The town of Bathurst, Australia’s oldest European inland settlement, stands with distinctive colonial grandeur on the rich, undulating plains that the Wiradjuri people have occupied and tended for countless millennia.
With its elaborate, proudly preserved buildings bordering expansive boulevard-style streets divided with towering ornate lamps, Bathurst is at once a manifestation of the proceeds of the 1850s gold rush and a monument to white colonial landgrab, pastoral expansion and Indigenous dispossession.
The final colonial claim to Bathurst (proclaimed in 1815 by the governor, Lachlan Macquarie) was the undeniable war between British military occupiers and Wiradjuri resistance fighters led by the fabled warrior Windradyne. Indeed, it is 200 years since British governor Thomas Brisbane declared martial law over the Bathurst Plains and violently wrenched and eventually – and bloodily – secured the settlement and its greater district from Wiradjuri custodianship.
Dozens of colonial militia, British troops and settlers died in the violence. Official accounts put the Wiradjuri death toll at hundreds of warriors (though poisoning and random shootings-on-sight – massacres – of Indigenous bystanders, including elderly and very young people, mean the fatalities of Aboriginal people may have been significantly higher).
In suppressing the Wiradjuri resistance in the Bathurst war (between January and December 1824), the central west was opened up to inexorable pastoral and mining expansion, while local Aboriginal people were further exterminated and marginalised from their traditional lands.
Familial generational memory – Black and non-Indigenous – tends to be long in Bathurst, a place that celebrates through bricks and mortar and numerous monuments white exploratory heroism across the plains, and participation in empirical wars (although not explicitly the one closest to home).
But the local Wiradjuri people endured. They are still there. As are the descendants of the pastoralists and townsfolk who benefited from Indigenous dispossession.
It is a fascinating, somewhat unsettling, place, that wears its fraught history very much on the surface of its constructed and natural landscape.
In commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Brisbane’s martial law declaration and continuing Wiradjuri resistance, Bathurst is this week hosting a series of events – including an academic conference, a host of talks and demonstrations of local culture, and an exhibition – to enhance public engagement with the war.
The bicentenary is being promoted as an opportunity for Black and white conciliation through a greater understanding of a war that is, in many ways, emblematic of the other conflicts and massacres that raged across the Australian continent with pastoral and mining expansion further west and south from the Bathurst Plains.
Commemorations began with a traditional Wiradjuri smoking ceremony last weekend. While the local Wiradjuri elders, who say that a state of war still exists across the Bathurst Plains, have frequently held such smokings in places of spiritual significance, the weekend’s event was groundbreaking.
The smoking happened on a trailer driven through the centre of town – itself a first for Bathurst. But, says Wiradjuri elder Dinawan Dyirribang (also known as Uncle Bill Allen) the ceremony was made more significant because it was given an official police escort.
“We’ve got a really good relationship with one of the [police] inspectors down here and he offered and said he would ensure the escort happened,” says Dinawan, who is a direct descendant of Windradyne.
A police escort for the Wiradjuri – not least for a direct Windradyne descendant – has a profound historical significance.
For not only is August 2024 the bicentenary of Brisbane’s martial law proclamation. Later this month it will also be 200 years since the New South Wales Legislative Council appointed Lt Governor Col William Stewart. As state upper house MP Jeremy Buckingham has pointed out in parliament, Stewart was integral to establishing and later leading the New South Wales mounted police, the world’s oldest continuous mounted force whose violent actions were pivotal in fighting the Wiradjuri.
Stewart’s force was responsible for widespread suppression of Wiradjuri resistance around – and increasingly well beyond – Bathurst, shooting Indigenous warriors and, together with local white militias, often massacring non-combatant Aboriginal people. The antipathy between police and Wiradjuri people has simmered down through the generations.
Buckingham spoke of the “history and context” of the formation of the NSW Legislative Council “at the time of what was openly acknowledged by settlers and government as a period of war or ‘Gudyarra’ against the Wiradjuri people – a war of dispossession and occupation”.
In the context of broader frontier conflict over the next century, the Bathurst war, Brisbane’s declaration, the Legislative Council’s appointment of Stewart and the establishment of the colony’s mounted police have deep symbolic historical resonances. The NSW Legislative Council is Australia’s oldest parliament; the forerunner to every state and territory – and later, the federal – legislature, across what became the nation.
Its very first decision was to appoint Stewart. And, so, the violent racial oppression of Aboriginal people was the priority of this continent’s first legislature. So, too, was it for the first federal parliament in 1901; its initial priority was the white Australia legislation.
Dinawan explains that the imposition of martial law in 1824 spelt “the end of our society as it was in the Bathurst Plains area and virtually to the rest of Wiradjuri country as they [settlers, British troops and militias] expanded west”.
“We lost everything – our lands which were completely taken away from us with no compensation. Then there was the loss of our language, the loss of ceremonies, the loss of connection to country. For us it has been a war that continues on since 1824 because there was never a treaty signed – an end to the war, which was talked of between Windradyne and Governor Brisbane but never happened,” he says.
How many Wiradjuri people died in the Bathurst war and its aftermath is a matter of ongoing conjecture, too.
“We reckon at least 2,000 to 3,000 [Wiradjuri people died] maybe more. Most of those were old people and women and kids because the soldiers and the militia forces that were formed at the time and the mounted police, they just killed any Wiradjuri people they saw. What Windradyne and his warriors were doing was going out after those white people that had broken the Wiradjuri law and they were doing … ‘giban’ [pay back] as we call it in our language. That’s how we were fighting the war. But the British were killing anyone they came across.’’
He says the generational wealth around Bathurst renders the town a monument to – and a historical symbol of – “dispossession”.
“There’s a lot of people whose families made their money on that gold and that land and they still see it as a matter of their white privilege to do whatever they want to do here.”
He says the Wiradjuri commemorations this week are an expression of peace and conciliation, and “about keeping the memories of our ancestors alive”.
“But also it’s about our responsibility to keep protecting country. So that’s why we’ve been involved in a number of actions in stopping some developments from going ahead.’’
It includes the scuttling of plans for a go-kart track near the existing Mount Panorama speedway, itself built on spiritually significant land (Wahluu), and fervent Wiradjuri opposition to a goldmine on another sacred site at nearby Blayney.
Two centuries to the day after the declaration of martial law during the Bathurst war between Wiradjuri and the British, the resistance continues in a different form.
