Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance — The Bathurst War, 1822–1824

By Stephen Gapps

'In May 1824, what can only be described as a period of all-out, total gudyarra ('war' in the Wiradyuri language) had begun west of the Blue Mountains. Relations between Wiradyuri people and the colonists in the country around Bathurst had completely broken down, and the number of raids and killings occurring across isolated stock stations in the district had intensified.' In Gudyarra, Stephen Gapps—award-winning author of The Sydney Wars—unearths what led to this furious and bloody war, beginning with the occupation of Wiradyuri lands by Europeans following Governor Macquarie's push to expand the colony west over the Blue Mountains to generate wealth from sheep and cattle. Gudyarra traces the co-ordinated resistance warfare by the Wiradyuri under the leadership of Windradyne, and others such as Blucher and Jingler, that occurred in a vast area across the central west of New South Wales. Detailing the drastic counterattacks by the colonists and the punitive expeditions led by armed parties of colonists and convicts that often ended in massacres of Wiradyuri women and children, Gapps provides an important new historical account of the fierce Wiradyuri resistance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Nov 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781742249971

Book preview

Cover image for Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance ˜ The Bathurst War, 1822–1824, by Stephen Gapps.

GUDYARRA

STEPHEN GAPPS is a public historian working to bring Frontier War histories into broader recognition as Australia’s First Wars. In 2011, he was awarded the NSW Premier’s History Award for regional and community history. Stephen’s The Sydney Wars: Conflict in the early colony 1788–1817 was the inaugural winner of the Les Carlyon Award for the writing of military history (2020).

‘This isn’t just a war for Wiradjuri country, this is a war for Australia: the country we are still to be. Our nation begins here.’

Stan Grant

‘The untold story of the Wiradyuri War of resistance against a World Empire’

Uncle Bill Allen Junior,

Wiradyuri Elder

‘In Gudyarra, Stephen Gapps plots in meticulous detail the brutal war between the British and the Wiradyuri for possession of the Western Plains of New South Wales.

A masterly account of both sides of the conflict, Gudyarra offers new understandings of the complexity of frontier history and the need for all Australians to reconcile with the past.’

Lyndall Ryan

‘This is an important book, indeed essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the new direction in the history of the frontier wars.’

Henry Reynolds

GUDYARRA

THE FIRST WIRADYURI

WAR OF RESISTANCE

˜

The Bathurst War, 1822–1824

STEPHEN GAPPS

Logo: NewSouth Publishing.

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Stephen Gapps 2021

First published 2021

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Design Susanne Geppert

Cover artwork natural pigments, Jazz Money, Wiradyuri poet and artist

Map artwork pencil and wash on canvas, Aunty Nyree Reynolds, Wiradyuri artist

Printer Griffin Press, part of Ovato

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

‘A cruel and bloody war was waged against my people. White Australian history says Australia was settled peacefully. This is a lie. Wars were fought, martial law declared, Koories massacred and their lands were stolen.’

MARY COE, WINDRADYNE,

A WIRADJURI KOORIE, 1989, P. VIII

Contents

Warning

A note on terminology

Conversions

Introduction

‘About twenty went out and shot and killed any they came across’

chapter 1

‘Horses, arms and ammunition’

Murriguwalbang (Strangers):

The Europeans, 1813–15

chapter 2

‘They must be numerous indeed’

Madhu mayini (Many people):

The Wiradyuri, 1816–17

chapter 3

‘Black man die fast since white man came’

Dugul balu (Sickness and death): 1818–21

chapter 4

‘At war with the whites’

Gudyarra gawaan (War against white men):

1822–23

chapter 5

‘Tumble down whitefellows’

Dhalgirridhunyal gawaan (I will kill you, white men): Late 1823

chapter 6

‘The natives may now be called at war with the Europeans’

Gudyarra gawaan (War against white men):

January–June 1824

chapter 7

‘Shoot them all and manure the ground with them’

Dhalgirridhunyal (I will crush or crack you, I will kill you):

July–September 1824

chapter 8

‘All were destroyed, Men Women and Children!’

Dhalabanha gibirrgirrbang, gambingum, galingabang bur (Destroy men, women, children):

October 1824

chapter 9

‘A label, with the word PEACE ’

Warraabarra gulbalanha (Make peace):

November–December 1824

chapter 10

‘Matters of history’

Maradhal (The past)

Mandaang guwu (Thank you)

Bibliography

Notes

Index

WARNING

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware this book contains words and terms written by non-Indigenous people in the past that may be confronting and would be considered inappropriate today.

