Martial law was declared seven times in pre-Federation Australia, playing a part in some significant historical events. Yet very little has been written on the topic,1 and no comparative study has so far been made. This paper gathers, for the first time, brief accounts of all of the martial law events2 in the early colonies into one document, and draws some initial comparisons. It will be seen that martial law was an adaptable doctrine. In the years between 1790 and 1853 it was used to fend off starvation, quash two rebellions, overthrow a government, and wage two wars against First Nations people.

Aboriginal women of Australia, in the early decades of European colonisation of the continent, were both inside and outside the law. This was partly due to the unique legal and constitutional conditions of NSW as both a colony and a military-run prison. It was also a consequence of the inconsistent and undecided legal status of Aboriginal Australians as neither hostile combatants nor British subjects. Whether, and how far, British jurisdiction extended to Aboriginal people remained uncertain until well intothe mid-1800s. Meanwhile Aboriginal customary law remained unrecognised by the common law.

Aboriginal women of the period were even less well represented, more vulnerable, and faced a wider range of dangers than Aboriginal men. Reprisals and raids on Aboriginal camps all too often occurred while the men were away, leading to the indiscriminate killing of non-combatant women and children.

In Bathurst in 1824 the Wiradjuri conducted a series of increasingly organised and deadly attacks on farms and cattle stations that collectively constitute some of the fiercest resistance to European intrusion in the history of the continent. This paper will explore the experience of Wiradjuri women during the conflicts. I hope to show how the records of the 1824 conflicts in Bathurst lay bare the gaps and contradictions in the legal historical narrative of European engagement with Aboriginal women. Crimes against Aboriginal women went either unreported or unpunished, with some arrests made but no convictions. As neither subjects nor hostile combatants, they had none of the protections, but many of the strictures, of British law.

Trilobite faunal provincialism is embedded in our understanding of early Cambrian palaeobiogeography, with the redlichiid, olenellid and bigotinid realms observed during Cambrian Epoch 2. However, provincialism apparently became reduced in trilobites across the diachronous late Age 4 redlichiid–olenellid extinction, with many families developing cosmopolitan ranges. We analysed data from the Paleobiology Database using network analysis to determine the nature and degree of trilobite provincialism during Cambrian Epoch 2, and how this changed across the redlichiid–olenellid extinction, with the aim of constraining the drivers of such patterns (e.g. biology, tectonics) under a neutral methodological framework. Results confirm that provincialism was elevated for trilobites during Epoch 2, but that Cambrian trilobite realms were not distinct entities. Rather, they reflect a continuous gradient of faunal turnover across the early Cambrian world that is most consistent with a model of rapid radiation and dispersal. Following the demise of the Cambrian Epoch 2 realms, faunal provinciality in trilobites at the family and genus level decreased measurably, with both biological and tectonic processes possible drivers of this change. Future work should aim to refine the observations and suggestions made here by exploring such patterns in higher stratigraphic resolution and in a broader range of taxa.