Addressing recent critiques concerning the accuracy of Alice Duncan-Kemp’s accounts of Queensland’s Channel Country, Dr Ray Kerkhove’s recently published essay, “Alice Duncan-Kemp’s ‘Warrior Lodges’ and Kooroongoora: Structures of Resistance During Australia’s Frontier Wars”, evaluates Duncan-Kemp’s extraordinary statements concerning the structure of the Kooroongoora millenarian movement and what she called ‘warrior lodges’. The essay considers the implications of these descriptions for our current understandings of how First Nations groups organised militant resistance against inroads of settlement. After defining millenarian movements and warrior sodalities, Kerkhove’s paper considers how Duncan-Kemp’s accounts align with common features of these phenomena. Evidence is presented for large-scale alliances, medicine man resistance leaders and warrior associations in many regions of Australia. Kerkhove suggests these may have been central to First Nations resistance during Australia’s Frontier Wars.

Kerkhove’s essay is an Open Access (free) article published in the Oceania journal by Wiley. To access the full-text article click here.