Tldr:

- Lack of treaty

- Refusal to recognise sovereignty

- Refusal to recognise land rights

- Genocidal Massacres

- Unequal justice system

- Mass Imprisonment and Exile

- Slave labour

- Segregation

- Discriminatory Laws

- Genocidal Assimilation Policies

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When James Cook and Joseph Banks reported to the British government that Botany Bay would be an ideal location for a colony, one of the major selling points was that the natives were nomads, with supposedly no concept of land rights, who sparsely inhabited a vast continent. Believing that the colony would only occupy coastal Sydney and possibly a few coastal outposts, the British believed that their presence would hardly disturb the native populace, who as nomads would simply live somewhere else, and eventually would learn to live in the superior British manner.

This was great, as it made them benevolent invaders who would uplift the natives as opposed to destroying them - even better, it'd wouldn't be necessary to enter into troublesome treaties as they had with every other sovereign Indigenous nation up until this point, and nor would they need to pay for the land, as they would in the several African locations they considered.

And strangely enough, the British were somewhat correct - the 'Indians' of Australia did accomodate the First Fleet and early Sydney, treating it as if it were simply another (very strange) tribe within the existing social, cultural and diplomatic structure. The early years were surprisingly free of conflict, most of which was provoked by convicts - it helped that British infantry struggled to catch the locals. Phillips' orders read:

You are to endeavour by every possible means to open an Intercourse with the Savages Natives and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all Our Subjects to live in amity and kindness with them. And if any of Our Subjects shall wantonly destroy them, or give them any unnecessary Interruption in the exercise of their several occupations. It is our Will and Pleasure that you do cause such offenders to be brought to punishment according to the degree of the Offence. You will endeavour to procure an account of the Numbers inhabiting the Neighbourhood of the intended settlement and report your opinion to one of our Secretaries of State in what manner Our Intercourse with these people may be turned to the advantage of this country.

The British authorities were reluctant to provoke their Indigenous neighbours, and genuinely saw little threat in them besides the occasional ambush in the bush as punishment for some slight - unlike other colonies, there were never any fortifications or walls intended to turn away Aboriginal attacks. Disease devastated most of Australia in the 1790s, and the sudden plummet in native population set off tribal wars with accusations of curses and witch craft, which the British profited from by expanding their frontiers and allying with this tribe against that, and essentially absorbing the refugees into urban Sydney.

Genuine war came not from the British garrison and the Eora and others of Sydney, but on the frontiers - freed convicts, squatters and free settlers expanding across the fertile plains of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land. The abuse of women and children, for sex or slavery, was often a leading cause, but so too was the imminent starvation of Aboriginal people denied access to traditional foods and water. All involved called it war, but legally the British claimed New South Wales as crown land, and Indigenous Australians as British subjects. For the military to police the frontier districts, they needed a state of martial law and a magistrate present, and officials generally sympathised with the natives, understanding that land was the principal cause of conflict, and blaming convicts for unnecessary provocations. Although the military was often a mediating force, both settlers and soldiers were guilty of murderous punitive expeditions that slaughtered indiscriminately, and despite claims of fairness the British legal system almost never hanged Europeans for the murder of Aboriginals - judges and juries were reluctant to punish their peers for crimes against 'savages'.

The British believed that since Aboriginal Australians did not live in permanent settlements and grow European-style crops, they had no concept of land ownership, and thus had no right to claim it - those who could improve it, through agriculture and urbanisation, were naturally more deserving. This completely ignored the complex land ownership and harvesting rights systems already in place across the entire continent, which often followed matrilineal lines (an alien concept to patrilineal Britons) and crossed tribal and cultural boundaries. Fanny Balbuk, an Indigenous woman of Perth who famously ignored the new colonial capital being built on her traditional lands, berated the governor and his guards for building his mansion over her grandmother's grave, whose blood ties gave her the right to harvest resources that were being claimed and destroyed by white Europeans. Indeed, it has been speculated that one of the reasons why Aboriginal Australians in various locations initially allowed Europeans to settle is because they believed them to be family members returning from the dead (a little confused from the journey), which gave them inherited land rights according to local law - the Perth settler George Fletcher Moore was welcomed by a weeping woman into her family, apparently recognising him as a family member who had died.

In Tasmania, a war of extermination carried out by settlers, aided by the rape and murder committed by whaling and sealing crews along the coasts, saw the Tasmanian Aboriginal population of 6000 almost entirely destroyed within the lifetime of the woman Truganini. Raised around European-wrought personal tragedies, she aided the missionary George Augustus Robinson on 'the Friendly Missions', a deal with the Governor that agreed to Tasmanian Aboriginals being removed to a remote island with the promise of soon being returned. The promise was not kept, the survivors shrank to a population of twenty-nine before being returned, and Truganini was (supposedly) the last Tasmanian. Even at the time this was considered to be (what would come to be called) genocide, and it was seen as a blessed tragedy - the world's most primitive people making way for the world's greatest.

With the withdrawal of British soldiers from policing duties around 1838 came an escalation in frontier massacres, as punitive settler and police expeditions routinely butchered local tribes. Awarded self-government at the same time as other more established colonies, frontier Queensland became a nightmare, where white captains led native police in what might be considered roving death squads, massacring both 'tribal' and 'friendly' Aboriginal populations, including those which worked the plantations and stations of white landowners. The landowning squatter parliamentarians fully endorsed this.

On the frontiers of Western Australia, police shipped masses of chained prisoners to Rottnest Island, where men from all across WA were shoved into cramped cells with the expectation that they would quickly die of disease. Slavery for sex and labour was openly practiced, despite its illegality, and considered a right and a necessity for the squatters - those who questioned the morality of this were ostracised and attacked. Wary of what had happened in Queensland, the British refused to grant WA self-government without guarantees for the safety of Aboriginal Australia - this came in the reluctant addition of a constitutional clause that mandated 1% of state revenue go to Aboriginal welfare. This law was abandoned almost as soon as self-government was granted (and the Australian colonies federated).

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