Uprising: War in the colony of New South Wales, 1838-1844

by Stephen Gapps

Genres: Nonfiction, Australia

256 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2025

Reviews

[David Holford · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a must read for anyone wanting to understand the history of the British colony of New South Wales. The British came, with their convicts, and all the apparatus required to administer them. That was in 1788. At first the Aboriginal peoples of Australia - the people who had lived in the country for thousands of years, and who were, by default, the “owners of the land” - were curious and interested, perhaps a bit anxious about what these newcomers wanted, why they were here. It soon became clear that the white people had not come for a visit, to make their acquaintance, and to marvel at the wonder of the land in which they lived, but to settle, to establish a society on the land that the Aboriginal people understood to be theirs. The trouble was that the Indigenous peoples depended on this same land for their sustenance, both physical and spiritual. They watched with dismay as the British just moved in and began to change the landscape into something quite unrecognisable, and also unproductive - barren, in the local people’s minds. The Aboriginal people resisted, and their resistance grew into rebellion. Why should they just retreat from the land which they called home? Understandably, as anyone would, they fought to keep their homelands.

Fifty years passed and British society spread inexorably further and further out from the original settlement at Port Jackson (Sydney), driving away the people before them. The British assumed ownership of the land, the whole country, without agreement, without negotiation, without payment, without regard for the rights of the original inhabitants. The government of Australia then took it on themselves to grant this stolen land to certain people, and to sell land to others. They gave away and sold land that did not even belong to them. By 1838 Europeans had spread north to what is now Queensland, south to present day Melbourne, and west over the mountains to the rivers of the western fall of the Great Divide. Everywhere they went they encountered Aboriginal people. They tried to ignore them. They put their flocks of sheep and herds of cattle on Aboriginal land. Many saw the Aborigines as little more than part of the curious fauna of this wild huge land. Even those who saw the Aborigines as people in their own right could not understand their resistance to white settlement. When Aboriginal warriors fought back, the Europeans thought it was outrageous. They talked about “outrages” visited upon the settlers, acting as if these reaction of the indigenous people was strange. Yet when push came to shove the British were just as keen to defend what they had begun to see as theirs against anyone who threatened them.

This book is the story of the war that raged between Aboriginal forces and white settlers during the years 1838 to 1844, a war which white settlers ultimately won, a war in which there were atrocities visited on both sides by the other, much like wars today. The Aboriginal people clearly held the moral high ground even if the Europeans saw them as uncivilised savages - it was they that had been attacked, it was their land that had been being taken. The Indigenous resistance forces fought a guerrilla war against the invaders - the only kind of war that was feasible in that context. They were well organised, co-ordinated, planned and in many cases effective. The British were a pathetic, divided opponent, but they had two things the Aboriginal people did not have - guns and horses. It took a long time for the British to get themselves organised, but when they finally did, they used their advantage brutally and mercilessly, killing Aboriginal men, women and children indiscriminately in an attempt to strike fear into the hearts of the natives, to drive them away to make room for livestock. The Aboriginal people fought back bravely, using their far greater local knowledge in every way they could to cause damage to the settlers. But in the end, in the face of the greater military might of the enemy, it was hopeless; despite the courage and the stubbornness of the warriors, the uprising was broken, the British victorious. The victors took the land and simply pushed the rightful owners away into the bush, caring not whether they lived or died.

Wars of this sort have been fought since time immemorial, when a foreign force invades with the intent to take another people’s land. But for two hundred years this invasion of Australia was not seen as that - but rather as a settling of an empty land. In the last fifty years there has been a movement among historians to tell the true story. This book is a contribution to that growing body of scholarship that seeks to represent the truth of the Australian Wars, the pain and injustice of which is still reverberating across this nation two hundred years later.

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rachel Perkins states that this book is essential reading. I agree, it is.

Public libraries who are in areas covered by this book should consider including it in their local studies collections with cataloguing detail to include the local connections, including the local wars of resistence.