In common with other areas of Australia, settlers on the frontier in southeast South Australia employed various tactics to deal with Aboriginal resistance to being forced off their land. Initially, settlers attempted to keep them at a distance using threats of violence, but they soon escalated to using actual violence, hoping that by terrorising them they could prevent them from interfering with stock and other property. Violence by settlers towards Aboriginal people often went unreported to the authorities, and became more secretive after a settler was hanged in March 1847 for the murder of an Aboriginal man in the colony's southeast – the only such sentence carried out in the history of South Australia's early white settlement. This undeclared and covert fighting between settlers and Aboriginal people in South Australia is considered part of the Australian frontier wars.