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https://theconversation.com/a-defiant-stand-histories-of-australias-frontier-wars-are-revealing-their-true-complexity-but-theres-more-to-be-done-253233>
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Review: Uprising: War in the Colony of New South Wales, 1838–1844 – Stephen
Gapps (NewSouth)
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.
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."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
