This chapter illustrates how Australian settlers and their leaders cooperated to create a new, morally legitimate category of martial experience – imperial military service – in contradistinction to the decades of frontier violence that continued to rage as a result of settler expansion. Australian officials, initially convinced of the viability of neutrality, reconfigured their military legislation and prepared their publics for service as the empire’s ‘police force’ throughout the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. In sum, the chapter charts a fuller history of Australia’s participation in armed violence ‘before the ANZAC dawn’, arguing that the many substantial connections that Australia’s colonial militaries maintained with the wider Indian empire – Sudan, but also the North-West Frontier and Burma – and thrice in Southern Africa served to separate ‘military service’ from ‘frontier violence’, creating conditions for Australian participation in ‘imperial’ wars alongside other colonies or Britain itself. Australians thus brought themselves into the military apparatus of empire. They did so first by transforming their militias into modern fighting forces that could cooperate with imperial forces, and then by seeking out opportunities to gain experience, usually on colonial battlefields in South Asia and Africa. Ultimately, the chapter shows that by the early twentieth century, many Australians joined the imperial martial effort because of a perceived sense that their rights to imperial equality also came with real obligations to ‘defend’ their empire in South Africa, the North-West Frontier, or the Pacific.