledge of, and therefore accountability for, such events,

both recent and older accounts make clear that ‘dispersals’

110

Figure 2. Conflict between settlers and Indigenous people in Tasmania. [Attack on a settler’s hut. Possibly by James

Bonwick. Rex Nan Kivell Collection: NK1300. Published with permission of the National Library of Australia.]

(a euphemism for killing) were part of the ‘core business’ of

the NMP in particular (Richards 2008: 15), though

documentary evidence of such actions were typically

minimal. In contrast, in North America massacres were a

routine and open part of government military campaigns. As

a consequence they were often officially and extensively

documented, thereby providing archaeologists with an

improved chance of relocating their locations through

linking information presented in archival sources with field-

based research.

Who the perpetrators were has clear implications for the

methods they used to carry out killings, and therefore for the

type of evidence we could expect to find preserved

archaeologically. Reviewing what is known of violence on

the Australian frontier, the main categories of killing

methods include firearm injury, poisoning, and to a lesser

degree stabbing or bayoneting, and blunt force trauma.

Potential evidence resulting from these types of killings

likely to remain at the attack scene are either consumable

components of the instruments utilised (e.g. bullets or bullet

casings), as weapons themselves are unlikely to have been

discarded, or skeletal remains from the victims.

Ordnance and weaponry

The presence of particular types of ordnance supplied to

militant-type groups such as the NMP gives rise to the

potential for ‘definitive artefacts’ to be located. By

definitive artefact we mean one that is tied historically to a

situation, and is quite specific to that particular engagement

– an excellent example can be derived from the relocation of

the Sand Creek Massacre site in Colorado. Here the location

was pinpointed archaeologically primarily through the

recovery of a specific type of howitzer shell fragment (NPS

2000a, 2000b); the Sand Creek battle was the onlyengagement in Colorado history to utilise such weaponry,

thus its presence in the archaeological record indicated a

definitive location for the event. While the Australian

context does not lend itself so easily to such interpretations,

there may still be instances where the knowledge of

weaponry may prove valuable. For example, until 1861 the

QLD NMP were issued with muzzle loading carbines, after

which they used Terry breech-loading rifles, until 1874

when they were issued with highly lethal Snyder rifles

capable of killing many people quickly at great distances;

the latter remained the primary weapon for the following

decades (Richards 2008: 55-6). In 1884 Martini-Henry rifles

were issued to the ordinary police, and Richards (2008: 56)

noted that many of these deadly weapons also found their

way into NMP corps. While weapons on the frontier,

amongst the civilian population in particular, may have had

a long use life, being able to identify the type of weaponry

used by the NMP at a specific time may help to build a case

for their involvement in an incident. An archaeological case

in point involves the aforementioned Irvinebank massacre

investigation, whereby Snyder cartridge cases, which can be

aligned to the NMP at that time, were key to convincingly

confirming the original site location.

Nonetheless, there will be many instances whereby

specific ordnance supplies will not have been used, thereby

making it difficult to unequivocally remark about a site

based on the discovery of a particular type of bullet casing.

It is expected that this will frequently be the case as many

perpetrators are unlikely to be linked to specific ordnance,

although it does not rule out locating or identifying sites

based on alternative lines of evidence. Further, as much of

the ordnance issued to the NMP was also available to the

civilian population, evidence for its presence in a particular

location may do little more than merely indicate that guns

were involved. However, Richards (2008: 54-56)

considered the question: ‘Did the frontier, as some

historians contend [e.g. Reynolds 1993: 52], bristle with

guns?’, concluding that ‘most frontier residents were armed,

but rifles, revolvers and other firearms were infrequently

mentioned in the historical material until the 1870s’. It is

also important to point out that in pastoral areas in particular

it is not uncommon to regularly locate bullet casings ejected

onto the ground surface from pastoral, sport and hunting

activities. In such instances, the contextual association of

bullet casings with other lines of evidence, such as skeletal

remains, is critical if they are to be confidently linked to

massacre events.

