New research from the Colonial Frontier Massacres Digital Map Project, compiled by the University of Newcastle, has revealed nearly half of the mass killings of First Nations people were committed by police and other government forces.
The final findings of the map displaying massacre's on Australia’s colonial frontier were released this week, and they show an additional 113 sites where six or more First Nations people were killed in Australia starting in the 1700s.
Most of these 415 sites are from Western Australia and the Northern Territory, where between 11,000 - 14,700 Aboriginal people were killed during the Frontier Wars.
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The Guardian claims this was 27 to 33 times higher than British coloniser killings.
A digital humanities specialist and key researcher on the project Dr. Bill Pascoe told the outlet that the research aims to add a personal narrative to these senseless killings, while also being used as empirical evidence displaying the trauma Aboriginal people have endured.
“We are always using conservative estimates,” he said. “We want to make sure it can stand up to any kind of criticism that might be thrown at it. We don’t want to be accused of overinflating figures.
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“Another one of the challenges is objectification. White research objectifies Indigenous people, it’s a big problem, and numbers tend to objectify.
"So it’s easy just to say 11,000 people (were) killed, and carry on with the next news item … so, one of the main challenges (has been), how can I work against that?”
Colonisers claimed these Aboriginal killings were due to the murder of one of their own; however, these massacres were hugely disproportionate as police would hunt down First Nations people for weeks, even months, according to these researchers.
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The interactive map, which attributes a dot to each murder site, also exposes Aboriginal massacres that even took place as recent as 1981, when two First Nations people were killed with 14 others hospitalised after sharing a bottle of sherry laced with strychnine in Alice Springs.
According to Historian Dr. Robyn Smith, police determined the bottle was left on the grounds of a church, but little is still known about the case.
Smith said that with the case remaining unsolved, it shows the difficulty in calculating all of the frontier massacres.
“It’s really, really difficult,” she said.
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“Unless, as often happens, someone writes about it 20, 30 or 40 years later, when either most of the perpetrators have died or moved away, or they think that the time for arrest and being held accountable has passed.”
Although researchers say the map is complete, they hope it acts as a ‘reliable resource’ to ‘inform public debate’ as Australia still has a long way to achieve equality for First Nations people.
Charisa Bossinakis