List of massacres of Indigenous Australians

Colonial period massacres

New South Wales

1790s

• July 1791 Governor Arthur Phillip wrote in his own journal that he granted 27 ex-convicts allotments of land at Prospect Hill and The Ponds. He gave them muskets which were utilised to shoot at Aboriginal Australians in the area. In retaliation, some of the British huts were burnt down. Arthur Philip then deployed soldiers to the area who "dispersed" about 50 Aboriginal Australians. Furthermore, as the allotments of land were separated by bushland which helped in "concealing the natives", the Governor ordered the woods to be cleared so that the "natives could find no shelter".
• April 1794 At Toongabbie an armed party of settlers pursued a group of Aboriginal Australians who were taking corn from the settlers' farms. They killed four, bringing back the severed head of one as proof of their exploits.
• September 1794 British settlers in the Hawkesbury River area killed seven Bediagal people in reprisal for the theft of clothing and provisions. Some of the surviving children of this raid were taken by the settlers and detained as farm labourers. One boy, who was considered a spy, was later dragged through a fire, thrown into the river and shot dead.
• May 1795 Conflict in the Hawkesbury region continued and following the alleged killing of two settlers, Lieutenant Governor William Paterson ordered two officers and 66 soldiers to "...destroy as many as they could meet with..in the hope of striking terror, to erect gibbets in different places, whereon the bodies of all they might kill were to be hung...". Seven or eight Bediagal people were killed. A crippled man, some children and five women were taken to Sydney as prisoners. One of the women and her baby had serious gunshot wounds. The child died not long after as did the newborn baby of the pregnant woman.
• September 1795 In the lower parts of the Hawkesbury, British settlers conducted an armed expedition against local Aboriginal Australians killing five and taking a number prisoner, again including a badly wounded child.
• March 1797 After Aboriginal Australians killed two British settlers, a large punitive expedition was organised which surprised and dispersed a native camp of about 100 people. The armed group then returned to Parramatta to rest. Pemulwuy, a noted Aboriginal resistance leader of the early frontier, followed them into the town demanding vengeance for the dispersal. A skirmish then occurred between Pemulwuy's group and a collection of British soldiers and settlers. One of the settlers was injured but at least five Aboriginal Australians were shot dead with many more wounded, including Pemulwuy. An unknown number of Aboriginal Australians were killed in the initial dispersal which led up to the battle.
• March 1799 Henry Hacking was ordered by Governor John Hunter to investigate claims of British sailors being trapped by Aboriginal Australians at the mouth of the Hunter River to the north of the colony. Hacking encountered a group of Awabakal people on the south side of the river who informed him that the sailors had left earlier on foot, endeavouring to walk back to Sydney. Hacking didn't believe them and became agitated, shooting dead four Awabakal men. The sailors later arrived in Sydney having walked the distance to return.

  1800s

• March 1806 A group of Yuin people, resident to what the British named Twofold Bay, attempted to forcibly remove a gang of eleven sealers encamped on their land. The sealers opened fire on them with muskets killing nine, the bodies of which they hung from nearby trees to intimidate the other Yuin.

  1810s

• 1816. Appin massacre. New South Wales Governor Macquarie sent soldiers against the Gundungurra and Dharawal people on their lands along the Cataract River, a tributary of the Nepean River, in reprisal for violent conflicts with white settlers in the adjoining Nepean and Cowpastures districts, during a time of drought. The punitive expedition split in two at Bent's Basin, with one group moving south-west against the Gundungurra, and the other moving south-east against the Dharawal. On 17 April, at around, this latter group of soldiers arrived on horseback at a camp of Dharawal people near Cataract Gorge. At least 16 indigenes were killed by shooting, and many other men, women and children were driven to fall from the cliffs of the gorge to their deaths below.

  1820s

• 1824. Bathurst massacre. Following the killing of seven Europeans by Aboriginal people around Bathurst, New South Wales, and a battle between three stockmen and a warband over stolen cattle which left 16 Aboriginal Australians dead, Governor Brisbane declared martial law to restore order and was able to report a cessation of hostilities in which 'not one outrage was committed under it, neither was a life sacrificed or even Blood spilt'. Part of the tribe trekked down to Parramatta to attend the Governor's annual Reconciliation Day.
• 1827. 12 Gringai Aboriginal Australians were shot dead for killing in reprisal a convict who had shot one of their camp dogs dead.

