SPEAKERS
Get to know those who are presenting at the Imperialism and Resistance Conference. Click on the speakers' photo below to read their biography.
Keynote Speakers
Session A
Rachel Perkins is a filmmaker with a career spanning documentary, TV drama and movies. Her Australian Aboriginal heritage (Arrente/Kalkadoon) has inspired much of her work including The Australian Wars documentary series which she wrote and directed, and which was commissioned by SBS and produced by Blackfella Films. Other notable documentary work includes First Australians and Blood Brothers. Her fiction work includes TV dramas Total Control, Mystery Road and Redfern Now and the movies Jasper Jones, Mabo, Bran Nue Dae, One Night the Moon and Radiance. She spends her time between her traditional country of Mparntwe/Alice Springs and Sydney.
Rachel Perkins
Rachel Perkins
Session C
Tony Abbott served as the 28th Prime Minister of Australia, from 2013 to 2015, and last year published a bestselling history of Australia. In 2014, and again in 2015, he spent a week running the government from a remote Indigenous community.
He served as the member for Warringah in the Australian parliament between 1994 and 2019. He served in the Howard government cabinet between 2001 and 2007, variously, as Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Minister for Health, and Leader of the House of Representatives.
He has degrees in economics and law from Sydney University and in politics and philosophy from Oxford which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author of The Minimal Monarchy (1995), How to Win the Constitutional War (1997), Battlelines (2009) and, most recently, Australia: A History, which was the bestselling book in its category in 2025.
In 2020 he was appointed as a Companion of the Order of Australia. Currently, he is a director of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, is a visiting fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs and the Danube Institute and is a director of FOX Corporation.
The Hon Tony Abbott
The Hon Tony Abbott
Session E
Professor Henry Reynolds spent much of his career teaching history and politics at James Cook University in Townsville. Local experience and everyday contact with Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders led him to begin a long period of research which greatly influenced his teaching and his published books and articles. After ten years of research all over Australia and in Britain, he published The Other Side of the Frontier which was initially published locally in 1981 but has been in print ever since. Many other books followed, many of them winning literary prizes.
Professor Henry Reynolds
Professor Henry Reynolds
Welcome Address
Mr Michael Bell is a Ngunnawal/Gomeroi man, and is the Indigenous Liaison Officer at the Australian War Memorial.
Michael has held the position since 2016. During this time his priority has been focused on the recognition and contribution of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island service men and women and the broader individual and community contributions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to the military history of Australia in times of peace and war.
Michael has co-edited (with Lachlan Grant) For Country, For Nation: An Illustrated History of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Military Service, and a range of articles relating to Indigenous service.
He has previously been involved with, and is still connected to, Aboriginal organisations dedicated to serving the community, including NTSCORP, the Native Title service provider for NSW and the ACT, Ngunnawal Aboriginal Corporation, Onerwal Local Aboriginal Land Council and Buranya Aboriginal Corporation.
Michael Bell
Michael Bell
The Honourable Kim Beazley AC is Chair of the Council of the Australian War Memorial, having been elected to the role in December 2022.
Born in Perth, Mr Beazley completed degrees at the University of Western Australia. In 1973, he was awarded the Rhodes Scholarship for Western Australia and completed a Masters of Philosophy at Oxford University.
He was a Minister in the Hawke and Keating Labor Governments (1983–1996), holding the portfolios of Defence and Finance, among others. From 1995 to 1996, he was Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the Australian Labor Party, and Leader of the Opposition from 1996 to 2001 and 2005-06.
Following his career in politics, Mr Beazley was appointed professor at the University of Western Australia. From July 2008 to December 2009, he was Chancellor of the Australian National University, and a member of the Council of the Australian War Memorial from July 2009 to December 2009.
In 2009, Mr Beazley was made a Companion of the Order of Australia. From 2010 to 2016, he served as Ambassador to the United States of America. In 2018, he became the 33rd Governor of Western Australia, retiring from the position in June 2022.
The Hon Kim Beazley AC
The Hon Kim Beazley AC
Session B: Histories of contact and conflict in Australia
Kate Fullagar is a professor of History at Australian Catholic University, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and President of the Australian Historical Association. She is a historian of the eighteenth-century world, especially modern empires and Indigenous resistance in North America, Australia, and the Pacific. She is the author of The Savage Visit: New World Peoples and Popular Imperial Culture (UCP, 2012) and the award-winning The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (YUP, 2020). Her most recent book is Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled (Simon & Schuster, 2023), which was short-listed for the Prime Minister’s Literary Prize, Australian History. She is the co-editor with Michael McDonnell of Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age (Johns Hopkins, 2018).
