The violent frontier expansion of Australia’s north is laid bare in a new book by Darwin academic Dr Robyn Smith, which details the massacres of Aboriginal people from 1824 until the 1980s, names the perpetrators and their benefactors, and explains how these massacres occurred.

The book, Licence to Kill: massacre men of Australia’s north, is the culmination of Dr Smith’s years of research on colonial frontier massacres across the north of Australia, particularly in the Northern Territory, as part of the University of Newcastle’s Colonial Frontier Massacres mapping team led by the late Professor Lyndall Ryan.

The Charles Darwin University lecturer in colonial history said that under the administration of the colonies of New South Wales and South Australia, massacres were a regular occurrence notwithstanding emphatic denials and later claims by officialdom of a knowledge vacuum.

Dr Smith said when South Australia’s ambitions for riches from the land dissolved, administration of what is now the Northern Territory was ceded to the federal government in 1911, but the massacres continued with relative impunity under that regime.

The book reveals not only the perpetrators of massacres but their benefactors and enablers, both public and private, and argues how colonialism was subtly perpetuated by the conferral of high civic honour on many of the actors, noting that these are embedded as place names across the landscape.

“It may surprise people to learn that police were not the principal perpetrators,” Dr Smith said.

“They were most certainly involved, but there were too few of them to cover the Territory, and they were vastly under-resourced.

“Those circumstances facilitated relentless human hunting expeditions in the pursuit of land and profit.”

Licence to Kill: massacre men of Australia’s north has been published by the Historical Society of the Northern Territory and will be launched at CDU’s Casuarina campus gallery on Tuesday, June 18 at 1pm.

The book is available from the Historical Society of the Northern Territory website.

The NT Independent will be publishing two pieces written by Dr Smith that draws on her research of massacres and the enslavement of women in the Northern Territory.