Summary

Blood Revenge examines the first time that white men were held to account in a criminal court of New South Wales for killing Aboriginal people. It happened in 1799, just 11 years after the New South Wales colony began.

This book answers the disturbing question: Why were five men found guilty of killing two Aboriginal people—yet they were never punished?

The story lays bare the nature of black-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 Aboriginal peoples.

Inevitably, there was a divide between policy and practice. In Blood Revenge the politics of this murder case reads like a missing chapter of Doc Evatt’s Rum Rebellion.