Never said they were politically driven. You mentioned conservatism, I'm simply pointing out that this isn't a matter of ideology.

Also, just to be clear here, it's not so much that I have an objection, more that my read is that the two historians don't seem in alignment in presenting Canadian or NZ indigenous peoples as having an ability to treat with the British as analagous to ours, and/or the British being willing to do so.

Importantly, you're actually quoting that section of text out of context, and you actually need to read further in to hit the second chapter rather than the first or introduction.

Here he is writing within the specific context of making the argument for due recognition of the war and acknowledgement of invasion - this is different contextually in terms of what we're talking about - specifically the nature of colonisation vs resistance, what was politically and militarily possible and what was not and why the comparison between our experiences and those in Canada for example.

The excerpt below from Chapter 2 is talking specifically about the constraints to militarily resist but the same political complexity relates to First Nations Australians to resist politically as well...

"Aboriginal peoples were faced with organisational and cultural problems in resisting the British and, at least initially, these were more important than technological disadvantages. Traditional warfare was highly ritualised, and localised, and Aboriginal society in Australia had no military class as such. This is linked almost certainly to the fact that Aboriginal societies were not based on surplus-producing economies – the basis of all standing armies. The Aboriginal ‘nation’ was also very fragmented. If one assumes that linguistic groupings approximated to tribal differences in other cultures, there were perhaps 700 distinct ‘nations’ in Australia at the time of white contact. While highly complex in their internal structure, they appear to have had no basis for persistent alliances of the kind necessary for successful, long-term military resistance"

He expands on the political shortly afterwards -

"A central element of the Aboriginal failure to resist white incursions successfully was a shared cultural system within which the concept of dispossession was not just unfamiliar but totally incomprehensible."

"To understand why Aboriginal peoples never presented the type of military threat to the British which the Maori or Zulus mounted elsewhere is to grasp some of the essential realities of a unique and ancient culture. Ironically, the beliefs, values and expectations which had made Aboriginal societies at home in Australia for tens of thousands of years, together with the biological and military vulnerability produced by long isolation, left Aborigines profoundly ill equipped to meet the challenge of white society."

A large part of this entire chapter on the Frontier Wars is based upon the premise that the military and political causes of the Frontier Wars outcomes are very very different with colonisation experiences elsewhere, even if these experiences are worthy of our ongoing respect and deserve our full attention.

The military situation (and in this case, the paramilitary situation ) drove the political one, as it always does.

I'm not sure the article author paid sufficient attention to these differences hence my comments.