The first Australian settler frontier (thank you Lyndall): Lyndall Ryan, ‘Australia’s Tasman Wars: Colonial Australia and Conflict in New Zealand, 1800–1850 by Craig Wilcox (review)’, New Zealand Journal of History, 58, 1, 2024, pp. 143-144 | settler colonial studies blog

The first Australian settler frontier (thank you Lyndall): Lyndall Ryan, ‘Australia’s Tasman Wars: Colonial Australia and Conflict in New Zealand, 1800–1850 by Craig Wilcox (review)’, New Zealand Journal of History, 58, 1, 2024, pp. 143-144

14May24

Excerpt: The renewed interest by Australian historians in colonial Australia’s involvement in the New Zealand Wars has inspired military historian Craig Wilcox, whose previous work includes Red Coat Dreaming (2009), to interrogate the Tasman frontier from the perspective of the Colony of New South Wales between 1788 and 1850. He contends that during this period, the maritime frontier was more important economically to New South Wales than the land frontier. Securing food from New Zealand for the rapidly growing colony, as well as engaging in sealing and whaling on the South Island and in Bass Strait, brought great wealth to Sydney traders, enabling them to bankroll the more volatile sheep and cattle industries on the inland frontier. Despite missionary endeavours in New Zealand, Wilcox argues that the Tasman frontier was a site of increasing violence between the Sydney traders and Māori communities, exacerbated by the increasing availability of firearms for purchase in Sydney.

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