Elizabeth Balderstone leads a lifestyle that many city dwellers fantasise about, on a farm in Victoria’s Gippsland, surrounded by friendly sheep, with a humble little creek just 60 metres from her house.

But that creek, Warrigal, has seen unimaginable horrors.

In July 1843 Angus McMillan and a group of his countrymen known as the Highland Brigade shot between 60 and 150 Gunaikurnai people in retribution for the murder of Ronald Macalister, the nephew of a wealthy pastoralist, Lachlan Macalister, who owned a local station called Nuntin.

In a letter to his family in England dated April 1846, the Gippsland squatter Henry Meyrick said:

The blacks are very quiet here now, poor wretches. No wild beast of the forest was ever hunted down with such unsparing perseverance as they are. Men, women and children are shot whenever they can be met with … I have protested against it at every station I have been in Gippsland, in the strongest language, but these things are kept very secret as the penalty would certainly be hanging.

‘As fast as they put their heads up for breath, they were shot.’ Photograph: Ciaran O'Mahony/The Guardian

The culture of secrecy surrounding the massacres was evident in Willy Hoddinott’s account (as an anonymous “Gippslander”) published in the Gap magazine more than 80 years later:

The brigade coming up to the blacks camped around the waterhole at Warrigal Creek surrounded them and fired into them, killing a great number, some escaped into the scrub, others jumped into the waterhole, and, as fast as they put their heads up for breath, they were shot until the water was red with blood. I knew two blacks, who though wounded came out of the hole alive. One was a boy at the time about 12 or 14 years old. He was hit in the eye by a slug, captured by the whites, and made to lead the ‘brigade’ from one camp to another.

One might assume that Balderstone was blissfully unaware of this when she moved to the farm in 1974, but she explains she knew about Warrigal Creek from the beginning.

“My late husband’s family had owned the property since the late 1880s and my father-in-law was a very passionate historian,” she says. “In his first notes [in the 1970s], he talks about the massacre and, from the beginning of my time here, no one ever kept a blanket over the story.

Balderstone’s home was built 20 years after the massacre – which happened just steps from the front door. Photograph: Ciaran O'Mahony/The Guardian

“It was well-acknowledged and put on the register of the national estate around the time.”

The house was built 20 years after the massacre and stands just 20 metres from the site. “It’s part of our life and it’s not that I don’t stop and think about it. Every day I look over and make sure things look peaceful there.”

Balderstone’s daughter Alice Irving calls the site “a powerful place”. “Probably even as a child I just sensed something – it’s a really spiritual place,” she says.

Gunaikurnai people have visited the land for years to pay their respects, giving Balderstone some understanding of the pain and intergenerational trauma they still experience.

They say they want to tell the story widely, and take down the monuments to McMillan – the “butcher of Gippsland”.

“I think the first thing for Gippsland is to acknowledge that it does have that history, like other places where bad things have happened, where massacres have occurred, where there’s some acknowledgement of what’s occurred instead of masking it,” a Gurnaikurnai elder, Doris Paton, told the film-makers Andrew Dodd and Lisa Gye.

“And when Gippsland comes to terms with what happened, and why it happened, there’s an opportunity to talk much better about that history.”

The manager of the Krowathunkooloong keeping place in Bairnsdale, Rob Hudson, agrees. “Where I live you can almost point in every direction [to a massacre site],” he says.

“We were hearing the stories all the time, especially when we were near the places or going past somewhere, my mum would always say, ‘Over that way.’ She’d point the finger and say, ‘Don’t go that way. Over there, that’s where the whitefellas killed our old fellas.’”

The Gurnaikurnai artist Steaphan Paton says the monuments to McMillan – one calls him Gippsland’s “discoverer” – should be removed: “They belong in a museum, they don’t belong on our land.”

Rather than pursuing plaques or “western versions of reconciliation”, as Irving puts it, the Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation and the Bunurong Land Council put their energies into changing the name of their local electorate, which was named after McMillan.

They proposed a different name: Bunjileene-Purrine. Bunjileene was a leader of the Gunaikurnai people and Purrine was the head of the Lowanjerri tribe of the Bunurong.

Their submission was denied; McMillan was renamed the Monash electorate instead.

Bass Coast South Gippsland Reconciliation Group members Marg Lynn and Florence Hydon say they have been left “completely unsatisfied”: “Stage one was getting rid of McMillan, of course, but stage two was totally frustrating.”

Viki Sinclair, another member of the group who is descended from a member of McMillan’s Highland Brigade, says: “It’s the first time around here that the Aboriginal groups came across with groups like ours to work on something like this and it was something important to tackle and do together.

“For them to do that and come up with a shared name was a major achievement. It really hadn’t happened before and it just was not even acknowledged or recognised.”

Balderstone and Irving hope that one day Australia fully recognises the extent of the massacres through a truth and reconciliation commission.

“People need to feel that their voices and stories are heard and we need to listen with humility because there’s not just emotional hurt there, but also terrible physical pain,” Irving says.