The map of Australia’s frontier massacres is done, but researchers say picture remains unfinished

Prof Lyndall Ryan, the academic and historian who led the massacres map project at the University of Newcastle. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

An eight-year long project to map the massacres of people on the Australian frontier is the “first sustained effort to break the code of silence” on the violence of colonisation, its lead researcher says, but the full story is yet to be told.

The true picture may never be known because “the code of silence about massacres has been universal”, according to emeritus Prof Lyndall Ryan from the University of Newcastle’s frontier massacres research project.