I’ve been reading as much as I possibly can lately about pre sustained contact Indigenous Australian culture, and there has been something that sticks out to me. In many of the books that I am reading, clans/family groups seem to almost literally be constantly raiding and fighting each other. Usually the dispute is over a woman, who was either promised to a man and not delivered, or literally physically taken from her husband/father. The fights seem relatively minor. A few people from each clan may be speared, hit with a waddy or boomerang, or killed. However, once the dust has settled from the battle, that seems to settle the dispute.
So now to my question. Was this how all warfare was conducted? Small raids on neighboring villages and clans? Did hundreds of clans ever come together and fight a prolonged campaign against another group?
Thank you in advance for any answers, and feel more than free to correct my current understanding of Indigenous Australian warfare or culture in general!
So this is going to be a borderline answer team, and if it means removal, then fair enough, but there is some contextual linkage here that informs the answer to OP's question.
Whilst I can't get too far into scholarship on whether any of the First Australian nations had a tradition or history of strategic warfare prior to Australia's colonial era (a time frame of some 75,000 years) and experience of large scale strategic warfare - I'll have to leave that to others to categorically confirm it - there are clues from the colonial period outside the scope of your question that help inform an answer to the period that is within your question. Namely, if that kind of warfare was part of First Nations cultures before Europeans showed up, why wasn't it present when Europeans did show up, and how is that absence now understood as a factor behind their near complete loss of collective sovereignty to the British?
One thing mainstream Australian military historians (so ideological and debunked cranks like Windschuttle are omitted by default here) have been able to establish without much argument is that at the time of the colonial era and arrival of the British onto the Australian eastern seaboard, there is scant if any evidence of such a strategic martial tradition (i.e. one that goes beyond the type of regular and intermittent low level warfare that you describe in your question) existing.
Not only that but in the last twenty or so years as the Frontier Wars have been correctly recognised as a military or paramilitary conflict and legitimately part of Australian history, Australian military historians have largely abandoned reductionist and oversimplified tropes of "natives VS gunpowder" in favour of a more nuanced appreciation of the cultural factors at play at that time.
A number of ADFA/RMC Duntroon and UNSW academics (Grey et al) increasingly have cited over the last few decades the distinct lack in evidence of such a strategic military tradition or cultural awareness of that scale of warfare. This has been cited in combination with a lack of a consolidated political opposition to the British, topped off by a general lack of awareness of what a non collective "ownership" of the land (in European terms) and thus what an invasion was (until it was too late) as the primary strategic reasons the Frontier Wars were a lost cause, well before disease and tactical military outcomes pursued largely by settler-sourced militia and police in a paramilitary role came into play (historically British regular army presence in Colonial Australia was very limited, and engaged mainly in coastal defence).
That's not to say that groups of indigenous peoples cooperating to achieve political ends never would have happened. British governor James Stirling cites just such headaches in his contemporary papers regarding potential alliances between Swan Valley Wadjuk peoples and the Pinjarra Binjareb that culminated in his controversial expedition to, and resultant battle and massacre at, Pinjarra in 1834. So it's entirely possible that separate groups pre-Colonial era would've cooperated in the kinds of small scale raids, revenge attacks/blood feuds, and brief but bloody small-scale conflicts we know occurred.
But coming back to the crux... If large scale strategic warfare (additionally at odds with traditional and distinct First Australian ideas of collective ownership and custodianship of natural resources) had previously been part of the experience of First Nations peoples, why was this experience not passed down using the exact same extremely strong oral traditions that was used to pass down so much of 75,000 years of continuous cultural knowledge to First Nations peoples alive in the late 18th century? Was it discarded? Or did it simply never exist in the first place?
This doesn't in any way detract from well established evidence on warfare and conflict occurring between First Nations in the pre-colonial era with some regularity and indeed ferocity. But it does cast doubt on it occurring on a large scale in the manner you're asking about. I expect one or two of this subreddit community who specialise in pre-colonial Australian history will be able to provide more information for you on that one way or another because I cannot confirm for you that those large scale campaigns never happened - it's outside my range of expertise. But given the above 18th and 19th century context, there'd be some challenges in maintaining that such a tradition existed on a broad basis, and then was subsequently lost to First Australian peoples by the British colonial era.