Newcastle University: The Centre for 21st Century Humanities

Definition

Unlike ‘genocide’, there is no legal definition of massacre, or a ‘frontier massacre’. Most international scholars of massacre appear to agree that the minimum number of people killed to constitute a massacre is between three and ten people (Dwyer and Ryan 2012: xiv-xv). 

In this project, a colonial frontier massacre is defined as the deliberate killing of six or more relatively undefended people in one operation. 

The definition applies to the frontier massacre of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and Colonists. The number, six, has been selected because of the devastating impact on these people. 

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, as Barbara A. Mann points out, most hunter/forager people operate in groups of about twenty people. The killing of an undefended group of six or more of them in one operation, comprises 30% of the group, which Mann terms a ‘fractal massacre’. The impact is immediate and devastating. The survivors are immediately vulnerable to further attack, such as the kidnapping of women and children. They are impeded in their ability to hunt and forage for food, reproduce the next generation and carry out ceremonial obligations to ‘Country’. They are also vulnerable to introduced disease. (Mann 2013: 167-183) In the longer term they are often forced to join other Aboriginal groups, or surrender to Colonists. 

For Colonists and other non-Aboriginal people, a frontier massacre of six or more undefended people can also have immediate and devastating impact. Frontier colonist communities were isolated, mostly male, and usually consisted of only a few families. Of the massacres of colonists included on the map, four of them include the survivors of shipwrecks on the Australian coast. Two others involve the slaughter of colonial men alone and the remainder include the killing of colonial families. In all but two cases, the frontier massacres of non-Aboriginal people generated reprisal massacres of extraordinary scale and impact.