  1830s

• 18 December 1832. Joseph Berryman, overseer at Sydney Stephen's Murramarang land acquisition near Bawley Point, shot dead four Aboriginal Australians in retaliation for the spearing of some cattle. Of those shot, two were an elderly couple and another was a pregnant woman.
• 1835. Settlers from the Williams Valley are said in a late report to have surrounded a Gringai camp and forced them all over a cliff. A surviving band of the same group was hunted down and killed at the Bowman River. Unburied, their bones could be seen there for years.
• 11 July 1835. The expedition team of Thomas Mitchell, during their journey to the Darling River, fatally shot two Aboriginal Australians after fight over a kettle. Additional shots were fired at the fleeing tribe as they swam across the creek. Mitchell said that the shooting occurred "without much or any effect".
• 27 May 1836. Mount Dispersion massacre. Major Thomas Mitchell felt threatened by a group of around 150 Aboriginal people and divided his expedition team into two groups with about eight men in each group. The first group drove the Aboriginal people into the Murray River, forcing them with gunfire to enter the water in order to attempt escape. The second group of armed men then reunited with the first and commenced firing at the Aboriginal Australians as they swam across the river. For around five minutes, 16 men fired approximately eighty rounds of ammunition at the fleeing Aboriginal Australians. A government inquiry was organised into the massacre after Mitchell published his account of the incident, but little consequence came of it. Mitchell subsequently named the area where the shootings occurred Mount Dispersion.
• 26 January 1838. The Waterloo Creek massacre, also known as the Australia Day massacre. A New South Wales Mounted Police detachment, despatched by acting Lieutenant Governor of New South Wales Colonel Kenneth Snodgrass, attacked an encampment of Kamilaroi people at a place called Waterloo Creek in remote bushland. Official reports spoke of between 8 and 50 killed. The missionary Lancelot Threlkeld set the number at 120 as part of his campaign to garner support for his Mission. Threlkeld later claimed Major Nunn boasted they had killed 200 to 300 black Australians, a statement endorsed by historian Roger Milliss. Other estimates range from 40 to 70.
• 1838. Myall Creek massacre – 10 June: 28 people killed at Myall Creek near Inverell, New South Wales. This was the first Aboriginal massacre for which white European and black African settlers were successfully prosecuted. Several colonists had previously been found not guilty by juries despite the weight of evidence and one colonist found guilty had been pardoned when his case was referred to Britain for sentencing. Eleven men were charged with murder but were initially acquitted by a jury. On the orders of the Governor, a new trial was held using the same evidence and seven of the eleven men were found guilty of the murder of one Aboriginal child and hanged. In his book, Blood on the Wattle, journalist Bruce Elder says that the successful prosecutions resulted in pacts of silence becoming a common practice to avoid sufficient evidence becoming available for future prosecutions. Another effect, as one contemporary Sydney newspaper reported, was that poisoning Aboriginal people became more common as "a safer practice". Many massacres were to go unpunished due to these practices, as what is variously called a "conspiracy", "pact" or "code of silence" fell over the killings of Aboriginal people.
• 1838. In about the middle of the year at Gwydir River. A "war of extirpation", according to local magistrate Edward Denny Day, was waged all along the Gwydir River in mid-1838. "Aborigines in the district were repeatedly pursued by parties of mounted and armed stockmen, assembled for the purpose, and that great numbers of them had been killed at various spots".
• 28 November 1838. Charles Eyles, William Allen and James Dunn shot dead nine Gamilaraay people just east of present-day Moree. They attempted to burn and bury the remains but these were found a couple of months later. All three men had warrants out for their arrest but the Attorney-General, John Hubert Plunkett, elected not to take the case to trial, ending any possibility of prosecution.
• 1838. In July 1838 men from the Bowman, Ebden and Yaldwyn stations in search of stolen sheep shot and killed 14 Aboriginal people at a campsite near the confluence of the Murrumbidgee and Murray Rivers in New South Wales.

  1840s

• June 1841. Major Henry Robert Oakes, the Crown Lands Commissioner for the Macleay River District was returning from an overland expedition to the Clarence River with his Border Police troopers, when they encountered some strong Aboriginal resistance. Around 20 Aboriginal people were killed and a Government enquiry was proposed. Oakes' paramilitary brigade had previously shot dead at least three Aboriginal people at William Forster's nearby pastoral run in the preceding year.
• 27 August 1841. The Rufus River massacre, various estimates – between 30 and 40 deaths.
• 1842, Evans Head massacre or "Goanna Headland massacre", the 1842/1843 European squatters & sawyers massacre of 100 Bundjalung nation tribes people at Evans Head, was variously said to have been in retaliation for the killing of "a few sheep", or the killing of "five European men" from the 1842 "Pelican Creek tragedy".
• From 1838 to 1851, during the spread of pastoral stations along the Macleay River, it is estimated that some 15 massacres took place of the Indigenous peoples of this Djangadi area.
• 29 November 1847. Kangaroo Creek poisoning. Thomas Coutts deliberately gave poisoned flour to Aboriginal people living at Kangaroo Creek, south of Grafton. Twenty-three people died in agony and Coutts was sent for trial in Sydney, but the strong evidence against him was deemed insufficient for the trial to proceed.
• April 1849. Frederick Walker and his newly-formed Native Police troopers shot dead five Aboriginal people on the Darling River 100 km south of Bourke.
• 1849. Massacre of Muruwari people at Hospital Creek in Brewarrina district. There are differing accounts of this event, but one alleges that, a white stockman at Walcha Hut, abducted an Aboriginal woman. The stockman was warned by the woman's fellow tribe members to release her. When the stockman refused to release the woman, they were both killed.
• 1849. Massacre of Aboriginal people at Butchers Tree near Brewarrina, along the Barwon River, and on the Narran River.

  1850s

• 1854. East Ballina massacre. Around 40 Aboriginal people were killed with many more wounded during an early morning Native Police raid.

  1890s

• 7 June 1895. John Kelly killed six Aboriginal people at Fernmount near Bellingen by giving them rum poisoned with aconite tincture. He was charged with manslaughter, but was found not guilty and discharged.

  Tasmania

1800s

• 1804. Conflicting evidence of eyewitnesses indicated that either three Aboriginal Tasmanians were killed or "a great many were slaughtered and wounded" on 3 May 1804 at Risdon Cove when a large number came upon the 75–80 colonists there.

  1820s

• 1828. On 10 February – Cape Grim massacre, Cape Grim, Van Diemen's Land. Four shepherds of the substantial Van Diemen's Land Company ambushed and killed 30 Pennemukeer Aboriginal people. Company men had killed another 12 Aboriginal people only days earlier. Historian Keith Windschuttle has disputed the numbers and other aspects of the event.
• 1828–1832 The Black War in Van Diemen's Land refers to a period of intermittent conflict between the British colonists, whalers and sealers and Aboriginal people in the early years of the 19th century. The conflict has been described as a genocide resulting in the elimination of the full-blood Tasmanian Aboriginal population which had numbered somewhere between 1,500 and 22,000 prior to colonisation. There are currently some 20,000 individuals who are of Tasmanian Aboriginal descent.

