page_title: Racial violence in Australia
section_title: European settlement and indigenous Australians
hierarchical_section_title: Racial violence in Australia / European settlement and indigenous Australians
context_page_description: Various examples of violence have been attributed to racial factors during the recorded history of Australia since white settlement, and a level of intertribal rivalry and violence among Indigenous Australians pre-dates the arrival of white settlers from the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1788.
  During the period of British colonisation, various incidents of inter-racial tension and competition for land and resources between Europeans and Indigenous peoples involved violence, becoming a factor in the decline of indigenous populations during the 19th century. Incidents of racial violence between settler communities followed the large scale multi-ethnic immigration of the Australian goldrushes of the mid-19th century – notably white miners targeting Chinese miners – which contributed to the development of the White Australia Policy which preferenced British and "white" immigration to Australia for some decades. The policy resulted in a largely white race population by the mid-20th century.
context_section_description: The early European exploration and colonisation of Australia often led to violent and deadly conflicts between the original inhabitants, the Aboriginal populations, and Europeans throughout the continent, from the arrival of early European mariners and arrival of the British First Fleet at Sydney in 1788, to the time of the Caledon Bay Crisis of the 1930s. Racism often played a role in this violence, though competition for land and resources and cultural misunderstandings over differing views of such concepts as sacred spaces and property ownership were also common motivators.
  By 1788, Indigenous Australians had not developed a system of writing, so the first literary accounts of Aborigines come from the journals of early European explorers, which contain descriptions of first contact, both violent and friendly: a 1644 account of Willem Jansz's 1606 landing at Cape York (the first known landing by a European in Australia) refers to "savage, cruel black barbarians who slew some of our sailors", while the English buccaneer William Dampier wrote of the "natives of New Holland" as "barbarous savages", but by the time of Captain James Cook and First Fleet marine Watkin Tench (the era of Jean-Jacques Rousseau), accounts of Aborigines were more sympathetic and romantic: "these people may truly be said to be in the pure state of nature, and may appear to some to be the most wretched upon the earth; but in reality they are far happier than ... we Europeans", wrote Cook in his journal on 23 August 1770.
  The first Governor of New South Wales, Arthur Phillip, was instructed explicitly to establish friendship and good relations with the Aborigines and interactions between the early newcomers and the ancient landowners varied considerably throughout the colonial period—from the mutual curiosity displayed by the early interlocutors of Sydney, to the outright hostility of Pemulwuy and Windradyne of the Sydney region, and Yagan around Perth. Pemulwuy was accused of the first killing of a white settler in 1790, and Windradyne resisted early British expansion beyond the Blue Mountains. According to the historian Geoffrey Blainey, in Australia during the colonial period: "In a thousand isolated places there were occasional shootings and spearings. Even worse, smallpox, measles, influenza and other new diseases swept from one Aboriginal camp to another ... The main conqueror of Aborigines was to be disease and its ally, demoralisation".
  Relatively small numbers of White settlers and convicts removed Aboriginal populations from much of South Eastern Australia. The island of Tasmania's small, though culturally unique, Aboriginal population in particular suffered – the majority of them succumbing to introduced disease, being killed in conflict with white settlers, or dying early as a result of displacement or competition for resources in the decades following European settlement.
caption: During the 1830s, the Christian missionary George Augustus Robinson negotiated a peace with some of the Tasmanian Aboriginals, following serious conflict between them and British settlers. The peace resulted in the exile of around 100 Aborigines to nearby Flinders Island to be taught European ways. Ravaged by disease, few returned to Tasmania alive.
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