![]() To maintain the study's focus, the conflict customs of the Torres Strait will not be included, having generally more in common with Melanesian warfare. This paper aims to reconstruct some of the regulations surrounding traditional warfare as it was practiced across Indigenous (Aboriginal) Australia (including Tasmania). ![]() The views presented in this article are the authors’ own and do not represent those of any organizations with which they are affiliated. The authors would like to extend their thanks to Mr Angus Murray, a Wiradjuri man completing his PhD at the University of Newcastle on pre-settlement warfare, who provided valuable inputs, direction and unique fragments of knowledge that underlay this work. * This paper draws upon and refines research conducted by the authors, recently published in “Indigenous Australians”, in Samuel White (ed.), The Laws of Yesterday’s Wars, Brill Nijhoff, Leiden, 2021. The study is a preliminary one, aiming to stimulate further research and debate in this neglected field, which has only recently been explored in international relations. ![]() This paper, co-written by a military legal practitioner and an ethno-historian, uses early accounts to reconstruct ten laws of war evidently recognized across much of pre-settlement Australia. Yet, very little has ever been written on the laws, customs and norms that regulated Indigenous Australian collective armed conflicts. All aspects of Indigenous customs and norms are now beginning to receive a balanced analysis. Thankfully, the situation is beginning to change, in no small part due to the growing literature surrounding the Frontier Wars of Australia. This is due largely to a combination of academic and social bigotry, and loss of Indigenous knowledge after settlement. Studies in Australian history have lamentably neglected the military traditions of First Australians prior to European contact.
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