The time has passed when the raids on the ripening cornfields are merely an alternative form of food gathering. The object of the recurrent, well planned attacks is to drive the white men off the river. New settlers taking up virgin land are attacked indiscriminately with those who had been marked down for vengeance. Four years of intermittent guerilla fighting gradually reduces the tribes along the lower Hawkesbury by 1803. (Docker 1964, p. 70)