The Rising: War in the colony of New South Wales, 1838–1844

The award-winning author of The Sydney Wars reveals the breadth of frontier resistance warfare.

The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance ended in 1824 with a series of massacres conducted by settlers in the Bathurst region. From the 1830s, colonists began occupying more and more Aboriginal land across western New South Wales and stocking it with sheep and cattle. By 1838, a dramatic fightback began across the entire frontier of the colony. What has been called the Second Wiradyuri War of Resistance, from 1839 to 1841, in southern New South Wales near Narranderra was, in fact, part of a vast arc of conflict from present-day northern Victoria through tosoutheast Queensland. At the time, it was seen by many contemporaries as a concerted and coordinated ‘uprising’.

In The Rising, historian Stephen Gapps reveals, for the first time, the incredible story of this extensive frontier resistance warfare – a series of wars that were conducted along a huge area of the Murray-Darling river system, across many First Nations’ lands, in a concerted defence of River Country.

About the author

Stephen Gapps is a senior historian at Artefact Heritage Services and a former curator at the Australian National Maritime Museum. He is the author of The Sydney Wars: Conflict in the early colony 1788–1817 (NewSouth, 2018), the inaugural winner of the Les Carlyon Award for the writing of military history and Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance — The Bathurst War, 1822–1824 (NewSouth, 2021).

Stephen Gapps
Published April 2025
Paperback
256 Pages
153mm x 235mm
ISBN: 9781742238029