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Event mentions

• Counterattack by Chamberlain
  11 Sep 1824 — NNW of Cudgegong River
  After escaping the attack by Blucher's warriors Chamberlain and his men were returning to Mudgee when they came across an unexpected sight. They found a place ‘where there were a number of natives’ fires, and an immense quantity of arms laying round them, consisting of spears, boo-merrings, &c’. Strangely, there was ‘not a living person to be seen’. They had stumbled across the camp of the warband they had fought the day before. The Wiradyjuri had left their weaponry at the camp, as they were conducting the ceremonies or sorry business associated with burying their leader and two other warriors – men who may also have had leadership status in the united warband of several combined family groups. Chamberlain recognised an opportunity. The party ‘immediately dis-mounted, and heaped the whole of the arms on the fires’. The mourners would have seen plumes of smoke rising from their camp. The whole warband, ‘men, women and children’, then raced back in a ‘great fury’; Chamberlain and his companions ‘immediately mounted their horses and retreated’. Again, around forty warriors pursued them, once more keeping pace with their horses. But ‘they had few arms with them’, and when Chamberlain saw ‘they had nearly expended’ their spears and boomerangs, he and his men ‘dismounted, tied their horses together, and faced about, commencing a fire of musquetry on the natives’. According to the Gazette report, they ‘then charged them with the bayonet until they were completely routed and dispersed’. There were ‘sixteen men dead on the field’ at the end of the affray.
  Source: Gazette, 16 September 1824, p. 2 and 30 September 1824, p. 2