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T H E B LO O DY ST R U G G L E
O N A U ST R A L I A’S
Convict
E A R LY F RO N T I E R
Valley
Mar k D u n n
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
1. The Valley 7
2. First Contact 18
3. A Convict Outpost 41
4. As Fine a Country as Imagination Can Form 69
5. The Land Rush 90
6. Working on the Frontier 116
7. Living on Country 136
8. Resistance and Reprisals 151
9. A Landscape of Violence 172
10. Convict Revolt and Ruined Reputations 187
11. The Convict Valley 215
Epilogue 233
Acknowledgements 236
Notes 239
Bibliography 271
Index 284
The reader will note that some of the language used to describe
Aboriginal people during the period this book covers is often
anachronistic and in some cases offensive. It is not the intention
of this work to offend, but where direct quotes from documents or
manuscripts are used, the original language remains. Individual
Aboriginal people are named where possible; however, the groups
or clans that they were from are not, as for the most part these
were not identified in the historical record. As the book shows,
Aboriginal men and women were mobile across the Hunter, moving
from the plains to the mountains, visiting the coastal settlements
and those inland. For this reason, I have not tied people to particu-
lar clans but rather discussed them as individuals in the place they
lived and were encountered. And although this book is focused on
a time prior to 1850, Aboriginal people survived in and continued
to live right across the Hunter Valley after this period. Today,
Aboriginal people in the Hunter Valley are represented by seven
Local Aboriginal Land Councils: Awabakal, Bahtabah, Biraban,
Karuah, Mindaribba, Wonnarua and Worimi. These Councils
vii
Hunter River
Denman
Singleton
Hunter River
Map 2
Maitland Morpeth
Nelson Bay
Raymond
Cessnock Terrace
Wollombi Newcastle
Wisemans Ferry
0 10 20 km
Gosford
10 miles
Hawkesbury River Broken Bay
Sydney
Key
convict road into the Hunter from Wisemans Ferry – 1826
road through the Hunter from Newcastle to Scone – 1829
coastal road from Sydney to Newcastle – 1844
Scone
Hunter River
Mount Royal
2 3
11
N
Muswellbrook
Hunter River 6
Glennies Creek
Goulburn River
Denman 7 8 10
9 14
4 Hunter River 13
Hunter River
12
Singleton
Wollombi Brook
To Newcastle
Key Bulga
roads 1
rivers/creeks
5
0 5 10 15 20 km
5 10 15 miles
To Wisemans Ferry
A HIDDEN VALLEY
THE VALLEY
A Valley Formed
Like much of the east coast of New South Wales, the Hunter
Valley—geologically speaking—is both old and new. Parts date
back over 400 million years, laid down by ancient volcanoes and
fluctuating sea levels. The great coal deposits that underlie much of
the valley, popping to the surface around Singleton and in the cliffs
at Newcastle, were formed during this era. Other areas show the
evidence of the vast, ancient continent of Gondwana, when Aus
tralia was linked to New Zealand, Antarctica, South America and
India. The high mountain rainforests around the Barrington Tops
and Mount Royal Range on the northern fringes of the Hunter
stand as some of the last vestiges of the forests from this time.
Marine fossils found at Stanhope near Branxton, now 50 kilometres
from the ocean, hint at the massive upheavals as the Gondwanan
landmass began to break apart 165 million years ago. Alternating
saltwater, freshwater and volcanic deposits reveal the fluctuating
sea levels and changing conditions across the area.2
Some twelve million years ago a great tectonic uplift mashed the
ancient layers together, pushing up a mountainous belt that became
the Great Dividing Range. Where the ancient, ancestral rivers had
once flowed towards the south, they were now forced eastward
towards the sea and began the long process of erosion that carved
the valley as we see it today. These old fault lines are exposed in the
country between Muswellbrook and Wingen, where an older, wider
valley can be seen. One of the new rivers was the Hunter. From its
headwaters in the high mountains around Mount Royal and the
back of the Barrington Ranges, its waters cut through soft sand-
stone in some parts and were resisted by the basalt outcrops and
lava flows in others. The yielding rock and the resistance meant
that the waters wandered through the landscape, carving out the
valley along the way. Once the waters dropped out of the highlands
they began to meander, slowing down, widening out—simultane-
ously eroding land on their outside curves and depositing alluvium
on their inside sweep.