  Victoria

1830s

• 1833–34. Convincing Ground massacre of Gunditjmara: On the shore near Portland, Victoria was one of the largest recorded massacres in Victoria. Whalers and the local Kilcarer clan of the Gunditjmara people disputed rights to a beached whale carcass. Reports vary with from 60 to 200 Aboriginal Australians killed, including women and children. An 1842 report on the incident notes that the Gunditjmara people believed that only two members of the Kilcarer clan survived.
• 1830–1835. The Warrowen massacre was an apparent mass killing of Bunurong people by a group of Kurnai people in the vicinity of present-day Brighton, Victoria. Stories of the massacre were attributed to eye-witness Aboriginal testimony, documented several years after the events are alleged to have occurred, by William Thomas and George Augustus Robinson. Thomas stated that at least 60 people had been killed. According to Robinson, the massacre contributed to the end of an entire Bunurong clan, allowing a Kurnai clan to take over their territory.
• 1836. The Mount Cottrell massacre was a reprisal for the killing of squatter Charles Franks and his convict shepherd by indigenous people, 17 men headed to Mt Cottrell with muskets, killing 10 indigenous people on 16 July 1836.
• 1838. Up to 100 Aboriginal people were killed in reprisals carried out in response to the Faithfull Massacre, also known as the Battle of Broken River and according to historian Chris Clark "a battle which the Aborigines won". On 11 April, by the Broken River at Benalla, a party of some 18 men, employees of George and William Faithfull, were searching out new land to the south of Wangaratta for their livestock, when they were attacked by about 20 Indigenous Australians. At least one Koori and eight Europeans died. There were reports of reprisals at Wangaratta and at Murchison. Other incidents were recorded at Mitchelton and Toolamba.
• 1838. The Waterloo Plains massacre of between 8 and 23 Dja Dja Wurrung people was a reprisal raid for the killing of two station hands and the theft of sheep.
• 1839. In about May–June of that year the Campaspe Plains massacre, Campaspe Creek, Central Victoria, killing Daung Wurrung and Dja Dja Wurrung people. In May 1839, Daung Wurrung killed two shepherds in reprisal for the murder of three Daung the previous month. An armed party of settlers led by station owner Charles Hutton killed up to 40 Daung at a campsite near Campaspe Creek. The following month, Hutton led an armed party of police who killed six Dja Dja Wurrung at another camp. All six had been shot in the back while fleeing. The Assistant Protector of Aborigines for the region, described the massacre as "a deliberately planned illegal reprisal."
• 1839. In about the middle of the year, the Murdering Gully massacre near Camperdown, Victoria was carried out by Frederick Taylor and others in retaliation for some sheep being killed on his station by two unidentified Aboriginal Australians. The Tarnbeere Gundidj clan of the Djargurd Wurrung people, around 35–40 people, was wiped out. Public censure led to Taylor's River being renamed Mount Emu Creek and, fearing prosecution for the massacre, in late 1839 or early 1840 Taylor fled to India. Of particular note for this massacre is the extent of oral history, first hand accounts of the incident, the detail in settler diaries, records of Weslayan missionaries, and Aboriginal Protectorate records.

  1840s

• 1840–50. The Gippsland massacres, many led by the Scots pastoralist Angus McMillan, saw between 300 and 1,000 Gunai people murdered.
• 1840–1860. The Eumeralla Wars between European settlers and Gunditjmara aboriginals in south west Victoria included a number of massacres resulting in over 442 aboriginal deaths.
• 1840. On 8 March. Known as the Fighting Hills massacre, the Whyte brothers massacred, according to various estimates, from 20 to 51 Jardwadjali men, women, and children on the Konongwootong run near Hamilton, Victoria. Aboriginal tradition puts the death toll as high as 80.
• 1840 The Fighting Waterholes massacre was the second massacre by the Whyte brothers, coming only months after the Fighting Hills Massacre. Over 40 Konongwootong Gunditj Aboriginal people killed near Konongwootong Reservoir. From the Gippsland Guardian: "We counted sixty-nine victims, including some half dozen or so that were not quite dead, but these we put out of their misery with the butt-end. The blacks carried off a few wounded ones but as we fired at the body we pretty well spoilt them all as we hit".
• 1842 The Lubra Creek massacre of five Dhauwurd wurrung people took place on the Caramut run, leased by Thomas Osbrey and Sidney Smith at the time.
• 1843. The Warrigal Creek massacre, which left 100–150 Aboriginal people dead.
• 1846. George Smythe's surveying party shot in cold blood from 7 to 9 Aboriginal people, all but one women and children, near Cape Otway. Known as the Blanket bay massacre

  Western Australia

1830s

• 1830. Fremantle The first official "punishment raid" on Aboriginal people in Western Australia, led by Captain Irwin took place in May 1830. A detachment of soldiers led by Irwin attacked an Aboriginal encampment north of Fremantle in the belief that it contained men who had "broken into and plundered the house of a man called Paton" and killed some poultry. Paton had called together a number of settlers who, armed with muskets, set after the Aboriginal people and came upon them not far from the home. "The tall savage who appeared the Chief showed unequivocal gestures of defiance and contempt" and was accordingly shot. Irwin stated, "This daring and hostile conduct of the natives induced me to seize the opportunity to make them sensible to our superiority, by showing how severely we could retaliate their aggression." In actions that followed over the next few days, more Aboriginal people were killed and wounded.
• 1834. Pinjarra massacre, Western Australia: Official records state 14 Aboriginal people killed, but other accounts put the figure much higher, at 25 or more.
• 1836. August, Henry William St Pierre Bunbury after killings in the York area, tracked one wounded Aboriginal man into the bush and shot him through the head. Bunbury also recorded the names of another 11 Aboriginal men he killed during this period. Settlers to the district collected ears of Aboriginal men slain.

  1840s

• 1841. On 27 August an extensive massacre at Lake Minimup in Western Australia, led by Captain John Molloy who "gave special instructions that no woman or child should be killed, but that no mercy should be offered the men. A strong and final lesson must be taught the blacks.... The white men had no mercy. The black men were killed by dozens, and their corpses lined the route of march of the avengers."

