Stephen Gapps

Shortlisted, NSW Premier's History Awards 2022, NSW Regional and Community History Prize Shortlisted, Les Carlyon Literary Prize 2022 In May 1824, what can only be described as a period of all-out, total gudyarra ('war' in the Wiradyuri language) had begun west of the Blue Mountains. Relations between Wiradyuri people and the colonists in the country around Bathurst had completely broken...

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,...

Winner of the Les Carlyon Literary Prize Longlisted for the 2019 CHASS Australia Book Prize The Sydney Wars tells the history of military engagements between Europeans and Aboriginal Australians, described as 'this constant sort of war' by one early colonist, around the greater Sydney region. Telling the story of the first years of colonial Sydney in a new and original...