This was a shock. No one ever told me about this violence on the Hawkesbury, or that it was dealt with in this way.

And Mum’s story about the Aboriginal people being all gone by the time Wiseman arrived on the Hawkesbury was looking threadbare. He settled on the river around 1817. Even if he got there after these troubles, it can’t have been long after.

Having worked my way through the despatches I turned to the Sydney Gazette. Its first issue came out in 1803, three years before Wiseman arrived, and for the next twenty years hardly an issue went by without a piece on the ‘black savages’. The tone varied from jocular to indignant. To get a feel for events before Wiseman came to the river, I started at the beginning. Judging by the reports in the Gazette, things were pretty busy in June and July of 1804:

among the reaches about Portland Head their ravages have been felt with much greater severity than elsewhere...Last Friday se’nnight the farms of Crumby and Cuddie at the South Creek were totally stripped by a formidable body of natives supposed to be about 150 in number…

Another group made a visit to Tench’s River on the maraud, where getting among the corn of J. Kennedy without endeavouring to conceal themselves they were speedily discerned gathering in the crop with unusual activity: the settler disapproving their diligence as it promised but little advantage to the interests of his own family, instantly embraced the means of repelling a visit that had no real claim upon the laws of hospitality, and by a few discharges obliged them to retire with a trifling booty…

Some short time since, a settler’s wife with a large family, entertained half-a-dozen of these idlers with an almost reprehensible hospitality, and they in return, amused her with assurances of their best wishes and gratitude to her bounty, but in the very interim, a body of their colleagues were busily employed in clearing a whole acre of corn, which they carried off either in canoes or on their shoulders.

These things didn’t happen to Wiseman, of course, but they’d happened only ten years earlier and a few kilometres from where they could have happened to him.

The Gazette, meanwhile, was in no doubt how to interpret all this: ‘It may verily be advanced, that no set of people in the known world were ever so totally destitute as these are of industry and ingenuity, or whose innate indolence rendered them so wretchedly inattentive to the very means of subsistence.’

Shortly before Wiseman arrived on the river, the Gazette’s reports of ‘outrages’ and ‘atrocities’ increased: between March and August 1816 they averaged one a month, in various parts of the settlement. After 1816—when Macquarie declared martial law—there were fewer reports for several years. When they resumed, the attacks usually happened further away from Sydney as the frontier pushed further out.

Squinting at the smudged old print of the Sydney Gazette, I was more and more appalled. I’d never known about any of this. Even worse, I’d never thought to ask.