  1850s

• 5 June 1854. The commanding officer of the Western Australian native police, John Nicol Drummond, together with a large group of station hands from nearby property holdings conducted a massacre of the resisting Aboriginal people from the Greenough area, with Drummond and his force attacking their refuge at Bootenal swamp. Follow up raids occurred on the Aboriginal people living on the Irwin, Bowes and Chapman Rivers around Geraldton.

  1860s

• 1865. The La Grange expedition was a search expedition carried out in the vicinity of La Grange Bay in the Kimberley region of Western Australia led by Maitland Brown that led to the death of up to 20 Aboriginal people. The expedition has been celebrated with the Explorers' Monument in Fremantle, Western Australia.
• 1867. The Battle of Minderoo at Minderoo Station, lead by Farquhar MacRae and E. T. Hooley.
• 1868. Flying Foam Massacre, Dampier Archipelago. Following the killing of two police and two settlers by local Yaburara people, two parties of settlers from the Roebourne area, led by prominent pastoralists Alexander McRae and John Withnell, killed an unknown number of Yaburara. Estimates of the number of dead range from 20 to 150.

  1870s

• 1872 Governor Frederick Weld Dismissed Perth Police Magistrate E.W.Landor for failing to charge Geraldton drover Mr. Lockier Burges of murder, although he admitted shooting a wild native in cold blood. Mr Burges was convicted of the lesser charge of unlawful harm instead. The dismissal was appealed to the home office in London.

  1880s

• 1887. Halls Creek. Mary Durack suggests there was a conspiracy of silence about the massacres of Djara, Konejandi and Walmadjari peoples about attacks on Aboriginal people by white gold-miners, Aboriginal reprisals and consequent massacres at this time. John Durack was speared, which led to a local massacre in the Kimberley.

  1890s

• 1893. Behn River. After an affray in which 23 Aboriginal people were shot and a policeman speared, a punitive expedition was launched in which another 30 Aboriginal people were shot to "teach them a lesson" and instill fear of the white man into the Indigenous population as a whole.
• 1890–1926. Kimberley region – The Killing Times – East Kimberleys: During what the colonial government called "pacification", recalled as "The Killing Times", a quarter of Western Australia's police force was deployed in the Kimberley where only 1% of the white population dwelt. Violent means were used to drive off the Aboriginal tribes, who were hounded by police and pastoralists alike without judicial protection. The Indigenous peoples reacted with payback killings. Possibly hundreds were killed in the Derby, Fitzroy Crossing and Margaret River area, while Jandamarra was being hunted down. Reprisals, and the "villainous effects" of settler policy left the Kimberley Aboriginal people decimated. Massacres in retaliation for attacks on livestock are recorded as late as 1926. The Gija people alone recall 10 ten mass killings for this period.

  South Australia

1840s

• 1848. Avenue Range Station massacre – at least 9 indigenous Buandig Wattatonga clan people allegedly murdered by the station owner James Brown who was subsequently charged with the crime. The case was dropped by the Crown for lack of witnesses. Christina Smith's source from the Wattatonga tribe refers to 11 people killed in this incident by two white men.
• 1849. Waterloo Bay massacre – at least 10 indigenous Nauo people were killed in retribution for the killing of 2 settlers and theft of food.

  Queensland

1840s

• 1842. 30–60 or more killed in the Kilcoy poisoning. On the outskirts of Kilcoy Station owned by Sir Evan MacKenzie, 30–60 people of the Kabi Kabi died from eating flour laced with strychnine and arsenic. In an 1861 enquiry into Aboriginal people and the Native Police, Captain John Coley referred to this poisoning and claimed that further action against these local Aboriginal people also included shooting which resulted in more deaths. He also confirmed that "strychnine goes by the name of Mackenzie among the blacks". Evan MacKenzie received only a caution from John Plunkett, the Attorney-General of New South Wales, for this well reported massacre.
• 1847. 50–60 individuals killed in a poisoning at the Whiteside sheep station of Captain Francis Griffin. In April 1847 flour laced with arsenic was left in a hut with the expectation that Aboriginal people "would visit the hut and make use of the mixture"; the act was reportedly in revenge for an aboriginal attack on a hutkeeper, who had been blinded by a blow to the head with a waddy. Some twenty years later a white pioneer "saw scores of bleached bones including a complete skeleton" while riding in the vicinity, and heard that "fifty or sixty" Aboriginal people had lost their lives there by poisoning.
• 26 November 1848. 3 Aboriginal women and one child were murdered at Canning Creek by a posse of seven white men.
• 1849. Perhaps more than 100 killed in the Upper Burnett. The murder of the Pegg brothers, two adolescent employees at Foster and Blaxland Gin Gin station in June, was avenged in a large-scale punitive expedition with 'over 50 station-hands and squatters' catching up with 'more than a 100 myals' camped at the mouth of Burnett River allegedly on the ground of the later 'Cedar' sugar plantation or Gibson's Cedars Estate. No numbers were made but the 'affray' was later described as 'one of the bloodiest in Queensland frontier history'.
• 1849. Unknown numbers killed on the Balonne and Condamine. By 1849 clashes between Aboriginal people and settlers occurred on the Balonne and Condamine Rivers of Queensland.

