It is estimated up to 100,000 people died in the frontier wars that raged across Australia for more than 150 years. This is equivalent to the combined total of all Australians killed in foreign battles to date. But there are few memorials marking these first, domestic wars.

This is the first book to tell the story of the continental sweep of massacres, guerilla warfare, resistance and the contests of firearms and traditional Aboriginal weaponry as Indigenous nations resisted colonial occupation of their lands, territory by territory. At stake was the sovereignty of an entire country.

Black and white writers tell the stories of these battles across three crucial time periods, and all the states and territories.

This history is still alive in those descendants who carry the stories of their ancestors. The Australian Wars brings what for too long has been considered the historical past into the present so that we might know the truth of the origins of this nation.