If First Nations families fear and distrust the police, the reasons can be found in the past as well as the present

• The killing times: a massacre map of Australia’s frontier wars
• Almost half of the Aboriginal massacres were by police or other government forces
• Australia’s history of massacres should be no surprise, but many have to be dragged to the truth
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Many Australians have little pause to deeply consider their interactions with police. But for many First Nations families, interactions with police and the judicial system are imbued with violent and often deadly experiences handed down through the generations and correspondingly documented by the white state.

A critical final finding of the Colonial Frontier Massacres Digital Map Project – that half the massacres of Aboriginal people on the Australian frontier were carried out by government forces, including police – reinforces how contemporary Indigenous deaths at the hands of state law enforcement agencies are part of a history of violence that began with European invasion in 1788.

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