Hannah Baldry, Ailsa McKeon, and Scott McDougall (2015): “Timothy Bottoms’ Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland’s Frontier Killing Times provides a systematic account of the mass killings of Aboriginal people that accompanied the expansion of the Queensland frontier in the nineteenth century.1Conservative estimates suggest that in the latter half of the nineteenth century, at least 24 000 Aboriginal people were killed at the hands of the Queensland Native Police.2 The estimate doubles when private killings by white settlers are included in the tally.3 Bottoms has comprehensively mapped these killings, charting some 140 frontier massacres that occurred between 1831 and 1918. Bottoms examines these killings alongside settlement patterns, concluding that the escalation of violence in the mid-to late-19thcentury traced the pathway of pastoralist expansion, coinciding with Queensland’s emergence as a separate colony and the arming of the Queensland Native Police Corps with more efficient weaponry. Conspiracy of Silence marks a significant contribution to the historiography of the dispossession of Queensland’s Aboriginal communities. It joins a growing body of historical work which highlights the scale and brutality of frontier violence in Queensland.4 From a legal perspective, it also gives rise to the jurisprudential question of whether Queensland’s frontier ‘killing times’ constituted crimes of genocide in the strict legal sense. The earliest recognition of the crime of genocide in international customary law appears to have occurred [late 1930s] just fewer than 20 years after the last of Queensland’s recorded massacres [1918].5 The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide came into force in 1951,6and was only enacted domestically in 2002.7The inability to retrospectively prosecute acts which occurred in the previous century means there is a lack of any prospect of criminal prosecution under domestic or international law. However, the apparent absence of any available legal redress does not detract from the gravity of the genocidal crimes which, as the evidence strongly indicates, were committed against Queensland’s Aboriginal population.8 Indeed, there are nonetheless concrete steps that should be taken to recognise and address the traumatic inter-generational effects of genocidal acts upon Aboriginal people in Queensland” (Hannah Baldry, Ailsa McKeon, and Scott McDougall, “Queensland’s frontier killing times – facing up to genocide”, Queensland University of Technology Law Review, volume 15, issue 1, pages 92-113, 2015: https://law.uq.edu.au/files/1263/Queenslands-Frontier-Killing-Times-Facing-up-to-Genocide-Baldry-McKeon-McDougall-2015.pdf . )