After the Referendum of 1967 that gave the Commonwealth the right to count and legislate for the Indigenous population, the Great Australian Silence on Aboriginal history began to unravel. W E H Stanner’s 1968 ‘Boyer Lectures’ series was published as After the Dreaming and was perhaps the first widely read attempt to re-examine what until then had been a pretty dull account of explorers and worthy pastoralists enlivened by the occasional bushranger or gold rush.

But progress during the ’70s was patchy – C D Rowley’s The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (1970) was influential but the rough equivalence Rowley draws between survival of ‘full blood’ and mixed race Indigenous and the survival of Aboriginal ‘society’ would not find favour these days.

Bobbie Hardy’s Lament for the Barkindji (1976) was something of an outlier including valuable sources on the Darling but encumbered by an irredeemably paternalistic point of view.

The breakout moment was Henry Reynold’s The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) – a revelatory survey of the modes of Aboriginal resistance to white settlement. Since then, there have been many excellent regional studies that have developed the theme. There are too many now to mention but they include Invasion and Resistance by Noel Loos (1982) (Queensland); Koori, A Will to Win by James Miller (1985) (Hunter Region); Frontier Justice by Tony Roberts (2005) (Northern Territory); Tongerlongeter by Reynolds and Nicholas Clements (2021).

Uprising is an honourable successor to this lineage. Gapps is also the author of Gudyarra (2021) (Bathurst area) and The Sydney Wars (2018) and has a deep familiarity with the contemporary sources – letters, journals, newspaper reports, police records. Uprising is an account of Indigenous resistance across a broad sweep from Northern Victoria to Northern New South Wales on the western side of the Dividing Range. He makes a convincing case for the existence of organised resistance across this region focusing on protecting access to water and rivers and focused on economic warfare against the squatters. As Major Mitchell’s account of Western NSW in the 1840s makes clear, the Indigenous resistance was successful in reclaiming large swathes of land, albeit for limited periods of time.

A valuable addition to the growing corpus of regional studies of Indigenous resistance to European settlement.

Reviewed by Grant Hansen

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Gapps is a public historian working to bring Frontier War histories into broader recognition as Australia’s First Wars.

In 2011, he was awarded the NSW Premier’s History Award for regional and community history. Stephen’s The Sydney Wars: Conflict in the early colony 1788–1817 was the inaugural winner of the Les Carlyon Award for the writing of military history (2020).

He is also the author of Gudyarra: The first Wiradyuri war of resistance – The Bathurst War, 1822–1824 (2021), and is an editor of The Australian Wars, the book of the award-winning documentary series, forthcoming.

Visit the publisher’s website