Part 1

A marker of European-Indigenous relations in early Australia is the evidence of massacres of Aboriginal people.

According to The Guardian Australia's map of massacres, published in 2019, about 270 sites saw at least six Indigenous people killed in confrontations between 1788 and 1928.

The frontier wars of which these massacres were part lasted for a long time.

According to The Guardian Australia, there were four such sites in the Hunter Valley, one in the Fal Brook area near Singleton, one in the Paterson River valley near Gostwyk and two in the valley of the Williams.

All told, about 60 Aborigines (and two Europeans) died in these encounters. Largely they were reprisals by Europeans for the killing of individual settlers or the theft of livestock and crops.

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Such killings naturally generated Aboriginal resentment.

But there would have been cause for anger even earlier. Doubtless some escaped convicts, starved of sexual opportunities, raped Aboriginal women.

Elsewhere in Australia, Europeans are known to have been speared to death for rape.

At Newcastle, according to Brian Walsh's Voices from Tocal: convict life on a rural estate, evidence from the 1820s shows Aboriginal resentment at the molestation of native women by European men.

Some Aborigines were shot dead for no real reason. Shooting could be wantonly easy and done with impunity. Some shootings were opportunistic, effectively "sport" to settlers.

European colonisation must have seemed barbarous to the Wonnarua people. The two groups had no understanding of each other's ways, and conflict occurred when Aboriginal people took corn and other edibles from farms.

To the settlers this was theft. To Aborigines it was utilising the bounty of nature as was everyone's right.

Wonnarua people were perplexed when Europeans simply took land for their own use, seeking no permission and forcing traditional owners off it, and then objected when Aborigines took ripe crops from settlers' farms.

Such misunderstandings caused conflict. Wonnarua were more peaceable than the Europeans, but they became angry when treated badly. They did not generally initiate conflict.

And there was disease, especially smallpox, which decimated Indigenous populations. Responses to a government inquiry in 1846 into the condition of the Aborigines implied that the decline was rapid.

One witness (the Rev George Middleton of Morpeth), thought the Aboriginal population of the local area was a third of that of only ten years earlier.

Hunting grounds disappeared as the floodplain bush was cleared and the lagoons drained. Native animals left as farming took over, the livelihoods of Wonnarua people were diminished and they were forced into areas the settlers did not favour.

These included the upper reaches of the Paterson and Williams valleys, less productive of food opportunities than the rich floodplains downstream and along the Hunter.

A few remained near Maitland, on the margins of towns and doing menial work for food.

Underlying it all was the attitude of the colonising Europeans. That attitude was summed up by the Manchester Guardian, editorialising in 1857 about an uprising in India. England, it asserted, had a right to rule over Indians "by virtue of inherent superiority."

It was the same in the Hunter.

Wonnarua society in the Maitland area was quickly marginalised, debilitated, displaced and shrunken after European settlement began.

Unsurprisingly, relations between Aborigines and Europeans deteriorated.

Maitland & District Historical Society