Settler Deaths on the Colonial Frontier

The precise number of settlers and other colonists killed in frontier violence is unknown. Available records are incomplete, but the total has been estimated at more than 2,000 deaths over approximately 140 years — an average of roughly 15 deaths a year across the continent.

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Those deaths occurred in very different circumstances. Some were isolated killings of shepherds, stockmen or travellers. Others involved attacks on stations, huts and small settlements. Shipwreck survivors were killed after coming ashore, and some incidents involved women and children. A relatively small number of larger attacks are now described as massacres.

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The circumstances matter. These deaths should not automatically be treated as battlefield casualties simply because they occurred during a period later described as frontier warfare. Many victims were civilians who were not members of any military force and, in numerous cases, had no reason to believe they were participating in a war.

Nor can motive always be known with certainty. Some attacks were retaliatory; others involved robbery, local grievances, disputes, opportunity or circumstances that can no longer be reliably reconstructed. Describing an incident as a “reprisal” requires evidence linking an earlier grievance to the attackers and to the particular people who were subsequently killed.

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The purpose of this research is therefore to examine the deaths themselves: who was killed, how they were killed, whether they were military or civilian, and what the surviving evidence actually establishes about motive and circumstances.