Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance - The Bathurst War, 1822-1824
This book, along with other recent works including Gapps’ previous book The Sydney Wars and Mark Dunn’s The Convict Valley, show us that careful and inclusive scholarly research into the history of New South Wales can produce accurate, useful and insightful analysis based on both archival, online and oral sources, and on previously published work. There will always be gaps and silences, and we may never know the name of every Aboriginal person who was involved, or the exact numbers who perished defending their country, but we can now begin to see and understand our own history from both sides of the frontier. The same for other parts of Australia is needed.
READ REVIEW
↓
Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance
The Bathurst War, 1822-1824
Stephen Gapps | 2021
This is a book I wished I could have read when writing my doctoral thesis on the Native Police in Queensland. Complex attitudes and policies regarding Aboriginal people (predominantly land-hunting and violence) migrated north with the invaders, and the search for precedents for the force’s ‘soldier-police’ and previous colonial conflicts led me to Wiradyuri resistance on the Murrumbidgee frontier. I knew that southern peoples strenuously resisted colonisation, yet – as Gapps notes – only a few local histories and no detailed scholarly investigations were available (p. 235).
I will continually refer to this book as a valuable source of background and contextual history for understanding our national history, at least from the time of the invasion and annexation of eastern Australia by the British. My review reflects the major points I discovered in the text. I am sure that readers with better local knowledge than mine will gain other insights, yet still glean new facts about the history of the Bathurst War. Two facets of the conflict in the Bathurst district were paramount to me: the proclamation of martial law on 14 August 1824, and the introduction of small mobile detachments of armed soldiers.
First, we need to examine the notion of sovereignty and the belief that war can only be ‘fought between states’. Aboriginal nations existed before British invasion, a fact long denied but slowly being accepted in contemporary Australia. Although some theorists describe nation-states as European inventions, others view them as ethnically based sovereign territories with their own distinctive languages, systems of law and governance, and most importantly, a sense of unified and shared identity. Before invasion (‘colonisation’), Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples (like Indigenous peoples around the world) lived in sovereign nations – even if they were very different from and more complex than the ‘countries’ that Europeans previously knew. We now broadly understand and accept that the British invasion of eastern Australia occurred as the Kamilaroi and Wiradyuri nations were on the verge of becoming recognisable nation-states.
Martial law, as deployed during the Bathurst War in 1824, was only sparingly applied throughout the British empire, with India (1857) and Jamaica (1865) serving as two major examples. War between Aboriginal and European nations should not, as many have contended, be seen as different to any other. Gapps’ book, in describing how inter-tribal meetings during the 1820s ‘decided on collective action’ to ‘conduct full-scale war’, lends even more support to the reality of war in Australia (p. 131). His conclusion that ‘a unification of Wiradyuri groups…accompanied by alliances with other people’ occurred in mid-1824 is crucial to this assessment (p. 50). I completely agree with Gapps’ point that previous British experience with ‘guerilla’ (or, as it was later termed, ‘irregular’) warfare, particularly in Spain, was applied to their manoeuvres in the Bathurst area (p. 175). Frontier conflict in Australia was more complex than we had previously thought.
A common element of the Bathurst and Queensland campaigns was the never-ending threats from Europeans to ‘abandon’ their newly seized properties if colonial governments failed to immediately crush all resistance by Aboriginal people (pp. 166, 260). In connection with these demands, the implementation of martial law – the so-called ‘total warfare’ that followed these standover tactics aimed at dispossession, is an important marker in Australian history. The proclamation of martial law, first made at Bathurst and too long overlooked, is clear evidence of war taking place on Australian soil. What more proof does the Australia War Memorial need?
In fact, the British use of this tactic in the Bathurst War predates France’s adoption of ‘restless pursuit, attack, pursuit again’ during the Algerian campaigns of the 1830s and 1840s. Just as the French aimed to eliminate traditional economic and political aspects of Algerian life, British mounted forces had already attempted to use the same method of conquest in the Bathurst War. Did the French copy the British, not the other way round? Certainly, the British colonists in the Bathurst area, as Gapps notes, accepted that full-scale warfare, including discussion of ‘extermination’, had developed by 1824 (p. 151) to counter the continuing resistance from the Wiradjuri.
There are other historical connections across the colonies. The call for a ‘troop of Colonial Cavalry’ (p. 153) alerts us to the realisation that mounted soldiers were, as a direct result of the conflict in the Bathurst area, seen as superior to infantry (pp. 175, 203). This armed mobile force was a direct forerunner of the Native Police, and JT Morisset’s involvement in the Bathurst campaign is of interest, partly because of his previous military career in the Peninsula Wars, and at Newcastle and Norfolk Island, but also because his three sons, Edric (1830-87), Rudolph (1838-87) and Aulaire (1841-1909), served with the Native Police in Queensland (p. 118). Edric was later appointed Superintendent of Police at Bathurst.
Admitting that widespread state-sanctioned violence occurred on Australian soil is only the first step in acknowledging that the British invasion of this continent affected – and continues to affect – multiple communities and nations. This book is a significant contribution to that essential project, and the author is to be congratulated for producing an important work that will be essential reading for all those truly concerned with history, and those urging truth-telling.
Reviewer: Jonathan Richards, The University of Queensland and PHA (Qld)
Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance - The Bathurst War, 1822-1824 is published by NewSouth Publishing.