Connecting Myall Creek and the Wonomo

Abstract

<p><i>Owing to the opening up of the country with the advent of the Europeans, … what with privation, disease, alcohol, and lead, the whole community has been annihilated.'</i></p> <p>Walter E Roth, anthropologist, 1897</p> <p>The Myall Creek Massacre of 28 Wirrayaraay people on 10 June 1838 (Figure 1) was one of the key events in the ongoing frontier war between settlers or intruders and the various Aboriginal peoples of Australia. It was an act of brutal murder, for which 11 non-Aboriginal perpetrators were tried and seven were hanged. As Lyndall Ryan points out in chapter 5, there had been a number of mass killings of Gamilaraay and Wirrayaraay people in the region over the previous year, in which many hundreds of lives were lost. The Myall Creek Massacre and subsequent trial had a direct impact on policing in the colony, and affected the lives of people from different Aboriginal nations across eastern Australia. Its aftermath in the region then known as Northern New South Wales, where a Native Police force was formed a decade later, was extensive. Aboriginal responses to the event in both the past and the present provide new insights, including how people from different Aboriginal groups at the time may have heard about Myall Creek and other violent clashes with white settlers, and how their families remember frontier conflict today. A Mounted Police Force had operated within the 'settled districts' of south-east Australia since 1827 and played a key role in 'clearing' the Gwydir region of Gamilaraay people in 1836 and 1838. In the aftermath of the Myall Creek Massacre however, in response to 'one atrocious deed for which seven unhappy men have suffered death on the scaffold', Governor George Gipps established a Border Police Force to protect squatters (unauthorised settlers beyond the 'Boundaries of Location') and the Aboriginal people of those lands - in principle this force was intended to protect them from each other. The force was largely unsuccessful and was disbanded in 1846.</p>