Skeletal remains

Despite popular television programs suggesting otherwise,

the cause of death can be difficult to determine from the

analysis of skeletal remains alone, since death typically

involves trauma to soft rather than hard tissues (Byers 2002:

257; Roberts 1996: 129). Thus, if a victim suffered shooting,

stabbing or blunt force trauma, the impact needs to have

intercepted bone to be apparent in their skeletal remains.

Harkins (2009: 10-17) makes clear how uncommon it is for

evidence of violent death to occur in the Australian

Indigenous archaeological record in the pre-contact period

(though see McDonald et al. 2007: 877 and Knuckey 1991),

thus suggesting the presence of such evidence in the

historical period might reasonably be attributed to non-

Indigenous perpetrators (or Indigenous NMP acting as

agents of non-Indigenous parties).

Even if bones with impact trauma are recovered, tying

the death to a specific perpetrator can be challenging. As

Richard Wright noted during his work on the Polyukhovichv Commonwealth War Crimes Trial, where the archae-

ological evidence was extensive, while it was possible to

determine cause of death it was not possible to legally

determine who was responsible based on that archaeological

evidence (Wright 1995). The answer as to whether or not

skeletal remains with evidence for violence definitively

relate to a massacre event will almost certainly require the

presence of supporting historical accounts or other

corroborating lines of evidence.

However, the presence of skeletal remains showing

evidence of gunshot trauma in Australian Indigenous

skeletal remains would point strongly to either non-

Indigenous perpetrators or Indigenous members of the

NMP, primarily since few Indigenous people had access to

such weaponry. Rev. JB Gribble was told that a settler at

111

Roebourne had been shown by local Aboriginal people 15

skulls of people shot dead during the 1868 Flying Foam

massacre, including two of children with bullet holes in

them (Gribble 1905; see also Gara 1983, 1993). Likewise,

Rowland (2004) convincingly described a case related to the

alleged massacre of between seven and eight Woppaburra

men from the Keppel Islands in which one skull had entry

and exit wounds from a low-velocity bullet (see also Pardoe

and Donlon 1991). This information, when combined with

that from available historic accounts, illustrates how a

compelling case for a massacre must rely on escalating lines

of evidence that in combination form a plausible case,

though it might not be legally acceptable.

Another reputedly common form of killing on the

frontier, particularly after the Myall Creek massacre, was

poisoning. Pastoralists on the frontier routinely faced the

prospect of their provisions being stolen when they were

absent from homesteads. One response was to lace flour

with arsenic or strychnine in the hope that the death of the

thieves would not only prevent them from re-offending, but

that others would ‘learn a lesson’ (Foster et al. 2001: 82).

The likelihood of any evidence for death by poisoning

appearing in the archaeological record is minimal, as the

soft tissue remains of the victims generally have to be well

preserved for the evidence to survive. Further, arsenic

requires long term exposure to be incorporated into hair and

nail tissue (Mays 1988). In the Australian context, human

remains from frontier conflict events will almost exclusively

be skeletonised and sometimes preserved owing to the ever-

fluctuating environmental conditions. Evidence for

poisoning as the particular cause of death of victims is

therefore unlikely to be witnessed in any remains located

through archaeological investigation.

Treatment of victims after death

A further factor affecting the archaeological record of

massacres is the manner in which victims’ remains were

treated: in essence, the natural and cultural site formation

processes (Schiffer 1987). If victims were not buried soon

after death, natural processes including scavenging would

cause their bodies to be quickly disarticulated and scattered

across the landscape. While such processes are an important

consideration in any archaeological investigation, rather

than exploring them further here, in this section we instead

focus on cultural transformation processes more specific to

frontier massacres, including burial, in mass or singular

graves, attempts at destruction of evidence (such as

burning), and traditional ceremonial funerary practices.

These processes can alter the predicted evidence and any

subsequent interpretation of recovered skeletal material, but

also will require changes in approach to the investigation of

such events.

