The Sydney Wars: Conflict in the early colony, 1788-1817

By Stephen Gapps

The Sydney Wars tells the history of military engagements between Europeans and Aboriginal Australians—described as "this constant sort of war" by one early colonist—around the greater Sydney region. Telling the story of the first years of colonial Sydney in a new and original way, this provocative book is the first detailed account of the warfare that occurred across the Sydney region from the arrival of a British expedition in 1788 to the last recorded conflict in the area in 1817. Analysing the paramilitary roles of settlers and convicts and the militia defensive systems that were deployed, it shows that white settlers lived in fear, while Indigenous people fought back as their land and resources were taken away.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Sep 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781742244242

Book preview

STEPHEN GAPPS is a Sydney-based historian with research interests in public history and early colonial Sydney. He has written extensively on historical re-enactments, military history and the commemoration of the past. He is currently a curator at the Australian National Maritime Museum and has also worked as a consultant and academic historian. In 2011 Stephen won a NSW Premier’s History Award for Cabrogal to Fairfield City: A History of a Multicultural Community, and in 2017 he was awarded the State Library of New South Wales’s Merewether Fellowship. The Sydney Wars is his fourth book.

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

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© Stephen Gapps 2018

First published 2018

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This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

ISBN:9781742232140 (paperback)

9781742244242 (ebook)

9781742248660 (ePDF)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover design Luke Causby, Blue Cork

Cover image Norou-gal-derri s’avançant pour combattre 1802 (Nicholas-Martin Petit). Voyage de découvertes aux terres australes : éxecuté par ordre de sa Majeste, l’Empereur et Roi, sur les corvettes le Geographe, le Naturaliste et la Goelette le Casuarina, pendant les annees 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803 et 1804; publié par décret imperial, ... / et rédigé par M. F. Péron. State Library of New South Wales

Printer Griffin Press

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Conversions

Introduction: A savage and unfeeling enemy

1This state of petty warfare: January 1788–April 1789

2Men, women, and children, lying dead: April 1789–December 1790

3An open war: 1791–96

4This sort of war: 1797–1802

5A pre-concerted plan: 1802–13

6Kill all the whites before them: 1814–March 1816

7Strike them with terror: April 1816–17

Epilogue: Vengeance still smoulders

References

Works consulted

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book really began back in Western Sydney in the 1970s when I wanted to know why I walked to school along a road named Bungarribee and why the place I lived in had once been called The Blacks’ Town. I am grateful to my father for introducing me to local history in Western Sydney.

Thanks to Brett Kenworthy for regularly reminding me there was a lack of scholarship around early colonial military history in Australia.

I thank Karen Pymble for research assistance and Alex Gaffikin for help with tabulating data and indexing.

Thanks to Josephine Pajor-Markus at NewSouth Publishing for the maps and Luke Causby at Blue Cork for the cover design.

A big thank you to editor Penny Mansley for her thoroughness and to Phillipa McGuinness and Paul O’Beirne from NewSouth Publishing for their faith in the book and support in publication.

I am very grateful for the State Library of New South Wales’s Merewether Fellowship award for 2017. The library’s wonderful collections have been crucial in researching and writing this book.

Thanks to colleagues who have generously shared their knowledge and time with me, in particular Bruce Baskerville, Ray Kerkhove, Paul Irish, Michael Bennet, Mark Dunn, Beau James and Helen Anu.

And a huge thanks to friends and family who have put up with me during this project, including the crew at Jim’s Gym; Miranda, Jim, Beatrix, ‘Shadie’, Erik and Francis; and my sister, Suzanne, my mother, Barbara, and my grandfather Bill Baldwin (who at the time of writing is 104 years old and still going strong).

WARNING Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this book contains words and descriptions written by non-Indigenous people in the past that may be confronting and would be considered inappropriate today.

It also contains the names of deceased people, and graphic descriptions of historical events that may be disturbing to some readers.