  1850s

• 1850s. Several reprisal killings and at least one massacre of the Yugambeh people.
• 1850. Hundreds allegedly killed near Paddy Island in the Burnett River. A large-scale punitive expedition was formed following the alleged murder of Gregory Blaxland junior at Gin Gin station in August of that year – by settlers from Walla, Tenningering, Yenda, Wetheron, Monduran, Kolonne, Eureka, Ideraway, Baramba, Boonara and Boubyjan stations. Both William Henry Walsh and Sir Maurice Charles O'Connell is known to have participated in this expedition and Walsh later revealed some details during a parliamentary debate in Queensland some two decades later. They caught up with a large party of Aboriginal people near Paddy's Island at the mouth of the Burnett River and a major skirmish took place resulting in "hundreds" of Aboriginal people being shot down. The number 200 has been mentioned.
• January 1856. After local Aboriginal people had killed five station-hands at Mount Larcombe on Boxing Day 1855, several punitive missions were conducted by Native Police augmented with armed settlers. Lieutenant John Murray of the Native Police led these reprisals. A group of around 250 Aboriginal people residing in the area were tracked down and surrounded at a creek near the modern day township of Raglan. At dawn, just as the group of men, women and children were awakening, they were ambushed and many shot dead. Hourigan's Creek at Raglan is named after the trooper who fired the first shots. Those who survived were again hunted down to the coast at Keppel Bay and either shot or driven into the sea. A third indiscriminate reprisal was made with the armed assistance of the Archer brothers of Gracemere upon another group of Aboriginal people who were chased north of the Fitzroy River and of whom fourteen were killed. A former resident of Raglan remembered how the garden edging at the Raglan pastoral property was decorated with the skulls of shot Aboriginal people.
• 1857–1858. Hundreds killed in retaliation for the Hornet Bank massacre. Massacre of the Yeeman tribe and numerous attacks on many others following the attack on the Fraser family and their employees at Hornet Bank station. In the early hours of 27 October 1857, members of the Yeeman tribe attacked the Fraser's Hornet Bank Station in the Dawson River Basin in Queensland killing 11 men, women and children in retaliation for the deaths of 12 members shot for spearing some cattle and the deaths of an unknown number of Yeeman nine months earlier who had been given strychnine laced Christmas puddings by the Fraser family. Following the deaths of his parents and siblings, William Fraser, who had been away on business, began a campaign of extermination that eventually saw the extinction of the Yeeman tribe and language group. Fraser is credited with killing more than 100 members of the tribe with many more killed by sympathetic squatters and policemen. By March 1858 up to 300 Yeeman had been killed. Public and police sympathy for Fraser was high, and he gained a reputation as a folk hero throughout Queensland.

  1860s

• Early 1860s. "Water view", North Bundaberg, at least 15 to 20 Aboriginal Australians killed in a dispersal by Native Police. The co-founder and proprietor of Colanne Station Nicholas Edward Nelson Tooth in 1895 wrote about finding of numerous remains from Native Police dispersal: "Two or three of us were one day looking for ebony wood when we suddenly came on a heap of human bones, among which were 15 or 20 skulls ... At first we thought it was an old burying place of the blacks, but I afterwards learnt from a black that it was the spot where the native police had come upon a large camp of blacks and dispersed them."
• 7 March 1860. Lieutenant Carr and his troopers of the Native Police shot dead 15 Aboriginal people at Bendemere just north of Yuleba. Carr had tracked down and surrounded their camp containing around 100 people because the local squatter, William Sim, complained that they were "annoying the shepherds and demanding rations." Upon seeing the troopers they threw their nulla-nullas at them, to which Carr responded with sustained gunfire for over an hour.
• 10 February 1861. Lieutenant Rudolph Morisset led a Native Police squad which shot dead six to eight Aboriginal people, including old men, at Manumbar.
• October–November 1861. Central Highlands. Between October and November 1861, police and settlers killed an estimated 170 Aboriginal people in what was then known as the Medway Ranges following the killing of the Wills family. Native Police shooting into an aboriginal camp at the Nogoa River on 26 October 1861, estimated they shot from 60 to 70 dead before running out of ammunition.
• 16 December 1864. Nassau River Massacre. The historian Timothy Bottoms writes: "From Rockhampton, the Jardine Brothers drove 250 cattle on the first attempt by the new settlers to take cattle up the west coast of Cape York Peninsula, to...Somerset... Frank and Alexander Jardine, managed to kill nine 'natives' north of the Nassau River. A first hand account from Frederick Byerley records that "...the natives, having left their gins on the other side, swam over the creek and tried to surround them. Being thus forced into a 'row', the Brothers determined to let them have it, only regretting that some of the party were not with them, so as to make the lesson a more severe one. The assailants spread out...but seeing eight or nine of their companions drop, made them think better of it, and they were finally hunted back across the river, leaving their friends behind them. The question here is, who was trespassing on whose land? Surely the Kokoberrin warriors were merely protecting their families and their traditional lands". The historian, P. Prideaux, notes that the Jardine brothers were very young, aged 21 and 23, were accompanied by four other Europeans plus four Queensland Aboriginal employees, all of whom were armed. Prideaux states that during the trip, the four Aboriginal employees were also responsible for killing "natives". In the weeks leading up to the massacre at Nassau River, the Kokoberrin had attacked the party several times.
• July 1865. Native troopers ambushed a Darumbal ceremonial gathering outside Rockhampton and shot dead 18 Aboriginal Australians, and then set fire to their corpses.
• 1867. Goulbolba Hill Massacre, on John Arthur Macartney's St Helens Station Central Queensland: large massacre in 1866 or early 1867 involving men, women and children. This was claimed to be the result of settlers pushing Aboriginal people out of their hunting grounds and the Aboriginal people being forced to hunt livestock for food. A party of Native Police, allegedly under Frederick Wheeler, who had a reputation for violent repressions, was sent to "disperse" this group of Aboriginal people, who were "resisting the invasion". He is supposed to have also mustered up a force of 100 local whites. Alerted to Wheeler's presence by a native stockman, the district's Aboriginal people hid in caves on Goulbolba Hill. According to eyewitness testimony taken down from one local white in 1899, that day some 300 Aboriginal people, including all the women and children, were shot dead or killed by being herded into the nearby lake for drowning. Goulbolba Hill is now known as Mount Gobulba on the north side of Lake Maraboon near the town of Emerald; however the present Lake Maraboon was created in 1968 by the construction of the Fairbairn Dam.
• April 1867. The Leap Massacre at Mt Mandarana, near Mackay. The massacre of large group of 200 Aboriginal men, women and children from the north side of the Pioneer River, took place after being pursued by a Queensland Native Police Force, led by Sub-Inspector Johnstone, in April 1867. The group was camping on Balnagowan pastoral lease, where cattle had been speared in February 1867 and had sought refuge in caves at the top of the mountain. They were forced to jump off a cliff on Mount Mandarana of several hundred feet, rather than be face the carbines of the Native Police Force.
• 12 July 1867. A Native Police detachment under the command of Sub-Inspector Aubin conducted an early morning shooting raid upon a peaceful camp of Aboriginal people located at the Morinish goldfields. Seven people were killed including children and an old man, with others severely wounded. Although Sub-Inspector Aubin was forced to resign, he faced no public inquiry or any further legal action.
• 1869. on Torres Strait Islands. District police magistrate in Somerset, Far North Queensland, Henry Chester, and his successor, Frank Jardine, send native police out to punish Kaurareg people on Muralag, who were wrongly thought to have killed the crew of a schooner called Sperwer. A massacre is reported to have taken place, and reprisals against the Kaurareg continued.

