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.