At the famed right-hand point break of Lennox Head, immortalised by George Greenough and later Mick Fanning in Fanning the Fire, Aboriginals were gathered up at gunpoint and marched off the cliff head that gives the wave its name. Along the Clarence River, which feeds surf breaks such as Angourie, Spookies, and Iluka, near Yamba, hundreds of men, women and children were slaughtered on the banks. On the Richmond River, which feeds the dreamy beach breaks of Evans Head, Brunswick Heads, and Byron Bay, a hundred or so were slaughtered in what became known as the Richmond River Horror (or ‘Evans Head Massacre’)—retaliation for stolen sheep and the deaths of five white settlers.

“You can probably go from Tasmania to Fraser Island (on the east coast) and every single area has massacres. In Ballina and Byron, there was basically genocide. They killed everyone,” says Mick Smith, CEO of the Jali Aboriginal Land Council in Ballina.

Between first contact in 1788, until as recently as 1934, Aboriginals were slaughtered to the tune of 90% of their population—from between 700,000 and one million Indigenous people, down to 93,000 by 1901. (The Aboriginal population is now listed as 669 900 or 2.7% of Australia).

The majority of deaths were not incurred on the battlefield, but during cowardly night-time raids where men, women and children were slaughtered like dogs.

“They used to bury the women and the children up to their neck in sand and kick their heads off… Newborn babies buried up to their necks in sand and they’d go along kicking their heads off,” says an Indigenous “knowledge holder” and massacre investigator from the the Bundjalung nation in the Northern Rivers of NSW, which includes such world class waves as Lennox Head, Byron Bay, and Yamba (Angourie).