Early on the evening of the 26 January 1808, exactly twenty years after the arrival of the First Fleet in Sydney Cove, the only military coup in Australian history bloodlessly unfurled. In what was to be posthumously dubbed, ‘the Rum Rebellion’, approximately 400 armed soldiers and officers of the New South Wales Corps, commanded by Major George Johnson and fuelled by John Macarthur, fixed bayonets and marched on Government House. Conjugated through ideas of usurpation and a mutual hatred for the incumbent Governor of New South Wales, Captain William Bligh, the mutinous Rum Corps successfully took control of the colony and effectively installed an illegal military junta, which brutally governed the settlement for nearly two years. When considered narrowly, the motives informing the deposition of the infamous Governor Bligh can be loosly distilled down to the collision of two immutable adversaries. On the one hand, the tyrannical machinations of the indomitable Captain Bligh, and on the other, the abrasive manoeuvres of the opportunist frontiersman John Macarthur. Undoubtedly they were the main protagonists in the rebellion, however, by no means were they the only ones with agency or influence in sparking the mutiny. In actual fact, the reasons behind the rebellion are far more complex than this binary reading would suggest. Consequently, in an effort to cast light on this episode, it is the intention of the essay to elucidate the reasons behind this seditious action and