It also contains the names of deceased people and descriptions of distressing historical events, including massacres.

This book contains graphic descriptions of historical events that may be disturbing to some readers.

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

In the 18th and 19th centuries, Europeans struggled to comprehend Australian Aboriginal languages, resulting in many different attempts to record words phonetically. Throughout this book, original terms, spellings and punctuation have been retained in quotations; modern, accepted or alternative spellings and other editorial adjustments are positioned in square brackets as appropriate.

The spelling Wiradyuri rather than Wiradjuri is used with guidance from the Gunhigal Mayiny Wiradyuri Dyilang or Bathurst Elders group.

The use of Wiradyuri words and phrases throughout this book follows Stan Grant Senior and John Rudder’s A New Wiradjuri Dictionary, 2010.

The term ‘native born’ was used in the past to refer to the children of Europeans born in Australia.

Unless quoting from original sources, this book uses the term ‘colonists’ rather than ‘settlers’.

CONVERSIONS

Introduction:

‘About twenty went out and shot and killed any they came across’

‘ON BATHURST PLAINS’

‘One little incident in the life of Sargent Miller worth recording in The Early days of Settlement. The Blacks were very troublesom. Tribes of Two or Three hundred would gather around the Sheep Stations often Killing Sheep. On one occasion one of those Tribes Killed the Hut Keeper. Sargent Miller Shot the Black Fellow who committed the crime, he was arrested and committed for Trial by the Police Magistrates, Mr Thos. Everenden and Lawson and had to go to Sydney to be tryed, but on arriving there was at once discharged without an hearing … after this Seargant Miller received orders to form a party to hunt down the blacks, he being the leader about twenty went out and shot and killed any they came across little and big young and old shared the same fate. This led to the safety of life and property around Bathurst Plains ever after. A book could be written without fear of contradiction on the Early days of Australian life.’

This description by Tom Miller of a massacre party sent out to track down and indiscriminately kill Wiradyuri people is a rare and brutally honest first-hand account of events that occurred on the rugged fringes of the Bathurst Plains in 1824. Threatening to ‘tumble down [kill] whitefellows’, from 1822 Wiradyuri warriors had begun killing sheep, cattle and stockworkers on their lands surrounding the township of Bathurst. By May 1824, a furious and bloody war of resistance had seen warriors take back control of all the country in the outlying regions that was not protected by soldiers or armed men.

The response by British colonists to the threat to their precious grazing lands was devastating. By the end of 1824, armed parties such as that led by ex-sergeant Thomas Miller had defeated the Wiradyuri through what one colonist described as ‘a war of extermination’.

Tom Miller’s role in securing the ‘safety of life and property around Bathurst Plains’ also secured his place among the ranks of the ‘pioneers’ of Bathurst. By the late 1800s, men like Tom Miller had begun recording their role in the histories of growing townships such as Bathurst, Mudgee and Kings Plains (near modern-day Blayney). Some, like William Henry Suttor and George Henry Cox, published their accounts. Others, like Tom Miller, were no authors of note. Miller’s brief account (written in the third person) of ‘one little incident’ in his life was never published, and has languished in the Bathurst District Historical Society Museum.

Tom Miller had been a sergeant in the 73rd Regiment, which arrived in New South Wales in 1810 with Governor Lachlan Macquarie. Miller decided to stay in the colony when the regiment left in 1815. He became a convict overseer, and by 1824 he had obtained a land grant and was farming at White Rock near Bathurst.

Miller was by all reports an honest man, described as someone ‘ready to help those in need’ and ‘never lacking in any good work or word’. His son, Thomas Miller Junior, said Tom was ‘highly respected by all who knew him’ and that he was known as ‘a terror to all Evil doers’.

Long before people could easily fact-check stories of what had occurred in the vastness of the rugged hills around Bathurst, many ‘old timers’ exaggerated their roles or incorporated other stories into their own family histories. But there is no reason to suppose ‘honest’ Tom Miller fabricated the ‘orders to form a party to hunt down the blacks’.

In December 1823, the ‘explorer and pastoralist’ William Lawson had just handed over the position of commandant of Bathurst to Major James Thomas Morisset, a serving army officer in the 40th (2nd Somersetshire) Regiment. Soon afterwards, Lawson was approached by Wiradyuri people at his homestead at the Campbell River, south of Bathurst, following Tom Miller’s shooting of the man he believed responsible for killing the hut keeper.

