Historian Unearths the Life of Musquito, Aboriginal Resistance Fighter Lost to Colonial History
Historian Naomi Parry Duncan has reconstructed the life of Musquito (c.1780–1825), an early First Nations resistance fighter whose story was largely erased from colonial records until now.
Musquito was not famous. For nearly two centuries, the Aboriginal man known by that name—born around 1780 in the Sydney region—remained largely unknown, his life scattered across fragments of colonial record and European artistic representation. But historian Naomi Parry Duncan has spent two decades assembling what little can be known of his existence, and the result is a portrait of an early First Nations resistance fighter whose defiance against British colonisation deserves to be remembered.
Musquito's life is notable not because it was well-documented, but because of what little documentation exists at all.
Three aspects of Musquito's life distinguish him from countless other Aboriginal people dispossessed during the first 40 years of British colonisation in eastern Australia. The first is visual: in 1802, French naturalist Nicolas-Martin Petit drew him, an image that became the basis for an engraving by Barthélemy Roger published in France in 1807. These portraits, reproduced in Duncan's new book, are among the few surviving contemporary depictions of an Aboriginal person from that era.
The second is geographic. Although born in what is now Sydney's northwestern suburbs, Musquito spent many years living away from his Country—making his story more closely tied to Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) than to the better-documented colonisation of New South Wales. This displacement anchors much of Duncan's narrative.
The third dimension is legal: Musquito was among the first Aboriginal people hanged under British colonial law. A fledgling Hobart Supreme Court found him guilty of abetting murder—a conviction that marks him as an early casualty of the criminal justice system imposed on First Nations peoples.
A Historian's Personal Reckoning
Duncan's investigation is inseparable from her own ancestry. She is descended from colonists who occupied the land Musquito called Country—the northwestern Sydney suburbs now named through English place-names. This genealogical connection, she has said, created "a sense of obligation" that sustained her across two decades of research. Her convict ancestors—surnames Mobbs, Grono, and Bateman—were part of the invasion of Country between Parramatta and the Hawkesbury–Nepean rivers.
Rather than obscure this personal stake, Duncan's book embraces it. Her narrative moves between third and first person, weaving together colonial history, natural history, and her own relationship to the landscapes Musquito once inhabited. The prose is lyrical without becoming sentimental, celebrating what she describes as the "bright" and "multifaceted" life of her subject while remaining clear-eyed about the forces that ended it.
Beyond the Individual Life
Notably, Duncan devotes far more of her book to Musquito's physical and social setting than to Musquito himself—a choice that reflects the scarcity of direct evidence about his own thoughts, words, and actions. She reconstructs the English origins of her convict ancestors, the ecology and geography of the invaded Country, and the colonial relationships that shaped Musquito's world.
A significant portion of the book examines the portraits of Musquito, positioning his representation within the broader story of how European artists saw and depicted Aboriginal people during the early colonial period. This echoes the work of art historian Bernard Smith, whose 1960 book European Vision and the South Pacific documented how Aboriginal people worked for, fought with, and resisted colonists in the first years of the 19th century.
A Life Recovered, Not Fully Known
What emerges from Duncan's work is not a complete biography—the historical record simply does not permit one. Instead, it is a carefully assembled constellation of evidence: a French naturalist's sketch, court records, geographic knowledge, family history, and the material world of non-human creatures and landscapes that connected the colonist and the colonised.
Duncan's invitation to readers is subtle but profound: to recognise how dispossession enabled sensuous inheritance, how the land Musquito inhabited is now hers to inhabit, and how understanding that relationship might reshape how we see early Australian colonial history. In that recovery lies Musquito's small but stubborn claim on the historical record.