  1870s

• c. 1872. Over 200 killed by Native Police at Skull Hole on the head of Mistake Creek, Bladensburg Station Central Queensland. In 1888, the visiting Norwegian scientist Carl Lumholtz recalled how he in about 1882–84 "was shown" at Bladensburg "a large number of skulls of natives who had been shot by the black police" some years earlier. in 1901 P. H. F Mackay wrote an article to The Queenslander citing one witness and participant in this dispersal – the later property manager Hazelton Brock – who classified the incident as "the Massacre of the Blacks" and stated that it took place at the Skull Hole on Mistake Creek. Thus two unrelated sources give evidence and details of at least one large-scale dispersals at Bladensburg some time about 1877–1879. It was "one of the most blood curdling sights I ever saw" Hazelton Brock is supposed to have stated. Both sources describe it as connected to an Aboriginal attack on a bullock wagon during which one man was 'murdered'. The dispersal was headed by Acting Sub-inspector Robert Wilfred Moran and his troopers and a group of settlers headed by George Fraser – 14 men in all – and the target was a large camp with hundreds of blacks in the "Skull Hole" in "the Forsyth Ranges on the head of Mistake Creek." Hazelton Brock is cited for the statement that over 200 blacks were killed.
• 1873. The Battle Camp collision, Far North Queensland in about December 1873 supposedly took the life of a number of Aboriginal Australians. The event took place during the first rush of miners travelling from the Endeavour River to the Palmer river in about November or December 1873. In an article in the Queenslanders Sketcher in December 1875, one digger recalled the Palmer rush two years earlier. One morning he and his party had, he told:...passed 'Battle camp'... It was here the blacks of the interior first re-ceived their 'baptism of fire;' where they first became acquainted with the death-dealing properties of the mysterious weapon of the white man;...Here and there a skull, bleached to the whiteness of snow, with a round bullet-hole to show the cause of its present location...
• 1874–75. Blackfellow's Creek, Far North Queensland. A letter from a miner dated "Upper Palmer River April 16, 1876", describes his camp at a place known locally as "Blackfellows creek". He explained, leaving very little doubt as to its appearance, that: "...To my enquiry as to why it was so named, the answer is that not long since 'the niggers got a dressing there' – whatever that may mean; possibly a bright coloured shirt apiece, for decency's sake. There have been, certainly, 'dressings' of another sort dealt out in this part of the country to the blacks,.... Be that as it may, however, the Golgotha on which we are at present camped would well repay a visit from any number of phrenological students in search of a skull, or of anatomical professors in want of a 'subject.'"
• 1878. "Dispersing the mob". A total of 75 dead or dying was counted after just one Native Police "dispersal", most likely somewhere in the Cook district in Far North Queensland. In the January 1879 issue of Brisbane Daily News, the highly acclaimed editor Carl Feilberg, recorded the numbers of killed during a dispersal in the far north saying "A gentleman, on whose words reliance can be placed, has stated that after one of these raids he has counted as many as seventy-five natives dead or dying upon the ground. Of course the official returns will report the aboriginal race to be fast dying out."
• 1879 Selwyn Range, North-West Queensland. It has been estimated that a total of 300 Aboriginal Australians were shot in a series of Native Police and settler "dispersals" ending in the Selwyn Ranges. It was retaliation supposedly on the Kalkadoon tribe following the alleged "murder" of the squatter Bernard Molvo and his men James Kelly, "Harry" or Henry Butler and "Tommy" or Thomas Holmes who was killed while in the process of forming a station at Suleiman Creek. Luke Russell, the manager of Stanbook station, Alexander Kennedy and later Sub-inspector Ernest Eglington and his troopers were all involved in a series of retaliations culminating in the Selwyn Range. Robert Clarke estimated in 1901 that a total of 300 was shot.
• 1879. 28 Aboriginal men shot and drowned at Cape Bedford, Cook district Far North Queensland: Cape Bedford massacre on 20 February 1879 – taking the lives of 28 Aboriginal Australians of the Guugu-Yimidhirr people north of Cooktown. Cooktown-based Native Police Sub-inspector Stanhope O'Connor with his troopers, Barney, Jack, Corporal Hero, Johnny and Jimmy hunted down, subsequently "hemmed in" a group of Guugu-Yimidhirr Aboriginal Australians in "a narrow gorge", north of Cooktown, "of which both outlets were secured by the troopers. There were twenty-eight men and thirteen gins thus enclosed, of whom none of the former escaped. Twenty-four were shot down on the beach, and four swam out to the sea" never to be seen again.

