Saxe Bannister was appointed Attorney General of New South Wales probably at least in part because his interactions with the Six Nations had brought him to the attention of the Colonial Office. He found himself plunged into conflict with competing settler factions. The chapter focuses primarily, however, on his interaction with Indigenous resistance, particularly by the Wiradjuri, in the context of the violent conquest of Australia. Bannister tried to apply the British rule of law as he saw it to frontier contexts, calling for the declaration of martial law during warfare in both Bathurst and Hunter Valley. He also tried unsuccessfully to prosecute police officers and local settlers for extrajudicial murders. Bannister left New South Wales in disgrace but his legal legacy persisted in debates that had implications across the British settler empire: the court case would later lay the groundwork for the legal refusal of Indigenous sovereignty in exchange for the protection of Indigenous people against settler violence. The chapter highlights the importance and the contradictions of the British ideology of the rule of law.

This chapter explores the legal history of dispossession in the nineteenth century. It argues, first, that the failure to sign a treaty with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for land in Australia was a significant act of dispossession. While there was no declaration that Australia was ‘terra nullius’ in 1788, the failure to treat has been wielded since to dispossess Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of land rights and sovereignty. The chapter then explores dispossession through the legal history of expansion – the mixture of legality and lawlessness that fed the pastoral boom in Australia after 1824. With the advent of self-government, Australian legislation facilitating the breaking up of some pastoral leases into fee simple farms from 1861 effected a more complete dispossession by closing Country to Indigenous Australians. These varied processes of dispossession by tenure were fed by acts and omissions of jurisdiction. For many decades, Aboriginal people were not protected by settler law because their legal status was unclear. The designation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as subjects of the British crown after 1836 resulted in an uneven mix of hyper-policing and under-policing.

This chapter explores typologies of frontier violence as a particular feature of Britain’s settler colonial world. As historians have discussed, settler colonialism was distinctive from other forms of colonialism for its reliance upon the acquisition of Indigenous lands and the dissolution of Indigenous societies. From the 1820s onwards, the increasing pace of settler migration to the colonies and the settler demand for land created new pressures that generated repetitive patterns of frontier warfare for the next century. Indigenous peoples resisted colonial incursions on their country, and governments responded with an array of measures that ranged from diplomatic solutions to paramilitary policing and the enlistment of martial law. This chapter considers how these patterns of frontier violence were not consistent around the nineteenth-century British world but moved in cycles between strategies of conciliation and extraordinary legalized force. In doing so, it traces how different expressions of frontier violence supported government efforts to secure the settler polity and to assert colonial claims of sovereignty.

Visual representations of colonial violence constitute an overlooked source of evidence that although shaped by contemporary visual and cultural conventions allow us to engage with this troubling history in significant ways. The ‘history wars’ of the turn of the millennium have been accused of focusing on disciplinary protocols with the effect of obscuring the moral implications of colonial invasion and dispossession. By contrast, images evoke empathy, creating social relationships across the British empire that defined identities and aligned viewers with specific communities. Images also return the modern viewer to the emotional and moral intensity of 1830s and 1840s frontier violence in south-eastern Australia. They map colonial ‘blind spots’ by demonstrating the ways that these emotions were politicized to legitimate colonial interests, for example by directing sympathy towards white colonists, or seeking to evoke compassion for Aboriginal people. From our present-day perspective, these visual images help us to see our ‘reflection’, and acknowledge the truth of our history and its legacies.