Lyndall Ryan

Although, as we'll come to see, they were not the last forms of frontier violence or colonial violence which would occur in Australia's history.

The area had seen countless amounts of violent acts and massacres occur, being one of the last colonial frontiers, with Lyndall Ryan's famous colonial frontier massacres map showing near on a dozen occurring there and in Western Australia after World War I.

To background these massacres, a couple things should be known.

Firstly, the Coniston Station was located near the Lander and Hanson Rivers, and had been established in the early 1920s on the land of the Walpiri, Anmairi and Kaiteti peoples.

But I think one other thing that's really important to sort of take away from those history wars is that they do consolidate and move the field along in some ways.

I mean, if you look at the history wars around Keith Windshuttle and Henry Reynolds and the kind of debates around frontier conflict in the early 2000s, one of the things that happened out of that debate is Professor Lyndall Ryan, after being a target of Keith Windshuttle in those history wars herself, went away and kind of did a new project around investigating massacres of Indigenous people in Australia's history and produced the massacre map.

And then we get from that a kind of building on that through other kinds of works that treat frontier conflict as a form of warfare for country and We then see the production of films like Rachel Perkins' Australian Wars.

And now we see that that understanding of that history has changed in that 25 years, you know, that Tony Abbott's recent history of Australia, you know, has to deal with the impact of frontier conflict.