Stephen Gapps

Readers of Stephen Gapps’s work will be delighted to see this latest instalment of his quest to highlight the reality of Australia’s internal wars from 1788. Gapps’s first major contribution to this literature was The Sydney Wars (2018), which detailed the military conflicts between the Darug-speaking peoples of Sydney Harbour and the British newcomers from the First Fleet to 1817. His second, Gudyarra (2021), focused on the battles between the Wiradyuri and the settlers around today’s Bathurst region from 1822 to 1824. Gapps’s new book, Uprising, takes us over the full middle swathe of colonial New South Wales, including campaigns from dozens of clans, between 1838 and 1844. Each volume moves us forward in time and over greater expanses of Country. Collectively, the Gapps trilogy is a clear and detailed refutation of Australia’s continued reluctance to name the violent episodes that occurred between black and white peoples before 1901 as what they so plainly were: war.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart, in May 2017, might not have had much resonance with the federal government. However, it coincides with a new phase of writing and research that helps to round out its long-term significance and impact. Mark McKenna has expanded on the importance of ...