rudd to make formal apology to aborigines, page-101

Banjar,
Some very good points.
In fact today it is often quite difficult for most to realize how difficult, if not impossible, it must have been for the government of the day to have had much real control over events and local policies in the many and varied isolated parts of Australia.

Given the extreme distances involved and the difficulty of and time involved in any transportation over even relatively small distances of undeveloped and rough country, it would seem to be fairly obvious that most disputes between settlers and other settlers or with aboriginal groups were largely local affairs and largely would have been over by the time any government could become significantly involved.

Even the reporting of the dispute and the mode of resolution would have depended largely on how the person wished to report it, and how the listener wished to interpret and recount what he had heard.

But as any government would do, the government would have tried to record events as if they were firmly in control even if they were only firmly in control of reporting what they liked to about whatever incident happened.