Australian Wars architecture: these buildings protected the people inside - and allowed them to attack those outside

As we Australians gradually come to realise that the Australian Wars happened and that they were about resistance by First Nations people as well as massacres of them, some questions will change. For example, if First Nations people resisted settler-invaders, how did those settler-invaders deal with this resistance?

Sure, they used increasingly powerful rifles, they used poison, they forced Indigenous people over cliffs. But they also built dwellings with defensive features, features that also provided a base for aggression.

An article in the journal of the Australasian Society for Archaelogical History considers these issues. The article, 'Architecture for a nervous landscape: defensive buildings in NSW 1788-1850', is by Stephen Gapps, Cameron Logan and Dallas Rogers.

The authors note:

[T]hus far, historians have not returned systematically to the buildings and remnant material fabric that often enabled military aggression and sustained colonial defence on the frontier – outbuildings with rifle slit windows, slab huts with gun loops, stone walls, strong rooms and a myriad of other domestic defensive architectural elements that reflect an unsettled, nervous landscape.

This diverges from the received idea of 'the early buildings of the New South Wales colony as home-like, restful places that were symbolic of a peaceful process of settlement ... How can we [the authors ask] rethink this heritage that has endured through conflict and colonisation but remains shrouded in a discourse of pastoral idyll? And finally, how might we include First Nations voices and narratives in this dominant heritage landscape?'

The authors invite input from heritage practitioners. Contact details are included.

See also, this post summarising work by Ray Kerkhove and others on defensive architecture in Queensland. Kerkhove wrote in 2020: '"frontier war" designs and structures... once dominated Queensland’s landscape: fortified camps, military posts,barracks, rural layouts, prospectors’ stockades, fortified telegraph stations,and fortified homesteads'.

Stephen Gapps is one of the editors of, and a contributor to, the forthcoming book, The Australian Wars. Ray Kerkhove is a contributor to the book.

David Stephens

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Picture credit: The 1820s granary at the Vines near Appin with rifle slit window feature (detail of photograph by Stephen Gapps).