Professor Kate Fullagar
Professor Kate Fullagar
Gauging Conflict in Darug-Speaking Country, 1788–1810
In writing Bennelong & Phillip (2023), which presents a history of the Sydney colony from inception to around 1810, my greatest challenge was to balance stories of racial violence with stories of autonomous — and even productive — interracial relationships. While there has been a surge of histories explaining the hidden scale of frontier conflict during the nineteenth century, scholars often imply that racial relations were better during the inaugural governorship of Arthur Phillip. Inga Clendinnen famously referred to this era as the days of hope when dancing could occur between strangers. My book shows this to be grossly over-stated. Phillip’s reign instigated brutal violence against Indigenous bodies, lifeways and Country from the very beginning. While Bennelong witnessed or directly suffered from this violence from at least 1789, I refused to allow him to become a stand in for Indigenous victimhood, rather he became a vehicle to show the different ways in which Indigenous people fought, outplayed, dodged, or otherwise lessened the impact of the First Fleet’s invasion. My talk will discuss the ways in which I tackled these and other issues.
Professor Kate Fullagar
Mina Murray, co-editor of The Australian Wars (2025), is a Wiradyuri scholar, educator and historian. Her research focuses on reclaiming the history of armed Indigenous resistance by integrating archival research and conventional, historical practice with the knowledge and philosophy of her people. Other recent publications include How to decentre 'whiteness' in historical education (2025) and Bilawi-gibang naabarra-nganhal: wanhamindyarra (2024).
Mina has worked with the ABC, SBS, AFL, the Australian War Memorial and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. She has collaborated with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities on a variety of projects, with a recent focus on education materials and teaching resources. In 2024, Mina collaborated with Wiradyuri Elders and local Aboriginal organisations as part of Dhuluny to produce a suite of Bathurst Wars teaching resources. In 2025, she worked with Banjima people to develop curriculum material to support the release of Yurlu | Country (2025).
Mina Murray
Mina Murray
Yinaa-ru: Women of the Wiradyuri Resistance, 1813–1885
Warriors did not fight the Australian Wars alone. The women of the Wiradyuri resistance, like most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in the nineteenth century, were forced to undertake dangerous tasks and make difficult decisions to keep their people alive. Women and children were often forced to forgo the protection of warriors and Country in order to interfere with the colonial machine. Many became agents of resistance, undertaking espionage, reconnaissance, negotiation and sabotage. Alone and unarmed, they gathered valuable intelligence and employed a wide variety of tactics to undermine the strength of colonial forces without being detected. Others carried out their existing social, political and cultural duties while also serving in logistical roles in safe country and on the front lines as required.
This paper broadens existing historical narratives of armed Indigenous resistance in the nineteenth century by shifting focus from the warrior to the agent, a role typically held by women. Through a synthesis of colonial documentary evidence, Wiradyuri knowledge and Wiradyuri philosophy, it explores the impact and legacy of Wiradyuri women and recontextualises their experiences with women from other Mob during this period.
Mina Murray
Dr Nicholas Clements is a historian of Aboriginal Tasmania and frontier conflict. His 2014 book, The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania, explored the motivations and experiences of both colonists and Aboriginal people during that conflict. Nick’s 2021 book, co-authored with Henry Reynolds, was Tongerlongeter: First Nations Leader and Tasmanian War Hero – the story of a remarkable Palawa leader and the incredible resistance he and his people mounted against the invasion of their country. Most recently, he contributed the Tasmanian chapter to The Australian Wars (2025). Nick’s work seeks to humanise history’s actors but also to view them through the moral lenses of their time, rather than those of the twenty-first century.
Dr Nicholas Clements
Dr Nicholas Clements
The Black Line: Tasmania’s Doomed Counter-Insurgency Gamble
In 1830, Britain’s empire was the most powerful in the world, with unquestioned naval and technological superiority seeing it colonise the far reaches of the planet, including Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania) from 1803. By contrast, that island’s Aboriginal peoples were derided as the most economically and technologically backward culture. But while they were vastly outnumbered and brought only spears and clubs to bear against their usurpers’ guns, these peoples mounted the most effective armed resistance of any of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. Hundreds of colonists were paying with their lives for supposedly free land. In desperation, the lieutenant-governor initiated a levée en masse. The Black Line, as this operation became known, remains the largest military offensive conducted on Australian soil. Led by the lieutenant-governor himself, 2,200 soldiers and settlers – 10 per cent of the colony’s population – scoured the bush for seven weeks hoping to capture the hostile warriors, almost all of whom slipped through the cordon with embarrassing ease. The significance of the Black Line, however, lies not just in the besting of an imperial Goliath by an Indigenous David, but that the effectiveness of Aboriginal resistance compelled the British to take the most extreme measure available to them.
