Stephen Gapps' book Uprising: War in the Colony of New South Wales, 1838-1844: review

This is Stephen Gapps' third book on the Australian Wars, following his two earlier volumes, The Sydney Wars (2018) and Gudyarra (2021). Uprising got me thinking about the forms of 'frontier violence' or 'frontier conflict'. I came up with this list, with perpetrators and victims in parentheses where it's not obvious.

Forms of violence

skirmishes; battles; massacres (mostly by Whites); murder and mutilation (by Blacks and Whites); revenge killings (Blacks and Whites); ambushes (Blacks and Whites); poisoning of flour and waterholes (Whites); firing rifles and shotguns (Whites - though later Blacks in some places); throwing spears (Blacks); rolling rocks down hills (Blacks)

Military tactics and strategy

guerilla warfare (Blacks); economic warfare (by Blacks against stock, crops and infrastructure, by Whites to facilitate dispossession of Blacks from land); co-ordinated attacks and responses (Blacks and Whites); alliances, sometimes between traditional enemies (Blacks); gatherings to exchange information and facilitate defence and attacks (Blacks); communication over long distances, using smoke and messengers to pass on information about movements of people and stock (Blacks); adaptation of inter-tribal warfare strategy and tactics into anti-colonial warfare (Blacks); protection of traditional waterways and pathways (Blacks); lighting of fires (Blacks); government direction from colonial capitals or London (Whites); government enlistment of settlers as a paramilitary force against Blacks (Whites)

Consequences

fear (Whites and Blacks); hanging of massacre perpetrators (Whites: Myall Creek 1838); decimation by Whites' diseases (Blacks); destruction of Blacks' land by hard-hooved stock - sheep and cattle (Whites); dispersal (of Blacks); dispossession of Blacks' land (by Whites) and repossession by Blacks (but not for long and often met with disproportionate force from Whites); secrecy and cover-up, especially after Myall Creek (Whites); stories passed down through generations to today's knowledge-holders (Blacks)

Many of these entries overlap, or one led to another: Blacks' killing of Whites' stock led to revenge killing of Blacks by Whites (often in disproportionate numbers, say, ten men for two bullocks); a battle was often followed by a massacre; dispossession was followed by 'dispersal', which was sometimes a euphemism for massacre or poisoning. The land filled up with Whites lusting after land and pastures for their stock: in 1838, the White population of New South Wales was 97,912 and the land under cultivation was 92,912 acres; in 1845, the figures were 181,556 and 163,979; over that same seven-year span, cattle numbers grew from 897, 219 to 1,348,022 and sheep from over 4 million to over 6 million (Gapps, pages 206-07).

The murderous implications of those numbers emerge again and again in Gapps' text. The Protector of Aborigines, George Augustus Robinson, was able to write in January 1840 about Campaspe Plains squatter Charles Hutton, 'If a member of a tribe offend, destroy the whole. He believed they must be exterminated (Gapps, page 242).' And this: 'The blacks interfere with the profits of grazing', said some New South Wales Legislative Councillors in 1849, 'a sufficient reason why they should be shot down like kangaroos, or be dosed with arsenic like native dogs' (Gapps, page 283).

Was all this 'a war' or 'wars'? Some folks' tendency to say it wasn't is governed by legends of Gallipoli and D-Day, of thousands of troops and tanks rumbling onto foreign shores. Yet, the history of wars is full not only of grand armies thrusting against each other, but of common people, young and old, unarmed, not in military uniforms, dying as 'collateral damage' as their community resists stronger forces. That resembles the Australian Wars - or Gaza - more than it resembles D-Day.

There is another way in which the Australian Wars are like those other wars affecting common people: the intergenerational effects of the wars and the subsequent actions - the Stolen Generations, forcible removal from homelands to missions, permit systems, classification by skin colour, suppression of language, bestowal of English-sounding names - actions intended to wipe out the traces of the original common people and assimilate them into the majority culture. (The Western Australian government has just announced a reparations scheme for living survivors of the Stolen Generations, leaving Queensland as the only Australian jurisdiction without such a scheme.)

