All Late Permian deformation structures in the southern New England Fold Belt can be ascribed to a single but complex compressive tectonic event, the Hunter‐Bowen Orogeny, operative 265–250 Ma ago. Early Permian rifting of the Carboniferous arc and fore‐arc of the Tamworth Belt and the region directly west of it produced the Sydney Basin and subsidiary meridional troughs in a backarc environment.Initial east‐west compression in the Late Permian produced a series of meridional folds and subparallel faults (D₁) above a westward‐propagating décollement. With continued east‐west compression, upward propagation of thrusts culminated in the southwest‐directed Hunter‐Mooki Thrust System (D₂), associated with megascale sinistral shear that resulted from pinning and rotation of the Hunter Thrust about an axis located near Maitland. East‐west directed stress release on the upper allochthonous plate of the thrust resulted in the development of meridional backthrusts.The final major deformation (D₄) reactivated the ancestral Peel Fault, resulting in the present Peel‐Manning Fault System. It rotated fault blocks in the Tamworth Belt and caused large‐scale sinistral displacement of tectonostratigraphic units in the Tablelands Complex, culminating in the Permian dispersal event of Cawood and Leitch (1985). It also resulted in mass translation of the entire Tablelands Complex from the southeast, removing a substantial portion of the Carboniferous fore‐arc, north of Gloucester.The entire orogenic cycle is recorded as a massive flooding of the Sydney Basin with continental detritus from the southern New England Fold Belt, the Permo‐Triassic megacycle of Conaghan et al. (1982), occurring in response to overthrusting and uplift of the belt, causing a change in depositional environment from backarc to foreland basin, in the Late Permian.