Dr Nicholas Clements
Session D: Colonial Australians fighting for the British Empire
Dr Tom Richardson is a historian at UNSW Canberra, and the Director of Professional Education in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. After completing his doctorate in 2014 he worked as a researcher on the Official History of Australian Peacekeeping (2015), and as a researcher on the Official History of Australian Operations in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan (2016-2018). He has lectured extensively on counterinsurgency, Australian military history, and special operations. His first book, Destroy and Build: Pacification in Phuoc Tuy, 1966-1972 was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017; his second, Soldiers and Bushmen: The Australian Army in South Africa 1899-1902, was published (also by CUP) in 2025. He is currently working on a history of the Australian Army and limited war in Southeast Asia.
Dr Tom Richardson
Dr Tom Richardson
Australians in the South African (Boer) War
This paper examines the experience of the Australian contingents who served in the South African War (1899–1902) and explores what their participation reveals about Australian society and emerging national and military identity at the turn of the twentieth century. Characterising themselves as soldiers and bushmen, these men believed they had a set of unique skills that would prove ideally suited to the kind of war being waged on the highveldt of the Boer republics. The reality would prove somewhat more complicated: Australian soldiers would end up fighting in South Africa for three long and brutal years, in the process shaping perceptions of the Australian soldier and the Australian nation.
Dr Tom Richardson
Peter Bakker has been researching and documenting Aboriginal military involvement for two decades. Peter is a leading scholar on the service of Aboriginal men in the South African (Boer) War, and in the AIF’s small War Graves Services unit (First World War). He conducts his research in close collaboration with family descendants to have the life and military service of Aboriginal men recognised through publications, public presentations, photographic exhibitions, grave headstones and war memorials. Peter was the founder of Victoria’s first Aboriginal war memorial, dedicated in Warrnambool on 1 November 2010. He has provided research to the Australian War Memorial, the Shrine of Remembrance (Melbourne) and the Victorian Aboriginal Reconciliation Committee (VARC). In May 2026, he established the Victorian Aboriginal Military Service Roll. Peter is a co-author of Australian War Graves Workers and World War One, (Palgrave, 2019).
Peter Bakker
Peter Bakker
When Dark Troopers Rocked the Boat: How 11 Men have Altered Our Understanding of Aboriginal Participation in the South African War, 1899–1902
“Indigenous soldiers have served from the Boer War to the present” is a commonly used phrase to describe Aboriginal participation in Australia’s military forces. Recent research into the lives of Aboriginal soldiers who served in the South African War reveals that their life experiences before, during, and after military service were very different from how they have traditionally been perceived and portrayed by historians.
This paper challenges the false assumptions and myths that have been held about Aboriginal involvement in Australia’s last colonial overseas conflict. Records of Aboriginal participation in this so-called “White man’s war” reveal that the Aboriginal men known to have served in the Boer War enlisted as soldiers, were largely treated as equals amongst their fellow colonials, and returned to Australia without difficulty. That their postwar experiences were far more varied, prosperous and impactful than previously assumed challenges the assumption that all Aboriginal people had limited rights and were treated poorly by their white contemporaries in the early 1900s.
Peter Bakker
Cam Simpson served with both the Australian and British armies and took part in operations in Northern Ireland, the First Gulf War and escorted the two Australian war artists, Rick Amor and Wendy Sharpe to East Timor. It was during this period that he researched and published Maygar’s Boys, A Biographical history of the 8th Light Horse Regiment AIF, for which he was awarded the Australia Day Medallion and was appointed the research assistant to Dr. Craig Wilcox for his Australians and the war in South Africa, 1899–1902. After leaving the army, he worked as a security manager for over twenty years in the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa while he continued researching South African colonial warfare. He published, either as an author or co-author, eight more books on the subject and received the prestigious ‘Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi Award for Services to the Zulu People’ for his book The Frontier Light Horse in the Anglo-Zulu War 1879. His recent book Moorosi’s Rebellion is a detailed study of the Cape Colony's campaign against the BaPhuthi in 1879 that ran parallel to the Zulu War. He is currently writing about the BaSotho Gun War (1880–81). He is a vice president of the Anglo-Zulu War Historical Society and was one of the speakers at the 2023 Clash of Empires Symposium in London.
