Within a couple of months of that moment in 1788 when the Union Jack was raised, two men had been speared. As the edge of settlement moved across the country, so did a fire-front of violence that burned well into the twentieth century in the remote parts of northern Australia. There were no big battles, nothing named and famous like the Battle of Little Big Horn. This was a guerrilla war: sparks of violence varying in intensity from place to place. Settlers carried guns and used them frequently, often using the ambiguous word ‘disperse’ to describe what they were doing. Aboriginal women were kept prisoner by settlers for sexual purposes. Family groups as well as warriors were ambushed and shot or driven over high cliffs. Sometimes they were given flour laced with arsenic. Warning signs were displayed to frighten off attackers: Aboriginal ears nailed to the wall of a hut, an Aboriginal corpse hanging from a tree with a corncob in its mouth.

Settlers were speared and burned in their huts, travellers were ambushed and attacked, settler families on isolated stations were killed—men, women and children.

The historians quoted document after document, from the easily accessed governors’ despatches to the most obscure letters and journals deep in the archives. They were a revelation. Here, for example, was a settler lying in his hut at night, convinced that he was about to be attacked:

all the horrible stories I had ever heard thronged to my recollection…I began to picture to myself the dreary bush outside, and the forms that might even then be creeping up in silence…the perspiration streamed from every pore. My hearing seemed unnaturally sharpened, and the Bush seemed as noisy as it had before been silent: all round the hut I fancied I heard the cracking of dry sticks and the rustling of grass.

A policeman in Queensland in 1898 described how ‘young lubras were taken to the station for licentious purposes, and there kept more like slaves than anything else. I have heard it said that these same lubras have been locked up for weeks at a time.’ I pored over an old photograph for a long time, trying to interpret it: a naked young Aboriginal woman stood in long grass looking woebegone while beside her a settler stared cockily at the camera. Did the long grass hide rope or chains around her ankles?

A settler wrote a letter referring to the Aboriginal people as ‘vermin’ and urging his correspondent to ‘Shoot them all and manure the ground with them!’

The murder of Aboriginal people was a crime for which white men could be hanged, and occasionally they were. That discouraged the reporting of killings. But at least two large-scale killings left an excellent paper trail because the perpetrators were brought to trial, and several of them were executed.