CONVERSIONS

INTRODUCTION

A SAVAGE AND UNFEELING ENEMY

The year 1804 was a particularly violent one for the sixteen-year-old colony of New South Wales. In March a convict uprising at the Castle Hill Government Farm led to what has become known – after a 1798 Irish defeat to the British in Ireland – as the Battle of Vinegar Hill. The battle occurred on the road from Parramatta to Windsor and was fought between a detachment of the New South Wales Corps, supported by militia forces, and around 250 hastily armed, mainly Irish, escaped convicts. The convicts broke out of the government farm and gathered weapons with the intention to march on Windsor, where they planned to gather a force of over 1000 men, take Sydney, capture ships and sail back to support rebellion in Ireland. Major George Johnston’s force, of around 60 soldiers and militia, suffered no casualties in the short period, perhaps 15 minutes, of fighting, while 15 convicts were killed and an unknown number wounded on or near the battlefield. Nine of the convict rebel ringleaders were later executed. The battle took place at present-day Rouse Hill, a suburb in northwestern Sydney. While the name of the area was later changed from the unpleasant reminder, Vinegar Hill, to the local landowner’s name, Rouse Hill, a shopping centre was recently named after the battle.¹

In the early 1800s the military garrison in the colony of New South Wales was concerned with security against attacks by foreign forces, rebellious convicts and the Aboriginal people they had dispossessed. These three threats – not always in the same order – were critical to colonial organisation, planning and expansion. After the convict uprising at Vinegar Hill had been dealt with, the military focus in 1804 turned to Aboriginal warriors conducting – almost with impunity – raids on farms and attacks on people, often deep inside the settlements around the Sydney region. Throughout the first half of the year there had been dozens of instances of armed conflict between Aboriginal warriors and Europeans. In June the colony’s newly established newspaper, the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, reported that after some ‘outrages’ at Ebenezer (originally called Portland Head by the Europeans), on the Hawkesbury River, an officially sanctioned ‘body of settlers, fourteen in number’ were issued instructions (presumably by the local magistrate) to pursue a group of ‘forty or fifty of the hostile savages’ into the mountains. The warriors did not melt away into the bush but formed up at a ‘cluster of rocks’. There, to their pursuers’ surprise, another group joined them, and their force suddenly increased to around 300. Even if this number was an exaggeration, the party of settlers was vastly outnumbered. A brief parley ensued, in which the armed settlers ‘endeavoured to ascertain their [the warriors’] motives for the acts of depredation and cruelty they had committed’. The answer was short and sweet: the warriors ‘would have corn, wearing apparel, and whatever else the Settlers had’, and at this they promptly ‘let down a flight of spears’. The Europeans fired their muskets to cover their retreat and somehow ‘got into Richmond Hill without receiving a spear wound’. The Gazette urged all settlers along the Hawkesbury to be on the alert against this ‘savage and unfeeling enemy’.²

This ‘savage’ enemy was not only threatening what were then the outlying settlements on the fringes of colonial Sydney along the relatively isolated reaches of the Hawkesbury River. They also conducted raids on crops and farms and ambushes on unwary travellers – ‘acts of depredation and cruelty’ – on the outskirts of the main settlements of Sydney and Parramatta. The northern shore of the Lane Cove River, for example, had been precarious for settlers, with regular reports of attacks, since 1794, when the first attempts were made to log timber and land grants were awarded in what later became the suburb of Lane Cove, on the lower north shore of Sydney Harbour. In May 1797 an officer of the marines and long-term chronicler of the first years of the colony, Captain David Collins, wrote that Aboriginal people ‘were exceedingly troublesome to the settlers in Lane Cove, burning a house and killing some hogs belonging to one of them’. By 1800 a stockade had been established on the river on the eastern side of Woodford Bay, for a detachment of soldiers and convicts employed in the nearby government sawpits.

James Wilshire arrived in the colony in November 1800, a free settler with a promise of a job as a clerk in the Commissariat Department. By 1803 he had branched out into farming with fellow Commissariat employee William Bennett, and they acquired the lease of four adjoining small grants around Lane Cove. Limited access across the harbour by boat and the rugged and heavily wooded terrain curtailed major settlement in the area, but by mid-1804 Wilshire and Bennett had much of their land planted with wheat and maize and tended by several ‘labouring servants’.

On Tuesday 28 August 1804 Wilshire was in the township at Sydney Cove. His convict servants who remained working at his farm were suddenly surprised by the appearance of a group of Aboriginal people. The Europeans were quite familiar with Sydney people coming onto farms and asking for food. But, like brazen bushrangers, this group set about holding up the farmstead, herding and then binding the labourers together. With the farm secure, they untied one of the convicts and ‘obliged him to cook a feast’ of potatoes, vegetables and poultry. With what the Gazette reported as ‘mirth and jocularity’, they camped the night at Wilshire’s farm.

