Gudyarra by Stephen Gapps

This year, 2022, should be the time to commemorate 200 years since the Bathurst War 1822-24, and to recognise that there was war on Australian soil between the First Nations sovereign groups and the invading British colonialists. And that if we were truthful, the conflict should not be termed frontier wars, but ‘Homeland Wars’, as Uncle Bill Allen Junior asserts.

Stephen Gapps’ book is a timely and well researched expose of early Australian history. He documents how there was a unification of Wiradyuri groups, accompanied by alliances with other Aboriginal nations, to combine together in a full-scale war waged against armed British soldiers. How many Australians today know that there was a proclamation of martial law in the Bathurst district on 18 August 1824; that detachments of armed soldiers roamed the area and that colonists accepted, even welcomed, the idea of full-scale warfare and ‘extermination’ of the enemy?

And how many know of the heroic leaders Windradyne, Blucher, Jingler and others that coordinated resistance warfare across the central west of New South Wales? Gapps’ book, like the recent publications about Kikatapula (Broken spear by Robert Cox)  and Tongerlongeter (by Henry Reynolds and Nicholas Clements), serves to remind us that Australia has a violent history, one of gudyarra – ‘war’ in the Wiradyuri language.

Themes: Non-fiction, Aboriginal hero, Aboriginal resistance, War, Frontier violence.

Helen Eddy