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Introduction
This article examines the significant place of the 99th (Lanarkshire) Regiment of Foot as part of the shared history of Australia and New Zealand through the 1840s and 1850s, including its role in frontier conflict with Aboriginal peoples in Queensland and Māori peoples in New Zealand. This is a preliminary comparative exploration of the role and experiences of detachments of the 99th Regiment on three different frontiers of colonial Australasia during this transitional period: the end of the convict system and commencement of free settlement in Moreton Bay in 1842–48; the short-lived North Australia Colony (later the site of Gladstone) in 1847; and New Zealand’s North Island in 1845–47.
Since the publication of Henry Reynolds’ The Other Side of the Frontier (1981), there has been a growing scholarly interest in and debate about Australian frontier violence. 1 Of particular relevance to this article has been John Connor’s The Australian Frontier Wars 1788–1938 (2002), which for the first time examined this conflict within the wider context of military expansion across Britain’s empire. 2 Similarly, despite some important historiographical inroads, the experience of imperial forces in colonial Australia remains largely ignored as part of the early frontier conflict experience, an absence that this article seeks to redress. 3
Of all the British Army’s infantry line regiments to have served in the colonies of Australasia, the 99th Regiment’s service of fifteen years was one of the longest, from the departure of its first elements from the United Kingdom during 1841 through to its departure from Australia in 1856. It is also the only British regiment to have the distinction of having a regimental war memorial (for New Zealand) erected on Australian soil in 1850 at Anglesea Barracks in Hobart, Tasmania, commemorating its service and losses across the Tasman 1845–46. 4
This southern colony had an additional significance in that, with the end of transportation to the eastern Australian colonies, Hobart took over from Sydney in being the land headquarters for the British Army in Australia. The 99th Regiment’s long-term posting to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania after 1851) resulted in the formation of many close personal liaisons with colonial communities. For example, when elements of the 99th and other imperial reinforcements left Australian garrisons for service in New...