People at the time in Australia certainly thought there was a war on, as the contemporary quotes in Defending Country Patron Henry Reynolds' books show. Yet, arguing about 'war or not war' really misses the most important point, which lies in those 'dispossession and repossession' words above. As Kate Grenville recently and, again, Reynolds, before that, and others, have said, 'frontier violence' was above all about the taking and control of land, land that was never ceded but which mostly now resides firmly in the hands of the takers.

So, these things happened. War historian Charles Bean's 1946 claim (in Anzac to Amiens) that 'war never had happened there [in Australia]' was nonsense. Some words from Henry Reynolds put things in perspective: 

[It] was about unbelievably important things for them [First Nations people]. It was whether or not they could control the way the land was managed, and it was ultimately about their very survival and the very survival of their cultures and traditions. It was war because of what it was about, not the way it was fought. And my view is, not only was it war but it was our most important war. One, it was fought in Australia, two, it was fought about Australia and, three, it determined the ownership and the control, the sovereignty of a whole continent. Now, what can be more important than that - to us?

'Ownership and control' is the nub. If the (mostly White) men who went to Gallipoli were fighting to defend the Wide Brown Land they loved, they would not have had that land to defend had it not been wrested decades before from its original owners. I wonder what those Anzacs, huddled in their trenches at Gallipoli or on the Somme, would have thought if they had known the history of their Wide Brown Land. Would they have thought that Australia was worth all that blood, sweat and tears?

Reviews of Gapps have been disappointingly sparse. Perhaps more will come. There was a brief chat on a Defence Connect podcast (from mark 2.0) and a longer one on the ABC's Late Night Live with Gapps and David Marr, where the stress was on the size and speed of the settler expansion, the degree to which the war was a defence by Blacks of the 'River Country' (the Murray-Darling Basin), Blacks' often sophisticated military tactics, strategy and generalship, and Blacks substituting introduced sheep and cattle for native fauna as a food source.

David Golding, in a book note in the Saturday Paper, got Gapps' pretty much right but noted that he is 'gentle and insistent rather than belligerent, though his subject matter is sometimes brutal'. I didn't mind Gapps' tone at all; he lets the evidence speak for itself without gratuitous FitzSimons-style bombast.

Yet, the extensive bibliography and notes in Gapps' book show how much he rests on the proverbial 'shoulders of giants': Tim Bottoms, Richard Broome, John Connor, Raymond Evans, Jeff Grey, Ray Kerkhove, Roger Milliss, Lyndall Ryan, Frank Uhr, and others going back well into the 19th century. The evidence has been there in spades for decades, for those prepared to look for it. Forthcoming, to add to the pile, is Gapps' book with Rachel Perkins, Henry Reynolds and Mina Murray and others, The Australian Wars, deriving from the TV documentary.

Let's return to that list of types of conflict and the crucial point that dispossession - theft of Country - was what it was all about and that First Nations men, women and children died defending Country or resisting it being taken from them. Can someone explain for me, then, how that form of defending Country is different from what was done by Australian expeditionary forces sent overseas to fight perceived threats to Australia - defending their country. 'We just need to get over this sense that this wasn't a legitimate war', says Nicholas Clements, historian of the Australian Wars in Tasmania, 'and that these people don't deserve the same sort of recognition as those who fought in our overseas conflicts'.

If there is no difference between deaths in the Australian Wars and in Australia's overseas wars, then why is not possible to recognise and commemorate all of these deaths in our national commemorative institutions, like the Australian War Memorial? Noel Turnbull, Defending Country secretary and Vietnam veteran, put it this way: 'As a veteran I can’t see how my service was somehow more deserving of being commemorated than that of First Australians warriors who fought bravely against superior forces'.