Stephen Gapps’ The Sydney Wars: Conflict in the Early Colony 1788-1817

Caitlin Mchugh

doi:10.5130/nesais.v4i1.1509

Abstract

Stephen Gapps’ The Sydney Wars covers the period of conflict in the Sydney Basin area between 1788 and 1817, detailing the various battles and massacres that took place in the early years of the Sydney colony. The book promotes itself as the first ‘detailed account’ of these conflicts in the Sydney area, and detailed it is. Gapps weaves together contemporary accounts from diaries, official dispatches to the British Empire, news reports and court testimony to present a thorough reckoning of the destruction dealt to lives and property across the three decades from first European contact. He paints a nuanced picture of the conflict which offers, in some respects, a dissenting voice in the narrative surrounding these frontier wars – a term Gapps himself takes some issue with.

Highlights

Gapps places constant emphasis on the description of these conflicts as a war. He highlights the use of military tactics in the construction of outposts as the colony spread west to Parramatta, of the enlistment of militias in the protection of person and property, and again and again the language of the diarists and journalists of the time, who had no qualms characterising the violence between whites and Aboriginal people as a ‘war’
Gapps does not suggest this was due to charitable attitudes towards Aboriginal people; instead, he points out a reluctance on the part of colonists to recognise that Aboriginal people were engaging in a military conflict
Theft of food was attributed to Aboriginal people being too lazy to cultivate their own, and destruction of crops was met with bafflement by many colonists, who did not conceive of these attacks as an attempt to push back the frontier or as an economic attack on the colony

Summary

Introduction

Gapps places constant emphasis on the description of these conflicts as a war. He highlights the use of military tactics in the construction of outposts as the colony spread west to Parramatta, of the enlistment of militias in the protection of person and property, and again and again the language of the diarists and journalists of the time, who had no qualms characterising the violence between whites and Aboriginal people as a ‘war’. Throughout the accounts provided by the various governors, from Arthur Phillip to Lachlan Macquarie, he points out an insistence that attacks by Aboriginal warriors on colonists were generally a response to ill-treatment of the Aboriginal people by settlers and convicts.

Results

Conclusion