Uncovering the shameful: sexual violence on an Australian colonial frontier

While Australian historians have long acknowledged sexual assault by white frontiersman as a causal factor in Aboriginal reprisals, precise information has been limited. Historians have had to elaborate from local rumours and oral history to explain what would otherwise be construed as unprovoked aggression. This chapter explores the vulnerability of Aboriginal women in frontier districts characterised by isolation and lack of oversight of male workmen. It discusses incidents of interracial sexual assault in official reports on the Moreton Bay frontier in the 1840s and how these assaults and other examples of white aggression were either ignored or cloaked in the letters and memoirs of leading settlers of the district. The crafting of settler stories by female family members was not always a sufficient screen for the violence of dispossession and the responses of two women from a leading settler family are also considered as part of this history of hidden violence