Frank and William Hann are legends in the annals of North Queensland’s white colonial pastoral and settler history.

About 1862, having originally landed in Victoria from Wiltshire, England, the brothers moved to the Burdekin River district of Queensland, the new frontier of pastoral expansion and violent dispossession of Indigenous landowners.

Queensland’s pastoral frontier was the setting for extreme, protracted violence – a place where, in the space of less than a century, it is reliably estimated up to 60,000 Aboriginal people were killed in conflicts with pastoralists, miners, soldiers and militias including native police under white command.

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Among the (once) revered white pioneers of the Queensland frontier was the odious mayor of Bowen, Korah Halcomb Wills, a ringleader of Indigenous massacres (and a butcher by trade who used his skills to dismember at least one of his Aboriginal victims). A couple of years ago I recounted my disgust at handling, even with gloved hands, the diary in which he recounted butchering an Aboriginal victim and stealing as a trophy a little Aboriginal girl (she later died; he cared more about the death of a horse) who survived one of his massacres.

He was a monster in an epoch when monstrous acts of violence against the Indigenous people who resisted rapacious pastoral expansion, sometimes through a passive presence only, were shrugged off as an inevitable, necessary part of frontier life.

History heavily implicates the Hanns in extreme frontier violence, too. Which is why, while there is ever a doubt about their complicity, a critical new 48-kilometre stretch of highway (completing an inland Cairns-Melbourne road route that is of great financial benefit to the Queensland pastoral industry) should never be named in their honour.

The soon-to-be-sealed Kennedy Development Road between Hughenden and Lynd Junction is already being informally referred to as the “Hann Highway” by local, state and federal authorities, and MPs including Bob Katter and Warren Entsch. The regular use of the name “Hann Highway” is, it seems, a step towards its official gazettal.

The ABC also refers to the “Hann Highway”.

At a time when governments talk endlessly (often with forked tongue) of reconciliation with Indigenous nations, there is a slow, national movement towards stripping the names of those who massacred and otherwise mistreated Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from Australia’s public nomenclature.

In Victoria, for example, the monikers of Indigenous mass murderers John Batman and Angus McMillan have been erased from federal electorates once named in their honour.

Elsewhere there is ongoing pressure to rename landmarks and streets honouring the killers of Indigenous people. There are unresolved suggestions that Mount Wheeler in Queensland, for example, was named after a “cruel and merciless” native police officer, Frederick Wheeler, who killed many Aboriginal people. It is not far from Mount Jim Crow, its etymological origins uncertain despite the clarity of its racist intent. Those names will not linger indefinitely in geography. Streets in Darwin and Alice Springs are, meanwhile, named after William Willshire and Paul Foelsche, murderous policemen who felt Indigenous people were akin to animals. There is ongoing momentum to erase their names from the landscape.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Frank Hann (right) with his assistant Talbot. Photograph: Wikipedia

In these circumstances it would be unenlightened, retrograde and an insult to many Indigenous people to name a highway after one or both of the Hann brothers.

Among the cattle stations established by Frank Hann, who jointly owned other properties with William, was Lawn Hill. Frank Hann worked Lawn Hill with another pastoralist, Melbourne Grammar-educated Jack Watson, who would later inflict the most sadistic violence in lands that would become part of the Northern Territory.

In 1882 the pioneering explorer and naturalist Emily “Carrie” Creaghe joined an expedition across the Gulf of Carpentaria from Normanton (Queensland) to Katherine (in today’s Northern Territory). She stopped for a while at Francis Shadforth’s Lilydale (later Riversleigh), a station neighbouring Lawn Hill.

Timothy Bottoms, a respected Cairns-based historian of frontier violence in north Queensland – author of The Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland’s Frontier Killing-times – writes how Carrie Creaghe recorded learning from the Shadforth women, that “Watson has forty pairs of blacks’ ears nailed round the walls collected during raiding parties after the loss of many Cattle speared by the blacks”.

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In their groundbreaking 2001 essay for Overland – Indigenocide and the Massacre of Aboriginal History – Queensland frontier war historians Raymond Evans and Bill Thorpe wrote how, “[Korah Halcomb] Wills dissected the Aboriginal body with the same matter-of-factness as Jack Watson and Frank Hann employed some twenty years later when they nailed eighty Aboriginal ears to the outer walls of their Lawn Hill homestead ... after reprisals for cattle-killing. Emily Caroline Creaghe ... would record that sight with the same equanimity as the Bowen citizenry displayed as they watched their mayor [Wills] riding into town with human bones protruding from his saddle-packs and a weeping, stolen child before him on his horse ...”

Frank Hann’s own diaries, meanwhile, are littered with allusions to the violent dispossession of the Indigenous custodians.

In April 1874, for example, he wrote: “Met John Anning just came back from hunting Blacks.”

In another entry he writes: “I came back ... got ... gun. Went round the Wall. Saw a blackfellow had a shot at him, did not see more.”

So, what’s in a name? Plenty.

The authorities should do their historical diligence before they name an important, new Australian highway after the violent dispossessors of Indigenous people through whose lands it will pass.

• Paul Daley is a Guardian Australia columnist