Cam Simpson
Cam Simpson
“We’re properly euchred this time, old man”: Australians in South Africa’s Colonial Wars, 1877–1881
Between 1877 and 1881, colonial South Africa experienced nine border conflicts. These wars kept the British Army, Royal Navy, and local forces in the Cape Colony and Natal occupied with little respite. British forces were occasionally humbled by defeat in battle.
In Australia, we have not associated these wars with our military history or national identity. In examining surviving British and South African colonial military records, however, no fewer than 53 Australians, including a nurse, have been identified as serving during the Zulu War, the Ninth Eastern Cape Frontier War (1877–1878), the two wars against the BaPedi King Sekhukhune (1878–1879), the Moorosi Rebellion (1879) and the BaSotho Gun War of 1880–1881. Australians fighting in South Africa 20 years before the first uniformed state contingents were recruited to participate in the Second Anglo-Boer War raises numerous questions: What were they doing in South Africa? What were their personal experiences? How should they be written into the story of Australian military history?
Cam Simpson
Session F: Colonial society, law and culture
Dr Samuel White is the inaugural Army Fellow (Major) at the Australian War Memorial. Currently, he is OIC Project Greenskin, which looks at strategic story telling of Army military history. He holds a PhD in Law and in 2025 was made both a Fellow of the National Library for Australian legal history, as well as of the Royal Historical Society for his work on cross-cultural understandings of violence.
Dr Samuel White
Dr Samuel White
Law and War on the Frontier
Was there war on Australia’s frontiers? This paper argues that, for those who fought, governed, and wrote about it at the time, the answer was often yes. It approaches frontier violence through the legal and intellectual world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, using William Blackstone’s Commentaries not as doctrine, but as historical evidence of how conflict was understood. Blackstone’s core distinction between subjects and enemies offers a powerful lens for reading colonial practice. Read through Blackstone, frontier violence appears less as sporadic disorder or failed policing and more as sustained, if uneven, warfare. This framing does not impose modern categories on the past. It takes contemporaries at their word and on their terms. By grounding the frontier in the legal imagination that shaped British imperial action, the paper bridges legal history and military history and reframes the frontier as a contested, militarised space – one that many of those involved already understood as a war, even if later generations struggled to name it as such.
Major Samuel White
Charlotte Macdonald is Professor Emerita at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, and Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi. She has published widely with her most recent book, Garrison World: Redcoat Soldiers in New Zealand and Across the British Empire (BWB, 2025) winning the Ernest Scott Prize for the best book in Australian and New Zealand History, 2026. She co-led a working group on the History curriculum in New Zealand schools in 2020–2021, and has twice been president of the New Zealand Historical Association. She is a member of the UNESCO Memory of the World Trust, and on the editorial board of the British Journal of Military History.
Professor Charlotte Macdonald
Professor Charlotte Macdonald
Conflict as War: An Empire and a Nation’s Story
This presentation considers the New Zealand Wars (1845–47, 1860–72) in the context of what I describe as the wider garrison world of the nineteenth century. From the outset, the conflicts in Aotearoa/New Zealand were known as wars, but they form also part of a wider range of resistance to imperial power or what Rudrangshu Mukherjee has termed “counter violence”.
Eighteen British regiments, as well as the Royal Artillery, Royal Engineers and a sizeable fleet of Royal Navy ships served in New Zealand from the 1840s to the 1870s. Their presence was crucial in the transfer of power from an independent Māori polity (manifest as signatories to Te Tiriti o Waitangi/the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840) to settler control. Yet the withdrawal of British redcoats in 1870 came to obscure the garrison era. By 1903 when Governor Ranfurly opened the first veterans home in Auckland, that history had become a distant relic.
While they have left an indelible mark on indigenous communities, the wars have drawn an uneven profile in the nation’s history and public memory through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At a time when reckoning with a colonial past is both compelling and controversial, telling this history presents multiple challenges. Some examples of recent work in Aotearoa will be discussed.
Professor Charlotte Macdonald
Dr Alex Little is an Early Career Researcher, having recently completed his PhD at Australian Catholic University. His forthcoming book, Imperial Advance: Colonial Australian Contributions to British Wars, 1885–1902 (McGill-Queen’s University Press), examines the Australian contribution to British imperial wars of the late Victorian, early Edwardian era. Alex has lectured across a range of topics relating to British history, Australian history, and conflicts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He specialises in transnational histories of the British Empire, and Australian military and naval history.
