ELLISTON, Australia — Jack Johncock, a local leader of the Wirangu people, pointed toward the spot near Waterloo Bay where a group of Aboriginal Australians were pushed to their deaths from rocky cliffs above a ferocious sea.

“My body crawls just looking at it,” Mr. Johncock said.

He didn’t want to get too close.

The town of Elliston had been arguing for months about whether a few people or a few hundred had been killed. He wouldn’t even be in Elliston at all if not for the presence of a new monument declaring that “a number of Aboriginal Australians were killed near this site in May, 1849 by a party of settlers.”

What happened at the cliffs was a massacre, in Mr. Johncock’s mind. And that’s what the monument commemorated: “an incident referred to by the traditional owners of this land as ‘The Massacre of Waterloo Bay.’”