Blood, brains and foul murder: the evidence of Australia's massacres are in its newspapers | David Marr

The frontier massacres were very public murders - known about, sometimes complained about - but the killings went on

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We're only human. We hang on to lies that comfort us. A big consoling lie that still hangs around this history of slaughter and dispossession is that we can't apply the outlook of the 21st century to killings on the frontier.

Tell that to those who denounced the crimes as they were being committed. Theirs was real time rage. "It is a fitful war of extermination waged upon the blacks, something after the fashion which other settlers wage war upon noxious wild beasts," wrote Carl Feilberg, editor of the Queenslander in 1880.