First Wiradjuri War and Resistance
Alternate Names: The Bathurst War, Windradyne’s War
Aboriginal people: Wiradjuri
Named Aboriginal people: Windradyne (Saturday), Blucher, Jingler, Simon, Joe, Sunday
Colonial Forces: 40th Regiment of Foot, colonial militia.
Notable Colonists: Major James Morisset
Narrative:
The fightback against the colonists and their tens of thousands of sheep and cattle that were entering Wiradjuri Country was announced by warriors in 1823. They told colonists in no uncertain terms that the Wiradyuri were going to ‘tumble down white man’ – to kill all the white men.
In early May 1824, the colonists at Bathurst noted that all the Wiradyuri who had been coming into the settlements and outstations – who had assisted the colonists in guiding and tracking and worked with them since 1815 – had suddenly ceased doing so. Communications between Wiradyuri and the colonists completely stopped. In late May 1824, Wiradyuri tactics shifted to a new level. Threats to “tumble down white fellows” were carried out in a series of bloody raids that sent shock waves throughout the entire colony. Full-scale attacks on outstations began right across the region, from the Turon River in the north to O’Connell Plains in the south, as Wiradyuri warbands mobilised. They were under the leadership of men - only some of whose traditional names we know today - such as Blucher, Jingler, Simon, Joe, Sunday and Saturday - more famously known as Windradyne.
The resistance in 1824 was total and widespread across the Central West region of New South Wales, with conflict stretching from near Merriwa in the upper Hunter Valley region, to present day Mudgee and Rylestone, and to the south of Bathurst near Blayney.
In early June 1824, people in the township of Bathurst witnessed a cart trundling through the streets with 7 dead convict stockworkers’ bodies heaped in it. Stockworkers across the Bathurst Plains were reported to be ‘cowering in their huts’ unable to leave for fear of being killed. Hundreds of cattle and sheep had either been killed or dispersed, or had been gathered up into herds and claimed by Wiradjuri people.
By July 1824, the number of dead colonists had risen to 21, with numerous others wounded. The pastoralists and stockholders of Sydney were in an uproar, clamouring for military intervention. A man writing under the name of Fidelis (very likely William Cox, an ex-army officer, first commandant of Bathurst, and with thousands of his own sheep and cattle in the district) wrote to the Sydney Gazette that the Wiradyuri were about ‘to crush the flourishing prospects of our little Colony’. It also seems to have been William Cox who suggested in a meeting with Governor Brisbane that the colonists should form ‘one continuous line’ of soldiers and armed settlers to sweep the Bathurst Plains – a plan later and infamously conducted in Tasmania, called the Black Line. In early August, to emphasise his point, Cox declared that ‘the natives may now be called at war with the Europeans’.
Instead of a Black Line, martial law was declared west of the Blue Mountains and the military garrison reinforced. Commandant Morisset responded with a sweep of three “divisions” of soldiers and armed colonists across the region. The coordinated movements of these units of around 15 to 20 soldiers and armed settlers led by Magistrates was designed to capture or kill the resistance leaders, and to “strike terror” among the rest of the people.
But it was not the military that ended the Bathurst War. Despite traversing a vast area of terrain (one division travelling to the Hunter River to the north), Morisset’s forces failed to contact any warriors or, as magistrate Ranken disappointedly wrote, failed “seeing the enemy”. Ranken was, like Cox, clear that the colonists at Bathurst were in a state of war.
In fact it was the well mounted and well armed parties of settlers and convicts who killed indiscriminately, such as that led by ex-Sergeant Thomas Miller who set out with 20 armed men (quote) “to hunt down the blacks”. Miller later admitted in his memoirs they (quote) “shot and killed any they came across little and big young and old shared the same fate”.
The northeast Wiradyuri campaign of warfare against the colonists at Bathurst forced Governor Brisbane to declare martial law west of the Blue Mountains in August 1824. The Bathurst War, or the First Wiradyuri War, was ended not by the soldiers that were sent to the area, but by the heavily armed parties of stockmen and farmers who conducted massacres. From August 1824 there were no more attacks on colonists, and by December Windradyne famously led his people across the Blue Mountains to Parramatta to meet Governor Brisbane. Windradyne came, as Governor Brisbane noted, to “sue for peace”. Perhaps Wyndradyne expected some form of negotiated settlement or agreement. Instead, the Wiradyuri received a feast and blankets and the colonising juggernaut rolled on across their Country.
Contributor: Stephen Gapps, 2025
Sources
Oral history interviews – various
ADB Australian Dictionary of Biography (various)
AIATSIS Australian Institute of Australian and Torres Strait Islander Studies Gresser Papers, AIATSIS, MS.21a, 21/1
BDHSMA Bathurst and District Historical Society Museum Archives
John Maxwell letters from Bathurst 1824–25
Letters, land grants, diaries, family history folios, etc.: S37, 38; F8, 10, 11, 116, 147; D135, 146; LF208, 240; ML41
Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser – newspaper (and others)
HRA Historical Records of Australia
JRAHS Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society
SRNSW State Records NSW (State Archives and Records Authority)
- Colonial Secretary’s Papers, Main Series of Letters Received, 1788–1826, NRS 897
- Colonial Secretary’s Papers, Main Series of Letters Received, 1826–1982, NRS 905
- Colonial Secretary’s Papers, Special Bundles, 1794–1825, NRS 898
- Land and Stock Returns, NSW, 1818–22, NRS 1268
- Returns of the Colony (‘Blue Books’), 1822–57, NRS 1286