Fighting died down after but flared again in before a truce was declared and peace returned. By hostilities had reignited, and New Zealand's colonial authorities requested further assistance from Australia.
In July British troops invaded the Waikato area and news of the continuing campaign spread through the Australian colonies. Some 2, volunteers offered their services on the promise of settlement on confiscated Maori land by New Zealand recruiters; most joined the Waikato Militia regiments, others became scouts and bush guerrillas in the Company of Forest Rangers.
Few of these volunteers were involved in major battles, and fewer than 20 were killed. Despite the preponderance of British troops in the Australian colonies, colonial military forces were maintained from as early as December , when the commandant of Norfolk Island, Phillip Gidley King, ordered his free male settlers numbering six to practise musketry on Saturdays. The first military unit raised on the Australian mainland appeared in September , when Governor Hunter asked free male settlers in Sydney and Parramatta to form Loyal Associations English volunteer units raised to put down civil unrest and practice military drills in case the Irish convicts rebelled.
Six years later Governor King recruited six ex-convicts as the nucleus of a military bodyguard, creating the first full-time military unit to be raised in Australia. Both these groups joined British regulars in suppressing the Castle Hill uprising. An officer of the 50th Regiment of Foot who was stationed at Victoria Barracks, Sydney, between to , following service in the New Zealand wars.
Insignia on cuff and collar indicates the rank of captain and the medals are for service in the Crimean War. Not until were volunteer corps and militia again formed in the Australian colonies, but news of war between Britain and Russia in the Crimea led to the establishment of volunteer corps in some colonies and the formation of informal rifle clubs in others.
When the Crimean War ended in volunteer units faded, to be revived in when it appeared that Napoleon III was preparing to invade England. By early most suburbs and towns in Australia supported a volunteer unit, usually a rifle corps.
An informal group photograph of spectators and competitors taken during a rifle shooting competition between ten men of the Hobart Town Volunteers Artillery and ten men from the First Rifles.
The land was defined as terra nullius, or wasteland, because Cook and Banks considered there were few 'natives' along the coast. They apparently deduced that there would be fewer or none inland. Their observations were soon proven incorrect. The governors of the first settlements soon found that Aboriginal people lived inland, and had special territories and associations with land on a spiritual and inheritance basis. Nonetheless, they did not amend the terms of British sovereignty. In the first hundred years there was no consensus about the basis of British sovereignty.
Estimates of how many Indigenous people lived in Australia at the time of European settlement vary from , to 1 million. Estimates of the number of Indigenous people who died in frontier conflict also vary widely. While the exact number of Indigenous deaths is unknown, many Indigenous men, women and children died of introduced diseases to which they had no resistance such as smallpox, influenza and measles.
Many also died in random killings, punitive expeditions and organised massacres. The pattern documented at and around Port Jackson - of initial friendly contact, followed by open conflict , reduction in the size of the Aboriginal population and then acceptance of and dependence on the whites by any survivors - was repeated time and time again as the frontier spread across the continent. Many past histories made it appear as if the Aboriginals simply 'faded away' before white occupation.
However, this was not the case. While some Aboriginal people accepted or adjusted to white occupation and some sought to survive as best they could by adapting to the new conditions, many others fought to retain their land and their culture.
Due to the nature of Aboriginal society, resistance took the form of guerrilla warfare - individuals or small groups of settlers were ambushed, isolated settlements attacked, crops, buildings and countryside burnt. In south-eastern New South Wales this type of resistance, organised by people such as Pemulwy around Sydney and Windradyne of the Wiradjuri around Bathurst, continued into the s.
They did not even know much about the climate. However, the risks paid off. By colonising Australia Britain gained an important base for its ships in the Pacific Ocean.
It also gained an important resource in terms of being somewhere to send convicts. However, this ended when the Americans declared their independence. Transportation was an important part of the legal system in Britain, and by the s there were large numbers of convicts in Britain who had been sentenced to transportation and had nowhere to go!
In , Captain Arthur Phillip and 1, convicts, crew, marines and civilians arrived at Sydney Cove. The most immediate consequence of colonisation was a wave of epidemic diseases including smallpox, measles and influenza, which spread ahead of the frontier and annihilated many Indigenous communities. Governor Phillip reported that smallpox had killed half of the Indigenous people in the Sydney region within fourteen months of the arrival of the First Fleet.
In addition to which settlers under the sanction of government may establish themselves in any part of this extensive territory and since the introduction of the numerous flocks and herds. Their territory is not only invaded, but their game is driven back, their marnong and other valuable roots are eaten by the white man's sheep and their deprivation, abuse and miseries are daily increasing.
Levels of frontier violence are hotly debated see Reynolds and Windshuttle , but historical records document numerous occasions on which Indigenous people were hunted and brutally murdered.
Massacres of Indigenous people often took the form of mass shootings or driving groups of people off cliffs. There are also numerous accounts of colonists offering Indigenous people food laced with arsenic and other poisons. We have shot them down like dogs.
In the guise of friendship we have issued corrosive sublimate in their damper and consigned whole tribes to the agonies of an excruciating death.
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