Lawson wrote to Colonial Secretary Frederick Goulburn, informing him that the Wiradyuri had come to him ‘for protection and demanded justice saying if they did not get satisfaction, they would kill Tom Miller or some of his children’. Miller was, he said, currently ‘in fetters [chains]’ and ‘committed to take his trial’ in Sydney. Lawson believed Miller had ‘shot a native and it appears without any cause or provocation’. He told the group of Wiradyuri they would get ‘satisfaction’ and that Commandant Morisset would ‘punish the white man’ if ‘the white man ill-treated them’. This, according to Lawson, ‘they perfectly understood’, and they promised not to kill Miller, his children or any sheep or cattle.

When Miller returned from Sydney not long after, Lawson’s words must have rung hollow for the Wiradyuri who had come to him seeking some form of justice. Miller’s case was dismissed because Judge Advocate John Wylde was informed the ‘Black Natives’ concerned were not ‘Competent witnesses in a Criminal Court’ – and anyway, could not be brought to Sydney. The man who later admitted he had ‘shot a black fellow’ in revenge (and against British law) returned to Bathurst, and just a few months later led a massacre party against the Wiradyuri.

Today, Sergeant Miller’s sword is on display at the Bathurst District Historical Society Museum. In 1824, armed parties went out from Bathurst with whatever weapons they could muster; in one instance a Wiradyuri woman was found dead with wounds inflicted by a convict stockworker armed only with a cutlass. Miller may well have carried the museum’s sword with him when he rode out at the head of twenty armed men to kill Wiradyuri people, ‘little and big young and old’.¹

Gudyarra (War)

The year 1824 was a violent one in the colony of New South Wales – the most violent since the British arrived at Port Jackson in 1788. It was a year with more killings and conflict than at the height of the Sydney Wars, during Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s campaign to ‘strike terror’ into the Aboriginal people of Sydney which ended in the Appin Massacre of 17 April 1816.

In May 1824, what can only be described as a period of all-out, total gudyarra (‘war’ in the Wiradyuri language) had begun west of the Blue Mountains. Relations between Wiradyuri people and the colonists in the country around Bathurst had completely broken down, and the number of raids and killings occurring across isolated stock stations in the district had intensified. In mid-1824, Wiradyuri leaders known to the British as ‘Jingler’, ‘Joe’, ‘Simon’, ‘Old Bull’, ‘Sunday’, ‘Miranda’ and ‘Saturday’ had all led their warbands in attacking remote outstations – the colonists’ weakest points – in a huge arc around Bathurst, extending to the south and west. Within a few months Wiradyuri attacks had resulted in the deaths of around twenty men, mostly convict stockworkers, creating such fear across the region that workers from different outstations gathered together for safety and refused to tend their flocks and herds. Back in Sydney, the owners of the sheep and cattle being destroyed in great numbers – the absentee pastoralists and graziers – were in an uproar, clamouring for the colonial authorities to take military action to ‘secure life and property’. On 14 August, Governor Brisbane declared martial law west of the Blue Mountains and ordered the reinforcement of the military garrison at Bathurst. Three ‘divisions’ of soldiers, led by newly appointed civil magistrates, were sent out to keep the Wiradyuri ‘in a constant state of alarm’.

In September 1824, a man known to the colonists around Bathurst as ‘Blucher’ was leading a large group of Wiradyuri people away from the cattle and sheep stations that had been established on the Cudgegong River valley near present-day Mudgee. Blucher had around a hundred people in his warband, including women and children and a strong force of over forty warriors. They were herding about forty head of cattle, travelling around a hundred kilometres north-northwest of the Cudgegong River (possibly near today’s Avisford Nature Reserve), in rugged terrain well away from the open country of the river flats. The cattle had been moved from the unfenced runs taken up by the sons of one of the first colonial stock graziers to venture into the Mudgee area: William Cox. Cox had built the road west from Sydney across the Blue Mountains in 1815, become commandant of Bathurst, and then sent his two ‘native-born’ sons, George and Henry, to manage his extensive – and expanding – stockholdings in the Bathurst region.

Blucher led his people well. They were in the process of taking a food supply that could last them for months into country where the colonists would struggle to find them, let alone defeat them in combat. In fact, this was a widespread practice reported over many years along the vast frontier between traditional Aboriginal lands and the expanding colony. Later, on other stretches of the frontier, Aboriginal people were noted to have herded and tended stock taken from the colonists. Some were known to have built brush fences to keep their stolen stock in, setting up their own cattle yards.

