The nations produced by the settler capitalism of an expanding Europe were founded on the dispossession of the original inhabitants. The white immigrant societies in Australia, New Zealand, southern Africa, Canada, the United States, and South America fought indigenous peoples for control of the land, and successfully wrested it from them. This was a gradual process in which the indigenous peoples fell victim as much to disease, cultural deprivation and starvation as to organised violence.

In Australia's case the frontier conflict between European settlement and the Aboriginal peoples was, for much of our history, greatly downplayed. Nineteenth-century Australians fostered the belief in the uniquely peaceful settlement of Australia and the victory of science and industry in taming and cultivating the land. The premise, sometimes unspoken, was either that the original inhabitants had simply made way for Europeans, or that the Aboriginal peoples had no title to the land; the resulting ‘history’ characterised their opposition to dispossession as occasional, sporadic and ineffectual. Unlike the Maori, the Zulu or the Native Americans, they were not conceded the dignity due to worthy opponents.

We now know that Aboriginal resistance was widespread, consistent and determined, and the debate has moved on to consider whether resistance should properly be called ‘warfare’. It centres on the nature and the extent, not the fact, of the armed conflict which occurred. To deny the existence of a state of war is to deny the status of combatant to Aboriginal peoples, with all the important attendant psychological ramifications.