Word of the events reached Wilshire in Sydney, and in the afternoon of the next day, ‘accompanied by several persons armed with firelocks [muskets]’, he returned to his farm to ‘render assistance to his servants’. After rowing up the harbour, turning in to Lane Cove River and then marching up the hill – probably from present-day Northwood Wharf – Wilshire and his four armed associates were ‘welcomed with shouts of defiance’ from the large group of Aboriginal warriors. According to the Gazette, they then ‘formed into subdivisions, and anticipated triumph with the brandished spear’.

A round of blank fire from the muskets, designed to intimidate them, drew nothing but ‘irony’ from the warriors, so Wilshire resorted to a ‘discharge of shot’ – several small pellets rather than the more lethal single large round lead ball. This forced them to regroup on an ‘eminence’ of some high ground. To Wilshire and his party’s surprise, there they were joined by a ‘prodigious number’ of Aboriginal people they estimated ‘must have exceeded 200’. Fortunately for Wilshire, the group then just up and left, taking with them ‘all the servants[’] necessaries and bedding’. A large band of Aboriginal people had sent their warriors in, taken over a farm, feasted, stocked up on food and blankets for the entire group and, after being confronted by musket fire, moved off through the bushland that still covered the valleys and ridges of the northern shores of Sydney Harbour in 1804.³

Little has been made of this and other raids on farms during the period, with one historian dismissing the events by saying simply that ‘a discharge of buckshot convinced the aborigines to depart in a hurry’. There are, however, several contemporary accounts from 1804 of large groups of Sydney people – often including women and children – taking settlers’ corn, clothing and blankets. Some-times they also speared livestock and at other times settlers. The raids occurred right across the Sydney region, from Lane Cove, on the north shore, to South Creek, in the west, to nearby Parramatta, the ‘vicinity of the Georges River’, and west and north to the Hawkesbury–Nepean River. The tactics were often similar but included opportunistic and at times quite bold variations, such as when a ‘body of natives, around 30 in number’ stopped a horse and cart at spearpoint midway on the road from Parramatta to Sydney, near current-day Strathfield. Throughout the year the attacks increased in number and intensity, and there were also several other skirmishes. The pattern of raids conducted by Sydney people on colonists had all the hallmarks of guerrilla warfare: raiding and retreating, and engaging the enemy only when in a superior situation. As the Gazette reported in May 1805, ‘Their operations are somewhat systematic and assume the appearance of a preconcerted plan’. By that time Governor Philip Gidley King had had enough of this ‘system of warfare’, as the ‘gentleman convict’ James Grant described it, and issued a government and general order announcing that these ‘uncivilised insurgents’ near ‘Parramatta, Georges River and Prospect Hill’ were to be ‘driven back from the settlers’ habitations by firing at them’. However, even as late as 1814 colonists in the Sydney region could be alarmed by threats from Aboriginal people ‘to kill every white man’. It was not until 1817 that the last major conflicts in this long period of warfare, which often occurred inside the ‘frontier’, came to an end, after the entire region had been tightly secured by Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s military forces.⁴

The conflict of 1804–05 was part of an on-again, off-again warfare that had taken place since 1788 when a British expedition occupied Sydney Cove and then pushed a colony out and across the comparatively gentle and open Cumberland Plain, until it reached the rugged mountainous terrain that rings the Sydney Basin. Amid the roar of cannon fire on the king’s birthday in June 1788 Governor Arthur Phillip had declared this the first ‘county in His Majesty’s territory of New South Wales’. He named it in honour of the king’s brother, Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland and Strathearn. Phillip claimed that the County of Cumberland stretched from ‘the northernmost point of Broken Bay, to the southward by the southernmost point of Botany Bay and to the westward by Lansdown and Carmarthen hills’. In 1802 the French naturalist François Péron described it in finer detail, as ‘bounded to the east by the great Southern Ocean; to the north by Broken Bay and Hawkesbury River … to the south by Botany Bay and George’s River; and to the west by a chain of mountains which envelopes the whole county in a sort of semicircle’, a ‘vast curtain’ that ‘formed an immense and impregnable bulwark’. In 1788 most of what Phillip included in the County of Cumberland had not been visited but merely seen from vantage points such as Prospect Hill, the highest point in the centre of the surrounding plains. But Péron’s semicircle is an apt description of the landform that is now called the Sydney Basin, which formed long ago.