As noted earlier, the Myall Creek massacre represented a

major turning point in frontier conflict, and particularly the

treatment of victims after death. The subsequent punishment

of the perpetrators resulted in a more covert form of

violence being adopted on the frontier, with greater attempts

to dispose of incriminating evidence. Since it was now clear

that settlers might be punished through the court system,

there was greater impetus – especially for civilians though

less so for the NMP – to destroy any evidence of killings

having occurred. Burial of victims was one obvious option

for disposing of the evidence, sometimes in mass graves:

… I found a grave into which about 20 [Indigenouspeople] must have been thrown. A settler taking up a newcountry is obliged to act towards them in this manner orabandon it. (Black as cited in Kiddle 1962:121)

The larger the grave, the greater the possibility of it being

detected using such techniques as remote sensing,

geophysical prospection or geochemistry. While the latter

method is technologically possible, the fact that many

massacres were perpetrated on the pastoral and agricultural

frontiers may cause difficulties when trying to use raised

phosphate levels as an indicator of mass burial or corpse

decomposition (Holliday and Gartner 2007). This is because

any geochemical signature may be affected by the presence

of fertilizers (to improve soil productivity), which could

mimic or mask increased phosphorous levels due to the

presence of burials (Cavanagh et al. 1988: 67).

If graves are located one needs to then ascertain whether

they were of victims of a massacre since, as discussed

above, the mode of killing might not be immediately

apparent. However, even without necessarily locating

ordnance or other evidence of violent trauma as the cause of

death, the discovery of mass graves of Aboriginal people

itself in remote locations would be highly suspicious. There

are some accounts of disease causing the deaths of large

numbers of Aboriginal people however they may not always

have been subject to burial. In Sydney for example, dozens

of bodies of Aboriginal people were observed ‘laying

around’ following smallpox and other epidemics (Campbell

2002), presumably because of either a lack of kin to claim

and care for the bodies, or fear that anyone handling the

bodies would also meet their death. The number and

patterning of the skeletal remains within any multiple graves

could also be informative as to their origin. Victims of

violence might be expectedly to be interred in a haphazard

fashion (as implied by the term ‘thrown’ in the earlier quote)

with little care taken.

Another element of the treatment of victims after death is

whether Indigenous people interred victims traditionally.

Richards (1999), Green (1995: 135) and Roberts (2005:

200) all recount instances where the bodies of victims were

recovered and subjected to culturally appropriate burial rites

by their kin, suggesting this may have been common (see

also Oxenham et al. 2008). If this is the case, not only will

the evidence of any massacre be limited, because it will no

longer be in situ at the location of the murder, but the bodies

will appear to be traditionally interred; unless evidence for

non-Indigenous trauma can be found on the bones or strong

oral testimony exists, identifying them as massacre victims

will be near impossible. Nevertheless, like with all the cases

studies presented in this discussion, how complicated this

makes the record will be very case-specific. Furthermore, it

is strongly likely that survivors, after witnessing such

violence, may not have had the opportunity to recover the

112

bodies of victims through fear of encountering a similar fate.

And in some places there simply may not have been

sufficient numbers of survivors to provide the appropriate

death rites.

The issue of post-mortem treatment of victims is further

complicated by the possibility that skeletal remains might be

handled decades after death. For instance, Colin Pardoe

(pers. comm. 24 March 2006) described a situation where

young non-Indigenous men used ‘old’ Aboriginal skulls for

target practice. On first examination such skulls might be

interpreted as clear evidence for death by shooting, though

a specialist should easily discern the difference between a

peri- or post-mortem injury.

While burial was one option available to perpetrators so

as to minimise their risk of exposure, they may have been

disinclined to exert the necessary physical labour required

for such an undertaking and, in very remote locations where

outsiders were unlikely to stumble across the evidence,

burial still might not have occurred. Furthermore, the racist

views of some settlers with regard to the ‘non-humanity’ of

their victims meant they may have not felt it was

‘appropriate’ or ‘necessary’ to afford Aboriginal people the

same treatment in death as they would their Christian

counterparts. In preference to burial, the burning of

Aboriginal bodies, a less labour intensive though more

callous practice – as it was not being practiced as a

culturally acceptable ritual by kin, but by perpetrators who

were simply ‘cleaning up’ with no regard for cultural norms

– appears from various historical accounts to have been

common (e.g. Bohemia and McGregor 1992; Elder 2003;

Genever 1996; Roberts 2005; Smith 2007). Such an

approach to destroying the evidence has several

archaeological implications. Human bones are typically not

fully destroyed by heating and, ironically, cremated bone

survives better in sedimentary contexts than does unburnt

bone (Hunter and Martin 1996: 96; Mays 1998: 207-8).

