The Black War
Reading time: 10 minutes
In the heat of commemoration of Australians’ involvement in the first world war, it’s timely to remember their participation in the frontier wars in the 19th century. As Nicholas Clements, the author of a new book on the best known frontier war, the Black War in Tasmania in the 1820s, points out, the death rate among the colonists was half that of Australians in the first world war, much higher than the death rate in the second world war and the casualties affected almost every family in Tasmania.