This book comes out of a long engagement with the Western District of Victoria, and in particular with Gunditjmara Country around Budj Bim and the Eumeralla River. It has taken nearly ten years to finish and has been a labour of love whose focus has changed and be rewritten many times over that period of time.

What I have tried to do here is to understand the conflict that took place in this landscape on its own terms, rather than treating it as a series of isolated incidents or as a simple story of expansion and resistance.

The starting point is the Country itself. The basalt flows, wetlands, and broken ground of the district are not just background. They shape how people move, where they can go, and what they can do. Long before pastoral settlement, this was a structured and managed landscape, with systems of water, stone, and resource use that reflect deep knowledge and continuity. When that structure was disrupted, the conflict that followed was shaped by the same features.

The violence that developed across the district was rarely concentrated or decisive in a single moment. It unfolded over time, in small actions that accumulated. Livestock spearing, reprisals, patrols, and attacks took place across a wide area, often with limited visibility and uncertain outcomes. Pursuit was difficult, coordination was uneven, and both sides operated under constraint. The result was a pattern of conflict that was dispersed, adaptive, and persistent.

Much of the evidence comes from colonial records and settler accounts. These sources are uneven and often use language that obscures as much as it reveals. Terms like “dispersal” appear frequently, and part of the task here has been to consider what lies behind them. The aim has not been to resolve every uncertainty, but to place events within a clearer structure and to examine how they relate to one another across time and space.

I have also approached the material with an awareness that this is not only a question of what happened, but how it can be understood. Ideas drawn from “just war theory” are used at points to frame questions about violence, authority, and conduct, but they do not sit comfortably within a frontier setting where recognition and legitimacy are contested. Rather than forcing the material into those categories, I have used them to test where they hold and where they do not.

What emerges is a picture of sustained conflict shaped by environment, organisation, and pressure. It is not a story of single battles or decisive moments, but of actions that build, constrain, and influence what follows. The intention throughout has been to keep the focus on how the conflict worked, how it was experienced in place, and how it developed over time.

The book is now available on Amazon here.