Conclusion

The expansion of the British Empire through the nineteenth-century age of ‘explosive colonisation' could not proceed without disregarding or directly subjugating the sovereign claims of existing peoples.

As Wolfe has succinctly observed, in order for the settler colonial endea­vour to be interrupted, ‘all the native has to do is stay at home’.⁴“ Under conditions where Indigenous people and settlers were compelled to compete for access to the land and its resources, frontier violence became an endemic and cyclical feature of Britain’s settler colonies. While it is impossible to identify frontier death tolls with accuracy, the calculations put forward by historians for different sites are suggestive of the scale and impact of frontier violence around the empire. The human cost of violence on Australia’s colonial frontiers has been a contested question, but conservative estimates by historians Henry Reynolds and Richard Broome suggest that fatalities were in the range of 20,000 Indigenous people and 2,000 Europeans, or a rough ratio of 10:1. More recently, Raymond Evans has suggested that upwards of 24,000 Indigenous people died at the hands of the Queensland Native Police alone during the years of its operation.

Certainly, the expressions and intensity of frontier violence varied accord­ing to local differences, including the pace and concentration of settlement, the topography of terrain, and the question of how much settlers were dependent upon colonised labour. Yet behind these localised variations, Britain’s settler frontiers all confronted the experience of Indigenous resistance, and colonial authorities across the empire responded with strate­gies of extraordinary legal force. These patterns shaped how frontier violence unfolded across the British Empire from the 1820s, and how it continued for more than a century thereafter.