The Hawkesbury–Nepean River cuts a large semicircular ring under the edge of the sedimentary sandstone escarpment that was pushed up some 50 million years ago, a process punctuated by various volcanic events that left ‘risings’ such as Prospect Hill dotted around the plain. About 30 000 years ago Aboriginal people were living in this relatively fertile area between the mountains and the coast, and generations of ancestors of the people who lived along the creeks and rivers witnessed the sea rise and flood the river valley that is now Sydney Harbour. During the period from around 18 000 to 6000 years ago a rich estuarine landscape formed in the upper reaches of Sydney Harbour, in Broken Bay to the north and in Botany Bay to the south. These areas were for several thousand years some of the most densely populated regions in Australia.

It was on this tapestry of open woodlands, creeks and rivers across a plain surrounded by rugged mountains and escarpments that warfare between colonists and ‘the real proprietors of the soil’, as King later called them, took place. In many ways, the terrain shaped the nature of the conflict, as we shall see. It united what was a long and at times gruesome and bloody period of wars.⁵

The warfare outlined above has generally been subsumed in histories of the colony of New South Wales as a series of skirmishes between the British military and Aboriginal warriors, with many histories of the early colony playing down the conflict as not really warfare at all. The usual narratives portray the British colonists prior to 1817 as vengeful or incompetent, or both: bumbling redcoats, sent out on punitive expeditions against the Sydney people, blundering around the bush or ‘posses’ of armed settlers hunting down Aboriginal people to exact revenge. Aboriginal people are normally depicted as either totally overpowered or overawed by the modern technology and superior weapons of the foreign enclave in their land, unable to understand how firearms worked. Historian Henry Reynolds is typical, in suggesting that in the first encounters ‘guns presented an enormous challenge [for Sydney people]. There was no way of grasping how they worked. Stick-like, they were pointed at the victim, there was a flash of light followed by a bang … but no one could see the projectile either in flight or when lodged deep in the damaged body’. In fact, as we shall see, Aboriginal people very quickly worked out both the effects of firearms and how to use them.

For the early years of the colony such characterisations of conflict by historians are not accurate. Early colonists – both military and civilian – recognised violent confrontation around Sydney as part of ongoing warfare, and many wrote about it as a war. Both sides adapted their weapons and tactics in response to those of the opposition. The British conducted numerous difficult campaigns against combatants who held the distinct advantages of terrain and local knowledge. Aboriginal warriors won several battles and often stretched the limits of the colonial military forces. They quickly developed tactics to counter the guns’ effects and even attempted to steal firearms in the first years of the colony; there is evidence of warriors using guns in Sydney well before 1817. In fact, colonists began to bemoan that warriors showed less and less fear of firearms only months after the Europeans arrived in Sydney Cove.

Recent histories have begun to challenge the older narratives and introduce a more complex picture of simultaneous conflict with, and acceptance of, the invaders. Historians also highlight how the conflict between colonists and Aboriginal people in Sydney formed a template for what occurred after the colony expanded beyond the Blue Mountains: as colonists occupied the Cumberland Plain, patterns of warfare developed that were seen again in the so-called frontier wars of the later 19th century. Despite these developments, however, no historians of the early colony prior to 1817 have considered, as they have begun to do with the later wars, the detail and impact of military strategic and tactical situations; nor, as Christine Wright notes, have they studied in detail the social and political significance of the British military in the colony. As military historian John Connor puts it, ‘Resistance history has rarely been analysed from a military perspective’. Indeed, despite the critical twenty-year role the New South Wales Corps played in shaping the colony, and the calls, since the 1970s, for a written history of the corps, there has been none. Historian John Connor’s work on the early frontier wars stands out as the only serious military history dealing with the Sydney region, and this largely provides an overview of warfare and tactics. Peter Turbet’s The First Frontier is the sole work to attempt any detailed compilation of the historical records of conflict prior to 1817.

The relative paucity of histories of resistance warfare and the British military in the early colony has recently become even more obscured by the plethora of new cultural histories. Some recognise that warfare occurred and momentarily dwell on military tactics and strategy but end up in speculation that is far from accurate. Inga Clendinnen’s assessment, for example, of naval officer John Hunter’s ‘ability to recognise the strategic deployment of Australian warriors in situations which to less experienced eyes would look like savage chaos’ shows little grasp of military context or understanding of the officers’ military experience.⁶

As a Sydney-based historian who has worked on many early colonial histories of the region, I have been surprised how often journals and official records describe the early colony as being in a state of war, or how warfare raged across the Cumberland Plain and its fringes – despite the later histories that suggest otherwise. And as an historian from Western Sydney, I have been attuned to how histories of the early colony are often focused on Sydney Cove – the centre of colonial affairs – at the expense of the areas to the west and south in particular, which were in fact critical to the success of the colony in terms of both agriculture and the military.

