The Remarkable Mrs Reibey by Grantlee Kieza

Author:Grantlee Kieza
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC Books
Published: 2023-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

THE HAWKESBURY AND NEPEAN experienced a great flood at the end of May 1816, wiping out the wheat crops and threatening food shortages. Macquarie turned his attention to this new problem, satisfied that the worst of the fighting was over.

The war wasn’t over yet, though. Settlers at the Kurrajong Brush, in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, were attacked with such ferocity and frequency that soon Joseph Hobson was the only one still farming there. On 7 July 1816, he was killed with a spear through the heart.38 Attacks on William Cox’s Mulgoa farm, on the Nepean between Emu Plains and the Cowpastures, resulted in the murder and mutilation of a shepherd, and two hundred ‘very fine sheep’ were hurled down an ‘immense precipice’.39 At Glenroy on the Coxs River, on the western side of the Blue Mountains, Sergeant Jeremiah Murphy was ordered not to allow Aboriginal people nearer to the settlement than sixty yards and to send any whom he captured – either handcuffed or with their hands tied with rope – to the depot at Springwood and then on to Parramatta.

Macquarie issued another proclamation on 20 July 1816, declaring ten Aboriginal warriors40 as outlaws and giving anyone – ‘whether free men, prisoners of the Crown, or friendly natives’ – ‘the power to kill and utterly destroy them’.41 He offered ‘a reward of ten pounds sterling’ for each of them, dead or alive.42

The bounties went unpaid, but the governor announced that several rebel leaders had ‘been either killed or taken prisoners’, and he called a truce even though Aboriginal people never meekly followed British rule. The ten outlaws would be forgiven if they surrendered, and ‘from and after the 8 November 1816, all hostile operations, military or other, against the said native tribes will cease’.43

At the annual post-Christmas feast day at the Parramatta marketplace, Macquarie assured the Indigenous people who attended his yearly gatherings and who seemed to co-exist well with the Europeans that meat and drink would be ‘plentiful’, and that he would personally advise them on the ‘plan of life’ they might ‘be inclined to adopt for their own comfort and happiness’.44 In his mind he had brought peace to the colony, even if it was with a heavy hand. Before long, he told Bathurst that the Indigenous population of New South Wales was ‘living peaceably and quietly in every part of the colony’.45 The wounds, however, continued to fester and would never heal.

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