Dr Alex Little
Dr Alex Little
“What Becomes of the Exaggerated, Extravagant Folly?”: New South Wales and the 1885 Sudan Contingent
General Gordon’s death at Khartoum in January 1885 sent shockwaves through the Australian colonies. Amidst the outpouring of grief, Acting New South Wales Premier William Dalley took the unprecedented step of raising an independent colonial contingent to support the British position in Sudan. While the contingent numbered less than 800 and only served for a few short months with minimal engagement against their Mahdist adversaries, it marked the first time an independent settler colony raised, equipped, and despatched military resources for an overseas British conflict.
This paper explores the contribution of Australian troops to Britain’s war in Sudan in 1885. It follows the contingent’s service and how this was debated within the Australian colonies. The initial enthusiasm surrounding the conflict quickly dissipated once it appeared that the New South Wales colony’s contingent would make little impact, and the expedition’s reputation remained mixed in its aftermath. Yet the prospect of an Australian colony independently contributing to an overseas British conflict raised important questions over Australia’s transforming position in the empire, and how its limited local defensive resources sat within an increasingly challenged network of British imperial defence.
Dr Alex Little
Session G: Objects that tell stories
Dr Jilda Andrews is a Yuwaalaraay cultural practitioner and the Deputy Director, First Nations at the National Museum of Australia. She has more than 25 years’ experience as a museum professional and leading scholar of museums, anthropology and cultural futures.
Jilda has worked extensively within the galleries, libraries, archives and museums sector in public-facing audience, learning and exhibition roles as well as exhibition design and gallery development – including the Museum’s Great Southern Land gallery and the Australia Pavilion for Expo 2025 in Osaka.
She is a leading voice in the sector, actively contributing through advisory and board positions, including affiliation with the Australian National University. Jilda engages actively in collections research and has a strong record of research and publication in the field.
As an active member of her Yuwaalaraay community, Jilda has represented Yuwaalaraay Country nationally and globally through her work as a researcher, cultural practitioner and performer. Throughout all dimensions of her work, she takes a decisive ‘futures-orientation’, exploring the concept of ‘Ancestral Futures’ in real and applied ways.
Jilda is extending continuities from Australia’s deep cultural roots to inform richly dynamic, culturally strong and inclusive communities and future societies.
Dr Jilda Andrews
Dr Jilda Andrews
Country and the Costs of Continuity
The narrative of this continent is like nothing else on earth. Evidence boasting a remarkable 60,000 years of continuous connection to place, this story is celebrated locally, nationally and is a source of national pride on the world stage. While this statement almost rolls off the tongue, it is a scale of time almost too great to comprehend for many people.
When we start to think about these continuities in real terms, we look to our ancient and lively Country, its continued wealth of resources and favourable conditions for life. What is true of Australia’s capacity to sustain vibrant societies today was certainly true of the continent’s capacity to sustain vibrant societies thousands of years ago. It is understandable that the wealth, resources and conditions of this Country have always been fiercely protected and defended – and always will be.
As today’s world privileges short memories and immediacy, Country retains inscriptions which chart long continuities over large depths of time. The inscriptions and episodes captured by Country chart a land marked not only by sophisticated land use and cultivation, but also the sustained efforts to protect and defend it.
Contextualising Frontier Wars of British colonisation in a much longer time frame offers us a nuanced lens to see things anew. Frontier Wars was not only an expression to protect and defend the people of this land – but the resources and governance around it that sustain continuities of life.
Dr Jilda Andrews
Margaret Farmer is a New Zealand-Australian curator, writer and editor. As Senior Curator, Honour Rolls, Official and Private Records at the Australian War Memorial, and a member of the Memorial’s Reconciliation Action Plan Working Group (RAPWG), she has contributed to several capacity building and research initiatives towards presentation of the Australian Wars at the Memorial. These include being project manager of the Memorial’s Cultural Safety and Diversity Audit (2024) and the development of the Memorial’s Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property Framework (2025), and co-convenor of the Memorial’s RAPWG Film Program (2021–present). Margaret was lead curator of the Memorial’s special temporary exhibition The Courage for Peace (October 2019–June 2020), and the four-part exhibition series A Home on a Southern Hill (November 2016–August 2018) marking the Memorial’s 75th anniversary. Previous exhibitions include the City of Sydney public art program We Make This City (November 2011–May 2012), and the UNSW touring exhibition Terra Alterius: Land of Another (2004–2006). Margaret’s abiding interest lies in creative and curatorial practices that build connection and possibility in relation to complex histories and threatened futures.
