We had both been drinking since Christmas' - battered wives and dead abusive husbands in early colonial Rockhampton

Twenty years ago, Kay Saunders published the first detailed analysis of domestic violence in colonial Queensland. While conceding that her research was constrained by our limited understanding of ninteenth-century Australian family structures, idiocyncrasies in the judicial record and statistics on criminal convictions, and the universal reluctance of victims to report domestic violence, Saunders nevertheless was able to discern a 'general typology' of domestic violence in colonial Queensland, and geographic patterns of its manifestation. She found that a significant but indeterminable proportion of domestic relationships were 'characterised by extreme violence, psychological terror and often a warped symbiotic relationship between the partners', that alcohol abuse contributed to this, and that batterers shared a psychological profile: they were 'frequently moody, tense, resentful, and generally anxiety-ridden', and insecure about their masculinity, characteristics which inclined them towards exerting physical power over their wives and children. Saunders suggested that in a 'crude frontier society like Queensland' the male role demanded men who were physically aggressive, and that this was more pronounced in the later-settled west and north than it was in the 'more "civilized" south-east region', where the capital Brisbane, is located.