There are four main rivers that flow through the Hunter Valley:
the Hunter, Goulburn, Paterson and Williams rivers. So it was
that over aeons each formed its respective valley and floodplains,
eventually coming together below Raymond Terrace to form the
plains, through the dense rainforest, into the gullies and mountains,
following the rivers and creeks. Archaeology in the middle valley
around Fal Brook and at Moffats Swamp near Port Stephens suggests
dates of 20,000 years for human occupation, with some sites as old as
35,000 years. Evidence around Sydney and the Hawkesbury River
points to occupation closer to 45,000 years, suggesting people were
settling right through this section of New South Wales, including
the Hunter region, around the same time.7 Shelters, middens, open
camp sites, engravings and art, ceremonial sites and bora grounds
have all been recorded throughout the Hunter Valley.
Aboriginal people came to know the valley over generations,
managing the land to take advantage of the abundant resources.
Camp sites and settlements were concentrated around the banks
of the rivers, as evidenced in the archaeological record, with the
majority of sites within 100 metres of a river or creek.8 The people
in the Hunter Valley then were river people, utilising the waterways
as living spaces, food sources and pathways through their Country.
Tools were shaped from the large river cobbles that lay in the
shallows of the Hunter and its tributaries; bark from stringybark,
river gum, kurrajong and other trees was fashioned into canoes from
Port Stephens to Newcastle and upriver to Maitland and Singleton;
and the long, straight shafts of the grass tree (Xanthorrhoea australis)
were used for hunting, fishing and fighting spears.9
On the coast, nets were fashioned from grasses and plant fibres
for fishing, weirs were built as fish traps and oyster shells fashioned
into pirrewuy (fish hooks).10 The women around the yohaaba (harbour)
at Newcastle made yirrawarn (fishing line) from the inner strands
of kurrajong bark, rolling the strands over and over until the line
was fashioned. Women also dived for lobster and collected oysters
from the rocks around the shore.11 Dozens of canoes at a time were
observed by the British on the harbour and out to the edge of
the ocean, with the women fishing from them. At Lake Macquarie
create the valley. When finished, they opened the valley floor and
let the waters run to form the rivers and creeks, bringing life to
the land.22 Around the coast a significant number of stories relate
to the geology and geography of the valley. Whibayganba (Nobbys
Island), at the entrance to Newcastle Harbour, was the resting place
of a giant kangaroo who occasionally shook himself, causing the
ground to shake and rocks to fall from the cliffs. Nearby, above
what is now Newcastle Beach, a sacred place in the high cliff known
as Yi-ran-na-li demands that anyone who passes by not speak, other
wise rocks will crash down upon them.23 Inland, another story
relates how a giant lizard wandered across the land, its tail carving
out the valley as it passed. The lizard remains in the mountains,
his head making up Yellow Rock sited prominently near Broke, his
body making the ridgeline behind.24
The Reverend Lancelot Threlkeld recorded a number of these
stories in the 1820s and 1830s, related to him by Biraban—also
known as McGill—who acted as a translator, interpreter and inter-
mediary for Threlkeld. He noted that local Aboriginal people at
Lake Macquarie told how all the land and the mountains around
the lake had once been covered by a big flood, with only one family
escaping in a canoe to the highest point. Cockle shells found on
high ground were evidence of the story. This story, coupled with
those of the giant kangaroo of Nobbys Island and Yi-ran-na-li at
Newcastle Beach, offers a tantalising hint of a long-held environ
mental memory of higher sea levels, distant earthquakes and
experience of place passed through generations.
Of these stories and sites, the most significant was that of Baiame.
The great Ground Spirit Baiame, as described by anthropologist
R.H. Mathews in 1893 and represented in at least one major art
site on the edge of the Broken Back Range, was the dominant
spiritual figure of the Hunter Valley and beyond. Baiame and his
half-brother or kinsman Daramulan were central to initiation and
ceremony, with rock art, engravings and ceremonial sites from the
Sydney and Blue Mountains areas, through the Hunter Valley, west
and north to Brewarrina and into southern Queensland.25 Mount
Yengo, halfway between Windsor and the Hunter Valley, is con-
sidered to be the site from which, when finished on earth, Baiame
stepped into the sky. The stories, lore and traditions shaped the
way that the people interacted with the Country around them, with
their neighbours and with those beyond.
It was into this ancient landscape, with its interconnected trading
societies and complex spiritual rituals and beliefs, that British
people began to arrive in the 1790s. With close trading, familial
and spiritual connections stretching from the shores of Sydney
Harbour through the mountains and along the coast to the Hunter
Valley, word of these new arrivals at Sydney had likely already
reached Awabakal, Worimi and Wonnarua people well before any
appeared on their shores.
The fertile valley, which sustained thriving Aboriginal commu-
nities from the sea to the far mountains for tens of thousands of
years, had been shaped over millions of years by a series of dynamic
and at times cataclysmic geological events. The future success of
the Hunter Valley as an agricultural and farming settlement was as
much a product of this process, of the land, the soil and the river,
as it was the hard work, forced or otherwise, of the convicts, farmers
and settlers who were to come.