Bryce Barker – The Conversation

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August 22, 2025

Ancient shells and pottery reveal the vast 3,200‑years‑old trade routes of Oceania’s Indigenous peoples

Bryce Barker, University of Southern Queensland and Tiina Manne, The University of Queensland

This study is the first archaeological research undertaken on New Guinea’s Great Papuan Plateau. Among the finds are a number of sea snail shells modified for use.

Ammunition found at a mounted police camp at Eyre Creek. Lynley Wallis

September 25, 2018

How unearthing Queensland’s ‘native police’ camps gives us a window onto colonial violence

Lynley Wallis, University of Notre Dame Australia; Bryce Barker, University of Southern Queensland, and Heather Burke, Flinders University

For 60 years, native police were deployed in Queensland to ‘disperse’ Aboriginal communities (a euphemism for systematic killing). Unearthing their camps is a key part of reckoning with the violence of those times.

There’s too much evidence of violence in Australia’s past to hide behind euphemisms. The Founding of Australia, Algernon Talmadge, 1937.

March 31, 2016

Of course Australia was invaded – massacres happened here less than 90 years ago

Bryce Barker, University of Southern Queensland

Detailed historical research on the colonial frontier unequivocally supports the idea that Aboriginal people were subject to attack, assault, conquest and subjugation: all synonyms for the term ‘invasion’.

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