Most accounts from the First Fleet suggest that the Eora people of Sydney mostly ignored the British, and there were similar 'first contact' reactions throughout Australia. The British were something entirely beyond Australian understanding - a people from a land outside of their own continent, their ships, clothing, weaponry and customs hardly comparable with anything local. The natural reaction to them was fear, and often to pretend they didn't exist. There were curious folks who investigated the British, but more often than not the British had to kidnap young locals and teach them English, and use them to draw the tribe into town. When relations were established, the British were generally treated as dead ancestors who had returned to life (and thus welcome to the land) or as just another tribe to interact with. The British themselves believed that they could take a small parcel of land without disturbing the natives, and for many coastal outposts this initially appeared to be true.

Conflict with the First Fleet and early Sydney was light, and usually brought about by misunderstanding or revenge for small scale injustices. Convicts hated and feared Aboriginal people, and abused them when they could - this led to revenge attacks on isolated men in the bush, which some colonists saw as cowardly and barbaric murder. With few women on the First Fleet, Indigenous women were also a constant target of abuse - this also occurred with the Dutch sailors of the previous century, and as Australia maintained a heavily skewed male-to-female ratio until the First World War, this would continue with whalers, sealers, soldiers, pastoralists and all sorts of frontiersmen right up until at least the 1940s. Aboriginal people practiced communal ownership, and for them anything on their land should be shared - theft of European goods was a common source of friction with the invaders.

There were many reasons why conflict didn't escalate. The colonial authorities were under orders to keep the peace with the natives - indeed, Aboriginal people were claimed as citizens of Britain, and thus legally had to be treated as equals, although this pretense was abandoned fairly quickly. Most of the colonial leadership believed in Enlightenment ideals like the 'noble savage', and were generally sympathetic if paternalistic to Aboriginal Australians - they certainly viewed them much more favourably than the convicts they guarded. Another reason peace was kept was that Sydney was starving and hemmed in by mountains - it benefited from Aboriginal hunters sharing food, and struggled to expand outward in search of fertile farm land.

From the Aboriginal side, three major factors played a part in peace. Aboriginal 'bands' were small and leaderless, often highly dependent on mobility, and usually at (low scale) war with one another. Aboriginal warfare primarily revolved around justice and honour - you didn't send an army to invade and establish control, you sent a group of warriors to kill one or two of their tribe, or sometimes even just injure them as punishment. Also, European alcohol and disease dealt a severe blow to the Eora people of Sydney and then continued to be spread by other tribes well beyond the pale of European settlement - when explorers out of Sydney finally managed to cross the Blue Mountains, they saw that tribes beyond had already been devastated by disease.

Frontier war began with the expansion beyond Sydney to the Hawkesbury River, the colonists looking for fertile crop land. This brought them into conflict with the Darug people who relied on the same fertile land to grow their yams. Settlers planted crops, built houses and erected fences, and the locals burnt down the houses, knocked down the fences and stole the food and other valuable materials. Horses were rare, Europeans sparse and muskets inaccurate, so the local warriors had the advantage. Peace eventually came when disease, starvation and war deaths whittled the local population so low as to be unable to continue the fight - according to colonial sources, much of the resistance was also due to the zeal of one man, the warrior Pemulwuy, whose death apparently ended the conflict.

Another example is the founding of Perth and the Nyungar lands of southern Western Australia. When James Stirling and the first colonists invaded the area of modern Perth in 1829, there was no initial conflict - the colonists struggled to establish themselves and the local Whadjuk Nyungar helped with food supplies and welcomed them as lost ancestors. Yet by the next year colonists had fenced off all fertile land and drinking water in the Perth area, and the Whadjuk people came into conflict as they foraged for potatoes in the same places they had foraged yams and tubers for millennia. This escalated into raids on flour stores in shops or mills by the starving locals, Aboriginals shot, and colonists speared in revenge. The 'leader' of one group, Yagan, was declared an outlaw, and his father executed by firing squad - he was eventually hunted down and murdered, and like Pemulwuy, his head was removed and sent to Britain as a trophy and souvenir.

This conflict had spooked the colonists of Perth, who exiled the most vocal opponent of war with the Nyungar (Robert Menli Lyons), and decided on an attack that would scare all Nyungar into submission. This was the so-called 'Battle of Pinjarra', where the governor led a posse of men to massacre a tribe of men, women and children as they fled across a river. The next year, the military men led settlers over the Darling Scarp into the fertile plains around York, leading to brutal war that like the war in NSW's Hawkesbury River lasted several years.

Generally, as the years went by and the further inland colonisation went, the more violent, greedy and destructive it became. By the time the frontier reached the north and central areas of Australia, native police were charged with massacring local Aboriginal people whether they resisted or not - survivors were rounded up to be forced labour, driven away or jailed and exiled. Slavery was an illegal but open practice, and there was little sympathy for Aboriginal Australians from the wealthy agriculturalists who ran colonial parliaments and profited from frontier expansion.

The opposition to the initial invasions did increase over time, as refugees fled inland and warned those tribes of what to expect.

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Good books on this include:

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The Other Side of the Frontier by Reynolds

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This Whispering in Our Hearts by Reynolds