The Australian frontier wars was a series of violent conflicts between Aboriginal Australians and the British colony of Australia which occurred between the landing of the First Fleet in December 1788 and the early 20th century. In 1770, the Royal Navy captain James Cook made the first voyage to Australia's east coast, skirmishing with the Aborigines on 29 April 1770. However, Cook declared Australia terra nullius ("nobody's land") after failing to find any signs of agriculture or development by the island's natives. In 1786, the British established a penal colony on Australia, and, in mid-January 1788, the first British fleet arrived at the island, settling in New South Wales. The British also expanded into Tasmania and Victoria from 1803 onward, using the doctrine of terra nullius to deny the Aboriginal Australians their land rights. Conflict between white settlers and Aboriginals was most prevalent in Tasmania and Victoria, but more settlers and Aborigines were killed on the Queensland frontier than anywhere else in the country. Modern Australia's "history wars" revolve around whether or not the white settlers' actions against the Aborigines constituted a genocide, with proponents of the "Australian Genocide" theory claiming that the British and Australains systematically destroyed accounts of massacres perpetrated against the Aboriginies, and opponents arguing that the Aborigines put up relatively little resistance to the white settlement and were mostly killed off by European diseases, infertility, the loss of hunting grounds, and starvation. The frontier wars left around 2,500 white settlers and a minimum of 40,000 Aboriginal Australians dead, and they resulted in the destruction of Aboriginal cultures, the forced assimilation of the Aborigines into white Australian culture, and lasting British domination of the island of Australia.
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