I have also been surprised that few historians have looked in detail at how deeply militarised a society early Sydney was. By the early 1800s British settlement had expanded from the shores of Sydney Cove to include townships and outposts at Prospect, Parramatta, Toongabbie, Georges River, Castle Hill and the Hawkesbury. There were military outposts in all of these, and, as we shall see, a layer of militia and paramilitary forces supported the network of garrisoned townships. Convicts were given arms when in parties venturing outside the settlement from the first months of 1788. Even travellers between settlements were for many years always ‘well armed’ or went to meeting places to find other travellers to cross the Cumberland Plain in the safety of numbers.

The Sydney Wars looks at the British military and paramilitary responses to conflict with Aboriginal people in the greater Sydney region in the period from 1788 to 1817. It also sifts through the at times hazy, at others informative, historical records of Aboriginal military responses to the British military presence. We know a fair amount more about the soldiers than about the paramilitary forces of settlers, ex-convicts and convicts and their families, who at times were heavily involved in these conflicts. We know much less about the Aboriginal warriors and their families who conducted resistance warfare.

I use traditional Aboriginal names of Sydney language groups or clans only when they are reasonably certain. Generally, I use either the European description from the time or ‘Sydney people’ for the various groups associated with the Cumberland Plain. Even when names of ‘tribes’ were recorded by the Europeans they were often incorrect and failed to interpret language or understand traditional relationships to place. Some historians’ efforts to define coastal and inland Sydney people as Eora, Dharug or other groups often do not recognise the new alliances formed after the population’s massive losses from disease and the disruption of invasion and settlement. The decimation of Aboriginal people around Sydney Harbour from smallpox in 1789 meant historical sources were limited and often misleading. For example, ‘Eora’ was, according to several early colonists’ accounts and word lists, a more general word meaning ‘people’. Also, the contemporary urge to define Aboriginal land in modern Sydney as it was in 1788 often fails to comprehend what historian and archaeologist Paul Irish identifies as a ‘shifting web’, particularly of ‘boundaries’ that were shared in common by different Aboriginal groups. As Irish notes, Aboriginal people in Sydney had long moved across various clan estates, and individual rights and responsibilities could change in ‘complex and shifting webs of connection to land and other people that linked bands across and beyond coastal Sydney’. Just like the colonists’ use of paramilitary forces, which included settlers and often swept up their families in the ensuing violence, Aboriginal raids on outsettlements and isolated farms across the Cumberland Plain were often conducted by large bands of people that included warriors and their families. This history looks not just at ‘redcoats’ and ‘warriors’ but at all who were involved in the wars that occurred across the Sydney region between 1788 and 1817.⁷

1

THIS STATE OF PETTY WARFARE

January 1788–April 1789

[They] desired us to be gone

Between 18 and 20 January 1788 eleven British ships with close to 1400 civil and military officers, soldiers and prisoners arrived at Kamay – or what James Cook had in 1770 called Botany Bay – to establish a colony. As the armed tender HMS Supply rounded the southern headland, members of the expedition had their first close look at the people who lived there. Lieutenant Philip Gidley King saw ‘several of ye natives running along, brandishing their spears, and making towards the harbour’. King had joined Captain (soon-to-be Governor) Arthur Phillip on the Supply at the head of the fleet. Phillip ordered the ship’s boats to be sent out to investigate the wide bay, which they had determined from Cook’s earlier assessments to be a suitable place to establish the colony. King observed a ‘group of natives’ who ‘immediately got up and called to us in a menacing tone, and at the same time brandishing their spears or lances’.¹

During the first two days at Botany Bay Phillip and his naval and marine officers led small detachments looking for fresh water, a site to establish an encampment and opportunities to communicate with the ‘natives’. On the north side of the bay, Phillip at first found the ‘natives very sociable and friendly’. Surgeon Arthur Bowes Smyth wrote that when ‘exploring the bays & coves up the country’ they were met with ‘laurel leaves’ and people who ‘behaved very friendly’.

But while some Aboriginal people around Botany Bay were undoubtedly curious about the strangers, to the southwest of the bay King found some of the ‘natives[’] huts’ and, with a military officer’s eye for threats and keen to investigate their arsenal, ‘took some spears that were lying there’. A group of warriors appeared and King described how they ‘in a very vociferous manner desired us to be gone’. He decided to leave some beads and cloth behind in exchange for the spears. Then ‘one of them threw a lance wide of us to show how far they could do execution’. King estimated it was thrown ‘about 40 yards’, and when he tried to retrieve it from where it had struck the ground ‘it required an exertion to pull it out’. He took this as a ‘menace that more would be thrown at us if we did not retreat’, and, outnumbered, he did so, ‘unwilling to fire amongst them, there being twelve of them’.