The warband was moving to a position where it might better fight back against the firepower of muskets. They were also carrying a large arsenal of weaponry, comprising ‘hundreds’ of spears, axes and boomerangs. A similar strategy had been successful for Gandangarra and Dharawal warriors at the Battle of Razorback, near Camden Park, south of Sydney, in 1816. Here, warriors had stockpiled weapons in a steep and rocky defensive position. They completely routed a militia force that attempted to attack them.²

But Blucher’s warband had an Achilles heel. Cattle leave a trail that is very easy to follow. Blucher’s people were soon being tracked by reportedly one of the most ruthless characters in the district – Theophilus Chamberlain, overseer for George and Henry Cox’s cattle and sheep runs in the Mudgee area.

Chamberlain, an Irishman, had been convicted of robbery and demanding firearms and was transported to New South Wales in lieu of a death sentence in 1815. In 1819, while working for the Coxes at their Clarendon farm, west of Sydney, he was convicted of stealing a horse and sent to the penal settlement at Newcastle. After two years he returned to Sydney and was taken back in by the Cox family as a stockworker on their runs in the Bathurst region. On his arrival in the colony Chamberlain had been described as ‘very active’, and his ‘ruthless’ character was perhaps initially regarded by the Coxes as an asset in their remote stations west of the mountains and far to the north of Bathurst.³

On or around 10 September, on the Cudgegong River, about 130 kilometres north of Bathurst, Chamberlain was with two stockmen, somewhere between the Coxes’ ‘Dabee Farm’ (later ‘Rawdon’, near current-day Rylstone) and the Mudgee area, when they ‘fell in with a tract [tracks] of cattle’ heading away from the main river.

The ‘well armed and mounted’ trio decided to investigate, following the cattle tracks. After travelling around ‘60 miles to the N. N. W. [north-northwest]’, the stockmen ‘saw a very large number of natives’ who were driving ‘about 40 head’ of ‘horned cattle before them’. It was Blucher’s warband.

Blucher attacked at once. He led thirty warriors straight at the men, who turned their horses and fled. To Chamberlain’s surprise, Blucher’s men were so intent on killing them that they kept pace with the three horsemen. As they ran, the warriors were skilfully peppering the stockmen with a hail of spears and boomerangs.

We don’t know his real name, but the colonists may well have called him Blucher after the Prussian general famous for his role in defeating Napoleon Bonaparte at the battle of Waterloo in 1815, acknowledging his prowess as a warrior. He certainly led his men from the front in the all-out attack against Chamberlain.⁴

Chamberlain’s horse was then struck by a boomerang, which ‘cut a piece out on the ribs’. At this point, the overseer decided that a counterattack was the best method of survival for himself and his stockmen. Bringing their muskets to bear – rather than fleeing on horseback, unable to shoot and reload – was a smart tactic. Despite being outnumbered ten to one, Chamberlain ‘turned the horse round’, took aim at the boomerang thrower and ‘shot the man dead’.

As it was later reported in the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser (Gazette) newspaper, Chamberlain ‘again retreated, loaded, and turned the second time, and shot the headmost native dead. He then retrograded again, loaded, turned, and shot a third man dead, whereupon the natives stopped’. Their leader, Blucher, was dead.

Looking back on these events, it is a challenge to comprehend how Chamberlain could fire a muzzle-loading musket with such skill and rapidity. It is possible for a seasoned shooter to fire and reload a flintlock musket in fifteen seconds, slightly less if you risk not using the ramrod and simply drop the gunpowder and musket ball into the barrel. Perhaps being ‘well armed’ meant Chamberlain had the increasingly common percussion-cap style of musket, making reloading slightly quicker. Perhaps, too, Blucher – an obvious leader – was well in advance of the other warriors, so that Chamberlain saw an opportunity. Whatever the case, the power of firearms was evident. Chamberlain had shot three men, including their leader. The rest of the warriors broke off the attack.

The overseer ‘with his two men rode on till after dark’, at which point they rested and ‘remained all night without any fire, fearful of being discovered’. The next day they rode on and ‘got into a tract of cattle to the W. N. W. [west-northwest]’. After riding about another 20 miles, ‘they gave up the pursuit for want of provisions’.

Then, as they were returning to Mudgee, they came across an unexpected sight. The men found a place ‘where there were a number of natives’ fires, and an immense quantity of arms laying round them, consisting of spears, boo-merrings, &c’. Strangely, there was ‘not a living person to be seen’.

