Contested waterways - Aboriginal resistance in early colonial Sydney

The words bamal and badu are spoken in the Sydney region’s Eora language. Supplied courtesy of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council.

In the 19th century, Aboriginal people in the Sydney region used rivers, creeks and waterways as places of refuge and survival after the devastation of colonisation. In the first decade of the British colony, waterways were also important in resistance warfare. From 1788 to 1810 there were numerous raids conducted in canoes, as well as attacks by Aboriginal warriors on British vessels. The role of nawi – the Sydney tied-bark canoe – in this conflict has been overlooked by historians.

Canoes were important cultural property in Aboriginal Sydney in 1788. As the Europeans soon found out, nawi were in fact prized possessions. During March and April 1788, just weeks after the colonists had arrived, several beatings and spearings of straggling convicts outside the British encampment at Sydney Cove occurred. In May, the bodies of convicts William Okey and Samuel Davis were brought back to the settlement by Captain Campbell. They had been found ‘murdered by the natives in a shocking manner’, with Okey speared several times and his skull split open, according to Surgeon White, ‘so much that his brains easily found a passage through’.

Governor Arthur Phillip and his military officers believed that these violent and gruesome deaths ‘must have been provoked’ by the convicts. The suspicions of Judge Advocate David Collins were confirmed when inquiry was made and it appeared ‘these unfortunate men had, a few days previous … taken away and detained a canoe belonging to the natives. Phillip suggested the warriors had acted ‘in their own defence, or in defending their canoes’.

The deaths of these two convicts, who had been collecting rushes for thatch, had long been assumed by historians to have been at present-day Rushcutters Bay, although several colonial journals record the location as ‘up the harbour’. Recently, historians have suggested this was likely to have been Darling Harbour. However, the museum’s new acquisition of The Log of H.M.S. Sirius 1787–1792 by William Bradley (see the museum’s Signals magazine number 123 page 60) includes a 1788 survey of Port Jackson which has not previously been published as it had been in a private collection. Importantly, the survey includes several place names around the harbour that do not appear in any subsequent maps, surveys or published journals. One such name is ‘Bloody Point’, located in Iron Cove, west of Leichhardt Bay, on a spit of land where the UTS (University of Technology Sydney) Rowers Club sits today. It is almost certain that this is the location of the campsite of Okey and Davis, where their mutilated bodies were found 1

While the colonists were quick to note how important canoes were to the Sydney people for use in fishing and travelling around the harbour, they also began to consider their utility in swift raids. In August 1788, Surgeon John White described how ‘a few days since the natives landed [from their canoes] near the hospital, where some goats belonging to the Supply were browsing, when they killed, with their spear, a kid, and carried it away’. Collins added that the raiding party had come ashore in five canoes, in which they escaped up the harbour with the freshly speared goat.

Again in September, canoes were used in an attempted raid. Several nawi landed ‘above 30 natives’ at Dawes Point, ‘it was supposed after some of the sheep there’. According to Collins, they were met by ‘two gentlemen’ and, ‘after throwing some stones, they took to their canoes and paddled off’. In early 1789, a coxswain was speared after he took a nawi.

The British response to ongoing attacks on the water and at the water’s edge was to carry more firearms in their boats. As Jacob Nagle, an American sailor on HMS Sirius, noted, ‘The natives ware now so troublesome that we ware allow’d a musket in the boat, as we were constantly up and down the harbor’.

Although nawi were often described as flimsy craft, several colonists noted how quickly the canoes could move through the water. Nawi were extremely versatile – swift and silent and easily landed anywhere, they were well suited to lightning raids and hasty retreats in the increasing guerrilla warfare campaign that was hemming the colonists inside their encampment, unable to go outside the ‘lines of limitation’ without firearms or an escort of soldiers.

In April 1789, however, the nature of the warfare in and around Sydney was irrevocably changed. Aboriginal people were decimated by the disease they called galgala –probably smallpox – which killed hundreds of people, and around half of all the warriors in the region 2.

Yet resistance warfare and conflict continued even after the smallpox devastation. Nawi were used to escape from punitive expeditions and roaming parties of armed Europeans. In December 1790, Lieutenant Watkin Tench’s expeditions to Botany Bay to punish the killers of two convicts were unsuccessful – not so much because they became stuck in the mud of the Cooks River up to their armpits, but because Aboriginal people escaped his soldiers by canoe. On the second expedition Tench conducted a well-planned campaign and feigned a march to the north, turning back to the south, and force-marching by moonlight. At the ‘nearest point of the north arm’ of Botany Bay, the soldiers saw a large group of Aboriginal people who promptly fled in three canoes that Tench described as ‘filled with Indians’.

In late 1790 the pressure on fish stocks in the harbour was great and Aboriginal people used their nawi to bail up the colonists’ fishing boats. At one point, Bennelong – a noted warrior, and later good friend of Governor Phillip – joined the raids, and ‘at the head of several of his tribe’, robbed some people who were out fishing. He persuaded them to hand over their fish by the threat of ‘several spears in his canoe’.

By 1791, orders were issued that all boats should go out armed, and ‘the native people’  were forbidden from certain parts of the harbour. Then in June some convicts destroyed a nawi belonging to Balloderry that had been ‘left at some little distance from the settlement’. According to Collins, Balloderry’s ‘rage at finding his canoe destroyed was inconceivable, and he threatened to take his own revenge, and in his own way, upon all the white people’. Even after he witnessed the convicts found guilty of destroying the nawi being flogged as punishment, Balloderry wanted further justice, on his terms. A few weeks later, ‘when everyone thought he was sufficiently repaid for his misfortune’, a convict who had strayed from the settlement was suddenly struck in the back by a spear, then more spears fell around him and another wounded him in the side. He somehow managed to escape, but Balloderry had upheld his threat 3.

1 ‘Port Jackson New South Wales’ in The Log of H.M.S. Sirius by W. Bradley ANMM Collection; Turbet, The First Frontier, 30

2 White Journal 30 May, 26 August 1788, p. 165; Collins Account pp 24, 32, 34, 40, 43; Bradley Journal, pp 120, 126; Phillip to Sydney 9 July 1788 HRNSW I, II, 148 Nagle Journal 104-5

3 Tench A Complete Account, 208-210; Collins Account 118, 121, 137-9; Cobly Sydney’s First Four Years, 1789-90, 310, 318; Hunter, An Historical Journal, 331, 353; Tench A Complete Account 215, 239

4 Collins Account 30, 41, 378; Barkley-Jack Hawkesbury Settlement, 296-7; ‘Distribution of New South Wales Corps’ 8 January 1802, HRNSW IV, 675; HRA 1, V, 18; Peter Turbet The First Frontier, 146; Sydney Gazette 10 June, 19 August 1804, 28 April, 5 May 1805

5 Gazette 8, 15 September, 22 December 1805; HRNSW I, V, 311, 741.

6 See Heather Goodall and Alison Cadzow Rivers of Resilience: Aboriginal People on Sydney’s Georges River, (2009); Paul Irish Hidden in Plain View – The Aboriginal people of coastal Sydney, (2017); Stephen Gapps Cabrogal to Fairfield (2010). These authors have noted the continued presence of Aboriginal camps along the Georges River, Prospect Creek and other areas of Sydney right through the late 19th century and even up to the 1950s.

This article originally appeared in Signals 123 (June 2018). Uncover more maritime history and stories in our quarterly magazine Signals.

This article is based on research from Dr Stephen Gapps’s book The Sydney Wars – Conflict in the early colony 1788–1817 (NewSouth Books, Sydney, ISBN 9781742232140).