An American sailor in the Sirius’s crew, Jacob Nagle, also described the first meetings: ‘The natives came down to us and appeared as though they did not approve of our viset … the governor attempted to be very friendly with them, but they came with spear in hand and a bark shield’. As King and his men retreated the warriors became ‘even more vociferous and very soon after a lance was thrown amongst us, on which I ordered one of the marines to fire with powder only, when they ran off with great precipitation’. When Phillip joined King, they returned to approach the ‘natives’ at what King called Lance Point, and although the warriors challenged the Europeans once more, Phillip offered them presents. King said, ‘Peace was re-established, much to the satisfaction of all parties’.

But the British were still very much on guard. King then had to put a stop to handing out ‘presents’, as the warriors were ‘fast increasing in numbers’ and the officers had only a ‘boat’s crew’ with them. He was most ‘apprehensive that they might find means to surprize us’. It had taken less than two days from the colonists’ arrival for the sound of musket fire to echo around Botany Bay.²

A denunciation of war

On 25 January Phillip, ‘with a party of marines, and some artificers’, anchored off a small cove in Sydney Harbour (Port Jackson), just to the north of Botany Bay. After an assessment of the harbour (which Cook had seen but not entered), Phillip decided this cove was to be the place of settlement. Captain David Collins described the next day’s work of clearing some of the bushland ‘at the head of the cove’ for ‘encamping the officer’s guard’ and a party of convicts. He was inspired to write about the ‘run of fresh water, which stole silently along through a very thick wood, the stillness of which had then, for the first time since the creation, been interrupted by the rude sound of the labourer’s axe’.

The sound of axes was not, in fact, unfamiliar in the area and had rung out for thousands of years, although the British tools gave a different tone, being made from metal rather than stone. The next sounds to ring out, however, extending further around the coves and headlands, were not so well known. That evening, ‘the marines fired several vollies’ from their muskets, announcing the officers’ toast to the ‘success of the new colony’. Collins, like Watkin Tench, a captain of marines, paraphrased John Milton’s Paradise Lost, writing that the ‘stillness and tranquility’ had been replaced by the ‘busy hum of its new possessors’. In fact, in Sergeant James Scott’s less florid summation, there were ‘4 vollies of small arms. Fired’.

The sound of gunfire was heard regularly from the beginning of the colony in Australia, despite evidence from other Europeans’ encounters with Pacific peoples that the ‘report of guns, drums, or even a trumpet’ could cause alarm. In 1768 James Douglas, the Earl of Morton, suggested to Cook ‘and the other gentlemen’ on the Endeavour expedition that the people they encountered ‘should be first entertained near the shore with a soft air’. Few of the early diarists commented in detail on the gunfire in the colony – it was usual practice, almost unremarkable. In the first weeks after arriving, officers left the encampment each morning and night to shoot game and birds. Lieutenant Ralph Clark, of the marines, recorded in February that he ‘went out shooting soon after breakfast [but] only shot one cocka too’. After dinner he went up the harbour in a boat ‘and shot a few parrokits’. Gunfire was also an important form of communication and signalling, and muskets were fired during parades; for example, in February a grand parade with ‘3 vollies fired [and] coulers flying etc’ accompanied the reading of the king’s commissions. In addition, the convicts’ daily regimen was based around the military calls of drums and musket fire, and a bell for working hours was rung ‘at gun-fire’ each morning before daylight.³

By June 1789 the sound of gunfire had been heard as far west as the Nepean River. On a journey along the river Tench observed ‘vast flocks of wild ducks were swimming in the stream; but after being once fired at, they grew so shy that we could not get near them a second time. Nothing is more certain than that the sound of a gun had never before been heard within many miles of this spot’. But by April 1791, at the Hawkesbury River, Tench noticed the contrast – how the people they met ‘heard our guns going off around them, without betraying any symptom of fear, distrust, or surprize’.

The distance from which gunfire could be heard around the harbour and beyond depended on such things as wind, cloud cover and hills and valleys, but it was considerable. On an excursion to the Nepean River in November 1792 Deputy Judge-Advocate Richard Atkins thought he could hear cannon fire far away in the distance, and ‘last night we thought