The Australian Wars facts for kids

The Australian Wars is a three-part TV show from 2022. It's a documentary series about the Australian frontier wars. These were conflicts between Aboriginal people and British settlers. The show was made by Rachel Perkins, an Indigenous Australian filmmaker, for SBS Television.

Making the Series

The TV series was directed and narrated by Rachel Perkins. She is a filmmaker with Arrernte and Kalkadoon family roots. The show was produced by Blackfella Films for SBS. It also received money from Screen Australia, Shark Island Foundation, and Screen NSW.

Rachel Perkins decided to change the show's name from First Wars after they finished filming. Blackfella Films and SBS worked with an Aboriginal group called Culture is Life. Together, they created special learning materials. These materials use short clips from the series to help people understand more.

The series was made available to watch online in many languages. These included Simplified Chinese, Arabic, Traditional Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean, as well as English.

What the Series is About

The series tells the story of the Australian frontier wars. It starts when the First Fleet arrived in 1788 and goes up to the 1920s. The show looks at when and where these wars happened. It also explores how both British and Aboriginal people fought. It asks why a war was never officially declared.

The documentary especially focuses on how Aboriginal people resisted the settlers. It shares the stories of people involved in these conflicts. It also shows how the wars still affect Australia today. Rachel Perkins calls the lack of discussion about many massacres "the great Australian silence."

• The first episode looks at events around Sydney.
• The second episode focuses only on Tasmania.
• The last episode explores the creation of the native police corps in Queensland.

The series brings together many different voices. It includes interviews with Indigenous and non-Indigenous historians. Some of these are Marcia Langton and Henry Reynolds. It also uses re-enactments of past events. The filmmakers studied old records from the colonial times. They also included stories told by the descendants of people who lived through these events. Plus, they used findings from archaeological research.

The show also investigates how the wars affected Aboriginal women. Rachel Perkins even looked into her own family's history. She visited the place where her grandmother survived a terrible event on Arrernte Country in the Northern Territory. The series includes recordings of her grandmother talking about it from the 1970s.

Show Popularity

The first episode aired on September 21, 2022. It was SBS's most-watched program that night. About 154,000 people watched it live. The final episode on October 5 had 147,000 viewers live. This number grew to 335,000 when all daily viewings were counted.

Awards Won

The person in charge of finding actors, Anousha Zarkesh, won an award. She received the 2022 Casting Guild of Australia Award. This was for her great work in casting the series.