Aboriginal women of Australia, in the early decades of European colonisation of the continent, were both inside and outside the law. This was partly due to the unique legal and constitutional conditions of NSW as both a colony and a military-run prison. It was also a consequence of the inconsistent and undecided legal status of Aboriginal Australians as neither hostile combatants nor British subjects. Whether, and how far, British jurisdiction extended to Aboriginal people remained uncertain until well intothe mid-1800s. Meanwhile Aboriginal customary law remained unrecognised by the common law.
Aboriginal women of the period were even less well represented, more vulnerable, and faced a wider range of dangers than Aboriginal men. Reprisals and raids on Aboriginal camps all too often occurred while the men were away, leading to the indiscriminate killing of non-combatant women and children.
In Bathurst in 1824 the Wiradjuri conducted a series of increasingly organised and deadly attacks on farms and cattle stations that collectively constitute some of the fiercest resistance to European intrusion in the history of the continent. This paper will explore the experience of Wiradjuri women during the conflicts. I hope to show how the records of the 1824 conflicts in Bathurst lay bare the gaps and contradictions in the legal historical narrative of European engagement with Aboriginal women. Crimes against Aboriginal women went either unreported or unpunished, with some arrests made but no convictions. As neither subjects nor hostile combatants, they had none of the protections, but many of the strictures, of British law.