The Convict Valley: The Bloody Struggle on Australia’s Early Frontier

by Mark Dunn

304 pp., Allen & Unwin, 2020

ISBN: 9781760528645 (pbk), $32.99

Review by Carol Liston

Western Sydney University

The title and cover illustration position The Convict Valley as a history of the European penal settlement at Newcastle and its expansion up the Hunter Valley. The title is both true and misleading, and the clue lies on the cover with a small group of Indigenous people gathered around a campfire.

Good local history draws together the elements of a place – the natural environment, its resources of water and minerals, the people who pass through and observe, those who stay, where they live and visit, what work they undertake and the cultural attitudes they hold and enforce. The Convict Valley is a very good local history as it provides insight into all these aspects of early Newcastle and the settlement of the Hunter Valley in the first half of the nineteenth century. Dunn’s research builds on the earlier work of W. Allan Wood, Dawn in the Valley (1972), itself a model study for its generation, but Dunn’s work goes much deeper into the early community offering a sophisticated analysis of European and Aboriginal relationships. The convict settlement, the coal mining at Newcastle, the timber cutting further up the valley and the opening of the district to free settlers in the 1820s are documented with interesting insights into the practicalities of establishing these farms and estates. Relationships between free and convict were often violent, culminating in the convict revolt at Castle Forbes. The new free settlers were mostly men of wealth who established farms and vineyards and raised their families. These new settlers were literate and the papers of families such as the Scott family are used with considerable skill. This pattern of settlement was accompanied by increasing violence between Europeans and the local Aboriginal population. Documenting the presence of women and children on this frontier provides a new depth to the history, as some of the children learnt the local language, and the women were frequently the point of contact with the local Aboriginal groups, evidenced in the gripping story of Mary Ogilvie.

What is outstanding in The Convict Valley is the methodological approach of weaving small elements of primary source documents, drawn from diaries and reports, and carefully selecting the rare occasional references to contact with Aboriginal people. Reading across these fragments enables Dunn to piece together the variable experiences of first contact, from hesitant encounters between convicts, timber getters and Aborigines to the violence that followed increased European free settlers seeking land and the presence of the mounted police from the mid-1820s. Dunn unpacks the different interactions. Not all were violent. Documenting the rare brief period of ‘middle ground engagements’ is vital to understanding colonisation, which Dunn details through the account of the Aboriginal guide Ben Davis (Munnoin). Different relationships developed between Aborigines and the smaller usually emancipist farmers who needed their assistance and they largely peacefully coexisted, but the growth of the larger estates led to more breaches of cultural protocols and fewer personal relationships developing between the settlers and the Aboriginal community.

This is a book that needs maps – maps that show the key estates and the sites of interaction recounted in the text. There is one map only, locating the routes in the Hunter Valley. Sadly the illustrations are all lumped into one coloured section but would have been more relevant if located throughout the text. This is a powerful book and hopefully a subsequent edition can add more maps.