‘A defiant stand’: histories of Australia’s frontier wars are revealing their true complexity, but there’s more to be done

Historian Stephen Gapps’ latest book, Uprising: War in the Colony of New South Wales, 1838–1844, describes a coordinated Aboriginal military front across more than 20 different Aboriginal nations and language groups. The front extended for thousands of kilometres, from Port Phillip in the south to Moreton Bay in the north.

Over this extended arc, war raged for several years from the late 1830s.

Review: Uprising: War in the Colony of New South Wales, 1838–1844 – Stephen Gapps (NewSouth)

This history is revealed through detailed research of settler archives: reports, news stories, and survivor testimony. Gapps establishes that organised and coordinated bands of warriors waged a successful campaign across multiple sites, which forced the soldiers, shepherds and settlers to retreat. He calls this the “uprising” and those who waged it “warriors”.

The warriors deployed a range of tactics to terrorise the invaders, forcing many to flee their holdings. By the mid 1840s, however, the squatters became militarised and more accustomed to the warriors’ style of warfare. The parliament grew concerned to protect grazing profits. Gapps notes that the colonial population had doubled, from nearly 98,000 in 1838 to 181,556 in 1845. Horse, sheep and cattle numbers also exploded. The rush to claim land beyond the “limits of location” meant the warriors were increasingly outnumbered.

As I read Uprising, I thought about my Aboriginal family. My great-great-great-grandmother, Mary Anne Tidswell, was born in 1836, on the eve of the swarming of her Country by sheep and soldiers and the uprising of her people. By the time her second daughter was born in 1864 – my great-great-grandmother, Emma Dingwell – a new world had descended on the occupied plains of north western New South Wales.

Aboriginal and military history

In the 56 years since eminent anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner challenged historians to address the curious “silence” around the recent Aboriginal past, an enormous body of research by historians and others working in the field has transformed the discipline.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives and experiences have been incorporated into accounts once dominated by colonial and settler perspectives, establishing the academic field widely referred to as Aboriginal history.

These histories have examined Aboriginal resistance. Henry Reynolds’ transformative work The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia included previously omitted accounts of Aboriginal responses to invasion. The book was a radical retelling of Australian history.

Reynolds documented the many and varied acts of resistance, from the first days of Sydney Cove until the start of the 20th century. Drawing on fragmentary sources – archival information, diaries, journals, newspapers, official documents and oral narratives – he introduced new ways of doing history.

Other historians have since detailed Aboriginal responses to invasion and dispossession, ranging from conflict and tension to negotiation and cooperation. Heather Goodall tells this history as one of activism and organising to secure rights to land.

Anthropologist Barry Morris has written about the violent dynamics of the colonial frontier, focusing on the experiences of the Dhan-Gadi people on the north coast of New South Wales. As the colonial economy underwent a pastoral boom in the 1830s, colonisers expropriated land on an unprecedented scale. The expansion was accompanied by what Morris describes as a “culture of terror” and the “rising” of Aboriginal people.

Gapps’ account differs from these earlier studies of Aboriginal resistance primarily because he considers the uprising in relation to military history. Rather than treating colonial violence as the predominant organising dynamic, he focuses on Aboriginal tactics and strategies, and finds a distinct pattern of warfare. His innovative interpretation contests most of the military focused histories of resistance.

Australian wars

Uprising extends Gapps’ two earlier studies of Aboriginal warfare: The Sydney Wars: Conflict in the Early Colony, 1788–1817 and Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance – The Bathurst War, 1822–1824. The earlier books are concerned with particular sites and periods of conflict between the First People and the invaders.

In Uprising, prevailing interpretations of Aboriginal resistance are dispensed with.

Scholars have usually insisted that Indigenous societies, where people are organised according to responsibilities to place and have a non-hierarchical relation to one another, mitigate against organised military campaigns. Uprising presents evidence that, in the period between 1838–44, and beyond in far western New South Wales, Aboriginal groups formed a coordinated resistance.

Rather than a narrative of “military weakness” and inability to adapt traditional tactics to war against the colonisers, Gapps proposes that 20 different groups “made a defiant stand against the push into their lands”. He documents an extensive resistance that benefited from networks of communication and shared strategies to repel the invaders.

He establishes, for example, that the warriors were using axe heads well before the invaders arrived. He argues this is explained by already extensive networks, which were used to exchange resources, observations and tactics. He also establishes that the warriors used firearms and stockpiled weapons.

Gapps questions accepted accounts that the use of horses and rifles proved critical to overwhelming Aboriginal resistance. Instead, he shows that the tactics deployed by Aboriginal warriors were effective along the rivers, creeks and gullies – conditions that did not necessarily lend themselves to the style of war the British were conditioned to fight.

The warriors’ deep knowledge of Country supported their military tactics. They would draw the soldiers into ravines rather than fighting on open plains, and they separated larger groups of soldiers into smaller, more vulnerable groups before setting upon them.

All these accounts are vividly painted and drawn from archival sources.

A highpoint of resistance

Gapps identifies two leading strategies in the warrior uprising. One was to destroy the squatters’ property and kill their stock, denying them thousands of pounds worth of cattle and sheep. As Gapps details, some squatters were “ruined” and “up and left”. Historians have attributed the squatting bust of the 1840s to drought and over-investment. Gapps offers a counter explanation: the warriors were a significant undermining factor.

The other tactic the warriors deployed was terror. Resistance fighters terrorised the invaders “forcing convict shepherds to cower in their hunts, swim rivers and flee for their lives, refuse to work for their overseer, destroy their firearms and go insane in the bush”.

The warriors could number as many as 1,000 in one camp alone. Not only did they successfully wage a war of terror; they sustained their camps and fighters on a diet of the invaders’ livestock. Soldiers travelling in the warriors’ wake came upon one camp that was strewn with the bones of sheep and cattle.

Gapps describes the uprising of 1838–44 as a “highpoint of resistance to the colonisers”. After this period, the colonisers deployed new strategies to overwhelm the resistance. Gapps reminds us of the terrible consequences of the deployment of the Queensland Native Mounted Police, established in 1849.

Further west, as the moving frontier and patterns of settlement encountered the Barkandji people, the Barka (Darling) river became a war zone. Warriors burnt down the invaders’ infrastructure and left stockyards in ruins. Gapps records that, in December 1845, Major Thomas Mitchell saw this as “humiliating proof that the white man had given way”.

Honour and remembrance

Gapps’ research is extensive. The bibliography and references make up nearly a quarter of the book. The richness of the archival evidence is impressive.

As the study of Australian and Aboriginal history continues, what remains outstanding is how this history is remembered and represented. While we might acknowledge the writing back of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander worlds into the history books, unease persists about how this history should become a remembered and honoured part of the nation’s story.

The significance of the uprising of 1838–44 has been poorly understood. Australian military history is still unsure how to represent the frontier wars. There are no monuments, plaques or markers of the uprising, no inclusion of these conflicts in Australia’s many war memorials.

There is still much more work to be done in the field of Aboriginal and Australian history. Uprising, with its emphasis on military tactics, provides a new interpretation of this period of intense conflict. How it can be represented in military history, and in the towns where these events played out, remains as outstanding work for communities and historians.

Heidi Norman receives funding from the Australian Research Council.