14/02/2026
Before there was a nation, there was the resistance.
Before there was Sydney, there was Country.
His name was Pemulwuy.
He was a Bidjigal man of the Eora Nation, born around 1750, long before the British flag was planted at Sydney Cove in 1788. Long before maps renamed rivers and hills that already had names.
When the First Fleet arrived under Arthur Phillip, the British called it settlement. Pemulwuy saw invasion.
For the Bidjigal and neighboring clans, the land was not property. It was law. It was ancestor. It was story written into rock and water. The newcomers fenced it. Cleared it. Claimed it.
And Pemulwuy chose not to translate himself into their world.
He chose to resist.
In 1790, after the killing of his kin by colonists, Pemulwuy began what would become a 12-year guerrilla campaign against the British colony. This was not random violence. It was strategic resistance. Farms were burned. Crops destroyed. Livestock taken. Supply lines disrupted.
He understood terrain better than any soldier. He knew where rivers bent. Where forests thickened. Where sandstone caves could swallow a man whole.
In 1797 came the confrontation the colonists would later call the Battle of Parramatta. Pemulwuy led around one hundred warriors in a direct challenge to the British outpost. Muskets answered spears. He was shot seven times, according to colonial accounts.
Seven.
He survived.
The British did not know what to do with that. They began whispering that he was a sorcerer. That he possessed powers. That bullets could not claim him.
But survival was not magic. It was endurance. It was refusal.
Governor Phillip’s successors declared him an outlaw. A bounty was placed on his head. He became the most wanted man in the colony.
Yet he kept appearing.
Striking. Vanishing. Reappearing again.
Like smoke in the bush.
To the colonists, he was a threat. To his people, he was something else entirely. A defender of law older than the British Empire. A man who refused to concede that invasion was inevitable.
He did not petition.
He did not negotiate.
He defended.
In 1802, Pemulwuy was finally shot and killed by British settler Henry Hacking. His body was mutilated. His head severed and sent to England in a jar of spirits, reportedly as a scientific curiosity.
It is one of the darkest and most painful chapters of early Australian history.
For years, Bidjigal descendants have sought the return of his remains. The physical head was taken. But something else could not be contained in glass.
His spirit did not travel in that jar.
Pemulwuy’s resistance marked the first sustained armed opposition to British colonization in Australia. Long before the word “nation” applied to this continent, he embodied sovereignty in action.
He was not a rebel against a state.
He was a defender of Country.
And like many figures of resistance, colonial records tried to reduce him to a criminal. But history has shifted its gaze.
Today, Pemulwuy stands as one of the earliest symbols of Aboriginal resistance. A reminder that invasion was never uncontested. That the land fought back through the people who belonged to it.
His story is not one of defeat. It is one of precedent.
Every later act of resistance.
Every land rights movement.
Every assertion of sovereignty.
They echo his first refusal.
Before there was Parliament.
Before there was Federation.
There was Pemulwuy.
Untranslated. Unyielding.
The first warrior of a war that never truly ended.