Hence, while burning reduces the quantity of skeletal

evidence, it also increases the possibility of any remaining

bone surviving archaeologically. For example, concen-

trations of burnt bone are known to occur at the alleged

locations of the Panton (Smith 2007) and Forrest River

(Elder 2003; Fitzgerald 1984; Green 1995) massacres and

were also found at Irvinebank (Genever 1996). However,

despite its potential for survival archaeologically, the ability

to determine the origin (human or non-human) of the bone

that has been calcified is very difficult (Mays 1998: 209-16;

Whyte 2001: 437).

Conclusion

As the above material illustrates, building a case for the

identification of a massacre site will be challenging and

require multiple lines of evidence so as to be convincing.

The general paucity of published information hinders

attempts to systematically review archaeological investi-

gations of massacre sites to date. And although Barker

(2007: 12) has suggested that such studies are too risky to

attempt as they ‘could ultimately fail, because even if

evidence is found, it is unlikely to be of the kind that will be

unequivocal’, we argue it is important to make explicit the

complexities of such approaches to avoid their subsequent

misuse by ‘deniers’. By critically examining available

historical accounts in combination with a consideration of

taphonomic process, we can better understand what physical

evidence is likely to be incorporated into the archaeological

record and therefore minimise the risk that revisionists will

make uninformed use of such studies.

Those massacres with the greatest chance of being

preserved and/or detected archaeologically will be those

which:

• involved more rather than fewer victims, killed in a

relatively spatially constrained area, owing to the

consequentially larger concentration of associated

material culture and skeletal remains;

• used death by shooting, stabbing or blunt force trauma as

the mode of killing as these are more likely to have

caused physical impact to skeletal remains;

• included attempts by the perpetrators to cover up the

crime scene such as through burial or burning, thereby

reducing the possibility of victims’ remains being

disarticulated and widely scattered over the ground

surface and increasing the chances of their being

preserved;

• involved military or other government personnel because

of the increased level of documentation associated with

their activities (even if it does not specifically detail

killings themselves);

• were subject to some form of inquiry soon after their

occurrence, on account of this providing the

contemporary researcher with a greater level of primary

source material about the events and landscape in which

they occurred;

• occurred either (a) prior to 1838 when perpetrators were

unlikely to have been punished for their crimes and

therefore knowledge of killings were more widely known

and documented, or (b) in the twentieth century (and

therefore by inference most likely in northern Australia)

owing to the greater chance of massacre survivors or their

direct descendants still being alive and able to provide

oral testimony to the location and nature of events, as

well as the shorter period of time that has elapsed since

their occurrence; and,

• are in ‘remote’ areas lacking extensive modern

development, of which local people (either Indigenous or

non-Indigenous) have a excellent knowledge of the local

physical landscape.

It should be remembered that because of the factors we

have outlined in this paper, massacre events are unlikely to

be found through random chance, and archaeological

evidence alone is unlikely to provide a line of evidence

sufficiently robust to silence critics who doubt the

ubiquitous nature of such violence. We underline the

113

importance in presenting a case adopting multiple lines of

evidentiary support – a hierarchy of documentary sources,

oral histories, material cultural evidence and skeletal

remains themselves that may allow for a massacre location

to be determined at a ‘possible’, ‘probable’ or ‘highly likely’

level. Providing a detailed understanding of why evidence

of a forensically acceptable level is unlikely to be preserved

archaeologically may persuade some critics to accept a

lower threshold for evidence of a massacre than would be

required in a contemporary legal setting. Of course there

will be many instances where the archaeological evidence

may be lacking entirely, though given an understanding of

site formation processes as we have outlined in this paper,

any such absences of evidence cannot be taken as support

for proving a massacre did not occur.

