The Bathurst War and Martial Law (1824)

When Wiradjuri resistance slowed the colony’s expansion across the Blue Mountains, the governor placed the Bathurst district under martial law.

After a road was built across the Blue Mountains in 1815, settlers and their livestock moved onto the Bathurst plains, the country of the Wiradjuri people. By 1823 and 1824, conflict over land, food and violence against Wiradjuri women had turned into open warfare. A number of stockmen and many Wiradjuri people were killed.

Martial law

On 14 August 1824, Governor Sir Thomas Brisbane declared martial law west of the mountains. For four months, soldiers and armed settlers could act without the ordinary protections of civil law. Mounted parties pursued Wiradjuri groups. Colonial records say little about the killings that followed, but later accounts and local memory describe massacres at several sites, and historians still debate the numbers.

Windradyne

The Wiradjuri leader Windradyne, called “Saturday” by the colonists, survived. After martial law ended in December 1824 he walked to Parramatta to attend the governor’s annual feast and meeting with Aboriginal people, which colonists read as a gesture of peace. He died in 1829. Today the Bathurst community marks the declaration of martial law each August.

A note on sources: some modern retellings say Wiradjuri leaders were beheaded during the Bathurst War. We have not found reliable evidence for that claim, so we do not repeat it as fact here.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Written for the Reader and free to read here.