They had stumbled across the camp of the warband they had fought the day before. The Wiradyuri had left their weaponry at the camp, as they were conducting the ceremonies or sorry business associated with burying their leader and two other warriors – men who may also have had leadership status in the united warband of several combined family groups. Chamberlain recognised an opportunity. The party ‘immediately dis-mounted, and heaped the whole of the arms on the fires’.

The mourners would have seen plumes of smoke rising from their camp. The whole warband, ‘men, women and children’, then raced back in a ‘great fury’; Chamberlain and his companions ‘immediately mounted their horses and retreated’. Again, around forty warriors pursued them, once more keeping pace with their horses. But ‘they had few arms with them’, and when Chamberlain saw ‘they had nearly expended’ their spears and boomerangs, he and his men ‘dismounted, tied their horses together, and faced about, commencing a fire of musquetry on the natives’. According to the Gazette report, they ‘then charged them with the bayonet until they were completely routed and dispersed’. It seems odd, though not impossible, that three stockmen would be armed with bayonets, and that they would attack with them in a quasi-military manner. While the report in the Gazette certainly added some martial flourishes to the story of the battle, the men may well have had ex-military-issue firearms with bayonets and used them in close combat. Or perhaps, urged on by Chamberlain – who was later reported to have been a vindictive man ‘of cruel disposition’ – they used their bayonets on the wounded.

Whatever the case, there were ‘sixteen men dead on the field’ at the end of the affray. Three well-armed and well-mounted men had killed nineteen warriors – around half of Blucher’s men – and there were unknown numbers of wounded. If Blucher’s warband had met small numbers of mounted, armed colonists or soldiers in terrain of their choosing, with such an arsenal of weaponry and supplies the outcome may well have been very different. Blucher may have become a famous Wiradyuri leader. We might know his traditional name today.

Although the warband had been shattered and their arsenal of weapons ‘completely destroyed’, it was sheer luck that Chamberlain and his men stumbled across the warband at the moment they were mourning the death of their leader and two other warriors. Blucher’s attack signified to the colonists that the Wiradyuri were on a serious war footing. A huge statement of military superiority had been made in the rolling hills and plains near Mudgee, where today vineyards and horse studs abound, their origins in frontier warfare largely forgotten.

In a bizarre twist of history, Blucher’s battle with Chamberlain has often been described as a massacre. While it is tempting to think that three men killing nineteen suggests a massacre rather than a battle, the fact the stockmen were well armed and mounted, added to their luck in finding and destroying the Wiradyuri arsenal, makes the battle account credible. It is unfortunate that Blucher’s initial attack, and his warriors’ subsequent valiant attempt to destroy Chamberlain and his men, has been seen simply as a massacre.⁵

‘The troubles with the Aborigines in this district’

The Bathurst War has received little attention from historians and very little emphasis in local histories of the region. Any trace of the war was virtually forgotten during the great period of colonial expansion across the inland of New South Wales during the 1830s, and then all but completely erased – in both a physical and historical sense – by the gold rush period of the 1850s. It was not until the 1880s that ‘old timers’ and their children, such as the Suttor and Cox families, began to put pen to paper, recalling the war as part of local stories about the hardship of ‘The Early days’ (as Tom Miller put it).

In 1938, Charles Wansborough Sloman wrote the first local history of Bathurst ‘compiled from available records and personal memory’. The history covered the years 1815 to 1915, yet in all its 350 pages there is but one sentence on the Wiradyuri, stating that between ‘1824 to 1831 the Bathurst district was constantly disturbed by bushrangers and natives, the former robbing settlers and the latter stealing stock’.

In 1959, Bernard Greaves’s work, The Story of Bathurst, the first formally published book on the history of Bathurst, expanded Sloman’s paltry efforts to include a paragraph on Wiradyuri resistance. But this paragraph made no mention at all of casualties, beyond ‘the killing of stockmen was reported from several stations’, let alone massacres. Greaves’s brief account ended with: ‘As far as the Bathurst district was concerned there was no serious trouble with the aborigines after 1824’.⁶

In 1967, the Bathurst District Historical Society’s A Short Story of Bathurst failed to mention anything at all of the Wiradyuri, going straight from what the society called the first ‘explorers’ across the Blue Mountains to Governor Macquarie and the occupation of the Bathurst Plains.

But by the late 1960s, some local historians had begun to pay more attention to the conflict around Bathurst and to the story of the warrior and leader Windradyne. Initially known by the colonists as ‘Saturday’, Windradyne rose to prominence in 1824 as a significant resistance leader. His story, and even his traditional name, was largely only remembered through his connections with the Suttor family, on whose property the Wiradyuri warrior was buried in 1829. Windradyne’s grave site at ‘Brucedale’, near Peel, just north of Bathurst, is still cared for by Suttor family descendants in conjunction with the local Wiradyuri community.