Interestingly, some archaeologists have more recently

entered into a discussion over whether or not ‘genocidal

moments’ are marked by ‘archaeological silences’ in

Australia. Harkins (2009) has argued that an absence of

evidence of post-contact materials in fact might be

indicative of the near-total decimation of Aboriginal groups

in some regions. This concept of a ‘lack of evidence’ in

studies of Australian frontier conflict was pre-empted and

supported linguistically by Harris (2003: 92) who remarked

that ‘languages decline for a variety of reasons but sudden

and catastrophic loss of languages as seen throughout

Australia is typically related to aggression’. He described

the marked extinction and sudden decline in several

Indigenous languages – including those of Tasmania, as well

as Kwaimbal (NSW), Kurnai (Vic) and Yeeman (QLD) –

suggesting that these languages died as suddenly as did their

speakers. Furthermore, he proposed that when Indigenous

people took part in extended guerrilla warfare a gradual

rather than sudden loss of language would occur, such as

was witnessed in the slower disappearance of the Wakay

(NT) language (Harris 2003: 92). The relevance of an

absence of evidence, with an understanding of how difficult

it will be to both distinguish and to relocate archaeological

evidence, cannot be ignored and in fact adds an extra

dimension to studies of frontier violence in Australia.

Owing to spatial constraints, we have entered into little

discussion of the ethical and legislative considerations of

archaeological investigations of frontier massacre sites,

though this is not to downplay their critical importance; we

direct readers to Harkins (2009), Litster (2006) and

McKewin (2006) for explorations of these matters. As

Barker (2007) has pointed out, we also recognise that there

are many other types of sites that can potentially contribute

to an understanding of life on the frontier (e.g. pastoral

stations, native police encampments, missions, ration

outposts, civilian fortified architecture) (see, for example,

Burns 2009; Grguric 2008, 2010) and encourage greater

investigatory focus on such sites.

How archaeology can contribute to a more multi-facetted

understanding of frontier conflict history is becoming more

frequently discussed by Australian archaeologists. This

paper adds to these debates through highlighting the

inherent difficulties associated with such events becoming

incorporated into the record and acknowledging their

potentially restricted archaeological signature in Australia,

in contrast with the situation in North America. Moreover,

the number of variables contributing to the incorporation of

these events into the archaeological record is large, and

clearly does not afford a clear, singular model of approach

for archaeological investigations. Nonetheless, with an

acknowledgment of this, such investigations do not run the

risk of potentially refuting that frontier massacres occurred,

and in fact, are increasingly being pursued at the request of

Aboriginal organisations. When handled systematically,

ethically and sensitively, with the approval and involvement

of the local Aboriginal community, they have the potential

to provide a valuable light on this disputed and controversial

aspect of Australia’s colonial history.

Acknowledgements

This paper emerged from research partially completed for

the Honours thesis The Potential Contribution ofArchaeology to Australian Frontier Conflict (Litster 2006)

at Flinders University, and also through informal

discussions with numerous colleagues about the topic.

Wallis would like to gratefully acknowledge the financial

support offered to her and the Woolgar Valley Aboriginal

Corporation in their studies of the Woolgar massacre of

1881 by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres

Strait Islander Studies. We would like to thank the

archaeologists and anthropologists who offered their expert

advise and guidance on the honours topic including: Shane

Baker, Shaun Canning, Denise Donlon, Neale Draper, Mark

Dugay-Grist, Stephen Free, Steve Hemming, Colin Pardoe,

Douglas Scott, Claire Smith, Pamela Smith and Larry

Zimmerman. Thanks also to Luke Godwin, Alice Gorman

and Peter Veth for commenting on an early version of this

paper, as well as to an anonymous reviewer and Peter White.

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R v Kilmeister [1838] NSW SupC 110 (5 December 1838)

117