WEST KIMBERLEY PLACE REPORT - Department of Sustainability ...

The resistance campaign was unprecedented in Western Australian history as was the
ferocity of the police and settler response. For some 13 years, the Bunuba resisted
European settlement, preventing the progression of the rolling frontier, an unusual
achievement by Aboriginal people in the history of Australian frontier conflict.
The experience across the new colony of New South Wales was one of dispersed
settlement rather than one single front. Governor Arthur Phillip initially concentrated
agricultural settlement in the districts of good soil around Parramatta, even though he
knew there were also rich alluvial soils in the Hawkesbury region north of Sydney.
Phillip was conscious of not wanting to overstretch the young colony. Phillip's
successor, Lieutenant-Governor Francis Grose, however had no such qualms, and in
January 1794 granted land on the Hawkesbury River. The rolling frontier of
settlement now had many fronts on which to spread. The Eora and Darug attacked
settlers and property across the new colony from Port Jackson to Parramatta in the
west; Toongabbie in the south and the northern settlements of the Hawkesbury (Elkin
1974; Roberts 1978; Barlow 1987; Connor 2002; Perkins 2008). The Eora reportedly
'conducted themselves with much art' and by 'flying immediately into the
woods…eluded all pursuit and search' (Martin 1988). Once farms had been
consolidated in the Hawkesbury area, the Darug rarely raided them, instead focussing
on the more isolated farms near woodlands (Connor 2002: 43). The frontier had
already dispersed the Aboriginal Traditional Owners living within the Sydney Basin
who could not stop the frontier's progression.
Later, in the New South Wales colony, a road was built from Emu Plains to Bathurst
following a trade route that had been used by Aboriginal people for generations
(Newbury 1999). Settlement of the fertile valleys west of the Blue Mountains out to
the Bathurst Plains was relatively peaceful between 1815 and 1822. Connor (2002)
notes that the small number of Europeans, and their limited use of the land to run
sheep and cattle, meant that the chance of conflict with the Traditional Owners, the
Wiradjuri, was lessened. However, when the new Governor, Sir Thomas Brisbane,
ended Governor Macquarie's limit on inland settlement and granted large tracts of
land around Bathurst, the Wiradjuri's resistance increased.
Parties of raiding Wiradjuri burned down buildings, attacked armed garrisons and
destroyed sheep, cattle and crops (Perkins 2008, Coe 1989). The attacks got so bad
that in 1824 the New South Wales Premier suspended the normal legal process and
declared a state of martial law in all the country west of Mount York (Lowe 1994).
Settlement by this point was dispersed across the western slopes out to Bathurst and
north to Mudgee. The Wiradjuri took advantage of the dispersed nature of the pastoral
frontier to ambush individual stockmen and farms. The mountainous terrain on the
edges of the Bathurst Plains and around Mudgee assisted the Wiradjuri warriors in
their attacks and gave them what the Sydney Gazette described as 'an interminable
extent of country to retire back on'. Connor (2002) notes that unlike the Bunuba, one
leader could not coordinate all the Wiradjuri groups. As the British advanced through
the vast Wiradjuri lands each group fought the invasion in their turn, 'country by
country'. There is no record of Wiradjuri using firearms in frontier conflict.
Unlike the rolling frontier in the northwest of Western Australia, the colony of New
South Wales had many fronts which Aboriginal people boldly resisted but were
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