Licence to Kill: Massacre Men of Australia's North by Robyn Smith

Licence to Kill is a forensic account of violent frontier expansion across Australia’s north with particular emphasis on the Northern Territory. Smith reveals not only the perpetrators of massacres but their benefactors and enablers, both public and private. She demonstrates how colonialism was subtly perpetuated by the conferral of high civic honour on many of the actors, noting that these are embedded as place names across the landscape.

Robyn Smith is a Lecturer in Colonial History at Charles Darwin University and a Conjoint Lecturer at the University of Newcastle (UoN). She is a PhD (Political History), Master of Cultural Heritage and Bachelor of Arts (Journalism & Anthropology) from Darwin. She is well written on the history, heritage, politics and governance of the Northern Territory and has spent several years researching massacre sites in the NT for the UoN’s Colonial Frontier Massacres project.