In our understanding of the past, we do indeed seem to have moved beyond the siloed agendas of the ‘history wars’. Divisions will continue, but the spirit of the exercise now finds its expression in the inclusive and magnanimous tone of the Uluru Statement. As another example, Lyndall Ryan, from the University of Newcastle, is leading the Australian branch of an international effort to document colonial massacres. The result so far is a minutely researched and even-handed account of interracial violence, documenting deaths on both sides, invaders and Indigenous peoples, in the Australian past.

Stephen Gapps’s new book, The Sydney Wars, belongs very much to the moment. Even-handedness is crucial. So, at the end of this book is a tabular listing of the killed and wounded on both sides, as far as the evidence allows. Gapps has searched very widely indeed, but of course settler casualties are much better documented than Indigenous ones.

But the first thing we notice about Gapps’s book is the title. Historians have two options in writing about Indigenous people. They can emphasise their difference from the invaders. That opens imagination to any number of hidden complexities and, where possible, it includes preferring Indigenous terms to English ones. One great advantage lies in assuming the mystery and diversity of humanity. But drawing as it does on anthropological method, this approach also tends to distance actors and observers.

Secondly, their language can speak of sameness. That typically means using English nomenclature and Western ideas. In his books on Australian race relations, Henry Reynolds generally uses such language, so as to argue about sovereignty, treaties, and legal rights. Inga Clendinnen similarly called Indigenous peoples ‘Australians’ and the invaders ‘Europeans’. Generally, Gapps takes this latter approach. For him, the main contenders are the ‘Sydney people’ on the one hand and ‘colonists’ on the other. Altogether, he uses terms free of any moral agenda. His immediate aim is to show how the violence of the first thirty years is rightly called ‘war’ or ‘wars’, terms that put such violence at the heart of the Australian story and, at the same time, dignify both parties.

The fact of invasion is set aside, but in other respects this must be the most effective approach for ‘truth telling’. As with the Uluru Statement and as with Ryan’s massacre project, the aim must be to create a national story equally acknowledged by all parties, in Australia and beyond. Good writing helps too, and Gapps’s story is not only full of effective detail but also beautifully lucid.

Also, as a comprehensive piece of scholarship, it is new in the way it shows a colonial community organised on military lines and in a state of continuous defence. The successive garrison units, especially the New South Wales Corps, have not always been taken very seriously by historians. They typically seem both ridiculous and corrupt. Gapps takes all these units seriously as the sharp edge of European occupation, with expertise essential for the safety of the colonists and for the local purposes of empire. In this sense, too, the book is part of a larger scholarly development. On the whole, we now pay more attention to the skills and intelligence involved in the settlement process, partly because we are better qualified ourselves to understand them.

Sydney Cove, 1808, by J.W. Lewin (bequeathed by Miss Helen Banning, State Library of NSW)

Gapps’s originality involves the reinterpretation of well-known detail. Dots are joined in new ways. Other writers have conjured up the soundscape at Sydney Cove in January 1788 by stressing the noise of the axe and of busyness, but Gapps gives instead a wonderfully evocative account of punctuating gunfire, ceremonial, casual or offensive. Later in Governor Arthur Phillip’s time, the non-appearance of the Gadigal is not passivity in Gapps’s account but ‘a military stand-off’. Guns and spears are made to define the relationship between old and new inhabitants, the governors repeatedly send home for more troops, and fear is a constant on both sides.

Throughout these three decades, 1788–1817, successive governors are shown to have tried two contradictory policies at the same time. Their first duty was to protect and extend the settlement, but they had also been instructed to upset as little as possible the lives and livelihood of the people they found in New South Wales. One of the beauties of this book is the way it shows how that contradiction unfolded, from Arthur Phillip to Lachlan Macquarie. At the beginning and at the end of the period respectively, each found it necessary to confront the problem with what was meant to be a single hard blow to Indigenous resistance. In Phillip’s case, this was the punitive expedition in December 1790, led by Watkin Tench, and it failed. Macquarie’s effort did work, partly, so Gapps argues, because the governor, who had appropriate experience on other imperial frontiers, took a more expert military approach. This was the campaign of April–May 1816, including the Appin Massacre. From that point, Sydney and the Cumberland Plain were at peace, and so a gulf opened up between these centres of European civility and the crude violence of an increasingly remote frontier.

We need to remember the limitations of Gapps’s approach. The ‘Sydney people’ had no existence in fact. In response to invasion, various Indigenous groups of the Cumberland Plain were drawn together from time to time, apparently in innovative ways, but otherwise the ‘Sydney people’ is a historical construct. A different type of argument might also have used a more relativist understanding of violence, conditioned as it is by time, place, and culture. The power of this book lies in the way its own particular logic unfolds within well-chosen parameters and towards a definite purpose. It is a fine piece of work and a vital addition to the ‘moment of truth’.