FOUNDATION AUSTRALIA
A site published by the Australia History Insititute
British Military Intervention on the Frontier
This research identifies 25 recorded military interventions in colonial Australia: nine against white colonists or concerning general public order, and sixteen involving Aboriginal people. These interventions varied in purpose, from suppressing convict uprisings, riots and other disturbances to protecting settlements, conducting punitive expeditions and supporting civil authorities.
Colonial police forces were often understrength, spread across large districts or still being established. Governments therefore called upon available soldiers to provide policing assistance when civil authorities lacked the personnel to respond. Military involvement must be understood in that context: troops could be deployed to enforce civil authority without undertaking a war.
The presence of soldiers does not, by itself, establish the existence of war. The schedules below compare the two categories of intervention and set out their timing, scale and purpose.
Scale and Character of the Interventions
The sixteen recorded interventions involving Aboriginal people were episodic and generally small in scale. At Appin in 1816, approximately 70–85 soldiers were divided among three detachments. At Bathurst in 1824, about 75 soldiers operated in separate parties across the district. Other deployments were smaller: approximately ten soldiers at Pinjarra, around 23 on the Nunn expedition and nineteen at Port Lincoln.
The major numerical exception was the 1830 Black Line in Van Diemen’s Land, when approximately 550 British troops joined a temporary force of roughly 2,200 soldiers, police, settlers and convicts. This coordinated sweep sought to capture or drive Aboriginal groups from the settled districts. Its scale distinguished it from the other interventions recorded here.
Taken together, the schedules show military personnel being used for punishment, protection, public order and assistance to understrength police, including operations under martial law. They document separate interventions with differing circumstances and objectives, rather than a continuous British military campaign across Australia. Whether any particular episode formed part of a war requires examination of the wider conflict; it cannot be established merely by counting the soldiers present.
The Missing Marks of War
British military service in Australia produced none of the conventional institutional markers normally associated with a recognised campaign of war against Aboriginal people. No campaign medal was created for frontier service, and no Australian frontier battle honour was granted for inscription on regimental colours. Battle honours were the formal means by which significant military actions and campaigns were commemorated on a regiment’s colours.
Nor was the British garrison in Australia principally an army deployed to fight a continental war. Much of its ordinary work was garrison and civil-order duty in a penal society: guarding settlements and convicts, supervising convict work gangs, responding to convict uprisings and assisting colonial authorities. Aboriginal resistance was one of several internal-security tasks for which troops were occasionally employed.
That does not mean military force was never used against Aboriginal people. It plainly was. But the institutional record is striking: intermittent deployments, no Australian frontier campaign medal, no frontier battle honour on the colours, and no sustained military campaign comparable with recognised British colonial wars elsewhere.
RELATED RESEARCH
