Pemulwuy, an Aboriginal warrior, led resistance against early British colonialism in Australia

"…with simple spears, rocks, boomerangs, stones, he defeated the British army that they sent here."

The British empire did not conquer the continent of Australia without a fight.

From the very beginning, Aboriginal Australians resisted the violent colonisation of their country by European settlers.

One of the first to do so was a man called Pemulwuy, who was killed on this day in 1802.

Pemulwuy in Botany Bay, depicted by Samuel John Neele in 1804

Pemulwuy was a warrior of the Bidjigal, part of the wider Dharuk people, and he was born in Kamay – called Botany Bay by the British invaders – circa 1750.

By the time the ‘First Fleet’ of European settlers invaded Australia in 1788, twenty years after James Cook’s landing, Pemulwuy was already a respected spiritual leader in his community.

The British, intent on colonising eastern Australia, renamed the area ‘New South Wales.’

Initially, the indigenous people of the area were hospitable to the Europeans – far more so than European societies have often been to outsiders.

Pemulwuy and his Dharuk compatriots were unsure of whether the new arrivals were guests, willing to respect the rights and dignity of the sovereign Aboriginal owners of the land.

But once it (quickly) became apparent that this was an invasion – that the Europeans had come not to coexist with and learn from the Aboriginal people but to kill them and steal their land – Pemulwuy began to fight back.

Coming across the beautiful new land of Australia, the British proceeded to claim for themselves everything from Uluru (Ayers Rock) to the Great Barrier Reef

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On 9 December 1790, Pemulwuy routed a squad of British Marines in Botany Bay, and he speared an agent of the new British Governor, who had previously murdered local Aboriginal people.

Pemulwuy intended this act as one of criminal justice. If the British were to live here, they ought to abide by Aboriginal law.

But the invaders did not see it that way.

As is the way with settler colonial projects such as the one being perpetrated in Australia during these years, acts of resistance and sovereignty by the indigenous people – self-defence against an unprovoked foreign invasion – were dismissed as criminal behaviour, worthy of violent punishment by the invading imperial state.

In response to Pemulwuy’s attack on the Marines, the British sent 46 soldiers to hunt him down – the largest military expedition yet.

But they couldn’t find him. Pemulwuy and the Bidjigal had disappeared into the bush. Australia was their land, and they knew how to use it – to live, to hide, and to fight.

The British were busy in the 18th century, using violence and suppression to lay the foundations for a vast Empire stretching from the Highlands of Scotland to the Australian outback

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Over the next few years, Pemulwuy mobilised more Aboriginal fighters in the 'New South Wales' area.

From 1792, he was leading a fully-fledged war of independence.

The Aboriginal fighters raided settler colonists across the area, burning crops and livestock.

The British empire called this criminal damage, but Pemulwuy and his Dharuk rebels saw it as self-defence.

The ongoing British invasion was based on the creation of permanent agricultural settlements, so, if the Dharuk could take out the Europeans’ agriculture then they might stop the invasion and save their country.

But the number of settlers was becoming too big for Pemulwuy’s army to handle.

The settlers, who were mostly armed with guns, just like the British army, ambushed and routed 100 Aboriginal fighters in March 1797. Pemulwuy was shot and captured.

Pemulwuy stands alongside people like Tecumseh in North America who have led resistance movements against settler colonialism (Tecumseh design only available on North American site currently)

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Somehow, despite being severely injured and imprisoned in a British hospital in Parramatta, Pemulwuy escaped.

But his anticolonial resistance movement never recovered its earlier momentum, and it became smaller-scale at the same time as British colonisation was becoming more powerful and more violent.

In 1801, the colonial governor of New South Wales put a bounty on Pemulwuy.

Wanted by the British empire, dead or alive, Pemulwuy was assassinated on 2 June 1802 by a sailor of the Royal Navy.

As a sign of how monstrously the British colonisers dehumanised Aboriginal Australians, Pemulwuy’s body was treated like a zoological curiosity, not the earthly remains of a human being. His head was preserved in spirits and shipped to the famed English naturalist, Joseph Banks, for study.

Pemulwuy’s son, Tedbury, carried on the struggle against the British invaders after his dad was killed, only to die in battle himself in 1810.

Pemulwuy and the Dharuk’s struggle to resist and turn back the British failed militarily.

The settler colonial invasion of Australia, which began during the late eighteenth century and lasted well into the twentieth, devastated Aboriginal societies.

It reshaped the continent through intense violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

It was the indigenous peoples who represented humanity in those centuries of struggle, while the European invaders were the barbaric ones.

Pemulwuy, in his dignified and courageous struggle for indigenous self-determination against an unprovoked invasion, stands alongside people all over the world, like Tecumseh in North America, Tupac Amaru II in Peru, and Steve Biko in South Africa, who have led resistance movements against settler colonialism, fighting for human liberation, and Pemulwuy’s struggle in eastern Australia continues to inspire the Aboriginal movement today.

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