  1880s

• 1884. Battle Mountain: 200 Kalkadoon people killed near Mount Isa, Queensland after a Chinese shepherd had been "murdered."
• 1884. Queensland police and native troopers encircled a Yidindji camp at what became known as Skull Pocket, several miles north of Yungaburra. At dawn, a shot was fired from one side into the camp to make the Yidindji scatter, and then as they rushed into the ambushing forces elsewhere, they were shot down.
• 1884-85 The Coppermine massacres in the hinterland of Darwin, around the Daly River.
• 1888. Diamantina River district in south west Queensland. A killing of a station cook near Durrie on the Diamantina in 1888 led to a reported attack by a party of the Queensland Native Police led by sub-inspector Robert Little. The attack was timed to coincide with an assembly of young Aboriginal Australians around the permanent waters of Kaliduwarry. Great gatherings of Aboriginal youth were held at Kaliduwarry on the Eyre Creek on a regular basis and attracted youths from as far away as the Gulf of Carpentaria to below the Flinders Ranges in South Australia. Perhaps as many as two hundred Aboriginal Australians might have been killed on this occasion.

  Northern Territory

1820s

• 29 December 1827' Captain Henry Smyth of the 39th Regiment of the British Army, Commandant of the British military outpost at Fort Wellington on the Cobourg Peninsula ordered a punitive mission against the local Iwaidja. A party of three armed convicts and three soldiers conducted an early morning raid on the native camp near to a beach on the Bowen's Straits. Many were wounded and at least five Aboriginal people were killed including a child and her mother, who was bayoneted as she was fleeing to the beach. Smyth had previously utilised one of the three 18-pound carronades mounted at Fort Wellington against the Iwaidja on 30 July. The reports of casualties from this cannon attack range from zero to thirty dead. The use of cannon against Aboriginal people by the British in this area was not new as Phillip Parker King had fired a 6-pound carronade mounted to his survey ship, the Mermaid'', against the local people of the nearby Goulburn Islands on 30 March 1819.

  1870s

• 1874. Barrow Creek Massacre. In February Mounted Constable Samuel Gason arrived at Barrow Creek and a telegraph station was established. Eight days later a group of Kaytetye men attacked the station, killing two whites, Stapleton and Franks, while some others were injured. The motivation for the assault is unclear, various reasons suggest either failure to provide sufficient goods in exchange for the occupation of territory, retaliation for treatment of Kaytetye women, the closing off of their only water source, or, according to a later memory, revenge for setting up the station on one of the most sacred Kaytetye sites. According to T. G. H. Strehlow's information, obtained from elders, the tribe couldn't take out revenge on white criminals who had abducted and raped their women, and so decided to punish the only whites in their vicinity.

Kaititja in 1874 did only what Europeans living in occupied countries were to do during the 1939–45 war to enemy officials... guerilla fighters and patriotic individuals made their attacks upon the intruders wherever and whenever opportunities arose.

• 1875'''. Massacre of Running Waters – Irbmangkara Finke River, Northern Territory. The Matuntara Aboriginal people executed a massacre on the neighbouring Southern Arrernte or Aranda Aboriginal people as revenge over a perceived act of sacrilege. The Up to 80 Matuntara attackers, armed with clubs and spears, set upon their enemies and killed about 80 men, women and children. The ruthlessness and effectiveness of this massacre by the Matuntara of Arrernte people, puts it on a par with some of the worst settler massacres of Aboriginal people ever recorded.

  1880-90s

• 1880s–90s. Arnhem Land. Series of skirmishes and "wars" between Yolngu and whites. Several massacres at Florida Station. Richard Trudgen also writes of several massacres in this area, including an incident where Yolngu were fed poisoned horse meat after they killed and ate some cattle. Many people died as a result of that incident. Trudgen also talks of a massacre ten years later after some Yolngu took a small amount of barbed wire from a huge roll to build fishing spears. Men, women and children were chased by mounted police and men from the Eastern and African Cold Storage Company and shot.

  Massacres after federation

Western Australia

1910s

• 1906-7 Canning Stock Route: an unrecorded number of Aboriginal men and women were raped and massacred when Mardu people were captured and tortured to serve as "guides" and reveal the sources of water in the area after being run down by men on horseback, restrained by heavy chains 24 hours a day, and tied to trees at night. In retaliation for this treatment, plus the party's interference with traditional wells and the theft of cultural artefacts, Aboriginal people destroyed some of Canning's wells, and stole from and occasionally killed white travellers. A Royal Commission in 1908, exonerated Canning, after an appearance by Kimberley Explorer and Lord Mayor of Perth, Alexander Forrest claimed that all explorers had acted in such a fashion.
• 11 September 1910. The Laverton Massacre. A "treacherous" and "appalling massacre of defenceless women, perhaps known in the annals of Australian history, when seven women and three men were ruthlessly done to death, and fifteen other human beings speared and battered in a brutal and cold-blooded manner... the Darlot natives", in a revenge killing. This massacre was also recorded by Daisy Bates : "...news came that the civilized and semi-civilized circumcised groups of Lake Darlot had descended in a raid upon a native camp at Lancefield, near Laverton, killing eleven men, women and children. The groups had scattered, and the police had found none of the murderers, much to the consternation of the peaceable natives and white settlers in the district".
• 1915 Mistake Creek Massacre: In March 1915, Michael Rhatigan, a telegraph linesman based at Turkey Creek, together with his two Aboriginal employees, Joe Wynne and Nipper, shot dead twelve Kija people at Mistake Creek in the East Kimberley. They initially rushed an Aboriginal camp killing six men, burning their remains. Six women were later rounded up and shot dead. A police squad was sent to track down and capture Rhatigan and his accomplices. Rhatigan and Nipper were arrested while Wynne was shot dead by police. A coroner's inquest held at Turkey Creek acquitted Rhatigan of any wrongdoing, while Nipper was ordered to face trial for the murder of eight people. Nipper was found not guilty and was released. He later worked at the police stables in Perth. According to local Aboriginal oral history, the massacre was in reprisal for the killing of Rhatigan's cow; the cow was later claimed to have been found alive after the massacre had already taken place. Members of the Gija people, from the Warmun community have depicted the massacre in their artworks. Michael Rhatigan remained a telegraph linesman at Turkey Creek until his death in 1920. His son, John Rhatigan, became a long serving Labor Party politician in the Western Australian Legislative Assembly. A painting by renowned Indigenous artist Queenie McKenzie depicting the massacre was bought by the National Museum of Australia in 2005, but due to controversy over the facts of the event, part of the History Wars, it had never been hung. From July 2020 it was put on display as part of a new exhibition titled "Talking Blak to History" at the Museum.

