This is my third major foray into frontier violence in colonial Victoria, spanning the period from the beginning of European settlement in Melbourne in 1835 to the formal separation of the Port Phillip District from New South Wales, and the change of name to Victoria in 1851.
My first foray was concerned with compiling a register of massacres and killings of Aboriginal peoples in western Victoria, which was published in 1995 as
Scars in the Landscape: A register of massacre sites in western Victoria, 1803-1859. My second foray was recently completed, when I published a two-volume study of Aboriginal violence against Europeans and other non-Aboriginal people, entitled 'Blood on the Spear: Aboriginal Killings of Non-Aboriginal People in Colonial Victoria, 1835-1851'. Volume One focussed on western Victoria, the Wimmera, and the Mallee, and Volume Two focussed on central and northeast Victoria, and Gippsland.
This present study is concerned with
inter se killings, or intra-Aboriginal deaths at the hands of other Aboriginal people. Inter se is a Latin phrase meaning 'between or among themselves' (Oxford Dictionary). Its primary focus is violence within and between Aboriginal communities, however, I have excluded Aboriginal deaths at the hands of the Native Police Corps when they were on official duty - I will discuss these in a separate volume.
The study of intra-Indigenous violence, and in particular incidents that led to fatalities, is instructive as it reveals a colonial legal system grappling with Aboriginal cultural practices and customary law and its impact on colonial legal proceedings. It also highlights the risk of violence that Indigenous people faced from other Indigenous people.
My study has uncovered some 296 inter se deaths alleged to have occurred between 1835 and 1851 from 285 incidents. This sum does not include numerous incidents that do not record the number of deaths, so the figure of 296 is most certainly conservative.
If we accept Richard Broome's estimate of Aboriginal deaths by Europeans, we arrive at the following statistics of frontier violence in colonial Port Phillip, 1835 - 1851:
Aboriginal deaths by Europeans: 700 - 1,000 (Broome)
Aboriginal deaths
inter se: 296+ (Clark, this study)
European deaths by Aborigines: 78 - 105 (Clark 2025).
These statistics reveal that between 1835 and 1851, Aboriginal people faced much greater dangers in the Port Phillip District compared to Europeans. It also reveals that violence between Aboriginal people was much more common than violence directed at Europeans. As a result, a more thorough and rigorous understanding of the killing times in the Port Phillip District is required.
Given the inadmissibility of Aboriginal evidence, inter se offenders rarely faced court, indeed, only four cases emerged from these 286 incidents.
One of the fundamental differences between the Western understanding of death and that of 'traditional' Aboriginal society was the latter's belief that harming practices or sorcery as performed by their enemies, were a major cause of death. At times the dying Aboriginal person would indicate the source of their harm, at other times established rituals were held as part of Aboriginal inquests to determine the source of the harm.
The othering of Aboriginal strangers, with whom there was no intermarriage, and no linguistic affinity, established their inferiority, and their dehumanization, and justified their killing. So being an Aboriginal stranger on the land of another group was potentially life threatening, and this study reveals the extent to which this danger persisted in t