In 1971, Tom Salisbury and Percy Gresser published Windradyne of the Wiradjuri: Martial law at Bathurst in 1824, a groundbreaking local history – written by non-Aboriginal people. Indeed, their work came to be regarded as the definitive story of the Bathurst War and has remained so, right up to this day.

Joan Rutherford was one of the founding members of the Bathurst District Historical Society Museum. With the family history boom of the 1960s and 70s, ‘Mrs Rutherford’, as she signed her letters, was in charge of the archives and spent much of her time replying to family researchers in the days long before the Internet. In the early 1970s, in response to a query about ‘Bathurst early settler’ William Lane, she was very pleased to write back to the Lane descendant that his ancestor had a mention in Salisbury and Gresser’s recently published book. Mrs Rutherford, perhaps politely, didn’t say what that mention was, but she did say that the book was ‘a very good account of the troubles with the Aborigines in this district’.⁷

In the 1970s, the telling of Bathurst’s history was slowly changing. Windradyne of the Wiradjuri was indeed a ‘very good account’, but it was, as the authors put it, a story of ‘tragedy and suffering’. It focused on massacre, not resistance, and ended with a patent untruth: ‘and so the Wiradyuri people of the Bathurst area gradually disappeared and have finally vanished’.

Wiradyuri people around Bathurst certainly had to confront what Ambēyang man and Aboriginal historian Callum Clayton-Dixon has called the ‘colonial apocalypse’. But as Clayton-Dixon shows in the case of the New England region, Aboriginal people did not merely ‘vanish’ under the juggernaut of the British occupation of their lands. They both fought back and survived.⁸

It took Wiradyuri woman Mary Coe’s 1986 publication, Windradyne, a Wiradjuri Koorie, to bring the survival of her people to the fore in the story of the warfare and killings of the early 1820s around Bathurst. Still, other historians, such as Al Grassby and Marji Hill (in Six Australian Battlefields, published 1988) and Bruce Elder (in Blood on the Wattle, 2003), continued to see Wiradyuri resistance as a valiant but ultimately tragic affair, conducted against impossible odds.

John Connor’s The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838, published in 2002, was the first history to seriously consider the Bathurst War in terms of military strategy and tactics, but remains very much a broad overview in a study of a larger time period. New research from Wiradyuri historian Angus Murray and Frontier Wars historian Ray Kerkhove, among others, has begun to change our understanding of Aboriginal traditional and resistance warfare, and how effective it actually was on the frontier.

In terms of local history, Theo Barker’s 1992 History of Bathurst showed a more sympathetic portrayal of the people who had lived in the area for tens of thousands of years before the colonists arrived, but still devoted only a few pages to the conflict of 1822 to 1824. While it is an otherwise exemplary local history, Barker’s limited analysis of the military situation during conflict at Bathurst is telling. He suggested that Windradyne could not be thought of ‘as a master of military tactics, directing his warriors in an organized campaign to drive the Europeans out of his tribal lands. At best he was the leader of wandering bands who attacked Europeans as opportunities arose.’

As this book will show, Barker and others got it completely wrong. In some ways, they were bound to – as the historical, oral and archaeological evidence is lacking, missing or still to be revealed. As historian Emma Dortins suggests, the limited ‘record of escalating violence from 1823, and the period of martial law in the latter months of 1824, leave the historian with a hazy understanding of the nature and severity of the conflict’.

Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance attempts to clear a little of this haze by revisiting the historical archives, walking across the landscapes where these events occurred, and talking to the people who hold stories about it all. In particular, it shatters the idea that the Wiradyuri were ‘wandering bands who attacked Europeans as opportunities arose’ and shows that a co-ordinated, sustained and intense campaign occurred, which threatened the core of the colonists’ vast enterprise of occupying Wiradyuri Country and stocking it with sheep and cattle. I’d like to think even Mrs Rutherford would agree that it is ‘a very good account’ of things.⁹

CHAPTER 1

‘Horses, arms and ammunition’

Murriguwalbang (Strangers):

The Europeans, 1813–15

‘Either to apprehend or destroy them’

In December 1815, glowing reports of what the colonists were calling the ‘New Country’ west of the Blue Mountains landed on the desk of the secretary of state for the colonies. Earl Bathurst, who had just had the first township in