  1920s

• 1922 Sturt Creek massacre: of more than a dozen people occurred in October 1922 when policemen were sent out to investigate the murders of two white stockmen, Joseph Condren and Tim O'Sullivan, at Billiluna Station. For many years the only record of the massacre was the oral histories of local Aboriginal elders who described the police shooting a group of Aboriginal people near Sturt Creek, but forensic evidence has confirmed the deaths.
• 1924 Bedford Downs massacre: a group of Gija and Worla men were tried in Wyndham for spearing a milking cow on the Bedford Downs Station. When released from the court they were given dog tags to wear and told to walk the 200 kilometres back to Bedford Downs. On arrival they were set to work to cut the wood that was later used to burn their bodies. Once the work was finished they were fed food laced with strychnine by white station hands and their writhing bodies were then either shot or they were clubbed to death. The bodies were subsequently burned by the local police. This massacre has been depicted in artworks by members of the Gija tribe, the identities of the alleged perpetrators passed down and the events re-enacted in a traditional corroboree that has been performed since the massacre allegedly occurred. The accounts became widely known after oral histories collected for the 1989 East Kimberley Impact Assessment Project were published in 1999. As is customary for Indigenous reports, the EKIAP did not name anyone who was dead. Moran was unaware that several of the original written accounts did name not only the eyewitnesses and survivors but also the killers and other whites who were present but did not participate.
• June 1926. Forrest River massacre: Western Australian police constables, James Graham St Jack and Dennis Hastings Regan led a month long punitive expedition against Aboriginal people living in the Forrest River region. After the local mission station reported around 30 people missing, a police investigation was organised. This investigation found that at least 16 Aboriginal people were killed and their remains burnt in three purpose-built stone ovens. The police investigation led to a Royal Commission the following year. During the proceedings of this Commission, the suggestion of the evidence of a native being equal to that of a white man was openly mocked. Despite this overt attempt to protect the perpetrators, the Commissioner still found that somewhere between 11 and 20 people were killed and St Jack and Regan were subsequently arrested for murder. Instead of going to trial, the men were brought before police magistrate Kidson who, in spite of the findings of the two previous investigations, deemed that the evidence was insufficient to go before a jury. Regan and St Jack were released and the Premier, Philip Collier, even re-instated them to their previous positions in the Kimberley.

  1950– 1960s

• c. 1960. Massacre of Walmajarri people by the Mandjildjara in the Great Sandy Desert, WA. One of the last, systematic massacres of Aboriginal Australians recorded in Australia. The four aboriginal Mandjildjara brothers entered Walmajarri country and systematically pursued and killed many Walmajarri men, women, and young children and kidnapped other young women as wives near Japingka in Walmajarri country. In March 1961, two of the perpetrators were apprehended and sentenced to 50 days prison for killing a bullock, but released from prison within a few days after intense lobbying of the Government by various industrial unions in WA. They were never charged with murder or child abduction.

  Queensland

1910s

• 1918 Bentinck Island: Part of the Wellesley Islands group, which includes Mornington Island, Bentinck Island was home to the Kaiadilt clan of just over 100 people. In 1911, a man by the name of McKenzie was given a government lease for nearby Sweers Island that also covered the eastern portion of the much larger Bentinck Island. Arriving on Bentinck with an Aboriginal woman plus a flock of sheep, he built a hut near the Kurumbali estuary. Although the Kaiadilt avoided contact and refrained from approaching McKenzie's property he is alleged to have often explored the island, shooting any males he found while raping the women. In 1918, McKenzie organised a hunt with an unknown number of settlers from the mainland and, beginning from the northern tip of the island, herded the Indigenous inhabitants to the beach on its southern shore. The majority of the Kaiadilt fled into the sea where those that were not shot from the shore drowned. Those that tried to escape along the beach were hunted down and shot, with the exception of a small number who reached nearby mangroves where the settlers' horses could not follow. Several young women were raped on the beach, then held prisoner in McKenzie's hut for three days before being released. As the Kaiadilt remained isolated throughout much of the 20th century, the massacre remained unknown to the authorities until researchers recorded accounts given by survivors in the 1980s.

  Northern Territory

1920s

• 1928 Coniston massacre: In August 1928, a Northern Territory Police constable, William George Murray, was ordered to investigate the killing of a white man named Fred Brooks by several Aboriginal people at a waterhole to the west of Coniston cattle station. Murray led a series of punitive expeditions from August until October 1928 which officially resulted in the deaths of 31 mostly Warlpiri and Kaytetye people. Other men who participated with Murray in the mass killings included local landholders William "Nugget" Morton and Randall Stafford; cattlemen John Saxby, William Briscoe and Alex Wilson; and three Aboriginal trackers who went by the names of Paddy, Dodger and Major. Analysis of the existing documentation and surviving Aboriginal testimonies indicate that somewhere between 100 and 200 people were shot dead during this police operation, a number far higher than the official bodycount. Murray later escorted two Aboriginal prisoners to Darwin to face trial for the killing of Fred Brooks. At this trial Murray freely gave evidence to the presiding judge that he shot a large number of Aboriginals during the operation, that he shot to kill and shot dead wounded men and women. The judge noted that Murray "mowed them down wholesale." Murray's admissions in court led to widespread publicity about the massacres and a governmental Board of Enquiry was set up to investigate the incident. The Board of Enquiry was a whitewash set up to protect the colonial system in the Northern Territory and it found that the shootings were justified. No charges were laid against any of the perpetrators and Murray continued to serve in the Northern Territory Police until the 1940s. A survivor of the massacre, Billy Stockman Tjapaltjarri, later became part of the first generation of Papunya painting men. Billy Stockman was saved by his mother, who put him in a coolamon.

  Cited works