David Marr reveals Hunter connection to Australia's darkest hours at Newcastle Writers Festival

David Marr launched his most recent book, Killing for Country, at the Newcastle Writers Festival on Saturday in a wide-ranging conversation at the Civic Playhouse. In it, he revealed that his mother's ancestor once had a close connection to the Hunter Valley before claiming lands from here through Queensland and into the Far North.

Marr had a packed local audience in the palm of his hands as he narrated the bitter and violent history of Australia's notorious colonial paramilitary force, the Native Police, and the discovery that branches of his family tree intersected with two of its most notorious officers.

"This story has nothing to do with the Marrs," he said with a knowing nod, "The Marrs are absolutely virtuous people who, for a century in Sydney, were in the iron founding business ... This is about my mother's family. And my mother's family were good at secrets. And really well-kept secrets are the secrets you don't know are even there."

What began as a family history project in 2019 to try to find information on Marr's great-grandmother, Maud Uhr, who he describes as a "blank" in his book's preface - "stories weren't told about her" - revealed a web of darkness that left him "appalled and curious".

Within hours of beginning the project, Marr said he uncovered a photograph of Maud's father in the uniform of an Australian Native Policeman - a band of specialised mounted paramilitary units that operated around the country, including in Newcastle and Port Stephens in the 1830s, enlisting First Nations men to hunt, capture and kill other Indigenous people as squatters and colonisers carved up the land.

"I have been writing about the politics of race all my career," he writes, "I know what side I am on. Yet, that afternoon, I found in the lower branches of my family tree sub-inspector Reginald Uhr, a professional killer of Aborigines. Then I discovered his brother D'Arcy was also in the massacre business."

"Some things really hit you like a blow," Marr said at the weekend, "I had never thought to look whether my family had any entanglement with the bloody history of the frontier and bang, there was Reginald Uhr in his pompous uniform for the Native Police, and I knew within half an hour ... that I was going to write the story. I had to write the story. This was the only way to deal with this: to find out what happened and to explain it to myself, to my family, and to people."

Marr's story intersects with the Hunter through Richard Jones - the one-time president of the Bank of NSW and Legislative Council Member between 1829 and 1842 - who was given 2000 acres near Singleton and later thousands more through grants and purchases along the Hunter River for the run of sheep and cattle. The accumulated land was called Black Creek, later known as the region's premier wine country, Pokolbin.

"He was an unbelievable turd," Marr said at the weekend.

Jones once controlled as much as 600,000 acres of unceded Aboriginal land from here into Queensland and, as a bankrupt, hid much of his assets in the name of Marr's great-great-grandfather Reginald Uhr.

"Jones only paid his creditors six shillings on the pound," Marr said, even though he was by far the largest landowner during his time on the Legislative Council.

"They were dispossessors; the legislators were the dispossessors. And so the indigenous people of the colony were simply ignored in law and ignored in practice."

Marr described a coming to terms in the process of writing the book that delves into the Uhr brothers' bloody atrocities with the Native Police, and at one point described them as a "standard trope of colonialism".

"The Spanish did it, the Portuguese did it, the British did it," he said. "You enlisted the local people as troopers of the colonisation itself."

The Uhr brothers were in their late teens and early 20s when they took charge of parties of enlisted First Nations men, often recruited hundreds of miles from where they would - as Marr describes it - "do their killing work" and were responsible for atrocities throughout Queensland and the Far North.

At one point, D'Arcy and his party massacred 59 men, women and children on the Gulf Coast, reports of which were published throughout Australia and abroad, Marr said.

"Those reports were published throughout Australia. Eight here, six there, seven there. One had 18 bullets in him and wouldn't die, so a trooper had to bash him to death with the butt of his rifle," Marr said, "(These reports were) not only published throughout Australia but published throughout Britain.

"The British government had no excuse whatever to pretend that they didn't know what was happening in their colonies. They knew."

Marr's book was described in the session as "essential reading" for its unflinching view of Australia's frontier realities, which, as the volume's dust jacket describes, are "still unresolved in today's Australia."

Marr's session coincided with a packed morning schedule featuring a diverse range of writers at the University of Newcastle's inner city campus, NuSpace, and the Press Bookhouse after the annual Newcastle Writers Festival opened on Friday night with headline guest Leigh Sales.

"There really is something for everyone - crime, romance, history, First Nations astronomy, poetry, politics, sex, memoir, food, and mind-opening discussions about global issues," Rosemarie Milsom, the festival's founding director, told the Newcastle Herald.

The program included award-winning writers Nam Le, Charlotte Wood, Christos Tsiolkas, Melissa Lucashenko, Kate Grenville, and illustrator Liz Anelli, as well as a record number of debut authors, including Madeleine Gray, Nadine J Cohen, and Hannah Diviney.