Blood Revenge – Murder on the Hawkesbury 1799

Murder on the Hawkesbury – 1799

Blood Revenge examines the first time that white men were held to account in a criminal court of New South Wales for killing Australian Aborigines.

It happened in 1799, just eleven years after the New South Wales colony was established. This book answers the disturbing question: Why were five men found guilty of killing two Aborigines, yet they were never punished? The story lays bare the nature of black and white relations at the colony’s Hawkesbury River frontier settlement. Governor John Hunter tried to carry out his orders and stop the wanton killing of Aborigines. Inevitably, there was a divide between policy and practice, and tensions and disputes between the Governor and members of the New South Wales Corps and the fledgling judiciary.

In Blood Revenge the politics of this murder case read like a missing chapter of Doc Evatt’s Rum Rebellion.
Historians writing about black and white relations say we will never reach true reconciliation until we are prepared to face the truth of our history. Author Lyn Stewart’s own ancestor was amongst those who murdered two Aborigines at the Hawkesbury River settlement over two hundred years ago.

‘My grandfather thought this was something we should not talk about,’ she writes. ‘By delving into this part of my family history I have learned not only why the murders happened but also about the volatile and uncertain relationships between settlers and Aborigines as the colony’s land grants steadily displaced the local people from their traditional lands. It is a history we must understand.’

(Rear cover text).