A Blood-Soaked Land: Part II
Robert Hill, Quadrant, Aug 21 2026
Cultural lethal violence was institutionalised in Aboriginal societies in a way that sustained warfare was not. Payback and retaliatory punishment could be socially sanctioned or obligatory, but there were no standing armies, permanent commands or institutions for sustained military campaigning. The deep record is therefore one of recurring lethal violence, not continuous war.
The same caution should apply to the frontier. Killing, reprisal and punitive expedition did not automatically become “war” merely because one participant was British. Yet modern revisionism increasingly reverses the categories: raid and reprisal between Aboriginal groups remain “feud” or “payback”, while analogous episodes involving the British are aggregated across decades and vast distances into “Frontier Wars”. In the process, scattered resistance is retrospectively endowed with a military coherence the underlying social organisation did not possess.
Demographically, the terminology changes nothing. A man killed in revenge is no less dead because his death is called payback rather than warfare. What matters is frequency, lethality and persistence.
Comparative anthropology reinforces the distinction. Lawrence Keeley, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of the influential Oxford University Press study War Before Civilization, showed from archaeological and ethnographic evidence that recurring raids and relatively small clashes could impose heavy proportional losses on non-state populations. More revealing still are anthropologists Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg. In a peer-reviewed 2013 study published in Science, they systematically examined lethal aggression in 21 mobile forager societies drawn from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. Their conclusion cuts against claims of ubiquitous primitive warfare: most lethal incidents were homicide, interpersonal disputes or feud, while warfare constituted only a minority.
That does not weaken the argument. It defines it.
Read Robert Hill’s The myth of Invasion