Margaret Farmer
Margaret Farmer
“We are what we choose to remember, but we are also what we choose to forget”: Considering the Australian Frontier Wars at the Australian War Memorial
The Australian War Memorial and its collections were established to commemorate the service and sacrifice of the Australian Imperial Force in the war of 1914–1918. Over time, the Memorial has expanded to include Australia’s involvement in earlier British Imperial wars as well as recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and peacekeeping and humanitarian operations. The Memorial has commenced working towards a gallery dedicated to the Australian Frontier Wars. This work has its own history, from Geoffrey Blainey’s 1979 proposal that the Memorial address “Aboriginal–European warfare” to the Memorial’s public commitments to presenting broader and deeper coverage of frontier violence and conflict in September 2022 and February 2023. This paper considers that history, and how the presentation of Australian Frontier Wars in the Memorial’s galleries continues the Memorial’s founding purpose and guiding principle of “commemoration through understanding”.
Margaret Farmer
Previewing the Pre-1914 Galleries
Session H: Naval and military history in the nineteenth century Australian colonies
Captain Alastair Cooper joined the Royal Australian Navy in 1988. A Maritime Warfare Officer, he served at sea in HMA Ships Canberra (II), Melbourne (III) and Fremantle (II), and ashore as Director of the Sea Power Centre – Australia, Commanding Officer Navy Headquarters South Australia (now HMAS Encounter), the research officer to the Chief of Navy, and in Navy Capability Division. He has also worked in private sector telecommunications and as a public servant in the Department of Defence, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and the Attorney General’s Department. Alastair is the author of many articles on the history of the Royal Australian Navy. He is the co-editor with James Goldrick of The Navy Chiefs: Australia’s Naval Leaders 1911–1997 (Allen and Unwin, 2024).
Captain Alastair Cooper
Captain Alastair Cooper
Colonial Australian Frontiers and HMAS Protector
Where were colonial Australian frontiers? They were relatively clearly defined in the case of settler conflict with Indigenous peoples, and later in the century when Australian colonies contributed to British Imperial conflicts, such as the South African War and Boxer Rebellion, during which Australian forces travelled to a known and reasonably specific frontier, albeit on another continent.
Yet in many maritime cases, Australian colonial frontiers were much less clear. When combined with the growing value of Australian colonial trade, this generated public demand for naval defence and the financial means to pay for it. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Australian colonial governments built coastal artillery batteries and raised small naval forces.
Some of these factors can be exemplified, in part at least, by looking at the service histories of colonial naval vessels. Perhaps no other vessel illustrates this better than HMCS/HMS/HMAS Protector. Focusing on the service life of this ship, this paper will consider Australia’s nineteenth-century naval history and its place in the development of Australian national identity.
Captain Alastair Cooper
Dr Thomas J. Rogers is a historian in the Military History Section of the Australian War Memorial. He has previously worked as a historian at the Royal Australian Navy’s Sea Power Centre, the Australian National University, and the University of Melbourne. Tom is an Adjunct Fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra. Much of Tom’s research focuses on the Australian Frontier Wars, the South African (Boer) War, and the First World War. He has worked on exhibitions relating to the Australian Frontier Wars, and the First and Second World Wars. His book The Civilisation of Port Phillip (MUP, 2018) examines the relationships between settler rhetoric and frontier violence in the early years of British settlement in Victoria.
Dr Thomas Rogers
Dr Thomas Rogers
The Frontier Wars in the Context of Nineteenth-Century British Military History
How are we to understand Australia’s Frontier Wars in the military history of the British Empire in the nineteenth century?
The Australian colonies were sites of brutal frontier violence, some of which was condoned or conducted by government agents. Some colonists, even government officials, called it war. All colonies condoned or conducted retributive expeditions against Aboriginal warriors accused of killing settlers.
Australian colonists understood themselves to be members of the British Empire. In the second half of the century, the colonies began to send soldiers and naval contingents to support British Imperial wars around the world. A line of military evolution in the Australian colonies stretches back to the earliest days of British colonisation, with associations, colonial police, volunteer militias, professional artillery, engineers, and navies culminating in the contingents to South Africa and China.
This paper will examine how these different conflicts were understood in the colonies, while seeking further understanding of colonial Australians’ experiences of war and conflict in the nineteenth century.
Dr Thomas Rogers